My Red Book

Curse you, Carl Jung! Just when the world was ready to forget about you, you unveil your sordid little Red Book.

For nigh on half a century, deep in the gold brick-lined vaults of Zurich, lay the tales of your vaunted vision quest. Meanwhile, your modern acolytes were busy alchemizing your high-falutin Nazi-sympathizing Swiss sorcery into one big, mealy-mouthed, touchy-feely, rainbow massage crystal to cure the world of its cosmic pain. Your legacy seemed right on track for an ignominious whimper of an end.

Then, all of a sudden, the New York Times announces the long-awaited publication of the “holy grail of the unconscious,” a tale of a psychiatrist’s struggle with psychosis, a modern man of science conversing with ancient demons and a personal discovery that would transform our understanding of the human mind. Now the salivating Jungians are dusting off their Ouija boards and polishing their monoliths, priming for personal revelation and an orgy of “Aha!” moments.

Well, I’ve got news for you, C.J. (I know your spirit is present. I can smell its foul pipe tobacco). You are not the only one with a secret diary detailing the mysteries of the unconscious. I, too, have cut new swaths of wisdom into the tangled jungle of the psyche. Everyone already knows about your break with Freud on the eve of World War I and the personal crisis it precipitated. Boring! But how many people have yet to read about my break with Dr. Leaky McNuds in those ominous summer months of 1997 and the voyage of self-discovery that ensued?

I had been a devoted disciple of McNuds for five years, enjoying the role of confidante and heir apparent in his elite circle of rogue urologists. He called me his “golden shower child”–potty jokes being a staple of the urology community. Naturally, I was flattered and my affection for my mentor was sincere. I saw McNuds as a sort of Old Testament prophet of the penis, thoroughly free from illusion or propriety, and committed to probing the depths of our field from sac to tip.

The tension between us began with a conversation one evening in McNuds’ study. We were discussing the significance of maladies arising from overzealous shaking when at the public urinal. McNuds was convinced that the act betrayed a repressed sexual wish. When I suggested that there might be a less sexual and more sincerely spiritual meaning to the gesture, perhaps akin to the waving of a sorcerer’s wand to purge the soul of evil spirits, McNuds stared at me, aghast. I knew then that if I were to pursue my own urological convictions, it would cost me my friendship with McNuds. And it did.

The last I saw of McNuds was at an uro-analysis convention in Indianapolis, a sausage fest, as it is called in the parlance of our discipline. I delivered a paper on Ancient Egyptian twisticles, wherein I remarked that Amenhotep IV’s scrotal contusion resembled the wracked state of contemporary McNudsian urology. McNuds fainted and, in a fit of guilt, I leapt from the podium to catch him. After depositing my fallen idol on the couch, I hobbled away, having just suffered a mild scrotal contusion myself, never to see him again.

Needless to say, I was drummed out of uro-analysis. Left virtually without a pot to have someone piss in, my livelihood collapsed. And it was then, in those sweltering summer days of 1997, during the great fen-phen epidemic, the fall of the Woolworth’s empire, the secessionist parliament of Scotland and finally-- the spark that set off the powder keg-- the death of Princess Diana, that I lost my mind. The ground beneath me seemed to open up and swallow me. I became trapped in the labyrinthine trenches of my own besieged brain, bombarded by poisonous shrapnel-filled thoughts.

There I was playing cards with a diffident proto-urethra and an ancient testicle from Carthage, worrying over my lost sanity and my pair of fives, when the hoary Carthaginian leaned over and whispered in my ear, “I am a nut, but you, my son, are perfectly sane. Go, engrave these trials on rune stones in a Gothic hand and illuminate them with instructive anatomical mandalas.”

I realized the only way I could maintain my sanity was by recording my phantasies, converting the crazed ravings of a castrated urologist into an epic poem about the male organ’s journey through all seven dimensions of spirit with his medieval guide Phallus Mundus. Phallus Mundus led me to these depths within my self, where I struck upon my revolutionary theories of the collective bladder of mankind and the Ur-pubis.

And as soon as these rune stones are hauled up from my grandmother’s basement in Joplin, Mo., where they have been kept safe all these years, I am confident they will be a penetrating stream of insight into the stagnant waters of urology.

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