Doodleman and his bastard son Squig

I first met Doodleman in St. Vincent's hospital, where he was being treated for anxiety. He was a man who felt he was walking
 in a whirlpool. I can still see him with his mouth wide open, screaming and the eyes, THE EYES! Goddamit they were manic,
 eyes that sucked in the whole world. The whole world began and ended in those eyes. He had fear in his blood, D.N.A and
 fingerprints.

"Be careful with public head phones…", ranted Doodleman, "telephones, anything you put up to your ear. Often there are 
receivers that drain you of your reason. Reason is the greatest commodity known to man. In my utopia, reason comes free
 with Kellogg's corn flakes. In this world it's something we've got to work for."

 He lived from one worry to the next. He worried most when he had nothing to worry about. As Mr.D. still says to this day;
 
"It's always good to know what the problem is". 

Paranoia set his brain into the wild disarray of the wind.

 He used to turn to me and say; 

"Squig can you see the baby typhoons in my eyes".

 Sometimes I could.

 He had a rollie constantly hanging from his lips, yellow teeth, yellow hair, yellow tobacco stained skin and of course those
 demonic eyes which convinced me of many a strange notion.
So any way as I was saying I first met him in St. Vincent's hospital, Michael's' ward. It was a ward for anorexics,
 manic-depressives and other mentally ill people. It was a low security ward and a lot of the patients had all the appearances 
of normal people. My job was unusual in that I was working as an Impersonating Patient or as we called ourselves, ImP's.
 My job was to act out the proposed rehabilitation, setting a good example (general head fucking with the patients but it was
 a well paid job). At group therapy I was always the first to say that I loved myself. I cringe now as I remember it. Various
 slogans of the most nauseous kind were drilled into the patients: 

I worked there for seven years leering at the nurses, pretending to be mentally ill and weekly feigning rehabilitation. It all
 ended when I met Doodleman. He was the only patient to ever see through my disguise. He saw straight away that I was
 a pretend patient. I was completely transparent to him. He also saw that I was a miserable Joe Soap. Joe Soap drinks his
 wages, likes to dance where it's the cool place to dance, listens to the prescribed "in" music, watches television, fantasizes
 about girls he shall never have and mauls the ugly tramps on the way home from the pub. 
Mr. D. took me under his wing. He taught me to see through the system by which people were systematically kept at a 
distance from their true selves. He let me in on his secret. 

"Squig you've got to discover the buttons on your body that trigger your perception. You can see beyond all this if you
 choose to. See this button here?"

Doods pointed to a wart on his left arm.

"This button switches my perception from the small picture to the bigger picture. When pressed I no longer perceive parts
 but only wholes. If I looked at that book-shelf over there all I would see is its bare out-line. I wouldn't be able to read the 
names of the books or see the colours of the covers; instead I would see the idea behind it and its role in the scheme of things. 
Everything pales to the bigger picture. Worries wash away, fear dissolves and my wretched anxiety leaves me. I need this
 button to cope with life. But I cannot press it the whole time. Unfortunately to successfully bed a woman, you must care for
 the little things. Zen aloofness tends not to charm the ladies."

He coughed a rogue's laugh. His eyes twinkled.

 "Seemingly basic human interaction is also important. You see the problem with the bigger picture is that it would not exist
 without the billions of little pictures. You see Squig, it IS important that the bin goes out in the morning. It IS important that
 we face the world. My button allows me to take a sneak peek at what its all about. It's my shot of untainted reason and God
 knows I need it. Only the other day I was fixated on whether to make a move on Nurse O' Key. That bitch took up front
 row residence in my mind until she was all I could see. I imagined her wringing my spine with her sensuous touch. Pressing
 the button brought me to my senses."



Doodleman lives in an old man's car. The old man only uses the car on a Sunday to drive to the church so Doodleman is
 usually left alone. I use to visit him after work for what we called perception realignment. We meditated and did not reject
 inner bitterness, weakness and negativity but stressed it as an integral part of us all.  Its ultimate aim was for me to discover
 a button on my body that would help me control my emotions. I sat for many a day in that car by the cliff with pen and
 paper in hand.

"Squig, let your mind go, let the pen mark out the uncharted territories of the unconscious. Draw the chaos and from the
 chaos bring back something new. Take inspiration from your mistakes, submit to chance."

