Life is Messy

often, the state of the kitchen is the state of the mind, confused and unsure men, pliable men, are the thinkers. their kitchens are like their minds, cluttered with garbage, dirty ware, impurity, but they are aware of their mind-state and find some humor in it. at times, with a violent burst of fire they defy the eternal deities and come up with a lot of shining that we sometimes call creation.... the man with the ever-orderly kitchen is the freak.... his kitchen is his mind-state: all in order, settled, he has let life condition him quickly to a basened and hardened complex of defensive and soothing thought-order....

Charles Bukowski

...badly underemployed and working on a novel about dysfunctional superheroes...biking downtown daily for the most intense and demanding vinyasa yoga classes I can find...discovering new ways and means for exploring and exploiting edges...leaving a pile of sweaty t-shirts, along with other laundry, by last week grown to the point that now I don’t want to deal with it simply because there’s too much to carry...sunlight can, now, be seen through four significant areas of my yoga mat...in line with hands and feet...which might seem cool in a sunny, happy, yoga hippie kinda way...put it in the right words along with a picture of a sunset and it’ll get a thousand “likes” on Facebook...but maybe, really, I just need a new mat, badly...writing about other people’s books*...piled around the deteriorating Ikea chair friends find so comforting...mp3 player blasting X, Cat Power, Mary Halvorson, Arvo Part, Frank Zappa, Miles Davis, and the Stones’ Get Yer Ya Ya’s Out...coffee ready if I can get up the gumption to go and pour a cup this early in the morning...glasses held together with tape on both sides under disheveled hair badly in need of basic grooming....for a while, I was getting haircuts from this old guy who’d be asleep in the chair when I got there, and I’d have to yell to tell him how I wanted it cut...the last time, he seemed so out of it, didn’t even ask...

....one thing you have to get used to living in the big city is that it never really gets dark...wildlife is the birds always coming and going from the power lines outside my windows, their flight sometimes causing shadows inside the apartment, making me think, for a moment, that they’re in here with me...

...Democracy is messy, by definition...the trouble with the concept of heaven is that none of us, in the long run, could really be comfortable there...an eternity of having our every failing magnified in comparison to the perfection all around...messiness is our condition, underneath all the careful ordering and cleaning products...but that doesn’t mean I don’t need to do something with that pile of dirty laundry, and soon...

* my latest rants & reviews at Elephant Journal: Addressing the Question of Whether Matthew Remski should be burned at the stake for Yogic Heresy and Ahimsa Be Damned: When Buddhists Attack...