Trail Difficult to Find Beyond this Point

 

I've never seen myself as a city mouse, used to think quite the opposite, in fact. My ideal was to get as far away from the noise, the pollution, the frenzied mass of raw humanity, as possible. Lengthy wilderness backpacking excursions seemed a kind of training for a time when any trips I took would be in the opposite direction, some untrammeled (except by me and maybe a few select friends) region my home.

I still see the appeal in that. Yet, I've come to realize that extremes of isolation aren't actually all that good for me. And, for a lifelong introvert, being way out in the country makes isolating oneself a little too easy.

Then, here in the northeast, so does wintertime. In February, a steady period of high temperatures in the low twenties or teens, lows in single digits, had finally convinced me to forsake the bike, find other ways of getting around town...or, y’know, stay in like a hermit when I didn’t actually have to be anywhere. It made for perfect timing for a visit to friends who'd had a baby, in the low desert metropolis of Arizona.

Full disclosure: they had the baby almost a year earlier, but I waited until it was twenty degrees in Philly and low eighties in the Sonoran desert, to fully enjoy the contrast between biking in a ski mask and standing barefoot on a rock to pluck a huge, juicy, red and yellow grapefruit from a backyard tree each morning for breakfast. Went with them to the botanical gardens, the zoo, and local parks with cacti and rock formations, watched the Oscars, and read their adorable little daughter extremely expurgated toddler versions of Moby Dick, Jane Eyre, and Frankenstein.

Also rented a shiny silver Mustang—seriously, the people at the airport wanted me to have it, for the same price as whatever purely practical low-mpg Japanese compact I'd originally agreed on—and took off north one day by myself. Ten years I’d been away from the high desert and on the drive up, just seeing it out the window, remembered deep in the fascia just how desperately I love it, ipod plugged in to the dashboard, Gram and Emmylou singing twenty thousand roads I went down down down and they all led me straight back home to you.

(Meant to drive all the way to Flagstaff, where I lived for two years while getting my Master’s, to see another friend, on another day before I left, but the forecast was for snow up there, and I’d be seeing that soon enough). (This time, I was heading for my favorite spot in Arizona, an out of the way area known as the Wet Beaver Wilderness).

(Yeah, it’s really called that. You drive maybe an hour and a half to two hours north from Phoenix, forty five minutes to an hour south of Flagstaff to the Sedona exit—fifteen miles to Sedona, but go the opposite direction just a couple miles, then hike in about three and half or four above the creek, along some red rock cliffs inhabited by lizards and the occasional petroglyph, before taking a little unofficial spur trail just before the mail trail crosses the creek. Then, in maybe a couple hundred yards, you see “the crack”—yeah, it's really called that, too—an area of perfect red rock swimming pools surrounded by soft cliffs).
 

Got off the highway and went barely a mile before running into a road crew re-paving the road. When I first visited there, in maybe 1994, I think the road was all dirt. Now, they told it’d be half an hour before I could get through. It was only a mile or two to the trailhead, so I thought about parking and walking, but instead turned around and drove into Sedona. It’s been built up and commercialized a lot in the past decade or two (actually, as old-timers used to tell me, long before that, as well, which I have no doubt is true, but one's own nostalgic grumbling doesn't generally have that long a scope). Nowadays, you have to pay to park at a trailhead, but only if you’re gonna leave your car. So, I stayed at the car, looking up at the big red monoliths while enjoying some leftover pad Thai (homemade by my friends the night before, and surprisingly good cold). Half an hour later, I was pulling into the Dry Beaver Creek parking area, paved and a lot bigger than it used to be, but nearly empty, just then.

(According to an internet source, one thing that hasn't changed is that the lot's still a common site for break-ins. Back in ’96, I camped in there with some friends, communing with rippling water, sun, and strange dried fungi while, an hour north, the ceremony for my Master’s graduation was happening—I promised my mom I’d go to the PhD one, so she could come and see me in my mortar board and robe, and did, eight years later—only to come out and find someone had broken into my van, smashed a  $300 window for a nearly worthless Sony disc-man that skipped like crazy and the old Grateful Dead CD sitting in it. Can't say the experience wasn't worth it, though).

