Once upon a time, there was a land far enough away for you to never have visited it before but close enough for you to know at least one person who knows someone who has lived there. In this land there was great joy and great sorrow, just as in any other land that you may have visited or read about in a book or seen pictures of in a magazine. The special thing about this land is that most of their joys and sorrows revolved around a common livelihood, namely making candy. The name of this land was, coincidentally, Candy Valley.
The candy makers were free to experiment with the candy and came up with hundreds of different varieties with names like Tiny Dancer, Indian Sunset and Dark Diamond. Each one was sweet and lovely, but everyone had their specialty. They would sell their treats at This Town Market every weekend and many had customers from faraway lands that would come especially to buy their goodies.
The people of Candy Valley not only made candy, they also enjoyed eating it quite a bit. Some would stay up really late eating candy and wake up the next morning with a terrible tummy ache! Others would have a few candies in the morning when they woke up and a few during the day and it didn’t really bother their daily routine very much. Still, others would only have a candy now and then, to celebrate such things as a lightning storm or the sunset, for example. Sometimes when people were working at their candy factories they would eat candies to give them energy to help them get through the day. Almost everyone in Candy Valley loved to eat candy, or if they didn’t, they loved to share it with others who did.
There was no shortage of stories, rumours, legends and myths about Candy Valley and a girl named Little Jeannie had heard a lot of them. She knew some were true and some were false, because she'd been visiting Candy Valley ever since she had fallen in love with candy, as a little girl. Of course, the craziest stories, the ones you might think were false were more often than not true and vice versa. She was bored of her life in Condo Corner and longed for the freedom she imagined would be hers in Candy Valley. It wasn’t so much the candy itself that drew her to Candy Valley, but the idea that she could do and be whatever or whoever she wanted to do and be, in the adventurous atmosphere that surrounded Candy Valley.
One day, she set out on an adventure to live and work in the Candy Valley candy factories. She knew a few people from her visits over the years who could vouch for her, show the others that she wasn’t a spy sent by the candy haters to infiltrate and bring down the candy factories or even a thief who would steal the candy and sell it herself, but rather a good friend and a hard worker who also liked to have fun and eat candy.
When Little Jeannie first went to Candy Valley to work, she met up with an old friend named Blue Eyes. He was seven foot tall with long white hair, a beard braided into cornrows and, yes, he had blue eyes. He lived on the edge. He straddled the line between here and there, then and now, right and wrong; encompassing and then transcending both sides of the line. When he greeted you, he shouted out “eawestcundy!” or “weascunday!” or “escandy!” These salutations were a mashed up version of where he lived, in the center of Candy Valley, neither on the west side nor the east, but both at the same time. He said this to subconsciously let people know that they too were living on the edge of somewhere and somewhere else and always took the opportunity to let them know it. He also used a variation of these words to say thank you, you’re welcome, good-bye and get the hell out of my house.
Blue Eyes lived in a sailboat called Good Ship Lollipop in the bottom of Candy Valley. He felt that at any time water could come and transform the valley into a river or a lake, and just wanted to be ready. He worked on his sailboat every day, tightening the screws and checking for possible leaks. He did not have a regular job because he was too busy tweaking his boat and drinking a drink called The Greatest Discovery. He had a small candy factory built into the hillside above him, and hired people to work in it. On the ground above it he grew most of the ingredients he needed for the candy. He was usually too distracted, let alone too large, to actually work in his factory, so he was overjoyed to have Little Jeannie there to help him. She quickly became his “right hand man” as she learned all the ropes and followed all his intricate orders as closely as possible.
Little Jeannie and Blue Eyes were good friends and spent many hours together drinking The Greatest Discovery. It made them go wild with inspirational ideas and allowed them to cross back and forth between worlds and different states of consciousness at their leisure.
“Ewescundy!” Cried Blue Eyes, as Little Jeanie climbed aboard the Good Ship Lollipop one day. “Wait, before you sit down, I need you to fix me a Greatest Discovery. Make it double honey, double sugar and a twist of lime. But don’t leave the lime in the glass; the peel makes my mouth feel funny. And I don’t really need all that vitamin C as I find it inhibits the depth and width of my sugar high.”
“As you wish, monsieur. I like it single-single.” Little Jeannie pulled a bag of ice out of the freezer and smashed it on the ground. The ice broke apart and she dropped some cubes into two glasses. She squeezed some lime juice into the glasses and discarded the rind. She pulled a large honey comb out of the cupboard that came from the bees of a nearby neighbour. She scraped off some honey into one glass and added even more to the other. She took a bottle of beet sugar syrup that came from the beets grown in the garden above the candy factory. Little Jeannie thought about how she had planted the seeds much earlier in the year and had only recently harvested and boiled down the beets, and now was able to consume the fruits of her labour. It was a special feeling, to grow things oneself and making things out of them, from scratch, rather than earning money some other way and then using that money to buy things that were already made. It was so gratifying to Little Jeannie.
After sprinkling a dash of Crazy Water into the glasses, she brought them over to the table.
“This is your Brand New Brother!” Said Little Jeannie, with a wink.
Blue Eyes threw back his head and howled with laughter. “Weastcandee!” He replied. They clinked their glasses together with great mirth and downed their Greatest Discoveries.
“Let’s close our eyes. Let’s feel the reality of the moment together. Do you feel it?”
“I’m opening up. My mind is infinite. Oh! My heart! Ohhhh!”
“Just stay with it. You’re expanding. Hold onto my hand if you need to. Oh, yes!”
“My third chakra is being contacted by a rainbow. 911! 911! Send the ambulance of love! My fear is subsiding, I no longer feel fear! Oh my god, I no longer feel fear. My security lies within, I no longer need lies and props to feel safe! The truth holds us together, we will not fall apart as long as we stay in the reality of the truth. It is possible! The postmodernists are wrong, I DO understand.”
“Aaaaughaah.”
“Spent all my money, on whiskey and beer!”
“Trailers for sale or rent, rooms to let fifty cents....”
“Uhhhh, speak to me!”
“Wsquoonday.”
The world(s) went silent for a moment and Little Jeannie and Blue Eyes waited for the birds to start chirping again. A rustle from the trees outside the window of the Good Ship Lollipop and a joyous cry from a crow told the two of them that life existed and that they were, in fact still alive. A great relief came over them.
Blue Eyes sat upright in his chair. He looked around at the peach and lavender coloured cupboards of the galley. He stabilized himself with a slow back and forth rocking motion and then took a breath. He was ready for work.
Little Jeannie pulled an ice cube from her otherwise empty glass. She glided it across her face and on the back of her neck. She breathed deeply and smiled at Blue Eyes. “Ok. Ready,” she said.
The two of them plotted out the measurements of the ingredients for the next batch of candy.
“Now listen,” said Blue Eyes. “The acidity and the sweetness have to be perfectly balanced. I want it to be like a divine dance between good and evil, wet and dry, ebony and ivory. You know what I mean?”
“Oh yeah,” replied Little Jeannie, giving Blue Eyes a reassuring nod. She knew what was coming next; a breakdown of all the reasons why every single ingredient was important.
“We need a coconut that was blown down from a tree by the wind, rather than one who’s fall was caused by direct human intervention. This will give the candy an essence of serendipity. Than we need some sugarcane sprouts that have been meditated on constantly from the moment they were first germinated. An intention of peace—“
“Sorry, did you say ‘intention of peach’?” Little Jeannie’s mind had wandered off down a dim corridor who's walls were padded with mattresses and floor was carpeted with eggshells. She was confused by his sudden decision to add a peach flavour to the mix.
“That’s fine,” said Blue Eyes, sitting up straight and throwing his head back, tossing his hair over his shoulder and crossing his arms. “If you’re not going to listen to me, you can just go. Get out of here. Go dry hump a fish basket. Dirty white girls everywhere.”
“Blue Eyes, I’m sorry. Keep going. I’m listening!” She said, trying to convince him of her newfound concentration level. She widened her eyes and tried not to blink. Her eyes started to water from keeping them open so wide and for so long. He thought she was sorry, so he went on.
“Okay, so we need an intention of peace. Half way through the addition of the sprouts, you’re going to need to start chanting. Preferably something in lower tones. The candy is going to need a bass vibration to facilitate the integration of the pioneering spirit of the wild ginger that you’ll be putting in next.”
“Of course,” agreed Little Jeannie. “You can’t plant a seed in a hurricane.”
“Yes! You’ve got it! See?” Blue Eyes’ blue eyes lit up and he grinned a toothy grin, as though all had been revealed in one metaphor. “You need stillness to be able to reach out into the infinite!”
“So, yeah...?” She nodded hesitantly, hoping to encourage him to finish giving the instructions. Although she was paid handsomely for her role as right hand lady in his candy factory, she found it a bit exasperating to listen to the same instructions, with few variations, every single time. She knew he liked to feel like he’d covered all the bases, gone over all the details, just in case she had forgotten something since the last time she had worked. She’d tried a few times to convince him that she knew what she was doing, but he made it clear that she had no idea what inspirational idea might suddenly come into his head, mid-instructing, and that he had to feel free to be completely involved in everything, at least in theory, since he rarely ever actually entered the candy factory.
Blue Eyes put on his sunglasses so that Little Jeannie could not read his expression. He put on his hat so that she could not read his mind. Then, with his head held high and with a haughty expression, he said, "Another Greatest Discovery, please."
Little Jeannie got up and began making the drinks.
"I'll have mine with double honey, double sugar and a twist of lime. But don’t leave the lime in the glass, the peel makes my mouth feel funny and I don’t really need all that vitamin C as I find it inhibits the depth and width of my sugar high.”
"Right. For a change."
"What? No, that's the way I always have it."
"Oh yeah, now that I think about, you do always have it that way." This time she added a few extra splashes of Crazy Water, just for fun. Let's see if I can get through this day without spinning into too many other dimensions, she thought. She placed the glasses down on the table. "Here you go. This one's Between Seventeen and Twenty."
"Haha!" cried Blue Eyes, and their Greatest Discoveries disappeared down their throats and were last seen crawling out of their ears and having a pillow fight while stars rained down from the sky and their profoundest insights were confirmed with a rubber stamp and a slap on the bottom while they hung upside down and a giant Frenchman tickled their toes.
