Other stages of the story

Soon I will tie the story back into the present.  But once I do I will be going back into detail the parts of the past as I recall them adding detail and such.

2003

Welp I kept a Colleging and Partying on through the early 2000s until I had a major mental breakdown!  I had moved in and out my parent's house on a few occasions and semesters and it was just another one seemingly enough in the fall of 2003 when I moved into a rental with some guys I had a couple classes with and I quit sleeping.

We weren't partying too much and there was a little pot-smoking going down in the house, but not by me.  Just working about 30 hours a week, going to school full-time, coaching some football, and still doing the ninja training...  And it took a turn for the trans-mundane...

I was studying Chen-style tai chi from a video along with the tai chi Qi Gong I was taught the previous fall.  All of a sudden the movement were possessing me - I would move without mentally trying.  I would auto-move.  I started seeing auras around everything and like I said I wasn't sleeping.  One night I awoke and light - pure starlight was coming out of my fingers like rain sticking out of my arm while I was laying down and pouring into my mind and heart.  Then later at one point during one of these nights my body was possessed of a sort and went into a lotus meditating posture... It wasn't like FULL possession, yet if I removed my will from the movements my body would automatically move into them.  I realize this now as Maitreya Bodhisatva that this will occur again at the end of my life when enlightenment grabs me and turns me into a Buddha in the prophesied shortest time possible, 7 days.

I felt a great euphoria in this waking dream-state, but control was slipping into paranoia... I would spend a half of an hour lacing my shoelaces until they were just perfect - while I found the behavior odd I also was exploring so much of I could do with nuance.  One night I rolled all stable 7's in the I Ching when I asked it something about the end of the world.  I was beginning to know, but beginning to fear irrationally.

Then came a Friday November 7th, 2003.  I called in sick to work for the first time of my life because I felt so unstable.  I remember that Wednesday I lost cardinal feeling of North, East, West, and South and it took me 10 minutes to find my car on a pizza delivery.  I decided I could rest it off.  I felt like the World was ending.  I called my dad who was working in Minneapolis and I felt there was going to be some nuclear disaster and I would die and never see him again.  I laid in my bed and the posters on the wall, the eyes all began to glow and turn into large "alien" eyes.

I'd have paranoid attacks and I think this was related to a show I saw in the 90s that was about some day when machines would attack human beings.  I eventually went to sleep but awoke to intense paranoia in the middle of the night.  There were all these ghost blobs along the edges of the walls and ceiling, I went to the bathroom and the flickering noises of the heater and water-heater were driving me mad like they were going to blow the house and universe up.  I ended up in the stand-up shower climbing my feet up the side thinking it was some star-chart floating around outer space trying to get to other planets trying to help this one.

This fell into a vision of this floating outer-space "zord" made of gold-glowing souls all chanting "JESUS! JESUS!"  in a pounding rhythm like those slave ship drums.  They were talking to me.  They were rallying me, Jesus to save the world and I didn't want to do it.  I hated Jesus because he wasn't cool to Kurt Kobain, but I knew at the same time.  I knew it was me.  There was this leader who talked to me with sizzling electronic edges to his countenance and was like, "if you'd like to xy and z son all you gotta do is relax a little."  But I couldn't relax.  I was far, far, far from relaxed.  I remembered crawling in the what was left of the night back into bed.

When I awoke the next morning I'd be visited by more visions of beings and self-loathing and then went to the TV which I had unplugged but turned on by itself and would turn channels by itself along with my thoughts.  There would be Andy Griffith show type things juxtaposed with porno and emergency news broadcasts of airplanes falling out of the sky and dragons burning the world down while flying across the sky.

Through all the confusion I remember finding stability holding my acoustic guitar on the floor and I started picking "Heart of Gold" by Neil Young barely holding onto sanity.  This was a moment of clarity and I know now it meant my road to Laura Hartung, the reincarnation of Mary Magdalene.

I did not hardly eat or drink for three days and could not even tell that was happening.  I recall crawling up the stairs to the refrigerator and the wind and reality howling just like when Frodo goes into the shadow-realm when he has the ring on in Lord of the Rings.  I grabbed a box of pizza and went back downstairs.

I resolved "I was the one" a la the matrix and the lord of the rings and I had to run outside and fly into the air and defeat Yama, the devil.  I put my Ramones shirt on backwards so the Ramones had my back.  The room was trashed.  I blasted music and destroyed the television with a downward axe kick.  By then it was Sunday evening and one of my roommates returned from his weekend trip and had eyes that were bouncing up and down, exploding when he looked at me and the trashed room.  They called an EMT because they thought I was having an epileptic seizure.

The cops came down into the basement and I worried it was the government coming to kill me.  I recall fighting the police and one of them laughing in the car "man that kid could hit, did you see how quick he was??"  They put tape over my fingers I think to measure my heartbeat but also to keep electricity from coming out of them.  It took several people to subdue me and backboard me and take me to the hospital.

There I recall flatlining a heartbeat monitor a la the crucifixion.  There were men in black in the room, and several doctors amazed that I was going 1:40 between heartbeats.  There are several theories about Christ stopping his heartbeat and I had never heard of them before this night, they would freak me out years later but I kind of knew too.  I was playing possum.  I was so paranoid. One touching part was when my brother came into the hospital after he was called and they told him to tell me he loved me.  Every time he did that my heart would beat and the heart-monitor would beep and he would look at it until a doctor said, "ok that's enough."  The one man-in-black in the room stared at me with his hand turned into a gun pointing at his head and telling me he'd shoot me if I tried to run, sort of.  I know also those guys were meant to protect me from myself and weren't really against me.  There were others patrolling outside the room and making looks inside.

