So now I guess I'm going to confess to a slew of reading that took place for me in the mid-eighties, symbolized by this cracktastic New Age book. I may, in trying to jimmie open that section of memory, slosh a bunch of other freaklicious New Agey books into this one which I read around the same time, so, don't crucify me. Although... come to think of it... if you catch me on a point of detail that will just prove that you read the lame ass thing as well.
I grew up in a household devoid of any religious observance. My grandmother had taken me to Jehovah's Witness services as a child, and shoved bibles into my chubby little fists from an early age, but none of the patriarchal beliefs had taken hold, so I was left wandering the planet with a vague sense of spirituality and nothing to hang it on. When I left home at 16 and felt all aimless and ungrounded, my search for SOMETHING began in earnest. It began really with Richard Bach's 'Illusions'. Aha! Something vague, profound and magical I could gravitate toward! Eventually that lead me to a crystal-grotesqued book store in Santa Rosa's Montgomery Village. I haunted it's aisles on a weekly basis, dragging home obscure volumes of belief: Seth Speakswas the beginning of the Jane Roberts books - where a pot-bellied Gestalt follower channels the soul of a pirate from the afterlife. These channelings go on and eventually Seth is reincarnated into like seven lives at the same time... one of which is a young girl and another of which is a firefighter or an astronaut or a time traveler... I don't know... it was very confusing. In the end it was like trying to figure out how many angels dance on the head of a pin. Like most religions or spiritual belief systems it all became ridiculously specific until I said to myself... uhm... really? That's just silly. And went back to watching Monty Python episodes and learning to juggle, cheating at my job by putting too many toppings on the Round Table pizzas until they took me off the front line and made me work the salad bar for the rest of my employment history. One of the fringe benefits of reading New Age books was that it influenced my poetry. This period of my life ended by my writing a poem for a co-worker about how we had been soldiers together in a former life, killed each other on the field of battle, and died crying salty tears which made rivulets down our dirty faces as out souls spun away into the void. I read it out loud to him during a dinner break. You could hear crickets chirping after I was done as he looked at me like I was from Mars... or worse... and tried valiantly to find something to say other than "Wow, you are a terrible terrible poet, please stop assaulting me with your creepy, stalker-like, uber geek self."
Anyway... Overshoe Seven was a cracktastic journey into the mind of a complete snake oil saleswoman. One of the infamous New Ageys whose main purpose in life is to find a magical spiritual silver bullet which will cause them to manifest their higher selves as millionaires with fancy estates and Ducati motorcycles. Uh huh... that's what happens when you're really spiritual. That's why Ghandi spun his own diapers and ate nothing but lemon juice for weeks on end. Whatever.