Me vs. Me: Manifesting Across the Multiverse
Aging.
I hate aging.
Not only for myself. I hate it for my father, my pets, my friends and everyone I love.
And I hated it for my mother.
I hated watching age take hold of her while she was here. More than any one person, though, I hate the fact that aging exists at all.
I hate death.
Death is that freaking barricade between us and them—the ones we’ve lost. They may still exist in our memories, our stories and everything they left inside us, but there is still something standing between where they are and where we are.
Time keeps ticking, and we keep losing people.
I hate it.
Today, I had to take my father to the emergency room.
Something random and strange started happening to him. His symptoms seemed to be leading somewhere that wasn’t good, and the best thing I could do—the only thing I could do—was get him to the emergency room.
Just seven days earlier, I had been in the hospital myself.
I was in excruciating pain, and they didn’t do anything.
No one did anything.
I called my friend Frank for help with a ride to the ER, but he was injured himself. I’m hoping he’s doing okay. I need to check in on him.
Now, seven days later, I was back in the ER—this time with my father.
The first thing the woman taking his vitals said to me was something like, “We hate to see our parents get old, right?”
“I hate it,” I told her.
“It’s good that you’re being cautious,” she said.
“Yeah. I mean, he is 75, and the symptoms weren’t good.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter that he’s 75,” she said. “The symptoms alone were bad.”
“Yeah, that’s true.”
I instantly thought about the day before my mother passed.
I was driving her home from the grocery store when she held out her arm to me.
“Look, Shorty, I’m old. Feel it.”
She was showing me the wrinkled, paper-thin skin on her arm. I took her arm in my hand with love and told her, “I don’t want this for you.”
As we drove, we passed the clinic where she said her insurance had scheduled her to see a doctor. I told her that couldn’t be right because it was a pediatric clinic.
We both realized her insurance company had made a mistake.
After she passed, I noticed that she had changed the appointment.
She listened to me.
Now there I was again, standing in an emergency room while someone took my father’s vitals and talked to me about parents getting old.
I didn’t want to hear it.
I didn’t want my father in that condition. I didn’t want to watch him aging in front of me. I didn’t want to feel as though I had somehow returned to a moment I had already lived—only this time, it was my father in front of me instead of my mother.
Fortunately, my father pulled through.
There was never a clear explanation for what he experienced. His vitals were fine. His lab work was fine. His X-rays were fine. Slowly, his color returned and his pain subsided.
Despite the unexpected trip to the ER, it was a win.
But it wasn’t a trip I wanted to make—not only because of everything already happening inside my own body, but because I never wanted my father to be in that condition in the first place.
My jaw feels out of place. I believe it has been contributing to the pain and compression running through the back of my head, my neck, my mid-back and my lower back.
It is an ugly sensation.
Horrible, really.
It feels like something fundamental in my body is no longer sitting where it belongs, and the rest of me is suffering because of it.
Yet there I was, driving my father to the emergency room, trying to push my own pain aside while wondering whether I was about to lose him too.
I thought about my mother and how I wish I could have taken her to the hospital the moment she first started complaining about what she was feeling. Instead, some time passed.
My father tells me not to blame myself and not to keep looking back into it.
I’m no doctor.
But then again, I’m no doctor now either.
All I can do is what I’m capable of doing in the moment. I can’t know everything. I can’t see everything coming. I can’t go backward and change what has already happened.
I could only take my father to the hospital.
So I did.
At the same time, life does not stop and politely wait for one crisis to end before introducing another.
There are still bills, household responsibilities, appointments, people depending on me and ordinary tasks requiring concentration while my mind is being pulled in ten different directions.
I was supposed to assist someone today and didn’t because I had the wrong time in my head. I don’t even know how that happened.
But I do know how it happened.
I’m overwhelmed.
I’m trying to function through pain while worrying about my father, thinking about my mother, trying to figure out what is happening to my jaw and waiting for the lawyers to tell me what they want me to do.
There is a possibility that I may need jaw surgery.
I don’t have jaw-surgery money.
I have already completed two local consultations and one consultation near the border. I have one more local consultation coming up Wednesday.
The two local options are very expensive. I don’t have that kind of money.
I do have border money.
