Bridges to Somewhere...

...been grumpy and miserable...and experiencing moments of peculiar contentment and clarity...

...ran into a friend last week who told me she was going to this weekend yoga thing...with this major yoga celebrity...an hour north of Philly in the post-hippie mecca of New Hope....no, I’m not gonna make some cute inspirational pun about that geographical designation and how appropriate it is for a transformational blah blah blah...did I mention I’ve been grumpy?...

...anyway, decided to go for part of it, friday night...which gave me some focus...woke that morning from dreams of incessant conflict...remembering before and after coffee the so many things I somehow got the idea life was supposed to be, but isn’t right now...so what could be more appropriate than a journey toward new hope?...bleah...got some stuff done, but, still sluggish by late afternoon, could’ve just as easily gone nowhere...had I not already paid fifty bucks for the thing...so went...straight into rush hour and descending dark....scanning the ipod for something mellow and yogic to get me in the mood...before deciding the last thing I wanted to hear was anything mellow or yogic...cranked the Clash...let fury have the hour...which actually had me feeling pretty good for most of the drive...

...'til I missed the exit, crossed the bridge into New Jersey...got off at the first off-ramp, hoping for a corresponding on-ramp...which wasn’t there...so thought I’d stop and ask somebody directions...before realizing, quickly, that I was in a part of Trenton where stopping and asking anybody anything was most likely a really bad idea...

...anyway, after a bunch of turns, made it back across the bridge...bridges...another lameass obvious metaphor...crossing from anger and pain to new hope for...meh...and, with somewhat aggressive driving on two-lane country roads, made it to the thing not quite on time but close enough...

...so...to provide a snidely mocking review of Seane Corn would fit neatly within this grouchy idiom....fulfilling the sacred office of the yoga cynic...going back through the mists of antiquity to the ancient and revered cynical sages...to poke fun of yoga megastars with magazine smiles and near-halos of golden ringlets....but, really, she was cool...and basically welcomed any negative thoughts anybody might be having into the room...which kinda takes the fun outta mockery...and, by the end, though nearly wiped out, I admit to basking in that very un-cynical trippy glowy feeling that comes as misery melts at least momentarily into the floorboards....all the best yoga studios use Karmic Cleanser™ to clean clinging misery out of their floorboards....and, chatting briefly afterwards about working with crack addicts, found her strikingly friendly and unpretentious...able to be refreshingly light and intense at the same time, with little apparent effort...

...which is something I strive for...diverse aspects of personality that can mingle casually over cocktails rather than glaring at one another from opposite sides of the swollen, churning river...finding it generally easier to be like a Lyle Lovett album...or, at least, the one Lyle Lovett album I have...half the songs lighthearted, absurd, about one-eyed girlfriends and cowboy hats...the others deep and intense, about longing, loneliness, and pain...but never both at the same time....which can be kind of a social problem...people who enjoy the irreverent humor and devil-may-care attitude say let’s get coffee, only to find themselves sitting across a table from this intense dude rambling on about the apparent limitlessness of human suffering and how Anne Frank is proof that a positive attitude doesn't guarantee anything....while those impressed by the deep and sensitive monologues don’t know what to think when, after a couple beers, they start hearing jokes about televangelists and sheep...


...much that’s valuable can be lost in the smoothing away of rough edges...bridging gaps effectively can be tricky...the essential difference between a middle way and mediocrity difficult to find...lines between completeness, communion, and confusion rippling like water and light below...but, on bridges worth crossing, the other side is rarely easy to see...

Every Last Leaf (Autumn Rivulet #5)

heard the people who live on the ceiling scream and fight most scarily;
hearing that noise was my first ever feeling that’s how it’s been all around me...
the Clash

...had a friend named Michael when I was seven or eight...first kid I ever met whose parents were divorced....he told me, I remember, one time when we were playing up in the treehouse my dad built in the woods behind our house....didn’t know many kids who talked about serious stuff like he did, either...

....at some point, heard my mom telling somebody, another adult, something his mom told her...about how she’d had to quit her job to look after the kids because the sitter’d been doing something sitters aren’t supposed to...which I didn’t think too much about at the time...

...another time I slept over a couple nights...don’t think I’d ever been in house like that...really bare and run down...toys lying around, mostly broken...holes in the walls his mom plastered over herself...said some bachelors lived there before, and apparently punched the holes with their fists....he lived there with his mom and two little brothers, and this guy who was living with his mom...dark beard, ponytail, tattoos, kind of quiet, soft-spoken when he spoke at all...had a workshop in the basement and an ashtray shaped like a hand with a middle finger sticking up at the back....nowadays, I’d call him a biker, though I don’t remember if he actually had a motorcycle....Michael and one of his brothers, a year or so younger, looked a lot alike...skinny white kids with long stringy hair down to their shoulders...first boys I ever knew with long hair...but his other brother, who was maybe three or four, had dark skin and an afro....Michael said he just came out that way....the first night I had dinner with them, that brother spilled some milk, and their mom turned red, stuck a big fist in front of his little eyes, said see this? this is gonna go right in your face...

