Against my better judgment, I've kept loosely in touch with several of my exes. This includes the one whose pet I killed when he offered to trade me to his drug dealer (but that's cool, 'cause we're friends now... twitch, twitch).
The last time we spoke he told me this girl I knew when we lived together had gotten a ton of plastic surgery lately. I hadn't thought about that chick in years, but once he reminded me of her I distinctly remembered her going on many a tirade about the evils of plastic surgery.
That's pretty much par for the course though because this particular woman was pretty much as full-out-balls-to-the-wall-bat-shit-crazy as they come. Her name was Mara and she was a friend of Brad's whom I met when I lived with him.
Mara was absolutely stunning. I was surprised someone like her would even be hanging out with the crazies in Venice Beach... that is until I asked her what she did and she told me she "created and maintained a frequency in which all living things could peacefully coexist... and also worked in retail".
As luck would have it, I ended up working with Mara for a while... in retail... not with the whole frequency... thing.
She helped me get this job co-managing an upscale furniture store on Venice Boulevard with her. No one ever really came in though, it was mostly just the pet project of this lunatic divorcee who needed to do something with all the money she had gotten in the divorce settlement and decided what better way to spend it than to open up a children's furniture store... 'cause that makes sense.
Since no one ever came in, Mara and I spent most of our days just hanging out and talking. And when I say talking, I mean she talked... mostly about her theories on metaphysics and the illusion of time and space, and I listened half heartedly while wondering why I couldn't have just gone to a normal college and lived in a normal dorm like a normal kid.
During the subsequent years after leaving California, I methodically self medicated away the majority of my memories about Mara and everything else that happened during the time I knew her, but two particular moments of crazy were so haunting that I have nightmare about them still.
First there was the day Mara told me about how she was getting really into crystal. I said "as in... meth?" but sadly no, as in quartz. Mara explained to me that she had channeled information from the planet Paladia, a million light-years away, and was thus privy to the information that once she had given enough of her "magical crystals" away, they would forma grid of purity, and the earth would be able to ascend to a higher plane of being... which... and I'm just throwing this out there... I'm fairly sure hasn't happened yet.
But better still was the day Mara brought in The Zapper.
You probably don't even know what a Zapper is, do you? That just shows the tragic extent to which Western medicine as kept the people blind to the truth. The Zapper is a simple and cheap device anyone can afford which cures all diseases known to mankind. It omits an electrical vibration that can be adjusted to match the vibration of any particular ailment, thus negating it and curing you! Or, in laymen's terms... it's a giant battery with a wire attached to it.
When I came into work that day, Mara was zapping away a mild cold. I asked her if the Paladians had told her about the Zapper, but as it turned out she had learned about it long before a "walk in" from another galaxy had possessed her human form (which, of course, was the event that allowed her to start communicating with being from other planets).
Mara had leaned about The Zapper from a friend when she was about 16. Mara was desperate because her boyfriend had given her Syphilis and she couldn't go to a doctor because then her parents might find out. Her friend gave her the Zapper and Mara used it to cure herself. She went to a doctor about 4 years later, who told her she had a rampant case of untreated syphilis, but Mara knew he was just seeing the dead cells that hadn't been cleared from her body yet.
Of course, as she told me all this the current from the Zapper was causing her left eye to twitch uncontrollably, making it that much creepier to realize that Mara's prided "enlightenment" was actually, in all likelihood, sheer insanity brought on from years of syphilitic brain damage.
That was the day I quit.
But I'm glad to know Mara's doing well after all these years. It's important to keep in touch.
I think I'm going to change my phone number after work today.
