your humble narrator has happened upon a rather restless chain of days, where he’s found himself sleeplessly stalking through the dark city streets of his mind, unafraid of what he knows to be lurking just footsteps behind just shadows away.  he’s heard them on other nights, always scuffling, and every time a symphony of chills in the equine echoes of his own hard-boiled imagination.  oh, the tones he can call out of that xylophone!  every spinal tap tingles out into another!  down every octave, through every key!  bring it up with the minor!  and let that major sing — !

it seems the lack of sleep has made me tired.  there is a paradox in there, somewhere.

don’t be afraid to think, just make sure you make time to sleep.

goodnight.

what i ate for breakfast:

scrambie eggs with feta, homemade bratkartoffeln (first attempt), homemade tzatziki (it's wow good), sourdough (lightly toasted)

what i ate for dinner:

linguine with broccoli, shitake mushrooms, garlic, red chili flakes in olive oil; grated locatelli

this picture is slightly misleading: it was taken on sunday, when i used linguine and didn’t lightly steam the broccoli first.  tonight i used spaghetti, steamed the broccoli, added more fresh black pepper – everything else the same.  it was better tonight, and more photogenic, but i was frenetic in the kitchen after a long day in the books, too hungry to leave the plate for even a moment.  so, no pictures.  our loss, though more yours than mine.

(im-ah-gin-AY-shon, im-ah-gin-ay-YY-shon)

I know I don’t live on Long Island anymore, but if anyone out there is listening, can you please vote this idiot out of office?  Peter King, via Politico:

“It’s bulls***. It’s disgraceful. You wonder which side they’re on,” he said of the attorney general’s move, which he described as a “declaration of war against the CIA, and against common sense.”

“It’s a total breach of faith, and either the president is intentionally caving to the left wing of his party or he’s lost control of his administration,” said King, the ranking Republican on the House Committee on Homeland Security and a member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence.

I mean, read the IG report.

Yes, this idea to have a special prosecutor investigate CIA agents and their interrogation tactics is borderline ridiculous, but ONLY when contrasted with the fact that the people who, at the highest levels of government, “legalized” the physical and psychological torture of prisoners in U.S. custody are facing no sanctions whatsoever.  Indeed, they are not even within the scope of this investigation, which is only logically explicable in the context of what I described last night about actors, if at all.  It is not known whether or not CIA operatives would have used these torture techniques if the DoJ had not authorized them, but it is plain from reading the interrogators’ statements that they used the techniques (read: cruel and unusual methods) because they were authorized, all the while dubious about the protection the law (and, significantly, those who wrote and approved the laws) would afford them (though it didn’t stop them from savagely murdering scores of prisoners).

That is not to mention the legal ass out of which he speaks when he says this:

Pressed on whether interrogators had actually broken the law, King said he didn’t think the Geneva Convention “applies to terrorists,” and that the line between permitted and outlawed interrogation policies in the Bush years was “a distinction without a difference.”

“…which side are they on?”  Really?  How does this pass for discourse of any kind, let alone one supposed to be rational?  Talk about disgraceful…

In the words of the always eloquent Dick Cheney:  Go fuck yourself.

Edit:  I generally refrain from writing about this stuff because Glenn Greenwald always does it much better, and this is no exception.  I guess I should have read his piece first, but I couldn’t hold my tongue after getting a whiff of King’s verbal flatus.

listen to bill moyers every day

If I’m not mistaken – and if I am then I should be mistaken about much that I hold to be true – the most essential entity within an economy is the individual.  The individual is always valuable, a creator, an end unto itself – by which the means that move are merely everything in between that derives its value from its relation to the individual or, by extension, to society.  You are ostensibly one of these individuals.

Based on this assumption (and that government is the manifestation of the will of society, the collective will of individuals), why is it that the people, the individuals, are the ones who lose, time after time, to entities that are ultimately worthless, secondary creations that affect an individual’s value when, in dejection or disgrace, he devalues himself?

That when these creations fail in their stated responsibilities so badly, especially under a vast shadow of bad faith, and ravish the essential entities of the economy – of which they are dependent and from which derive power and profit – why are they the beneficiaries of our governmental grace, which is supposed to be oriented towards the welfare of the people, not to their impoverishment?

The news has been a consistent stream of reportage on crises in which the ones that benefit – win – from the actions of government (of the people, by the people, for the people) are not the people, but these macroentities which have been demonstrated empirically to be detrimental to the quality of life of not only the people, the supposed beneficiaries, but also to the environmental economy upon which all of our life is ultimately based?  Why is it that when the people and the government of this nation were attacked, the beneficiaries were corporations and their subsidiaries*?  Why is it that when the institutions* we have created (to enable trade amongst ourselves) defraud, bankrupt, and foreclose upon every avenue of good faith we had entrusted in them, why is it that the individuals must suffer and beg for the mercy they are due, but do not receive?

Look no further than what is right in front of you.  Change is not what you thought it was because you assumed that you are worth something.  Well, you are not, but if you want, you can be proud that your creations have grown up so big and strong.  Can it be any clearer from the evincing example of health system “reform” and its priorities that you and I are indeed worthless?  We will not get to the top, both you and I, not at the same time; maybe you, maybe me, but one of us has to wait our turn.  We all pay the tolls as we go – up and up, so slowly, all the way up to see the saints.  They’re so much smarter than you and I, up there; they’ve seen the top – they know how it is and how it should be, so they charge you a toll for the structure, a flat fee (beware! beware the hidden fees and artificially-inflated fees, and maintenance fees…) and that is great for them because we have to go up – but on the way, all you’re worth is what you pay (they get you on the way down, too).

The actors at the top want to make sure they’re holding onto the roof before the ladder goes down (as they know it will, just as surely as they know that someday they’ll be in the ground); just below, the junior actors – waiting bright-faced in the sun, impatiently smiling at the sky knowing that they are so close to that pie (and might even taste it!); and below them, in the middle, the ones who trust that the line will keep moving and that when we get to the top, we will all be standing on a floor instead of roof; and yet still below, the ones who cannot see the top at all but for a shadow in a halo against the wide-open sky, clamoring to know what it is they’re doing on the ladder in the first place, wild-eyed believers in the stories that fart their way down from the asses above; and at last, the ones who did not hold on, the ones who let go, the ones who fell off, lying on the street patiently smiling at the sky, to which that long chain of humanity ascending the ladder will never reach.

***

When do we win?  We have been handed loss after loss in this period of profit; the winnings are distilled from the sweat of toil, the tears of sorrow, and sold back to us as good spirits for a price we must pay, regardless of faith.  Look, listen: see that the bread is taken from those who labor and suffer (can you hear them creak and snap like tired old boughs? or do they shiver obeisances like saplings?).  What you cannot see or hear is that same bread rotting in the guts of those who have eaten what was taken unjustly from the earnest hand.  But you can sure smell the shit.

Who can sleep in such a world?

Do you question your faith when you’ve suffered blow after blow, or is it only another that you can see falling, for your fall occurs more slowly?  Have you been born into so much injustice that you have faith no more, or perhaps you subscribe to the Tao of the blind?

This is no game, this is no show – yet time after time, what they take is slowly sown in the soil beneath our heeled hooves, so that finally, when our feet are without their soles, we will see, understanding what devastation was wrought beneath the weeds when we dig our toes into the dead ground, and find that the seeds of our will no longer grow.

How does it feel to lose and lose and lose what cannot ever be taken, but what we insist on giving away?  Are you faithless or just trying to save face — either way, your blood is nothing but grease.  Don’t you know it is more?  Don’t you know your worth?

Take up the knife and murder your darlings, but be not satisfied watching so much blood pour from your creations – that blood is your own; it is your fathers’; it is your mothers’.  Turn to your brothers and your sisters and say, “I will give blood to the dead no more; I take only from blood what is already mine, as surely as God will take it back from me when I die — It is my life.”

Why do we insist on giving it away to anything less than God?  Why struggle in the cold, dead hands of our own creation?

If you know winning is impossible, do you believe we can win?

***

It is ridiculous to feel the need to say that I don’t mean stab your children in the middle of the night and watch them bleed to death.  I meant those precious beings we’ve created that threaten the integrity of our place in the Creation.  Flashes of genius that bleach the retina blind, only the negative image left behind.  But, really, our collective ability to deduce and infer these things from poetic rhetoric is as atrocious as it is absurd.  So much for good faith…

Oh, and By God!  God has no beard, doesn’t require forced conversion, and doesn’t heed my appeals for a Stanley Cup.  It’s all up to you, Lunchbox.

*(A dense qualification: “Corporations and their subsidiaries” & “institutions” includes those individuals who operate primarily within the parameters of these organizations and only secondarily within the society [of the general welfare], and are afforded a class to themselves with different rules and information in an artificial society with its own monetary considerations, secrecy clauses, and lack of or immunity from legal/ethical/professional accountability in society at large….  [I think actor best describes such a person more aptly than individual - those pretending to share human allegiances, but are nonetheless dependent upon their own artifice.])

when you speak, what do you say?

could you spare some change?  have a nice day?

when you talk about the things you believe (and when do you?),

are they just somethings you say, or do you really think that way?

every day, someone explains what they mean

when they say, “this is what i want, this is how it should be” –

every day, someone else nods but does not understand, wondering, “how can it be?”

how can it be that we speak the same language, but have no idea what it means?

on the strength of the absurd, i believe –

is there no other way?

__________

a reading day, very grey.  tomorrow, i’ll pick a different vowel sound to confine me.

till then, dancing the night away :: datA, the mezzanine.

ugh, too much caffeine.

It amazes me that it has taken this long for me to read this record, let alone add to it anew.  Not once have I revisited the words that led me to this place, the words that followed me here.  In many ways, I don’t even recognize the written remains of my journey as my own, reading them now as though the writer had known so much about me, and yet… how could I have said all those things?  What relation do I bear to the me who lived those words, to you who read them?  For those of you who believe in past lives, a question:  must you die before living another life?  How do you define a lifetime?  In the past year, I have lived and died, loved and shined, caved and cried, lost faith, come alive…

San Francisco, just over a year ago, I sat on the same couch in the same coffee shop, alone then as I am now, though in a decidedly different state of mind:

alright, i’m moving to san francisco.

multidimensional love affair with life.

(02 August 2008)

Before rereading this whole thing, I would’ve had no idea what that meant.  Recreating the circumstance isn’t really helping to recall the feeling – so wrought I am with the intensity of my experience since then – but reading backwards and forwards, seeping in slowly, context comes back to remind me of what I was then, and I have found that the past is nothing to be afraid of, lest it end up becoming present and future.  With addiction, it is an incessant search for past feelings; with shame, with fear, it is a continuous avoidance.  What they have in common is escape.  Why else would I have stayed away from something that was so essential to me, something that filled me with so much renewable energy, that changed my life in so many ways, if not for fear?  How could I bear to face such beautiful feelings when the pain and disappointment I have experienced here, as a result of my decisions and the stops that I have made, has been a most extraordinary and personal desperation.  Instead of raging against it, I am beginning to accept it as part of the same journey, to take it for what it was to help me find myself on this unending search for… for what?  If it doesn’t end, how will I know what I am looking for?

A year ago today, I was in the backseat of a cab careening from the airport towards my apartment in midtown Manhattan.   A few months ago, I was driving a cab in the cold, grey fog light on streets teeming like tidal waves.  A few months ago, I was going mad.  A few months before that, I was in love.  But a few months from now?

More than anything, I have returned to writing here because of all of you who have read through this, all of you who I have left hanging.  Rereading your comments was one of the most emotional aspects of it all.  In fact, losing touch with most of you has been one of the hardest parts of my experience here, knowing how much you all contributed to my strength and, ultimately, my happiness.

I didn’t intend for this to be an apology or even a simple explanation, and reading what I’ve written here, I’m not sure what to call it.  I had originally wanted to commemorate the one year anniversary of my tattoo, which I had done in Seattle, 08.19.08 to mark the realization of my journey, an important and interesting detail I left out of the original composition.  But as I’ve just said that the journey continues, the tattoo is just a realization of something.  It was also an amazing experience.  Maybe I will write about it, maybe I will write about anything.  I’m not sure what this is now, but I am here and engaged with it, so perhaps I will figure that out.  As I once said, in another time, in another life (maybe):

And so I go – that is the only purpose.  In motion, there is interaction; from interaction comes understanding.

(04 July 2008)

I invite you all to figure it out with me, because I know that I cannot do it alone.

For Jessie Mae

the albluminar surface...

a zero entropy system.

so perfectly concocted, it had to be destroyed.

SO it has come to this – waiting in the dining room at the Green Tortoise for the inevitable, my flight back to New York, the end of this adventure.  Honestly, because that’s all I feel capable of right now, I thought I would have more to say.  It’s hard to describe how I’m feeling – tired, for sure, but not excessively.  I do not feel anything excessively, as though there is quiet in my being that is listening without judgment or desire.  I am excited to return to New York, eager to make peace with the wilderness from which I am born.  There are things that I have missed about The City, but none of them for a moment made me feel like returning.

ALAS, the time has come and found me again, so long spent in its eternity, to return now to the man-made minutia of hours and minutes seems as though I am about to be buried alive, but I am as calm as I’ve ever been.  Seattle is a wonderful place, I could tell from the moment I got off the train, and when I get on the plane, I will know that Seattle was not my destination, not the end of my journey, but a place in which I was able to feel the love I’ve experienced on my own, to know the universe that is my soul.

AS with most of the things I’ve written on here, this is all another way of helping me understand the things I’ve found, learned.  If you have been along for the ride, I admire you.  This is not easy to understand, even for me, but that you were willing to wade through the incoherence and the irrelevance to understand me and, by extension, my truth, is a sign that you are ready to receive.  Or perhaps you work a shitty job that necessitates your zoning out and surfing the internets for hours.  Or perhaps you’re weird.  Either way, you tried, and you are better for it.  I hope you have become inspired to open up to the universe, to talk to strangers, to listen, to love, to eat sea urchin.

I will continue to post – even though the trip is over, my journey has begun.  The format may have to be modified slightly to make this record more interesting, however, it will be here and I hope you will be too.

THAT is all for now, two and a half hours before I must leave for the airport.  Time to breathe, to feel, not to think.

i’ll decide… take the dive

take my time… not my life

wait for signs… believe in lies

to get by… it’s divine… whoa

oh, you know what it’s like…

One day, things will start to make sense. You will see the universe as it is, as infinite expressions of one truth. It is as ineffable as existence because it is. Psychology, for example, is the explanation of existence as the input of experience on a spectrum of Fear and Love. Both are undefinable except generally as the inhibitory and excitatory forces that govern the one existential constant, interaction. It is only a system that incorporates a few dimensions of the boundless whole, in order to make a metaphor readily accessible to those who understand the language. And on it goes.

Systems circumscribe our understanding, preventing the simplest expressions – manifestations of being in the most physical or spiritual form – from being received as they are, without interruption, the transmission uncorrupted by lesser truths. That, I believe, is the intention of meditation, to quiet the systems that shout for supremacy in the mind and drown out the truth that is always present. Meditation is not the only way, and is itself a system, but it is a way. There are many, but the point is that you must be willing to leave behind the anxious noise, the comforting sound of habit, to believe that love is the force leading to truth, and that the path of least resistance, in the existential sense, will bring you there.

I started reading The Alchemist after a long bout of wavering between other people’s reviews and irrelevant thoughts about its popularity. Coming into it now, at the end of this huge, but short journey – just one of many, one of all – allows me a hindsight perspective of my path, uncorrupted by reading too much into fiction and fad, but one experienced for myself, and amazingly, one that led to the same feeling, however differently worded our explanations. The book was given to me by Satya, my love, upon my departure from San Francisco, and has brought me out of the irons in which I had found my ship stuck. I had begun to doubt my experience, to discount the signs and the lies that led to truth, but now I am reconfirmed, my faith strong as the day I found it.

Tomorrow is to be a singular day in my life, but until then I shall live this one as it will be different from every other. Today’s repose was very necessary, and now it is time to venture out.

… little secrets, tremors… turned to quake

the smallest oceans still get big, big waves…