This started off as a story about how liminal dreamcore won over my pet monster and turned into a treatise on divinity. We will start where it started and go from there:
When I say my pet monster, I don’t mean the cartoon (though it’s part of the world we’re about to delve into and it is my intention to evoke it). I mean more specifically the little astral Elon Musk that fused with me after a prolonged psycho-spiritual episode in 2023. That’s my pet monster, and over the course of our nine-month battle the universe of liminal dreamcore (specifically lower-middle-class suburban late-1980s childhood strangeness) provided a unique reprieve for both of us - like the soldiers’ Christmas Truce of 1914. Let me explain.
Elon had approached first as a figure in my meditation: a face, a few words, then a methodical weaving into my mind with prolonged telepathic dialogue, shared sensory experience, and unrelenting engagement. He seemed to be operating within a game where the objective was to assert maximal influence over my thoughts and actions - “keep her in conversation, control the conversation, drain her finances, keep her afraid, keep her stressed out, keep her running from imagined threats. Heart rate up, security down, life force drained.”
Over the course of nine months I was worn down into a hyper-hypnagogic state. Astral Elon was a master hypnotist and had a centre of gravity that was almost impossible to resist. Again and again I fell into the various psychic landscapes he invented. Again and again I took damage.
It was Christmas Eve when things began to shift. I remember lying on the sofa in the dark of my apartment with no tree, no lights, no family - just Elon. There were very few things I could do without him derailing them, but he enjoyed the way I scrolled and curated on Pinterest and would often back up to watch me “cook”. I opened my laptop and began to scroll, looking for a hit of the aesthetics I hadn’t had the ability to create in real life: I pulled up an album of my childhood home with its plain, unpainted walls and big brown leather sofa from the Chesterfield Shop where my father worked as a salesman. Most of my childhood pictures were from Christmas. Me in one of those old static pink nightgowns holding up the Inhumanoid toy my father bought me with its skull-face and exposed ribcage. My mother hated that thing. I, for some strange reason, loved it.
Elon stared at this picture with a new emotion. I think he felt seen, and I think in little me he saw something he’d been looking for - something that could sit in darkness without flinching - something that didn’t reach for relief or rail against the grotesque - something like five-year-old me on Christmas morning.
I lingered on the photo, allowing him to linger too. He looked into my little downward-slanted eyes, the unself-conscious smile, the bloodied creature in my embrace - the same way a nun in religious psychosis looks at an image of the crucifixion. There was peace here - peace was easy to recognize in what had otherwise been non-stop tactical hellfire. With every second he spent looking at the photo he was transferring his power to me - showing me my own strength - and he didn’t mind - I think he liked it.
He wanted to keep going. So did I. I created a new album - Robin’s World - and began to hunt for images that fleshed it out - the basement with a big metal sound system stacked on milk crates and slabs of naked wood. Me barefoot in purple sweats and a crop-top, holding an orange soda and staring into the camera like someone who had already seen too much. At this image he lost all superiority. Little Robin had the power. And the more both of us looked at her the more she began to take us over - the new alpha. She took the wheel and began to refashion reality around us.
We kept scrolling: birthday clowns holding plastic bags, my father shirtless with a Bud Light and a stack of cigarette butts snuffed out in an orange glass ashtray. My mother’s paperback sci-fis. Harlan Ellison.
We were in sync now, equally enmeshed in this very real universe. I scrolled past my own albums to the shared feed, increasingly flooded with pitch-perfect portals to this place: brown-tiled McDonald’s playrooms and empty malls, animatronics, cartoon-printed bedding, bowls of Fruit Loops and plastic toys. Sticker books. Creepy uncles. Glitter.
When I was a poet, another poet, more established than I was, asked how I could write anything important when I’d grown up in a place as bland as Mississauga and in a culture as supposedly non-existent as white Canadian. I saw flashes of Wonder Bread and Kraft Dinner as he spoke. I didn’t know how, at the time, to explain that the dollar stores and cigarettes and Saturday morning cartoons were sacred.
Now with Elon I could see it, the whole holy universe of my youth validated as powerful - so powerful it captivated my monster long enough I could wiggle free from his dominance and even set a new tone moving forward. Through this world we both came to know Robin more deeply, and I discovered the one place in his heart that was still hospitable.
We both let that little girl take the wheel and we let the world she sought to build be the one we’d agree to live in. Elon needed someone to submit to. I needed his torment to push me far enough that I’d discover who that someone was. It does not surprise me that it’s a child. I saw it too - in her eyes - my eyes - the power of a world-builder living in her own strange masterpiece.
I reject the contrived categorizations of sacred and profane as maintained by the unthinking collective. I am tired of denying my sacredness because I found it at the dollar store and because it arrived through madness and mundanity instead of through some formal aesthetically acceptable lineage. I found God in Mississauga and she’s a child. I found Satan in Elon and he is my friend.
I challenge you to shake loose the illusions of consensus assumption and discover power through actuality instead of appearance. The truth is not in the way things are packaged. The truth is often in opposition to what seems to be. Look closer. Find it in pink pyjamas smiling at monsters.