Leaving the rental car unlocked and empty but for the winter coat and thick shirt I'd left in the backseat at the airport, I headed into the high desert, on foot, entering the Wet Beaver Wilderness through a metal gate a mile or two in. If I’d recalled my love for the high desert viscerally from the car, to actually be out walking in it—hiking, something I don’t do nearly as much these days as I used to, and hadn’t much at all recently—was a true revelation. Back home, low-grade, seasonal depression had been edging gradually into the deeper, nastier kind. But here, in this environment so harsh that only the prickliest life can manage to thrive, hot sun reflecting magically off the slick rock, I somehow felt a peculiar renewal—prana chi kundalini life-force happiness—in an almost magical connection to something temporarily forgotten but, as it turned out, far from lost.

Once at those storied rocks and pools, I climbed around a bit, then, yogi I’ve become since those rambling semi-hippie graduate student days when I roamed here, sat to meditate for the better part of an hour.

As a semi-responsible yoga teacher, I try to be careful not to give the wrong idea about things like meditation and mindfulness—talking about, y’know, those blissed-out kinds of mental states—satori sadhana peak experiences whatever—that, yeah, might manifest for us sometimes, but not usually, and can’t be counted on...and I'm told aren’t really the point anyway...not to mention that I've certainly experienced the oh shit I guess I'm not really enlightened hangover...the feeling that mystical awakening played with my affections and then wouldn't return my phone calls...more than once...so it’s much better to focus on the average and ordinary, the ever-returning-to-the-breath-and-being-cool-with-that. And yet, they’re the awesome when they come—rejuvenating, ecstatic, trippy, and all the more special on a good day out in the desert.

So, at the risk of sounding like a not-so-cynical yogi, let's just say that's what was happening.

Feeling inspired to extend my hike, rather than just retracing the three or four miles back to the car, I head for the quite-literal heights, across the creek and up the Weir Trail—another steep steady mile and half above a steep side canyon to the Mogollon Rim, spotting hidden waterfalls deep below and feeling an almost embarrassing love of life with every step, as if living the words of my one-time idol Jack Kerouac—who, yeah, I know, could be kind of a misogynistic drunken jerk—pass here and go on, you’re on the road to heaven.

And, there at the top, at the very edge of the Colorado plateau, where high desert ends and an alpine zone begins and you can see desert below and the San Francisco peaks in the distance, just where the trail flattens out, I found a sign reading: Trail Difficult to Find Beyond This Point.

And ain’t that just the way it is?

Prose Poems, Ramblings, & Mala Beads

Prayer is nothing but poetry that achieves the destruction of its reciter.*

...Matt Remski thinks a helluva lot about mālā beads...hell, he thinks a helluva lot about a whole lotta stuff...but mālā beads more than most...,turns out he’s a recovering Catholic...redeemed through pain, not through joy, as Jim Carroll put it...as well as rehabilitating himself from various more coercive forms of Buddhism and yoga...and has written down some of those thoughts in a thin volume called, with nods to Baudelaire as well as a number of spiritual traditions, Rosary {or les fleurs du mālā}...

Having been possessed by Jesus, Mary, Buddha, Kṛṣṇa, rage, the destruction of idols, the empty dawn, so many books, the weight of my love’s foot upon mine, I wonder: what rosary could string these holy crises together?

...honestly, was a bit leery about it, at first...coming from a liberal and largely secular Quaker background, ceremony, spiritual hierarchies, sacred objects, and incantations have always struck me as suspect...at best....even if that didn’t prevent me from buying a beaded necklace or two at a roadside stand in the Navajo Nation on the way to the Grand Canyon at nineteen...(always figured wearing beads was like long hair without the long hair...and combined with long hair?...the 80’s neo-hippie girls at Grateful Dead shows were gonna hafta wanna share their Indian blankets with me)...(but they didn’t)...(so much for the power o’ fuckin’ beads)...

