Tearing up the Avenue: A Book of Transformation

By Dale DeLong

Albert Lucky has hit a wall. He’s a middle-aged loser, adrift in middle management in a big-box retail store. At work he has started talking to phantoms instead of customers. He has become unkempt and slovenly. Then, there is an awakening. Great energies pour into him from Divine places, harkening him back to miraculous visions he experienced as a teen.

Thus begins an epic journey of reconciliation that is graced with a bevy of characters, including the owner of a big-box retail behemoth, who happens to be a former live wrestling champion. Meet also a Native American woman, who is a paralegal in a run-down law firm; Albert’s wife, children, and unflappable dog; and an unorthodox private investigator who can’t decide if he’s Hindu or Mennonite. The unexpected happens in this gripping account of spiritual and psychological growth.

Tearing Up the Avenue is a novel about loss and the experience of terrible abuse, but also a book about love, prophecy, and mysticism at the highest level. Albert Lucky finds himself at the center of a whirlwind of profound vision and insight in the midst of what was a relentlessly drab life. Incredible events and revelations abound.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Nov 2, 2022
• ISBN: 9798765235928

Book preview

TEARING UP the

AVENUE

A BOOK OF TRANSFORMATION

DALE DELONG

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Copyright © 2022 Dale Delong.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Balboa Press

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are

models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

ISBN: 979-8-7652-3591-1 (sc)

ISBN: 979-8-7652-3590-4 (hc)

ISBN: 979-8-7652-3592-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022919876

Balboa Press rev. date: 10/31/2022

CONTENTS

PART 1

Losing It

Visions

Poking the Bear

Retails, Retells, Re-tales

Butch’s Kingdom

Heartache, Neglect, and Loose Screws

Night Creature: The Shedding Begins

Tearing Up the Avenue

The Bear

Night Drive

Joy Ride

The Spirit Tree

Tree House

Awakenings

PART 2

A New World

The Poultice

Dysfunction

Autumn’s New World

A Meeting at the Doctor’s Office

A Walk on the Towpath

Metamorphosis

Retail Ministry

PART 3

Changes

God’s Speed

Dawn’s Early Light

Festivities

Awakenings

As the Seasons Turn

In Maurice’s Lair

On the Path

Out of Time

Flight to Freedom

A Time to Get Real

The Coronation of Autumn

Thunder and Lightning

The Aftermath

Albert’s Journey Home

Angelic Voices

A New Social Order

Homecoming

Within a Caduceus

The Great Messenger’s Words Made Manifest

Morning Time

Enlightened

Messages for a New World

Endings and Beginnings

The Dark Night of the Soul

Thus with Suso, as with St. Catherine of Siena and with other mystics we have considered, the travail of the Dark Night is all directed toward the essential mystic act of utter self-surrender; that fiat volundas tua which marks the death of selfhood in the interests of a new and deeper life. He has learned the lesson of ‘the school of true resignation’: has moved to a new stage of reality: a complete self-naughting, an utter acquiescence in the large and hidden purpose of the Divine Will.

—Mysticism, page 310, by Evelyn Underhill (1911)

I am,

Forms pass.

From me they go,

And again they come to me.

Their returning

Is what men call destruction.

Be not deceived thereby.

I tear down only to build anew.

Verily destruction is the foundation of existence,

And the tearing-down thou seest

Is but the assembling of material

For a grander structure.

—The Book of Tokens, page 156, by Paul Foster Case (1934)

PART 1

LOSING IT

P lanetary resident Albert Lucky was an excruciatingly normal man. He had a wife, two children, a slobbery dog, a bad mortgage, and a wan retail job forty hours a week that sometimes lasted seventy when the capricious conceit of his bosses whipped up. He was middle aged, middle class, middle management, and Midwestern, espoused middle-of-the-road politics, possessed a mediocre religious outlook, and of late had sprouted a paunch in his middle. Not surprisingly, he squeezed his toothpaste from the middle of the tube. In a bell curve sort of way, he was definitely one standard deviation from the middle either way on just about everything.

But speaking of deviation, there was (as we shall see) an added, tantalizing pinch of paranormal and abnormal in his makeup that of late had exposed itself. And it was creating quite a ruckus.

