Decades of Me

...a yoga teacher I know said something about the tendency, this time of year in particular, to set intentions...resolutions...that are essentially negative...centered around parts of ourselves we want to be rid of...suggesting that instead we might try focusing on good things that have grown in us over the past year or decade...ways we’ve become kinder, healthier...things like that...which I don’t find difficult...

...though I still have a bit of trouble with this whole big whoop about new year’s eve new year’s day start of a new decade thing...and not just because of that string of miserable New Year’s Eve party experiences that caused me to forsake them years ago...

...some writers have suggested that this almost-past-decade-nobody-could-come-up-with-a-decent-name-for began, actually, not with the flipping of calendar digits and immensely anticlimactic Y2K...(I mean, seriously, even if we can’t have the Apocalypse, is a worldwide digital breakdown really too much to ask for?)...but with 9/11....bringing an abrupt, if late, close to a decade of relative peace and prosperity that started early with the fall of the Berlin Wall...just like the 30’s began with the stock market crash, and the 60's ended with Watergate...or Altamont...or Disco....okay, clearly, this system isn't perfect, either...

...nonetheless, I found myself applying its logic a bit more personally...even if rushing to do so and get this post up before midnight...(yeah, I know)...

...starting in 1966...or so I’m told...there was a relatively innocent decade called childhood...

...followed, somewhere around 1978, by one that lasted only ’til '83 or so, even if it felt like an eternity in whatever circle of hell’s reserved for the lonely and despised...

...leading to what I’ve dubbed my psychedelic era...which could also be called the really really confused decade....which might be the same thing...

...and it lasted approximately ’til 1994 or so...eventually giving way to the (semi-)respectable decade...or the trying to put it all behind me decade...or the deep denial decade...

...which crash landed some time in 2001 in a period of depression so deep and dark that everything, it seemed, needed to be reevaluated...and, in order to do that, nothing could be denied...everything had to be seen and explored...opened up in a gradual process...commencing what might be called my second psychedelic era...without the artificial sweeteners...

...and I really don’t see that ending tonight...nor, truth be told, do I really think I’d want it to...

Nidra

I’ll be your mirror, reflect what you are in case you don’t know...
Lou Reed

People are always calling me a mirror, and if a mirror looks into a mirror, what is there to see?
Andy Warhol

...toes fuzzy and pink...remember dipping into cold water on the Oregon coast 1987...a mellow place, even if not feeling that way inside...scents of incense, wet bark, and self-righteousness...brightly colored star fish and those long green whips of seaweed...bright blue anemones in profusion on the rocks along the shoreline where I walked...

...knees harbor nostalgia for early childhood...when they touched the earth with every movement...dumb feet dragging behind...

...like a globe representing a tortured world...churning and rumbling at the most inopportune times...my stomach is prone to self-dramatizing...

...spine like an old soldier, too long stuck on guard duty...soldiering on, nonetheless...dreaming of learning to dance, like a snake...

...fingers have a regrettable tendency to get into trouble...well, a tendency, at least...can’t say I always regret it...

...shoulders tense, hard...impregnable bulwarks...or so they’d like to think...against dangers real and imagined...past and present...and far too often unable to tell the difference...

...throat feels lonely...too much struggling to express what needs to be said...to establish connections...victim of post nasal drip and whatever crap enters through the mouth...and yet, tirelessly bringing the breath in and out...I’m learning to pay more attention to my throat...

...nose often irritated...kinda like it’s the angry talk-radio host of my face...but open to whatever comes around...taking in as much as it throws out...hard to say what its politics are...

...right forehead, this morning, from the eye on up, a dark grey cloud...though dissipating as warmth and light gradually filter through...



...artwork stolen from Karin.......okay, so she gave me permission to steal it...which if yer gonna insist on bein' all literal n' shit means that, in a purely technical sense, it wasn’t actually stolen...but just lemme feel like an outlaw, awright?...

This Actually Happened...

...there was this woman I was feeling really attracted to, and she was sitting near me...not conventionally beautiful, I don’t think...but not notably unconventional...or unusual, looking, either...though I certainly wouldn’t want to say she looked ordinary...because she didn’t....and, beyond that, I can’t say much...since I didn’t have my glasses on...and the room was kinda dim...so, really, I could hardly see her at all...don’t know for sure if I’d recognize her if I saw her again...though I’ve been thinking about her ever since...

...anyway, she was talking somewhat loudly to this other woman across the way...can’t say much of anything at all about her...but they were talking in this strange language...kinda clipped, choppy-sounding, somewhat guttural and staccato, like an early new wave song...and I wondered for a minute or two just what language it was...until, after a little while, I recognized it...realized it was English...though I still didn’t understood a word they said...