 After several thousand pages of doodling I began to see an underlying form, a map of my undisclosed self. I discovered 
a freckle on my right hand that, when licked, enabled me to see the blueprints of life. Mr.D, true to his word had a doodle
 for a blueprint and mine turned out to be a squiggle. To see for myself was a schema jolting experience. The fact that my
 make-up was a mere squiggle meant I could decide for my-self what I wanted to be. Looking at regular peoples' blueprints
 I could see their obvious destiny and fate. Oh yeah he's, sure enough, the milkman with the gambling problem. I can see it
 in his blueprint. All around me I saw people with set roles and parts to play. Often people were taken aback by my squinting
 eyes as I strained to read the fine print on someone's make-up.

"What are you looking at?", asked a man destined to invent a non-toxic form of glitter-glue.

"I'm sorry. I'm a little cross-eyed. Was I staring?" I replied, mystified by the uniqueness of his destiny.

Working in the mental hospital I noticed that the mentally ill had undetermined blueprints. The whole rehabilitation system
 was designed to squeeze these people into a role. I realized that a new role was to be invented. There is a new form of man.
 Squiggle people of the world unite!






I brought Doodleman to a restaurant where they give you crayons to play with while you are waiting for your food.
 Lately I was seeing myself as jigsaw piece so I couldn't help seeking my place on the board everywhere I looked. I took a 
quick lick off of my freckle. Doodleman noticed me going under so he pressed his wart. Sure enough there was a girl in the
 restaurant who would make a perfect fit for me. We drew with the crayons and our scribblings looked more real than the
 table, knife and forks. We felt the calm of the dead. The food arrived. Doodleman unpressed his button. Fear returned to his
 eyes. I unlicked and reexamined the girl. She didn't look like my type.

 "Strange. She carries a lot of my future in her," I thought. 

What to do? I posed the question of free will to my mentor.

"Well Squig I wouldn't like to spoil the surprise. Some-things are best found out for oneself," said Doodleman. 

"Some say free will is what a stone has when it wills itself to fall at 4.3 miles per second", I replied.

"Oh that poor delusional stone."

We put our drawings, now meaningless, aside and busied ourselves with our food.

 Mr. D spoke in his frail voice; "The way to overcome free will is to discover the extra option, the one that goes against nature 
and reality. What we BELIEVE we bring into reality. Remember there will only ever be your mind, Squig. Nothing else!
 What else is there? You can choose to refurnish your mind as you will. You can put a God in the corner beside the nice
 collection of holiday memories. You can have a few social insecurities cluttered by the jokes that made you laugh. You can
 even put a button into your mind, link it to your arm and what that button does, well that's what you decide."

I slurped a long string of spaghetti. The girl looked over and smiled. 

"So are there extra buttons? I thought this was it."

"There are different buttons if you can conceive of them. There are an infinite amount of viewpoints. When we trigger our
 buttons all we get is the aerial view. But if you could see through the eyes of a snail, or of a god, and come back with what
 you've learned, now that would be something special."

I licked my freckle to check out the girl again. This time her DNA was simplified and dazzling before me like a Las Vegas
 neon sign. 

"LOVE"

"That girl is going to leave a permanent residue in you", said Doodleman. 

I looked over and saw that he had his button pressed as well. I watched grand sculptures emerge from his cigarette smoke.

"What should I do?"

"Who knows? That's the pleasure of it all. The moment a man has the answer to his life he dies. Its all trial and error till one 
day we get it right and on that day we no longer have squiggles for blue-prints, we have the fate and the plan like everyone else."





Her name was Joni. I had her bent over, leaning on the radiator. She was wearing long black boots and her short skirt was
 hoisted over her ass. As I grabbed her ass I felt  a madness tickle within. I licked my freckle and reached in to caress her soul.
 Her moans took on a physical shape. They slowly circled my entrails and drowned me in her ecstasy.  She was the answer
 to the sum of my heart. I dripped sweat on to her back. In the water-mark of her blue-print I saw traces of God. Cuming,
 I felt a cold rush pass through me. I licked my freckle to bring myself back.

She began to notice my second vision. She told me she was living in the wrong time and that everything felt disconcertingly
 out of synch. I looked into her genetic make-up and saw that she was right.  She wasn't due to be born for another hundred
 years or so. I told her about my alternate view of reality and she understood unquestioning. My days with her were spent
 swinging like a pendulum between two versions of reality. She actually liked me to lick my freckle when I was with her. 
She always wanted me to tell her what I saw within her. 
I use to wrap Joni in my arms like a present and tell her bed-time stories from her futuristic fate. If she had been born at the 
right time she would have fulfilled her internal destiny but in this age she's just another squiggle person. 

It was not long before Joni too wanted to find a button on her body. Doodleman warned me against this.

"Perhaps she'll find the button that realigns her soul with the future and you'll lose her to another time", said the old man.