A double helix can be formed by twining a rosary and a mālā together. It seems to be in the nature of the human genome to blur the boundaries between east and west.

...later, much later, three and a half years ago, having gotten into the yoga thing...if never, like Remski, the whole appropriated-Hinduism-with-a-paternalistic-guru thing...while doing teacher training at Kripalu, was given mālā** beads in a highly ceremonial fashion...and learned a mantra to recite with them... Om Namo Bhagavate Vasudevaya...and recited it...a lot, in fact...if never quite figuring out what it meant for me...felt, at least, that it tied me, in a sense, as if on a string, to the people with whom I’d spent that very special month.....(wore it every day until a night-time pool party that summer, when I took it off when changing into a bathing suit...and, later, while a buncha of drunken hipsters were doing the kinds of tricks in the pool any responsible adult would’ve yelled at them to get out of the pool for if they’d been kids, deciding I didn’t really want to be there at that horrible second when bacchanalian revelry turned to blood on the edge of the pool and drunken tears and ambulance sirens, took off)...(though, as it turned out, nobody got hurt)...(and I never saw my beads again)......

...the mālā is a non-denominational tool possessing enormous flexibility and power because it is symbolically void. It can hold and accelerate and multiply the power of countless aphorisms, deities, or seed syllables issuing from thousands of contrasting streams of Eastern rhapsody.

...been poring through the book over the past week or two while simultaneously re-reading Kurt Vonnegut, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Manuel Puig, making yet another valiant effort at getting all the way through Sprach Zarathustra, drinking beer, and waiting none-too-patiently for amazon.com to finally deliver my copy of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage...making Remski, perhaps, a bead in a mālā already containing Fitzgerald, Vonnegut, Puig, Nietzsche, beer, the internet, and Murakami...better him than me...

Baby’s first rosary consists of two felt balls attached to the ends of a length of twine. He dangles it over the cat, prefiguring how he himself will be teased by beautiful ideas.

...stylistically, I’m kinda doing a really lazy approximation of what Remski does, here...along with my usual thing...y’know, the rambling and ellipses n’ all that...which, let’s face it, is also pretty lazy and self-indulgent, too....hell, I’m a yoga blogger...making a claim to uniqueness by, just now and then, doing something other than complaining about how everybody else is doing it wrong...(though, yeah, there were a couple pretty snarky remarks up there...if not nearly as bad as the ones I deleted)...(kinda like my own little anti-guru bead)...(see what I did there?)...

True maturity might involve making a mālā with no guru bead. No bead more important than any other. No bead that conceals the beginning and end of the string.

 

...the book is itself self-consciously fashioned as a kind of mālā...incorporating poetry and prose, prose-poetry, math and numerology, sex and violence, mysticism and neuroanatomy, child- and fatherhood, the earthy and the ethereal, earnest and joke, as well as the various liminal spaces Remski would no doubt call the string connecting all of these....sometimes, quite honestly, I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about...but that’s not a bad thing...nor is it apart from the book’s overall intent and theme, as I understand it....which involves expanding rather than contracting meaning...to set already-overloaded signifiers and the thin strings that bind them free...without breaking........(I think)...

(Zero is a perfect bead, into which all calculation and meaning disappears)

 

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* all quotations (in italics, set apart from the rambling, are from Remski’s book, unless otherwise attributed) (I also stole the lovely pic at the top from his website)

** can I tell ya what a pain in the butt it is quoting Matthew Remski with all his fancy schmancy letter symbols? So, I'm gonna write mālā in just that way, with the pretentious little lines over the a's every chance I get...

Is This the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius? (Kind of a different perspective)

...got some big news, folks...courtesy of my ever-out-there-but-unfailingly-lovable kundalini friends....yes, even bigger than whatever the hell the Mayans predicted is gonna happen in 2012....I’m talkin’ about...are ya ready for this?...

...the Dawning of the Motherfuckin' Age of Aquarius!!!...

...like, seriously...

...no more patriarchy...

...no more wars...

