Wielding the One Ring

© Jonathan Zap 2004

When I put on the gold ring, my Precious, I know I am The One, and all the hotties can feel my power, feel my power like heat ripples coming off of me and they know that I can rock their world and they stare at me with glazed eyes mesmerized and infatuated with my power as Michael Jordan comes up around me in slow motion trying to do a lay up and I spike the ball right out of his hands and when I land, I am dancing, circling around the ring, a genetically enhanced version of Muhammad Ali in his prime, and I am floating around the ring, floating like a butterfly, stinging like a bee, and I’ve slowed time down as I dance around the ring, my awareness and speed heightened so that my movements can flicker like lightening, and I am dancing circles around Mike Tyson, Iron Mike, Mike of the Iron Age, who is there in his prime and at the peak of his orc-like obnoxiousness, and everyone knows he wants to bite my ears off, wants to eat my children, wants to feed on man flash tonight as I dance, dance around him out of reach, the lethal grace of a big cat, amused and alert, and Iron Mike can only glare at me, orc-like, but to me he is just a dense and rubbery thing, an armless latex martial arts dummy on a weighted stand, a bowling pin waiting for a depleted uranium bowling ball to be shot out of an 80 millimeter super canon at mach 7, and I just circle dancing, a thousand arc lights reflecting off the shimmering curvilinear planes of my muscle definition, muscle definition that makes anatomy charts seem flabby by comparison, and occasionally, just to amuse the crowd, I sting Iron Mike with a flickering jab, sting just hard enough to raise big red welts on his face, and he begins to look like a chocolatey version (with raspberry highlights) of the Pillsbury Dough Boy trying to fight a phase 9 Terminator with gamma enhanced nuclear magnetic resonance circuitry capable of power surges in the trillions of volts, but I hold the power back and just keep dancing, dancing circles around him until I sense that every ringside photographer has a sweating finger pressed on shutter button ready to fire, and the strobe flashes go off all around me as I deliver the knockout blow, the G-force making Iron Mike’s face flatten into flabby accordion ripples before he drops to the canvas like a sack of wet rubber coated iron pellets while I lean out of the balcony of my Death Star drinking ever darker cups of espresso, the earth a glittering ball beneath my feet, and when people give me shit I find their lack of faith disturbing and I cut off their oxygen supply and when I do that little hand gesture, that little hand gesture has nothing to do with how I use The Force, which requires only my will, I make that little hand gesture to show how small they are compared to me, and when I employ breath masks and body armor it isn’t that black plasticy looking crap, its the polished gunmetal black of an adamantine metal so powerful and impervious that when some rebel tries to detonate a one thousand kiloton nuclear projectile right in my face it only raises the temperature inside my body armor by about one degree centigrade, which the climate control system adjusts for in nanoseconds anyway, and would I be willing to share my Galactic Empire with a twinkie like Luke Skywalker? Yeah, right, dream on Lukey-Luke, believe that and I’ve got a slightly damaged death star I can sell you at a huge discount…

And when I play electric guitar chords, at the center of a huge stadium of admiring hotties, their tongues hanging out and eyes glazed with infatuation, when I play electric guitar chords they are are searing, mesmerizing, alchemical, metaphysical, lightening made musical type guitar chords, and yes, Hendrix, Gilmore, Jimmy Page, Stevie-Ray they’re good, they do their best, but next to me their chords sound so rough and ameturish, and when the giant video screens show close ups of my fingers bending the strings, the speed and precision is so, so amazing and when I do drum solos the overhead cam shots of my drumming are so blurred with impossible speed that it seems like I have more arms than a Hindu deity and when after the concert paparazzi crowd around and ask me questions about quantum mechanics the challenge is always how to translate what I know so that the layman can get a picture of it in their minds, though they say that my Unified Field Theory makes Super String Theory seem like a tangled knot of nonsense, and I don’t know why they call my Unified Field Theory a “Theory” when so much experimental evidence confirms it, so many spin off technologies are based on it now, but I don’t always answer the questions of Paparazzi, sometimes I just ignore them, sometimes I just walk away from them, the aura of psionic power surrounding me keeping them out of my personal space, black helicopters circling around high above as governments track my movements, as they impotently seek ways to restore the New World Order, but I laugh at them and their conspiracies, I hold press conferences where I hand out lists of everyone in the Illumanati complete with all the account numbers and passwords of their Swiss Bank Accounts, and I diss all the Druidic rituals they do at Bohemian Grove and Bilderburger, diss the Reptilians and their secret bloodlines, and as I assume more and more power I grant myself a massive, massive tax cut, a tax cut so massive that the Federal reserve owes me trillions and trillions of dollars and the European Union owes me trillions of Euros and when I use hypnotic mind pressure on George W. Bush I force him to appear at a press conference crawling on all fours like a dog, and in his mouth he carries my slippers, the Heraldic crest of my World Government Federation and Galactic Empire embossed in silken thread on the fine black velvet of the slippers, and then I make him wake up from hypnotic mind pressure with all the press standing around him, but then I suddenly get bored with politics, all the mind-numbing tedium and bureaucratic bullshit of running a Galactic Federation, so I cloak myself and use my changeling abilities to morph into a variety of forms so no one can recognize me and I use my remote viewing abilities to find buried suitcases of cash left by drug king pins long since gunned down and I drive around in a black Shelby Cobra, the trunk brimming with C notes, fistfulls of dead presidents, and now when I encounter individual hotties, now I restrain a lot of my psionic power, I want to overwhelm them just with the power of my magnetic personality, want to have orgiastic sex with them so overwhelming it creates bonds of loyalty and love in them that last for incarnations but so much more personal than before, and sometimes I even share with them the secret of my immortality so that they never lose their youthful beauty as we travel together, as we phase through time and space together, as we exercise our abilities as interdimensional travelers to go without sleep, without limits, and sometimes they look longingly at the golden ring of power on my finger so I make them lesser rings of power which bind them ever closer to me, but sometimes they become annoyingly addicted to my power and when that happens I return to earth, I step through the mists of time and wander across continents, seeking a new hottie, one that has some really exotic allure and some psionic power of their own this time, a real mutant hottie, and although I don’t experience them as an equal, although they can never be my equal, I can at least take them seriously, can at least take them under my dark wing, and I come to love having someone to travel with across the long eternity of immortal incarnation and with infinite wealth I can buy them little gifts, a ring with a cabochon of cobalt blue sapphire, and sometimes I may even switch identities with them and I may journey for a time as a beautiful and androgynous youth, cloaking myself, my identity hidden, and I play the Super String Guitar phasing through the sticky membranes of incarnation, and as I phase through incarnations I grow tired of power, tired of the odds always in my favor, and I want to experience the exoticism of innocence and benevolence, want to wander out in the rain really getting wet, want to be the hottie in someone else’s mind, beautiful to behold, mysterious and alluring, but also with some mortal vulnerabilities, an ability to feel pain, but not aging or putting on weight, none of the really gross stuff, just continual mortal youth and beauty, mortal flesh beautiful to behold and unencumbered by Galactic power and all that, what a drag that can be, believe me, so I accept a degree of mortality and I wander out in the rain, a beautiful youth in a weathered Gortex coat only it doesn’t look Gortex, not a yuppie Gortex coat, more like a hooded cloak but really water repellent, but I don’t bring much else with me, except that little silver case I carry which has a driver’s license and a credit card, no account limit, so if I need plane tickets or to buy something, there’s no problem, but I don’t claim much worldly power beyond these two plastic cards, and for the most part I don’t use mind pressure on anyone unless they are really threatening me, and sometimes I even think about what it would feel like to pass the ring to someone else for a brief time, momentarily to a lover so that I could feel their power over me for a little while and I have long since stopped wearing the ring on my finger, I wear it on a chain of fine silver-steel beneath a flannel shirt and when a ring bearer switches to the chain method it mutes their power, makes it more subtle, makes them more vulnerable, and when you are more vulnerable life is more of an adventure, out in the rain you really get wet, and there are things you can do, inner resources you can call on far more than what an ordinary mortal can begin to imagine but you can still suffer, can still be up against the ropes, and when the caffinated surge of ring power begins to wear down you begin to realize something, begin to realize something you never realized when you were at the height of ring power, when your ring finger pulsated like an excited penis of power, you begin to realize the stagnation of power, and when the being that you always traveled with, the spirit being you always kept at arms length begins to step through the mirror, begins to step through the mirror when you realize the utter stagnation of power and you are finally open to what he suggests, what he suggests, makes my knees feel weak and my palms get all sweaty but I know he is right, I know he is right, I know this is the medicine I need, the medicine I need to cure the ring sickness, the curse of narcissism, the curse of narcissistically dissing narcissism right here and now, the curse of wanting the hottie and external power, the curse of losing my androgyny when I grasped for the ring, but I feel shaky when I think about what he suggests, I really don’t know if I’m up to this, don’t know if I can handle it, but I look through the mirrored surface he holds before me, look through and see an incarnation where I’m stuck in one mortal body, a healthy but unprepossessing body, 5’ 7″ and 46 years old and subject to aging, my Gortex coat looks no different than anyone else’s in Boulder, and the battered laptop I have has about one fifth the clock speed and processing power of anyone else’s in Café Sole. Everyone’s got a lap top better than mine, hotties come and go and scarcely glance in my direction, a middle aged guy rocking back and forth on his seat over an antique laptop, the coffee starting to wear down and his mortal blood sugar beginning to go down, blood sugar really plummeting now, but inside him there is still some sort of power, some sort of alchemical knowledge and an ability to bend emailed documents to his will, and still the curse of narcissism is there, but getting humbled all the time, Hotties and nonHotties don’t give him the respect and attention he feels he deserves, and he wishes he had that high definition wide screen Toshiba laptop but lacks the sort of plastic card that would make such a purchase possible, but somewhere deep inside he knows that life is now a quest, an adventure of surpassing intensity, now that his hands are tied behind his back, now that the NBA won’t give him a second glance, now that he no longer knows shit about quantum mechanics, no guitar, no one taking him seriously as a heavy weight contender, but now he knows that there is alchemical tautness in his life, he knows that he has finally escaped the stagnation of power, now he knows the unexpected intensity, the terrifying commitment and meaningfulness of mortal existence and in his mind’s eye, in his mind’s eye, he sees the gold ring, gold ring glimmering gold in his mind’s eye, shimmers of gold, his golden Precious, and it is tumbling , tumbling through space, tumbling slowly, falling, falling ever slowly in space, falling ever so slowly into the white hot magma beneath the Cracks of Doom.