18.
   The idiots were all naked now. They stripped me and pushed me up against some kind of wooden yoke on a wall. Below me a jungle stretched to dark mountains beyond. They forced my arms up to the yoke and tied them with leather straps. The whole thing looked like some sort of trite Hollywood set. They started dancing like Josephine Baker and chanting “Dub Ya! Dub Ya! Dub Ya!” It was a Berchtesgarten Bierfest, a Crawford Ranch barbecue. I kicked and struggled and spat at them, then my eyes focused and I looked down. It must have been fifty feet to the floor of the forest. OK, I thought. It’s a dream, a pizza and late night movie. This was so ridiculous I would have burst out laughing if I weren’t scared shitless.

   The trees in the jungle below started bobbing and flailing. An ungodly roar echoed out of the jungle. I struggled and slammed against the wooden yoke. This was not going to happen. I was not going to be the victim of these insane idiots. I didn’t care how unreal the whole thing was, it wasn’t going to get any worse. I was going to escape. I was going to throw all these rich, naked jerks off the wall. I was going to find a gun and blow the head off whatever the hell was in that God damned jungle below me.

19.
   The morons fell to the ground in terrified reverence. Their naked butts quivered and shook. What the hell was I going to do? I ordered myself to wake up. I twisted and turned trying to make myself fall out of bed. I yelled at the top of my lungs. I reached down to the bottom of my guts and let out a burst of energy. Nothing. I was strapped to a wooden yoke surrounded by a bunch of cooing, moaning halfwit shit for brains and hanging above a jungle that was about to eject God knows what with the real possibility that I wasn’t dreaming just beginning to dawn on me.

   Suddenly I felt something land on me. I turned to find those damned dogs were trying to chew me loose. They jumped on the wooden yoke and gnawed at the leather straps around my wrists. They snarled and growled. Their hackles bristled. Another roar blasted below. One of them looked me in the eyes and said, “It’s not the monkey, you moron.”

20.
   The monkey was back and thirty feet tall. It burst out of the jungle with eyes ablaze. Its creamy, white skin flapped and jiggled. Its gaping maw was full of broken yellow teeth. It stunk of cheap beer, cheap cologne and hairspray. It was Fay Ray time. It was naked, should have stayed home, lefty, commie, pinko for lunch time.

   The jungle shook and the monkey lurched. A huge, sweaty paw reached for my head just as I felt the bonds around my wrists fall free. I turned to run but before I could, the dogs grabbed my hands and lifted me into the air. “You have much to learn.”, said one.
   The monkey reached for my ankles but it was too late. I looked back over my shoulder to see the prostrate sycophants pulling themselves to their feet. The angry looks on their faces were replaced by abject terror. The monkey turned on them and pounced.
   We drifted high above the cartoon horror. The blood curdling screams faded away. A volcano loomed on the horizon. A shimmering sea stretched under a brilliant orange sunset. I looked up at the dogs clinging to my wrists. They were determined, saying nothing as they looked into the distance. This is a hell of a ride, I thought. Wow, flying dogs. Not bad.

21.
   As we flew into the clouds leaving my nightmare behind, one of the dogs said, “It’s time to put things in perspective. All of this pestilence didn’t burst its ugly boil overnight. It’s been festering for a long time.”

   The clouds parted over a desert. The dogs dropped me in front of some god-awful sphinx wannabe wearing an oversized pair of horn-rimmed glasses. “Let’s start with the Doctor. It’s been at the center of every power grab since Rockefeller put a leash on Nixon and handed it to him. This is the only Nobel Peace Prize laureate that’s wanted by the authorities all over the world. It’s wanted by the French for it's role in Operation Condor, by the Spanish and the Chileans for the CIA coup in Chile and by the Indonesians for the Indonesian genocide yet it’s worshiped as the grand Pooh-Bah of corporate global dominance. It wanders through the halls of power stinking of stale flesh and sulfur: The Bilderberg Group, The Council on Foreign Relations, The Trilateral Commission, The Heritage Foundation, The Cato Institute, The International Institute of Strategic Studies, The Hoover Institution. It's words come slowly for the true believers as it ponders how many more it can drag with it to hell.”

