The Dark Twins of Yarrow St.

 

Hello everyone, and welcome to my first post here at The Loresraat. I've been thinking about this post for a long time, and have been working up the courage to come over here and write it. Why?

Interesting question. It gets more complicated than I need to be getting at this site. Let's just say I've had some long-standing issues of shame and self-worth, so indulging myself by telling these stories in this setting is a powerful culmination point for me. I need to pause to shed a few tears. I mean it.

I have fought so hard to get here, against odds that would have killed a lot of people. It is well-known by now that I barely made it myself. Just barely. As I have only begun to discuss (though I have done that multiple times), my entire life has unfolded in a certain way for certain reasons that have to do with projects run by the CIA and other related agencies (like the NSA). A simple way of putting it would be that I have been intentionally gaslit for most of my life, via a process that, paradoxically, was also always designed in such a way that when the time came, I would behold what had happened and would then share it from my point of view...for reasons.

I have had the truth I knew, right in front of me, denied time and time again, for over 40 years. I have been locked up on psych wards, at times, solely to make the point that that is where I would end up for good if I did not play ball. I know this all sounds crazy, but I am not kidding, and if I am delusional, I have the grounds I need to own, understand, and interpret that, too. But I am not merely delusional.

By sheer force of habit, now that I have been given permission to be myself (I know, it's a weird concept, isn't it? Did you know most people locked up in asylums, psych wards, mental hospitals, etc. often feel that way? That they are being imprisoned and punished simply for being different. Many of them are only ever harmful to others when those others get in their way or try to impose their views on us), I'm having a hard time actually doing it.

My therapist, for example, is fully aware of my situation and I am free to sit there and speak frankly about my part in a global conspiracy, without fear of persecution. Without fear of losing my freedom, just for sharing ideas. And yet, I can't address the elephant in the room. For running on 4 sessions now, I have saved it until near the very end, to actually dig in and open up about who I am and what I am on this planet to do, and most importantly, about how it's going as I execute it all right now.

I have needed to gather myself, my friends. And my sea legs are still shaking here. But anyway. I am here to tell some Twin Tales.

On my substack, I introduced the work I'll be doing at the Loresraat in a post entitled SM(O)thered. That post centers on the circumstances of my birth, aside from the discussion of Maakari and the concept of the Twin. I even tell one of the twin tales from that part of my life (they are everywhere I look, really). My hometown was Arvada, Colorado.

I grew up in what was, at first, a garish house on Yarrow St. (it was painted some weird neon yellow or something when I was born, later painted forest green with white trim). "Yarrow St." I can't think of that Street Name now without thinking of the i Ching, which is traditionally cast using Yarrow stalks, of course. We grew some yarrow in our yard. I loved the way it smelled. Almost like eucalyptus. Our yarrow was yellow, too.

The first Twin Tale from this home took place in a special venue: The back yard. That is a place that will always remain in my memory due to what happened there one afternoon; the memory was made much more significant later in life when I learned a certain myth while traveling to Thailand with my father.

I was watching television in the living room (in the chairs you can see in the background here) and my mom had been working in the garden. She came running inside, distraught, because there was a snake outside. She needed me to go out there and "take care of it" for her.

She took me to where it was, a patch of dirt in the corner of the yard with cracking dried mud. A tiny garter snake lay there, squirming around. I knew how upset my mom was. There was only one way to take care of this. I went over to the garden, picked up a trowel, walked back over to the snake and decapitated it swiftly before burying it where I killed it.

It always makes me think of the myth of Garuda, the part where he braves the advances of the serpents to win the Amrita that he needs to rescue his mother, Vinata, from slavery to her sister, Kadru. Here are some twins, right? Vinata was the ruler of the birds or garudas, while Kadru ruled over the nagas, or serpents. I was little Garuda, slaying snakes for my bird mommy.

I made my very first friend while playing in that yard, too. I was swinging on my aluminum swingset and, as usual, mother was working in the garden. There was a house behind ours. I had never really paid attention to it before. However, I noticed a little boy playing in the yard. I waved to him and he waved back. We said hello to each other.

I asked him, "What's your name?" And he told me, "Daniel." And that couldn't be true because that was my name! He couldn't have my name, too! Nope. I cried! I called out to my mother, "MOM, HE'S MAKING FUN OF ME!!!!" But no, his name really was Daniel, just like me.

His last name? Cabala. No joke. Like the branch of Jewish mysticism. For real! I have laughed about that ever since I learned about the Qabalah. Little Daniel Cabala. We were best buds after that. Inseparable. His family, like much of mine, was from Poland. His mother was named Lucy.

My mother used to drive us to school together, nearby Weber Elementary. We always listened to the band Midnight Oil in the car on the way to school, and always sang along to the song, Beds Are Burning.

I always wanted to play with him, but he lived on a cul-de-sac all the way around the block. It was too far for me to go, I couldn't get permission. We shared a fence anyway, so I just pried one of the boards off to make a little hole in the fence that I would use to go over to play with Daniel whenever I wanted. His father had to repair that thing at least twice, and I just kept pulling it back down.

Some years later, our family would move to Westminster, a nearby suburb and also the city where I was technically born. I have written about how I began to attend daycare in a church basement, the daycare center being called Noah's Ark.

One afternoon, I started playing with this kid named Andy Dick. I had seen him around, but hadn't played with him yet. I think our initial conversation had something to do with expressing our shared love of the song She Drives Me Crazy by Fine Young Cannibals. We were singing it together, we had both heard it on the radio.

Things got most interesting when I asked him where he lived. He told me he lived in Arvada. I told him, "Wow, so did I! What street?"

"Yarrow Street."
"Really? Us too! What house?"

And that's when I learned my new friend's family had bought our old house from us.

I remember, growing up in that house, always saying to my parents that it was haunted, and them always telling me how crazy I was for saying that. No one had died there, so the place was therefore not haunted. I begged to differ. I can't remember why I felt this way. It was just that, a feeling, of a presence. There had been one occasion when there was some suspected paranormal activity. I was sitting in my bedroom and my mom was down in the kitchen getting me some soup. I heard a knocking on the wall behind me and yelled to my mom about it. She remembers hearing it herself and thinking, "What am I gonna tell this kid?" Then she came upstairs to see that the sound was the rocker of the rocking chair that I had been sitting in, banging against the wall as I rocked it.

No ghosts, just a rocking chair.

Anyway. My friend Andy Dick (who actually kind of looked like THE Andy Dick) told me just how haunted the house was, and I was surprised to find the story hard to believe because, after all, I wanted to believe it so badly. But this kid told me that the way he found out the house was haunted was the night he walked into the playroom (ah, the room where my mother caught me masturbating and shamed me) and one of his Transformers was walking around the room all by itself.

The things didn't have motors back then.