The Many Manifestations of the Mysterious Gwendolyn
by Cliff Pickover,
Reality Carnival
Gwendolyn was a typical Brooklyn atheist, unable to believe in spiritual
matters. She wandered the streets of SoHo, contemplating the meaning
of existence. She took acid in Belgium, and mushrooms in Amsterdam
and at the Arizona-Sonoma Desert Museum. She felt like a shadow.
Dead. Despite her emptiness, or perhaps because of it, she won an
international poetry award for her epic 'Crossing Mongolia on
Horseback'.
Now she is happy. Last year, Gwendolyn
spent a month with the Bari tribe of
Venezuela where they taught her how to throw the shugda, their
traditional spear made of palm wood. She spent six months living in
New Orleans, in a room on rue de l'Elysée, where she read Keats,
Milton, and Wordsworth. Her fondest memories are as an adventurer heading west on
horseback and camping with Native Anericans of the Uinta tribe in
Snake River valley.
Her peak experience in life was swimming with the
Humboldt squids in the Sea of Cortes. Last month, she drove an old Iranian
van on dirt roads in the Zerafshan Valley of Tajikistan, where she met
the Yagnob people and taught them the complete works of St. Ignatius
Loyola, and in turn they taught her about the art of sword making.
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