So she got me an invitation to speak at the upcoming NewsWorld Conference in Berlin, annual mecca for the broadcast illuminati. That was the year digital news was emerging into the zeitgeist, much to the annoyance of the old guard, and I got placed on the keynote panel with the incoming news lead for the newly launched MSNBC as well as a few other high-calibre executives who were there to challenge us. During my talk, I ran through the experience of going from launching Channel Zero‘s global video-magazine on a shoestring budget with a handheld camcorder to landing a multi-million dollar seed investment that was the DNA for a guerrilla broadcast network.

Then I capped it by throwing a tomato at the most hallowed and protected asset in news: the million-dollar anchors who, I asserted, were not held in the same level of esteem and trust by the younger generations. And who were, I brazenly claimed, one of the main reasons for the viewership exodus.

The talk was a hit – or at least, it hit a chord. After the panel, I saw a blizzard of white business cards thrust at me from the floor. One of those came from Tony Burman, executive producer of Canada’s CBC News.

Another from Tom Johnson, CNN’s Chairman and CEO.

While Tony boldly — and riskily — offered us a deal to be the first-ever independently produced series on the CBCs flagship national news program, The National, Tom Johnson was interested in the broader scope of a channel.

Meeting at CNN’s HQ in Atlanta a few weeks later, I hyped the deal by highlighting the fact that we had branded ourselves with the numeral zero and that channels on the digital cable boxes all started at 001 – meaning we could establish our brand as the first channel (000) on the entire number spectrum. Tom and his team were excited and asked me to present the game plan.

So while our team got to work on a non-traditional three-part series for the National called Confessions of a Surveillance Society, I double-timed on writing a channel proposal for CNN titled The End of Broadcast Television (playing with the double-entendre of ‘the end’ — ie the terminus and the ultimate function — which was a nod to my mentor Neil Postman’s book, The End of Education).

The vision was of a ‘think local, act global’ news network that would deploy an international network of citizen journalists to shoot street-level stories about critical issues. But our concept for the broadcast studio was to turn it into a kind of telethon environment where human and capital resources were tapped on-the-fly to solve the issues we presented until they were solved.

Instead of just reporting on developing crises and then cutting to commercials.

All of which would be paid for through a home-shopping model (and not advertising) in which we sold products that were aligned with our ethos of organic food, ethical companies and spiritual evolution.

It was a grand and wildly ambitious vision. But I had no choice. Channel Zero, which had grown into a 15 person company, was burning through cash at an insane rate and I had begun to realize that our video-magazine model was unsustainable. Hence the bet on moving it all to a broadcast model once the opportunity presented itself in these deals with the CBC and CNN.

But it was not to be.

By February Tom Johnson had turned down the channel proposal and, after plowing the rest of our cash into production excesses on the CBC series, Channel Zero was broke.

Meanwhile, my time as flavor-of-the-month was over. A string of punishing articles in the Canadian press assailed me for not fulfilling the lofty hype-ridden promises to use our money to build a new television model; kicking off with the Naomi Klein’s This Marshall has lost his message and ending with the ultimate humiliation ritual: that 8 page full-color psychological deconstruction in Toronto Life.

I had become a media pariah.

So I closed the Toronto office — reneging on promises to my funders and dedicated team of co-creators — and went on the road in an attempt to save the company by landing the channel at another network. This meant decamping to New York and launching a series of Hail Mary passes to the major network CEOs. It’s a testament to how delusional I was that my ‘plan’ depended on charming the secretaries and assistants to then-broadcast titans Barry Diller, Sumner Redstone and John Malone and getting them to deliver personalized boxes with my Channel Zero/CNN channel proposal.

Which, again, just to ensure it was weaponized for maximal alienation retained its title: The End of Broadcast Television. I don’t think they got the Postman reference.

The reality was that my mental state was a shambles.

In three years I’d done two around-the-world guerrilla video-shoots, launched and lost a media company (and millions of dollars), got hooked on some pretty vicious narcotics, and orchestrated one of most extreme high-wire crash-and-burn spectacles in Canadian media history.

The deeper, more quixotic narrative, however, was that I believed Channel Zero was all part of a trojan horse takeover of the global media by a clandestine extra-terrestrial intelligence that was working through me to usher in a 5D revolution.

Yah.

*

Pleiadian Protagonists

Rewind to February of 1993 and my first gig as a videographer.

My good friend David Griffiths was an early convert to the living foods/holistic health movement and, later, one of the biggest champions and supporters of Channel Zero. In the early days of my video making career, David offered to fund a stay at San Diego’s Optimum Health Institute if I filmed him doing a one-week fast. Always up for an adventure, I agreed and signed up for the bodily deprivation and a week’s worth of colonics. We emerged with glistening clean bowels and decided to ride our natural high through Sedona, Arizona to visit a couple of self-proclaimed Pleiadians that David wanted me to meet.

Zo-de-Ra and Zo-de-Ja were two twin-like women — definitely in the category of they/them’s in modern gender parlance — who had short, blonde, mulleted hair, elongated heads, and huge blue-grey eyes… and a house filled with very trippy art which they described as channeled Pleiadian messaging.

They also claimed to be cosmic chefs and practitioners of an ET procedure called sixth-dimensional brain surgery. Of course, I wanted to try it. So after watching me gobble up a specially-prepared meal – scanned with a gold-plated orgone generator – they began to remotely tinker with my brain, moving me into a quasi-hypnotic state through which they facilitated the recognition and visualization of my dominant matrix programming: fear of abandonment.

Then they led me through the process of cutting the primary cord that was binding ‘3D Stephen’ to that fear, which simply entailed me cutting an umbilical cord in the crazy-real visualization they had constructed for me.

At that time I was 25 and still very much the product of my conservative WASPy, multi-generational industrial/capitalist upbringing. Despite my teenage-love for LSD, I had never experienced spontaneous emotional catharsis. But there it happened, and in such a profound and ego-shattering way, that I was brought to an explosion of tears and remorse. Followed by a full body/consciousness sensation of liberation. I can still say with confidence that I was fundamentally altered.

The Pleiadians seemed very pleased because, as they relayed in our post-op debrief, I had some important work to do here that was connected to building communications networks for the 5D ascension of our species. (I had no idea what they were talking about.) They also taught me how to continue the cord-cutting on my own and then sent us on our way.

The next night I was snowed in at O’Hare on my way back to Toronto and all the hotels were full so we had to sleep on the floor of the airport. While my fellow travelers were irate, I could only see the upside. All the more time to do some more 6th dimensional cord-cutting! Which I continued to do with what, in hindsight, was probably a reckless frequency. By the time I landed back in Toronto and burst excitedly through the door of my west-city studio, I found my brilliant, beautiful but restless wife (TK) with her boss rushing around in a shocked and guilty two-step.

My immediate reaction was relief.

Deprogrammed enough from the cord-cutting to no longer be triggered by the predictable cuckold-victim role play, instead I had the instinctual recognition of a reality-shifting, freedom-granting opportunity. The fact was, the marriage had largely been a wound-based response to the epic demise of the Marshall family steel business and dissolution of my parents’ own marriage. TK’s father — a wise-hearted uber-entrepreneur in Toronto — had begged us not to do it. But do it we did, even though a deep, intrinsic part of myself knew the relationship was massively dysfunctional from the start. I had been powerless to remove myself from its gravitational pull.