For forty-two years, Albert had been blithely hitching a ride on great Mother Earth (along with six billion other souls), but of late, he had really lost his way. No, it wasn’t the sort of thing where one is directionally challenged; Albert was actually rather good at that in a mappy, topographical sort of way. His visual nonverbal skills were actually pretty good. Rather, it was an issue of his interior—the universe between his ears. Some camps of thought described it as clogged chakras. Others said it was mucked-up meridians of energy. But that is pretty fancy, esoteric stuff. Simply, Albert was descending into a messy, mental chaos. A vapid miasma of melancholy and despair had washed up onto Albert Lucky’s cognitive shore.

The long and short of it: Albert was losing it. A riot of moments, moods, and mental pictures of life that were not quite right, not quite the way Albert would have had them if he was in his right mind, had conspired and formed a fixed idea, an alien thought form, just about the size of a stretch limo Hummer (assuming one could actually measure such a thing). It had, after a fashion, parked in his consciousness. It was akin to, frighteningly, the relatives who come to visit for the holidays and decide they like it so much they want to make it permanent. This punishing view of life (it’s all relative!) was making him miserable and dark. And it was playing itself out in his head, or at least in the general location of his head. As a result, his heart was affected; a gooey web of sadness and spidery deceit enshrouded him. Dude was messed up.

In its beginnings, this deleterious demise plodded along at a geologic pace. It was slow, like watching dust settle. It had been fashioned and shaped by the infinity of small and big events that compose the days of our lives. Events as subtle as the pained, empty feeling he had when, one day, he happened to look up at a cloud of a dark gray marble color as it was rushing by. It left him empty and bereft, and he did not know why.

Events as grim as the unseemly force he felt from the perpetual stream of odious work that pressed in on him day after day after day, ad nauseum. Events as small and unpolished as the equal amounts of disgust and desire he felt when the disapproving glance of a beautiful, self-possessed young woman he had looked at for a moment too long made him aware he was ogling her. And as large and sad as the time when his best college friend experienced the onset of schizophrenia, and Albert watched in stupefied horror as his buddy started roaming the streets, bursting with paranoid madness, filthy and unkempt, looking in vain for his wife in strange people’s basements. And as heartrending and telling as the disconsolate despair he felt when he saw a man and a woman screaming at each other by a bus stop in front of thirty people.

Get your things out of my house!

You never loved me!

You never cared!

Their bitter sense of being betrayed, the loss of their dreams about and for each other, poured out of them and into him, Albert Lucky, on a gray, nondescript city street. Everyone who waited for the bus was affected: young mothers with their babies slung haphazardly on their hips; teenage boys littered with earrings and tattoos, who were quietly mouthing violent street raps; unsure old men and old women catching rides to doctors’ offices and libraries; and teenage girls with low-cut jeans and tops that exposed their belly button piercings (who were unsuccessfully trying not to pay attention to the boys). They were all caught breathless for a moment by the embittered cries of the shattered couple. Even the street, carrier of the human condition, buckled and cried out. And the human condition, in all its majesty, hypocrisy, and inscrutable wonder, was left to contemplate its state.

Our life breath left as we were seized by fear

And the belief that when things die

It does not give rise

To life

That the incident grabbed him in the pit of his stomach surprised Albert, but on he had walked, largely dismissive and unaware of how this moment had lingered and turned on him. As these seemingly random but subtly powerful feelings and experiences do with all of us if we have lost our way and do not go about the business of tending to them, they had started to show themselves. And, sensitive and gifted fellow that Albert happened to be (as we shall see), the physical manifestations on Albert were strange and even comic.

He had started walking differently—slouched over but oddly spread out from shoulder to shoulder. His walk began to take on a shuffling quality, particularly when he felt pressured. He began to squint unnaturally; when you saw him, it was as if he had been in the dark and had suddenly come into a brightly lit room. This crouching, slouching, squinting, spread-shouldered look required a lot of energy to cobble together, which may explain why he had been experiencing a sleepwalking fatigue. Albert began to feel as if something unexpected and shocking was always about to befall him. His nervous system had actually recalibrated itself to be on a perpetual and anxious alert.