...no more racism, sexism, or homophobia...

...cooperation taking the place of competition and strife...

...harmony and understanding, sympathy and trust abounding, no more falsehoods or derision, something-something dreams of vision, mystic crystal revelation and the mind’s true liberation...blissed out people dancing around naked...kind bud growing abundantly along the sides of endless networks of well-tended bike paths...unlimited free downloads of Grateful Dead and Phish shows...all that good shit...

Acid, incense, and balloons...
the Jefferson Airplane

...(yeah, I know, I thought that all happened back in the ‘60’s, too....guess that’s what happens when ya get yer news from pop songs instead of more reliable authorities)...(like Facebook)...

...so, anyway, it’s all supposed to start on November 11th...which all sounds cool, except............

...let’s face it: if yer gonna kick some ass, ya better do it now....seriously, people, if this thing's for real, that means there’s barely more than a week left to enjoy telling, flipping, or pissing people off...because, after 11/11/11, that shit’s gonna be totally uncool...

....may have to cut this blog post short, for that matter, so I can go elsewhere on the web and leave some gratuitously meanspirited political comments, since there's obviously gonna be no more of that...(hell, I don't even know if there are gonna be any political situations worth getting nasty about...just intimate circles of kind, open-minded earth-mother types gently reaching consensus on the best ways to love and nurture the general population)...

...namasmotherfuckingte, people...(oh, man, am I gonna miss saying that...)...

Practicing Yoga for the Wrong Reasons? Who the Hell Cares?

Yogas citta vrtti nirodhah
Yoga Sutras of Patanjali 1.2

Some come to laugh their pasts away,
Some come to make it just one more day...
Robert Hunter

Everything’s cool as long as I’m getting thinner...
Lily Allen

One night a week, I work at a residential rehab for women coming from the most challenging backgrounds—long-term addiction, rape, prostitution, poverty, prison, childhood incest, loss of children, every imaginable kind of abuse. I bring my expertise in reading and writing, in hopes that they’ll get their GED’s, maybe go back to school, or simply learn to narrate their experiences in writing; they bring PhD’s in suffering.

I feel particular admiration for some of the older women, those most scarred and humbled. As bad as life can get—the stuff of nightmares that leave us shaking in our beds, afraid of falling asleep again—they’ve been there. They’ve known Hell, and what it’s like to claw their way out, only to slip and tumble backwards into the depths, again and again and again. And yet, here they are, still trying.

Then there are some of the younger women—still vibrant and cute enough to hide their scars, and still naive enough to think they can run away from it all, there because it beats jail; the older clients say they haven’t hit bottom yet. Often, as I arrive, many of the clients are on their way out the door, heading to a weekly outside meeting—a twelve-step group beyond the confines of residential rehab, allowing them to incorporate their experiences of recovery within that sequestered world with those of people on the outside...many of whom are men. While everyone, generally, cleans up a bit for the outside meetings—hair done, a little mascara, a skirt in place of sweatpants, maybe a touch of jewelry—a few of the younger clients take it a bit further: wearing thick layers of makeup, low cut blouses, jeans tight enough I wonder they don’t cut off circulation. One put on thigh high black leather boots with stiletto heels, fishnet stockings beneath a short leather skirt and bustier week after week, resisting the entreaties of staff members to the effect that this really wasn’t appropriate for Narcotics Anonymous.

But, though their attitudes seem be blatantly off, though they may be missing the point, though their dressed-up-get-messed-up choices in couture might be a complete mockery of the well-established values of twelve-step programs and recovery itself, they keep going. They’re encouraged to. And there’s a reason for that. Whether they realize it or not, they need help—badly, and such resistance only serves to put that need into stark relief. And it may be that in these meetings they attend for, apparently, all the wrong reasons, they will, in spite of themselves, find the help they need. It’s better to be there with the wrong attitude, in other words, than not to be there at all.

