WILL YOU EVER WIN?

She purchased the cheap paperback at the airport, figuring it would help her to pass the time during the long flight. High as a kite and on her third day without a hairbrush, she rummaged around deep inside her kitbag looking for her smokes and the flask of whiskey. Patchouli wafted out from her bag like a drunken genie. A woman with blue hair standing behind her wrinkled her nose and moved several steps away where her nostrils would not be offended. Ashtray eyes and fingers clad in dragon’s wings, she stood waiting and listening to the primordial drumbeat within her head, imagining herself a whirling dervish in black gypsy fringe—a siren’s song calling her from across time, compelling her to move on, to listen and succumb to the voice that was hers and hers alone. Sing! Soar!

She had had enough of the scene, the streets were played out—the dead end friends and the boyfriend asleep at the wheel—she was finally free, man. Free! All this happened while she waited for a plane to take off and her mind to cease it’s tripping.

She had few expectations of the book but the cover spoke to her. Gave her a vision. A crystal vision. She kept it to herself.  She threw it into her bag, took a swig from the flask and boarded the plane. Sinking into her seat, she prepared herself for destiny. As the plane crossed the North Atlantic, The Triad was completed; much loved—memorized, dog-eared and devoured. Cloaked in its mythology and the wings of flight she became the maker of birds. She had been transformed, she had listened—it was 1974, her boots were platform, her jeans were tight and she had officially arrived. Right on.

What took her ten minutes to write would forever inspire the trite prolific goddess/witch/whore-obsessed singers, poets and art students all over the world. Candles would be lit in dorm rooms, records played while girls dressed like fortune-tellers would twirl in circles with long diaphanous scarves trailing behind them. Lonely women in bars, crying into their whisky would feel a yearning female spirituality—they were too good—too special—to waste their time on [insert name]. The 80’s would inspire them to Stand Back!, rush to parlours to get doves inked to milky shoulders, and punish their hair with really bad perms.

Thanks a lot.