Mine was not an easy life, especially since I spent the first half of it scrubbing the bottom of a Marin hot tub. My parents were devotees of O-Show (who in those days was called the Bhagwan Bhakteesh), and we lived in a collective called the Community for Expanded Expansion. Among other things, this meant that I was forced to share the intimate details of my life with stoner parents and ten housemates, plus endure the constant freak parade that was always marching in and out of our geodesic dome.

My earliest known memories are of a couple who came to visit us when I was three-years-old. Paravati and Ajna had actually lived in O-Shows ashram in Kansas, which made them even more confusing to me than my parents. My dad told me that even though she was a womyn, Paravati was the man of the family (a fact which seemed to be substantiated by her long tuffs of facial hair), but nobody in the dome talked about it in front of her, because Paravati had more power than all of our juicers and vita mixes combined. I didnít care much for Anja, but I loved watching Paravati, so I only partially upset when Paravati decided she and Anja were far too sensitive to sleep downstairs (the refrigerator waves interrupted her sleep) and insisted they too move into the room my parents and I shared.

One afternoon while my mom was breast feeding me, Paravati entered the room and ordered my mother to take her breast out of my mouth.

"What on earth for?" asked my mother, the terror in her voice revealing she already knew the answer.

"Because you are feeding the child dairy, which is an animal product and animal products, as we all know, are poison. Do you get it, P-O-I-S-O-N."

Then she yanked me away from my mother, pushing what I now know to be a bottle of vanilla soy milk into my mouth. I spit out the synthetic nipple, cried and cried for my motherís empty boob, but Paravati prevailed, and my mom brainwashed me never to eat dairy againóónot even a sundae-sundae bar from the neighborhood ice cream man.

This was especially hard when I reached kindergarten and got into fights over the flesh-eating habits of my classmates. Disgusted by the way they scarfed cheeseburgers and bologna sandwiches, I thought they were all shamefully un-evolved, and told them so every chance I could. I cited O-Showís commandments as good as any five-year-old, then lambasted their tofu naiveté and lack of concern for their prematurely putrefying colons or mounting karmic debt.

My penchant for evangelizing grew with my verbal skills, and halfway through my second grade year, just days after I brought in bootleg pictures of a slaughter house for show and tell, the principal invited my parents to his office to discuss my "behavior". The next morning, I began dome studying. For a while, I had Momís teaching all to myself, but then the other kids in our dome put up a fuss about having to ride the school bus and contribute to world pollution. They demanded to dome school too, and after an all night meeting on the advantages and disadvantages of studying in square buildings, Mom became their teacher too.

These were high times. Mom wasnít the smartest person in the world, but she was fun and we got to do all sorts of creative visualizations and affirmation exercises. She taught us to forget most of what we learned in our old school, because she said history was written by a bunch of misogynist white men. In its place, she had us study the lost civilizations of Atlantis and Lemuria. We learned how to worship the goddess by lighting yoni candles and how to grow flowers by talking to plant spirits. We learned the twelve signs of the zodiac and memorized the significance of trines, squares and nodes. While other kids our age were sweating over geometry and trigonometry, we were watching Drunvalo Melchizedek videos and making backyard tetrahedrons.

By the time I was seventeen, I was a whiz at all things sublime. I had read all of Carlos Castaneda books three times and had visited two crop circles in person. I could recite the thirteen moon cycles of the Mayan calendar and spin every chakra. I channeled Serapis Bay at will, sometimes even Metatron. I meditated twice a day and saw angels hanging around the 7-11. I even made a tachyon energy conductor that I through mail order.

But my true passion was numerology, especially the number seven. All on my own I figured out that Disney released Snow White and the Seven Dwarves in 1937 and that Sean Connery played secret agent 007 seven times. Ever since I was able to talk I could remember local phone numbers, which made perfect sense because they are seven numbers not counting the area code. At first I thought this wasnít much of a skill, but then one night an AT&T swami came to me in a dream and said six eight nine and ten, which meant that the Great Number needed my help. Honored to be chosen for this lofty service, I underwent an astral initiation, whereby over the course of two weeks I was subliminally instructed in archangelic binary koans. As a numeric vehicle for God, I learned to humble myself before every formula and calculation, and at the end of my training, I received a gilded sliderule holograph to hang above my third eye.

