"Wow. It must be nice to hope for the thing you wish to want."

"Jerri Blank", aka Amy Sedaris, "Strangers with Candy"

As I laid moaning like a whore in my sweat-sodden hospital bed - fever-plagued, eating my dinner out of a hole in my arm, unbathed and reeking for nearly four days - I made certain to spend my precious waking moments attempting to piece together my misdeeds to determine why I was being punished with not one, but two hospital stays (appendectomy, diverticulitis) in 2007. Ultimately, I came to the conclusion that nothing* I'd done so far in my twenty-seven years merited this year's medical gang-rape, so I determined that I would need to pay a call to a local past-life regressionist/high priestess/Kroger employee named Sri Lakhshmiramadeva-ji Unicorn-Princess North-Star Tortelli-Berkowitz to see what might be at the root of my ghastly, unbidden issues as of late.

[ring, ring]

Male voice: [urrrrrrp] Who the feck is this? It's, like, 10 in the goddamn morning.
Me: Good morning, sir! I was wondering if I could set up a meeting with Sri Lakhshmiramadeva-ji Unicorn-Princess North-Star Tortelli-Berkowitz for this afternoon.
Male voice: Better make that next week. She's on the rag and's been giving all of her male clients "herbal remedies" that make the heads of their decks bleed.
Me: Good to know. So, how's Wednesday of next week?
Male voice: No good; that's the night we meet with our swing partners over at this dungeon across town for some -
Me: [reaching for something - anything! - to kill myself with] Alrighty then. How's about Friday?
Male voice: Yeah, I'll tell her. Hey: when you're on your way over, how's about you stopping at the Circle K down the street and bringing me a package of White Owls? You know, the kind with the white plastic lip-guard.
Me: Only if you promise to not smoke them while I am there, as the aroma they produce reminds me of that time I had to have my ingrown toenail cauterized with a laser.
Male voice: [whispers] Awesome.

Friday afternoon finds me standing next to my car, door ajar, beholding a tarpaper shanty and wondering if I'd made a wise decision. Several emaciated feral cats wended their way through calf-high weeds to greet me; finding a largish stick several yards from my person, I held the mewling, distempered beasts at bay with it long enough to broach the "porch", whereupon I was greeted by the delicate scent of pet feces, nag champa incense and Velveeta. I used the stick to rap upon the door; when several minutes passed and I was not received, I turned to hack my way back to awaiting (and unlocked) Orhan. I was about halfway across the "lawn" when a man's voice called out to me.

Morbidly Obese Man with Combover: Do you have my ceee-gars, whelp?
Me: [beholding a creature on the porch who, surely, has spent a significant amount of time hiding under a bridge] Here they are. I must insist, though, that they remain on my person until I leave, lest you begin the process of immolating and "enjoying" one. Also, you owe me $7.
MOMwC: Don't you judge me, son. Also: Shirley - uh, I mean, Sri Lakhshmiramadeva-ji Unicorn-Princess North-Star Tortelli-Berkowitz - has agreed to knock the seven clams off your fee today.
Me: So, this means that I am paying $3 for the pleasure of her company? This is going to be one quality regression.
MOMwC: Damn skippy, motherhumper.

He bid me forward into the inner sanctum of the shanty and I, for my part, attempted to suppress my gag reflex and open my Inner Eye to the experience. This was difficult given that the inside of the home was less in keeping with my own ideas of what these places would be like (Enya on stereo, tasteful lezzie decor, a woman clad in a willowy frock) and was more as I imagine the interior of one of those hermit-apartment might be. You know, an apartment inhabited by one of those people who live for twenty-five years in a place, never go outside, have seventeen cats and when they die, only the stink of their rotting corpses alerts neighbors to their passage.

I was shown into a small, darkened room where - from the eye-stinging reek of it - the nag champa was merrily burning. Sri Lakhshmiramadeva-ji Unicorn-Princess North-Star Tortelli-Berkowitz was sprawled in a rather unladylike position on a small daybed behind the reading table and, upon our approach (and with a deleriously sputum-filled throat-clearing from MOMwC) she leapt up, covered her nearly-exposed junk with the yards of linen she'd girded her body with and summoned her mistiest, most supernatural voice. Which, considering that she was a chain-smoking fiftyish former Jewess from Albany, came out sounding like Bea Arthur trying to talk through a mouthful of tuna.


SLUNT: [hack, hack] What brings you to Sri Lakhshmiramadeva-ji Unicorn-Princess North-Star Tortelli-Berkowitz this fine day? Oh, wait: aren't you the guy who's trying to figure out why his twenty-seven-year-old guts are rebelling against him? Like, from past lives and shet?
Me: Yeah, I guess that would have to be me.
SLUNT: Yeah. Well, let's get started. Before I open your Inner Eye, I will need to know two things; one, do you have the three bucks? Two: are you allergic to bat guano?
Me: Yes, and most likely yes.
SLUNT: Shet. Well, how about Crisco?
Me: That'd be fine provided that I know what you are going to do with it. If I wake up and my jimmies are covered in lard, someone in this room is getting tasered.
SLUNT: Just close your goddamn eyes.

When I awoke an hour later, Sri Lakhshmiramadeva-ji Unicorn-Princess North-Star Tortelli-Berkowitz was panting like a fallow deer in heat and was scrounging about in a macrame handbag for her More Ultralight 120s. I frantically reached for my genitalia and, finding them Crisco-free and dry, I began to calm myself.

Me: How'd it go?
SLUNT: [visibly shaking] You just stay the feck over there, wouldja?
Me: Ah, I take it that it went well.
SLUNT: Look, I don't mean to judge, but your soul will need to go through at least three hundred more lifetimes - many of them involving clergy membership - before it is clean again.
Me: So, who was I in the past?
SLUNT: Well, let's just leave it with this: I'm fairly certain that you were responsible for the importation of the Black Death into Europe, the invention of the first decapitation machine, the idea for an exploding tip for whaling harpoons, the summary execution of the Romanovs, the Dutch occupation of the Congo, the establishment of the Khmer Rouge, the idea for the partition of India and Pakistan and the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution.
Me: So, wait: I was Mao Zedong?
SLUNT: Well would you LOOK at the time?

I left with more questions than had been answered (and by left, I mean "was forcibly driven out of the reeking tarpaper shanty by a remarkably agile MOMwC and his butterfly knife"), but one thing was clear: it was the misdeeds of my former selves that had provided the karmic stick that roiled up my present-day innards. For this, I spent four days alone in an isolation ward room because of a raging Clostridium difficile infestation, requiring that nurses and doctors suit up like biohazard/hazmat teams to poke me. For this I had to go for three days without food, receiving nourishment via a suspended bag filled with clear liquids, only to be told that I can never again eat popcorn, nuts and seeds. For this I had to endure countless nurses and doctors asking me incredulously how old I am, as diverticulosis is very rare in people UNDER THE AGE OF 40.

I do know one thing, though.

{whispering} [down with cow demons and snake spirits!]

Until later, I remain,

Domonic (FeatherSonoftheEast) Potorti


*OK, well, selling all of those fifth-graders that home-brewed John Stamos' Proud Greek Nutsack probably had something to do with it.