Realizing this was the direct — and wildly immediate — manifestation of my work with the Pleiadians, I calmed the confused lovers and told them not to worry. To take their time and that I’d be back in a few hours. A response that only made my wife — who was an amazing artist and one of my best friends — even keener to keep us together. But I had tasted something that was so reality-shattering and soul-liberating, I was already en route to unraveling the contracts and relationships made from my ‘old’ conditioned self.

Fast forward a few months, and I was now the sole occupant of that studio, spending my daze lying in bed, voraciously reading through a stack of books by Barbara Marciniak that were billed as channeled materials from Pleiadians. In her non-sophisticated style, Marciniak explained spacetime reality as a kind of intermediary experiential platform in which humans were:

a) seeded by extra-terrestrials,

b) unaware of the true nature of ‘reality’

c) manipulated by a mass media that was in service of a control matrix designed to keep them ‘asleep’, and

d) most importantly, reachable by a group of extra-terrestrials who could guide them out of their stockade

Even in the Marciniak material’s woo-hoo style, the message was connecting at some deep level with my awakening self. Blasting me with successive A-HA moments that rolled across the frame of my consciousness like a set of interstellar tidal waves. By the end of the first book I was unable to leave the studio, unsure if I wanted to experience the fake cardboard cutout reality that lay beyond the door. So I just kept reading and letting the words slowly rewire my neural framework. Until it became too uncomfortable, both physically – I had an unrelenting, pounding headache – and psychologically.

I felt like my identity had become unglued from its mooring in the onset of a scary bipolarism.

Plus, I felt completely alone. I had no way of reaching the Pleiadians in Sedona and there was no one in my life with whom I could share the new information and how it was changing me. Then I saw — taped to the fridge — the number of a person who was supposedly an ‘energy healer’ that TK’s cousin had given us.

His name was Don Chef.

I dialed him immediately and left a rambling message explaining my predicament. A few hours later the phone rang and a deep, gravelly voice acknowledged my plea for help. He said he was doing a quick ‘scan’ and that he was able to see the problem and asked, could he do an ‘adjustment’.

I could feel his touches in my head. Loosening something… and perceptibly releasing the pressure. This shit is real, I thought.

‘Indeed’, Don answered. ‘Do you feel better?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you have access to a car?’, Don asked.
‘Yes.’
‘If you come and see me I can do more for you, I am limited by remote viewing.’

Sure, anything.

The next day I drove 40 minutes north to Barrie to see Don in his office, where he had a small practice performing a wide spectrum of healing arts — massage, reiki, and yes, channeling. As I lay on the table while he moved his fingers to different points on my skull, I told him I didn’t have a lot of money.

Don smiled and said, ‘I will never charge you because you helped me in the pyramids.’

I didn’t even know how to respond, but that is how I began my relationship with Don Chef. It was the spring of 1994 and, over the next three years, I would see him nearly a hundred times, during which I was treated with what are generally considered premium but super-New Age healings. Don essentially picked up from where the Sedonan Pleiadians left off, working with me at a higher dimension through the inception and materialization of Channel Zero (CZ), through its insane rise and rapid fall, right up until I bolted from Toronto in August ’97 to try (and fail) to land the network in New York.

It’s worth noting that by the time Channel Zero was launched and I was gathering the first wave of hype-ridden media accolades from the Canadian and US press — which led to a $1.5 million investment — my work with Don now included a process of orgasmic-kundalini inter-dimensional travel, in which he would bring up my sexual energy (yes, call it an inter-dimensional hand-job) and then use it to open portals for me to travel through to gather objects and intelligence that I would need for my ‘work’ in spacetime.

[I know, trust me. It sounds fucking nuts. But I just need to lay it all on the table because each of these individual tricks form part of a system that players wanting to jailbreak their avatar from its matrix factory settings may want to consider.]

What I’m trying to get across here is that — even if it was just a coincidental trajectory or something I was imagining — the ascendance of Channel Zero ran in parallel with near-weekly sessions with Don (and the prophecy from the Sedonans), which in my mind placed the project and its successive dizzying achievements in a totally cosmic, ET-assisted framework. I saw myself less in the role of some media wunderkind and more as a interstellar secret agent who was helping to usher in a new paradigm.

And, through my contact with, and being directly aided by, my own ET team.

You can see why the crash to ‘reality’ came so hard.

Flash forward to 1997 where this story began — a few months after I fled from New York — it’s a cold and rainy December on Vancouver Island. I have been camping out in small cabin that my 10-year younger brother Christopher and his college mates were renting. My days now spent making fires, reading books and smoking a lot of weed, trying to make sense of just what the fuck happened to my life, and why the alien prophecy and all the seemingly related accelerations had just totally stopped on a dime, leaving me shipwrecked and stranded in this phony construct of a reality.

But my mother — whose house I had left after a few weeks for the less judgy environs of my baby brother — had had enough. After watching her eldest son sink deeper into what objectively looked like a profoundly self-pitying depression, she finally told me to get my shit together and find a job.

Of course, at this stage of my [r]evolutionary spiritual ‘awakening’, the idea of putting a single joule of energy toward anything that would edify the matrix and its system of anti-spiritual economic enslavement was tantamount to treason. A betrayal of everything I had been taught and experienced since that chance encounter with the aliens in Sedona.

Of course there are many ways of analyzing this attitude. The product of extreme privilege is the most obvious. But there was something much more… psychotic… happening. Because since my father lost everything, I had never been scared of work and did not mind menial labor. But somehow, somewhere during the last three years, I had acquired an unyielding mystical fundamentalism that was now going to rear its uncompromising militancy.

I knew of course she was right.

My time in that state of stoned wallowing had come to an end. And my time in the cabin had seeded in me a new approach to the 3D matrix adversarial forces that were trying to crush me. And that was to go full aikido. In other words, to absorb the energy of the system attack (designed to make me question myself and abandon ‘the resistance’) and move with it toward some action that would expand my own learning and power.

Even if it risked safety and sanity.

The solution did not take long to surface. I had been reading Hesse’s Siddhartha and one section had stuck in my mind; this exchange between Siddhartha and his employer about the value of transcendental experience:

“What is it that you’ve learned, what you’re able to do?”
“I can think. I can wait. I can fast.”
“That’s everything?”
“I believe, that’s everything!”

I kept hearing those three sentences in my head, on a loop. Except I had somehow taken the middle part and replaced ‘wait’ with ‘walk’ (I was clearly done with waiting.)

I can think. I can walk. I can fast.

And then it hit.

I would test Siddhartha’s maxim and in so doing, simultaneously force the invisible hand of my non-local handlers in the terrestrial simulation. To see if they would blink in the face of an epic and self-endangering denial of the matrix’s power to determine human actions through fear of economic hardship and social judgment.

I would jump into the void without a net.

So I stated my game plan to the Pleiadian guardians, to which I received several very clear signals in the form of highly symbolic phenomena.

Then announced to my mother that I was heading south to a warmer climate.