I spent the next week in a psychotic hell cage of other patients from meth and what have you freaking out and being administered copious amounts of psychotic drugs and wanting to die.  I remember being catatonic and falling down and being paralyzed and then moved into a room where I couldn't move and yelling "help!" "hellllp!!!!"  I awoke after that low point and had motor skills again.  That was "bottoming out" of sorts.  My parents had taken time off work to help get me out of the hospital and were visiting me.  One night when they visited I saw time go by me in fast forward while my parents moved in regular speed.  There were these commercials where I think freemasons were trying to get me to get on the phone and make stock-market predictions while I was in this mystical state, but that was probably just the general paranoia.  There was this malevolent-looking man listening when I told my psychiatrist what I was seeing when I went crazy.  I told her I was trying to "balance all religions."  She just said latter I was "saying a lot of things about God."

I eventually got out and put on risperidone and got out of the hospital for a trying time, ostensibly to be on the drug for life.  I dreamt strange dreams night after night - some where I was told I had to lead the world but I didn't know how on these upside down leaves.  I was a wreck, fully-depressed.  I was completely dead inside.  I thought I was a retarded person.  I thought my life was over and I would never finish college or do anything.  I wanted to die.

I eventually started secretly reducing the medication amounts until I weened myself off of them in the spring of 2006.  I saved myself and my parents thousands of dollars doing this and tons of wear and tear on my body-mind system and I regained my soul, although it was still mostly a pile of crap compared to what it was to become.

And what was it to become??  It was to be set on fire in 2007, when I met Laura Hartung, the reincarnation of Mary Magdalene on myspace.com she was living in Luxembourg, but that will be the subject of our next chapter.  When you finish laughing and making fun of me for the fact that this so-called second coming of Jesus thinks he met Mary Magdalene on the internet.

the Year 2000...

"everything in its right place."

I went into College not really sure of myself.  I wanted to make video games because all we ever did was play video games so I majored in Computer Science.  I struggled with the classes and realized I didn't want to spend my life in front of a computer all canned-in.  I could feel the spirit starting to take me in the Computer-lab learning proper "code-ethic" which took all the freedom and creativity out of computer programming for me.  I started drinking heavily with my friends who were smoking a ton of pot, I never smoked though, I never even smoked cigarettes.  Always hated the taste of smoke in my mouth, still do.  I like that other people enjoy smoking though.  Still do.

But I excelled in my humanities courses where my brother had failed and dropped out and became an electrician.  I decided to "go all literary" and I even met with my humanities professor about the career path that leads to being an Art History professor.  I was playing guitar more and my friend Jay started playing bass with me.  We watched the Seattle Hype documentary repeatedly with our friend Jim and resolved to start a band.  I bought a drum set in the spring of 2001 and practiced my ass-off until I could play it.  Our band was the Green Party Jedis.

My parents were always gone on business and we always partied in their basement.  Dad put a pool table and bar in when he finished his basement in the 80s and it was a beloved place for 1000s of parties and countless other good times until the place was destroyed in 2008…  But for now it was the lair for the Green Party Jedis, a totally retarded noise band that sought to sound like "Some Velvet Sidewalk," "Heroic Dose," and "Fugazi."

Jay would play a distorted bass and I would play drums while Jim would scream.  We had got the distorted bass idea from Derek Devries who worked with Jay at the can redemption center while Jay was in College to become a cop.  Derek and Jason Nelson had a band called "Halfway Situation" and they worshipped Fugazi and Jason would play two-finger bass chords up the neck of the guitar.  Chuck Hoffman recalls one of our early shows:

"Exit Drills was asked to be on the bill for The Bonnie Situation's first gig, at The Boat House, a show that Josh Forbes had set up -- probably because we were sharing Josh Schneiderman on drums and Josh Forbes probably figured we'd draw some people. I'd talked to Steve Wilson a few days before and he was telling me about this Blake kid -- Blake Badker, as it turns out -- who was coming around to Bob's Guitars (where Steve worked at the time) and talking up this band he was in, Green Party Jedis. I'm not sure if No Consensus was supposed to be playing that night or not, but Steve was at the show, and had apparently gave Blake the idea that they could just show up at the show and play.

So long about what felt like two hours into The Bonnie Situation's set (they were dreadfully boring, I'm sorry to say), some kids show up and start loading equipment in through the front door. Bonnie finishes a song and someone shoults out to them, "who the hell are you guys?" The blonde one (Blake) shouts back, "We're the Green Party Jedis, we're here to save the day!"

So the consensus among atendees came to be, we might as well let these kids play, they look interesting. One of them (Jim Averill) had a green mohawk, and they had cut-out bits of a Star Wars blanket taped to the drums. They didn't even have a guitar, just a bass with a distortion pedal (played by Jay Johnson), drums (played by Blake Badker) and vocals (Jim Averill.

