First, let me state that I am not a scientist. I barely completed two years of college but that is more than Rush Limbaugh has and he is making scientific proclamations five days a week. I feel I’m just as entitled as he is and that is the foundation of my scientific inquiry.
I am a believer in String Theory which holds that all objects are composed of vibrating filaments called ‘strings’. It also states that there are many dimensions, possibly eleven or thirteen. I don’t profess to understand this theory but it does help me reconcile what I know to be true with what I can’t explain. String Theory is the reason for a tanguera’s uncanny ability to read the leader. This hypothesis is the basis for the world in which I created ‘Tango Zombies’ and ‘The Witches of La Befana’. Ultimately, it will explain how the Mayan blood god intends to get back to Earth and wreak havoc.
Women have a unique ability called ‘women’s intuition’. They are somehow able to perceive events in the future, among other things. There is also a phenomenon known as the Placebo Effect, much studied but always ignored. These two observable, but unexplained facts, are what lead me to embrace String Theory to help me understand the universe and the laws by which it abides. Throw in déjà vu and you can see why I need something beyond the Theory of Relativity to make sense of what I am experiencing in this life of mine.
When I began dancing, I manhandled my followers unintentionally. Sorry girls:-( I studied ballroom for two years before picking up tango but I was already beginning to see how perceptive the ladies seemed to be and the true meaning of contra-body movement. For the activities I was involved in, contra-body movement allowed me to travel on my legs and inform my partner of direction changes with my torso. The more course changes I could convey, the more respect I developed for followers who could discern all of them.
She also utilizes contra-body movement to read me with her torso and move about the floor on her own balance.
One aspect of tango I find extremely rewarding is ‘watching’ how my partner’s brain works as she listens for my cues on navigation, hears the music and effects embellishments. That last one is the clincher: embellishments. A tanguera really needs to know the song to make them happen but she also must be an accomplished compartmentalizer. When she is doing this, somehow, she has assigned the task of reading my cues to another part of her that exists on another plane, in another dimension.
I call this plane the ‘intuitive plane’. Women access it all the time. They know when their man, or child, is cheating or doing something he’s not supposed to be doing. I was married and this is first-hand information. It is their connection to the intuitive plane, I believe, that enables a good dance to become a great dance. Her embellishments inspire the leader to reach for a higher plateau, to attempt that which is at the threshold of their combined ability.
When the music ends and you both stand back in amazement at what you’ve accomplished together, she’ll usually say something like this, “I didn’t know I could do that."
Once, at a milonga, while dancing with a woman I call ‘Lady X’, I stepped on another woman’s foot who must’ve thought she was being filmed because she let loose with an Oscar-winning performance. I felt very bad. Lady X felt my pain and consoled me, convinced me the play I was watching was merely a repeat performance of one that had aired many times before. At that moment, I could feel her empathy reaching inside of me and erasing my feelings of remorse.
That feeling stayed with me for the entire two-hour ride home. It was during that journey back from tango that I considered all the paranormal phenomena there were in my life. As a father of two teenage girls who tried unsuccessfully to raise them as Catholics, I wondered how I would answer their questions. Is there a God? Are there such things as ghosts, esp, telekinesis, etc.?
Fortunately, I haven’t had to answer those questions yet. I stopped sending them to Sunday School when they were 12 and 14. I think they were so jaded by that experience (God loves you because I’m giving you candy), that they decided to go elsewhere for answers. However, I needed to have an answer for these inquiries, just in case…that’s what fathers do.
My mother and father have, as far as I can remember, always been prepared with responses for these types of queries. Usually, their reply would be, “God works in mysterious ways,” or words to that effect. However, whenever any of their children lost something and couldn’t find it, they, especially my mother, implored us to say a prayer to St. Anthony.
To this day I pray to him whenever something’s lost. I’m pretty sure he’s batting a thousand so far.