“But you have no money, and I’m not giving you any,” my mother protested.
“True. But I can think. I can walk. I can fast.” I assured her.
“What does that mean?”
“I am going to hitchhike south and see what happens.”
“But you don’t have any money.”
“There are other forms of currency, mother.”
“What does that mean?”
”It means its not real mom, its just the simulation of a reality with bullshit stakes to keep us enslaved based on programmed fears.”
”And what if you’re wrong? What are you going to do in the middle of nowhere with no money?”

I thought for a moment.

Then I’d rather find out now and then I will accept that reality and adjust my perceptions accordingly.

This conversation repeated itself for several days before my poor mother grew very agitated. Not the kind of distress that arises from frustration with a stubborn child, but rather that of a parent discovering they may be bi-polar. The fact that this was happening on the edge of my thirtieth year probably wasn’t any more reassuring, but she had no choice. I had been given the plan and set the departure date for December 14.

As the day neared, she made a final attempt to gather me close and begged that I at least stay for Christopher’s birthday dinner on the 15th. I acceded and, on that day, went to her place to wash clothes and pack. As I was walking in the door, I had an inclination to check the mailbox. Which was weird because in all the time I’d stayed there I hadn’t done that before; no one knew I was there to send me mail anyway. But do it, I did. And there was an envelope addressed to me in an elegant handwritten scrawl.

I tore it open and unfolded a letter from my aunt explaining that the estate of my uncle Ian had bequeathed $5,000, which was included as a check. My temples shimmered with white heat. This had potent implications because my uncle, Ian Stephens — my mother’s younger brother — was in many ways my artistic and rebel inspiration.

A vanguard of the 80s indie rock and 90s spoken-word scenes in Montreal, Ian was gay, gorgeous, and wildly talented. He died in 1996 of AIDS-related lymphoma, which he beautifully and brutally documented in his writing and final performances — during which he slowly wrapped himself in yellow crime scene tape printed with “DO NOT CROSS”, turning his body into both installation and indictment; a living memorial to queer disposability.

One of my first real gigs as a music video director was shooting some of the spoken-word tracks from Ian’s book/album Diary of a Trademark.

So, I saw this as an omen. A conferral from the otherworld blessing my journey.

My mother saw it as two months rent.

The fact that I was claiming it as some sign from the spiritual dimension — and her own deceased brother — that I was meant to do this only exacerbated her frustration.

And strengthened my resolve.

If I had been harboring any lingering doubts about spirit-jumping into the matrix, this demolished them. The sense of elation I felt in my commitment to launching into the void with now a little more rope to get to the end of my rope, was unlike anything.

It was the first true calling I had ever experienced.

Little did I know that by intentionally preparing to jump into the void, I had inadvertently unlocked one of spacetime’s most powerful narrative systems, the Grail Protocol, which would turn the world into a giant fucking ouija board tarot card reading.

Of course, any normal person would say: You fool, this was a coincidence! Shit happens! It doesn’t have to mean anything. And they are absolutely right — it was a coincidence and it didn’t have to mean anything.

But, you see, the only reason I am writing this all down is because of everything that happened after I cashed the check and hopped on that ferry.

And where I went.

And who came to take me.

And what I was asked to do when I got there.

*

Chapter I: Crossing the Chasm
In which I learn the rules of the road less traveled…

I feel it’s important to acknowledge the degree of ‘insanity’ that I was operating under during this episode of my life. Because I was, at the most fundamental level of socialized behavioral norms, ‘out of my mind’.

And while there is (hopefully) a modestly entertaining — and maybe even aspirational — aspect to all of this, I’m in no way trying to normalize or even suggest that other players should allow themselves to get to these stages of psychic rebellion against the matrix and its status quo conventional wisdoms.

However quixotic, this is high-stakes gaming. There are people who never make it back. I know some of them. Brave, turned-on journeyers who got the full-on accelerational download which just cracked them to pieces they were never able to fully reintegrate. [Think of that next time you pass a homeless woman on the sidewalk screaming nonsensical half-truths in ebonic code.]

So it’s critical to understand that no matter how virtuous or courageous or well-stated the intention, there’s absolutely no guarantee that a player is going to regain a level of operational ‘sanity’ once they have fully crossed the line in their intellectual and spiritual denial of the authority of the ‘reality’ that is being generated by the matrix control system.

As I write these words and reflect on that version of myself, I shudder at his state of mind. And the conditions that had to be created for him to so willfully, stubbornly, self-destructively point his middle finger at ‘reality’ and dare it to blink.

He felt he had no choice. Everything that he had experienced — not dreamed or imagined, but directly experienced in sober states — had led him to this moment.

To this path and its forking of realities.

But, pushing my present self back into the being of that broken person, I know returning to the old world was not an option. I was past the point of no return and in many ways that just made it easier. It wasn’t courage so much as desperation that drove me.

Well-meaning psychologists would say that I was suffering from multiple traumatic stressors compounded by delusions of grandeur and dissociation. They would frame my state as a severe manic episode with psychotic features, driven by an overwhelming need to find meaning in catastrophic loss. In four years, I had endured the collapse of my family and its fortune, a marriage and divorce, multiple drug- and danger-fueled round-the-world trips, the intense scrutiny and public unraveling of Channel Zero, and my ultimate rejection by conventional power-players like CNN’s chairman for the channel deal — all can been seen as textbook examples of maladaptive decision-making driven by narcissistic injury and unresolved grief.

From a clinical perspective, I was someone grappling with delusional ideation — creating an elaborate, symbolic reality to escape the unbearable truth of failure. My insistence on seeing the world through this lens of cosmic rebellion, rejecting societal norms and material needs, interpreted as a defense mechanism, albeit an extreme and risky one.

And herein lies the tricky, dangerous part of this game.

Because the thing about actively — as opposed to theoretically or philosophically — breaking out of the matrix is that it requires that the player do exactly that.

Break out.

And that means unlocking the neural circuitry of their avatar from its factory settings, which is the matrix.

To effectively do this, the norms and rules of the matrix system must first be denied and revoked at the cognitive experiential levels. Again, it’s not theory. It’s practice. Only then can the physical adventure of jailbreaking the matrix on the material plane of spacetime be undertaken with any hope of success.

That’s because to ‘successfully’ get to the other side of the chasm that opens up once a player breaks free cognitively, they need to acquire — and be acquired by — a new kind of conscious awareness which exists to guide them through the most solitudinal and dangerous facets of the journey. Here it becomes ‘spiritual’ — which is just a clichéd expression that points to a plane of experience that is an augmentation of the material (‘physical’) plane.

This where the true game begins. It’s as if a new layer opens up ‘on top of’ the material world. A concept very similar to that of a ‘palimpsest,’ a term that jumped out from the pages of one of the last books I read before I left for my mission, Carl Sagan’s Contact.

A palimpsest refers to the layer of parchment that Egyptians would lay over a hieroglyphic when they wanted to amend or correct it, without erasing or corrupting the original or base layer. But more broadly it can refer to: “An object or area that has extensive evidence of or layers showing activity or use.”

And herein lies the most amazing part of what I call spacetime 2.0: that when a player earnestly undertakes this kind of all-in, no-comebacks mission — and makes it past the first few purposely mundane stages — the entire world is suddenly ‘in-play’.

I mean every object, every person, every movie, every song that comes on the radio, every weather pattern, and yes even the arrangement of the planets and stars… become set-pieces on some boundlessly complex and incomprehensible IRL tea leaf reading that exists to facilitate your journey out of consensual reality.

And the player is left to walk a razor-thin edge between profound insight and absolute madness.

[For the film lovers out there, think Logan’s Run meets The Truman Show.]

*

December 16-20, 1997

It was a cold northwest coastal morning as the Coho ferry crossed the Strait of Juan de Fuca. I stood on the front deck the whole way, letting the bracing salt water lash my face.

Heading into an uncharted oblivion with no set destination or timeline was a kind of freedom that I had never felt before. On this quest I was willfully disconnecting from all lifelines and timelines — just heading ‘south’ until my money ran out.

[Oh yes, there had been no shrinking from my original mission to crash land into the firmament of some otherworld, I had just been given a little more rope to hang-drop before I took the final leap into who-knows-where.]

I knew that only then the real test of this calling would kick in; when I would see if I could force my alien handlers, or the matrix itself, into another level of response and consecration of my higher role. Until that time and place, this trip into the wild yonder was all a gifted vacation from the universe, funded by a ghost.

And I was going to milk it for as long as I could.

It was around noon when I walked off onto the harbor of Port Angeles. The road was calling and I decided to get a few miles under my feet before sticking out a thumb. Clouds had gathered and a light mist gave the forested track a temperate, womb-like feel.

I had no previous experience with hitch-hiking but this felt as natural as trekking in the woods. I did not look like a typical drifter. The only clothes I had were leftovers from my exotic Channel Zero days and I was dressed in an oversized furry purple chinchilla top and black snowboarding pants. As I got further from town, the logging trucks whipped up spray, so I pulled a multi-color felt jester’s hat over my ears and hugged the treeline to keep dry.

Before an hour had passed a small pickup swerved onto the shoulder and a hand gestured me over.

No thumb required.

I could hear familiar strains of Grateful Dead coming through the cab. A friendly face greeted me with a conspiratorial glint in his eye.

‘Where you going?
‘South.’
‘I’ll get you a little bit down the road. Jump in.’

Gary was an electrician and handyman heading home to Discovery Bay for his lunch break. It was only thirty minutes down the road, but after we got talking he asked if I wanted to smoke a bowl. I had been clearly instructed not to bring or buy any drugs on this journey, but there hadn’t been any directives around accepting kind offers from strangers. So I happily accepted.

A few moments, later Gary pulled off onto a dirt road and parked under towering redwoods. He loaded the pipe and lit up.

As we sat under the dripping trees, the live Dead (concert) bootleg continued to play on crackly speakers, permitting a comfortable silence between two acknowledged ‘heads’. When the band broke into Cassidy – a song about Neal Cassady, the legendary Beat writer and troubadour, and the holy ghost in Jack Kerouac’s On The Road – Gary used it as a segue to ask me where I was going. I deflected the question by telling him I had done a few multi-show road trips with the band in college. Which took the conversation into easier tributaries.

By the time the tape finished, we had been chatting for a half hour. Gary started up the truck and asked again:

‘Where you headed?’
‘Just going south, to warmer weather.’
‘Hey — you can tell me — are you in some kind of trouble?’
‘No, I just… hit my limit with consensual reality. Testing out some spiritual theories.’
‘Kind of like… a vision quest. Just not in the woods.’ [He actually said this.]

My glistening eyes told him, you get me.

Gary smiled and announced he was taking the rest of the day off to drive me further south, if I wanted.

‘There isn’t much except trees and loggers for the next patch of road, you’ll get some good traffic once the freeway breaks after Olympia.’

I gently reminded him I wasn’t in any kind of a rush, but conceded I’d be grateful for more time with him and the Dead.

‘Then I know just the place to drop you. A good omen for your travels.’

An hour later, he pulled over at a shoreline rest stop/campground with an offer of some weed for the road. I was amazed at the unhesitant thanks but no thanks that came through my mouth; I’d been smoking pot pretty much on a daily basis since Channel Zero went down, and was glad to see some deeper part of myself releasing that unhealthy reliance.

Gary stopped the truck and parked in front of a sign that read Potlatch State Park. I couldn’t help but smile, considering my understanding of the shamanic narratives of northwest coastal tribes, it just made too much sense.

You see…

The second job I got after the end of Marshall Steel was as a sales associate at a high-end Indigenous art gallery in Victoria, BC.

[My first was as a bike courier in Toronto — which had its own heavy meta-meaning — having gone from working as a highly-eligible steel scion at the apex of the newest tower in the downtown core to riding a bike as a sweaty messenger dropping envelopes to bored ground floor secretaries who didn’t give me a second look. Despite becoming the top earner in the company, after a few hard spills and too many quizzical looks of concern from my grandparents, I knew it was time to go. So my fiancee TK and I went as far as geographically possible from our families to the land of the newly-wed and nearly-dead to see what fortunes we could unearth.]

After rejections from every restaurant in town, I landed a job at the Art of Man gallery, situated in an intimidating oak-walled study overlooking the harbor in the century-old Empress Hotel. Anyone who walked in was immediately bedazzled by the inventory of masterworks from Inuit, Plains, and Northwest Coastal artists, floating atop oak pedestals on geometric platters of white marble under crystal-white halogens.

There was never under 250K on the floor at any time. And it had to move, quickly.

As a salesman working under the tutelage of the gallery’s strict owner Raj Sharma — who would direct the energies of his floor staff by issuing a sharp cough and then a dart of his eyes toward promising buyers — we learned to identify and target collectors who camouflaged themselves by dressing down and acting clueless. But nothing fooled Raj and while he was a demanding and impatient boss, he taught me to detect valuable marks and close on high-value items in very short windows; enduring skills that would serve me well throughout my various careers.

God help you if he ever came in when the gallery was quiet and you weren’t ‘attending’ to the stragglers wandering through the displays.

What made me the lead seller at Art of Man, however, wasn’t Raj’s training. It was my passion for retelling the shamanic narratives behind each piece with equal vigor for every person Raj pointed me toward. In what became my first initiation into spacetime 2.0, I learned that many Indigenous artists believed their art could directly influence reality through intention, belief, and execution. For instance, Inuit carvers like Henry Evaluardjuk honored the spirit of the polar bear with their bone and soapstone creations, offering thanks to sustain communities mortally reliant on successful hunts. Similarly, Northwest Coastal artists like Ron Telek crafted redwood spirit masks as symbols — and catalysts — for transformative journeys between worlds, granting their bearers profound insight or power.

My last sale at Art of Man validated Raj’s militancy. It came late one wintry night in the off-season when the gallery was mostly empty and the staff had been pared down to one — me.

I might have been forgiven for ignoring the elfin man who wandered in just as I was about to close. But he stopped in front of a wall of shamanic Telek masks which had become my favorite pieces in the gallery. Casually siding up to him, I began to recount the stories behind each mask, which could have been worn at a potlatch ceremony where chiefs often gave away all of their possessions as signs of wealth, status, and generosity. An act of strategic sacrifice because, as animist practitioners of generative reality, these leaders knew about the quantum effects of precision rituals that would return more in spiritual power than they had surrendered in material possessions. A feature of spacetime explained in The Grail Protocol:

As Gary turned back onto the 101 to head north, I whispered him a blessing and felt happy to be on my own again. Resuming my slow walk down the misty 101, my lungs drank in the moist atmospheric brew of ocean and redwood.