...late that night, hearing footsteps in the dark hallway, she shrieked, high pitched and threatening, through the door...then opened it, said oh, it’s you in a voice turned gentle and soft, and pointed me toward the bathroom...

....the next day, Michael and I jumped up and down in a pile of leaves his brother’d raked up, scattering them all over the yard...his mom yelled at both of us, said we’d better get up every last leaf...so we started raking....then, after a while, eager to get back to playing, I said I doubt she really meant ‘every last leaf’...with a nonchalance that grew naturally in my world...but he kept working...he was in his world, and he knew it...

...just happened to remember this story, recently....sorry if it's a bit dark...

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....

Apocalypse Here and Now (Kind of a Movie Review #3)

The first time I saw Apocalypse Now was when it first came out, on big screen. I was somewhere around twelve years old, expecting a cool war movie—and why not? War seemed a whole hell of a lot more fun than those peace-loving sentiments associated with the incredible boredom of having to sit through Quaker meeting every Sunday...but wasn’t expecting to see that family get blown to pieces for a puppy, or the guy holding in his guts and begging for water, or the mother’s voice on the tape that kept playing, wishing for the safe return of the son lying dead, or the hanging bodies...the horror, the horror...and so, with the Reagan/Bush era that, thirty years later, we have yet to leave behind looming a mere year or two in the future, I felt my first glimmer of political consciousness...Charlie don’t surf to this day sounding like as good a three word summation of a half century's foreign policy as anyone’s likely to hear...as well as a good Clash song...though a decade later, already burned out as a left wing anti-war activist, and watching it again on VHS, smoke far less toxic than that from napalm filling the air, I thought whooooah...this shit’s trippy...particularly the opening sequence and ending, comprising what is without a doubt the coolest rock video ever....of our elaborate plans, the end, of everything that stands, the end, no safety or surprise, the end, I’ll never look into your eyes, again....but it was only in my thirties, in therapy, probing through the wreckage with an intensity equally exhilarating, liberating, and terrifying, that I could understand what authentically drunken Willard said in between Jim Morrison’s lines, beneath that Saigon ceiling fan...when I was here, I wanted to be there; when I was there, all I could think of was getting back into the jungle...wondering if perhaps the apocalypse—that ultimate battle between heaven and hell taken so literally by fundamentalists and conspiracy freaks, and so overmined for imagery by heavy metal groups and horror movie scriptwriters—might, in fact, be always here, and always now....

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
W.B. Yeats

Q. How Can You Tell That Your God is Man-made?
A. If He Hates All the Same People You Do.

One evening on the Appalachian Trail, I wandered into a shelter some few miles south of Delaware Water Gap. Sitting there already were another thru-hiker and a skinny guy whose jeans and flannel shirt showed he clearly wasn’t one, holding up his watch and asking what we thought he might get for it at a pawn shop. We made some guesses, and he told us a story of middle class woe—how he lost his wife, and kids with her, along with a house and three or four failed businesses, leaving, it seemed, only his “God”—a woman, as it turned out, who lived at some kind of ashram somewhere in New York state. He was walking to her. “She sees everything,” he said, “she knows I’m here right now.” We started preparing our respective dinners, and he just sat there quietly, until I asked if he had any food. He said no. “You hungry?” “Yeah!” I dug out a bag of instant grits I’d found somewhere, offering my stove once I was done with it. He didn’t want to wait, though, upending the bag and inhaling its dry and tasteless contents before pronouncing it good. That was when I realized his hunger wasn’t the haven’t eaten since lunch variety, but closer to haven’t eaten in days. Digging deeper, I found a bag of granola, which he wolfed down in no time, as well. It was the last food in my pack, which was okay, since I’d be getting into town in the morning anyway, and a diner breakfast would be all the better after a couple hours hiking on an empty stomach.

I didn’t see him again, but somehow doubt his “God” was gonna be too receptive to a supplicant showing up with empty pockets—no different in that way from third world dictators raising gilded cathedrals in their impoverished cities, or countless ministers of the "prosperity gospel" on cable TV with their bogus stories of people sending in their last dollars, only to have God drop hundreds in their path the next day. Those folks tend to be really into the apocalypse, too—no need to worry about global warming, the more things blow up in the Middle East the better, that just means the rapture’s coming sooner, so keep sending in your checks and you won’t get left behind. Faith can offer consolation to the desperate, certainly; all too often, though, it takes the desperate for whatever they may have left.

Thanks to Friendly Atheist for the God joke.