Hello, Cleveland?

...I’m thinking about reading some blog stuff at this open mike at a local coffee shop this Saturday*...............................you heard it right...that's:

*****YOGA FOR CYNICS—ABSOLUTELY LIVE!!!!*****

...which means, yes, the cozy anonymity and serene dignity of the yogi blogger’s staid, quiet life, typing away and silently meditating like an aesthetically sensitive urban anchorite, a mystic radical subsisting on prana, stale bread, and the sad solemn songs of the heart in his dusty, book-lined, cheap incense-scented garret...lost, forsaken, repudiated for the tantalizing allure of footlights...the empty glare and ever elusive satiety of fame and glory...

...and who knows where things could go from there...

...screaming fans, endorsement deals, and giant bowls of M&M's...(minus the brown ones)...promoters, bodyguards, and ostentatious sunglasses worn indoors...a life of outrageous, excess, tired tour buses, trashed hotel rooms, jaded groupies, and absurd quantities of booze and dangerous drugs...the hopelessly compromised artist's desperation in trying, at first, to hold on to lofty ideals and integrity in a crazed whirlwind of contracts, parties, frenzied dissipation, and increasingly expensive habits...squandered talents, supermodels, private jets, and paranoia...teenage angst has paid off well, now I’m bored and old...fulfilling an endless round of contractual obligations, only now and then wistfully remembering the days when it meant something more than than a vain struggle to maintain a decadent lifestyle worthy of a Viking chieftain or Borgia pope...

...sounds cool...in a way.................maybe I’ll skip it...



* the High Point at Allen’s Lane, West Mt. Airy, State of Caffeinated Samadhi, USA, sometime between 2:00 and 4:00 PM

It's About Time

Hard work pays off in the future. Laziness pays off now.
Steven Wright

Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul in this world--and never will.
Mark Twain

... There are times I feel I'm new and different...like the past is just a series of harsh cocoons I’ve sloughed off...left in a pile I can sort through if necessary, but no more parts of my self right now than banana peels and apple rinds tossed in yesterday's compost...leaving me nothing to do but grow....and there are other times I feel like I’ve never left high school...or nursery school...or my first experience of unrequited love...or my second...or third...or tenth...or that gradual, mostly forgotten disillusionment that comes to all of us when we realize our parents aren’t actually omnipotent, omniscient, or even omnibenevolent...

...just as I was writing that, got a spam e-mail, advertising products meant to temporarily ease the downward pull of time on male sex organs...which, if I’m to believe the official date and time, was sent at 8:55 on September 3rd, 1938...

...a little while ago was in the car listening to some early Stones...Aftermath...that collection of classic rock n' roll riffs, bad vibes, crude misogyny, and angst released just in time to mark the birth of the late 60’s love generation...not to mention my own birth....and opening, on the American version, at least, with Paint It, Black...which has that legendary sitar riff, followed by Charlie Watts’ drums pounding like the heartbeat of someone nearly consumed by dark anxiety...and I can’t listen to it without thinking about just how goddamn good it ain’t easy facing up when your whole world is black sounded when I was sixteen...which, at this point, makes the song a refreshing reminder of how much better right now is than those fabled best years of my life....and how, all in all, my thirties were better, if less exciting, than my twenties...as my twenties, for all their problems, were almost infinitely better than my teens...so, though my forties haven't been without difficulties so far, they still have a long way to go, and I seem to be on an upward slide...