Vegetable Wisdom

...“sweet,” in the somewhat archaic definition of the Oxford English Dictionary, is that which “affords enjoyment or gratifies desire.” Like a shimmering equal sign, the word sweetness denoted a reality commensurate with human desire: it stood for fulfillment.
Michael Pollan

...my doctor told me my blood pressure and weight have increased the last three times I’ve seen him...not bad, but going up, nonetheless...which seems outrageous considering all the yoga, biking, and meditation I’ve been doing....then, perhaps, a bit less so considering all the cheap deep-fried Chinese take-out, Tastykakes, Mexican Cokes...with real sugar!...and margaritas....it really is all about balance...I’m positive about that...but, apparently, that particular balance hasn’t been balancing nearly as well as I’d hoped...

...generally speaking, that thing yoga teachers say about listening to your body is sound advice....trouble is, my body still thinks I’m a hunter-gatherer...struggling for bare subsistence against the ever-present threat of starvation...which is reasonable enough, considering that the vast majority of human beings who’ve ever lived have been exactly that...and thus far more attracted to the deep fried saber-tooth-tiger-on-a-stick at some stone-aged equivalent of my corner Chinese take-out than the organic broccoli bush frequented by those mellow cro-magnons down the way etching You Can’t Hug Your Children With Sharp Sticks onto their cave walls...

...as such, sometimes I gotta tell my body to shut up so I can exercise some vegetable wisdom...which is what I’m trying to do now...just in time for the holidays...

What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?
Lin Yutang

...went to see some bands play at this art space...technically a loading dock....it was BYOL...which at least one guy did to the point that he probably shouldn’t have been so close to the loading dock...but there were lots of snacks...including these colorful cupcakes...my friend who works at a coffee shop that sells really good, really high quality pastries asked how they were...I said they were good...but in that real old-school PTA-mom-who-buys-a-cupcake-mix-and-that-really-sugary-kinda-colorful-frosting-at-the-supermarket kinda way...which, really, is a more primal kinda good than you’re likely to experience with anything more refined...

When you’re a kid you can eat amazing amounts of food. All I ate when I was a kid was candy. Just candy, candy, candy. And the only really clear thought I had as a kid was get candy.
Jerry Seinfeld

...which, when you think about it...or, at least, when I think about it...could be a contributing factor...along with these holidays coming up just when things have started getting cold...and living in a culture of frenzied consumption...for my habitual resemblance, by the time the new year rolls around, to the StayPuft Marshmallow Man...because not only are there lots of high calorie treats around...but some of them are supplied by my mom...or at least in the presence of my mom, along with other family members and all kinds of rituals meant to evoke nostalgia for those sweet, squishy idealized childhood experiences...and, if I’m not feelin’ it...as, often, I’m not...there’s always more sugary stuff around...

...happy holidays, folks...enjoy some high calorie crap for me...

Talkin' Nonsense With Dostoyevsky

Talking nonsense is man’s only privilege that distinguishes him from all other organisms. If you keep talking big nonsense, you will get to sense. I am a man, therefore I talk nonsense. Nobody ever got a single truth without talking nonsense fourteen times first. Maybe even a hundred and fourteen.
Dostoyevsky

...a guy I know shares a birthday with the guy who wrote Mein Kampf...I got the guy who wrote show me that I’m everywhere and get me home for tea...and I’m only a day away from the guy who said he shot a man in Reno just to watch him die....honestly, I don’t think this means much, but I’m not complaining, either...

...berenice left a comment on my Postmodern Yogi Bear post with a link to a story from the BBC involving a bear found sleeping in a campground in Washington state, surrounded by thirty-six empty beer cans...taken from campers’ coolers and opened with teeth and claws...need I mention that this makes me feel proud to be an American?...

...when I was twenty-one, hitch-hiked with a friend from Rome to Pompeii, where we had to leave our backpacks with this old lady in black who seemed like she’d probably been there since before the volcano erupted, to go and wander the ancient dead streets...climbing through windows where we weren’t supposed to go to see things closed off to other tourists....as we traipsed into the empty coliseum, history's weight seemed almost overwhelming...I thought wow...Pink Floyd played here...

...connections, it seems, are always tenuous...a shrink once told me small children go through a crisis when they realize they're actually separate from their mothers...autonomous, lonely beings in a frightening world....my question is when, exactly, does that crisis end?...

...if something is disappointing I know it’s not nothing, because nothing is not disappointing.
Andy Warhol

...Lao Tzu wrote when you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you....that is, with the right attitude, you can have everything you want...just like the new age people say....I doubt he was really talking about the mansion in the Hollywood hills, the private plane, or the movie star significant other, though...more likely, I think, he meant you can have everything you want when you stop wanting anything you don’t already have...