And in those deeper subconscious levels, Albert, without any real awareness, was seeking outer circumstances that matched his inner world. It was his odd, ridiculous way of seizing control of his misery and directing its course. It was his way of becoming the creator of his own world (as we all are of our own worlds). And the universe, grand mysterious force that it is, was wildly accommodating. The universe exists to do our bidding, and it pours forth our version of reality free of charge and at all times. We can become very willful with the universe, but a cautionary note is that we ought to watch our willfulness, for our will will be done. Our quest as humans is to become conscious of this process, to become aware of our roles as creators on the little speck of dirt in the universe we inhabit. And Albert, without realizing it, had imagined this moment. His being had become an indiscriminate dream catcher.

Or you could say that Albert had become something like fly paper, and it was people’s feelings and moods he caught. And it was largely miserable, unsavory feelings he was attracted to and was catching. These untethered feelings were clinging with great ferocity. Albert Lucky had become clogged up. It was cultural clutter. It was emotional sewage. And worse, it was forming into something that resembled a disease. If you listened closely, you could even hear it. It was a bleating clatter, a riffraff rap. Albert had started hearing the plaintive, pained voices of his world, though he didn’t understand why.

At work, Albert had started pivoting away from people who approached him, turning and then silently fleeing to the remote corners of his workplace. This, of course, wasn’t good because Albert was expected to relate to people. Success in his business, big-box retail, depended on it. Albert had started to internally replay events from his recent and distant past so intensely that he was observed mouthing and muttering responses to unseen personages as he went about his daily routines. Events that might have taken place thirty years ago. Or thirty days.

One memorable scene occurred several weeks ago. He was caught talking to a row of drain-cleaning products while restocking them. The conversation was going something like this when he was rudely (in his mind) interrupted by a customer:

"I did not say that!" said Albert, looking directly at the row of neatly arranged cans of Drain Master.

I said I wanted to help. I said I wanted to be a part of your life.

Albert was miserable. He really wasn’t sure he did want to help. And now, more than seventeen years after the incident, for some reason it had cropped up as he was restocking a variety of drain cleaners and scouring powder. It was lost on him that working with drain cleaners and scouring powders was vaguely analogous to cleansing and reconciling a moment in his past that had been dogging him and clogging him up.

She was right there in front of him in the cleaning agents’ section of the home goods aisle, as real as life. "You do not want to be a part of my life!" she said angrily and with significant volume, her reddish-blonde hair sweeping back dramatically and revealing her fierce green eyes. And she was right, but Albert could not admit it.

I need you in my life! Albert said as a begging, whining retort, just as a customer approached and kindly inquired about the location of trash bags.

Sir, do you have those extra-sturdy, thirty-nine-gallon trash bags in your store? she inquired sweetly. I need them to store some linens. We are going to move and thought this would be a good way to carry them! What do you think?

The customer blithely and enthusiastically carried on about moving, not really even noticing that Albert, while there in body and fully uniformed in the store’s gear, including ID badge, was engaged in a heated exchange with a woman who was, at that moment, 1,432 miles away and removed by more than eighteen years from one Albert Lucky. Still, this memory lurked in Albert’s gut and had apparently been activated by Albert’s engagement with drain cleaners and home cleansers. And he had to play it out, which was to the distinct disadvantage of the trash bag–seeking customer.

The poor, baffled customer, who was not quick to anger and, among other activities, sang in a local church choir, was taken aback when Albert angrily responded to her benign query with, "I am not trashy!" Something was clearly lost in translation. The woman slunk away, rubbed her rosary, and went to a store manager, concerned that one of the employees was having a breakdown.

It looked bad. When the manager approached Albert ten minutes later, after reassuring the woman and arming her with a discount coupon for her next trip to the store, Albert had moved on to a more recent exchange that had backfired at a local gas station. Someone had jerked his car in front of Albert at a gas pump and almost hit him. Albert did nothing but wished he had. He was now replaying what he imagined he should have done.

Look, buddy, you almost hit me, and I think you better watch what you are doing! Albert was saying this loudly and assertively in a testosterone-centric sort of way as the manager approached. Albert was so immersed in his little drama that he was aggressively pushing cans of scouring powder over rather than stacking them. And he wasn’t noticing the grimace on the approaching manager’s face as she witnessed Albert’s high-octane drama. It looked like the disconnected muttering of the insane. Clearly, this was not exactly what you wanted to be doing in a people-oriented retail setting.