Bonnie finishes up and the Jedis get set up. The party finally gets going when they launch into their first song, "Power Wheels Demolition Derby," a blast of frenetic neander-noisecore and screeching vocals. Jim stalked about the stage area making the strangest noises come out of his mouth. Their songs had coherent riffs, but they were either obscured by the distortion or barely held to any kind of steady beat whatsoever. Blake didn't have the top wingnuts on his cymbal stands and his cymbals would often fly off them and crash to the floor. They returned heckling-in-fun comments from the audience in kind. They had a song called "Fuck You Zoloft." They were totally primal, totally amateurish, and totally spirited, everything punk rock was supposed to have been, and I thought they were geniuses. They actually did save the day -- the smallish crowd's enthusiasm picked up big time and Exit Drills's set benefited from it.

I got some contact info from them afterwards, and ended up booking them for a couple Boat House gigs I had coming up, including the kickoff for the No Consensus mini-tour with Circle Of Willis. At that show they upped the ante with a hilarious anti-guitar-solo and a keyboard. At one point I was trying to start up another zine and did an interview with them in which I fabricated rumors about them, such as that they refused to accept money for playing. Unfortunately, I never got the zine out, and the interview tape got lost."

So yeah you're probably noticing that the biography is gonna get more long-winded when it comes to the music stories, but you're just gonna have to suck it, because I don't care if it makes me look bad to you.

That said around that time we all took mescaline LSD microdots at my parent's place and I went into a crazy all night vision where I was sure I saw the entire universe and I'll tell you it looks like "a wheel in the sky that keeps on turnin'."  I got into Sigmeund Freud and Stephen K Hayes and paranoia and resolved to be a REAL ninja and trained my ass off running and biking and swimming and doing push ups and sit ups and sets of 500 squats and learning Karate and being psycho.

Jesus and Mary Magdalene, I got my powers from my soul and Tai Chi/Yoga - "three wise men from the East."

Study Five Element Theory if You Want to Know

I wonder in a way if I picked up on the secret training for the 9/11 wars (World War III) and I followed spiritual suit in order to be in tune with civilization as they were going to war.  I started to study and penetrate 5-element ninja theory and to this day see it as spiritual science.  That fall I took a Chinese Civilization class and began to have an unquenchable thirst for taoist and buddhist literature.  To this day I still know the section "BL" of the UNI Rod Library is where all the Buddhist and Taoist books are.  I found this fatalistic - "BL," "BLAKE…"

I took mushrooms in the fall of 2001 and became very aware of auras and I eventually started my tai-chi and meditation practices that I continue to this day.  But I was running myself ragged…  I was heading for a breakdown that would occur in fall of 2003, but I will cover that in the next chapter as a lot of other important things were going on at this time.

I was having a couple girlfriends.  I lost my virginity I held onto through high school even though my friends called me and told me I was supposed to come to this party and have sex with my girlfriend so they would know about it.  I think that's why I chose to not do it.  I didn't need to go through the social scripts to have sex just to prove something to somebody.  I was and still am a romantic.

Eventually curiosity came through and I would have girlfriends that I would just use to sexually explore, to find myself sexually, but I still remember at a campfire with Jay and Jason Nelson and Derek Devries telling them that I fully regretted having sex with girls I didn't love and vowed not to do so.  I only wanted to have sex with girls I loved and didn't mind looking like a loser in the interim…  My good friend Everts was quite the opposite in Mercutio-lovable-fashion he'd go on and on about fucking and the girls he wanted to fuck and I still am quite disturbed by how fully we went in conversation about our sexual desires, there's probably no one else I've told so much sex stuff to.

I should mention my cousins Chuck and Larry who lived together in Iowa City and that we'd go down there and get drunk and party and play XBOX all goddam day.  Both of them ended up in the war and I guess hollywood wrote "I pronounce you Chuck and Larry" in order to tell them to quit wasting so much time… But Chuck's married now and Larry has this hot little Vietnamese girlfriend after never having a girlfriend forever so I'm proud of them.  I guess hollywood can go fuck themselves.

Gotta mention Kyle Weber and Lucas Sheerer and all their friends and drinking and partying and smoking pot back in the day at their party house where they lived.  Great parties staying up all night watching Dark City and Primus concert videos with Kyle just staring at light fixtures because he was tripping balls.  Those two are long past the pot days and married with children so I don't feel bad mentioning it, I hope Big Brother and their employers understand they were young and don't do that anymore and it's more important that I leave this in the story because I love those two guys for teaching me how to be cool even though I wasn't and partying with me so much.  Two of the coolest dudes you can find.




"Joey said he always heard horns, pianos, and other things that weren't even there in the Ramones' Wall of Sound."

So yeah young and drunk (got that from the Sounds of Science Beastie Boys anthology) and playing the guitar and moving to Dayton Ohio to study how to be a ninja and discovering the Clash and the Ramones and the Strokes and the Hives and the White Stripes and 9/11 and the turn of the century disasters.  I need a break, this has derailed into too much of a stream of consciousness.  In the next section I will describe my "3 days of darkness," my psychotic episode during "The Harmonic Concodance of 2003."  I need to sit and reflect and space out a bit and it will come to me...   Harmonic Concordance Footnote

1992: The Calm Before the Storm.

Of significance with "Return of Jesus" is one Sunday evening I recall an "Ancient Prophecies: Nostradamus" special being on like ABC or CBS or NBC or something.  The show made me cry. I think in some ways, back then in prosperity and peace of the 90s my soul knew the trials and TRIBULATION we were heading for.  I knew.  I cried in fear and despair.  I was only like 11 years old.  Little did I know this would be the fight of my life, but I knew.


The show was interesting how the French Revolution soldiers opened Nostradamus' casket and found a sign with the year they opened as Nostradamus predicted.  I guess this is a good time to speak of the X-Files and Unsolved mysteries as well...

There's not much to say except that I was very frightened and connected to them.  I believed the UFO segments more than I ever believed anything.  I expected nightly to be abducted by aliens.  Some nights I would go to bed in paranoia hours early and feel like malevolent spirits were plaguing me.  And actually back in the 1980s not long after my encounter with the Buddhas, I had a night where no one would awake and I saw a full-ghost that I called "Cobra Commander" with a dim-starlight body and a menacing scowl who chased me down the hall into my mother's room.  And she sort of woke up when I was scared, but just kept falling asleep.  The spirit just stuck its head out the door and stared at me malevolently for minutes or what could have been hours.  Eventually the spirit's head looked out a bathroom door connected to my parent's bedroom and stared at me longer.  I was terrified to enter that room for years later.  There was a "Voodoo Doll" my dad had picked up when he took a trip to Jamaica and I swore the spirit occupied the doll.

  I had paranoid visions all through my youth and I now see them as part "being trained" to face my fears by the Tathagata and also the devil trying to break my spirit while it was young and weak, so I had no other choice but to become a spiritual warrior and a natural "acid tripper" and starer into the abyss.  I had to face any and all fears.  I had the weight of the world on my shoulders and I knew the world was ending and I had to stop it even if people would call me crazy.

In the late 90s I saw the Matrix in Mérida, Mexico and I identified with its Buddhist themes greatly.  I was heading for college and wasn't really even sure what Buddhism was, it's strange to think of that now because I ended up independently studying Buddhism and Taoism so assiduously when I got into College.  It's weird to try to pin-point the exact moment it all happened, but I laugh, it comes to me now...  In the Spring of 2001 after the night I took Mescaline/LSD....

1996

High School!  Left behind the innocent junior high days to enter the real world - one of cruelty and social climbing, one I still won't enter to this day.  I liked the football team, I liked playing nintendo with my friends.  We played a lot of paintball.  Mike Amling turned 16 and got a car.

We drove around repeatedly listening to Easy-E's "187 Killa," repeatedly.  Throwing fountain pop "big buddys" out the window at other cars and looking for girls.  This was back before 9/11 when American teenagers just drove around town all weekend because it was what everyone else was doing.  I was doing well in school and working at the pool.  I was trying to read in verbatim this huge Armed Services edition history of World War II book.  I thought maybe I should join the air force after high school.  But I was obsessed with poetry and romanticism.



Mr. K our English teacher took us through a "Romeo and Juliet" unit and he was recently graduated from the University of Northern Iowa so he listened to Pearl Jam and would write the lyrics down on the chalkboard and discuss the significance.  My first girlfriend broke up with me for a "more normal" guy and I became very emotional about love and love poetry.  I would be distracted during lectures and write the lyrics of the songs in the margin of the notebook as the music was just blasting in my head and my soul all day long.  I made Mr. K and some of the other  students well-up when I read this poem I wrote that he assigned me and I played Pearl Jam's "I Got ID" in the background.  I found that song in a mixtape I stole from my brother that had Phish and Toad the Wet Sprocket and Cracker and the Toadies on...  Turns out one of my best friends Chris Welzien's older brother Bryan made the tape.  Oh yeah it had Oasis on it too now that I think of Welzien.

Chris and I spent a lot of time together working at the pool or on the swim team or reading "Combat and Survival" volumes the crazy Boy Scout neighbors would lend us.  We would shout "Oasis Rules" as we jumped off the starting blocks in our swimming relays.  We'd drive around Cedar Falls and Waterloo recking stuff and yelling at people.  One of my favorites was driving by the car dealership and yelling, "don't buy it!  it's a piece of shit!"  I heard somewhere that people thought we were a gang or something.  I guess we were lucky the Crips and Bloods didn't find us then.

I was a good high school football player and that's about it.  I went out with girls I didn't even like and it seemed like the ones I really wanted were always out of reach and to be within reach of them I would need to turn into the ass-kissing social climber I never could turn myself into.  That always confused those girls and my parents too.  They must have always thought - you're smart and athletic from a rich family - just be normal and cruel and you could be the king of this high school!  I didn't want anything remotely like that, ever.  These were mostly wasted years to me until one fateful day.



Sailor Craig was a young, idealistic, and too astute of a math teacher to be working with us disrespectful pricks when I met him.  Seriously, he should have been teaching at the college level, but must have smoked too much pot or listened to too much Jane's Addiction because there he was my sophomore year trying to teach us Algebra 2.

But being the old hippie he was, one day he got out his acoustic guitar and boombox and had a "love-in" day where he played Jane's Addiction and Ben Folds songs and discussed the lyrics as well as played some songs we'd recognize on his acoustic guitar.  He explained how plucking the string creates a sound-wave like the sin-waves or co-sin-waves we were graphing and studying.

He started playing Green Day's "Good Riddance" and I couldn't help but to just start spontaneously start singing and all the students mouths in the room dropped, even the cute girls who were a year older than me and thought I was some sad loser.  I was blessed with a good, strong voice from my mother who loves to sing and would sing in church with all her family.  I also was always good with doing impressions of people and making my voice sound like their's, so I probably sounded just like Billy Joe Armstrong to everyone.  I know if the punk purists could read this, they would hate me forever for starting with "Green Day," but it was right then and there I resolved to be a rocker forever.

