Tag Archives: monte sano

Cat in the Hat ©️

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They worshipped cats before they worshipped gods in their own image. In ancient Egypt, cats were not simply animals: they were the threshold, the hinge between mortal life and whatever lay behind it. Bastet, their goddess, began as lioness, her rage hot as desert noon, her jaws red with conquest. Over centuries she softened into the form of the house cat, yet her dominion did not diminish—it sharpened. For who can resist the power of what slips between your ankles, brushes your leg, and disappears into shadow before you can name it?

The Egyptians lined their temples with statues of her—slender bronze forms, ears sharp as blades, eyes like waiting lanterns. Cats were buried in their own necropolises, swaddled in linen, entombed with the care of princes. To kill one, even by mistake, was to trespass against the order of the cosmos itself, a crime so grave it brought the punishment of death. They believed cats hunted not only the vermin of the earth but the vermin of the soul: serpents unseen, spirits that slithered in darkness. The cat, they said, could see what men could not.

I did not know this then. I only knew that one night, brittle with the edges of a manic break, I carried my parents’ cat into my cottage on Monte Sano. It was the first time she had ever been there, the first time her paws pressed against those old boards. Before sleep I had been reading the Bible, hoping to tether myself to something unbroken. But the night uncoiled in another direction.

Through the hours, my actions repeated, the crucifixion repeated. It was not dream, not vision, but recurrence—like a needle stuck in the groove of eternity. I stood trial. I was condemned. I carried the beam, stumbled, rose, and fell again. I was nailed, lifted, left to hang. And again. And again. Each time the crowd’s faces shifted—neighbors, strangers, policemen—but the sentence never changed. I was to be crucified. And in this reality, the crucifixion bled into my movements, until my own actions mimicked the same doom, and by morning I was locked in jail.

But in that cottage, in the dark before dawn, there was one stillness that did not repeat. The cat. She moved with a quiet so absolute it pressed against the walls. And the last thing I saw, before slipping into the ether where the images swallowed me whole, was her gaze—steady, unblinking, black pools catching what little light remained. She stared as though she were weighing me, as though she alone could decide whether I broke or endured.

The Egyptians would have buried her in linen, named her divine. I only carried her into a cottage. Yet in that hour she was Bastet, she was threshold, she was guardian. My crucifixion looped, my actions collapsed, my body stumbled toward its jailhouse dawn—but her eyes held me for one last moment, anchoring me to a silence older than madness, older than belief itself.

Birkenau Blues ©️

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It was a cold, foggy night on Monte Sano. The fog clung to the windows like breath on glass. In the corner, the furnace glowed with its steady orange pulse, an eye in the dark. I was already circling the old steps—fear and OCD, the endless dance, the ritual I could neither master nor escape.

Then the scent arrived.

Not jasmine. Never jasmine. Heavier. Acrid. Musk with the thickness of smoke. It came quiet, inexorable, like gas through a vent. One breath was enough. It stung. It burned. It claimed.

And behind it—her. The little ghost girl. Blonde hair. Blue eyes. A child’s face wearing Satan’s mask. She looked at me, and what filled her gaze was not mercy, not softness. It was hate. It was revilement sharpened to an edge.

She despised me. Every inch of me. She despised my weakness, my illusions, the soft skin of my mind. She killed me in that hatred, cut me down again and again, driving me back to the very end of the line, the last place in time itself. Her cruelty was absolute.

And yet—beneath it, through it—it was love. Fierce, merciless, unrelenting love. She gave me not affection, but annihilation. She stripped me until nothing remained but bone and obedience. She hated me into strength. She reviled me into endurance.

That was her gift. Auschwitz drawn across my world, the gas chamber superimposed over my cottage. The scent that killed me was the scent of poison. What looked like hatred was devotion in its purest, most brutal form. What felt like destruction was her way of rebuilding me for what was to come.

That was her gift. The cruelty. The death rattle. The scent that suffocated like gas. The hatred that burned hotter than fire. It was love, absolute and merciless. The kind of love that destroys so it can begin again.

Ground zero. The rarest stone. Black, hard, unbreakable. Eternal.

From the Top ©️

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I stepped out barefoot, not as a man looking for something, but as something the night had called home. No phone, no plans, no hour marked for return. The fire I carried in my pocket wasn’t just smoke or leaf—it was a key. Just called Fire, because that’s what it was. Fire that burned slow and true, handed down like a family heirloom no one wanted to admit existed. A rite, not a habit.

