Beulah-Land

By David Ray

Sure! You know what it's like to hold a life in your hands! Your own life... Someone else... But... Do you know how to love?

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Ray II
• Release date: Jul 16, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301903207

David Ray

I like to contemplate reality, ponder existence, and commune with the Big Guy Upstairs...

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BEULAH - LAND

Davy Lee Ray II

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 David Lee Ray II

License Notes: This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this ebook with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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Table of Contents

Prologue

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Chapter XV

Chapter XVI

Chapter XVII

Chapter XVIII

Chapter XIX

Chapter XX

Chapter XXI

Chapter XXII

Chapter XXIII

Chapter XXIV

Chapter XXV

Prologue

Stricken souls start young ...

The evocation of a late hour unveiled the tell-tale signs of dusk. He approached the small house where the phone-book said his former philosophy-teacher lived. Davy recalled being twenty-one at the time, freshly diagnosed for the first time in his life with a legitimate psychiatric ailment of paranoid-schizophrenia. He knocked on the front-door. The philosophy-instructor answered momentarily ...

May I help you? he asked from within.

I would like to speak to you, Davy informed the teacher.

It’s rather late ...

I think I’m Jesus! Davy Ray was just your average madman!

That had been only one of as many and various the chapters as he had so far experienced in his life-time.

By twenty-three years of age he had been fortunate enough to spend ten whole days meandering about what remained of Jerusalem’s old city circa the end of the twentieth century. All-told for little more than half-a-century Davy so far walked across the same world as was attributed to the abbreviated life of the legendary Jesus Christ. Short-lived as his visit to the holy city actually proved to be, its effect upon Davy’s out-look revealed to be quite enduring. Decades later that chapter of his life still yet bore impact upon his conscious understanding of what he knew in the present. In following years he learned to refer to his brief stay-over spent in Jerusalem as a pilgrimage.

While wandering afoot amid the historical remains of the ancient city’s narrow avenues, Davy felt as if to only then begin to discover for his own sake a foundation where-upon he might establish his individuality. And wasn’t that just the whole purpose in a pilgrimage to the holy city of one’s choice? Davy thought much of this peculiar discovery he made in the heart of Jerusalem, at the site of what many people referred to as the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. His over-all feeling in that hour was of so much inspirational quality as allowed him what necessary endurance his path of choice required in his life’s ensuing years. That little piece of Jerusalem’s old city accompanied him where-ever Davy ventured, refusing to merely fade away among as many moments as he had long since forgotten.

Thus did the wayward pursuits of his young man-hood empower Davy in his typically American adventuresome pursuit of life, liberty, happiness, and, as the case occasionally demonstrated to be at the turn of the century among the citizenry of the land of the free, a peculiar kind of madness!

In 1987, also the year of his daughter Felicia’s birth, after having demonstrated himself to be of a mind to marry and settle down to raise a family, the devil came knocking on Davy’s door. It was at that time in his life, at twenty-nine years of age, that he experienced the penultimate meaning of the consequences of one’s iniquity.

They were extenuating circumstances evolving out of his youth, not the least of which were a potential chemical imbalance in his brain, the diagnosis of paranoid-schizophrenic he received years prior to meeting his first wife, Felicia’s mother, as well as what adverse effects he knew from regrettable incidents involving Davy’s left eye going blind during his childhood. It was around the age of eight years that his left eye, almost inexplicably blinded in that day, was surgically removed for fear on the part of medical specialists that the blindness might spread to his remaining right eye. As a result Davy’s defective eye was replaced with a prosthetic. The artificial eye proved to be the bane of his self-esteem, inducing in him an extreme degree of self-consciousness. Somehow it threatened him with a predisposed understanding of himself as being synthetic in nature, which aggravated Davy to no end! The inevitably traumatic effect upon the child he once was touched his life in many situations in many discomforting ways for years to come, affecting him well after he reached young manhood.

Wrath as a result accompanied Davy’s conception of life in very nearly every instance imaginable. His discomfiture had a resounding effect upon the sympathies of his extended family, as at that early age Davy grew accustomed to being in the family’s spot-light, even being spoiled with intentional favoritism by the nuclear family that raised him. All in all, Davy’s childhood among his family proved a perfectly happy affair for him, however, at the age of fifteen all his memories of discrimination and insult by other unrelated persons against his person over the matter of a different looking glass eye, that inescapable fact of the matter being what apparent physical defect led some acquaintances Davy met with to suspect him as likely somewhat mentally slow. That perception of his person invested in Davy what by the age of fifteen years amounted to some considerable anger on his part, which he in his teens expressed through acts attributable to anyone behaving in the fashion of a juvenile delinquent!

This delinquency on his part he later felt should have been confronted through Davy’s sincere personal conviction of conscience, if he expected to be able to even lay claim to having such a thing as a conscience, and there were a few who doubted he could ... What-ever conscious effort he introduced during his young manhood toward expiation or the making of amends, he barely recollected. At that point in his life the inherent value of the confessional had as yet not materialized in his thinking, an accomplishment still years in the making. Nobody scheduled the rate of their ascendency into maturity

The wrath he knew within his heart and mind, injuring as it did Davy’s emotional development through-out the course of his youth, led to such unfathomable reasoning as demonstrated a somewhat afflicted capacity for judgment on his part. The intrusive effect was a dark design which by the time he married Thelma Lou Gibson in 1985, never-the-less allowed him a belief in what personal confidence motivated his repeated attempts at transcending any problems evolving out of his childhood. Then, a short two years later, in the midst of familial preparations for the holiday season, Davy almost inexplicably found himself choosing between the lesser of two evils as a course of personal behavior.

Complications well beyond any understanding on his part by December of 1987 left him devoid of any means of coping through his own devices in the midst of such perceptibly destitute circumstances as may raise the ire. There existed for Davy in those days of deep shadow a conflagration of the soul, the catalyst of which posed the necessity of very nearly killing his ex-brother-in-law with a pocket-knife in September of 1986. Whose abominable love for gore brought that catastrophe into fruition was anybody’s guess! Could there be any doubting the existence in their lives of some kind of devilish involvement? Or, could the violent out-come of Davy’s contest with his former brother-in-law somehow be construed to be the will of the sovereign universal authority? Who was to say? Except for some prosecuting attorney that informed Davy’s father David Ray how his only son’s bloody deed of that day had certainly gotten him his pound of flesh!

Other than his gradual slip-sliding into a form of psychosis, a number of factors involved themselves in coming months in causing Davy’s vehement desire to somehow lash out with a life-time of pent-up fury against what in some circles is conceived as the ‘Machine’ ... Davy recalled how in November of 1987, just a month prior to his greatest mistake, he had even gone so far as to make a bomb-threat in a telephone-call he made to the local mall.

But how very much he detested what local characteristic of the machine most immediately represented its soulless mechanisms effectively milking the American public for whatever potential profit the corporate elite alone did realize. In that instance of potently poisonous personal bewilderment, bitterness, and confusion, he was blinded by a subtle assertion of what deceptive thinking did ultimately succeed in reducing a Davy Ray in the prime of his life, to the tearful status of what kind of fool nails himself to the cross of his own shame. He was only temporarily unable to realize the intimate and intricate character of the agent he was causing the adverse effect on his own ability to comprehend the continuity of moment-by-moment living in the immediate reality. But five minutes was all anyone required in order to commit the mistake of a life-time! His discovery of the name of this essence of what hidden determination invaded his experience remained at that time lost somewhere in Davy’s unexplored future. Initially he might only speculate as to whether it was the name of good or evil, light or darkness, love or hate ... Regardless of the ultimate agent of its instigation, Davy’s attempted transgression in December 1987 proved nothing less than a deliberate attack on innocence itself!

Secular society adjudicated his actions of that desperate hour in his life to be of such extreme consequence as to cause Davy to forfeit everything progressive about himself. No longer would he be allowed to strive to accomplish any sense of normalcy in his life comparable to the lives of his fellow human beings. The very meaning of the word normal ceased to be relevant in any hoped-for understanding of his individual person. Normal people don’t experience a voice of lunatic ambition nagging at their conscious awarenesses!

Davy originally possessed no answer as to the question of why his path through life’s twists and turns appeared so certain in this sudden and intrusive alien determination within the bounds of his own awareness. Something so apparently inevitable in such imminent action on his part as he felt must necessitate his expenditure of a destruction-bound force expressing itself through him, he had not faced since his teen-age years. For Davy Ray’s sake it mattered hardly at all whatever offense this possessive essence of evil motive enabled him that darkly distorted night. The only concern he knew warned him to do anything and everything possible to avoid harming his first wife, Thelma Lou. Davy was terrified out of his mind that he was actually going to kill the mother of his only child!

He recalled his last words that night of rationalized thought, a question, Am I out of control? At the last Davy concluded his own belief in such eventuality had ultimately allowed it to become his reality.

It seemed so obvious, Davy later determined of that instance in which he realized himself as what monster he previously expected to witness only in horror movies shown on the television’s late show. The adverse self-conception he then knew he sought to discipline through the soul-felt effort Davy invested himself in; where-in he went on a hunger-strike meant to impose a hopefully celestial authority upon his otherwise temporal flesh and blood body. Shattered into a million pieces as he had felt to be in that unfortunate chapter of his life, Davy eventually possessed no doubts over what insidious power of absolute darkness was the real culprit behind his unacceptable behavior. Unfortunately for him, a secular society acknowledged no ultimately good or evil authority over the final disposition of this world and its inhabitants. A pretense to logical deduction of truth led the so-called intelligentsia to conclude how the individual’s personal ambition was absolutely all that determined whether that human being proved to be of either good or evil nature, either civil or criminal ...

Absolute confidence in a spiritual determination apparently proved impractical in what many acknowledged as the material world. Odd, it seemed to Davy, how in a so-called secular society truth itself was defined as being somehow beyond the jurisdiction of the creator. Whatever validity or soundness existed in the proposition of a godless reality, Davy could not at that time fathom it. All he knew in life he attributed in point of origin to one definite source.

He certainly did not believe he chose for himself to present to others the face of evil! I am not a monster! screamed his tortured heart-felt thoughts. The battlements protecting Davy’s sense of self he felt collapsing around his over-whelmed conscious mind. He needed time to learn to understand what it was the sovereign universal authority over all-things wanted for and from him. There-in, Davy felt confident he at least had some hope for personal expiation, if not justification.

It was at this point in his life, in the year 1990, when a court of law adjudicated Davy to be legally insane, that he silently promised himself how the day would most assuredly arrive whenever the agent responsible for existence enabled Davy to personally dispose of what devil toyed with humankind, as well as with his own life. In time, he told himself and anyone who would listen, I will destroy the destroyer! Davy’s personal objective became a not-so-secret desire to see to it that the devil did indeed pay the piper ... And pay dearly!

In every thought, feeling, word, and deed, Davy expressed, so it became the case how he realized quite nearly too late what overt amount of influence the lord of demons exerted in his life. Never again, Davy told himself, heart-broken. In his life of what were up to that time some thirty years, he felt to be a resounding failure in every respect. Finally committed by a court of law to the Department of Mental Health of the state of Missouri, Davy was locked away about a year after Thelma Lou divorced her insane husband.

It was in the state hospital that Davy thought to ultimately receive the education of his life. Earning through the next six years what he proclaimed to be a doctorate in humanity, so knowledgeable in regards to people’s propensity for erroneous behaviorisms did he estimate himself to be, Davy gradually regained something akin to sanity.

I

I’m a legitimate representative of the human condition! Davy once declared to a professionally licensed counselor several years after his release from the state hospital in 1996, having spent six years locked up and hidden away from public scrutiny. He had since met the woman, Nona Jean Smith, in 1998, which he married in 2005, after such period of time as presented Davy the assertion of some sense of personal capacity toward once again assuming a responsible role among the general public.

Bull-shit! declared the counselor Kris Hamilton, knowing full-well how possible it was for him to repeat his attempted transgression.

Davy felt inclined away from arguing the point, still somewhat uncertain as to whether or not he could ever again fully trust himself, even after some twenty years had elapsed since he attempted to impose himself on a fellow human being in December of 1987, with his daughter being born on the first day of March of that same year. She was a quarter-of-a-century old now, and married. Davy profoundly regretted being unable to provide himself as a father in her behalf, while she was growing through childhood. At least, he thought, according to his daughter she was able to realize a surrogate-father in her grandfather, who had been Davy’s father-in-law during his four-year-long marital relationship with Thelma Lou.

Certainly, Davy reiterated for the sake of his own understanding, there is no denying how every living man, woman, and child, is a legitimate representative of the human condition, no one individual any more or less than another, such being the self-evident nature of that established universal realization which defines all humankind as equals, that exists in the hearts and minds of billions of people, past, present, and future, and especially so in the immediate result of this production of observable truths actually felt to be authored through the process of intelligent design, as is so eloquently expressed in the guise of this commonly referred to as creation.

These feelings thus defining the qualitative characteristics of a very human experience, that is indeed historically demonstrated to be most effectively interpreted, understood, declared, and ultimately judged, through what lyrical ability reveals this universal language in which a pleasing melody is key. Now, as in ancient times, human expression discovers the heights of meaning and significance most effectively in song and ode. Definitive expositions of first-hand personal knowledge provided over millennium through the handing down of information born from longitudinal studies of biblical proportions, clearly demonstrate what superior method of communication may be realized via melodious symbolism by anyone. Probably the greatest example ever put forth of this extraordinary and underestimated form of effective self-affirmation through a sincere, open, and shared sense of an intimate and, therefore, greater understanding of just exactly what this is that we call truth and its author, exists in the text of Psalms, much of which is attributed to King David of ancient Israelite fame.

For the record one of Davy Ray’s favorite past-times in life had been to apply lyrical meaning and significance through what musical compositions his talents enabled him to accomplish as a member of a musical quartet popularly described as a ‘rock and roll band’. Since childhood he endeavored to familiarize himself with such instruments as the French horn, the alto saxophone, and the electric bass guitar, all of which experience contributed to his over-all ability to in the manner of the sovereign universal authority demonstrate the creative characteristic of a most effectively expressive individual personality. To be sure Davy Ray’s objective of discovering his own human heritage he found to be most satisfying in his process of sharing personal musical interpretations of truths with his fellow human beings. It was in brief what he had taught himself to live for years previous to the present hour, even as there were more and less interesting activities Davy alternately developed a growing interest in during his life of just over half-a-century.

The immediate reality found Davy asleep beside his slumbering wife Nona Jean in the bed the middle-aged couple shared more often than not with the cat Dusty and the dog Skeeter. They each knew great personal distress from their individual lives prior to their meeting and eventual marriage following a court-ship lasting seven years. There were for both dead moments originating in expired circumstances, which on occasion actually threatened to overwhelm whatever shared hope they possessed of experiencing their immediate lives together with some semblance of delicacy. Either of them was familiar with what abominable depths of personal despair were indicated by any facsimile of a concept of the valley of the shadow of death! Sleep proved barely amenable to whatever desire they shared with each other to realize such peace of mind as they individually might, were it not for his or her suffering an intrusion by the lord of nightmare.

The recent history of their marriage revealed after only two years, much to Nona Jean’s chagrin, her husband’s apparent propensity toward the alcohol. Within the realm of Davy’s oft-times overly vivid imagination, inspired by what perhaps was an excessive awareness of his immediate surroundings, he sought through inebriation to numb what sensitivities he owned. He knew how truth is sometimes a harsh mistress. So it was that by day’s-end his over-wrought thoughts and feelings extending from a long-dead past left him reflecting a mentally exhausted condition. Sleep, for his woman as much as for himself, offered only a vague impression of peace.

Having beheld too long the sun’s illuminating brilliance, he was there-upon blinded by the orb’s magnificence, much in the manner a model example might hold intrigue for what stroke of genius spawned apparent perfection, so that all else became irrelevant. Believing to be at the point of understanding the wisdom of creation’s creator, presented Davy a sense of self-identity with a crippled foundation in regards to worldly means, unable to seriously invest his talents in the material/physical realm of things, due to an overt contemplative interest in things celestial.

He considered the legal jurisdiction of the essence of existence upon his person, the unlimited authoritative extent of what infinitude many perceive to be the being of the one whose visibly transparent substance is the intangible name of forever, whom no structure may ever hope to contain. For many years this naturally proved too much definitive reality for him to bear in his simple understanding. Likewise the question put forth by so-called professionals insinuating how Davy’s was the mind of an emotionally disturbed person, proved to be of no benefit to him what-so-ever, in-so-far as his life-long search for a personal sense of self-worth was concerned. His ambition was ever to live a simple life in the capacity of that generalized concept of individuality he called Joe or Josephine, depending on one’s sexual identity.

Of course, taking into