When I was twenty-two I was going nowhere, so I decided to take a couple summer classes. I had a vague idea of what I wanted to understand: something about physics, about how things worked, about what things were. I'd failed every math class I'd ever taken, but I was reckless enough to dismiss the past entirely. During those years I felt unrelated to it.

I enrolled in two courses, one on literature and one on algebra. I hated the algebra, but loved the literature. This surprised me, made me feel like I was a stranger to myself. The professor—a pale, red-headed woman in her late thirties—had a way of talking about great literature as if some deep secret was hidden within it. Over the course of the summer I began to wonder if she might somehow be talking about my vague idea.

One day we were doing an exercise on putting our impressions of things into words. The theme was smell, and she passed around several small colored papers, each of which had a unique scent soaked into it. We'd pass them around, write a word or two about our impression, then she'd have us explain why we wrote what we did. I got the yellow paper. When she came to me and asked what I'd written, I looked at my paper and laughed. "Green," I said. Everyone else laughed with me, looking at the yellow slip on my desk.

"Green?" she asked, "Why green?"
"I don't know," I said. "When I smell this paper, I see a very specific shade of green."
"See it?" she says.
"Yes," I said, "behind my forehead, I think." The class continued laughing, and I laughed too. But she seemed genuinely interested. "It's a weird thing," I continued, "and it doesn't happen very often, but sometimes I can see a color from a smell, or even a sound."
"That's called synesthesia," she says. "Some people have that. It's a real thing."

From that point forward we began getting to know each other better. I told her about my vague idea. She laughed and said it was the same with her, and she was still trying to figure it out.

After class one day she pulled me aside and said, "Behind the forehead is an excellent way of putting it. Let me show you something." She got a book from her desk and opened it, then showed me a page with a painting on it. "Have you ever heard of Alex Gray?" she asked. The story that followed changed the trajectory of my life.

"One time, when I was your age," she began, "I was in my room with my boyfriend. We were lying on the bed reading together, when my cat crept in through the door and began meowing to be petted. It jumped up onto the bed and settled between us, and we both put a hand onto her and began stroking her fur. I don't know how to explain what happened next, but suddenly I looked over at my boyfriend and realized I could see all the energy inside his body, shining and moving in very specific ways, coagulating into small orbs at very specific points. He was staring back at me. "Can you see it, too?" I asked after several moments of shock. "Yes," he said, a mixture of fascination and horror on his face. He pulled his hand away, and suddenly everything was normal again."

She went on to say that she never again saw what she'd seen, but years later came across Gray's paintings in a bookstore. "That's what it looked like!" she said, "Just like that! The human body is far more sophisticated than we believe, I'm afraid."

I went away that night deeply disturbed. Either the woman is a loon, I told myself, or she just told me something supremely valuable in my wish to understand. I settled on the latter. I quickly became less interested in physics, and more interested in humans—in what we are, how we work, and why. The summer was coming to a close.

I abandoned physics and dropped out of school. On the last day of class I told her of my decision. "For you, it's the right one," she said. I told her I was going to begin studying to try to understand the image she'd shown me, that my humanity had never interested me so deeply until now. I can remember that I was wearing a black shirt with a lion emblazoned on it. "Oh, Daniel…" she says, "Daniel in the lion's den. You'll need a lot of faith for that. But if you're serious, I could take you to the cage, and introduce you to the lion."

Bubble-gum, bubble-gum
Bubble-gum on the blacktop!
Simon says, Simon says Go—No!
Simon says stop!

Up like a ladder
Up like a hope
Down with a shatter
Down like a dope
In by a hole
(You greedy little mole)
Now my dogs
Will eat your soul

Sing your song
And sing it loud
Sing it long
And sing it proud
Sing for me and maybe, maybe
For my lock
You got the key!

"Coffee is my weakness. My kryptonite. I love it, but my system is very sensitive to caffeine, and one day it'll probably kill me. My heart will just give out. So don't be surprised when you hear it one day: Breaking News, Danny Piper Drops Dead. Just remember I told you beforehand. Will you remember?"

Danny asks me as he fills my cup from the french-press. He sets it down, then drizzles honey into my coffee with a wooden dipper that looks like a beehive. Honey in coffee, I ask? "Honey in almost everything," he responds without a thought. "The good stuff though, none of that store-bought nonsense. Honey and coffee, I basically live on them. If one day they suddenly disappeared from my life, I wouldn't know what to do with myself. I'd have to rethink who I am."

Is that so, I ask? And who is Danny Piper?

With the death of his father and the dawn of a new millenium, Danny Piper joined a cult. He was 20 years old.

"We quit our jobs, sold everything and renounced ourselves," he explains, "until finally we decided to go off and live in the wilderness."

The wilderness? Danny watches my brow rise, doubtful. I decide to humor him: For what, may I ask? What did you hope to find?

"Hard to say," he responds. "Enlightenment, maybe. Or self-destruction. Or maybe God, revelation. For sure, we at least got a little of each."

Immediately my mind imagines a bunch of bare-footed fools chanting in the trees. Danny laughs, then bites back, "No, not quite like that. Sure, there were a lot of us, but we hardly ever saw each other. We each lived isolated, as if in our own solitary little desert."

I listen straight-faced, then can't help but to smirk. But Danny, I say, none of this makes any sense to me. He laughs and looks off out the window. "Yeah," he says, "I imagine it doesn't..." His words trail off as if in a pause, but he settles staring back at me in silence.

Then how does one end up doing what you now do, I ask him? Dance music? I'd have expected solemn chants, drones that hypnotize and attempt to elevate. "For sure," he says, "I've done a bit of that. I don't know. I guess you might say that my revelation was different..."

Again he suddenly pauses, then stops. Not this time, I say to myself, and I prod him on with a wave of my hand. He smiles and takes a breath. "Well," he begins, "I guess it has a lot to do with what became of us. We were out there for fifteen years, and even though we were solitary, we still communicated, we still tried to figure things out. And at the end of all that searching, I guess you could say we came to a conclusion."

Which was?

"The world is going to end."

I hear his words, and as he delivers them I can feel his eyes pursuing mine, watching for the slightest inclination to laugh and walk out. I smother the urge. His eyes relax, and he gives me a friendly smile. "The only question at that point," he continues, "is what the hell to do with yourself in the meantime. Right?"

I suppose that's true, I say.

"Well, I thought and thought on it," he continues, "we all did. Some of them resigned themselves, and died of despair. Some of them dove head-long into pleasure, and some sought positions of power. Others sought spiritual knowledge, trying to find a way to free themselves, while others sought simply to understand why it all was so. And me..."

Again that wretched pause. I get the distinct impression that he is enjoying my anticipation. But I'm intrigued, and I ask with genuine interest, And you?

"Don't ask me to explain it," he said, his voice tinged with annoyance, or maybe cynicism, "but in those dark moments, it seemed to me that there was nothing at all in the whole world worth doing—except dancing."

Silence lingers between us. I let it linger.

A very strange story, I say at length, though it makes sense with an album title like Daddy Was A Dancer. Tell me, why did you settle on that?

Danny stares into his cup. It's as if it is burdensome for him to change subjects. "There are three reasons," he begins, "it is true to me in three ways. The first concerns my own children—that their daddy is, indeed, a dancer. I love the idea of making choreographed dance videos for my music. It's pie-in-the-sky at this point, but I'm not too old to dream.

"The second way it is true is that my own father was, at one time, a dancer. During the seventies, he taught disco at a dance school. By the time I came around his dancing days were well behind him, but he'd talk about them once in awhile. For some reason, in his early 20s, he developed a deep need to dance. He signed up for a class, but was so nervous when he got there that he had to sit in his car and drink a beer. It worked out for him though: my mother tells me he was the one on the dance floor that everyone revolved around.

"And the last reason I think you'll find strange, but I'll tell you anyway. Somewhere along the road of life I developed the idea that whatever created this world we inhabit, is itself a dancer. All of nature, all of physics, is nothing but one big dance. The world is a dance-floor, and how well we move in it is a big part of it. Living is itself a form of dancing. God is a dancer."

Daddy was a dancer, I say. I see.

As we part and shake hands I laugh and ask, What are the chances any of that was true, Danny? I can't help but feel like I've been swindled, or stung by a stingray.

He laughs, then playfully raises his eyes in thought before looking back at me squarely, saying, "Not good."

As I walk down the driveway to my car I hear the door close behind me. But hardly a moment passes before I hear it open again, and he calls out to me from the doorway, "Isaac!”

Yes, Danny?

“Even if it is not—it is at least trying to be!"

Isaac Bloomstone for Bloomstone Radio.

I’m tired of God and I’m tired of the devil
I’m tired of the good and I’m tired of the evil
I’m tired of the battle they rage in my mind
I think I’ll just lay down and die…

Pretty bird, pretty bird singing in the tree
Pretty bird, pretty bird looking down at me
I’m pretty sure, I’m pretty sure away you would fly
If right here I laid down and—♪

Gravedigger, gravedigger whistling a tune
Digging me a grave by the light of the moon
Gravedigger making the bed where I’ll lie
As soon as I lay down and die…

Stain the clay, paint my face
Now I’m free to kill the beast
Kill the beast!

Plant the spear, the beast is near
The tracks are fresh, the scent of flesh
Get the beast!

Circle ‘round, knock it down
Use your teeth to kill the beast
Kill the beast!

Thunder-cloud, tearing loud
High above
In the mud and blood
Where we kill the beast

Kill the beast, cut the throat
Spill the blood, kill the beast
For a feast

Make a flame
The beast is slain
But leave the eyes
For the flies
(For the flies…)