Making Imaginary Snowpeople Out of Rain

To recognize the basic goodness in everyone takes courage.
Tara Brach

...the holiday season is upon us....and I thought about being really postmodernly ironic and cute and putting a syrupy sweet Thomas Kinkade holiday image at the top of this post....trouble is, there’s kind of a fine line between being postmodernly ironic and cute and seriously sucking up the place...and that might just cross it...

...and, anyway, this is a time of year...or so I'm told...for dropping one’s cool, ironic stance and getting all warm, fuzzy, and spiritual...like so...

***THIS BWOG WUVS YOU***
***AND WISHES YOU A VEWWY MEWWY CHWISMUS***

...okay...that went waaaaaaay too far...and was kinda painfully ironic, anyway...so...perhaps an inspiring line from The New Testament?...

...I was stoned...
2 Corinthians 11:25

...alright, forget it...

...Bob Dylan came out with a Christmas album, Christmas in the Heart...and I’ve been listening to it while roasting chestnuts on an open fire, redecorating my apartment to look like a manger, and making imaginary snowpeople out of rain...all the while thinking if I keep listening to this, then maybe, just maybe, I’ll come to see it as something other than yet another twisted ironic joke Bob’s playing on his dedicated fans, like me, who he knows would buy a CD of him blowing his nose...which, truth be told, might sound better than his rendition of Here Comes Santa Claus....but, at least, the proceeds are all going toward providing food for people who need it...and that’s what it really should be all about, anyway, isn’t it?...

...(yes, I actually ended that last paragraph with something sincere...even providing a link...as if my Grinch heart grew three sizes...)

In From the Storm

If we are honest with ourselves, most of us will have to admit that we live out our lives in an ocean of fear.
Jon Kabat-Zinn

To be awake is to be alive.
Henry David Thoreau

...was talking about how I sometimes feel nostalgic for the most tragic and horrible times in my life....when, for a while, the mind stopped drifting so haphazardly...attention overwhelmed...focused, whether it wanted to be or not, on a gaping and unavoidable pain...every unhappy moment felt so deeply and intensely as to burn with a flame that continues to glow in memory....but this isn’t a story about that...

...went backpacking in the Rockies twenty years or so ago...Indian Peaks Wilderness, near Boulder, with a friend who’d never backpacked before...and probably never did again....we hiked about six miles, mostly up, and were way above treeline when dark storm clouds appeared off above the ridgeline....I thought better get the tent up...which is what we did...this old fashioned pup tent found in my dad’s attic...and managed to clamber in just as the first raindrops started to fall, which seemed to us like perfect timing...though it couldn’t’ve been more than a minute or two before wanton winds coursing across the alpine tundra unearthed flimsy metal tent stakes, bringing thin orange material down on us like a wet cowl....which, as best we could, we held up with arms outstretched like twin Jesuses as the scene through the open flap resembled the Apocalypse as much as anything I’d ever seen...lightning dancing and exploding everywhere, wind raging in countless directions at once, cold rain hammering down....my friend said, at one point, I don’t know if I can deal with this....and I said I don’t think we have much choice...

...not that I wasn’t terrified, too...I was, of course...but also felt a curious exhilaration...crouching in the midst of this all...the insane, spectacular lightning, the wind and rain rampaging at us from all sides...the inescapable knowledge that we could die at any moment, easily...but that, right there, right then, blood was pulsing through us with a ferocity rivaling that of the storm...

...at some point, we decided it'd be a good idea to get away from the useless metal tent poles, and went to crouch by a rock that kinda sorta almost gave us some shelter until the storm passed...which it did, after a while...but by then it was dark, though the moon shone limply through the clouds, and we went back to the tent, found it completely waterlogged, sleeping bags and everything else utterly soaked and cold...and, even if I’d had the backwoods know-how and fortitude to get a fire going, there was no wood up there....then, if I’d had any backwoods know-how at all, we would’ve turned around and run for treeline as soon as we saw those dark clouds....so, with hands numb from the cold, we crammed sleeping bags into backpacks, leaving the tent stuffed between two rocks, where I retrieved it, along with various other items strewn around the area, two days later, and started the long climb down...

...not sure where it came from...except that I shared it with Mittens, our otherwise fearless Welsh Corgi...but I had a phobia about thunderstorms from early on...by my mid-twenties, it was subtle...just a dark cold feeling somewhere inside whenever I heard that ominous rumbling...but very real nonetheless....after that experience in Indian Peaks, though, the fear was gone....my friend Jeff came out to Colorado and we spent much of the rest of that summer backpacking high in the mountains...often setting up camp just below treeline so that, when the inevitable afternoon thunderstorm came, we could go and watch it from close up....and even today, when I get caught on my bike in a storm...which happens at least once a summer, usually somewhere between downtown and home...I try to avoid it, but not always very hard...it can feel like a crisp, unruly baptism...