LARS' LAST LAUGH

I met with Lars Knowlund just weeks before he died. He was quite

agitated about it all. He did not ask for this trouble. He most certainly

resented the attention. He never felt it was his personage that

deserved the credit, but rather his mind...don't ask him why, because

he claims, "no clue" that the mind had a mind of it's own and doesn't

belong to him at all, but instead, chose him to transmit that which was to be

dictated to him...through him... nightly. It was, at first thrilling and

electric...he channeled with great energy, and enthusiasm rippled

through him. They flew through the words, ripped through pages,

strode through volumes of uncanny verse. Strident, daring, head on

A bravado assault in the pairing.

Symbiotic brothers, belting them out

Fish to water...current take me where you will.

But...

Time can turn the exuberant into the expected ...with more expected

from each party, each passing night.

“Don't think. Just type. TYPE!”

The voice began to bitch.Their nightly rituals gone stale. Lars was not channeling properly. They grew to doubt one another, Lars and the voice. Night after night, the battle, the fight.

Listen to me damn it!

Then Lars' mind finally locked...he was, he moaned, "oh so Deathly

blocked."

Consciousness overruled the “sub-”... and Lars felt vacated. Nothing

lived in his attic. No one came knocking. No one shook him awake.

Just, Quiet, Cobwebbed coherence.

Coherence? Blasphemy!

Incomprehensible as it seem, the dream stopped.

"That can't be," he told me, "that just can't be! How could we possibly

have separate ideas, he was part of me...but not mine. He had the

thoughts, I had him, at least for as long as he determined to stay. But

you don't leave me barren with nothing to say!"

He raged that day. Shaking a fist at a sky growing darker than he and full now of it's own Energy.

“Damn you! What have you left of me? Hollow as hell,

thoughts I can't swallow. Myself a self doubter! Damn you. Better that

we never conjoined, than to have shared and be left barren. Ignorance-is-

bliss can kiss my ass, it's fucking boring!”

He slammed the door on me. Smack in my face. Now it was my turn to

pace and there was no better place than this lush pine grove. Who would not appreciate this glenn? So, I strolled the meadowed field hoping the weather would hold. I had to connect with my own thoughts. Get some perspective on what I had

just experienced, the words I heard...

"What are you thinking?" He asked sneaking up behind, or perhaps I

was just distracted by the distractions in my mind to notice. He had

calmed. His face not so troubled and lined, but his complexion quite

pale as if he'd just reached a reckoning.

"...no, no, tell me...the thoughts...the words. I'd like to know. Speak to

me as you think them, aloud so I can hear. I won't use them I swear,

they'd be your thoughts, not mine, I 'd just love to hear...words strung

together, and take some joy in here."

I rambled on for several hours...bits and pieces of work and interviews...

"Ha! That's crap," he'd say, and rightfully so.

Sometimes his eyes would light up like he could see it before him, his finger fidget as if tapping it out, like code...feeling the sense, the smell of it formulating...before

the shade draws back down again and he fades.

The storm finally mastered him, I hear. Oh, not the piddling one that

we experienced, but it's big, big brother, who took no time to pay the

man it's mind as it barrelled inland. “Excuse me while I blow this bare-ass old buggar to oblivion.” He railed back at the storm, "Go away !!"

And so he was, in an instant...within a flash. Gloriously Gone.

Lars' last laugh.