The Old Haggard Man without a Name

The blunt cigarette he holds between his aged fingers slowly chars as the ashes are carried away by the dead breeze. A blood red sun fades into the horizon and his gaze travels with it. It may only be 7:35 pm but his wizened mind is at midnight. The remains of the burnt fag shrivel away, and it, he carelessly tosses into the black volcanic sands. He sighs. This was supposed to be a relaxing vacation to Maui but it had turned out tortuous and lonely. Salty tears begin to well up in the corners of his eyes. He falls to the cold sand on his knees and screams out to God but God, too, is on vacation. The first infinitesimally small pinpoints of light appear high in the sky. Their cold, uncaring photons dazzle the old man on the beach into a frenzied state of insanity. He rips his moth-eaten tweed jacket and rolls over the sand like a rolling pin. He is performing the argathanon star motions that he learned from his initiation into the Brahmaputra.
Overhead soars a mighty Titan hawk. He will not tolerate the blatant insubordination to God of the haggard old man below so he swoops downward with his cruel talons retracted. They make contact with the man born without a name and tear into the gelatinous blubber of his flank. The hawk cranes the man away to the top of the bombastic volcano named Jampato. The man screams an aching shrill as the mighty Titan hawk releases him into the bowels of the hungry volcano never to be seen again, at least in human form. Some vacation! 


He is reborn as a fungi. A boring old mushroom. Perhaps this was because he had scorned the fun guys of his youth: the delightful art connoisseurs of his neighborhood, and the gregarious bourgeoisie. He never felt like he belonged to those cliques. At the ripe age of twelve he became a Brahman of the highest degree and a celibate since initiation into the Brahmaputra. He had worked very hard as an Indian priest, a priest with no name. For he never liked labels, being born without one anyhow. He was of God and not your ordinary individual. Yet despite his faith, he one day, after many years had passed, arose from his bamboo-framed bed and suddenly felt empty. There was a void in his heart without the light from above. At that precise moment, his belief in a God disappeared. He decided to do what the average Joe would do and have himself a period of debauchery. He would now dwell in the mundane and the ordinary. He took to smoking the cancer-stick as an idle pastime and his eyes turned toward the fairer sex for the first time.


Some time passed in his new life of sin, but he soon became bored. He needed new stimulation. Thus, off he went on his first vacation to have some fun in the sun. Hawaii would be his first port-of-call. Then Bangkok and Madrid. Only the higher powers that were, knew that he would never make those destinations. His 'vacation' turned out to be a self-imposed period of internal destitution. He felt both spiritually hollow and alone. Sure, he ended up imagining that God did indeed exist in the end. But it was too late. And his ritualistic motions in the sand were in vain. Now, as a benign mushroom in the decaying bed of a great forest, he would have all the time he needed to question his reality and perhaps find peace with his God once again.