It turned out that Gary’s omen was well conceived. I got quick and mostly uneventful rides on this early leg of the trip. A pattern that in retrospect would tell of easy days; the easiest of the journey.

And for a reason.

Dressed like a happy jester and throwing off vibes of zero-fucks in the world, I was in one of the most profound flow states of my life.

In this way, maybe I was medicine for the people who came to carry me along each part of this unfathomable expedition. Each in their own way, perhaps, seeing in me a reminder that there was always a choice in their lives; a solitary but liberating path away from the structure and determinism of the worldly world.

If they could just unhitch themselves from their self-crafted yokes and fears.

Like Janice, the woman who slowed and then accelerated before doubling back. Unrolling her window she nervously offered:

“I’ve never picked up a hitchhiker before. Especially not a man. But you seem OK.”

I was more than OK.

Being out there, in that frame of mind, kept me in a state of humble appreciation for each driver that stopped. As a child of money and privilege for whom all was provided, and mostly because of my last name, this was medicine for me as well.

I quickly learned that every aspect of my presentation — from the expression on my face, the casualness of my thumb, the openness in my posture — all signaled my trustworthiness in micro-seconds to the drivers whizzing past. Once inside, being in the position of the grateful passenger, one is not required to speak and, in fact, quietly thanked for not filling the space and time with idle words.

This freed me from my wild thoughts and devastating losses. Seen through the fresh and unfamiliar eyes of my ferriers, I was a new person, with no past to qualify. After spending two years running around telling anyone who would listen about alien-sanctioned tv networks, bragging about how crazy my life was as if it was some badge of honor, now I could just be… silent.

I was also aware that it could have been a radically different experience.

Before I found the check from my uncle Ian, I had been prepared to walk as far as necessary. To sleep in the forest and under bridges. And to fast until I was either offered or found food; I’d even bought a book on foraging, just in case. So these pick-ups were all magic to me. And now with just under $5,000 in my possession, I knew I could always find a warm motel bed when that day’s rides had closed out.

There was a system of grace out there on the road and I finally understood why hitchhiking is romanticized as a metaphor for life.

And for that section of the trip, life was good.

It didn’t take too many rides to get down the road from the forested snows of Washington, through the mountain passes of Oregon and into the warmer climes of California. After Janice there were the two boys from Olympia who stole their parents car to go overnight mushroom-picking in Oregon. A truck driver who I helped with a blown a tire in the middle of a traffic jam in Portland. A home-schooling Mennonite family in a van who sang hymns the whole way. And one man who didn’t say a word and just dropped me at a Days Inn in the middle of nowhere, in the pitch black of night.

But that first leg, with all its wonder and ease, came to an abrupt end on the fifth morning of the trip, when I walked out of that dingy motel just outside of Bakersfield, CA. There was a pronounced shift in the vibe of the road and I felt exposed and vulnerable under the beating sun.

Things were about to get weird.

Chapter 2: Hitching the Oracle
In which I encounter fragments of my soul in the carriage of strangers…

When people use oracles to tell their fortunes (like Tarot cards or the coins of the I-Ching), they are engaging in something called cleromancy. Which is:

a form of sortition (casting of lots) in which an outcome is determined by means that normally would be considered random

But which, in the context of cleromancy, are not random. Because the belief is they have been generated by some non-physical ‘entity’ or process.

I’m stressing this for an important reason. Because in reducing ancient oracles to the status of parlor games, we have buried the fundamental mechanisms by which it is assumed these devices operate.

For centuries, when people consulted oracles they did so with a belief that they would generate a bespoke output — i.e. a message just for them. They had this idea that the cards or coins were being sorted by an unseen and intelligent ‘force’ (spirit, angel, demon…) that intervenes in the seemingly random part of divination (shuffling cards or throwing coins) and uses the oracular medium to transmit messages inter-dimensionally in the form of combinations that are interpretable within a codified lexicon, and which offer meaning.

Like Morse code from the otherworld, but with narratives instead of dots and dashes.

Thus oracles like the I-Ching that have sustained across millennia are peak forms of spiritual communication technology.

But people who are skeptical of oracles would say that the dopamine rush of coherence or knowing that people get from them has everything to do with the intentionality and desire to have their lives seen.

To have their selves seen, period.

That it’s just a trick of pattern recognition and confirmation bias.

I don’t think they’re wrong.

Part of the reason people think oracles work is because they want them to. And they will fit whatever narrative the cards or coins generate into that which resonates with them and for them. This undeniably happens a majority of the time.

But.

But. When the wanting goes beyond mere wishful thinking and into a practice of applied belief — meaning taking actual actions in service of that desire for knowing, actions that leverage the mechanics of an ‘intelligent’ oracular system that can respond — then we are moving out of the realm of parlor divination and into something more experiential.

Activating the oracle in spacetime.

I can still remember the unshakeable certainty I felt when I left for my journey into the void: That there was something out there that was going to reveal itself to me, but only if I went unreservedly toward it and into it, taking nothing of the old world with me.

It was the kind of kamikaze attitude that is loaded with potentiality for turning any random process of sortition into a cleromantic one.

In this case, when I surrendered myself intentionally and strategically (‘I know how to think, I know how to walk, I know how to fast’) and with a deep belief that I would be seen and caught by some force that recognized my leap into the void as a call to the intelligence lurking beyond the barren, indifferent construct of reality…

It appeared.

First in the small synchronicity of my delayed departure and the arrival of the $5,000 check from my departed uncle. And then, in the not-so-random sequence of phenomena and people that guided and ferried me to my destination.

It was an alchemical process that required me to believe before I could see.

That’s one of the fundamental ‘rules’ of generative spacetime. That there be some measure of applied faith to go along with the informed and articulated intention.

No different than a true believer placing their palm on the top of a Tarot deck, once I started thumbing my way down US 101 from Port Angeles with no other goal than to see where it would take me, I had potentialized an oracle. For what is hitchhiking, if not a wildly potent divining rod, in which the randomness of the cars — and all the factors that determine their drivers’ desire or ability to stop, and where they left me, and for how long, until the next ride — created new funnels and eddies of destinies and micro-destinies…

So that my journey became a sorting opportunity for some thing to send me messages through the immersive, narrative-generating envelope of spacetime 2.0.

Which it did. With a mix of poetic subtlety and heart-wrenching symbolism that I know was meant only for me.

But this phenomenon doesn’t come fast or easy. In fact, at the beginning, the signs and synchronicities come barely at all… or, at least, they come at the last possible moment.

And in almost imperceptible packages.

It’s as if the game was designed to reward those who have attuned themselves integrally to the signals and specters that flicker through the barbed wires of the system-fortress.

And the highest value signals only appear just at that crucial moment: as the player is about to give up hope. To illuminate, it would seem, the limits of their faith.

Or what else would be the point of spacetime as a feedback system for the spiritual development of its players?

