"If My Parents Hadn't Met; I Wouldn't Be Born"... response... "Good" and "Bad" is also part of the Greater Plan...

Back in May I connected with a woman I had known in middle school. I was surprised that she spoke Brazilian Portuguese and Ukrainian. I always thought of Branchburg, NJ as highly "whitebread, Anglo-Saxon Protestant" with a few people of Polish and Italian heritage, Italian and Irish catholic, very few Jews, a very rare Asian Indian and almost no one else. In middle school there was Chad, the only person of African Descent in our grade. And a whole lot of racist jokes and comments... So, when I learned that this "friend" spoke Brazilian Portuguese and Ukrainian, my "ears propped up" and I wondered if there was something I and the rest of us missed in childhood... In Brooklyn I had dated two women who were from Ukraine.  Both of them, Anya and Lyubov, I met at the Art Student's League where I drew models in open sketch classes.  I cooked for Lyubov in my apartment New Years 2000.  She offered to pay me to marry her.  I told her that she was very attractive and should wait for someone to fall in-love with her, since supposedly she had 3 more years on her student visa.  In the end I believe she was trapped in the Russian mafia as a prostitute, and she was trying to save her son who was still in the Ukraine.  She said she was escaping her violent husband who stabbed her with a fire poker during a party at their house in Ukraine.  She has what looks like a bullet wound  in one of her shoulders...  I met Anya a few weeks later and ignored Lyubov's urgent phone calls.  Anya suggested I respond to them.  But I knew it was just a trap...  The thing is that I met some of Lyubov's "friends" on West Broadway where she was selling photographs...  The energy wasn't "clean"...  That evening we went with one of those Russian friends to a restaurant club and he dropped me off at my apartment.  I was sure that Lyubov would get out with me, since we were "dating".  But, her "friend" insisted that she go with him...  It was a pretty tense situation and I let her go.  If I'm correct that was the last time I saw her... 

It turns out that this Branchburg friend's grandparents of her mother's side fled the Ukraine for Brazil and her grandparents of her father's side fled the Ukraine for Venezuela. Her parents met in Somerville, NJ after growing up in those respective countries of Venezuela and Brazil. This friend's mother had a childhood love from Brazil when she left with her parents for the U.S. She and her boyfriend agreed upon maintaining communication through letters. But, she never received one letter from that boyfriend. After waiting to no avail, the friend's mother met her father, they married and the friend was born. The marriage was a disaster and the parents divorced. Years later the friend's grandmother delivered a boxful of letters from the childhood boyfriend to the mother. It turns out that he had written! But for some reason the grandmother didn't want the mother to be in contact with the boyfriend. 

47 years after losing contact with each other, the old boyfriend divorced his wife in Indiana where he had studied Engineering at Purdue University and where he had 3 children. He decided to look for the friend's mother who also was divorced and now they are happily married with grown children of the other... 

Aside from it being a sadly beautiful story, the reason I write this is because the friend mentioned the concern that, had her mother not married her father, she would not have been born...

I must ask you this: Are we just organisms created by organic matter and chemical processes of and within our parents? Do you see and feel yourself as just this; a biproduct? Had my father not had sex with my mother, would I not exist today? Did you know that a female dog can give birth to puppies of different males in the same litter? What does this have to do with Humans you may ask... Lots of questions. Who are you? What is the soul? What is the spirit? What is the mind? When you feel yourself, where are you? In other words, where is it that you sense yourself most? I sense myself in the space behind my eyes. I feel most intensely in the space projected forward from that space behind my eyes. As you may know, I've had 3 major surgeries. I've had my colon and my rectum removed. I've seen my small intestine respond to the touch of my finger. But I didn't feel that touch nor pressure that my small intestine felt. It immediately receded inside my abdominal cavity. Not long afterwards it stretched itself outwards and "spit at me"... No, it didn't do that intentionally. I  was changing the colostomy bag I had in place for 3 months in 2001 and 2002, hoping that my bowel movements would hault for 5 minutes to give me the opportunity to clean myself and replace the old bag with a new one... If I didn't clean the surface well enough, the bag would fall off as it had many times because the hole where they pulled that part of my small intestine through my lower abdomin was created in a bad curve of my body, making it very difficult for to seal the bag against my skin... I would have loved to control the bowel movements of my small intestine, but like the heart, it functions independently of the mind. You can hold your breath.  But there will come a point where your brain shuts you down causing the relaxing of the lungs back into their natural breathing cycles.

