Chapter 1 

Did I say I knew Eden? Yes, Eden a place where the unrelenting halts and music takes place. And in the context of the music so much loveliness, so much of a good thing; richness dropped note by note and I felt wonderfully large and happy. That was Eden, perhaps a slight one. It was one the media would never pick up on. “Man Finds Eden in a Few Pieces of Music.” And then the tale that would make the audience laugh at another goofball who slipped over the edge because life was too much.

But I knew Eden and the world sailed on without me. What a happy stand I made! It was that one fatal step though, the one to Hell that did me in or, at least, sobered me of the idea Eden was real or attainable. Maybe once but never again after the trip through Hell. It was a most frightening thing. Yet I had jobs and met with people all during that trip through Hell. I had no control over it. I was there and suddenly surrounded by its inhabitants, its secrets and strangeness. The inhabitants were monsters, yes, or evil gnome creatures but it was their convincing arguments that I was in the real world, the one that actually counted that got to me.

I don’t like thinking on those days. Bad things happened. I sold items not belonging to me, I disgraced my own talents and was embarrassed by myself. I lacked all self-respect and went through the streets like a lost puppy. I began to understand the nature of things. I suddenly knew why men murder and women scheme. And before I knew it the world was filled with murderers and schemers. It was nothing else! That’s when I did a few bad things. “I am one of them!” I thought to myself. “I’ve been tricked into becoming one of them.” This thought drove me nuts for a long time. I had seen them in Eden as one see’s crowds of the anonymous from a steel and glass building. But now I was among them. And they all knew where I had been and where I had come from so I felt helpless.

From the long-away darkness Eden appeared as the goad of necessity. And I could hear them on the surface chanting, “now it is heaven, now it is earth, now heaven, now earth.” It went on and on. It could be a shock to the system to see how the disillusionments of heaven and earth moved the creature. But they always snapped into place, almost by design I finally figured out.

David Eide
January 24, 2014