How to Become More Spiritual

I was riding on the bus along Divisadero St, 7:30am, watching the early morning sun cast mottled light against the passing houses. The air was cool. There was a dark fog to the west over the ocean. But on the bus, along Divisadero, the morning was fresh and rejuvenating, though I myself as always was slogging along, keeping the timetables of capitalism running by getting up at 6am, dragging myself to a job that made me feel like rotting wood stuck in a window sill, forever seeing the spry life dance outside in the street, forever stuck inside keeping company with office desks, computers, printers, filing cabinets, and the small perks of snacks and coffee, just enough sugar stimulants to keep me dragging along, heart beating like on life-support, stifled, dreary, sleepy, may as well be writing emails from a coffin.

Anyway, I was on the bus and in front of me was a young Lantinx woman with two children. She had a daughter, 5-years-old, well behaved, occupied with a Barbie doll. Her one-year-old son was slung on her back, who, from time to time, would slap her on the side of the head with his whole arm. Then she would restrain him. He would settle down, and, after she released his arm, he would pull at her hair. Poor woman. Young mother of two, never having a single moment to gasp at the miracle of life because she was always head down, grinding for survival. She looked tired. I felt tired. I felt sorry for her, because she was surely more tired than I, carrying that heavy burden on her back.

I turned to look out the window again while the bus stopped. When I looked back, the door was shut, the bus was moving, the woman and her children were outside, the daughter was crying, the son was pulling her hair again, and the doll was on the seat in front of me. Poor woman, another bitter barb for her to endure this morning.

I reached out and picked up the doll. It was a Barbie, brunette, long greasy hair, naked, with red paint splattered across her face like blood. I was powerfully drawn to this object. It was an object filled with violence, I could feel it. I took a photo of it on my phone, sent it to my housemates. They all unanimously responded, “Do not bring that back home.”

You see, one of our housemates, Thais, had recently brought a mask into the house that some insane homeless person had given them on the street. That was on Tuesday. Tuesday night, Jess and Iliza (other housemates) had both started having nightmares, which continued into Wednesday. They felt the mask was invading their dreams, and the last thing they wanted was another cursed object in our house.

But the woman and the child were gone, and the doll was in my hands, and I was drawn magnetically to it. I couldn’t put it down. So I put it, her, in my bag to decide later what to do with her.

The bus worked its way through the Castro, turned, crossed broad Dolores St with the palm trees in the median, and turned on Mission St where I got off.

I dropped into the office of the mental health clinic I’ve been working at. The sickness of the world dropped into the chair on top of me. I went back to feeling the drudgery of life. That pale fatigue that puts our thoughts to sleep, like we’re labotomized patients in a sterile white ward, sitting on a white twin bed, under white fluorescent lights, drooling on our clean white pressed shirts. Coffee cannot cure this. It’s a sort of boredom, of waiting for a stagnancy to pass that never does.

There is a client here whose ex has found out where she is and what times we go out on walks. She has initiated a restraining order against him, but she got freaked out recently because a story came out in the news from the South Bay in which a woman–who had a restraining order against her ex–was putting her kids in the car, at noon, in the middle of a residential street, and her ex came up on her and cut her head off in front of her kids and other bystanders. Look it up.

So this client–we’ll call her Steph–was scared, because her ex had been waiting outside in his car, approaching the group during walks, and possibly having access to a gun. Steph had become afraid her ex might do something similar and that bloody-faced doll seemed like it might be an omen if ever there was one.

But for now at any rate, locked inside the program, the morning passed like a glacier. I’d say it passed like a kidney stone, but I understand those are excruciatingly painful, and pain is a liveliness that this morning lacked. We checked in as a group. Everyone at the table, myself included, looked like we’d all washed up there, barely breathing, half-drowned by the thrashing waves of life out in the streets, recovering from near collisions with death. It’s the same every time. Everyone sits at the table like an animal that’s been beaten one too many times, head bowed, waiting to see if a beating is coming today or not. Everyone mumbled out a short response to my questions, and we adjourned. The client’s did chores. I cooked eggs in a skillet.

When the walk came I was dying to go outside, to reach for the sunlight, the kiss of life, if but for a handful of minutes. I was starving for it. I brought my bag because we were going to the library branch up the street and I wanted to grab a couple of books for myself.

The moment we entered the lobby, on the returns rack, facing right at me, was a book on occult practices. The witchy synchronicities were speaking to me on this day, and I was worried they didn’t bode well. What did they want to say? I held on to that book as we wandered the shelves for some minutes, peeking into it from time to time for clues. The clients picked out their finds and we accumulated at the check-out desk. As I put the occult book into my bag, one of the client’s–Danny, a motorcycle building, death metal listening guy–glanced in my bag and saw the doll.

“Holy shit, man, you gotta get rid of that thing,” he blurted out.

The other clients saw the doll too. They all found it frightening. Everyone wanted me to ditch this thing. Powerful connection or not, people had succeeded in making me paranoid. So I pulled her out of my bag and carried her as we left the library, intending to place her somewhere, in a park or on some stairs in the neighborhood.

As we walked in a group down the street, Danny was keeping his distance from me and the doll. I noticed the other clients furtively glancing, waiting for the moment I would leave her in some bushes. Steph had her head down and her hands in her pockets as she usually did.

All of a sudden, a strange man with greying hair, stubbly beard, and a gut underneath his green t-shirt creeped up to Steph and tried to grab her arm with one hand. The other, I noticed, was buried in a pocket of his cargo shorts.

That floating, impotent ghost state-of-mind I had been drifting down the street in vanished as my claws, fangs, and ferocity poised for a violent fight. The man was tall and aggressive, and his hand was still in his pocket, which I couldn’t take my eyes off of. In the meantime, he was harassing a client under my supervision, so it was me up to bat, on stage, tapped for action. I had no idea what to do. It was so sudden.

Before I knew what I was doing, I raised the bloody-faced naked Barbie doll that was in my hand, and began shouting at the man, “Tinaku’s vengeance will fall upon you if you do not leave that woman alone!” I repeated this, shouting, and holding forth the doll in his face as I approached him, with some deep fear in me always peripherally aware of that hand in that pocket.

He was so confused by me, and this terrifying doll in his face, so out of place and random, and finally he looked into the face of the doll, and something inside of him recoiled in terror, and he began backing away from us, to the car from where he had emerged, and he got back in and drove away.

All of us were stunned, adrenaline surging in our senses, and baffled by the scene that just unfolded with the doll. I realized just then, the terrible aspect of this bloody doll face was not an omen of disaster for the doll keeper, but an omen of terrible vengeance against those who would come for the keeper of the doll. And in that moment I had a vision of her: Tinaku, the bloody-faced naked Barbie in my hand, wrapped in leather skins, wielding a long two-pronged spear, gripping an aegis shield, and sporting a ram-horned helmet. She was a savage warrior, a beneficent spirit for those who honored her, and a nightmare demon for those who would try to defile her. What’s more is I noticed all the trees and colors around me bled with a vivacity that felt animal. I was definitely keeping that doll.