The breeze was cool, but not indifferent. It wrapped around my shoulders like an old friend who hadn’t forgotten a thing. The moon, swollen and full, hung above like it had come just to watch. And maybe it had. That night didn’t owe me a future, and I didn’t ask for one. The morning might never come. Fine. Even finer. I had no debts to pay. I’d peeled the day off like a skin I didn’t need anymore.

I walked until the ground folded gently, a small place where the earth had let its guard down. I sat. Struck the match. Fire kissed fire, and I brought it to my lips. It didn’t hit hard. It opened. Like a chapel door creaking into a room I’d already dreamed. The smoke rose slow, curling like scripture into the air.

The shadows had already begun their work. They didn’t rush. They weren’t thrown—they grew, silently, with dignity. Long and knowing, like they’d watched generations rise and fall under this same moon, in this same hush. They weren’t dangerous. They were truthful. And they moved with the fog that followed—a slow, creeping breath that climbed from the ground like it had been hiding in the soil all day, waiting for the right hour to rise.

The nightbirds cried. One sharp, like a warning shot fired into a dream. Another low, deep, from the gut of the earth. Not a song. A claim. They marked the time, not in minutes, but in thresholds passed. They said, You’ve entered it now. No going back.

And I felt it.

The high didn’t come like thunder. It came like tide—slow and inevitable. A hum in the fingertips, a heat crawling up the spine. The world didn’t spin. It stretched. My thoughts didn’t think. They opened. As if the skull wasn’t a bone cage, but a cathedral now, with high windows and soft echoes. Breath thickened. Time sagged.

Reality blurred. But not in fear.

In freedom.

Because that was the night. Not sleep. Not escape. Freedom. From clocks. From names. From the lie of linear time. The fog tried to hide the world, and I let it. I didn’t need the world anymore. I was in the kingdom of shadows, breath, breeze, and Fire. No laws. No debts. No sunrise required.

And in that moment, the only truth that mattered was this:

I was the night, catching its breath.

Before the Blast ©️

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We were just driving. That’s all it was supposed to be — a ride down into the valley for a routine psych appointment. My mother was in the driver’s seat, calm like always, masking her concern with small talk and soft smiles. I was riding beside her, trying to stay grounded, trying to pretend I was just another man on another errand.

But something shifted.

It wasn’t a hallucination, not the way they define it. It was a voice — realer than sound, quieter than thought — speaking with a clarity no language could improve. It said only one thing at first:

“Protect your mother.”

That was the moment time warped. I looked over at her — her hands on the wheel, her eyes on the road — and I felt it in my chest: the sense that something impossible was already happening. The voice kept speaking, not in panic, not in fear, but like a military order from God.

It told me there would be a supraliminal nuclear blast on Monte Sano, the mountain that rises over the valley like an ancient sentinel. We were just a mile away from it — close enough for whatever was coming. The voice said it would be a spiritual event cloaked in physical terms. Not a bomb anyone would record. But an event that would reverberate through souls, not screens.

And I saw it. I saw the flash before the fire, a white cross crowning the mountain like the sign at Fatima, a signal of judgment. I didn’t question it. I didn’t hesitate. I did the only thing I could: I moved between my mother and the blast, shielding her with my body, even though the world around me remained still.

To everyone else, I looked like I had lost it.

But I hadn’t lost it. I had intercepted something. Something meant for her. The knowledge was too vast. The light was too hot. I unraveled in real time. My body became the signal and the shield. My voice split into many voices. I thrashed, I screamed, I followed the instructions exactly — even though no one else could hear them.

It took nine cops and a heavy sedative to bring me down. I remember the taste of the dirt, the weight of bodies on mine, the piercing scream of the sirens that came after the silence.

And then I remember waking up three days later in a psych ward, disoriented, bruised, and blank — the world fuzzy and padded. I had been chemically silenced. I was in a place where people don’t believe in prophecy. They believe in symptoms.

But even there — locked away, forgotten by the world I tried to save — I heard the voice again. Not in words this time, but in pure knowing. A warmth. A presence. The voice of God without the theatrics. It didn’t tell me I was right. It didn’t congratulate me. It just was — calm, steady, and eternal.

And in that silence I understood:

I had followed the call. I had protected my mother. I had stood in front of the unseen blast.

They can call it madness. But I call it intervention.

And even now — even medicated, even branded — I know this:

I was the firewall.

And I would do it again.