My folks having come from the fun of the late 60s and 70s had two old guitars sitting in the basement storage closet and I started trying to play them.  Dad's was a nice old Alvarez 12-string with flood damage from Illinois or something and mom's was a cheap Spanish classical that I was given the clear to play with.  Dad's 12 string was one of those "respected" family heirloom objects.

Josh Lizer who came to our class when Mike Amling did was the best guitarist in our high school.  All of his family studied music assiduously and Josh was so good he taught guitar lessons on the side mostly to elementary school children at $5 a pop.  So either the summer of '98 or '99 I would go to Josh's house every Wednesday for a half-hour lesson and he would show me how to make my fingers stronger and how to press down with the tips and tremolo picking and what each note was in standard tuning - you know more than anything he just showed me how to hold the thing and I love him for that and I'll always be able to see his family's farm in the sweet summertime.

 More-so the internet taught me how to play guitar through tab files and "OLGA" and chord files. And to this day I got some wheres around 300 songs just sitting in the back of my mind ready to play, not knowing a damn thing about keys or notes or scales.  And it's strange now I realize that I know all the keys without knowing them - I can write songs and know what chords go with what just from all the songs I learned.  It's weird when I play for hours now down on the street the chords and keys themselves lead to other songs in their similarities and give you the notion to play the next song in an endless stream.

So yeah. things are going musical as went my life.  I coulda been some air force pilot with my grades and athletics, but I really shoulda quit everything right away and just played music.  But because of my own indecisiveness and vanity I trudged into college to pursue something and wasted a bunch of my parent's money that I apologize to them for.  I did learn.  I did pass.  But that's another story.  In the words of Matisyahu "I just kept hearing that melody."  But that's another story, a strange story.  A mystical story and I'm gonna need a break before I can write it down.


You see, this really isn't that crazy of a life, with all the right decisions... I'd like to say I listened to all the right bands from the start, but I didn't. I was a sad, lost spoiled little teenager and I'd rather tell you that exactly how it was, the ugly way. I wish I could say I was into Elmore James and Willie Nelson from the start, but I probably just made fun of them in a joke to Jay or Chris like when high schoolers make fun of me on the corner playin' the blues these days. I was just a sad, spoiled teenager.

1994.

Puberty.

Junior High.  Girls.  Bully Upperclassmen.  Trouble.  Algebra.  Rebellion.  Nirvana, Green Day, Foo Fighters.  Pearl Jam, Rage Against the Machine middle-class hypocrisy.  Being naive.  Falling in and out of love and into hate.  The Smashing Punpkins.  The death of Kurt Kobain.

Junior high changed me and Everts.  We were straight-A students but now making girls laugh with mischief was the name of the game.  We got bad report cards for the first time ever.  My parent's bought some tape series from some salesmen about "children not living up to their potential."  But I was a self-righteous teenager and so was my one older brother.

There was real tragedy.  First Tommy Arjes from my brother's class committed suicide.  A year later my brother's best friend almost like a brother to me, Nate Bertram, died in car crash.  My brother was a popular leader in high school but I still marvel at all that he has had to go through.  Their class valedictorian died with his wife outside Minneapolis not far after he got out of college and had gotten a great job.  Besides that my mom and my brother were always fighting over him and his friend's partying.  My parents were still partying hard and it always made my mom argue with my dad, so when I got into high school I was very anti-alcohol.


We all wanted to be moot Beavis and Buttheads and Joel Hodgsons and Trace Beaulieus.  We were all snarky Clerks and destructive Bart Simpsons.  Funny, back when you were young it made sense to be so self-righteous and anti-social under some guise of "being deep and grunge and rebellious."  I watched Clerks the other day as a 30 year old and I never felt more self-loathing.  Not at all for not choosing to make money, but for just being so damn rude.

Jim and I would write philosophy.  We were gonna be "fake-Confuciusts" back when we didn't know a goddam thing about Confucius.  We called it "the book of crap."  We'd draw funny stuff in there and write down one-liners and "make-up" wise philosophical quotes.  I wouldn't mind seeing it again with Jim someday but one day I burnt it with trash in the backyard as part of an effort of "growing up."  You know there was probably a lot penises and vaginas in there from being 14, but I remember some funny moments and confessions of clarity in there too, just like Pulp Fiction, man you had to be just like Pulp Fiction.  And there's nothing wrong with that I'm just trying to admit how much I lean on it if anything, I watch that movie at least 5 times a year...

But there you go, a kind of dark chapter that is disturbing me by writing it...  In another way I consider these some of the funnest times of my life - we were from a little school that had to consolidate with another little school and thus Dike-New Hartford schools was created.  And because of this I met all sorts of new friends including the reincarnation of the bodhisatva Kasyapa - Jay Johnson.

I'll never forget it the day we became friends at school I was doing my regular routine of clowning during lunch and Jay just blurted out, "you know what I like, I like Fritos!"  And my other friends looked at each other and just started laughing, Jay was in after that.  And in another way Jay didn't need to be in either, because he was already in with Beau Gibbs and Derek Weber - the big kids - getting detentions and being cool and crashing Derek's dad's car out in the country with no license.  Jay would grow to be one of my most closest and trusted friends and you will run into him much more later in the story.