I went into practice as soon as I pestered my mom into kicking me out of dome school. Changing my name to Songbird (an eight numerologically, which was just one number above my magic seven) and incorporating my affinity for phone numbers, I developed a highly refined niche in the realm of Seven Digit Phone Number Creator Gods. My success wasnít as immediate as Iíd expected, but I figured this was because before I came along and discovered the existence of Seven Digit Phone Number Creator Gods, most people thought phone numbers were random assignments or lyric fillers for bad song writers. Knowing I was blessed, I accepted my special status and began telling the world that phone companies had been divinely inspired to adopt 7-diget phone numbers in order to encode secret stellar messages with specific numeric frequencies of life purpose blueprints.

In my first year of business, I mainly did readings for our community and some of the girls at the local high school. I got my big break when Star Essence, the editor of Lightworker Today called me up for a reading (all readings were done over the phone to facilitate psychic rendering). I still remember her number; it was 843-2852, which was a very powerful number. Just looking at the prefix alone, 8 plus 4 equals 12 which is divisible by 3, which can be multiplied by 4, and 4 times the remaining two numbers equals 8, again just one above 7óan amazing and fortuitous combination in numeric feng shui. But, when I told her this, she burst into tears and said her magazine was failing despite the fact that the Michael entity promised her that she was a Seventh Level Old Soul who would become a mouthpiece for the New Age. I had never made a mistake like this before, and for a moment I feared the end of my numeric career. Then the Great Number telepathically suggested that I ask her what font she used for her numbersówhich was how I discovered she listed her number as 1-800-THE-BULB, thus diluting its numeric potency with alphabetic representation.

Needless to say, this simple, twenty-minute reading propelled me to national fame. Within six months, I was on the cover of Lightworker Today and by the Harmonic Convergence was manifesting vast amounts of abundance. I hired one person, then another and another and another until I had seven employees; then the Great Number said my business was ready for franchise. So to make sure nobody stole my ideas, I copyrighted my divine training techniques and opened the 7 Phone Retreat Center and School in Mill Valley, California.

For the next couple of years my sevens were rapidly gaining zeros. To keep up with the accelerating times, I joined a Womynís Wisdom Monthly Moon-time Lodge circle. I attended fourth and fifth-dimensional embodied empowerment workshops. I gave up newspapers and television, read the Ra material, listened only to Seth and Ramatha tapes, and for a while, I truly believed I was going to ascend at any moment. I thought I was happy.

Then one stormy afternoon, shortly after the 1989 San Francisco Bay earthquake, my life took a new turn. It all started when I received a cylindrical tube in the mail from one of my clients. Thinking it was another poster of Mount Shasta, I almost gave it to a friend for her birthday. But when my guides insisted that I keep it for myself, I obliged. Boy was I surprised when I opened the tube and discovered an IíM NOT AMERICA map.

A channeled look at the Earth changes prophesied to coincide with the 100^th Monkey paradigm shift of consciousness, the IíM NOT AMERICA map was a topography of cataclysmic events. It showed the aftermath of great floods: Water ripping through the Americaís heartland and vast land masses becoming tiny islands; Washington, DC reduced to a couple of dead white statues and a new capital; a new capital called One-Mind Government sitting on the bluffs above the freshly formed Central Ocean of Samadhic Undertakings. Other great cities, such as New York, Philadelphia, Boston and Hoboken also suffered tremendous losses as the Eastern seaboard encountered the wrath of tsutoomany karma. Tidal waves, volcanic eruptions, Earthquakes, flash floods, tornadoes, hurricanes and lightning bolts decimated shopping malls, banks, high-rises and planned communitiesóówhich meant much of the conventional population was gone. In its place was a fringe race of lacto-ovo meditators populating ecocities such as The Peace of Harmonic Tonality, Group OM and Now. Global warming was gone, and pollution was non-existent, especially since cars and airplanes had been replaced by astral travel. People wore holographic clothing and duality had left for a parallel reality. The grid reality matrix had lay lines of energy connecting everyone to each other through their grounding cords. It was said to be bliss.