22.
   “This toad never goes away. It just gets more and more poisonous with age.”, said the other dog, shaking its head. “It’s responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands and the oppression of millions yet it has been elevated to avatar, to a great and mysterious Sphinx that gazes down on a bloody reign of tyranny. It is more aging, withered spider than Sphinx. It squats on its mountaintop waiting for the princes of Empire to climb up and pay homage. When they come, the frigid plutocrats are sucked even drier until they drift to the spider’s feet like dead leaves.” He waved at a carved inscription below the Sphinx. “Here’s a proud quote from decades ago when it first crawled onto the stage: ‘Who controls the food supply controls people, who controls the energy can control whole continents, who controls money can control the world.’ You see, this megalomania is not new at all. Whether it is a valley with a couple of tribes, a transcontinental empire, or one little blue world, someone always and everywhere wants to control it, twist it, squeeze it rape it into an agonized ecstasy of domination and death.”

   Suddenly the huge pile of stones began to quiver and come alive right in front of us. It raised itself up and glared down at us. A growl emanated from its throat. Its claws scraped the sand at our feet. The lesson was cut short.

23.
   Wonderful. A stone sphinx animates into a giant man lion like a genie out of the sand. I couldn’t believe it. But the sand under my bare feet felt real. The sun on my bare ass felt real, and I was backing away from another thug, this one forty feet tall and pissed off, with a couple of flying dogs who apparently forgot how to fly.

   “Art is man’s expression of his joy in labor!”, it bellowed.
    “What the hell?”, I said as I looked up at it.
    “For other nations, utopia is a blessed past never to be recovered; for America, it is just beyond the horizon!”, shouted the Sphinx.
    “This thing is a bore.”, I whispered to the dogs.
    “Nobody will ever win the war of the sexes. There is too much fraternizing with the enemy!”
    “This thing bombed the hell out of Cambodia in secret. The result was civil war and genocide.”, said a dog.
    “This thing will bore you with platitudes then snap off your head.”, said the other dog. “Run!”
    It rushed at us. We ran into a thicket of tall reeds. If we could keep far enough ahead of it, we might lose it before it crushed us under its huge paws. As we dashed through the undergrowth, it stomped right behind us smashing and scattering the vegetation. “We must distinguish morality from moralizing!”, it boomed.
   I threw my hands over my ears. “This thing is going to make me puke!”

 

  

24.
   We raced through the reeds ducking and dodging the butt ugly beast until we stumbled upon a riverbank. I pushed the reeds aside and found a very large, very ugly baby floating in a basket. “My God! What the hell is this freak doing here?”, I asked out loud. Cracked yellow teeth jutted out of its mouth. It swayed and bounced as the current rocked and bobbed it against the shore. It looked back at me with hungry eyes. A sneer crossed its face. It let loose the low growl of an angry cat. “I think you are somewhere where you do not belong.”

   “It speaks!”, I blurted. “Is this how religion is going to elbow its way into this hallucination?”
   The dogs stared at it in astonishment. “Doesn’t religion elbow its way into everything?”, muttered one.
   The baby’s voice was deep and menacing. “Three heretics standing before me without the good sense to bow down before a Prophet. Three savages who will never see the light of God and are about to be sent back to hell from whence they came. You look tasty. Have you any last words”?
   With an angry fifty-ton lion on our tails, I had to do something quick before we were all stomped into the mud. Then it came to me. There was only one thing to do.

25.
   Mug the thug with Moses. The Sphinx had found us. It paused for a moment as if trying to decide whether to tear us to pieces or swallow us whole. It made its mind up quickly and came at us. I bent down and grabbed the wiggling little monster in the basket.

   “Take your hands off me you dirty, naked, subhuman piece of shit!“, it screamed, its eyes wide with terror.
   It snapped at my wrists as I lifted it in the air and over my head. I threw it at the thug with all my strength. The imperious little thug made an excellent projectile. It smashed the sphinx’s specs to pieces and bounced off into the undergrowth.
   The Doctor was stopped in its tracks. It roared with rage exposing a nasty collection of orange, spade like teeth. It raised a claw studded paw to its face, winced in pain then violently shook its head and whipped off the broken glasses. Its other paw pounded a cloud of sand in front of me. Its tail sheered the river reeds in every direction. Another deafening roar exploded in the air.
   The dogs jumped into the empty basket. I followed them into the river, grabbing on to the basket and pushing off just as the mud caked prophet came skittering out of the reeds on all fours like an angry lizard. It stopped short at the water line. We left the howling horror and its furious little sidekick stomping impotently on the shore.

  

26.