*

December 21, 1997

When I stepped out of the budget motel outside Buttonwillow, California that fifth morning I could sense that the currents had shifted. Gone were the lush, womb-like forests of the northwest. Here I felt solitary and exposed under a blazing sun and the zooming freeway traffic; the kind of down-on-his-luck hitchhiker for whom I would’ve never stopped, nor even spared a second look.

But I was still living the dream and traveling light — besides my clothes, all I had was my passport, my slowly depleting $5000 in a mix of cash and an Amex credit card, a map of the US, and for some reason a beat up copy of Channel Zero’s first issue, Planet Street.

In no hurry.

So I tightened the straps of my backpack and started walking south along the I-5. After an hour I crossed toward a gas station to buy some water and snacks.

As I came out, I could feel eyes on me and turned to see a dilapidated Chevy station-wagon awkwardly parked beside the air tanks. The windows were filled with clothing and books and appliances. A hoarder’s car by any definition. The passenger door swung open and a man (who clearly belonged to that car) waved his arms.

Shouting across the lot in a hoarse voice, “where you heading to?”

I kept my eyes lowered and shook my head, suddenly wishing I didn’t look so much like I needed a ride.

The man bolted out of the car and ambled toward me.

“You going to LA?”
“No, definitely not LA,” surprised by my certain tone.
“I saw you come down the southbound side. You don’t want to be hitching on the south, man. Every ride worth getting from here on in is to LA.”
“Appreciate that.”

Good to know. I scanned the freeway, and saw a sign for the 58 heading east to Bakersfield. The man was now limping in lock-step beside me.

“I’ll make you a deal. You pay for gas and I’ll take you wherever you want. My name’s Dave. Good to meet you.”

Destiny Dave.

The words just surfaced in my mind like the name of a book I’d once read but long forgotten.

It was one of those exchanges that just seemed so weirdly out-of-place and yet perfectly of-that-moment. A sign for sure that there was something in this for me.

Dave’s offer was loaded with a kind of karmic inversion.

I was in the middle of nowhere, had money and no ride.
Dave was in the middle of nowhere, had a ride and no money.
I was willing everything to destiny.
Dave was leaving destiny to a stranger’s will.

We were a perfect match.

Destiny Dave. Why not?

“Ok, I’ll try one tank. What about we head east and see how far we get?”

“Sounds good. Can you help me with a push?”

A few minutes later I was reclined on the torn plastic seat cover with my feet raised on a pile of books and trash, my bag stuffed into the back seat, windows wide open to force a circulation of breathable air. Within the first few seconds of being in the car I knew it would be a short ride. If Dave’s car made it to an eastbound freeway, I’d consider the price worth it.

Destiny Dave was a ferryman, I was a passenger. Might as well have been crossing the Styx.

He was a mumbler and a self-talker, which was fine because I was lost in thought. His warning, and my instinct, not to head to Los Angeles had shifted me out of wonder mode and into something more… solemn. Practicality had muscled its way into my musings and the impulse to make some kind of plan took me over.

As we cleared the outskirts of Bakersfield and settled into a sputtery momentum through the arid expanse of the 58 freeway, it suddenly became clear that I could not just be hitching in circles around the United States, avoiding large cities.

I also knew I was definitely not heading back north into the dead of winter and Christmas eve. That left south and east. I pulled out the map and traced my finger along the Interstate 10 to the Florida coast.

Our family had owned a house on a small Bahamian island called Eleuthera that we lost in the forced sale of the steel business. But I knew the islands well and felt my hopes rise with a daydream of working on a trade boat that crossed between one of the Florida ports and the archipelago. The thought of Eleuthera evoked a deep somatic memory. I spent some of the best Christmases of my childhood on those white sand beaches, under the crystalline blue skies.

Before the traumatic destruction of my nuclear family.

I suddenly thought of that scene from Contact where Ellie (Jody Foster’s character) is transported by aliens to a beach in Pensacola, Florida she sketched as a child. There she encounters her father, who died when she was very young. The aliens use the emotional familiarity of the scene to place Ellie in a receptive state – where she will not be freaked out by the strangeness of ETs – to deliver their message about when Earthlings will be ready for contact.

The desperation of it hit hard and I pushed it away.

Looking over at the crazy man in the driver’s seat, I suddenly knew: I was looking at a version of myself. Or, at least, a fragment of me that I had to accept and integrate if I was going to move past this quagmire in my life.

This shipwrecked state of paralysis and confusion and sadness.

Seeing Dave in that framework, and knowing that he was sent to surface that recognition, offered an immediate return to a security in the meaningfulness of this journey.

It wasn’t pretty, but it was on message.

So I sat there, sending covert pulses of love and compassion for this manifestation of the deeply cracked part of myself. And when Dave started muttering about the heat and the tires and something to do with some other place he needed to be, I gently interrupted.

“We’re good Dave. You can let me off at the next gas station and go on your way.”
“You sure? We still got half a tank.”
“Yeah, I’m sure. You got me where I needed to go.”

And with that I watched a subtle wave of relief wash across his permanently furrowed brow. The recognition of his own gift from the universe, rarely as they probably come to a man in his stage on the road of life.

I was filled with gratitude to be that channel for another human being. And ready again to resume my own treas

ure hunt for the other lost unintegrated parts of myself… waiting for me out here in the Middle of Nowhere.

*

Three hours later I was in a surly mood from the hot sun, lack of food, and terrible luck with rides.

So much for Zen and the Art of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

What had happened to that Siddharthian On The Road ethos that had originally got me off my baby brother Christopher’s couch? I knew, of course. It was the gift of easy money from the spiritual dimension.

I had been here before and knew how quickly hard times could wobble of my self-assured faith in cosmic predestination.

But it was not without merit.

After leaving Dave I had made the rookie mistake of setting off along the 58 freeway, without consulting my map. Energized by the cleromantic omen that he represented, I didn’t need to know where I was going or what lay ahead. After all, I was willing myself into a new destiny and when I was ready, the right ride would come to take me there.

But after three hours of walking and not seeing another living thing on that scorching road, the wonder started to flag. My extended thumb suddenly felt like a ridiculous gesture in the face of cars and trucks tearing past me at 130 mph. When I finally pulled out the map, I estimated it was 20 miles to the next gas station. Based on my pace, I figured I had another four hours to go. I could just make it before nightfall.

Or turn back.

Never one to retrace my steps, I decided to gut it out. But first I needed to eat. So I sat down on my pack to lick a melted Snickers bar out of its wrapper and drink the last of my water.

Stranded in this temporary Wasteland brought me into visceral awareness of just how fucked I would have been without that death money from my uncle Ian. It was one thing to play merry prankster on the logging roads of the temperate northwest, but down here in the desert bowl you could viscerally feel the mortal threat of exposure to the elements.

I could hear Bowie’s Changes in my head: So I turn myself to face me, but I’ve never caught a glimpse, of how the others must see the faker…

And then the quick response from that 5D part of my mind, that energizer bunny of positive self-reinforcement:

Back off. The money came because you went all-in on the call. Stay in the magic.

Those affirmations helped bleed the toxicity out of my royal snit and I got moving again, settling into a steady trudge. Happy again to be alone and anywhere but in my former reality.

Right on time for Carl James to swerve his spotless maroon Caddy off the freeway. As the dust cleared, I watched with cautious hope as his huge torso leaned over to open the door for me. I was a sweaty mess and was sure he would balk when he saw my state, but ‘CJ’ was not one to doubt his marks.

