Lyrical Constipation

I, with my big mouth, promised Kali I'd write about our magical adventure into the great north country. Now, I know I've written about it in the past. I figured, dig that up, embellish it, we'll be done in no time...

But I went to the top of Mt. Beacon with Kali almost a year ago,and it feels so much longer than that, and I feel all these old feelings coming back again.

The Enneagram: Ancient Symbol of Disillusionment

I am sick of being told that simple questions invented by simple people are going to revolutionize my relationships with people. It might be true, I suppose, that individuals are so isolated today that they know nothing about how to interact with each other, and cannot intuit enough empathy or sympathy as to understand each other. Perhaps, even, an enneagram can help us define the sorts of patterns people have fallen into. But it is not a revolution. It is a simple and crude diagnostic tool and not at all to be confused with any sort of cure.

I propose we come up with our own enneagram: one based on how excited people get about things, and where their natural intuitions really lie. This would require a lot more caution in constructing. People would have to actually accomplish tasks, and be observed by someone other than themselves. In short: it's a lot of work. But we can start to get closer. Websites like OKCupid take in reams more information about people than an enneagram, and the site is constantly evolving. It learns from your choices, and from your successes and failures, and makes guesses on what might work for you moving forward. It is, in short, almost intelligent.

So let's stop pretending we can simplify our lives. Instead, let us rejoice in complexity and start bringing ourselves into greater understanding by learning, rather than categorizing. But then again, maybe some of us work in categories- maybe I am just expressing my enneagram ;)

Wet.

Logging jeans. Still poignant when wet with dew or exertion or both, there is the unmistakable aroma of pine sap, almost erotic. The stains in the knees come alive in memory, a fresh kill is evoked. The weight of the pants reflects the crashing weight in a perfect silent forest of a wise ancient tree felled with the best of intentions. You are standing, in the forest, an axe in hand, covered in life.

Sing an Excusatory Note.

"I just don't like fighting," he said. "Or drama. I don't like wasting my energy on so many details of life that grab at me like thorns until my flesh is pulled down by the enormous weight of the earth."

She looked at him and he was encouraged to continue.

"I prefer learning to bear the lightness of being. I find my salvation in big, silent spaces and unspoken relationships. I want wind that pulls my breath away on a mountain vista. I live for transitions, where the sky and earth invade each other. Then the weight becomes my roots, holding me upright, nourishing me.

"I need to be engaged in the production of my own values. I strive to understand myself and my universe, with insatiable curiosity I am always trying to make things better. These are the terms on which I understand my world. This is how I make sense out of so much life. I live to serve.

"So I'm sorry it didn't work out. I'm so sorry, because to me this was as beautiful as any other thing, but it has become tedious, and encrusted, and I can't bear it any longer. I need...

a clean break."

She nodded, and slumped imperceptibly. He quivered. He took this as a signal of her love, and smiled. He knew she understood, but was occasionally terrified when faced by his own lack of understanding. He hoped they could still be friends.

Parl'r Majik

My life is primarily an art, and not a parlor trick, and any woman who does not see that, who is enamored by what she considers magic, is instantly debased to me. I require a woman who sees straight through me, who understands my method and motivations, and only then deems me a worthy companion.

Metanoia

The psychological detoxification of my so-called life.

Sitting in the Ft. Myers airport reflecting through the window on the past couple weeks. Pretty wild. Hectic, wearing, but uplifting, successful, empowering. I wonder what kind of pace I can maintain if I come off the coffee and eat well again on my return home. If I get a truck, stay fit and active, do pullups religiously and choke down protien like it's my job, wich it will be, because the only point of life is to live it under whatever terms you so choose beyond what your situation chooses for you.

My life has been filled with challenges and beauty, the flexing of old, dormant muscles and attitudes. I battled the DMV, exposed myself to failure for the first time in months with the needle tester and the pickup truck, and battled to the point of exhaustion. And...it was good. I tasted victory. I succeeded in my pursuits. I felt like a better person.

I am still full of fear, I suppose, a nagging weight of fear that I do not shed for I no longer recognize the burden. But I challenge my fears anyway. The next giant to slaughter is the second try with the Fire Department. I must swallow my pride and return there, to give it a fair trial. I am waiting until I begin to trust my truick, however. I figure I deserve at least that respite and change of plan.

I think I can make a go of this lifestyle, but I need to reassess my awareness, and get some sort of framework for me and my friends to snap each other from complacency in order to live a life of full-on catastrophe.

I have had many thoughts on the pursuit of women, like the girl in town, the girl from Beacon, or the girl from up north. I need to dedicate myself, and realign myself with such pursuits, andplan out my success and failure. I need to accept I am a control freak who likes situations too complicated to control.

I have thought about my job, and how I need to make more of a concerted effort to remember names, pasttimes, to be warm and gracious and strong. I need to buy better clothes, get to work on time, impose rigor in my outlook and self-expectation.