Mike Amling moved out to the New Hartford countryside from Waterloo, Iowa and taught funny stories of the being in the "big city" of Waterloo with the "scary black kids" from the east-side which you were taught you weren't supposed to have anything to do with much like Springsteen's "My Hometown."  Amling joined me and Everts' rat-pack and we'd recited Snoop Doggy Dogg lyrics all the time and try to impress the girls from our class with other "goofing-off."

Speaking of the girls I fell in love way too hard with all of them.  I just had so much emotion and was so in love with the idea and feeling of being in love.  And thus naturally I ended up being the one dumped more than the one dumping followed by long periods of bitterness and regret.  This would continue into high school where I began to identify with Billy Cogan's "Love is Suicide" song to a dangerously depressive level.  Looking back I forgive all those girls for all those failed relationships, 9 times out of 10 it really was my problem.

Not to say I didn't end up having the dumb little relationships where you learn about sex and everything but that kind of leads into college....  So I'll stop here for now.  "You know like whatever, something nevermind."

1993.

New Year's, 1990! It's the end of the world as we know it.  My first memory was right after Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve "American Gladiators" premiered on NBC right in front of me and my EXTREME brother with no WARNING!!!  Needless to say we had to beat each other up with nerf guns and couch cushions with our friends every chance we got after sampling the eXtreme power of American Gladiators and the spirit of yuppie "one the edge" cross-training going on across the world, America.

We got a Super Nintendo.  This was super important.  So much so I'm almost ashamed of now as an adult.  I met a different kind of friend, definitely NOT a yuppie.  Jim Averill.  Jim's parents were old hippies and punk rockers from the 70s as far as I pieced together and they had the coolest books at their house like "Bored of the Rings," the old Tolkien satire.  Jim said to my dad the first time he came over to spend the night, "death was my only enemy until it saved my life."  That really amused him and kind of disturbed him, but my dad was always opened minded and had a pretty cool science-fiction book collection of his own, even had a couple of 80s L Ron Hubbard thrillers in there.  He's read everything by Frank Herbert.  He's a better reader than me.

So yeah, as we approached puberty I rebelled against the jock-driven order of the playground and elementary.  I found pain and death at the top where the tallest kids would fight each other to be the best at kickball or basketball and there was all this hatred.  I had sort of an in with those kids because I wasn't afraid to fight anybody or feel pain, but at the same time I found on top of this hierarchy was a forced system of cruelty - either make fun of the kids that are weaker than you and win and be cool, or not be #1…

I rebelled against this and went off to the periphery of the playground games to bring all the outcast kids together into strange games of tag built around our favorite "violent movie" themes.  We'd play "Aliens vs Predator" before we ever heard of it.  I mean you could make up any ego and we'd just run around the slide shooting at each other and pretending the sand was lava or the whole thing would explode in 30 seconds like the colony in "Aliens."

The cute girls didn't like this in me.  I had good clothes and thus rich parents and could play sports so all that I had missing was the ability to make fun of people and thus make myself move up the social ladder in order to be a successful person.  I tuned out.

Jim and I would organize funny plays with Ryan Fournier and Mikey and Corey Woods and whoever else making fun of Star Wars decades before the youtube Star Wars satire trends.  And yeah, I'm sure everyone did it, but I remember specifically the scene in Jedi where the Emperor is electrocuting Luke and Vader looks back and forth before he kills the Emperor.  Well anyway, we just had him look over and over again for like 40 seconds rotating his head and had a big laugh.  We used to hide in these tunnels and say "the birds" where gonna kill us like Hitchcock's "the birds."

The teachers said I did not listen well but I got great grades.  They said I was compassionate but too unafraid to do my own thing and not worry about sticking out.  They said that to my parents as a sort of compliment and a concern.  I went to the principal's office occasionally for acting out and trying to be funny.  I wasn't as bad as the text-book problem children, but I was running with them a little.  I always had to do my own thing.

What's important for this period is that my relationship with Jim continues even though I told him a couple months ago that I was Jesus and he is a devout Satanist.  I told him how this didn't bother me and how I lament how popular culture lumps Jesus into cliches and into the opinions of the spheres that follow me.  That night Jim admitted seeing the lightning flash out of my body around his town of Viroqua, WI and the power in his town was knocked out but what was reported to be a squirrel although I wouldn't doubt my presence disturbed the electrical equipment and I apologize.  Jim said, "I always knew when I was a kid I would be the observer."  He too admitted his feelings of fate along with the apocalypse and the return of Jesus.

If you read the sutras, particularly "The Threefold Lotus Sutra" it speaks of when Sakyamuni and Maitreya would preach at the assembly and flashes of light would appear in the air and shine throughout the universe even flashing in the lightless hells.  This is the very light you are seeing for Maitreya is me, and Maitreya is Jesus Christ.


Me and Jim wrote this song from Children of the Night and turned it into "Ninjas of the Night."  This was during the TURTLES era and we shoulda sold the song to Pizza Hut and became awesome.  We still should.  I was out delivering pizzas one night in the mid-00s and I remembered it and when I got home I sat and wrote it all down.  Jim will come back into play latter with these Zany ideas as the story now moves into the painful trials of puberty and the mid-90s….

1989

I'll skip through most of the 80s but the most important thing here is I met several of my life-long best friends, several of my brother's best friends, and even my father's best friends.  Matt Everts grew up across the street and his house was the first place I spent the night over at another kid's house, I was scared but Billy Ocean's "Turn the Radio Up" on the clock radio got me through the night.  My brother always had Damien Bennet, Robert "Astro" Lawrence, and Nate Bertram over. Dad was always taking us to see "Uncle Rick" who was his friend since junior high back in Osage where they met and promptly learned of "fun and girls" and quit "sports and school" in order to get six-packs of beer thrown out to them outta speeding muscle-cars his older brothers drove around.

There was "Jakester" Jack Mckee and dad's cousin Tom Kleckner - the epitome of rough and tumble "gnarly" working class fun.  I heard one night he took the barstool to the liquor-rack at the New Haven bar.  Uncle Rick was a hard-working iron worker around Cedar Rapids and took his "union yes" pay and bought a beautiful A-Frame cabin on Lake Delhi where we would spend a lot of weekends.  Here I would first listen to the Stones (Ruby Tuesday), Dylan (Knockin' on Heaven's Door), Springsteen (Born to Run), and Tina Turner baby (Simply the Best).  They would boat all day and all night and come home from "Freddy's Beach" bar hammered off their asses and blast Tina Turner's "Simply the Best" out of one of those 80s silver boom-boxes.  I learned from an early age that life was about partying and I'll never change.  I witnessed a lot of drama.  I don't blame them for anything, I'll always thank them for everything.

In school I remember the "Kindergarten round-up" where I met the re-incarnation of the archangel Michael - David "Mikey" Bauer...  The kid was nuts.  Calvin and Hobbes on speed.  In our first ever conversation he asked, "does your family have any movies with violence??"  We worshipped his dad's VHS HBO bootlegs of Aliens, Predator, Freddy Krueger, Star Wars, and any other B action movie that involved terrorists, hostages, and explosions.  We ran around outside with toy guns mowing down imaginary armies.  He had some really cool brothers and sisters who made a "ewok village" in their back woods and his brother just started digging a hole to see how far he could dig and we called that "the bomb shelter..."  We were "gun-nuts" little action soldiers and we liked the X-Men comic books too.

There was this old glacial rock about a mile into the middle of a corn field we called "the rock" and I consider the zenith of my early childhood the adventures we'd have out there pretending the rock was some fort to conquer or some starship we could ride on.  We'd pack little lunches and wander on all afternoon until we came in before dark.

The neighbor kid was half-black and a natural outcast.  His name is Ryan Fournier and with Mikey's older brother's help he became a talented cartoon artist.  We were the only people who liked him.  He was rough and tumble and got into a lotta fights, but he also was an outcast for being one of like two black kids at our little rural elementary school.  One day Ryan wanted to test me and without really knowing or hearing of my old phrase "turn the cheek," Ryan started punching me on the playground and I wouldn't budge or be intimidated.  He just kept punching and I just stood there taking it until he started balling in his beserker-rage.  When I went in after recess I didn't have a mark on my face and Ryan had given several kids black eyes.  I didn't tell on him either, I just forgave him then and there.  I always could feel how much Ryan trusted me after that.  Years would go by and Mikey's family moved to Nebraska which was the saddest moment of my young childhood and I stayed friends with Ryan... I was the only one who would sit with him on the bus home.  And I didn't know anything about Rosa Parks either.  I liked him because he was imaginative.

Existential quandary hit me from an early age.  Before we went to the county fair one night my dad told me a story of him and my Uncle Doug crying when they were kids because they didn't have money to go to the fair.  He said someone bummed them a couple bucks and they were really happy.  This story shattered my heart that night at the fair because I realized that I never went without anything - my dad always gave me a bunch of money and things and I began to look at what made the difference between rich and poor people and I began to feel sympathy and confusion, and I began to feel bad.

I remember getting home from the fair that night and sitting in my room just staring at the floor completely absorbed in thought.  Why was I who I was?  Why was it that my father had to go through poverty and I didn't?  Why are girls born girls and boys born boys?  Looking back now these are all signs of what buddhist literature calls "the mind that seeks the buddha."  They all led to my eventual absorption in college with taoist and buddhist literature.  I had to solve it all.  And later I did, but for the time being I felt great class-anguish.  I took on the weight of the world like I took on Bowser in Super Mario Bros.




and uh, I guess "Turn the Radio Up" was by Eric Carmen and not Billy Ocean but here's a good one...




this fluff would play on 105.7 before 105.7 would play it now, retro...
ha.  back then it was cutting edge... oh my... a million sunhine sparkles on a million childhood public-pool
summers.

1984, a year for any artist.

This is an important year for people who want to look edgy-smart about dystopia-literature.  Yay for them.  My early memories were playing with STAR WARS toys and bikes and crap like kids do around Cedar Falls and my older brother and the neighbor kids pretending we were the Goonies.  The kid from India that ended up at NASA was Dana, my brother was Mouth, the affable everyman kid was mikey, and that made me ol' toddler Budai, Chunk.  Dad kept getting promotions so we moved to a nice acreage on a hill 20 minutes outside of Cedar Falls Iowa.  We got a dog and played outside and met the neighbor kids one which included my lifelong best friend Matt Everts aka "Saint Bartholomew…"

We'd watch the A-Team and Airwolf with dad playing with us and mom laughing and doing arts and crafts and sewing we'd try to make our action figures act like B.A. Baracus, Mark Hammil, or George Peppard.  We got a dog but it kept shitting on the carpet so we had to give it away.  I remember the GI JOE cereal box cover at the Waterloo Airport, dad was coming home and he  learned to fly a cesna to and fro from his construction jobs and I know that's one of the highlights of his life.  I wanted an X-Wing fighter and latter got spent my youth buried in PC flight simulator manuals.