As astonishing as they were, I could have handled all of these Earth changes it hadnít been for the foretold future of California. For years I had ignored prophetic whisperings of Californiaís ultimate demise. If anything, the rest of the country was going to drop into the ocean, not California, the seat of the New Age, the fulcrum of consciousness. As a whole, California was more enlightened than anyplace on the planet. Not only did we have Marin County, but we also had the green bud of Mendocino, a UFO base hidden in Mount Shasta, the digital be-ins of Silicon Valley and the freaky intellectuals of SF and Berkeley. Based on the guidance of my Higher Self, I was convinced the Northern half of the state far outweighed the drama of Hollywood, the smog in Los Angeles and the gubernatorial precedent set by southerners like Ronald Regan and Pete Wilson.

Apparently, the IíM NOT AMERICA entities didnít agree. In their not-Americaócalled the "Untied AMs of I"óCalifornia was a distant memory, with only the tip of Mount Shasta remaining as a pointy island. All of its unevolved inhabitants drowned as the state cracked along the borders of Oregon, Nevada and Arizona and sank to the bottom of the sea. I couldnít believe it. How could I continue to do phone number readings when the very land on which I wore my moccasins was destined for the same fate as Atlantis?

It felt like Iíd died and reincarnated in a parallel universe. More than my desire to see auras and be on Foxís Sightings show, I wanted to join this new team of do gooders. Like them, I wanted to live in a world where I could trade in my car for a light-body and rest at night knowing that all cosmetics were cruelty-free. I called IíM NOT AMERICAís 900 number (which the Great Number said was in resonance with my phi ratio) and ordered a case of maps. I gave them to my friends and ordered seven more cases. I hung a map in every room of my house, then I wallpapered my office with them, then my bedroom and kitchen, until it I was the IíM NOT AMERICA map.

I began to pray fervently to my devic creator Gods, knowing that it was no accident that I had seen NOT-AMERICA. I truly believed that these maps came into my hands so I could carry out the higher purpose of warning Californians of their impending doom. A vibratory field in my holographic RNA seed commanded me to contact my yoga teacher Bulabunda, who sidelined as the medium for Whozdime, a high octave, 12th dementia dull, hypo-planetary being with a wide photon belt. In our first session, Whozdime, using the intonations and memory patterns of Bulabunda when heís pretending to be a directory assistance operator, said:

I was stunned. Imagine, me in the same boat as Noah. Bulabunda congratulated me on my evolution, mentioning that he would take over my business as a favor to the Council. When I accepted, he added that it must be my synchronistic day, since he also sold teepee kits. Again, as a favor to the council, he said that although he doesnít usually take trades, he would give me a deluxe teepee kit with an add-on sweat lodge in exchange for the deed to my house. I accepted immediately, overjoyed at the ease with which I could create my reality.

My weekly meetings with Whozdime resulted in all sorts of surprises. For one, I became a multi-level marketer of gem elixirs through Bulabundaís downline. I also started a weekly group called Integrative California Counseling Integration for Relocation (ICCIR). Through the course of these meetings, I recruited an inner circle, a core group of martyrs and thrill seekers who were willing to join my cause and stay with California to its watery end. We purchased a fleet of ark kits from Bulabunda and began construction for the new millennium.

For a while, our work was in perfect alignment with the wishes of the Great White Brotherhood, and we enjoyed our special status as the last sentient life which would touch a dry California. We held weekly channeling sessions with Whozdime and knew we were saving the lives of thousands through our commitment to the future of the Untied AMs of I. But this all changed when the Greys manipulated termites into attacking our arks, and group morale began to falter. One by one, members of our Operation Mothership (OM) fleet found some reason to question the integrity of Whozdime and IíM NOT AMERICA. Gossip contaminated our medicine bags, and unwelcome chi coursed through our meridians.

