Livin' With the Earth...Kinda...

...when my brother was applying to med. school, I went over his application essay...including a sentence that began growing up on a farm,...I commented in the margin are you sure you grew up on a farm and not two and a half acres in the outer suburbs with a father who raised some goats and chickens as a hobby?...he changed it to small farm...

...in college years was what you might call an eco-hippie...raised money for Greenpeace and the Rainforest Action Network...recycled before everybody started doing it...spent an awful lot of time getting high in the woods...

Yes it’s good, livin’ on a farm, oh so good, livin’ on a farm...
Jefferson Airplane

...one dream shared by just about every eco hippie is of one day having a farm...living and working directly with the earth...in tune with the natural order...flowing with the eternal cycles of life and death...just like agrarian people have for thousands of years...

...as it turned out, I was the one exception to that...in my crowd, at least...then, I was also the only one who’d ever had to shovel shit out of a barn...

...mom was never really into the farm thing, either...nowadays, the pasture gets mowed once or twice a year, and my brother keeps up the garden, but the animals are gone...though not without a bit of trouble...out of twelve chickens, it turned out there were only four hens...and finding homes for eight roosters ain’t, as it turns out, easy...after ads offering them for free at local feed stores went unanswered, I suggested leaving the henhouse door open at night...letting nature take its course...mom didn’t like that idea at all....

...outsider art is cool...generally created by people with little education or training in art...like Henry Darger, whose work would have been a lot less interesting if he’d ever read Freud or Jung....alas, it’s kinda difficult to be an outsider artist with a PhD...nonetheless, despite a fancy digital camera and familiarity with the celebrated work of Ansel Adams, Diane Arbus, Annie Leibowitz, Edward Curtis, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Earth to Holly, I’m trying to be as outside as possible with this photography thing...and an almost complete lack of technical knowledge helps...like, so far, I’ve figured out that light is everything...but haven't the foggiest idea what to do with that knowledge...

...walking around the old homestead a weekend ago, looking at old things breaking down...memories and all those memories carry with them crumbling to earth...tend to find it depressing...so, started taking pictures...trying to maybe save something...but not happy about how most of them came out...mostly because the light wasn’t right...ending up thinking the ones that came out best were the ones that came out worst...so, messed ‘em up even worse and put ‘em here...

I heard the old, old men say,
'Everything alters,
And one by one we drop away.'
They had hands like claws, and their knees
Were twisted like the old thorn-trees
By the waters.
'All that's beautiful drifts away
Like the waters.'
William Butler Yeats

Really Deep, Intense Discussions With Myself...

and if my thought-dreams could be seen,
they’d probably put my head in a guillotine,
but it’s alright, ma, it’s life and life only...
Bob Dylan

...haven’t been talking much to people lately...at least not in much depth...though I’ve been having a lot of really deep, intense discussions with myself...

...that’s included trying to do some writing by hand every day...which is notable because I never, if I can help it, write with anything less than a full-sized QWERTY keyboard...don’t even get me started on how I can’t stand text messaging...and yet, I've found myself letting loose with some personal thoughts the likes of which I’ve never let see the light outside my brain...often painfully embarrassing, shameful...offensive to anyone other than...or, sometimes, including...myself...and, it occurs to me, the reason for this and the reason I don't normally write by hand might be one and the same...that what comes out is thoroughly incomprehensible to anyone but me...and, sometimes, to me, as well...thus eliminating the worry that, no matter how well hidden, someone might stumble upon and read it...and freeing me to write absolutely anything I want...

...of course, it could be decided...possibly after my death...like with William Blake, Emily Dickinson, or Henry Darger...that what I write’s important enough for scholars, handwriting analysts, or freelance pharmacists to go combing through the hieroglyphics...then, that might be cool...would make my unauthorized biographies a lot more interesting...certainly, people talking about how boring I am after I’m dead would be adding insult to injury...comb through my hieroglyphics, baby, comb through ‘em all night, dig into my present past darlin’, bring it all to light...then, I could also end up buried in intensely dull jargon filled written-for-no-reason-except-to-get-tenure scholarship...

BALD heads forgetful of their sins,
Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men, tossing on their beds,
Rhymed out in love's despair
To flatter beauty's ignorant ear.
William Butler Yeats, from “The Scholars”

...then, such are the perils of posthumous fame...probably better to be alive and obscure...

Really, Really Loaded Questions....

...though it’s absolutely meant as a compliment, yoga teachers don’t seem to like it when I say you fucking killed me with that shit at the end of class...though a person can't possibly be born to new possibilities without dying now and then....

Finally, I got it: a heart that is open to the world must be willing to be broken at any time. This brokenness produces the kind of grief that expands the heart so that it can love more and more.
Stephen Cope

...one time in college, I was feeling pretty down...not sure if my heart was broken, or if class work and the endemic to college ever-present threat of not-being-smart-enough was weighing me down, or if it was just another wholly ephemeral case of late-adolescent angst...though it could’ve had something to do with the people I hung out with...one of whom I ran into, a globally-thinking person I’ll call Alice....she asked how I was doing, I said I was feeling down...and she replied, with a contemptuous smirk, yeah, I bet a straight white male has a lot to be unhappy about....I knew some really lovely people in college...but, then, it seems like it’s difficult for most of us sometimes to get the point that compassion actually means being kind and empathetic—rather than something where, when you expend a bit on the oppressed of the world, you gain scorn credits to dump on those closer at hand....

I think it was Diogenes Laertius who told the story about a philosopher who studied for three years to rid himself of all passion, paying money to every man who insulted him. When his period of study was completed, he stopped giving out money, but the habitual skills remained with him: one day he was insulted by some ignoramus, and instead of setting about him with his fists, he began to laugh. ‘Well, did you ever,’ he said, ‘today I received for nothing what I’d been paying for three whole years.’
Victor Pelevin, The Secret Book of the Werewolf

...sometimes I help recovering addicts through practice GED tests....I hate that standardized test crap, but sometimes the best you can do is teach people the stupid rules needed to pass, including the rule that use of imagination and originality should be avoided....anyway, there are these essay questions: write six sentences about your family...write two paragraphs about a goal you have....meant to be innocuous, no doubt, for the average suburban teenager, but really, really loaded questions for those with so much trouble behind and only the most desperate hopes ahead....so, they write about staying clean, about not going back to jail, about getting a job, about getting custody of their kids again...in a nutshell, wanting to live...

...and, when ya think about it, what better goal could there be?