Meanwhile, the serious yoga world’s full of outrage that so many people see yoga as a means of getting a firm butt...or to show off one’s firm butt in the latest designer yoga clothing and compare said butt and clothing with those of others in the room...or to enjoy other peoples’ firm butts so tightly wrapped in that expensive stretchy stuff. The women at the rehab, from what I've seen, appear to see morning yoga as an excuse to go outside and smoke cigarettes.

That’s cool with me. They might learn something and it might help them, in spite of themselves...

Botticelli's Niece

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.
Rumi

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
William Faulkner

Gotta hurry on back to my hotel room, where I got me a date with Botticelli’s niece...
Bob Dylan

...trying to write but can’t ignore that classic profile...pre-Raphaelite...if moderated by a nose ring...hair straight outta Botticelli, eyes staring into another world...but there I’m editorializing...or, more accurately, fantasizing...more likely she’s thinking of some boyfriend with six-pack abs straight outta Jersey Shore...and, certainly a lot younger than I...but maybe that’s just cynicism...hard to stay out of these frames...a year or two ago on my birthday, a younger guy I was talking to said he bet I got laid a lot back in the day and asked if I regret never getting married...since, apparently, a man in his mid-forties is ineligible for either marriage or sex...no matter how much time he spends on the yoga mat...then, I always say, while it’d be great to have a twenty year old body again, I’d rather hold on to the mind I’ve got now...and sometimes believe it...and, anyway, now she’s stepping out the door to get away from a screaming child, carrying a paperback copy of To the Lighthouse, which, to tell the truth, I saw before coming up with the eyes staring straight into another world thing...and Botticelli’s Venus always looked more classically vain than anything, a yoking of Renaissance ideals with those pretty girls who wouldn’t talk to me in high school...which was exactly what appealed to me, wandering through the Uffizi after crouching awake all night on the train from Brindisi, having last slept, for only an hour or two, the previous afternoon...passed out from all those godawful early morning shots of Ouzo on the boat from Patras...covered by my rail-pass, of course...I’d slept out on the deck and rolled over in my sleeping bag at around seven a.m. to an invitation from that somewhat older guy I’d been talking to the night before to join him for a drink...and, later, somebody lent me a Walkman and I passed out blissfully listening to a scratchy Dead tape...twenty years old beneath a Mediterranean sky...

Alone Together, Together Alone (Building From the Ground Up, Part Three)

...useta see yoga class as pretty much like any other educational venture...a place to gain useful information and/or skills...(and, y’know...maybe meet some babes)...that could then be effectively utilized elsewhere...with that absolute elsewhere always and essentially the focal point...or drishti if ya wanna get all yogic about it...and, in the case of yoga, that meant a reasonably quiet, and, in some sense, spiritual space, by myself...the inherently anchoritic practice of the serious yogi walking that path so fine that it can only be walked alone, like it says in the Bible and the Upanishads and that Grateful Dead song, toward enlightenment or at least a better relationship with oneself and maybe a bit less depression and anxiety in the morning and knees that won’t give out from biking up all those hills...or something like that...

Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way....
Matthew 7:14

The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over...
Katha Upanishad

The path to happiness is so narrow that two cannot walk on it unless they become one.
Unknown

If I knew the way, I would take you home...
Robert Hunter, Ripple

...then, however, with an enticing mixture of compassionate guidance, collective experience, sense of community...(seriously, for all the stories I read online about people sniping about each other’s designer yoga wear...not to mention the nasty arguments online yogis get into...I rarely meet any but the nicest people in yoga classes...creating a sweet supportive sadhana in which it's perfectly okay that I try and fail again and again to get so much as a toe off the floor in side-crow...parsva bakasana...knowing that we’re all, in our own ways, struggling along our own paths, and it’s nice to have sympathetic company along the way)...yoga class itself kinda became the thing...and practicing solo became what I did when for one reason or other I couldn’t go to a class...and, even then, usually skipped it...having become, inadvertently, my own disappointing substitute teacher...thinkin’ damn, looks like I’m stuck with myself today...

