Enlightenment is a State Located Just North of Hysteria, Southwest of Catatonia

# One

Judge Candy Extracts a Rail-Spike from His Head...

Judge Candy remembered pulling out the enormous rail-spike that had been lodged discretely in his frontal cortex. It was not a normal rail-spike. It was greatly over-sized, gigantic; it must have come from the Giant's Railway Yard. The rail-spike was the color of obsidian even though obsidian was not a color, but a type of glass, a mineraloid.

There were spatters of blood, some mucous-type stuff, and what looked like happy smiling sea urchins sliding out the brain cavity at the pulling of the spike. The urchins quickly scurried under the fat, stubbly, unsmiling couch and Judge Candy wasn't sure there had been any sea urchins or not. The blood and mucous were suspect too. The major-league divot the spike had left in his cranium filled in like a bowl of pudding swallowing a bullet.

Rail-spike. What rail-spike?

This all happened (the discovering and pulling of the spike) in the moment of the lifting of the darkness. There was an age; Judge Candy lived in this age, and it was dark. And then said age was over, or maybe "overing," or at least lightening. It was in the faint glimmering, the sputtering re-ignition of the light that Judge Candy noticed there was an enormous rail-spike protruding from his head. He skulled the mirror and the mirror skulled him back. To say he was surprised would be an understatement. Judge Candy was literally Gob-Smacked. Which was not a common event in his vague existence, but then again, he had been Gob-smacked in the past too. Judge Candy would have said "the distant past," because to him everything seemed distant, even the present moment, the least-est, latest, Breath Moment.

So yes, Judge Candy was Gob-smacked to find that there was a rail-spike on (or better yet, embedded in) his person that needed extruding (that is until he extruded it). And Gob-smacked that there was light again. He did not think these things were possible. Judge Candy remembered how the light slowly ebbed away. It did not happen overnight, although, night would have been a good time to institute the darkness. It would have been just an elongation, a persistent continuation of the absence of light. And who would have noticed? Who would have protested?

The light was just a bulb and the bulb just got weaker and dimmer and weaker and dimmer. But it was such a slow process it wasn't really noticeable, even though Judge Candy thought he was quite the sharp cookie. In this case, the Sharp Cookie was crumbling around the edges, there were crumbs in his hair, on his shoes, and tracked into the Oriental carpet in his living room. Still it was amazing how much a person (in this case Judge Candy), could really get done (swab the deck, re-arrange the pots and pans, re-calibrate the Venetian blinds) without the assistance of light.

So the dark lifted, (just a little), the bulb throbbed with new life. He couldn't pinpoint the moment, pinpointing moments was one of those existential tasks that Judge Candy took to like a fish to water, but really it was a task much like trying to tack a cloud into place. No matter the technique, the clouds always moved on unimpeded and all he was ever left with was a mouthful of tacks.

The clouds had their own ideas. Bigger ideas than Judge Candy was willing to birth. So there were no clouds stitched to any of the walls or ceiling of his apartment, but lots and lots of tacks - some firmly inserted in mouth and some not (these stragglers were strewn about willy-nilly). That was the kind of Cloud-Tacker Judge Candy turned out to be - sloppy, inept, all over the place. Always surrounded by sharp, dangerous objects. No pinpointing the moment. It was a great source of frustration for him. Made him want to make toast, by the loaf.

And what of the rail-spike? Judge Candy flung it across the room, he saw himself in short pants, throwing it like a javelin, throwing it a great distance, an Olympic-proportion distance, and it hit the far wall point first, (talk about pinpoint accuracy!), and stuck fast. It quivered like a dying animal, the spike had deeply wounded the blank, uncaring wall, and it seemed to find some pleasure in that, it was some kind of freak, a decadent, a DeSadish rail-spike. Obsidian.

Judge Candy mumbled the words, "Good riddance." And even before the words hit the surface, a great pool of loneliness welled up in his chest like a big percolating glop of lava. He knew this lava, was friends with it. But it was a friendship that only increased his loneliness; it was always a multiplier never a subtracting factor in the loneliness equation.

Lava.