As I open my eyes, I find I'm not in a marsh being ravaged by a blue, . eight-armed goddess. I'm not floating down a red river on a raft piloted by Rapunzel. Instead I'm sprawled awkwardly on the sidewalk in front of the Catalyst in Santa Cruz. There's a rip in my pants near the right pocket, and blood stains the hole. It seems that while I was zonked -- was it a dream or some hypnogogic hallucination generated by that strange cotton pad? -- my flesh intersected with a broken bottle lying nearby.

Ruefully, I fully register the fact that I've returned to the state of mind that hundreds of millions of people all over the world ingest drugs and alcohol daily to escape. How long have I been away? Too long. The sun is going down. Twilight isn't far away.

I try to slide back into the vision. The last thing I recall is the message scrolling on the weird, "organic" TV.

During your time of the month, meditate on the following questions:

1. What feelings and intuitions have you been trying to ignore since the moon was last in the phase it is now?

2. Which parts of your life are overdue for death?

3. What messages has life been trying to convey to you but you've chosen to ignore?

4. What red herrings, straw men, and scapegoats have you chased after obsessively in order to avoid dissolving your most well-rationalized delusions?

An unwelcome image weasels its way into my mind's eye in response to the first question. I see myself quitting the music business cold turkey, abandoning the work to which I've devoted so many years of my life. It's a painful thought that has become increasingly hard to suppress these last six months. I've truly grown to hate playing unventilated nightclubs where my lungs fill up with a year's worth of secondhand cigarette smoke in one night. And I despise those odd nights when I'm totally uninspired and have to rely on professional tricks and techniques in order to fake boisterous abandon and improvisational fun. And I abhor it when my band members aren't satisfied with a mere one hundred ten decibels, but feel compelled to crank their volumes up to eardrum-curdling levels that make it impossible for me or the audience to hear a word I'm singing. Worst of all, I can't even bear to think about how much I despise dealing with slimy record company executives.

I force my imagination to slip over into more pleasurable meditations. I remember how utterly relaxed I was sailing along with Rapunzel in my vision. As I sneaked peeks up her rainbow batik mini-dress, I was flooded with memories from other times in my life I've felt perfectly at home. I can almost taste the white paste I licked from my fingers as I made a Valentine for Karol Darnell, the girl I had a desperate crush on in kindergarten. I can smell the cherry candies my grandma used to keep in a cedarwood bowl in her kitchen. I'm back at the Christmas pageant in church when I was eight years old, awash in smoldering myrrh and entertaining obsessive visions of growing as strong as Superman by drinking the hot blood of Jesus.

Two resolutions grip me. First, I've got to find out how to get in touch with Rapunzel. Second, I've got to summon every shred of wisdom I've accumulated about the arts of seduction and devote them to invoking that moment when I will gaze into Rapunzel's adoring, lustful eyes -- not in a dream but in concrete reality -- as we weave our actual physical bodies together.

Censor that.

The previous fantasy belongs to an obsolete version of myself which I've earnestly sought to outgrow. Only in the old days would I have said, "I vow to do whatever it takes to win Rapunzel's love." Since then I've become wiser about the ethics of imposing my will on others. Witchy hexes definitely work -- temporarily. As do manipulative stratagems copped from self-help books about love and relationship. But in the end there's always sick-hearted, soul-withering karma to pay.

I recall an event from years ago, when Arlene, in a demonic show of strength, ripped out a half-broken piece of a curb across the street from the Dragon Moon dance club and hurled it through the windshield of my blue VW van. That was the night she fully registered how much I hated domestic routine and how unlikely it was, therefore, that I would satisfy her need to nurture me with regular doses of her fantastic cooking. The love spell I'd used to snag her infatuation three weeks previously had failed to take that detail (and many others) into consideration.

The shattered glass was easy to tolerate, I should add, compared to the revenge Arlene sought in the ensuing weeks. With lunatic clarity, she launched a letter-writing campaign to my friends, the local newspapers, and anyone else who'd listen, accusing me of all manner of crimes, from refusing to wear condoms to kicking a cat to using the term "cunt" in violation of my feminist principles.

No. The safer and wiser approach to seduction is to never never never seek to bend anyone's will but my own.