Are black outs a negative physical response to trauma or are they a positive system shut down protecting you from certain of your behaviours, such as over exerting yourself on a hot day while not eating enough and not drinking enough... For me, the black out is a warning or a signal and the opportunity for a forced break, be that break on a couch or in a hospitital bed... My body tells me when it doesn't want alcohol or coffee or sugar or other simple carbohydrates such as pasta or bread. But, other people don't have or aren't aware of the communication between their bodies and their minds and push certain situations to more drastic limits, such as the anorectic who blacks out upon rising from a reclining position or the person who blacks out after passing their alcoholic limitations... Must we await cirosis of the liver or diabetis or car accidents or becoming pregnant by an unknown lover during the alcoholic blackout in order to question our behaviors? But, I've gotten way off track. What does this have to do with not existing if our parents hadn't met? 

My response to the friend is a little convoluted. But I believe there is a point that can be further worked upon: 

I don't know how that works... with parents and the birth of children, etc... "had things been different"... I believe you would have been born, but at a different time or to different parents. It's a strange concept I've been working upon in my head, since there is absolutely no other way of working it... different concepts of being and spirit/essence etc... the soul... There is a belief that the child seeks the parents, or the situation... Granted, it's not a child who seeks, but a soul or spirit (if there actually is a difference)... I met an upper middle-class middle-aged Mexican woman in Acapulco who told me that she sees spirits and has helped them leave the body of family members. Yes, this may seem wacked... But, a little while ago I decided against judging a person for saying they had an experience I've never had... In any case, she said that your soul can occupy up to 10 bodies at a given time. That was 3+ years ago and I thought she was nuts. But, for some reason I couldn't stop thinking about that. And I thought about certain dreams I've had or certain recurring dreams since adolescence... The same young woman but with differing physical characteristics and the same feeling. When this happened back in the early 80s I would look for her the following day, although I knew she was only in my dreams... And this has occurred many times here in Mexico the past 3 years. I was really bothered about it, because I felt I was being subconsciously unfaithful to Margarita. Then I realized that she appears in my dreams to show me that I am loved and attractive... (Something having to do with my experience of feeling un-accepted in Mexico)...  During adolescence she was a young blonde woman. Why blonde? For me, attraction towards blondes is socially prescribed due to advertising, modelling, television and Hollywood norms of beauty; probably connected with the Anglo-Saxon political-cultural hegemony of the times... You know that the natural blonde in the U.S. and the world is a minority and always has been.  But why consider Blonde hair and light skin the epitomy of beauty if it isn't for socio-political reasons? Yes, this is besides the point. Here in Mexico Mexican men respond to knowing that I am married to a Mexican woman with the comment, "Oh! So you like Mexican Women!" And I respond rather foolishly, "Just one." In another situation I would explain that I don't have a physical standard of beauty, that I could have been in-love with a Scotts-Irish with red hair and rosy freckled skin or with an Arabic woman or a Korean woman or a a a Central African woman with the darkest of dark "blue-black" skin... If I fell in-love with a blonde woman, it's because she was beautiful without that blonde hair... But, in adolescence she appeared repeatedly in my dreams... The dreams were more sensual than they were sexual since they were meant for expressing a spiritual-loving connection. Yes, we were naked. But that could also be the point of bringing us closer to our basic physical essences... Why didn't she appear as a brown haired Jewish woman? Why didn't she appear as a black woman? In Mexico she doesn't have a standard appearance.  But the feeling is the same.  Who is she, is she me?  Is she someone I knew in a past life.  Is it that my soul is occupying another body and I am dreaming their life experience?  No, I don't believe that at the moment.  Why do we need that type of bonding?  Why would I need it if I am with Margarita?  Since I don't hallucinate, she doesn't appear in my waking life...  Is she but a repeated fantasy?  I doubt it... 

What does this have to do with the soul occupying up to 10 bodies at any given time? 


Probably nothing. It could have been a tangent. Or better yet, she is a part of me. Your mother and your step-father were always connected; just awaiting the truly correct time for connecting physically; when there wasn't so much risk for the relationship; when both had truly found themselves and felt secure in their own personal worlds... We all live in a personal learning process of steps and degrees. 

Back to you being born or not; The idea is that your soul seeks the lesson you're going to learn in this lifetime. In New York City I "studied" Astrology. And I studied indepth my own personal horoscope. Would you believe that there is something in my chart that says, "because of this combination, you will lose a parent or both parents early in childhood..."? Now, that sounds absolutely absurd. For me, the importance of Astrology is the formation of your personality/character and how that effects your relationships, etc... But, how can my Astrological chart kill my father? Or it's that much more complex... One Astrological chart seeks or is sought by another one. No we are not astrological horoscopes.  