“You out here doing research or something?” he asked quizzically after I had basked for a few minutes in his ice cold air conditioning.
“You could say that,” I laughed. “Why?”
“There are Greyhound buses that travel this route. By the looks of you, you could afford one if you wanted.”
“True,” was all I could muster. He didn’t press the point.
“I’m headed to Bullhead City, a few hours away. I can drop you there if you want.”

I didn’t have to check the map because I knew exactly where he was going. Over lunch I had had plenty of time to mull over my route to the Florida coast, which required that I drop down to the I-10. There was a southbound junction right around the turnoff to Bullhead City.

“Can you drop me at the Junction near Needles?”
“Sure thing.”

He gave me a long look and caught himself as he started to say something.

Oh no, I thought, this is the moment I get asked if I’ll turn a truck stop trick.

But CJ just gave me a wistful look and turned up the volume on his CD player to cut the silence. A soft, gravelly male voice was talking about the mathematics of gambling, specifically a set of rules for hitting-and-standing, doubling down, and pair-splitting in blackjack. I had been making risky bets with my business life since my 20s, but never did any actual Vegas gambling. I immediately found the subject fascinating.

CJ picked up on it.

“Edward Thorp. Kind of a guru. Wrote the book on probability theory and card counting.”
“Huh. Do you gamble?”
He nodded with the hesitancy of a confession.
“I’m on the road. A lot.”

Ed Thorp continued talking, seamlessly weaving lessons about gambling with investing and the game of life itself. It wasn’t cheesy stuff, he came off as scientific in his applications of statistics to risk management. Then he said something that returned me to that sense of being in the pocket of some all-powerful experiential dealer, who could manipulate the artifacts of spacetime to suit specific contexts of my inward journey:

“I wondered how my research into the mathematical theory of a game might change my life. In the abstract, life is a mixture of chance and choice. Chance can be thought of as the cards you are dealt in life. Choice is how you play them.“

Chance. Choice.

Destiny and will. Those themes again.

It was my turn to gaze off into the desert, consumed by the background inventory that my rational mind was incessantly conducting in an effort to reconcile the madness of it all with some semblance of procedural logic.

This happened… then this… and then this… and… then:

This.

All in an effort to keep me from tipping into the abyss by proving I am where I am supposed to be.

Ed Thorp’s gambling metaphors forced me to reckon with the incredible degree of luck that had been dealt to me in the hand of Channel Zero – with my amazing team of co-creators, the sequence of breaks and great press, not to mention $1.5 million in cash. It was like I had been dealt straights and full houses all night. But instead of playing it safe, each time I pushed the cards back and asked for five more, throwing all my chips onto the table. Betting everything on…

Aliens and channelers and prophecies of 5D revolutions.

I’m telling you, no matter how committed or seasoned the speedrunner, these moments of revisionism are a mind-fuck. Especially now that I was in the presence — or at least the voice — of a savvy gambler-turned-investor who had learned to game the system and won big.

With calculated risks.

I had tried to game the world. But there had been zero calculation in any part of my method. Running purely off emotion and instinct, I bought into a belief system that said this whole reality thing was a holographic theme park… one that any true player could exit entirely.

And now, here, on this road to nowhere, I had bet it all on a last spin of the wheel.

How is that going for you? I heard the rational mind query from the depths. You with your big middle finger pointed at the poor Muggles, unwitting inhabitants of a paper-thin simulated ‘reality’.

There’s a reason normal people don’t do this shit, it scolded.

Yah, my 5D rebel snarked back: Because ‘reality’ has engineered their obedience through the precise application of one terrorizing possibility:

That if you don’t fucking behave, you will end up right where I was now:

Alone and disavowed and heading into some uncharted oblivion because of a voice that keeps telling you to cut all ties and step further out on the edge.

On that they could both agree.

One part of me knew it was madness and the other proclaimed me a psychic rebel.

The street-talker or the Matrixian jailbreaker. Of course the line between them is essentially non-existent.

Which is exactly the point. That’s the high stakes game speedrunners are playing. And there are pitfalls and trapdoors everywhere for the all-in, give-no-fucks player.

For me especially.

Because there was more to this story than me arrogantly middle-fingering the worldly world with my careless ET/5D prophecy disclosures. Along the way I had also thrust a dagger into the umbilical cord that connected me to one of the most – if not THE most – vital connections to my terrestrial life. The kind of cut that can be extremely dangerous both psychologically and materially for the player if executed too early or from the wrong mindset.

And that is the severing of tethers to our earthly parents.

You see, in the two years before the launch of Channel Zero, I had watched my father become increasingly distant and unable to summon even token support for my newfound passion.

Granted, I had been erratic. In that time I had applied to and been rejected by all the top law schools, become a bike courier, run off to Vancouver Island with my girlfriend-soon-to-be-wife to become a writer, then morphed again into a salesman at a high-end Indigenous art gallery, only to return to Toronto and suddenly switch to self-taught videographer/editor and globe-trotting channel launcher.

[By which point — thankfully — we had become so distant that he was spared hearing any of my ET narratives.]

Suffice it to say, in his own Icarian plummet to Earth, his once-exuberant exhortations to seize the moment and the world on my own terms had retreated into a deep concern that he may not have adequately prepared his eldest son for the world outside the enclave of our all-providing family business. But I took it all personally. Perhaps even more so because I felt that so much of my newfound courage to break the family programming had been directly unleashed by his encouragement to take a year away in Africa.

Add to the mix the work I had been doing with Don Chef on reclaiming my younger self — which had been highly traumatized from my father’s unpredictable stress eruptions and at times violent disciplining. So, in the shadow of his disapproval and the wake of my growing repudiation of all things terrestrial, I started to develop a narrative that tied my father’s psychological abuse and parental neglect to the pedophilic forces that were running the matrix.

An accusation I leveled at him at the end of a lunch I had initiated in a crowded restaurant in downtown Toronto.

I know that’s a lot to dump on the reader out of the blue and in a few short paragraphs. But it happened. And dad was hijacked in a way that even he — as a rough player in one of the more pugilistic of business arenas — was totally unprepared for. So that when I was done with my way-too-calm prosecution, he staggered out of the restaurant, threw up in the street and did not talk to me for several years. A reaction that fueled my righteous disavowal of him and the elites who were consciously or unconsciously protecting the current order by sabotaging the bodies, minds, and spirits of its (r)evolutionaries.

Like me.

[Probably not the first time a prodigal son has misdirected his repudiation of sky gods towards their worldly fathers, or vice versa. As above, so below.]

When George Emerson – the journalist who wrote The Channeler article – discovered my family background and the loss of Marshall Steel, he used it to psychologize my episodes of quixotic and unhinged behavior that he catalogued from Channel Zero’s quick rise and fall. And found in my estranged father an expert witness:

And so — without any context for our fractured relationship — the entire origin story for my radicalized worldview was anchored squarely in the pattern of my own father’s road to ruin: unresolved anger at our family’s enemies and the impulse to avenge our financial wounds.

This was the psychic topography I was lost in as CJ pulled the caddy over at the Needles junction.

“This is you,” he said, with a tone that almost sounded like regret.