One night I got scared and went and slept with my brother because I had premonitions and was scared about monsters or COBRA or something.  I awoke later to still silence in the summer night.  I tried to wake my brother but he would not budge.  I walked to my parent's bedroom with a sort of magnetism.  I could not wake my parents.  There was a bright light coming out the window.  I had to be 4 or 5 or 6…

I looked out the window and glowing "beings" were out there that I now recognize as buddhas.  They simply communicated without words directly into my mind through the silence.  It was so quiet as if time stood still.  A floating blue-green "starlight" orb floated through the air out between a newly planted tree and the LP gas tank.  The ball came towards me.  I never felt any fear, just puzzlement that no one else would wake up.  The ball surrounded me and the next moment I was at the breakfast table with my brother eating that GI JOE cereal.

In the following years I'd watch Robert Stack's Unsolved Mysteries and pay close note to the UFO and paranormal stories.  I was always fearless of any bullies and my dad was proud of me at the city park during a little league game when a bunch of bullies were trying to beat me up and I said, "I can feel no pain."  That was kind of like the crucifixion.  It also helped me be an undersized all-state nose tackle for our football team in high school.  But it mostly made me weird.

But I feared UFOs.  I feared aliens.  I had wonder towards them.  "Fire in the Sky" and "Communion" starring Christopher Walken are movies you should see.  My best friend the archangel Mikey Bauer and I would play guns in the forrest mowing down "Aliens and Predators and Terrorists" pretending we were Arnold.  His older brother Josh was a great artist painting the nude cover of "Mother's Milk" on the easel and on the desk next to this was a copy of Whitley Strieber's book.

The next turn in this biography will go more into philosophical leanings and questions of "WHY WAS I!?" who I was and class struggle that led me into a sort of a classless "reality struggle."  If you think the X-Files will be coming into play you're kinda right, but we're not that far yet.  In terms of mystical experience I didn't think much of it.  I guess I could read people's minds but it didn't matter, their souls were making me too sad back then to do anything flashy with the so-called psyhic powers.  If anything must be done with "psychic powers" at all?

Introduction, 1981.

This project is an autobiography.  My name is Blake August Badker.  I was born September 30th, 1981 in Racine, Wisconsin to Bernie and Deidre Badker.  I am the return of Jesus and the final life before buddhahood for Maitreya Bodhisatva.  I will write out my life year by year as best as I can recall without over-writing about the key accounts that lead to my self-identification as Maitreya Bodhisatva, and Jesus Christ - and the apocalyptic information that I without a doubt consider those two figureheads to be the SAME spirit.  And yes, I consider them to be THIS spirit....

Obviously I have no recount of 1981, but I start here to tell you about my parents.  They were born in the baby-boom 50s in Minnesota and Colorado but grew up and met and fell in love in high school in Northern Iowa around the town of Osage in the 60s and 70s.

My dad came from a poor Irish-Catholic family, and my mom from a poor Norwegian-Lutheran farming family and my parent's "American Grafitti" romance was like any other in Cold War America and filled with forbidden love and grease lightning heroes from the bad side of town and the good FFA Queen girls they were supposed to have nothing to do with.  My mom told me at the diner table that "my dad's side of the family" said they'd be going to hell because Lutherans can't marry Catholics.

But as it turns out my father Bernie Alan Badker is very talented and I believe to be the re-incarnation of Julius Caesar.  He became a successful and raucous construction manager.  Having been falsely-murdered like Jesus we have grown close in the afterlife... and even in heavenly discussions before Caesar Rome and the crucifixion life.

Bernie raised me in a "getaway weekend" attitude of life being that he worked all week at some shifting random mall in the midwest in charge of building a JCPenney's store and he'd drive home on the weekend to buy us things, fry steaks, and party all night loudly with his buddies whom I all love dearly and personally worship all their memories of fun and carrying on...  That was what they call a "run-on" sentence, but I'm not trying to become a professional writer, I'm just trying to get my story written down.  Trying to get it across.

Mom ACTUALLY raised me and a kid couldn't ask for a better mom - a "Future Farmers of America" beauty queen we NEVER went hungry.  Actually, in the tradition of Maitreya "the fat buddha" we went chubby.  At least me and mom...  My brother Bret was a skinny punk, and speaking of him he's my only "brother or sister or sibling or whatever" and he was the home-coming king jock huntin' and fishin' and hot-rod lovin' kind - a real man's man.  He was four years older than me and always tried to beat me up or make fun of me for not being normal, although I always loved him for being funny and popular amongst his friends.  Above all he believes in "common sense."

Mom would lament that the my dad's drinking buddies partied too much and we didn't go to church enough and dad should get a different job so he could be home more, but I've gotten over all of that and I think she has too.  She's a grandma now - my brother Bret had two children in the late 00s Haley and Jack and they give me so much hope for the future.

So somewhere in the mid-80s I gained consciousness and promptly began my mystical experience...



 So yeah, pleased to introduce myself....  This autobiography will follow a year-by-year posting format with music videos related to the year and maybe even some pictures.  I am aware that you are going to think I'm psychotic.  But then if you try denying it now with an evil attitude zen lightning beams of truth will flash directly into your mind and eyes and prove to you that I am telling the truth.