Hopefully, the third local consultation presents an option I can pull off, but it will probably still be expensive compared with going south.
If the lawyers tell me I can go down south, then down south it is.
The sooner, the better.
I need my jaw fixed.
Hell, with everything happening, I was even able to make a trip to Mexico and back.
During the drive, I caught up with a really good friend of mine who told me his father was now dealing with stage-four cancer. I knew his father had been going through something, but I didn’t realize how bad it had become.
That sucked.
There were a lot of tears on the road. He told me about everything going wrong in his life, and naturally, I had plenty of negative things happening in mine to share with him.
Afterward, he said, “Well, I’m glad we got all the negative stuff out. Now we can try to enjoy the trip.”
It was difficult for me, but I tried.
I tried to enjoy spending time with my friend. I managed to get a dental cleaning while I was there and collected prices for the work I may have done next time—if I go back, or when I go back.
I also shared some of the new music I had been creating before the accident. That work has been on hold for the last couple of months because the accident stopped me right in the middle of it, but at least I was able to share what I had already created.
I shared the two screenplays I recently wrote: El Cachorrero and They Toxic.
My work can be found on my Stage 32 profile .
READ MY SCREENPLAYS:
We talked about my work in its entirety. After seeing what I had created, my friend told me he was interested in writing a book or a screenplay himself.
It inspired him.
That was cool. It means something to know that my work inspired a really good friend of mine to want to create something of his own.
We discussed his plans, and I told him I would help him write it when we both had the chance.
Maybe that will become something we create together.
He also told me that one of his favorite guitarists had just passed away: Eugene Richard O’Connor, better known as Cheetah Chrome, the guitarist for the punk-rock band the Dead Boys.
Ironically, the band was called the Dead Boys.
Cheetah Chrome was his Ozzy.
My friend told me about meeting him after attending so many concerts. When he finally had the opportunity, he didn’t ask for an autograph.
He asked for a hug.
And he got one.
He doesn’t have a signature or some object he can show people as proof that the moment happened. He doesn’t need one.
It was something between him and the artist—between him and someone whose work touched his life.
That is all that matters.
Death really fucking sucks.
We talked about a lot of things, tried to enjoy the rest of the trip and eventually made it back home.
Somehow, through everything else, I have also managed to get mechanic work done and still squeeze in some kind of social life.
I don’t know how.
I don’t know when I found the time, the strength or the right mindset to do any of it.
But somehow, I did.
Now I have to wait for a response from my attorneys. I need to know whether I should stay local or whether they are okay with me returning to the border to get my mouth, jaw and teeth fixed.
So I’m back in limbo.
I have to go through all of this—every appointment, every consultation, every decision about money and every day of pain—all because some idiots don’t know how to fucking slow down.
Then there is Yin-Yang.
I have an appointment tomorrow afternoon to surrender him. I don’t think I want to do it. In fact, I don’t think there is much of a decision left to make.
I love the little guy.
At first, I only wanted to get him vaccinated so he would be more adoptable. Now I want to get him vaccinated because I think I’m going to keep him.
I just need to figure out how to afford it while everything else is happening.
I wasn’t planning on having another cat.
That wasn’t the plan with Liliana either. I rescued her for the sake of rescuing her and finding her a good home. But Liliana was different. She behaved like a normal cat.
Yin-Yang is not a normal cat.
He is still very young, probably around six months old, give or take a month or two. He is frightened of nearly everything and everyone. He is afraid to touch the floor inside the house. He is afraid of being outside. He is afraid of other animals and other cats. He prefers confined places and needs a little space that feels like his own.
Before I took him in, I would come home and find him crying in the middle of the street. Sometimes he would lie there like a suicidal little Siamese kitten.
I knew he needed extra help, so I gave him his own protected area and started nursing him back to health.
Now he trusts me.
He gets excited when he sees me. He hugs me. He sits on my lap for hours.
It has taken some of my time away from Monkey, which I never wanted. But somewhere between trying to save Yin-Yang and trying to find him another home, I fell in love with him.
So tomorrow may not be about surrendering him.
It may be about finding resources to keep him.
And then there is Practical Magic.
That movie has my mother’s essence all over it. She loved the original, but she didn’t make it here for the second one.
I know she would have wanted me to take her.
Without spoiling anything, the subjects of mortality and aging hit me hard.
It wasn’t only the story. It was seeing the actors older and knowing that the characters—and the people playing them—cannot escape time either.
That feeling isn’t limited to Practical Magic. It happens with all these new movies that bring back the actors and characters we grew up loving.
We watch them get older.
We watch their characters pass away.
Then, outside the movies, we watch our favorite actors, musicians, artists and entertainers die too.
I could mention Ozzy, but the list goes on.
Cheetah Chrome was my friend’s Ozzy.
It has been a horrible year. In many ways, it has been a horrible last few years.
Time keeps ticking, and we keep losing people we love.
I don’t want to watch my father get older. I don’t want to see him lying in another hospital bed. I don’t want to lose him.
I didn’t want to lose my mother.
I don’t even want to lose Monkey.
I hate aging.
I hate death.
When reality becomes this heavy, the mind searches for someplace else to go.
For a while now, one of those places has been Rick and Morty.
It originally premiered on Adult Swim, Cartoon Network’s nighttime programming block, and now I watch it on Max.
It has become part of nearly every little mini-vacation I have taken within recent years. It has played in hotel rooms, giving my brain somewhere else to exist for a while.
I watched it before the accident, but I especially leaned on it throughout everything that followed.
It is funny, absurd, highly intellectual and unapologetically adult. It plays with science, philosophy, existence, mortality, alternate realities and the idea of an infinite multiverse.
It is multifaceted, multidimensional and sometimes complete chaos.
Somehow, after watching it throughout all of this, I finally completed all nine seasons.
Maybe “completed” is a strange word to use for watching a television show, but it became part of the experience—something I could disappear into whenever I needed my mind to be somewhere other than inside my current reality.
In other words, it made a pretty good distraction from my own chaos.
Then there is Shorty.
Shorty was mostly a nickname used inside the house. Maybe some kids at school called me that after hearing what my parents called me, but outside of that, I tried to lay Shorty to rest as soon as I could.
I was born weighing only three pounds, four ounces, and I had been called Shorty since I was two years old. The name also carried a story from before me. My grandmother’s husband had been known as Shorty before he died in a towing accident.
I understood that it was an endearing nickname within my family, but after a while, I didn’t like it. I would get upset when my parents—especially my mother—called me Shorty.
It didn’t fit me.
I wasn’t short, and I wasn’t tall enough for Shorty to work as some ironic nickname either. It just felt awkward.
That wasn’t me.
My father even told me that he never liked the nickname for me. He wanted people to call me Carlos Jr. or Carlitos.
I always liked Carlitos.
Eventually, my mother picked up on the fact that I didn’t want to be called Shorty anymore. She started calling me “my Carlitos.”
As I got older, I began choosing my own names.
Nocturnal was the moniker I used when I started rapping during my teenage years. Later, I shortened it to Noc. I carried those names throughout my teenage years and much of my young-adult life until I eventually landed on Los Official.
They were different names from different periods of my life—different versions of me that existed along the way.
Now, after spending so long trying to lay Shorty to rest, I brought the name back and included it in the header video for this entry—also because Shorty rhymes with Morty.
In a blog entry about alternate realities and different versions of myself, it felt right to acknowledge one of my earliest versions—the one I spent most of my life trying not to be called.
But now the name makes me think about something else.
If I could have my mother back, I would take back every time I got upset with her for calling me Shorty.
I would let her call me anything she wanted.
Shorty.
Carlitos.
Anything.
I would give anything just to hear her call me again.
But I can’t.
That is the barricade.
Somewhere along the way, the distraction of Rick and Morty started connecting with something deeper in me:
Manifestation.
If there are infinite versions of reality, then somewhere within that possibility is a version of me who is not going through what I’m going through right now.
There is a version of me whose jaw is where it belongs.
His neck doesn’t hurt. His back doesn’t hurt. He isn’t spending his days trying to pry himself loose from pain and compression.
There is a version of me living where I want to live, doing what I want to do and possessing the things I have been trying to call into my life.
There is a version of me who made it.
That is the version I’m trying to tune into.
I think of it as entering the quantum field and tapping into the Source—the place containing every possibility of who I am and who I can still become.
Whether another version of me literally exists in another universe or represents the future self I’m trying to create, the purpose is the same:
I need to see him.
I need to feel what he feels.
I need to think the way he thinks.
I need to live like the man I’m trying to become is already reaching back for me.
That is why I created my vision board—my manifestation board.
It contains images of what I desire and how I want my life to become. I focus on those images and try to see where I’m living, what I’m doing and what life looks and feels like when this painful chapter is no longer my present reality.
I have even considered printing the images on vinyl sticker paper, cutting them out and placing them where I cannot avoid seeing them—on the mirror in the restroom, near the windshield or throughout the house.
I could also print copies of the entire board and place them on different walls.
Not because pictures possess some automatic magic, but because I need constant reminders of where I’m going.
The vision board isn’t the only thing I created to make life easier on myself.
I put together programs for my exercises, spine mobility, rehabilitation, diet, recipes, grocery lists and everything else I need while trying to put myself back together.
Then I had to decide where to keep it all.
At first, I thought I would save all the PDFs on my phone or upload them to the cloud. Then I ran out of space and started creating another cloud account just to hold everything.
Finally, I thought, You know what? I’ll just make a website.
That became MyDailyBread.online .
I created it as one central place for everything I’m using to rebuild myself. It covers habits, nutrition, mobility, recovery and strength. It includes my spine-mobility and rehabilitation routines, exercises, food guide, recipes and grocery list.
It also has a spiritual side where I can collect scripture, video sermons that catch my attention and anything else about my walk with God that comes to mind.
The website also connects to something I call Seven Wins, a separate group of exercises for longevity.
Instead of searching through my phone, digging through PDFs or trying to remember which cloud account contains what, I can open the website from anywhere and find what I need.
I didn’t really create it for anyone else.
I made it for me.
But it’s there. If someone else finds something on it that helps them, I can share it.
At a time when my mind and body both feel overwhelmed, My Daily Bread gives me one less thing to keep track of.
It is my foundation—a place where I can return every day and remind myself what I’m supposed to be doing to move forward.
Right now, pain is demanding almost all of my attention.
Fear is demanding the rest.
If I spend every day bitching, moaning and speaking negatively about everything happening to me, then pain and fear become the only reality I continue to feed.
That doesn’t mean I’m pretending this doesn’t hurt.
It hurts like hell.
It doesn’t mean I’m pretending I’m not scared.
I am.
It means I refuse to believe that this is where my story ends.
There is a woman I follow on Instagram named Juliette Tamsin . She talks about manifestation and always seems to carry an uplifting spirit.
In one particular video , she talks about maintaining a positive mindset after experiencing something horrible that left her with severe injuries and all of her teeth broken.
Despite everything that has happened to her, she remains determined to stay positive.
She keeps reminding herself that it is temporary. She's currently in it. She tries to see what remains instead of focusing exclusively on what has been taken from her.
Her philosophy is that it could be worse.
She has a GoFundMe or something of the equivalent up to collect for her surgery. This is probably something I will need to do also.
Yes, it could always be worse.
That is difficult to say because pain should not become a competition. But it is still true that my accident could have ended much differently.
It might not have stopped at my jaw, my neck or my back.
I could have lost something.
I could have suffered injuries from which there was no coming back.
I’m still here.
My father is still here.
Monkey is still here.
Yin-Yang found me, and he is still here.
So perhaps this moment requires two things from me at once: counting the blessings that remain and focusing on the blessings still coming.
My jaw is going to be fixed.
My facial structure is going to return to normal.
My body is going to recover.
I am going to get through this.
Everything I’m going through now is part of the process, not the destination.
Everything is working for my good, even when I cannot yet understand how.
This is temporary.
Somewhere—within the quantum field, within the multiverse, within the future, within God’s plan or simply buried underneath the pain—there is another version of me.
He isn’t trapped where I am right now.
He is healed.
He is focused.
He is creating.
He is living.
Every time I choose faith over fear, gratitude over despair and vision over whatever the present moment appears to be, I tune a little closer to his frequency.
Maybe this is me versus me.
The version of me trapped inside everything going wrong versus the version of me who already knows how the story turns out.
For now, I’m using the multiverse as my distraction.
But maybe distraction isn’t the right word.
Maybe it’s direction.
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