Since writing this over two months ago I believe I've answered the question.  Let's say that there is a super entity above we call God.  Maybe God administers a whole complex system of spiritual "workers" like angels and those entities have at their reach all the possible combinations existent for creating destinies and lifework for each soul that is going to appear on a planet or on Earth in the physical human form...  The soul or the spirit decides it wishes for the next life experience and chooses a challenge.  Who knows?  Maybe this challenge isn't determined by YOU, but by those above you.  So, they match horoscopes for creating certain childhood experiences.  My horoscope says that one or both of my parents would die when I was young.  In effect, my father's horoscope must say that he would be a superstar with faulty genes leading to his sudden death at a young age leaving behind a young wife and 3 young children.  His horoscope must have similarities with that of my mother, since both of them lost their mothers at young ages...  My mother was born on May 29th and my father was born on June 1st, both Geminis.  I am Gemini too.  Not very important information, since the horoscope is about the interaction between all the planets, the moon and your rising sign.  I am Gemini because my Sun is in Gemini.  But my moon, Jupiter, Uranus, Pluto and Rising are in Virgo.  My Mercury is in Gemini.  My Venus is in Taurus as is my Saturn.  My Mars is in Sagitarius and my Neptune is in Scorpio.  What is my sign?  My rising being in the same sign as my Moon makes me very Cancerian because the Moon rules the sign of Cancer...; I love cooking and mothering people... I am very tenacious like a crab and I approach situations side-stepping with much caution...  But I am prude, overly analytical, hermit-like, trapped in my head and in my home like a Virgo, I am mentally ambidextuous, with multiple interests and talents, a "jack of all trades", juggler of ideas and interests like a Gemini and I am a directionless journeyor into welcome abysses like a Sagitarius...  Mars signifies how you pursue your life.  Sagitarius is symbolized by the Centaur,  half man/half horse archer; a metaphore for Sagitarius is an arrow shot with the force of 100 horses into the unknown.  The Sagitarius knows that the arrow will land somewhere.  That somewhere is the object.  But the true interest is the journey necessary for encountering that arrow.  It's not the ends that's of interest to the Sagitarius, but the journey and what is discovered and learned during that journey...  For the Sagitarius there is only one way, and it's the way of their arrow, a reason why you may find that many Sagitarius seem very obstinate or stubborn.  Don't try pushing a horse.  You may find a mouthful of hoof...

But back to God's spiritual worker/administrators. A lot of time and planning and vigilance for finding existing human beings, viewing their horoscopes and/or life experiences and figuring a way of connecting them and disconnecting others or managing the complex situation.  I will continue repeating:  WE ARE ALMOST 7 BILLION PEOPLE LIVING ON THIS PLANET!  

There is the idea that real time isn't the same as human time.  It's more like a computer time line.  It's all infront of your eyes and you click the date that interests you. The idea is that that yesterday and today and tomorrow occur at the same time.  Yes, that sounds absurd.  But you can't conceive of 7 billion people, all being equal to you either...  all having the same rights towards the protection and love of one God...  In fact, most of you would use this as proof that God can't exist.  It's inconceivable.  And how can God exist if you've never seen that God?  It's all hearsay, no?  Humans are too intelligent to be fooled.  But we are fooled each and everyday by so many different people and literature and organizations and systems...  

When one believes that their body is the only body they have and that this life is the only life they will have, maybe they consciously or subconsciously justify lying, robbing, exploiting, tricking, ignoring and neglecting the needs of others...  Afterall, this is the only life you live, you may as well obtain what you can at any expense... Isn't that the case?  Living one life with one body makes people very selfish.  But if you know that this is just one level or part of a bigger process, then maybe you will consider other possibilities of why you are here on this planet, and maybe you'll be more considerate.  The idea of one life also fuels the idea that you couldn't have been born in the shoes of others.  So, if you are privileged and others aren't, that isn't your problem.  When we are born through blood lines, we believe that one line is better than another...  But what if you die today and tomorrow you are reborn in the other situation?  Yes, I have a conflict with this argument because I understand that all situations are intentional at a spiritual level and, for us to learn, we must have racists and exploiters and torturers and violators and mutilators and mentally ill people...  For a moment I think that I have no right to complain or argue about ethics and morals and justice.  But then I also realize that everyone and everything is put in this life for interaction within the playing out of all the events; meaning that the activists must exist with the missionaries and the murderers and the international corporate exploiters and thieves....  Harsh statement.  But what's the difference between the European "conquistadores" (conquesters/conquerors) imperialists who came to the Americas and to Africa and to South and East Asia and and and...?  Read Isabel Allende's book Inez of My Soul;  a great description of how the Spanish were when they arrived to Peru and Chile and what underlied their behaviors, their violence etc.  And remember all the time that Isabel Allende comes from the Upper Upper Middle Class of Chile and was the niece of the former president of Chile Salvador Allende who was assassinated in 1972...

 The idea of spiritual or cosmic time (Past, Present, Future) occuring at the same time is part of the understanding of psychic phenomena y dreams...  How can you know about something that hasn't yet happened?  How could I draw or paint

 my girlfriends before they appeared?  I drew Margarita's younger sister Alba in 1999.  The drawing takes place a few years from now...  I drew Margarita twice. The Psychic Estrella in Brooklyn said that I would leave the U.S. in less than 4 months and that I would meet my last girlfriend when I arrived where I was headed.  How could he know that?  But, how cold I be connected with Margarita and her family almost 4 years before meeting them, and how could we be connected from such physical and cultural distances?  And why?  How did I know that Chris would appear and what he would do 3 years before our meeting when he was living in Washington State and we were living in Xalapa Veracruz?  How does all of this work?  And in dreams vivid experiences pass before your "eyes" in distant lands with very real people you don't know seemingly so real, events that seemingly pass hours or days, yet in reality only occupy a few minutes of your sleep...      

Carl Jung used Astrology to prove his concept of syncronicity in contrast with the concept of causality... He found that there was a 300% increase in probability of marriage between two people if one of the person's sun signs was in the same sign as the other person's Moon sign or Rising Sign or when one person's Moon sign is the same as the other person's rising sign.  My moon is in Virgo.  Margarita's Rising is in Virgo. In Mexico, I've leaned away from Astrology. Probably because I left all of my books in New Jersey and Mexico is very limited when it comes to literature.  Plus, books cost so much more here than in the U.S...  I originally wrote:  Not that it's (Astrology) less important to me now than then. But, because I feel that there is so much more to consider, such as Good and Bad/God and Satan... That sounds stupid. I don't believe in the Devil, nor in hell. I believe that good can be bad and bad can be good as far as learning and growth experience is considered... God isn't a loving entity, nor is God jealous, nor angry. God manages both good and bad and all the degrees between. The question is, "What is God? and why good for me and bad for the other, or better for me and worse for the other...? How do the spirits of our ancestors fit into our experience... if they do...? Is there truly a blood line or are you travelling on a spiritual line? Should I look back towards my ancestors or should I look into the spiritual connections I've made in this lifetime... In the U.S. they ask you what you are and you say, "I'm Ukrainian" Maybe I say I'm Russian-Romanian... When I was painting in New York City I drew Margarita 4 months before meeting her, before ever thinking I was going to move to Mexico. (In fact, she says that I drew her in 1999 too...) I painted Anya one month before meeting her at The Art Students League... I was pretty sick and exhausted that evening... I left the class, because I couldn't concentrate and there she was; a dream straight out of Fiddler On the Roof... It turned out we had much in common at that moment and we lived near each other; she lived up the park from me. The first day I visited her at her duplex in Park Slope, I was waiting on the sidewalk and Randi, my girlfriend from college who I was "supposed" to marry and who brought me to New York City, passed by at the moment Anya climbed down the steps. Anya went to Amherst College and Randi and I went to Hampshire College, in the same town. Randi was my first Jewish girlfriend and my family's dream and my dream to finally be accepted by them. Anya was a Ukrainian "Jew" without Judaism and the only other Jewish girlfriend I had. The two of them had the same damn voice... 1.5 years earlier, one and a half years after I broke up with Randi, Randi called my mother and invited her to her wedding. My mother said, "I'd love to go, but there's a problem... You're getting married on the same day as Beth!" (My younger sister)... I'll keep going... My mother sent my sisters and I to summer camp (for me 6 summers) to the New Jersey Young Mens and Young Womens Hebrew Association Camps in the Poconos... That's where I learned about the Birds and the Bees, because my Branchburg peers made me "Untouchable". Randi, who grew up in Astoria, Queens went to those camps. And she just happened to be in the same group as my younger sister Beth. They are sitting next to each other in a group photograph. But they never knew each other. I had to go to college in Amherst, Massachussetts to make that connection years later. My sisters, my mother, my aunts, my cousins all loved Randi. When I broke up with her, I broke their hearts. My mother didn't hug me for years after. I can go on and on. In the painting of Anya, Anya is looking askance, she's tense and she is flanked by two cats. The painting of her is the first painting or drawing where the person isn't looking at the viewer.  In real life, Anya has a problem with looking people in the eyes. One of the reasons our relationship didn't work was because she didn’t spend time with me in my apartment, where I cooked, where I painted, where I lived... because I had a cat and she is allergic to cats. I am allergic to cats too. But I love cats. I'm allergic to dogs. But I love dogs. She loves dogs. But, the cat was a wall between us. I had a painting called "The Woman with the Red Hair." I painted it on a queen-sized matress protector and hung it on the french doors that separated my bedroom from the living room. She has long curly red hair and she is crying giant tears that fall from the center of her eyeless eyes; they are pure white light. For years I was wondering who that woman was.  

In the beginning of 2001 I was living in Anya's mother's studio apartment in Brighton Beach.  Anya was in Kiev 2 months then and didn't call me, nor write me via email.  She had told me that she couldn't guarrantee returning to me and I was crawling out of my skin living in her mother's studio, immersed in the Russian community.   The woman who was my last girlfriend in the U.S., Joey, called me one day.  I told her that I was itching to up and leave New York City, leaving everyone and everything behind.   I wanted to walk away, cross the country and see what happened.  Joey surprised me saying, "I will miss you if you leave..." We had been "friends" since 1999.  But, I had never sensed a true warm connection. 

I didn't leave New York.  Instead I found a studio apartment on Ocean Avenue between Kings Highway and Avenue O.  Not long after moving my stuff, I invited Joey over for dinner.  It turned out to be the first time she entered an apartment of mine.  Joey was always very busy.  She was a dancer (modern and ballet) and a filmmaker, along with a masseuse...  Normally we would go to a dance performance or a film together and part rapidly.  She always had somewhere to go, with the exception of one time before Anya left for the Ukraine; Joey and I spent 4 hours in a Tibetan restaurant talking.  She would later inform me that that was when she knew she was attracted to me.  I was running 4 miles per day and was in great shape.  I guess that's why she didn't leave running for another date...  The day I cooked for her, she offered to meet me for shopping for the ingredients in Chinatown.  We must have spent hours crossing from store to store.  In the end I must have finished cooking sometime after midnight.  Since I lived in central Brooklyn and she lived in East Harlem, she mentioned that she would have to sleep over.  I said that she could use my bed and I would sleep on the floor.  She said that that wasn't necessary, that she trusted me.  So, we lay down on my mattress and couldn't sleep.  What would you expect?  As I write, memories return.  After Joey miraculously accepted my invitation to have dinner in my apartment, the thought entered my head that something was about to happen.  I knew it.  Maybe because she had said the month before that she would miss me, had I left the city.  

Joey has always been a very self-centered person.  Like Anya, she is an only child.  Her mother is a prostitute, was a flight attendant and taught Joey the idea of using men.  Joey wanted to study dance in college and her mother pressured her into film, since her foolish mother believed that dancers couldn't become connected with rich men...  Ballet is one of the arts invented by and directed towards the upper classes.  If a ballerina is attractive and talented, it is almost guarranteed that she will enter wealthy circles...  In order to pay her films and compete with her NYU/Tisch school classmates, Joey began selling herself.  Now, let me tell you about Joey;  She is a triple Cancer with Moon in Leo (emotional need for being in the limelight, for being important).  Her father is of Czechoslovakian heritage and her mother is from Alabama African-descent...  It seems that her father met her mother in a bar in the midwest and tried saving her from prostitution.   (Later on I would do the same around 9/11).  They married and Joey's mother rapidly became resentful towards her father, since he never offered a strong economy, working at the Denver Botanic Gardens.  Later on they divorced and Joey's mother followed Joey to New York City.  Aside from Joey's egoism and her mother's value system Joey adopted, Joey is an inherently beautiful person. But she has difficulty managing both her inherent beauty as a sensitive and caring human being and her intense ambition...  Before I moved out of Park Slope and before Anya left for Kiev, Ukraine, Joey called me about her issue with being a masseuse.  I knew she worked as a masseuse, but I had no idea that there were massage therapists who offered "release", which makes them light prostitutes.  Later on I would learn that, if the client offered more, the masseuse would break her ethics and give him what he wanted...  After all, the massage rooms are private.  Granted, there are cameras in the rooms to protect the masseuse if the client becomes violent.  I learned all this in the beginning of our romanting relationship.  The reason she called me that day was because she was feeling desperate.  She told me about having to masterbate her clients and something about role playing.  She said that the work was killing her; she felt increasingly vacant. And that she didn't want to become like some of her co-workers who were in the business for over a decade.  She saw those women and she saw how hollow and miserable they were...  She didn't want to become one of those.  But she didn't know how she would pay her rent and manage her dance classes in the afternoons...  Her dream was to be a dancer and to shoot dance films...  

I was a crazy artist.  I was learning.  I was open minded.  I didn't judge her.  It was her experience, not mine. For 2 years I was without romantic ideas towards this beautiful and internally wilted woman.  The first time we met for a "date" in September 1999, neither of us had money.  Truthfully I have no idea how we ended up in the Harlem Museum.  I imagine I paid for her and then had nothing left over.  Remembering better, Joey said that her policy was saying that she didn't have money, since she didn't believe in women paying their way.  We got into a long conversation about this and I realized that I would never date her, not because I wanted her to pay, but because I didn't want to be looked at as a bank account; I wanted us to be equals.  2 years later she would change her tune with me, without my input.  In fact, that would be a time when it seemed that a lot of woman wanted to pay for me...  No, I wasn't a male prostitute; it was a period of beauty.  

So, for 2 years I maintained myself in a platonic distance with Joey and learned to appreciate our friendship for it's limitations...  But then things changed from Joey towards me.  To this date I don't truly understand what happened.  Syncronicity, fate, timing...  Anya was in Ukraine.  But it couldn't happen when I was renting Anya's mother's studio in Brighton Beach...  But, it was in that apartment in Brighton Beach, on that phone that Joey would tell me that she would miss me if I left.  I believe that changed things, although I don't remember much...  

That night that we couldn't sleep, Joey had this crazy idea about playing "Truth or Dare"... That night we fell into a deep intense love that Joey never imagined.  Before truly meeting, I couldn't sleep during the day.  I couldn't share a bed with another person.  I still suffered horrible insomnia.  With Joey, I could sleep during the day, during the night all day and all night, wrapped in her body, without her...  Joey claimed that sleep was one of her favorite activities.  Before "meeting" her, I claimed that sleep was necessary for resting, but hours were for productivity.  I absorbed Joey's energy and learned true sleep.  Insomnia is a very rare occurance for me now...  I mentioned that Joey never imagined falling truly in-love with anyone.  I was her first true boyfriend at the age of 26.  The first time we made love with her on top of me, I felt hot drops of water falling on my cheeks and eyes.  I opened my eyes and noticed that heavy tears were falling from the center of her eyes. I realized that Joey was "the Woman With the Red Hair"...  (She had been dyeing her hair burgundy for less than a year before that fateful evening.  In fact, the day she dyed her hair burgundy she also straightened it for a viewing of one of her films.  I was horrified.  What had happened to her beautiful curly black hair?!!!)  That would be the first of so many occasions I would see Joey cry.  Everytime, the tears fell large and heavy from the center and not from the corners of her eyes.  

One day Joey informed me that she must speak with me about something about her she felt obligated towards sharing.  So, we met in Tompkins Square Park and she informed me of her history of being a prostitute paying for her NYU/Tisch Film school with those jobs.  That day I invited to cook Chinese food for her in my new apartment and knew something was about to happen, I said to myself that I could handle dating a woman who offered massage with release.  I thought I was enlightened.  I thought I was an open-minded artist.  I was naive.  But, when she informed me of her real history, I found myself in a horrible dilemma;  I was so in-love with her; in-love in the true sense of the word and not in the projection of our fantasies upon the other person sense;  The feeling in-love because "the hand of God" has touched the two of us in order for the occurance of an intense evolutionary experience between the two of us.  In-love does not mean permanence.  It doesn't mean perfection.  It doesn't mean harmony.  It means a powerful beginning.  It means a potential.  We supposedly fit together perfectly.  She was "The Woman With the Red Hair"; it was predetermined.  Plus, she was born 7 years, 7 days, and 7 minutes after me, 3 lucky 7s and her father shares my younger sister Beth's birthday of March 12th (Like Margarita's mother's youngest brother Gregorio)...  I wrote spoken word and she danced to it and people enjoyed that and applauded us...  We danced so well together; how we moved.  But, I couldn't get past the character flaw of Joey selling her body to strangers.  What was worse was that she was from a middle-class family; she went to good schools.  How could she put herself in such danger?  It was so unnecessary.  And you may ask, "when is prostitution necessary?"  And you may wish to study the history of real life situations of poor women, especially poor women with children in a world where most people are economically and politically excluded and ignored, many of them exploited by their goverments and employers...  I think you would sell yourself if it was the only of two options; prostitution or hunger for your children.  But this wasn't Joey's issue.  This is what concerned me most.  I couldn't disconnect myself from that issue of her poor judgement.  And I wondered what truly lay below the surface.  When she told her mother that she was dating me, her mother said, "I hope he has money and isn't living off you..."  Joey said that she didn't feel we should have sex until she removed herself from herself from the massage parlor.  She thought it would take months, but relationships have a way of inspiring the speeding up of time or energies and she removed herself from that work in less than a month, started waiting tables (horribly, since she was an organizational mess) and then became an instructor at the New York Sports Club facility on Wall Street. I met Joey's mother for dinner at her mother's apartment somewhere in Manhattan.  She also had a condo in the outer Bronx...  Her mother wanted to meet me, so we met.  Supposedly her mother found me very charming.  But she spent much of the evening talking about Joey's issues being related to Joey's father and that she believed that Joey's father sexually abused Joey, turning her into an overly sexualized being...  I never met Joey's father.  All that mattered was that Joey's mother was a prostitute and what Joey told me about being introduced to her mother's "boyfriends" as a little girl.  

I can continue with this train of thought.  I'm sure I've gotten so off track in some form.    I realize that this is a giant and complex story and question about spirit, and soulmates, and how and why do we meet and for what reason are we here on this planet and in these relationships?  Can you see the future or a past that wasn't yours?  Why do some people only experience coincidences and others experience intense syncronicity?  There are almost 7 billion people on this planet.  Are we all important and special?  Are we all here to experience and do important things?  Or are so many just pawns on a chess board.  Yes, the person who becomes a superstar is also but a pawn, although they don't understand that and that they are not truly Gods...    But it seems that millions move in the same side to side directions and others move with more flexibility and with more independence (and I'm not talking about privilege)...  In all groups or societies you will find people who seemingly don't "belong" as if they come from a different part of the world or universe.  Some of those people are called explorers.  Others are said to be "ahead of their times."  