"But it will only be a button", I replied, "she'll be able to un-press it."

Joni went into training in the back-seat of Doodleman's car. I didn't feel safe leaving her alone with such a pervert but she
 assured me that she was willing to take the risk.

"I have to find a way Squig, there is something within me that must be woken up.  Doodleman is an agent of change. He must
 be trusted." she said with pleading, beautiful brown eyes.

"Please don't try to fuck her Mr. D," I said.

"I wouldn't dare son," he replied. He didn't smile and for once he didn't look like his true roguish self.

"I think this could be important son. I feel changes within me. I think maybe I'm finding a role", said Doodleman. There were
 tears in his eyes.

I hugged Doodleman. I realised he was one step closer to being born. 

Under Doodleman's guidance, Joni went into automatic writing trances in her search for the button. In the forming and 
unforming of her writings various sentences began to emerge;


                                                      "Rewire our organisational systems!"
                       "The people are trapped in a meme-replicating machine of their own devices"       
                                                  "The future is just another copy of the past"
                "Plant the seeds from the eyes of the dead. What they saw, what they imagined, what they dreamed of, must be 
                                                                        brought to fruition."
                               "God wants us to discover him within us and seize upon his power."



Doodleman analysed the text religiously and gave me his prophesy;

"There is no future only a further turn of a jaded cycle. We are here to bring about the future. We have meaning. We must 
teach the world to see beyond the immediate and the obvious. We must teach the world to seize control."

I licked my freckle to confirm my suspicion; yes Doodleman's fate was beginning to gather and take shape. From a billion 
splinters something new was forming.

"Joni's right, you are an agent of change," I said.

"Fuck. I know. Joni's got INSIGHT. She's our umbilical cord to another world," said Mr.D.

" What are you going to call me when I lose my Doodles?", he asked jokingly.

"Dad!"

"Oh Squig, remember when you were a Joe Soap?"

"That was another life. What am I now?"

"You are Squig; the first child of the new world."




I woke up the next morning feeling very unlikely. I could no longer believe in my own existence. Were the three of us insane?
 I had for a long time held a disbelief in the existence of insane people but now the notion was staring me in the face. Where
 was the illusive reason that we dreamed about?

It was all happening again, the over bearing presence of a surreal situation;  a cold goose pimple rush, a dull head-ache as I
 prayed for the world to slow down and become boring again, this time it was adrenaline fuelled fear, the world was
 throbbing, I found it hard to breathe.

" What the fuck is going on. Somebody's doing voodoo on me."

It was my turn to get upset. After years of listening to patients freak out it was my curtain call for drama. Just like those
 patients, I brought to the fore my woes from the past. I remembered being in a hospital bed denying my mother. Girl-friends
 I mistreated dredged guilt from my heart.

"This is not real. This is Disney Land. This is a doctored photo showing a UFO's visit to the Loch Ness monster."

It reminded me of when I used to study psychology. One day a pupil started coming on to the teacher, sexually, in the middle
 of a lecture. 

"I'm hungry for your pussy Mrs. Kaufney," he replied in answer to a question about statistics.

It was not the correct answer.

He was normally a quiet pupil but this day he had the arrogance of a porn-star. He stuck his tongue out and suggestively
 licked the air.

Everybody was speechless.

The teacher had no time for out rage because following this, a student got up and stood in front of her.

" What the fuck? Have we slipped into another dimension," we collectively thought as we watched the student bend over,
 hoist up her skirt and reveal her crack to the stunned teacher.

It turned out to be an experiment. They were monitoring our reactions. The college's higher authorities approved the project.
 It was in the aid of research, furthering our understanding of human nature.

Even now that lecture seems like a dream or a strange revision of the past.

 "First child of the new world? I can't believe this is happening. I need photographs, something concrete, something real."

Tattoos make sense, they are to assure you that you are actually yourself. I needed a tattoo bad, a resilient piece of me that 
fights against change. But even tattoos change. They sag and fade beneath veins and old skin. 

I licked my freckle and to my horror it no longer worked. It was a crisis of fate. Doodleman, world authority in the science
 of fear, had to reassure me with thought exercises. Joni held me and my world began to return to me. My freckle felt
 connected again. I licked it to check and there before me was the bigger picture in all its beauty. A wave of deep relief 
washed over me. I looked at Doodleman and saw his blueprint had metamorphosised into a role. 

"You have found your role"

"I know"

He seemed different. He was different. There was a calmness about his eyes were there once was fear. 

"Has the tornado stopped spinning around you?"

"Yes my world is at peace with me. I never thought I would hear myself say those words."