Archive for February, 2004

The Pearl

Published on February 28, 2004 in Personal and Waiting for the miracle. 0 Comments

I’m fired up this morning. A strong cup of coffee, a spirited discussion with m.a. on the promise and perils of Christianity, and a copy of Kerouac’s On the road (my first taste).

“[What] did it [anything] matter? I was a young writer and I wanted to take off. Somewhere along the line I knew there’d be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.” (p.11)

These lines sent waves of sadness rolling through me as my thoughts drifted to Eric, the image of him sitting on the music house porch in tears after our big talk. “The dream is already over.” Yet I’m still dreaming, still yearning for that pearl. Maybe I gave up too soon, was too chicken shit to face my fear of conflict. Damn. Hitting the highway in the Blue Meanie–I just wiped that whole dream away with a few choice words. But did I really give it my all when I had the chance? Of course not. I was in a tough spot and didn’t really know what to do. Life is always a work in progress, and this yearning will continue to pull me along, somewhere, some way. I will make it to Carrboro for the CD release party.

It was somehow fitting that I spent the final night in the Music House alone. Everything was finally moved out, and the other guys were installed in their new residences. I made the trip from Kentucky to help the guys with the cleanup and thereby secure my share of the deposit money. I paid rent through January, so technically it was still my room, my house, empty as the day I first laid eyes on it.

The first night we all spent in the Music House together was during the weeks prior to the official move-in, when we were scraping and painting and dreaming the place into being. We all camped out in the living room, drinking and getting high till the wee hours, laughing ourselves to tears over the ingredient list of a jar of mixed nuts. It was just the way Jeff said the word “filbert” that set me off, and it just never got old. Three hours later it was still the funniest thing ever. That is, until Doug decided to go to sleep. We were short of blankets, so I offered him the curtains from my bedroom window. When he pulled them over him, his legs (he’s six feet six) stuck out about three feet. This sent the rest of us into fits of hysterical laughter at regular intervals throughout the night. We would laugh and dream together in that room many more times during the next several years.

With so much work to do, moving stuff out and cleaning up, there’s been no time to reflect on the fact that the House of Rock ‘n Roll is no more. Maybe it’s better that way. I walked around the empty house and turned all the lights out for the final time. I stood an extra minute in the living room, choking back the unbearably sad waves of nostalgia as I surveyed the scene. One wall was covered with red wine, and there were huge holes in several other places, made by fists and heads. This all happened at parties in the past few weeks, after I had moved to Kentucky. I found this house, and it was ultimately my decision to move that led to its downfall. As I curled up in my sleeping bag, I could hear the raccoons walking on the roof. It’s their place now.

Being Bob

Published on February 28, 2004 in Personal and Waiting for the miracle. 0 Comments

New age music obnoxiously seeps into my brain like lead into blood. The synthesized bird chirps and the fog of cigarette smoke settle over me with all the subtlety of a wet sneeze. I’ve been plowing through Miller’s Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch, and I find it lacking. He speaks of what happened during his years there as if these events are wholly unrelated to his life at present, recollecting without tether to the moment. It bores me. I bore me. I give a resounding “Boo!” to the entire day, and while I’m at it, to the entire city of Lexington. Everything is so goddamned ugly here, especially the blue blooded natives that scurry about like albino rats up and down the aisles of the Walmart Super Stores and churches the size of football stadiums. Staring at a fat beam of sunshine illuminating a blizzard of dust particles, it occurs to me that this is what I’ve been breathing in all along. A moment later, the clumsy stomp of a passerby sends a wave of vibration rolling across the floorboards, up through the couch and into my asshole. Refreshing, like the breeze from a butterfly’s wings. Everything is ugly, especially people in Kentucky, white wraiths sailing up and down the aisles of Walmarts and Home Depots.

Nothing. Strike one hundred seventy five thousand. Okay, one more pitch; this time I’ll tear the leather off the fucking ball. Who cares… if it’s the tundra or the temple floor? Either way, it’s a place to fall to pieces. Who cares… if it’s memory or pure invention? Either way, it’s a candy-coated rat turd.

–Later– I’m sitting on a tree stump in Kirklevington Park. Kids are playing, running around like dogs off the leash. Their parents are walking around the perimeter, getting their laps in and trying not to look embarrassed when their dogs stop to take a dump or sniff a passerby’s crotch. A guy, maybe fifty-five or sixty, has quickened his pace to a jog, moving with all the grace of a coat rack tumbling down a flight of stairs. It’s painful to watch him. It’s like he’s been dipped in cement and is seconds away from becoming a living statue. Another guy is showing off his pet iguana, although it could be an armadillo or an alligator for all I can tell. What ever it is, the guy is clearly loving the attention he’s getting.

It’s Saturday, and I’m in a foul mood. After a week of toil and exhaustion, I find myself unable to engage, wake up, or break loose during the only block of time when I have a little freedom. The sun is nice though, and I like the way that little boy told his Dad about how he never dreamed he would see an iguana in person. So it’s an iguana.

Walking toward the park I thought about all the times I strolled up and down Franklin Street and before that, Haight Street in San Francisco. Does it really matter where I am? Has anything really changed? Remembering the pizza slices at the Double Rainbow on Haight St., getting to know Denise and wondering where it all might lead. Kentucky? Ridge Behavioral Health System? Massage school?

Changing pens from black to blue, I take a moment to catch my breath. A crowd has gathered around the iguana now, and his master has launched into an undoubtedly well rehearsed lecture. Sitting slumped on a stump, my ass starts to ache and I sink a little deeper into my funk. I don’t know what would have to happen for me to feel happy or alive, I know only that I’m powerless to make it happen. There are no zen fireworks as a reward for this realization, however, so I can only assume I’ve missed the mark again.

Strike one hundred and seventy six thousand. Trying not to try. Struggling to let go. Being Bob over and over again. A broken record of a bad song. Pull the fucking plug already!

Beyond Theology

Published on February 26, 2004 in Philosophical. 0 Comments

Some food for thought from Watt’s (Beyond Theology):

“Spirituality needs a beer and a loud burp, just as sensuality needs a bed on the hard ground, a rough blanket, and a long look at the utterly improbable stars.” (p. 162)

“Material pleasure, even of the most refined order, is never enough, if “enough” is what you are seeking. If there is that strange, deep longing in the heart for something that is “the answer”–the gorgeous, golden glory you have always wanted but have never been able to find or define, the thing that is finally for real and for keeps, the eternal home–then anything in the physical or intellectual universe that is asked to be that will collapse. [...] The answer, the eternal home, will never, never be found so long as you are seeking it, for the simple reason that it is yourself–not the self that you are aware of and that you can love or hate, but the one that always vanishes when you look for it. As soon as you realize that you are the Center, you have no further need to see it, to try to make it an object or an experience. This is why the mystics call the highest knowledge unknowing.” (p. 162)

“[A] superior religion goes beyond theology. It turns toward the center; it investigates and feels out the inmost depths of man himself, since it is here that we are in most intimate contact, or rather, in identity with existence itself. Dependence on theological ideas and symbols is replaced by direct, non-conceptual touch with a level of being which is simultaneously one’s own and the being of all others. For at the point where I am most myself I am most beyond myself. At root I am one with all the other branches. Yet this level of being is not something to be grasped and categorized, to be inspected, analyzed or made an object of knowledge–not because it is taboo or sacrosanct, but because it is the point from which one radiates, the light not before but within the eyes.” (p.225)

“[T]he way in which we interpret mystical experience must be plausible. That is to say, it must fit in with and/or throw light upon the best available knowledge about life and the universe.” (p. 225)

[Pages 226-229 kick ass and should be re-read. They discuss the connection of modern scientific understanding with the feeling of mystical experience.]

“[U]ltimate faith is not in or upon anything at all. It is complete letting go. Not only is it beyond theology; it is also beyond atheism and nihilism. Such letting go cannot be attained. It cannot be acquired or developed through perseverance and exercises, except insofar as such efforts prove the impossibility of acquiring it. Letting go comes only through desperation. When you know that it is beyond you–beyond your powers of action as beyond your powers of relaxation. When you give up every last trick and device for getting it, including this “giving up” as something that one might do, say, at ten o’clock tonight. That you cannot by any means do it–that IS it! That is the mighty self-abandonment which gives birth to the stars.” (p.229)

Digging

Published on February 22, 2004 in Personal. 0 Comments

I’m feeling a little nervous and self-conscious to be writing again. It’s crazy, I know, but I wouldn’t be hesitant if there were not something important going on, something I’ve been avoiding. It’s Sunday morning and Mary Alice and I are hanging out in the apartment “studying.” Well, she’s studying and I’m doing this, whatever this is. The struggles, vicious circles–in short, the pure insanity–have been well documented elsewhere, so there’s no need (thankfully) to beat any of that further to death. The dust has settled now in the wake of my extrication from Carrboro, and here I am, feeling a bit lost and a bit scared, wondering if this whole so-called spiritual journey has been nothing more than a fantasy, a game that I invented to make the candle of my life seem worth the flame. A game within a game. The internal knot I’m picking at right now feels like stifled waves of nausea, a sense that if there is point to be missed, then I am surely missing it. It’s a familiar feeling. Reading over some old journal stuff, it’s clear I’m capable of being swept up in a sense of hope and promise. I’m struggling to put the past few years in a perspective that looks anything like progress, spiritual or otherwise. One thing that jumps to mind is the transition from Denise to Mary Alice. From one perspective, the past few years have amounted to little more than that, although that, in and of itself, is no small thing. Until now, everything in my life has been wrapped up in the grand project of finding someone who loves me completely, especially sexually and romantically. When things with Denise fell apart, I started to understand a lot about that. I had to understand so that I could carry on. When I met Mary Alice I was at a spiritual peak, secure and strong in myself and seemingly on the right track in every way, living the life of the artist, which had become my ideal through my love of Miller. Things got complicated when Mary Alice moved away, and I’m still unclear as to all that went into my change of heart regarding the band. In any event, I made some tough decisions and somehow I need to pick up the thread again, regardless of what happened and where the thread leads next.

And so here I am, digging.