Desperate to revive our stagnating paradigm, I met with Whozdime every day for two weeks, but then my money ran out and I had to turn to vinomancy (divination through red table wine) and substitute teaching at the Tarot Speed Reading School (my contractual agreement with Bulabunda prevented me from running numbers for profit for three consecutive incarnations). Certain that this wasnít my destiny, I looked for coincidences everywhere, asking everyone I saw for the message they had for me. I evaluated my familial birth order and slept on a bed of charger crystals. I ate only organic food, recycled my trash, and put a Free Tibet sticker on my car. Still, nothing happened. I was as ordinary as ever.

I was in this desperate state when I bumped into my childhood friend from the Community for Expanded Expansion in the bulk food section at the health food store. In between samplings of carob malt balls, he told me about his new found contentment with normal life. He said he watched wrestling on TV and went to neighborhood barbecuesóóate veal even. I didnít believe him. This was the kid who was on a first name basis with Merlin and had experienced more close encounters than Richard Dreyfuss. The last time Iíd seen him he had broken the world record for the longest Om. Yet there he was, dressed in a polo shirt and khakis, eating cooked food.

"Voltron, what happened to you," I asked him.

"My name is Derek now, and Iím a newageoholic," he said with an air of humility that made me suspect he was a walk-in. "And Iíve been without crystals for six months now. Iíve never felt better in my life."

I was stunned. "How did you do it? Flower essences? Saint Johnís Wort? Acupunc . . ."

"Quit cold turkey," he told me. "I fell in love with a woman who refused to wear white. She got angry and judged people. She listened to the Rolling Stones. Basically she was so real that I couldnít live without her. She said she wouldnít be with no airy fairy boy who was afraid of his own power tools, so she told me it was the New Age or her. I chose her."

We stood there for another twenty minutes talking about his amazing courage. Not wanting to end the conversation, I invited him to have wheat grass with me. He declined the wheat grass but agreed to continue talking outside. Three hours and six wheat grasses later, my bowels were rumbling and my head was swimming with thoughts of holding a 9 to 5 job; I was full of emotions I hadnít felt since Iíd fallen for white light synchronicity. I now knew about some show called Frasier, had some idea what the California budget was and had agreed to vote for Prop 215.

Derek knew heíd almost gotten the NAA message under my massage-oiled skin, so he used the excuse that neither of us had eaten to invite me to his favorite restaurant, a 50ís diner with waitresses on roller blades. To this day I still get ducky bumps when I think about sitting in that red vinyl booth with Derek. Its true, I admitted I was powerless over the New Age. Maybe it was the smell of pork chops and applesauce, maybe it was the jukebox playing music with words I could sing to, but something in me knew I had to accept that I was a flake. At the end of our meal, Derek handed me a newspaper and suggested I start reading again. We agreed to meet at the diner the following Wednesday.

It took seven (it takes a while to let go of an addiction) secret dinners before I breathed a word of my deprogramming program to anyone. But, once I accepted NAA into my life, I refused to leave my teepee except to go to the diner, knowing I wouldnít be strong enough to resist bi-weekly rebirthing, daily solar orgasm aerobics and group chakra toning. When I finally worked up enough courage to tell my recovery story to the members of Operation Mothership, Integrative California Counseling Integration for Relocation, and Womynís Wisdom Monthly Moon-time Lodge circle, I was immediately ostracized. The womynís group made me give back my yoni ring, glad rags and initiation broom. The people from O.M. dismantled my teepee and kicked me out of the collective. And I forfeited my tenure as Grand Wizardress of Prophecy of the ICCIR as soon as I admitted that I no longer believed California was going to become an underwater shelf.

Thus, with no more than a sleeping bag, a friendly diner and a very shaky will, my recovery was in full swing.