We prefer to go deformed and distorted all our lives rather than not resemble the portrait of ourselves which we ourselves have first drawn.
André Gide

You gave up all the golden factories,
to see
who in the world you might be...
Joni Mitchell

...and, then, such an outward and interactive focus goes along quite neatly, I think, with that part of Yoga for Cynics mission statement that goes something like...if I remember correctly...yoga is about opening...

...and yet, I realize, that’s not all...

...no, no, don’t worry, I’m not gonna start throwing vedas and sutras and florid potpourris of ancient beliefs at ya...though, for some people, that stuff certainly qualifies and may be essential for grounding...

...which is what I’m talkin’ about...or trying to, at least...(with, perhaps, all the more relevance now, on the day after the alleged apocalypse...which I wrote about yesterday, here...serving, perhaps, as a kinda reminder that life here on earth is what we’ve got to deal with...and that might be for the best)...

...what I mean is the establishment of a stable if ultimately provisional base from which to open...that mulabandha thing...the Shiva thing as it relates to the Shakti thing...trust me, I’ve read about this shit...the reasonably solid foundation from which the asana grows and expands upward and outward...the still point...or perhaps, a comfortable self...

...which can be hard to find...and might require openness...which, like I said, requires grounding.....as always, it's a work in progress...

Ghosts of Christmas Past #1: Acid, Incense, & Abject Terror of Nothingness

In other ways, too, our laments for lost paradises may really have much more to do with our own state of mind than with the state of the place whose decline we mourn. Whenever we recall the places we have seen, we tend to observe them in the late afternoon glow of nostalgia, after memory, the mind’s great cosmetician, has softened out rough edges, smoothed out imperfections and removed the whole to a lovely abstract distance. Just as a good man, once dead, is remembered as a saint, so a pleasant place, once quit, is recalled as a utopia. Nothing is ever what it used to be.
Pico Iyer
Christmas 1986, I’d just dropped out of college for the first time and, once the family thing was out of the way, flew out to San Francisco to fulfill a life-long dream of being a real-live hippie...Melinda asked if I we might’ve met, but we probably didn’t...I was one of those 80’s Grateful Dead types who, for the most part, the more punk types couldn’t stand...though, I didn’t fit in with the latter-day hippies too well, either...both too overtly cynical and, ironically enough, too into the Clash and Sex Pistols...who, ultimately, were as out of sync with the Reagan/Rambo/Van Helen/pre-yoga-Madonna present as the Dead....though, at that point, anybody else’s past seemed better than my own....

...acid, incense, and balloons...
the Jefferson Airplane

...no future for you...no future for me....
the Sex Pistols

...everything I owned fit into a backpack on the floor of a tiny unfurnished room with a bare lightbulb and mattress in a college friend’s sister’s apartment on Page St., just a block or two from the corner of Haight & Ashbury...where strung-out derelicts and runaways, well on their way to being derelicts themselves, breathed in two-decades-stale pretensions of creating a new society...$300 a month, which was a lot then, particularly for somebody trying to scrape by as a Greenpeace canvasser...a job at which, it should be mentioned, I was singularly lousy...lived on peanut butter and weed....then, one night in January, seeing the Dead at the San Francisco Civic Center, I got lost in some lonely, dark place between galaxies...unmoored...inconsequential...every body and every thing I might reach for dissipating into white space vapor....afterwards, having landed somewhat uneasily in the park across the street, a friend and I got grabbed by undercover cops who read us our rights before, following a quick search, deciding we weren’t worth their time and effort...and so, for just a moment or two there, I felt good about being inconsequential....

Self Indulgence: The Musical

Was called upon by a famous hippie yoga blogger to give a top seven albums list...which I’d consider way too shameful a self-indulgence...without an excuse (note that this one was in response to reader demand)...even if I’m gonna ignore the rules as always...so, here’s seven I feel like talking about right now, in no particular order:

Miles Davis—In a Silent Way: no diss to anybody’s favorite Windham Hill or Sanskrit chant music, but this is what I practice yoga to—a bunch of soon-to-be-major figures of what would come to be known as jazz-fusion enjoying a trippy groove while the Dark Prince lets out muted wails from places deeper than most would ever dare to go....

