The Camerado Chronicles -- Part One -- Chapter IX

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17 June
Texas Panhandle country

Tulsa beat Midland last night, 8-2. Preston Wilson hit a big league bomb down the left field line in the third inning; it was intense.
Really nice ballpark experience. I spent the game with two kids, a 12-year old with a good country Okie accent named Harold, and a
little black kid, probably no more than five or six, whose name, though he repeated it to us
several times, neither Harold nor I could decipher, but it sounded like “Nate” so that’s what I
called him. Harold has pink hair, I mean bright pink; he bleached it before adding the color,
which was red before he washed it a few times. Nate was a stylin’ lil’ tyke in a red-n-white
Starter basketball outfit and matching “Shaq” hightops. Their father and mother, respectively,
sat about 10 rows behind us, and though I thought they all came together apparently Harold and
Nate had just met, but they were getting along like best buddies. They were really interested in
my game program at first, so I bought them one, which was demolished by game’s end of
course. I also shared my contraband Doritos and Sobe with Nate, who wasn’t at all shy about
asking. Mostly I just watched and laughed as they traded wrestling maneuvers, tried to out-rap
each other a la Eminem, and flirted with the teenage girls behind them.

After the game, Harold asked if I could hang out some more –after all, our section had been awarded coupons for a free hot dog at
any Tulsa-area Quik Trip, because some animated rooster won a race against a donkey and a steer on the scoreboard. Sadly I said I
had to be going; I was already pretty far behind schedule by staying for the game. He wrote down his phone number on a little scrap
of paper and asked me to call him sometime so we could get together. It wasn’t easy to explain to him that I was just passing
through town, that I was going to a place 800 miles away and I might not come through Tulsa again for months. I suggested to his
dad to swing by the Lowes parking lot on their way out and I’d show him the truck, which they did. Harold climbed up into my seat,
a little sheepishly, like he was in a place where he didn’t belong. But he blasted the air horn a couple times and seemed genuinely
thankful. I said I hoped he’d had a wonderful night at the game, and he and his dad went home. Or maybe to Quik Trip.

I also hope he knows that he made my night. I’ll have to give him a call sometime.

* * * *

When Aubray and I lived in Bisbee, Arizona, I had a short stint at a doomed weekly newspaper (it was on its financial deathbed when
I started). One of the people I did get to meet through my work there was a local guy, a denizen of the burned-out-hippie village that
constitutes Old Bisbee, who had just self-published a book about the Mobius strip . It was a thin volume, bound like a graduate thesis
and sold in all of one bookstore in Bisbee as far as I know. But John Galleher was proud of the work, and deservedly so, it was a
good read. His wife Marcia, who I knew previously, tipped me to the story, so the three of us sat at a coffeehouse and discussed all
things Möbian. It was a fun interview, and made for a good little piece. I wish I had it with me. It is in Ashland with my other clips,
so I’ll pick it up and have it to quote from next week.

The Möbius strip is a geometrical oddity discovered by a 19th century German

mathematician

(probably named Möbius).

It is very simple: you can make one now

with a long, thin strip of

paper. First, connect the two ends of the strip, so that

you

have a basic three-dimensional loop,

with an inside and an outside. Now take one end of

the strip and twist it, so the

side that is the

bottom on one end is the top on the other

end. Then connect them again to form a loop with a

twist in the

middle (a little tape

would help here).

So what’s the big deal about this twisty loop? Take a pen and, from any starting point,

trace a line

around that side of the

loop. If you made your Möbius strip correctly, you’

ll soon see that you

can draw a line all the way around it, on both

sides of the flat strip,

without lifting your pen. That

twist made the paper into a three-dimensional object with

one

unbroken, continuous plane –with

one side.

And that’s the whole point of this section. John had a kind of a motto that was

featured

prominently in his book:

“There

is only one side…and we’re all on it.”

In as

much as one writer

has the right to steal from another, for the benefit of both,

I’d like

to offer you those words of

Mr. John Galleher from his humble book.

There is only

one side, friends…and

we're all on it.

Now John didn’t hold this out as truth because some bored mathematician had a little fun with a piece of paper on his desk, and
neither do I. The Möbius strip does not try to prove anything; that would be to confuse symbol with substance. The single-sided
Möbius formation is a symbol of non-dual thought (the “substance”), and the non-dual thought leads to the observation of unity.
When someone asks, “What do you mean by ‘there is only one side?’” we can point to the Möbius strip and say (perhaps with more
explanation), “it’s like this.” That which appears to have two sides, upon closer examination, has only one. That is the proper
relationship between symbol and substance; a symbol can and should do no more than that. (This is an important concept for
later, as we examine the “competing” symbols used to portray the substance of God.)

I should also add, for the sake of answering likely emerging questions about my sanity, that this unity is underlying the day-to-day
reality in which we walk, and is not plainly visible on the surface (not invisible, just not plainly visible, and I’ll get around to
discussing the difference). I’m not naïve to the fact that “our world” has many, many sides on various stages of competition, and in
some cases the competition appears to be a matter of life and death. All I am saying –somewhat dogmatically at this point— to add to
it is: religion is designed to be a portal into another world –a world that looks surprisingly like our own because surprise! it is our
own; to a world where all the competition is recognized as drama for drama’s sake; to a world where life and death are not a
matter of life or death (a false dichotomy –life and death are not opposites; birth is the opposite of death, and life is a cycle that
includes both).

The diversity of life is there, it is real, as are all the problems that go along with it. But that diversity rests within a unity that, if
recognized, would solve most of the problems inherent in diversity. The end result is a world where fear is as unnecessary to us
as lungs are to a fish, where we need no more fear a terrorist attack, another world war or even a nuclear holocaust, than
the actors in Hamlet fear the final scene –once everyone’s dead, the curtain falls, then the actors get up off the floor, take a bow,
and prepare for the next performance. Life is like this.

A corner has been turned in these writings, and I’m conscious of the discussion going away from the earlier themes of compare-and-
contrast between Biblianism and Christotheism and into more of a pure exposition of Christotheism itself. I figure anyone who would
find it inherently flawed, wrong-headed or just plain evil probably stopped reading long ago. Good, now I don’t have to be so damn
civil. Man, what kind of an idiot…just kidding. I’m actually feeling goofy tired. Five hundred sixty-eight miles on short sleep under
a hot New Mexico sun makes a boy sleepy. Tomorrow I think I’ll jump in with some unabashed personal testimony, or whatever
else comes up after reading the past few days. –HC Alamogordo, N.M.

© 2004 by Hermit Crab
a Fish Out Of Water production

Next -- Chapter 10