   I threw an arm over the edge of the basket to steer it as I swam away from the riverbank as fast as I could. I glanced over my shoulder at the pair of dirtbags scowling on the shore.
   “Leaders must invoke an alchemy of great vision!", the sphinx bellowed.
   I rolled my eyes and thought of those giant paws stomping around me, and that huge mouthful of horrible teeth, and that little mouthful of horrible teeth. I imagined the two of them diving into the water or suddenly taking flight and drowning all three of us. When I realized that they weren’t going to follow us I sighed with relief. The water was warm and relaxing. I clung to the basket as the current took hold of us and swept us away.
   The dogs seemed nonchalant, almost playful. They bounced excitedly back and forth in the basket with their tongues hanging out and their ears and tails in the air.
   I was amazed at their insouciance and more than a little peeved. “Listen,”, I said as I looked up at them. “I really appreciate you saving me from that monkey back on the eleventh floor, but I’m not really interested in this Alice and Wonderland from hell meets The Thief of Bagdad on acid. And what’s with all the bad teeth? It seems like you’re taking me from the frying pan into the fire. I’m up for a history lesson or any kind of lesson you want to give me but isn’t there some way to do so without getting me killed?”

27.
   The dogs dismissed my whining and introduced themselves as Pat and Nanette. They informed me that from now on I would be addressed as Oliver.
    “Hey, you made it, didn’t your Oliver?”, asked Pat. “It was a hell of a ride. Where’s the thrill, kid? Where’s the adrenaline?”
    “Get into the basket, Oliver,”, barked Nanette “and use the baby’s blanket to make yourself decent.”
    I did as I was told begrudgingly and a little bit sheepishly. As I climbed into the basket and folded the blanket around me, I pushed the curtain of cynicism aside a bit and began to marvel at what I had just experienced. The vision of a giant stone lion rearing up over me made me shiver. Its dim-witted platitudes amazed me. Remembering the threatening adult voice emanating from a child no matter how ugly made me sick. The fact that I had actually used it as a weapon made me smile. I looked around for the first time and marveled at the wide, blue river. A school of fish gathered around us, and some leapt from the water. A forest of dunes lined the riverbank. An ethereal mosque framed by minarets quivered in the wavering light on a hill above. The silent desert stretched to the horizon.

   “And stay on your toes.”, continued Nanette sternly. “You have embarked on a journey that will change your life and, should you manage to live through it, the lives of your fellow countrymen.”

28.

   “Should I manage to live through it?”, I sputtered, collapsing back into the basket. I suddenly realized that for some strange reason even though a couple of huge monsters in a matter of a few minutes had done their best to snuff me out, it had never occurred to me that I had almost been killed.
   “You’re going to die someday anyway. We all are.”, reasoned Nanette as she hopped on to my chest. “The journey is the lesson, and we have no more control over it than you do.”
   “The sooner you make adversity a friend in life, the better.”, waxed Pat. He batted at the fish as they jumped in the air. “If not, someday you’ll find you will have little time left to make up for the time you have wasted.”
   “Do you know what makes us older, Oliver?”, asked Nanette. “When we stop being surprised and challenged at what life throws at us and get angry and scared instead. We go from ‘Now what am I going to do?’ to ‘What am I going to do now?’. We don’t really run out of options. We just stop looking for them.”
   Great. I almost get squashed like a bug then I’m told to get used to it and now I get a lecture. I dropped my arms over the sides of the basket and let my hands trail in the water as fish jumped around me. My head fell back and I looked up at the drifting clouds. I was irritated. I was spent. The wonder was on hold, the cynicism was back and the river was moving faster now as mountainous terrain replaced the serenity of the desert.

29.

   The river narrowed and we drifted into a deep canyon. The acrobatic school of fish followed us. The river ran faster now, and the rickety basket ran very low in the water. The dogs seemed oblivious. “You should enjoy the adventure which, after all has got off to a pretty good start with you mugging the Doctor and all. That’s a moment you should treasure, young man!”, marveled Nannette. “With that kind of quick thinking, you’ll go a long way.”
   “Quick thinking?”, I asked. “What quick thinking? Things have gotten so out of control that I forgot that I was dreaming, or if I was dreaming. I have had dreams when I knew I was dreaming before, dreams that were so real I would wake up wondering when I was going to wake up, long dreams with adventure and a complicated plot, but never all at once. Maybe I’m not dreaming. Maybe someone slipped me some acid.”
   “You’re not dreaming and you’re not on drugs.”, sighed Pat as he leaned out of the basket snapping at the fish and causing it to ride even lower.
   “But I was dreaming about Monkey Boy and Zombie Thug and Snake Lady, and I woke up. Then on the eleventh floor they were back!”, I said exasperated.
   “Shit happens!”, Pat proclaimed. “So now you’re in a world with angry Sphinxes and talking dogs. Did you ever think you would be in a world where your country tortures people, where a thousand years of Habeus Corpus is thrown out with the bath water?”
   “Your point is well taken.”, I admitted.