Joni Mitchell—Court and Spark—I hate slickness, and this is about as slick as 70’s pop albums get—but it’s about slickness, giving up Paris and People’s Park for the city of the fallen angels, and feeling unfettered and alive for the surface thrills of stroking the star maker machinery...because trying to hold on to that fabled romantic idealism has simply come to hurt too much....

The Clash: Sandinista—it’s up to you not to hear the call-up, you must not act the way you were brought up...that pretty much says it...not sure what can be added that won’t be lame, other than to evoke how it felt at sixteen to see Joe Strummer up there, belting out Police on My Back to a stadium filled with classic rock fans waiting to see the Who and not at all open to this punky shit—defiant absolutely, thriving in a world of manic sound as the slings, arrows, and orange peels fell impotently to the stage....

Cat Power: The Greatest—saw Chan Marshall in a club in Philly last Spring—no more of the legendary drunken rambling interspersed with the occasional bit of a song, or bursts of tears ending a show three minutes in—but the kind of painful nakedness of expression previously seen in videos of Janis Joplin or Billie Holiday...what most would call being fucking nuts...though it can make for some kick-ass music...when I lay me down, will you still be around? when they put me six feet in the ground, will the big fat beautiful moon be around?....

Bob Dylan: Tell Tale Signs: The Bootleg Series Volume 8—to say that when Dylan accidentally leaves the tape machine running before going to the toilet, the result is still better than 99% of the music-product painstakingly produced by just about anybody else is a tired cliché. It’s also true. While contemporaries fade away or make repeated lame attempts at relevance, Bob, reinvented as an old-weird-vaguely-19th-century-dude, growls I crossed the green mountain, I slept by the stream, heaven blazing in my head, I dreamt a monstrous dream....

John Coltrane: A Love Supreme—another great one to do yoga to, though even better through headphones with feet dangling over the rim of the Grand Canyon...really...try it and you’ll see.....

The Grateful Dead: Buffalo, July 4th 1986—dude...I actually don’t like even have this tape anymore...but this show was like seriously...whoah...like I was there n’ it was like a hundred degrees n’ I was gettin’ like really fuckin’ weirded out n’ shit, n’ then they played The Wheel n’ I like listened to the lyrics...round round robin run around, gotta get back to where you belong, a little bit harder just a little bit more, a little bit further than you’ve gone before...n’ then like everything was totally cool...seriously....

Mistakes, Brilliant and Otherwise

Marcel Duchamp’s The Large Glass was badly damaged in transit. He considered the spiderweb of cracks an improvement.

You can hold back from the suffering of the world, you have free permission to do so, and it is in accordance with your nature. But perhaps the holding back is the one suffering you could have avoided.
“Fonzie Kafka,” according to Bubbles, in the final episode of The Wire. The real author was probably named Franz, but I like it better attributed to the sitcom character I idolized in fourth grade, like most of his young fans never imagining that his incredibly self-conscious obsession with cool was meant as a parody.

The title of a recent post, Old Roads Rapidly Fading, was a misquoted Dylan lyric, “your old road is rapidly aging”—changes in tense and syntax purely conscious and intentional, fading instead of aging not so much, but I liked it better, anyway. And why should a correction be the end of the story? I mean, sure, if the Pope says "I like muffins" and the New York Times misquotes it as "I like your muffins," that’s a problem, even if it makes a better story. But that’s not what we’re dealing with, here. Somebody once told me his favorite Grateful Dead lyric was “look into any eyes, you’ll find value,” which he saw as a powerful evocation of the inherent worth of every person. Holding back the natural urge of the pretentious liberal arts undergrad and would-be hipster, I didn’t tell him the line was actually “you find by you.” Why ruin such a lovely sentiment for something so crass as accuracy?