I bumped into Joey at Alt. Coffee on Avenue A infront of Tompkins Square. in the East Village one of those everydays I escaped Mónica the Monster Puerto Riqueña.  I was in the middle of talking with a friend infront of the door on the street when I noticed her sitting in the back of the cafe-living room.  Joey had a hell of a head of curly hair that evening; thick and heavy curls that sprung out in all directions.  So, I interrupted my friend and said that I had to meet this woman.  I wanted to draw her.  We ended up in a long conversation that ended with me walking her to the West Village where she lived until she moved to Harlem the following day.  She had just graduated NYU Film School and had just found herself her own apartment.  The conversation flowed for hours until I dropped her off in the wee hours of the morning; I hadn't lifted a pencil...  I gave her my phone # and she said she would love to hook up with me...  The truth is that the probability of a woman calling a man she had just met in a cafe in New York City is very low.  Most friends and dates are made through friends, colleagues and adult education classes...  Joey didn't call me...  Not that week, not that month...  

I met Johanna while drawing a Colombian woman in the Barnes and Nobles cafe on 7th Avenue in Park Slope, after the Colombian woman gave me her number and invited me to paint her at her house...  Johanna had been watching me draw the woman and then listened to our conversation when the woman's sister or friend suggested she look at the drawing I was doing of her...  I sensed some sexual undertones in the invitation and became scared.  Scared?  Why?  Stupid fantasies about a jealous husband involved in the Colombian drug trade...   Very stupid fantasy.  She was beautiful.  But I didn't want to set foot in her house...  And I intentionally lost her number.  But Johanna appeared anyway.  She offered to model for me in my apartment in Winsor Terrace, suggested we find a more private space in the bookstore for talking quietly.  Johanna was the first woman I kissed in a public space without waiting for a sign, without hesitating much, without having a date, without knowing each other for more than an hour and not waiting 2 weeks like with Randi or months (2 years later) with Anya and not debating the situation.  And she said, "I was afraid you wouldn't do that.  Had you not kissed me, I would have know that nothing would happen between us."  And she showed up at my apartment the following day...  And she returned 2 days later.  But Mónica's older sister Sinsi appeared unannounced with their two young half brothers who were visiting from Puerto Rico.  And Johanna hadn't given me her phone # nor her email...  I had no way of warning her against arriving.  But it was a miracle.  And that began the breaking of Mónica's grasp upon my apartment; from the beginning of her moving in with me 9 months earlier, she claimed, "Possession is 9/10ths of the law.  As long as I am here, you can't get rid of me..."  This was 1998.  Joey would move in with me on 9/15 2001.  

That first time Johanna appeared in my apartment I didn't paint her.  I don't remember more than showing her my paintings, drawings and painted shirts (one of them she took with her) and laying naked with her on my bed, listening to her stories and looking in her sun illuminated eyes that had become beautiful kaliedoscopic images.  I didn't realize that she was so beautiful.  I also didn't realize that I could look someone in the eyes for seemingly hours.  That afternoon I learned the difference between sensuality and sexuality and realized that I didn't need, nor did I want an orgasm...  So, I didn't have sex with her.  I just listened to her and looked into her eyes.  Johanna told me that she was the child of an Egyptian man and a British woman.  She also said that she had been horribly abused by her mother...  She was 28-years-old and supposedly had breast cancer...  4 years later I would meet Bürcu from Turkey (you really must read "the 3 messengers parts 1,2,&3") who would also tell me that she was diagnosed with cancer, but of the Uterus, also at the age of 28...  

Memories come slowly and pass through narrow spaces as if they are passing through thick mud...  For some reason I remember thinking I saw my father in Johanna's eyes...  I imagine I would need to be hypnotized to understand that incredibly strange thought....  I think it had something to do with understanding what he knew he was leaving behind...  For a week or so after Johanna disappeared, I found myself walking the streets thinking about her and about life.  Through her I discovered the beginning of my connection with God.  I knew she was there.  I smelled her perfume randomly.  I knew someone was with me.  Why Johanna?  What did she say?  What did she do?  Maybe it wasn't that I saw my father in her eyes, but he was looking through those eyes at me.  Yes, they were Johanna's eyes.  She was a woman.  When she left my apartment that day, she put on Islamic cover and told me that she was on her way to an Arabic school where she taught in the afternoons...  

Paul, my Lebanese friend I met while drawing in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, warned me that Johanna signifies in Arabic someone connected with the underworld or with Satan...  But, what does the underworld truly signify? All of our fears, and our secrets most people don't share with others.  In Astrology Saturn refers to your fears and your shadow and your life struggles.  But does that mean we should ignore it or hide from it or hide that half of reality from the rest of the world?  Yes, my meeting Johanna was very bizarre and the result was just as bizarre. I had just turned 29 one month prior.  I was in my first year of living as an artist, the same year Van Gogh began dedicating his life to painting.  The same year my mother learned that my father was ill with Cancer the same year in Margarita's life when she married me and changed her life, the year Johanna and Bürcu supposedly became diagnosed with cancer...  It takes Saturn 29 years to complete its journey around the sun.  Supposedly at the age of 28 you start experiencing your "Saturn Return", which is the beginning of a monumental change in your life.  You complete that "return" around the age of 36, when you should feel that you have discovered yourself.  But before you complete your return, you experience a ton of turmoil and you feel a lot of internal conflict, confusion, worry..."  Change is difficult.  Growth is painful.  But, does that mean it is bad?  Suffer true suffering and look at your growth afterwards...

What is God?  Should I have asked, "who is God?"  And how complex is that reality?  Imagine your eyes like video cameras and your dreams like films...  and you are an actor in a perpetual improvisation.  I once dreamed that God appeared in the form of my father.  I almost just gave myself a headache; at the moment  was about to write "it was the only time I dreamed with my father", a memory appeared of another dream, but I didn't grab it.  

Some people believe that life is but an illusion; your projection of your own fantasies upon the screen infront of your eyes.  I have yet to find anything the slightest bit logical and interesting in that commentary.  You may wonder how I can talk about "logic" when I talk about God and phantasms or ghosts and spirits and Astrology...  But, some of these ideas can be tested or proven with examples.  The concept of "God"?  Well, the problem is with God being a word.  A very small word at that.  The problem is that humans seek familiar concepts or ideas for transmitting and sharing with others...  So, God must be a wise old man in the sky or must be a man nailed to a cross who supposedly suffers for our sins...  But why must God be a person, especially a male person?  And that's the thing.  I can blasphemy all I want, and the sky doesn't fall on my head.  Why not?  Because I'm not truly blaspheming...  There is no blasphemy.  God isn't that sensitive. When you can be buried by an avalanche or a mud slide or swept away by a tidal wave or be crushed by a falling scaffold full of bricks or an overpass poorly constructed or toppled by an earthquake, or or or, I don't believe God is clenching "his" fists saying "DAMN YOU TO HELL!"  The only people truly blaspheming are those who don't respect the true laws of nature.  And maybe they aren't even blaspheming...  Maybe God placed us on this planet to destroy it and ourselves...  Maybe we aren't much different from viruses.  Or maybe, like the saying, "you are what you eat," maybe humans truly wish for living freely like viruses and intentionally destroy our host...  So, you become what you believe you are, just a parasite feeding off of the Earth and off of others and not truly listening and not truly believing anything of true value and not truly caring about others and life...  When you grasp too hard anything, you strangle it...  You do that with life too.

I believe a week or so after Johanna disappeared, I downed who knows how many anti-depressants.  Mónica's father is a doctor in San Juan, Puerto Rico.  He sent Mónica with a suitcase full of sample packs of Paxil and all other name brands...  After the explosion of Johanna appearing when Mónica's sister and half brothers were with us, Mónica spent some time with a family friend of theirs in Manhattan.  The morning I took the anti-depressants, Mónica called in.  I told her what I had done and she called an ambulance.  I imagine she also called my mother, since my mother appeared at Maimonides Hospital...  Mónica's father sent  her younger brother Martin to New York City to help her pack and return to San Juan.  She also packed some of my credentials, such as my Hampshire College Diploma.  What did she think she would do with that?  I guess she was thinking of practicing black magic...  When we were the month in Puerto Rico, I remember Mónica playing the card game Magic with her siblings...  I wasn't interested in the occult at the time, so I didn't pay much attention.  

The day I left Maimonides Medical Center in Boro Park, I drew my first drawing of Vicki.  I was in a cafe with my younger sister Beth and her husband Marc (Marc has his Moon in Beth's Sun Pisces).  When I arrived in my Mónica and dogfree apartment, there was a message from Joey on my answering machine.  She had called that same day, the first time she had called me...  When one chapter closes, another one opens.  

I imagine I can write for days about Joey.  I believe she is one of the reasons I decided to live in 2001.  I could have let my illness run it's course.  Afterall, didn't God or life give me Familial Polyposis/Gardner's Syndrome for my premature physical self-destruction?  But the lifelines on both of my hands are very long.  It could all be such a riddle, such as that I was given this disease in order to see how I would respond to the situation.  If there is no challenge, there is no learning...