My girls are now in their second and fourth years of college and I feel compelled to instill in them a faith that St. Anthony would help them find lost objects when I am no longer around to help them. My eldest had misplaced two cell phones and I implored her to pray but I also did it for her. Both phones showed up just as we were completing the second insurance claim.
This had become an obsession with me: making sure my girls knew, as far as Iezzonis were concerned, prayers to St. Anthony were always answered.
In October, I was finishing up a contract for Cricket Communications in San Antonio. I had a week free to explore a part of the city called ‘Riverwalk’. Each day I would jog a two and a half mile stretch for a round trip of five miles. As I jog, I always pray and think about the important things in life, of which, teaching my kids about praying to Saint Anthony, is one of them. There are many grottoes and shrines on this beautiful and extravagant trail following the San Antonio River around a man-made island in the heart of downtown San Antonio.
One day, at a place called the Main Plaza near the East Commerce Street Bridge, as it crosses over the main artery of the river, I stopped to read a plaque the was written in Spanish and English. Using Google Translate on my phone, I deciphered the meaning to be, “what I dreamed of had been lost and now I have found it.”
I knew right away what it meant, it was a tribute to Saint Anthony. I had been here two months and didn’t realize San Antonio and Saint Anthony were one and the same. When my kids joined me, a week later, I once again voiced my belief in the special powers our family had to find lost things thanks to our patron saint but it was lost on them.
Since then, I have tried to educate them about dualism in the universe by pointing out the Placebo Effect. Sick people are given pills they believe will cure them, and they are cured, even though there was no medicine in the pill. This is the most widely reported phenomenon and the least discussed by the medical community. Every test that is conducted where the Placebo Effect is noted, should be saying we’ve got to look into this with more resources, yet very few do.
Yesterday, I was driving down the road and saw an auto dealership and a neon sign for quilts. A few years earlier I experienced a déjà vu with the same two scenes. I remembered it clearly because I had thoughts of dying when it happened. This has been happening to me since I was twenty-nine. I’ll experience the foresight, thinking that is when I’m going to die. When the foresight catches up to the present, a few years later, usually two or three, I see the scenes and wonder if I’m going to die. After the first few times, I began to realize I wasn’t actually going to die, but rather, I was just going to think about dying. Still, whenever this happens, I try to drive slower and keep an eye out for the unexpected.
So there you have it. A woman’s intuition gives her unique abilities to read her partner’s intentions far beyond what is physically possible. The Placebo Effect shows us we are able to heal ourselves without medicine in thousands of well-documented experiments. The random occurrences of déjà vu are a symptom of something extraordinary and an explanation is needed.
I believe String Theory is the answer to all these events. Except for my children, it is not important to me to have others subscribe to my theories for I know these things are real and count on them to enhance my life. I dance with the expectation that something wonderful can happen even though science says it shouldn’t. When I write, I can now imagine the impossible because, in my mind, it is possible.
In my fiction stories, the zombies and witches are endowed with special powers through these phenomena. Their emotions, intuitions and premonitions are all ‘strings’ emanating from other dimensions where beliefs are as good as true and the future doesn’t necessarily follow the present. The lead characters are unexpectedly drawn into a cosmic plane of white light. This plane is the opposite of space and a conduit to travel other places.
Space is black and it has been theorized that it is full of a substance called ‘dark matter’. Dark matter is thought to account for all the missing mass in the universe according to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Therefore, I reasoned, the Plane of White Light has no space and no matter. It is a place where immeasurable forces: feelings, souls, intuition; all pass through to other dimensions or other parts of the universe.
Finally, if you’re wondering what all this means, I’ll tell you. I’ve finally acclimated to life in Farmington. My job training is complete and I can now focus on my writing. Look for more posts on Tango Zombies which is now combined with The Witches of La Befana. I was not able to get tango started here but I have reconciled with the thought of driving two hundred miles to dance. Life is good and my imagination is running wild and free like a whitewater river. Grab your boat and join me.
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