Youie Summer

[Youie Summer came along two years after I wrote the sonnet posted yesterday.]

During weeks of manic inspiration in the summer of 1989, I received spiritual revelations so striking that I began to keep a journal to record them. Their significance seemed to demand that I share them with others. But a sad technical job at a large corporation felt at odds with that calling, leaving me only an hour or two out of each day at home with my wife to inscribe my insights.

Early in July, I entered the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes and regularly chanted affirmations that I would win. Something told me that my entry number contained a sign that the prize money would be mine, so I translated the number according to a pairing of digits and consonants that I used as a mnemonic device, and indeed it turned out that the entry number signified that the ten million dollars would be a grant-in-aid for me to write full-time for Youie.

Youie. A couple of weeks earlier I had been playing around with Einstein’s E=mc² to try to find a similar formula for spiritual energy, which I abbreviated UIE, for Universal Intelligent Energy. Pronounced as a word, UIE sounded like “Youie,” which I soon noticed contained not only “you,” but also “I” (Spanish “yo), “we” (the sound of French “oui”—also “wee”) and “yes” (literal “oui”). The name was thus revealed to me to be a mystical invitation to affirm joyously that we are one. My son had already pointed out the name’s similarity to “Yahweh,” the name revealed in the passage in The Second Book of Moses where the burning bush tells Moses that he will lead his people out of bondage in Egypt, and Moses asks who he should say told him so, if the people should ask. (I thought that I may even have discovered the secret pronunciation of Yahweh’s name.)

Unfortunately, simply winning the sweepstakes wouldn’t guarantee that everybody was going to read about these wondrous revelations. But what if I could prove that I had known in advance? Then I would no doubt appear on Oprah and people would flock to bookstores to own the story.

On July 26, one week before the winner would be announced on television, I had the manuscript notarized and I posted it to myself by certified mail. Earlier that same day, I had seen a neurologist about recent dizziness and muscular fatigue. The neurologist seemed to be someone I could talk to, so I told him about my journal and of a fantasy I’d had about needing surgery and being excused from my job for a few weeks. He asked me whether I might be “trying to do too much” and whether my “thoughts seemed to race.” He told me that my symptoms probably stemmed from “all that was going on” and would clear up by themselves “after this gets resolved.”

The manuscript arrived in the mail on Tuesday, August 1. On Thursday, the day of the announcement on The NBC Nightly News, I packed up all of my personal belongings at work so I could flee quickly after quitting my job the next day. My wife didn’t know about my entering the sweepstakes—it wasn’t something I could tell her about it until after I had won. Later that night, I could at least be glad that she hadn’t been in the room to see my reaction to the revelation that there would be nothing to tell her.

The following summer I fell asleep on Interstate-40 while driving home from work and spent the next five and a half months on medical leave with chronic fatigue syndrome. In January 1996, during a hard freeze, I fell down twice playing in the forest with Ruffy, our golden retriever. That evening, about to go for a walk with Ruffy, I slipped and sat down hard on an icy step. I got up and we went for our walk, but I returned to the house speaking incoherently. The neurosurgeon later surmised that the jolt to my spine had caused an ancient, slow-growing tumor in my pineal gland to start bleeding. After a six-month leave for brain surgery and rehabilitation, I was informed by my manager that I hadn’t been very productive during that time, and he advised me to take early retirement to avoid an unfavorable performance evaluation.

I felt relieved but also angry that it had taken something stronger than my own volition to deliver me out of the land of Egypt.