WALTER'S COSMIC ENERGY INTENSIFIER
William A. Wisdom

Just about every year for the past 15 or 18 years my wife Fritzi and I have attended the Blue Grass and Old Time Fiddlers Convention in Mt. Airy, North Carolina, which draws musicians and fans from around the country. We have regularly camped near one of the most colorful, generous, and interesting characters we've ever met.

Walter is a tall, lean fellow of indeterminate age--somewhere between 60 and 75--invariably wearing shorts, sandals, and a scraggly beard to his waist. His little home-made trailer, in the shape and colors of a barn, is pulled by a pick-up truck whose South Carolina license plate reads "THE BUM". Though now retired, for many years he worked as a physicist. Over the years, we have come to realize that Walter is no fool, though he is indeed a jester.

The first thing Walter does when he arrives at a festival is to decorate his trailer and surroundings with an exotic array of plants, sculptures, and signs (e.g., "Borogove Crossing", complete with a cut-out borogove).

For the past several years he has brought us one sort of present or another. Once it was some of his homemade onion wine. And once it was a Cosmic Energy Intensifier of his own design, a larger version of which we had admired in previous years. Ours was a pyramidal wooden frame about four inches along the sides of the square base, with bright red beads attached to its edges. Its function, Walter explained, was to absorb, intensify, and redirect the "cosmic energy" all around us--something like an orgone accumulator--the main difference being that orgone is imaginary whereas cosmic energy (he tells us) is very real.

Although he assured us, when asked, that it worked, we were rather skeptical. In fact, we had next to no idea what it meant for it to "work". But it was not long before we had our own experience of the Cosmic Energy Intensifier in action. Our little electric water heater failed to work one morning. We had no idea what the problem was; it had worked well the day before. So Fritzi and I undertook our separate investigations of the problem. My first thought was to put the Cosmic Energy Intensifier on top of the heater and try again. At just the same time, Fritzi decided to plug in the water heater. Voila! It worked just fine. The Cosmic Energy Intensifier had done its job!


Copyright © 2002, William A. Wisdom