Present day~
The classical composer Carl Orff stated you cannot escape where you come from, where you are from remains an indelible part of your makeup, regardless of where you wind up later in life. For him that place was German Bavaria at the turn of the 20th century, for me that place is the murder capital of the world, Detroit Michigan. What captivates me about this great lake’s industrial empire is not its crime statistics, rather its music. Detroit’s lightning in a bottle is the unpredictable raw fury of Rock and Roll, the war cry detonation of Proto-Punk, the infectious pop anthems of Motown and the ceaseless innovations of Hip Hop. Any music buff will tell you that Detroit is one of the main fulcrums on which the power of music pivots.
The sense that Detroit is a city of misfits and outcasts, even in terms of the music industry, is pretty well established. There might be slicker studios and shinier suits in the city of lost angels, The big Apple and London Town but Detroit has always had that gritty, hard edged, working class hero kind of vibe that took music through the metamorphosis it needed to evolve into something truly special.
Back in the late 60’s and early 70’s, Detroit icons The MC5 and The Stooges were the musical Motor-City Goliath to a lesser known band called The Dogs. Breakin’ mother fuckin’ decibel levels from one end of the country to the other, The Dogs and their manager, my father, Bill Sheets, revolutionized the world with three defiant chords and unwittingly started a new musical genre while they were at it, punk rock. Detroit is a substantial part of my musical DNA because it’s where I come from and I can’t escape it. That might be how I feel today but it sure wasn't how I felt growing up. Read on.
Diary Entries
May 9th, 1997.
I’m 13 years old and I uh… feel really at odds with where I’m from, I always have. I don’t resonate with my family, the kids at school, Detroit; but not just that, I don’t even resonate with planet earth. This is not because I am some sort of cliché, angsty, adolescent human teenager. Far from it. The star-dust of my molecular structure tells it plain. I am an alien.
Post Script~ If you don't believe me then here is my 1st grade picture which hopefully proves the point.
I decided it’s probably best to not tell to many people what I am. I don’t want to set off any alarm bells. I’ve already seen enough raised eyebrows to last a lifetime.
Even though I am an alien, nothing and I mean nothing terrifies me more than the thought of aliens, weird, I know. I am completely fascinated and tormented by what utterly scares me more than anything else in the world. Does this mean I am terrified of myself?
For the past few months I have been attempting to build a contact device which will alert the mother ship that I need to be rescued. I really hope they are listening because I need to go home. Night after night I go out in the backyard with my dog Luke Skywalker and my trusty telescope and we document UFO sightings. So far, I have seen class 3V8, 5BX, GKL9 and even a 001P. I learned this neat lingo from my UFO identification guidebook which allows us curious seekers to document their sightings categorically.
Then something happened to me recently that I don’t really know how to categorize. This is what I remember. I was outside as usual with the telescope, it was approximately 10:30 pm. My diligent work as the night watch-boy of the skies was about to pay off because that night the UFO to end all UFO’s decided to show up. A craft hovering a mere 100 feet from the earth’s surface, about the size of a football field, although it was so massive I couldn't really make out the total circumference. It made no sound whatsoever, just silently appeared out of nowhere, hovering right above my driveway like some sort of all-seeing inter-dimensional colossal alien eyeball. Sounds unbelievable, but it’s true.
I walked down the driveway and looked straight up at it. Complete and total was the fixation my brain held for this rouge cosmic chariot. I remember thinking it was weird my earth parents and siblings weren’t looking out the window, why no one on the block was aware of a giant alien spacecraft hovering too low not to be noticed. I recall the street lights flickering out, no cars driving by on the road. Time had stopped ticking. I didn’t hear my dog barking anymore, I didn’t notice the wind had ceased blowing, I no longer felt my neck hurting from looking straight up at all those baffling lights for who knows how long, I didn’t even notice when they took me. Yes, they.
The missing hours is a common phenomenon reported by abductees who experience they have lost minutes, hours or even days of their life after contact with ETs. This also proved to be true in my case. The feeling that your memories have been tampered with is a most singular sensation. I don’t know what happened to me that night, or how I got back to my Michigan driveway, but whatever tampered with my memory was unable to remove the entire experience. I have flashes of them from time to time in my head. Yes, them. They didn’t have to return me to earth but they did, so now I’m just like you, a terrestrial bound orphan searching for the purpose and the reason for why I am here.
Post Script~ I found out later as an adult this sighting was correlated by Witnesses all across Phoenix, and various South West cities where thousands of people on March 13th, 1997 saw what they describe as a football sized craft with strange lights, making no sound, hovering super low over their cities. The phenomenon has been coined as, The Phoenix Lights.
October 26th 2001
It has been about 4 years since that fateful night that the giant spaceship came and blew the mind of an awkward, awestruck 13 year old kid wide freaking open. Since then I have been playing guitar a lot. I was in a Nirvana cover band and took classical guitar lessons from a guy named Phil for three years. There was a conspiracy going around that Phil was actually Kurt Cobain hiding out as a guitar teacher in a Detroit mall after faking his suicide. Pretty logical.
About 2 weeks ago I released my first album called, March To The Sun. Lots of the songs on the album happened because my best friend, who is an alien-being named Kozmar, made the songs happen. I’m not sure if the memories of my past alien experiences are getting into focus or what but Kozmar is real. I even wrote a song called, Kozmar’s Reel.
Kozmar is kind of hard to describe. I describe him as HE, but I think he is without gender as we know it here on earth. His body is made mostly from outer space star portals and green icicles that ice blue wings shoot out from. The wings flutter all around enabling him to levitate and travel great distances. He is all green, his mouth is a portal to other dimensions and his eyes are hexagon shaped. Kozmar’s planet is called Ozglazemotheiginiginiginiginiginiginiginin and the only way to get there is to go down the outer-space slide of fierce mushroom elephants who are standing on top of smiling oranges that cannot frown.
Kozmar lives there with a beautiful angel named Viola who wields a giant sword. Viola also has a special song on the new album. Of course, the invisible caterpillars with names of Mark live there too and the colors are there but Kozmar is all green just like his planet.
Present Day, April 1st, 2023
Creativity. Freedom. Imagination. Magic. Transcendence. Play. Joy. That's what Kozmar is all about. He is my teacher, my comrade, my sidekick, my friend, my guide, my cohort, my companion, my ally, my accomplice, he is me and I am Kozmar. I painted giant Kozmar murals across every wall in my room as a teenager much to the bemusement of my father and now I bemuse my wife and son, for I have returned to the land of the emerald coated paintbrush, finishing the above piece just as the fabled green comet came swirling near our auric stratosphere in early February of this year.
I stopped communicating with Kozmar back in 2002, don't ask me why because I don't know the answer, it wasn't a conscious choice. Kozmar remained a distant, though sacred part of my psychedelic past until 2 years ago he started to get in touch again. It happened when I began to write a new song called, D is For Diamon. This 11 minute prog-delic odyssey unconsciously was paying tribute to my long lost alien brother. In a nutshell, or rather, in a spaceship, Kozmar is how I got started in the world of music and song-writing. All those first songs I wrote were influenced by him. He allowed me the freedom of uninhibited experimentation that remains with me to this day.
It is an opportune time to share these above experiences as they are currently metamorphosing into new songs, albums, comic books and dimension cubes. These days I no longer feel like I don't belong here on earth, I mean there must have been some good-gosh darn-tootin reason I got left here! So why fight against it? I've embraced my Detroit roots and reconnected with both my heritage and with Kozmar.
This feels like rapturous liberation to me, tremendous life-giving energy beams are shooting out in every direction, all at once, like a never-ending grand finale fireworks display, erupting in a cosmic tornado of infinite singing echos which cradle futuristic moonbeam children in an orange peel.
The compulsion I feel to make art has never waned, for It was an alien-being from another dimension who came to Detroit and made a wayward soul feel part of something special, something bigger than anything I could have conceived alone.
My wish for you dear reader is to surrender to the temptation of wonder. Yes, touch the tendrils of the Daimon who resides within the power seat of your own spirit world. We are walking, talking human antenna's, whichever station we choose to tune ourselves into will become our very own experiential reality.
The universe will widen itself in direct proportion to the eyes which gaze upon it.
Your mother ship is waiting, It is all yours for the taking.
Your friend,
through thick and thin,
~Dalrymple MacAlpin
April 1st, 2023. Waxing Gibbous
“Everyone is a divinity in disguise, a god playing the fool.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson