4th of July, Somewhere in Philly

...I live a couple of miles from the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall, where the Roots play the Wawa-sponsored biggest free concert in America (about 600 thousand people last time I went) in front of the Art Museum steps every 4th of July....the residents of my building, a narrow row house converted to four apartments, are all Chinese, except for me, while most people on my street are Muslims from North Africa, the Middle East, and Bangladesh, mixed in with African Americans, who make up the majority of the population of West Philly, along with a large community of lesbians and transgendered people, vegetarians, wealthy college students, hipsters, yogis....just walking around the block, one hears a striking variety of languages and accents, sees all kinds of clothing, along with a mosque, an old stone church, and a head shop that closes for prayers......the kind of place that would make some cry out in despair...this is supposed to be AMERICA!!!!...I want my COUNTRY back!!!!!.....probably some of those folks live around here, too...everybody else does.....and that, I think, is the way it oughtta be...a country struggling, failing far more often than not, but still struggling, to live up to an ideal that founding fathers, themselves heavily invested in slavery and ethnic cleansing, put forth all those years ago, just a couple miles away....

Playing With Blocks

...all we can really experience, or be truly aware of, is the present moment...the right here and right now...like all those yogis & Buddhists’ll tell ya...(when they’re not going on about past lives or India)....but, at the same time, like any neuroscientist can tell ya, it’s actually impossible to be aware of or experience the present moment...the brain doesn’t work like that...by the time you’re aware of or experience anything, it’s already past...


...spent last Saturday on a weekend bed-and-breakfast yoga retreat way up-state...(I’m now proud owner of a pine-scented eye-pillow...seeing how much I was enjoying it, someone commented that I’m becoming a metrosexual...I said I’d probably have to stop buying my clothes at EMS to make that happen)...woke up for the first of three awesome, healthy meals with good friends, morning yoga class, a couple long walks along the creek and a climb to the top of a mountain (overlooking the Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania...which, admittedly, could fit, along with the Grand Canyon of New York at Letchworth, and the various grand canyons of other eastern states, into a small side canyon of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado in Arizona...but is lovely nonetheless)...(see pics)...restorative yoga class, and a post-dinner-and-red-wine Thai massage....and it occurred to me that this really wasn’t a day I could complain much about...


...with the women at the rehab, I focus mostly on GED preparation and literacy, but now and then, with someone more advanced in her education, get to work with creative writing and journaling...encouraging letting-loose on the page, freeing-up the creative voice...almost invariably resulting an empowering and enjoyable experience, for everyone involved, when we see what blossoms on the page....but it’s also a difficult, and often daunting, frightening process...giving what can seem a terrifying concreteness on the page to thoughts one would like to push away, no matter how consistent and inevitable the failure to do so...requiring encouragement, gentle prodding, and understanding from the supposedly more-together teacher-person....and, ultimately, it's all about honesty...

...I haven’t written anything this week, she said, head hanging low....that’s okay, said the teacher, neither have I...

After the Fall...

...somebody told me that, back in the 60’s, when fabled rock band Iron Butterfly tried to record a song called In the Garden of Eden, the singer was too wasted to pronounce the words, so it came out In A Gadda Da Vida....which is a good story...if, most likely, completely dubious....then, that's true of most creation stories...and why they tend to be ruined when taken literally...

...around that same time Joni Mitchell sang we are stardust, we are golden, and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden about a fabled rock festival she didn’t actually get to attend, though many of her friends did, and she’d wanted to...so, really, she wasn’t singing so much about that legendary communal gathering, or even the longing for the fabled garden that, according to that 33 rpm myth, the festival was about....but longing for that longing...hoping for that hope...impossibly dreaming of holding that impossible dream...

The Paradise is in the desire, not in the imperfection of accomplishment...
Allen Ginsberg

...some years ago was sitting in a coffee shop...there was this kid...mid-teens, or so...not bad looking...kinda gawky...he was there a lot...usually alone...like me...but, this one afternoon, there was a girl...about the same age, kinda cute, clever smile, long hair tied back in a child’s ponytail...kinda gawky, too...sitting across from him at a tiny table...and looking every bit as nervous and awkward as he....though anyone could tell they liked each other...a lot...and that they themselves knew...even if they weren’t really sure how to proceed from there...and I couldn’t help thinking goddamn, what I wouldn’t give to be that kid right now...

...(don’t worry...this isn’t some sick Allen/Polanski/Humbert kinda story about a pervy middle aged guy going after little girls....more a sad, wistful middle-o'-the-wintertime kinda one, about wishing one could turn bad memories in for good)...(even if it’s better to follow what the bumpersticker says and give up all hope for a better past...like all the yogis and Buddhists say, live in the here and now...even if so many of them seem so hung up on mythical pasts...when perfectly enlightened words were written by perfectly enlightened sages...which, I guess, shows just how hard it is...and why we shouldn’t be too hard on ourselves for now and then wallowing in our self-indulgent might have beens)...

...to be in his seat, zits, confusion, and all...with the boundless fears that go hand in hand with boundless hopes...countless strange discomforts, all fresh and new...but also the knowing that, deeply disturbing as this clash of innocence and experience called adolescence might be, for this moment at least, he wasn’t alone in it...and that he and she could only imagine what flowers might grow out of their confusion...

...harsh as the end of that story in Genesis was...prospects of mortality and death, angels with flaming swords, and all that...at least Adam & Eve had each other...

It's All In Your Mind

Dreaming is free...
Debbie Harry

...unfulfilled fantasies can be painful, says a friend...and yet they’re better than no fantasies at all, says I...yeah, I know, live in the here and now...and that makes sense, too...and yet there’s something to be said, while you’re living in the here and now, for letting the mind wander and stretch...even if that means mixing metaphors...to see what we can explore even as we create whatever it is that’s to be explored...that the line between creating and exploring is far hazier than we usually think...that wandering and wondering are essentially the same word...to see what pleasures are possible within the mind...since, ultimately, all pleasure is both created and experienced in the mind...it doesn’t exist anywhere else...that’s one thing you learn from antidepressants...acids flowing, momentarily flooding the grey tissue before receding...even God, they say, may exist somewhere in the frontal region of the cerebral cortex...not far from where the yogis say the third eye is located...or maybe I’m making all of this up...

‘Prisoner, tell me, who was it that wrought this unbreakable chain?’
‘It was I,’ said the prisoner, ‘who forged this chain very carefully. I thought my invincible power would hold the world captive leaving me in a freedom undisturbed. Thus night and day I worked at the chain with huge fires and cruel hard strokes. When at last the work was done and the links were complete and unbreakable, I found that it held me in its grip.’
Rabindranath Tagore

Here and Elsewhere

Life is elsewhere.
graffiti seen by Milan Kundera during the Paris uprising, 1968
There’ve been times when I’ve been in a beautiful place, with good friends, at a show, spending time with someone I want to get to know better...and I’ve thought "man, it’d be cool to be here...doing this."... The logical fallacy isn’t exactly hard to see...but the problem remains that life, often enough, does appear to be hopelessly elsewhere...and experienced by someone else....

Depression does get boring after a while...I have of late but wherefore I know not lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercise; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory....yeah, yeah yeah, tell it to yer goddamn shrink, Hamlet...no shrinks in Elsinore?...tough break, but maybe just as well...as a million despondent teenagers sing along with their Pink Floyd mp3's running over the same old ground, of how we found the same old fears....

History is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake.
Stephen Dedalus, Ulysses

Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it, but any student of history can see that’s often just as true of those who remember it. The past holds on tight, those memories from growing up that everyone tells you to treasure often as not taking the form of wounds...no matter how many yogis and Buddhists say it’s nothing but illusion...which is not to say that they’re not right...in most cases, the only walls that matter are those in the mind...but that’s not to say they’re easy to get over....

I work a few hours a week tutoring recovering addicts in reading. How amazing it is to see an adult go from having a handful of very basic nouns at her disposal to reading full sentences...even if she never gets to the point where she can read Dostoyevsky, it means a lot...far more than any particular words on the page...then, how great is it to be writing this right now?...skipping through thoughts and experiences, messing with words and meanings...lines from Shakespeare, Joyce, and Wish You Were Here...or even to be reading it, even if you think it’s all pretentious, boring bullshit...you can enjoy thinking what a dickwad I am...life given to words is itself miraculous....