And then, after I thanked him and opened the back door to grab my backpack:

“I have a son your age who I haven’t seen for a long time. You reminded me so much of him when I saw you walking on the side of the road, I thought you might be him. Glad I picked you up anyway.”

I pursed my lip and tried to hold back the tears.

Even in these moments of profound regret of how utterly spiritually unaligned I was during thar time when I felt most sure I was breaking free of the material world, gifts were being delivered in the most inexplicable and elegant of ways.

We are all entangled.

“I’m glad too. Good luck at the tables.”

And while this synchronous experience of riding with an estranged father while thinking of my own broken ties was not enough to inspire an attempt at reconciliation from the road, it did plant a recognition in me of the integral pain a parent can feel from the loss of a child.

And the instinct to throw them a lifeline, no matter what the circumstances of their rupture.

Because when the time came, I was going to need it.

*

Chapter 3: Freebasing the Simulation
In which addiction gives berth to a spacetime speedrunner..

After CJ dropped me in Needles, I found a Motel 6 and crashed hard into a deep, dreamless sleep. The kind that leaves the player with a sense of having been jettisoned from their avatar for some appointed cosmic link-up.

So it was that I woke to my sixth day with a rekindled sense of purpose and alignment. Digging into a huge breakfast at an old skool roadhouse called Jedro’s Wagon Wheel, I caught up on my trip notes and felt like Jack Kerouac as I scribbled my plan to drop south to the 10 and then head to the coast to find a boat.

If I got the right lifts, I could be in the Bahamas for Christmas Day.

[The reality was that I had only two more rides before my hitchhiking adventure would be over, and I wasn’t going to be leaving on any damn boat. Oh, the best laid plans of mice and speedrunners…]

The food was so good at Jedro’s, I stayed for lunch and then strolled over to the junction where historic Route 66 crosses the 95. I couldn’t have been there for more than an hour when Noah stopped in his faded green converted pick-up.

I told him where I was headed and he beamed with a cherubic smile. There was a dutiful enthusiasm in his movements as he jumped out and opened the hatch-back for my bag, placing it carefully next to a neatly stowed bed roll and camping supplies.

The old pick-up needed runway to get speed and I smiled at Noah’s gentle verbal coaxing of the sticky gears. When he finally veered onto the freeway he beamed at me like a 10 year-old who had just skyed his first kite.

He had a southern drawl that was cinematically Gumpian, and his pale blue eyes had a distant, absorbent quality that made you want to confess all your worldly sins. Which I would have lots of time to do, since he was heading to Ciudad Juárez, just across the border from El Paso. Ten hours worth of driving that Noah said he wanted to cover in one shot.

“You go there often?” I asked.
“Once a month I make the trip from Searchlight, where I live.”
“Searchlight, that’s a place?”
“Sure is, home of senator Harry Reid.”

And that was the most I got out of him. For the next few hours Noah conducted an expertly meandering interrogation that maneuvered me into the one place I had so far avoided on this trip: Channel Zero territory.

I’d been living and hyping that story for two years and it only led to bad feelings. The part of me that was running this jailbreak had no stake in any of the ambition and ego that had fueled the enterprise. In fact, though I had never admitted it to my self: the subtext of this suicide mission was to kill off that part of me that had left me so shipwrecked.

There hadn’t been a single moment since I hit the road that I felt any urge to talk about it. But Noah’s gee-gosh-golly reactions to each innocent question (starting at where did you grow up? and ending at what kind of work do you do?) somehow led to:

“How does a person with no training get to have their own film company?”
“Well, they sort of need to have a camera and be at the right place at the right time.”
“And where were you?”
“A crack house in Belize City.”

I’d like to say that I thought long and hard before answering, but I’d known I was going to tell him before the question had come out of his mouth. Now I was regretting it.

So I avoided Noah’s wide-eyed stare and did my best to pretend like I hadn’t just opened a biographical confetti cannon. I could hear his brain whirring. Oh, so many questions. Where to start?

I felt my lips stiffen. But Noah’s cautious glance assured me, we have all the time in the world.

Where to start? The obvious place is back in February of 1993, in that period after my return from Sedona and the Pleiadians and the discovery of my wife and her boss-lover.

But when perceived from the construct of spacetime 2.0, and treated as a self-generated event that has surfaced to offer us a quantum fork for up-leveling, of one thing we can be sure:

A reward is imminent.

It’s like hitting a warp zone in Super Mario Brothers — or in more generic terms, unlocking an easter egg in your favorite video game by performing a series of moves that opens up a whole realm of experiences that would otherwise remain hidden.

Operationally, this is merely a kind of zen stance where the player, operating from the higher-level understanding that other avatars are observer-generated (and thus all contributing agents to their jailbreak), does not lash out at the antagonist but instead withholds any response and processes their injury through the lens of the game.

Of this game.

And not through the matrix-conditioned perspective of a chaotic meaningless world in which random things happen to good people and the only way to prevent ‘harm’ is by punishing ‘adversaries’ or at least building massive psychic fortresses to buffer their advances — even if they are family or soul mates.

It’s a hard maneuver that gets especially harder when people are devastatingly hurt by other avatars. But this is a vital thing to grasp because the deeper the wound, the greater the gift. When players take the attacks personally and lash back out into the illusional matrix — or in self-hatred toward them Selves — they lose that opportunity to fork out of the current level into a higher plane of the game, and instead are returned to the familiar existential loop from which there is no escape from the endless ‘karmic wheel’ of cause-and-effect that is the spell of material reality.

Not a realization I came to with any level of ease, as I will relay in further parts of this story.

*

When landed back in Toronto that cold winter day, I was still high from the impromptu session of Pleiadian 6th-dimensional brain surgery in Sedona, followed a full night of self-run attachment-clearing on the floor at O’Hare airport.

And when I found my then-wife and her boss at our studio I knew just how to (not) react.

I left them to deal with their shit and then returned a few hours later with nothing but love in my heart and wonder in my eyes (at how fast this shit works!) and the full conviction that things would work themselves out in Time.

Which completely mystified my wife, who was looking for a different kind of reaction.

Soon after that I got a very clear vision — the gift — that I was to stop looking for part-time videographer gigs and just use my newly-bought video editing station (Power Macintosh 8100) to create a film festival for local film-makers who did not have access to the tech. I would charge them a small submission fee for editing their footage and renting the screening space.

I named the festival Persistence of Vision, got a slate of films lined up and paid my rent. In what would prove to be an omen of things to come, I managed to hype the thing enough to got some local press in The Toronto Star.

A few weeks later she had moved out and I was on a plane to Belize City to shoot the Camel Trophy: Mundo Maya with my friend Bill Stone, who was already playing with broadcast-quality cameras while I preferred Super-8 film and my hi-8 Handycam.

Now the Camel Trophy – for the uninitiated – was a genius marketing plan conceived by some agency creative to avoid losing one of their major cash cows when governments pushed for banning all forms of tobacco advertising.

In the last decades of the 20th century, Camel cigarettes had evolved their branding of the rugged outdoor adventurer to match that of the Marlboro Man cowboy. But they were both facing extinction if the anti-tobacco lobby got their way.

This spot from 1991 epitomized the vibe and was very likely the inspiration for what was to come: