I met this woman in AA who was a massage therapist. She sold me her massage table for $100 because she was moving and didn’t need it anymore. She was tall like me and it was a pretty big table, so it worked out great.

One time, she took me to meet her friend who was into a lot of spiritual stuff. It seemed like weird shit at the time, but I have since evolved a little and learned a few things. Looking back, I realize I was just clueless at the time and didn’t know hardly anything.

This lady had a map on the wall that predicted the future. It was called a Prophecy Map. It showed all the changes in the earth, like where new coastlines were going to be, after all the earthquakes and cataclysmic stuff would happen.

Apparently, there are over 250 prophecies from all over the world saying the exact same thing, from the Hopi Indians to the Mayans and from all the major religions; they all say there’s going to be a big problem with the earth around 2012. I looked at the map and thought to myself, how stupid is this map. No one can predict all these changes and with such pinpoint accuracy. It’s just a make-believe map.

Or was it…

Years later, I did some more research and found out a few more things about how the planet was changing. I’m not going to flat out say that the map was right or wrong. But I will say that certain knowledge has been presented to me, and I believe that it is a possibility, that there will be major earth changes in our lifetime and just in case these things happen, I want to have that darn map.

I found out where the map was made and bought it online. It took about two weeks to arrive and during that time I told a lot of people about it, how the water was coming and that they better start learning to sail. I told them there was going to be a lot of big earthquakes sometime within the next 10 or 15 years, and that I had a map explaining the whole thing, like that the water was coming and that L.A. would be underwater and that New York would be underwater and that a lot of other places all over the world were going to be underwater and that a lot of people were going to die.

No one really was all that impressed and I guess it didn’t really matter all that much to me. It was partly a joke and partly real. I don’t mind living in different worlds and I can go back and forth fairly easily. It’s not that hard, actually, but I have noticed that not many people want to go there and that it’s a fairly unpopular thing to do, so I keep it to myself quite often.

Bill Cosby had a routine on one of his records about Noah and how his neighbor was always asking him what he was building and how Noah said it was an ark and then he’d ask them how long could they tread water?

I always thought that was pretty funny. I sort of incorporated that bit in the routine I told everyone about this map and that the water was coming and how long could YOU tread water. I also used to tell people that they should buy a sailboat and invest in solar-powered stuff, just in case there was a big flood of some kind.

Everyone knows that sooner or later there’s going to be big changes in the earth and whether or not it takes a million years or ten thousand or next week, sooner or later it’s gonna change.

Everyone also knows that there have been ice ages and dinosaurs and volcanoes and tsunamis and fires and meteors and all kinds of other cataclysmic things over and over throughout the years. It’s just geological fact, not some weird idea. Anyway, I was really into this map and couldn’t wait for it to get to my house because it was a cool map and I wanted to show it to my friends.

On the day it arrived, I went to work like always. I had a little recording studio on Hollywood Boulevard and Vine in a mangy old 12-story building. My studio was on the 11th floor. I was meeting a new producer/engineer to show him my studio and see if we could get some work, etc.

I met him in the lobby and we took the elevator to the 11th floor and walked towards my studio. As we got to the door, I noticed an odd thing was happening. There was a little bit of water dripping from the ceiling right in front of my studio door. I had never seen a leak like that in my building and figured it was just some stupid pipe or whatever and that it would get fixed soon. I didn’t really think too much of it.

But when I opened the door I couldn’t believe my eyes. Niagara Falls was pouring through the ceiling onto all of my delicate and fragile music and recording equipment! My entire studio was being totally destroyed by thousands of gallons of water gushing from the ceiling onto my keyboards and computer and mixing board and all of my stuff!

I was horrified and frozen in shock. My prospective client said, “I guess we won’t be doing business any time soon,” and he turned around and split.

I was in panic mode and frantically started grabbing all my stuff and unplugging everything and dragging it out into the hallway where it was dry.

My whole world was being destroyed by WATER!!!!!!!!

The water came all right, but only in my studio!

It just so happened that the water tower was DIRECTLY above my studio and I was the ONLY one in the entire building of hundreds of other offices and studios with any water damage.

I find that kind of an odd coincidence.

I had been totally obsessed with water coming and telling everyone to watch out and prepare themselves for water destruction coming any second, and then the water came in a completely different way than I was predicting and drenched my whole collection of musical gear. It was a catastrophe.

After I pulled a couple things into the hall I realized that I needed some help and couldn’t deal with the entire situation all by myself. Just at that moment, the building janitor maintenance guy showed up with a five-gallon, teeny- weeny pail and walked into my totally drenched studio while hundreds of gallons of water poured through the entire ceiling and he set the little pail under one little stream of dripping water in the middle of the room.

I just looked at that imbecile and said, “Is that all you’re gonna do, man? You’re just gonna stick a little bucket under less that .000001% of the problem?”

He didn’t say a word.

“Call the fire department or the plumbing people,” I yelled at him. “Let’s run up to the roof and turn off the water mains. Let’s do something!!!!!” My whole business and recording studio was being totally destroyed, right before our eyes.

“We have to act swiftly and decisively right NOW to save my life, and that’s all you can do?” I asked him, pointing at the miniscule pail.

It was like a sketch comedy from the Carol Burnett show where Tim Conway is the goofy old guy who can barely walk inches at a time and he’s the maintenance guy and I’m Harvey Korman who’s trying to actually solve a severe emergency.

The old lame maintenance guy told me that he already called the water department and that they were going to come over in 15 minutes to shut off the water leak.

“15 minutes?!!” I asked him. “That’s the best our water department people can do?”

What are people going to do when there’s 100 billion tons of water pouring into Manhattan? We’ll probably hire Tim Conway to put a five-gallon bucket down to solve the problem.

I just couldn’t believe the mess that was happening right before my eyes. No one was there to help me, and I had to watch all my efforts of the past five years of building and designing and wiring and learning and assembling all the complicated and detailed recording studio equipment being destroyed right before my very eyes.

Every thing I owned was totally destroyed and soaked, and I mean SOAKED. All my super-sensitive, delicate, DRY, computer gear, and recording gear and keyboards and floppy disks and printers and hard drives were totally drenched!

Thank God the power wasn’t turned on or all of my gear would have been zapped instantly. I had NO insurance and I was just basically fucked.

I ran downstairs and told the property managers what was going on and they said that they weren’t liable for anything and that I should have had insurance. They showed me my lease and it said explicitly somewhere that they were NOT responsible for any damages in the event of a water leak or fire, or earthquake or all kinds of stuff.

I was a stoner when I’d moved in there five years earlier and didn’t even bother reading the lease. I didn’t even care or think of things like fires or floods or whatever kinds of things like that. Why should I be negative and a worrywart? Well, I should have had insurance and was just a dumb ass for not having it.

That was the end of my studio on Hollywood and Vine and even though it was a HUGE nightmare and destroyed a lot of my stuff, it was, in a weird way, a GOOD thing. I really was over having a commercial studio in an old, disgusting, dirty, rotten office building and the whole “vibe” thing of being on Hollywood and Vine was totally a joke and didn’t matter to me anymore. Been there, done that. I always wanted to have my studio at home where I could wake up and make music and have everything all organized and neat and tidy the way I like things to be.

I took all my main pieces of gear to an electronics repair place and asked if there was anything that could be done. They told me as long as the power wasn’t on there was a good chance all the gear could be dried out and cleaned and restored to normal operation.

After all that destruction, it came down to $3,000 to fix most of my stuff.

I told my parents about the disaster and how my entire business had been destroyed by an act of God and once again, they took pity on me and I was rescued.

I think God was playing a pretty mean trick on me that day.

The water had come, just like I said it would, but it didn’t quite pan out the way my stupid map said it was going to. Maybe the business of predicting water catastrophes with a Prophecy Map wasn’t exactly for me.