And I need creative expression. If I have to, I will sever my Beacon life to fund a New York City one. I need a pool of people I can associate with, who will take the time to learn my language, and whose language is beautiful enough to learn myself.

The primer has been on the back-burner too long, as has pursuit of my own health through careful notation. I need to think about how to best record my life for health. I think designing my own software for this, or finding whatever might already exist, woud be a good first step toward many complimentary goals. I should research smartphone programming.

So, I could see a renaissance of self, if I live aware of all these small choices I make, concsiously or not, without metaanalysis. Without the view from 10,000 feet these are just words, they will fail as pieces of a challenging and beautiful puzzle of life. So where to begin? Songlines. Always making the best choice and weighing outcomes. Trusting intuition and challenging myself toward intuitive discovery. Record the changes so as to know how to repeat or avoid history.

Fairytale.

I am still looking for the enchanted stone fox from which to pull my sword.

Tampa

"Sleeps and dreams of gardens
Gardens and trees and ladies at tea
Ladies at tea, they're wearing
... Wearing great tufted beasts upon their heads"

Ybor bedroom->coffee>nipples cut glass>shedding towel>dreamer>Cake>oatmeal>Staples>Walmart>copy center>wallet enlargement>business cards>convention>Dan the charmer>shut down>guiness>Ybor>Centro>sushi>waitress>street kids>heaters, tequila, and Brad's long island iced tea>main street>bars>girls>pickpocket>Colombia>irish coffee, with whipped cream from the surly bartender with the torn dirty shirt, the spanish moustache and the awesome sense of humor>bread pudding>the jazz drummer from
Terrytown who used to fix copiers and now sells auto parts>halloween>gay bar>clubs>hipster bar>PBR>hipster girls>Brad's Dance>yboring>cigarette moth friend>evil angels>communist hairstylist party>moth friend flies away>Polish pre-med girl and mean friend get their bench stolen> Jeep> club girls>Halloween 2, Busch Gardens>Leelo multipass>Abe Lincoln was the dead lovechild of Christian Bale and Ryan Gosling> tankgirl really got to sit in a tank, but she's underage so you can't buy her a drink>dubtrucks in the street>club girl looks like a singer, but her sister more so>I can't touch english language so I can't touch the ceiling and I don't get $20, but I can touch the sign>drunk enough to trip on the median>two cops and no white guys make the best clubs, but the white girls don't know and I can't dance>$8 parking and free restrooms>Ybor house> saved by a one-hour time change.See More

Happiness

I have been making progress in being more active about processing the mentality of "High hopes, low expectations." I think it's working well.

Best birthday I can remember in recent history. Nice to have friends, and land, and the air and the fire. Nice to have high hopes and low expectations. Examples: Sweet horny love-making with REI girl on new crash pad/she never answers the phone andor turns out to be really dull and uninspiring and somehow makes me embarrassed or is embarrassed by me or both anyway. It helps to motivate by keeping the goal in mind, it helps not to paralyze by fully weighing the potential outcomes.

Anyway, It was a splendorific experience to get the salesgirl at the big outdoor chain's phone number after getting her to try out my new bed just like the experience was straight out of a Climbing magazine article or sleeping-bag gear guide or tent-guying bivy tarp cautionary tale. And it was wonderful to have Ashley make me a yummy cake, and all the other wonderful little nuances of the evening. The chair breaking, dousing myself with wine, laughter all around. The warm feeling from sitting in the crashpad with fire and wine, the ease of building a roaring fire as if by intuition, because Adamo and Dan did all the work. The coming-togetherness of my life's feeling these past few dexedrine fueled low carb days. Splendid. Cherished.

D-D-T you can E-A-T

"the entomologist calls for a bowl of porridge"

Chance Encounter

Sometimes you meet a random hairdresser on a drunken night of revelry because you are waiting for your friend who parks cars under the FDR at the seaport, and he has to get the hairdresser's car and you're stumbling around making stop-motion of everything because you can't afford a video camera. And the hairdresser wants to collaborate and you get locked out of the apartment so you pass out in the car with a friend who has malodorous digestive difficulties and you're freezing cold and you have to piss so you beg your way into a McDonalds bathroom somewhere in Brooklyn and your fly is stuck and you get a phone call from a number you don't recognize but you're too fucked up to think not to answer it, so then you're left waiting at Coney Island for no pay and some jokesters who are four and a half hours late because they had a hard time with her makeup, which appears to be toxic silver spraypaint, and her costume, which consists largely of 80's weightlifting gear from the salvation Army. And the spraypaint is flaking off of everything, making her face crackly, and you are doing your best to be encouraging to this poor girl who looks & feels like a drowned rat from outer space and has no modeling experience and you have no time to ease her into it because you're losing the last good light. So you are cursing this damn hairdresser and wishing this experience on someone else.

Other times you explore an old abandoned cold-storage warehouse that is probably the biggest thing in the world made out of nothing but concrete, pipe, and cork, and you feel like you're wandering inside some sort of underground bunker even though your legs still burn from the ten-story walk-up, and you take these really fun pictures of friends and crazy art on the roof and it's a perfect fall day and then you pocket some glasses you found because they remind you of an ex you once had and how these yellow shades always made life seem so cheerful but then you lost them so now you've got another pair, from another explore, free from ties to the ex and you're with this other girl, who you're not dating or even fucking but who has largely replaced the ex, and there's a train station built into this place, and the paint is peeling off the wall like lichen, so some kid spraypainted they decorated for us and you're so amazed by the beauty of your friends and of the graffiti and industrial grandeur. And then a week later you find out the whole place caught fire in what amounted to a holocaust of cork, and they pin it on some scrap-metal welders who were cutting out pipe illegally for months without a problem and then a few days after you took the glasses which were lying on some welding equipment (you wondered why it was there and commented to your friends that it was sketchy) the whole place goes up in smoke and burns for a week even though they pump water into it day and night, hundreds of thousands of gallons. So it was basically your fault but you post your exploration pictures on the internet and the guy who painted on the roof contacts you and says, hey, nice picture, and you say hey, want to collaborate? And life gets in the way but then about a year later you're back in town and you hit this guy up and it's back and forth and at the last minute when you've resigned yourself to religious rites at would-be jazz festivals he calls you up and then leads you to a secret lair of underground artists, and their leader is built like a greek god or at least an important warrior and they all make this amazing art, so you help carry cans of paint and they show you this jaw-dropping old church and take you inside and say: go forth, play! And you take lots of pictures and wrap up the day by photographing three of these amazing artists putting up big wall paintings in a huge industrial site until the sun goes down. And I feel like running into you is more likely the second kind of experience.

Bedtime story.

Better than Ambien, better than counting sheep: http://vimeo.com/7097964

Something About French Girls' Eyes.

new independent photography

new independent photography, a group on Flickr.

Nice.

WVKR

The kind of woman,
from Pine Island
who at dinner time,
dedicates a radio-show
polka song to her
dead dog.

The "Group"

If only they allowed a little more spotlight. They would be risking their own good for that of others. So I guess they don't believe in altruism:

So far, I met a guy with a full grill, selling counterfit sunglasses at a starbucks, who had his first kid at 12 years old, and now is in his early 30's with five of them from four mothers. He was paying child support at 15. His youngest, 4, was running around playing with the other AAers and calling them fag. He was pretty well behaved, though.

I also met a French man who used to be a rugby player on the french national team. You'd never have guessed it. He was sitting at the Starbucks doing sudoku and had installed the inventory system for the popular local restaurant whose hat he was wearing. His main job is working as a legal translator. He is married, wears black-framed rectangular glasses, scruffy facial hair. Apparently he was doing like a couple grams a day of powerful painkillers at the peak of his troubles. But a very nice, intelligent, engaging man.

And then the kid I met last night used to be a dealer with a gang affiliation. Now he is an emo kid, with the hoodie, thick glasses, soft voice...a broken arm from rollerskating. But he has apparently raped a man with a broomstick to force him to give up his money stash at a competing growhouse, has been beaten by baseball bats, suffered two broken collarbones and two rhinoplastys. Now he is pining because the girl he loves (who is ill) is seeing another man, and he swears she's going to break it off today and be with him.

Really nice guy.

All of these people are pretty respectful, engaging. On the surface it's very cultish...but it's just such an amazing pitri dish of different personalities and origins, all with very similar outgoing personalities now. They have such passion and integral individuality. I haven't felt this at home since I was an actor, except I can't stand actors, and I love these people.

Herr Verdict,

I believe you have been treating me unfairly.

Four people in a room, and anyone of them given
millions of dollars, only one wants to save the world.

Everyone else wants: Booze, books. A deserted island
or someplace cheap to live out youth. They all worked

the hard life and now they want themselves. He still
just wants everyone else and how. Fulfillment of all.

Game

Play fetch
Hypokarmic
Thermochondriac

I______you
hide and _go ignore my innermost desires.
_________fuck yourself

It is

Yearning.
A cat, purring,
pressing down warm and fuzzy
on my navel. It stretches and I feel claws.

New Orleans. I love you. I love your strangeness, I love your clouds. I love it all, down to the dog shit scraping off the bottom of my Chucks.

Coming on suddenly, she had bear claws and puppy-dog eyes.

The mailbox post stood like a frontier tombstone.

Leaving a wet bloody metallic taste after every swig, it led to a vicious cycle- always drinking more to try and erase that flavor.

A heady high, just from trying to keep your balance.

Wobbling like a walrus.

An alliterate illiterate.

One door rusts from beneath.

Catching it in the digital age.

Peace, love, and harmony, but don't borrow my bandwidth. The yoga studio owner didn't own up to her wifi.