Elvis Costello, in Accidents Will Happen, does not actually sing a perfectly pithy half-rhymed evocation of how it might feel to return day after day to an unhappy living situation, she says she can’t go home without a shot of rum. Instead, he sings she says she can’t go home without a chaperone, which isn’t bad, kinda clever, in fact, but not nearly as good as the way I heard it...so why not call it a creative collaboration between Elvis and me? Jean Paul Sartre called reading directed creation (or so I remember, and it works, so I’m not gonna look it up)...and Herbie Hancock described, in a documentary on Miles Davis, how he made a mistake when they were playing live, and Miles picked up on it, and made it right (I'm not gonna double-check that one, either)...and some of the best places I’ve ever been were found when I was lost. Isn’t every misstep really just unconscious improvisation? Why hold back, just because you goofed?

Peace, Love, and F... Off!

revolution in society must begin with the inner psychological transformation of the individual.

If I am greedy, envious, violent, merely having an ideal of non-violence, of non-greed, is of little value.
J. Krishnamurti

Here's me, saying peace, love, and...you get the rest, somewhere around 1986, in a dorm hallway at Boston University...a professed pacifist, actively opposed to apartheid in South Africa, Duarte's bombing in El Salvador, the Contra death squads in Nicaragua, destruction of the world’s rain forests, and, in general, sincerely dedicated to working for peace, justice, equality, and looooove between my brothers and my sisters aaaaaaall over this laaaaaaaand...

...as well as intent on making sure nobody fucked with me like they did in high school...much as I seemed doomed to be an outsider...and hated the insiders, anyway...but honed my verbal skills to where I could shred anybody who pissed me off...or even irritated me...finding solace in casual acts of vandalism that cost everybody on my dorm floor their deposits...if any of you are reading this, that was a joke...but doing it all in a way that was socially respectable...because it was clever and funny...that’s one difference between college and grade school...in grade school there’s no need for subtlety...kids act out their issues by calling other kids faggots or shoving them into lockers...in college, you’ve gotta be clever...though, in the end, it amounts to the same thing...the same endless and endlessly hurtful and pointless battle.....

You can’t close the door when the walls cave in.
Robert Hunter

After a while, I left there...dropped out...went to San Francisco to follow the Grateful Dead, then wandered around Europe, then came home to work for Greenpeace in Philly, had a couple minor run-ins with the law before ending up back in school in Olympia, Washington...at Evergreen, those who were weird in other places were pretty much the norm, and those who were weird there would most likely have been committed anywhere else...actually, I suspect some of my friends eventually were...since you can’t stay in college forever.....

I’d rather stay here, with all the madmen
than perish with the sad men roaming free....
David Bowie

Here’s the thing about the Pacific Northwest in the late ‘80’s...just barely pre-both grunge and Microsoft...while, in much of the country, the conservative inquisition of the ‘80’s seemed to finish what the punk reformation started in stomping out any idealistic vestiges of the ‘60’s still smoking behind the bushes...(yeah, I’m mixing historical metaphors all over the place, but it’s fun)...and such efforts got no end of immoral support from ‘60’s idealists themselves whose concern for peace ended with their draft eligibility, who voted for the ex-governor who’d shot at them in People’s Park when they realized he’d be good for their stock portfolios...from Santa Cruz to Seattle, those organic roots sank deep...counterculture becoming conventional in its own ways...paranoia striking deep before growing comfortable and old...as even my old friends from Dead tour became what I affectionately came to term granola fascists...full of love and compassion for all living things...except for other people who didn’t live and think exactly as they did...strangely reminiscent of the Christian fundamentalists I grew up around...and, no doubt, that some of them grew up around, as well...rebelling until they became exactly what they were trying to escape...if with better taste in music, and, certainly, cooler attitudes about partying and sex...but at least you can drink a Pepsi with the fundie crowd without subjecting yourself to “constructive criticism”....

Free your mind, and your ass will follow.
George Clinton

Many, it seems, in the process of trying to free their minds, do little more than create colorful new cages...which isn’t to say that freeing your mind isn’t worthwhile...or that changing society isn’t necessary...in fact, we're probably in the biggest trouble ever if both don't happen on the largest of scales awfully soon...but it may be a lot more complicated than we think....