Over the past several months, Albert had forgotten about his appearance. He was still taking showers and shaving, but he was seen with food stains on his shirts, dirty, unkempt shoes, and pants that were hitched up strangely over his now-bulging stomach. He was not pleasant to look at. His wife, tired, long-suffering, and beautiful, noticed. His children thought he was a zombie or an apparition, though they couldn’t really tell you what an apparition was. Only his dog, Butch the boxer, didn’t seem to notice or care about the emergence of Albert’s bizarre slothfulness. Butch was so occupied with chewing, drooling, barking, and gulping his food whole that he regarded Albert’s behavior as an affirmation of his own.

Albert was increasingly in a waking dream, which was different from the waking dream we are all more or less in, by virtue of its quantity, size, and distortion. His sleeping dreams, too, had become twisted. Dark, ethereal visitations pierced his nights and left him trembling upon awakening. Phantoms lurked in all his secret places. The result was that it was taking him away from his placid outer world. And he had lost his sense of time, which unfortunately did not coincide with the time-addicted shape of his life.

Recently, the pace of this psychic reduction had quickened. A strange, debilitating, accelerating speed had reduced his mind—once given to long stretches of restful simplicity and perception and to the uncanny gift of knowing and relating to others—to a blur of thoughts that swiftly shuttered by nonstop, loud, intrusive, cacophonous. Hopped-up hyperactivity. It was bad jazz. It had become a bulbous infection of the soul that had started collapsing of its own weight. He had hit a critical mass. Or it was a critical mess. You could call it what you would. And now Albert Lucky had begun feeling old and insane. He was stuck. He was terrified, and he was bored. He saw no way out. And now he had started acting very strangely.

VISIONS

On the Experience of Voices and Visions …

Commonly, however, if we may judge from those first hand accounts which we possess, mystic conversion is a single and abrupt experience, sharply marked off from the long, dim struggles which precede and succeed it. It usually involves a sudden and acute realization of a splendour and adorable reality in the world—or sometimes its obverse, the divine sorrow at the heart of things—never before perceived.

It is of so actual a nature that in comparison the normal world of past perception seems but twilit at the best. Consciousness has suddenly changed its rhythm and a new aspect of the universe rushes in.

—Mysticism by Evelyn Underhill

T hough he had all but abandoned himself, the private Albert Lucky could still hear the call of his Self in brief moments of quietude, though the calls were faint and had grown fainter. On occasions that were distant in time and more and more muted in intensity, he heard (or thought he heard) soft, sighing cries. They seemed to originate from within him, though he wasn’t sure where they came from. They called out to him. They were oddly familiar, oddly intimate. They reminded him of a series of disquieting experiences that had occurred about the time, years ago, when he was awakening to the greater awareness adolescence gives rise to. But he was so far removed from that time he could barely remember how these startling experiences were a part of him.

The deeper truth was that they were in a kind of profound, somnolent dormancy that had taken twenty-five years to reawaken. Albert’s current state was deceptively analogous to the dormancy of an abandoned underground coal mine that had caught fire in the Appalachians. It had burned for years, deep within dark, bituminous veins under a lost, decrepit town. The town had known vitality and abundance when the mine was open. After being abandoned, the mine and then the town were all but forgotten. One day, however, an acrid, putrefying smoke belched through a hole that suddenly opened up in a large, grassy pasture close to town, revealing the mine. Parts of the field fell into one of the fissures from the old mine. The people in the valley were awakened to a momentous event: the mine was alive. It had been burning for years. While they had lived their lives and lived with the memories of the mines, it burned. The mine once had been the heart of their lives, when they were young and could work and raise families. It was when they had dignity and health and were fertile and abundant. It was when the men could still breathe and their bodies were like knotted steel, before they were reduced to dark phlegm and death rattles. It was when the women would sing sweet tunes of the mountain forests and valleys and make gentle homes decorated with light. It was when they loved. Albert Lucky, though in a hibernating denial, still burned inside—like the mine. His life, which was shaped by seminal, profound experiences, still burned within him far more than he comprehended.

When Albert Lucky was a teen, he was shaken from his foundations by immense voices and visions. The crystalline experiences began when he was walking one gray fall day in woods close to his home. At the time, he was entangled in an adolescent malaise. He saw no meaning in his family. He was bored with their routines and their interests. Everything fatigued him. He felt only despair as he looked at the world. He had lost interest in his schoolwork and was failing. School was all memorization and sitting in rows and being quiet and not moving and reading old, marked-up texts that supported a view of life he was repulsed by. Things were hopeless. These were common teenage themes to be sure, but, too, it had provoked him to begin a search and spurred a fragile awakening of understanding and a budding awareness of the innate dignity of the human soul.

In the past year, Albert watched a special older friend, several relatives, and a beloved pet dog he had known as long as he could remember die, and this, too, weighed heavily. The funerals were conducted by dreary Protestant prescription. Though he could not say what it was, something seemed fundamentally wrong with how people mourned. He could not feel anything in those stifling rituals, where people stared at waxen bodies and could only say, He (she) looks so good. He looks twenty years younger, followed by a minister who gave a canned sermon in velvety, vapid tones in King James English to literal-minded Ohio laborers and farmers. It was with a judgmental and unfair youthful rancor that he condemned what he saw, but it masked and unearthed deeper, more complex feelings and pushed him to look at questions of mortality.

Albert was also beset with tangled, confused feelings about a girl who did not know who he was but whose delicate beauty he was wildly drawn to. This madness over another, this wild, dreamy heat, was new. It was both punishing and exhilarating. He could not explain why she was in all his thoughts, why she was woven into the fiber of everything he did, why he found himself screaming out in frustration. He saw and thought about and felt her everywhere. He tasted her in his food. He heard her in the silence. He imagined her merged with him, and he caught himself inhaling her image deeply into his body. It was so personal and so powerful he felt as if no one else had ever known this feeling—or any of the feelings he was experiencing.

It was while in this adolescent blur that he slipped on a steep trail as he hiked in a small grove of woods in his neighborhood, stepped on a tree root, and suddenly fell. He tumbled down a hillside covered with slick, newly fallen leaves, and his fall was broken only when he rammed, headfirst, into the trunk of an old sycamore. It knocked him out. He lay unconscious for some time, sprawled on the forest floor.

When Albert awoke, a strange alertness emanated from the pit of his stomach. It was a feeling he was completely unfamiliar with. He was incredibly on edge and fell into an odd lucidity. It burst through him. He saw movement out of the corner of his eye. He lifted his head off the ground and looked toward it, but it was gone. There were hissing sounds that were not clearly emanating from anywhere. He realized with a start that the trees were speaking to him and about him. It was as if they had assimilated him into their worldview, which was entirely strange because Albert realized that they had a worldview! They were aware of him. Albert Lucky was permeated with their stories and their very souls. He wondered if he was in a dream. It was not the same woods he had been walking in, and yet it was. The noise that filled the silence made him lift up with a start. He stumbled and ran wildly from the strange, powerful, and unearthly conversations he heard.

He arrived home, shaken and in disbelief, his understanding of the world absolutely challenged if not shattered. His head throbbed. He was late for dinner. To his mother, Albert mumbled that he had been in Hiram’s Woods. His mother could see that something was wrong and assumed it probably had something to do with a girl, though she did not press him. Albert didn’t seem to want to talk, and as she was generally smarting from the pattern of sharp, sarcastic retorts Albert had subjected her to since he had turned sixteen, she said nothing.

Albert tried to forget what had happened. He watched All in the Family reruns on TV. He picked limply at a TV dinner. He listlessly read an English assignment but couldn’t get his mind off what had happened. He forgot the girl. That night, his dreams were wild and urgent, filled with talking trees and animals of the forest speaking telepathically. He felt their world; he saw the forest from their viewpoint. His world had shifted.

After that, he was both strongly repulsed by and attracted to the forest. Powerful events began to manifest. There, one supposes because of a predisposition or sensitivity he could not explain, he clearly, dramatically, and elegantly connected to the life of the forest. It became more than the likes-the-outdoors refrain you hear about hiker types who always seem to smell like woodsmoke. He became aware of a cryptic, unfamiliar reality that lived with great purpose and structure within his, Albert Lucky’s, formerly familiar reality. He was overwhelmed with the sense of importance of this