"If it's meant to be, it will be," is how the New Agers phrase it.

Therefore I will now beseech the Goddess to reveal Her divine will for Rapunzel and me. Is it best for all concerned if Gorgeous Sphinx Prankster and I become temporary consorts? Best friends? Sisterly-brotherly comrades collaborating on some as-yet unimaginable project? Till-death-do-us-part soul twins?

"Dear Goddess," I pray, "In the coming days please reveal your intention concerning the relationship between me and Rapunzel which will serve the greatest good for all concerned."

Having said all that spiritually polite crap, of course, gives me at least half a license to lust and plot and scheme with all my heart and soul and mind to make Rapunzel my lover. After all, my job as a human being is to master the art of being both a generous idealist and selfish narcissist at the same time. The two impulses should balance and complement each other. One should not overwhelm and cancel out the other.

Besides, the Goddess sometimes takes a while to reveal Her intentions. While I wait, I sure as hell am not going to be courteously passive. Instead I'll proceed on the hypothesis that Rapunzel is my Queen and Chosen One, my soul twin and splitapart. Yes, I'll be alert for signals from the Goddess telling me to cease and desist. But till those clues filter in, I'm full speed ahead.

So how will I track down my future muse? I think back to the performance ritual "A Happy Birthday for Death," where I glimpsed her dancing atop the sepulcher. Were there any friends of mine there who might be able to slip me some intelligence concerning my heroine? Yes. Stim and Katrina. They were among the instrumentalists playing music to accompany her wriggle.

I hop to my feet as if I'm totally in control -- nodding to the confab of skateboarders ten yards away as I gather my menstrual gifts from Rapunzel and pluck her underpants off my head -- and bolt to the pay phone in front of the Catalyst.

Stim's not home and his answering machine's not on. I can't remember Katrina's number, and it's not listed in the directory. She lives just a few minutes away, though. I decide to make the trek to her house immediately. Whether or not she's home will constitute the first omen from the Goddess about whether She approves of the union of Rapunzel and me.

Oops. Another pang of conscience intrudes. A big, inconvenient pang. My love nausea recedes just enough to remind me that I and my band World Entertainment War will be taking the stage at exactly 11 o'clock tonight, which means that a few hours from now I'll be called upon to generate fountains of virile energy. The singing and dancing and performing I'll do during the show will be the equivalent of playing three consecutive full-court basketball games. If I expect to endure till the end I've got to approach the delivery of fuel to my body with a scientific discipline similar to that of a long-distance runner. By rights I should have loaded in one high-carbohydrate meal within the last hour, and should plan another between 8:30 and 9:00.

Then there are all the other pre-gig rituals I haven't done yet: yoga, meditation, vocal warm-ups, pep-talking the band, method acting exercises with my assistant Marijka, and coordinating with my stage manager Erica on the organization of costume changes and props. These are very serious matters. My many years as a professional performer have pointedly taught me that there's nothing worse than arriving on stage unprepared, my voice not ready to hit the high notes, my body unlimber, my improv instincts unlubricated.

This gig is our maiden voyage since we divorced both our giant record company, CBS, and our giant management team, Will Boehm Management (WBM). After struggling for years to link our fortunes to powerhouse institutions with the clout to make World Entertainment War a household name, it turned out that we could not bear the ignominious compromises imposed on us by their corporate hackdom. Our relationship with WBM lasted fifteen months, with CBS eighteen. For the foreseeable future, we've opted to uphold our creative integrity at the expense of disseminating our music to as many people as possible. So begins our headlong plunge into the hype-less, fund-less void.

Do I know what the hell I'm doing? The entire mess scares and depresses me.

When I stumbled onto my career in music way back when, I had two main ambitions. First, I wanted to be a sacred entertainer: a shamanic clown conducting poetic rituals of catharsis for my tribe. The second motive, composing maybe thirty percent of the total, was to be worshiped as a rockstar. This sub-personality of mine, which I call the wannabe sexgod, was not and has never been in it for the joy of being of service. He's greedy for all the fame and adoration he can suck up.

To my credit, the sacred entertainer has held the upper hand in the relationship for most of my career. It has only been recently that the rockstar persona began, like a smarmy parasite, to gobble up more than its rightful share of psychic energy. I've found myself performing more and more acts of self-violation which I'd once sworn off as taboo.

Capitulating to WBM's wishes for us to do absurdly inappropriate shows was just one example. Nothing made me more embarrassed in front of myself than opening for the sweetly polished Neville Brothers at a sit-down concert in a Sacramento auditorium filled with yuppie baby-boomers. World Entertainment War is a radical chaotic tantric pagan dance band, for Goddess' sake. In contrast to the Nevilles, as well as ninety-nine percent of all other famous rock bands, we don't do no stinking love songs.

And then there was the bit about working with the CBS-assigned stylist, she whose aesthetic must have been imprinted by the anorexic pouting robots that populate the Neiman Marcus catalogues. Her attempts at sleek, chic makeovers made the rowdy faces of me and my fellow band members resemble evil but goofy harlequins.

And those humiliations are mild compared to the worst stuff, which I will not allow myself to obsess on for the thousandth time.

But that's exactly why my music career, after many years of slow, steady ascent, has in the past year begun to degenerate. I've discovered, to my amusement and horror, that I'm one of those rare and unfortunate men whose success -- maybe even my very survival -- depends on maintaining my integrity.

Which is the reason I had no choice but to bail out of my contracts with one of the world's biggest recording companies and a management group founded by a legendary name in the rock biz.

If this were any other day, even any other gig day, I would immerse myself in the delirium of the encounter with Rapunzel and its aftermath. I would cultivate and savor this mood for as long as it would last; would spend the next ten hours or three weeks in a dreamy haze of erotic nausea, revving up a master plan of seduction, composing love letters and creating gifts and staging surprises for my new-found goddess.

Tonight I'd compose an invitation, handsomely printed on a pumpkin I've saved since last fall, for her to meet me on Mt. Shasta, where, with the power of our combined voices uttering thunderous prayers in the language of the angels, we would precipitate avalanches that would lay bare the secret entrance to the fabled pleasure dome of the Atlanteans which they built eons ago inside the mountain.

Tomorrow I'd buy a Barbie doll and, with the help of modeling clay, surgically alter it to resemble the figurines of the obese mamas found all over old Europe by the archaeologist Marija Gimbutas. Taking my inspiration from "Venus of Willendorf," the most famous of those ancient big-assed goddess statues, I'd call my creation "Barbie of Willendorf" and impale her on a homemade crucifix. Rapunzel would find the gift on her doorstep wrapped in an Easter basket together with colored eggs emblazoned with bull skulls, alongside of which would be a real double-headed ax fresh from the hardware store, inscribed with the faux autograph of famous feminist sexpert Susie Bright.

But I won't launch any of that fun stuff tonight. The show at the Catalyst is too important to shortchange. In my personal mythos, I've already built it up into a landmark. I intend it to symbolize a turning away from my ego's cheap agendas; to be an exacting and final cure for the rockstar virus.

Redemption and resurrection are words too pretentious for me to breathe in the presence of anyone else, but alone with myself they're my mantras.

I decide on a compromise. I'll give myself the next hour to be utterly irresponsible in service to my infatuation. Who knows? Maybe I'll actually be able to get in touch with the Menstrual Temple's most tantalizing witch and offer to put her on the guest list for tonight's show.

With guilty triumph, I head towards Katrina's house. I pray she'll be able to tell me where the Grail resides.

As I leave the Catalyst parking lot and head into the residential neighborhood behind the downtown area, a wry voice from my higher self's funny bone adds a corollary to my recent musings. There is, of course, another impetus that has propelled my musical ambitions since they were first spawned, I mean aside from the urges to be a sacred entertainer and a famous rockstar. It's the desire to pick up chicks. Or to be more candid and specific: In lieu of being independently wealthy, I imagined that a job as a sacred entertainer-cum-rockstar was the best possible position from which to execute my yearning to make love with every decent-looking, halfway-smart woman I met.

I hasten to add that I'm painfully aware of how common and tawdry this aspiration is. Often I've wished it could be easier to sustain the delusion that my omnidirectional lust is more noble and unique than the dumb lust of the other two billion males on the planet past the age of puberty. But I was almost thoroughly deprived of that luxury long ago.

The earliest I recall admitting the ugly truth was one warm October afternoon in a college anthropology class taught by the witty and acerbic Dr. Tacker. My testosterone was burbling and gnashing in response to the vistas of flesh visible on three different nubile coeds seated within pheromone-sniffing distance. The sight of Joanie Rivalson's freckled back screamed at me from the plunging scoop of her purple tank top. The shimmering vision of Hilary Clark's slightly spread thighs hovered at the edges of her denim miniskirt, which I could steal glimpses of if I turned sideways in my chair and pretended to gaze out the window thoughtfully. The bulge of Tara Worthington's breast where it overflowed from her pink bra was begging me to stare at it through the gap between her upper arm and her sleeveless white blouse.

Together, the three muses had launched me deep into a ritual fantasy I'd been regularly invoking since kindergarten. For maybe the five-thousandth time in my life, I found myself on a gorgeous green and blue planet much like Earth, with one exception: There were no other human males in all the world except me. As I stood atop a verdant hill wearing nothing but a red silk robe, I surveyed hordes of females streaming towards me from all directions. They were all ages, all races, all shapes and sizes. I turned slowly in circles to drink in the abundance. They gazed at me with tender longing or fierce lust, spilling out of their clothes as they converged.

As it had each of the four thousand nine hundred ninety-nine previous times I'd invoked it, the fantasy's prologue gave way to an utterly unique scenario. In other episodes, for example, my English teacher from junior year in high school smeared her entire body in virgin olive oil and gave me the ultimate full-body massage, or the German female double agent from the TV show "Hogan's Heroes" brought forth six of her cohorts to conduct a ritual that combined the Episcopalian eucharist with a psychedelic orgy.

But in this particular version of the fantasy, Hilary Clark, Joanie Rivalson, and Tara Worthington pushed to the front of the horde riding on a sweaty black bull. They were yodeling and ululating like madwomen, their faces painted like nineteenth-century Native Americans going to war. The three of them slipped off the beast and ran around to face it. Joanie grabbed its horns and launched herself in an airborne somersault lengthwise over the bull, in the style of the daredevil maidens portrayed in frescoes in the Temple of Gnossos in ancient Crete. The other two women followed suit. As soon as they landed, they raced in my direction. Joanie rammed her shoulder into my midsection and tackled me. Hilary scurried over and threw her mouth over mine. Tara untied my sash and threw open my kimono. But as Joanie sat on my shins and began to swoop down devouringly, the voice of my anthropology teacher, to which I'd previously been oblivious, somehow injected its way into the scene.

"The human male," Dr. Tacker was saying, "is driven by a biological imperative to disseminate his genetic material to as many members of the female gene pool as possible. He really is an automaton, a hostage in blind service to the All-Powerful DNA."

In response to this awful magic, my lyrical fantasy collapsed. I was propelled into a humiliating line of thought about how much I resembled a robot. Tara and Joanie and Hilary and I explored no further intimacy that day.

Or for many days. For a few months following Dr. Tacker's rude hex, I grew so self-conscious about my "Planet of Women" fantasy that I half-heartedly abstained from it. Eventually it raged back stronger than ever, though, and served me again as a talismanic meditation and beloved recurring dream.

Still, in my darker, less self-forgiving meditations, I fixate on Dr. Tacker's assertion. My virtually indiscriminate lust could easily be seen as the damning proof that I'm little more than a slave exploited by my DNA -- that resourceful matrix of amino acids -- to disseminate its signature to as many different collaborators as possible. In this theory, DNA tricks me into believing I'm acting out my own designs so that I won't notice it's working to maneuver me into endless situations where I might conceive children, thereby making possible its infinite proliferation.

In my nobler moods, though, I envision an alternative. In this model, the human species is a single unimaginably complex intelligence. Call it the Goddess or the Christ or the Oversoul. Individual people are in a sense the body parts of this Gorgeous Supercreature, each with a unique assignment to carry out. I may be more like a lung cell and you may be more like a white blood cell. Because each of us gets so carried away with our specialized tasks, though, we lose sight of the larger purpose we're in service to. I forget that I can't be a good lung cell unless I coordinate my efforts with all of you white blood cells.

The good news is that just as every part of a hologram contains a tiny image of the entire hologram, each of us carries the master plan of the God that we collectively compose. The bad news is that the master plan is buried so deep beneath more immediate agendas that it might as well be a repressed memory. If we could only access it, it would detonate our passion to collaborate purposefully not just with a mate or a lover or a few special people but with every single one of the other cells in our shared body.

This is, in fact, the Root Desire masked by every one of our mundane desires. It's the engine that secretly drives evolution and that will one day become fully conscious in all of us. It's the original, divine agenda that we incessantly shortcircuit by chasing after inferior and incomplete unifications. Most of us can manage no more than a narrow little obsession with a particular human who we mistakenly imagine can satisfy our gargantuan yearning for the real, primordial thing.

According to this scenario, the reason I'm such a fucknut is that I've begun to tap into the Root Desire. I've awakened the drive to achieve conscious unity with all my fellow cells. I'm increasingly at one with the master plan of evolution, which intends for us to collaborate with all, not just a few. How, therefore, could I not help but lust for liaisons with as many different aspects of the Gorgeous Supercreature as possible?

According to the model implied by Dr. Tacker's formulation, on the other hand, I'm just a pawn of my measly little DNA's drive to reproduce itself everywhere.

Whichever is more true, the end result is that the wellspring of my life can be reduced to one pithy formula: cruising for babes. And if that's the case, then those other obsessions feeding my music career -- to be a shamanic high priest and rockstar -- are really only in service to the ultimate obsession.

Wait. Wait. Wait. Here comes another voice demanding to be heard. From out of the subconscious depths it erupts, begging to offer a further nuance to the master theory.

It's true that on the face of it I may seem to be just another sleazy patriarchal drone possessed by my own testosterone (even if I rationalize it with spiritually savvy abracadabra). But in my defense, there is a considerable body of evidence suggesting that my testosterone's imperatives might be developing a distinctly womanly bent. I could even go so far as to say that for some mysterious reason -- either through my own craftsmanship or some divine favor -- I am in the process of re-engineering my generic male lust so that it serves feminist agendas.

Theorem 1: I never seek out women who honor and obey obsolete gender roles, or who willingly participate in their own objectification, or who rely so utterly on their fabulously beautiful appearance that all brain cells not contributing to that project have ceased to grow. While my libido may reflexively and atavistically flow in the direction of such throwbacks, I'm never moved to act on it. Theorem 2: More and more I find myself doing unto women as women have traditionally done unto men. I try to read the moods of any female companion I'm with, for instance, and use this information to play to her needs. I'm an enthusiastic listener; I ask catalytic questions; I'm acutely attuned not just to what I want to do, but to the ways she and I can blend and collaborate. Most importantly, I don't do any of this merely out of duty. I enjoy it. It fulfills me.

Theorem 3: I love to give women gifts; I need to give women gifts. Not in the typical style of a generosity-addict, though: My goodies are not a means to control and manipulate the recipients. I confess I'm not perfect; if I were I'd bestow my blessings anonymously so that no one could ever puff up my ego with her gratitude. But I've worked hard to eliminate the compulsion to attach any strings.

Theorem 4: Nothing excites me more than a woman who's able to express a balance of "masculine" and "feminine" qualities. I demonstrate my commitment to this ideal in the way I treat her. For instance: I encourage her independence with tenderness, not aloofness. I reward her objectivity without punishing her subjectivity. I jack up her ambitions by being supportive, not competitive.

Theorem 5: I get off almost as much from invoking my companion's pleasure as I do from my own.

Theorem 6: Unlike the majority of the male population, I know the identity and location of the only human organ whose sole purpose is to experience pleasure, the clitoris. Unlike the majority of the male population, I know a woman's sexual engine can't go from zero to eighty miles an hour in ten seconds. Unlike the majority of the male population, my hard and fast rule about orgasms is, "After you, dear."

Theorem 7: I feel sheepish about the kind of bragging I'm doing, since I know that doctrinaire radical feminists who think all men are rapists would regard me as a self-deluded poseur. And it's good that I feel sheepish. It keeps me humble; it drives me to continue checking in with my true motivations; and it encourages me to cast that big frowning dyke in the role of my superego, which is far better for my moral growth than a big frowning patriarch.