Category: Personal

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DSCN3098I was sitting on the toilet clipping my toenails when my brother called to tell me they were pulling the plug on Dad. “Pack your bags bro…” is how that conversation started. A few minutes later he called again, this time to ask me if I wanted to say goodbye to my father before they let him go. My brother held his cell phone to my father’s ear and I had about fifteen seconds to say goodbye. I fell to the floor in tears. Head spinning, I paced around the back yard, mowed the lawn, noticed the two doves struggling to make a nest on my back deck and the two new rosebuds (the first of this Spring) that popped up overnight. Next thing I’m in the air between El Paso and Albany, writing up a draft of the obituary. Then I’m doing my Mom’s taxes, working on the eulogy with my siblings, singing at the funeral service, carrying my father’s casket through the pouring rain to the grave site. Of course it was all difficult, heart-wrenching, and beautiful too. All my time on this planet, until now, my father has been here with me. Even across the miles, he’s been here, somewhere. Now he’s gone. Not here, not anywhere. And even though I’m surely not alone, I feel as if I’ve been dropped off in the middle of nowhere, left to find my way back home. But “home,” by definition, has always been the place where my father is, and so I’m lost. Heaven is a comforting idea, for those who believe, but I’m not looking for comfort. My father is dead and I’m trying to find my way home, to a real place on this planet, where I can live and breathe and be wide awake under the real shining sun, doze and dream under real stars. I may be lost, but I’ll find my way, eventually. When I get there, it’s not going to be the same without you, Dad.

dadandbob

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Have a nice pie!

It’s a curious thing that we men so often wake up with raging boners. You might assume it’s because we have sex on the brain twenty-four seven, but I don’t think so. I think it’s just a blood flow thing. Of course, I could google it and put the matter to rest, but I’m hesitant to enter “morning erection” into the search box. I can see myself in a court room someday trying to explain that I was just “researching” for a blog post. No. I can’t risk it. Besides, I know for a fact that I wasn’t dreaming about anything sexual when I woke up this morning because I remember the dream clearly. I was in high school, participating in a gym class run by my former soccer coach. In real life, that coach always had it in for me ever since the day my older brother told him to “shove that whistle up your ass!” My brother quit the team that day, leaving me behind to take the heat for the next two years. Anyway, the dream kept morphing between gym class, soccer practice, and some sort of camping trip, all run by my former coach. At one point we were sitting around a campfire and the coach decided he wanted to bake up a pie. He sent me off to the supply room to fetch a “one-by-four” pie pan. Once in the room, I realized I no idea what he meant by “one-by-four.” It couldn’t be inches. That would make it too small. Four sides and one bottom? Too general. Anyway, after tearing apart the supply room I returned with an aluminum pan that seemed suitable for the task, but the coach berated me in front of the rest of the kids for “fucking everything up, as always!” This sent me into a rage and, in complete contrast to how things played out between us in reality, I went-the-fuck-off on the coach, ripping him up and down for all the times he unfairly picked on me to get back at my brother. The denouement arrived as I crumpled up the aluminum pan into a dense ball, threw it at the coach, and then hit him with this: “Have a nice pie!”

No wonder I woke up in such a state…

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Letter to all and sundry

[Reflections on writing]: I’ve been thinking about writing, about the different voices or modes I use to express myself depending on what prompts me to write. It’s relatively easy to respond to a prompt from another person, whether that prompt is a specific question or an email or whatever. I supposed it’s just easier to get started when one is prodded like that. Free writing without any clear intention is more difficult, at least in terms of getting started. I’m toying with the idea of writing specific prompts for myself, as a way of galvanizing the process and differentiating the cacophony of voices echoing throughout my dome. It seems my blogging voice is different from my journalling voice, the former coming across more as a “letter to all and sundry” type of thing, the latter a “getting things off my chest” gesture of catharsis.

[So now what (post-job, pre-grad school)?]: Well, looks like I’ll have some time on my hands for at least the month of June, assuming my daily job searches continue to yield nothing. As has been the case for years now—twenty years, at least—, I’m not at a loss for things to do. Boredom is not something I experience outside of a compulsory work or school situation. My “free” time is often haunted by other bugaboos though, like self-doubt, poor focus, fuzzy intentions, habits of distraction and avoidance, etc.

[So, what are you avoiding right now?]: Despite the fact that I’m writing at the moment, I’m certainly dodging the long-standing, ever throbbing intention to write in a more disciplined way. I’m also haunted by the many unfinished songs that I’ve set aside over the years. Every now again I try to take the perspective of my future self, myself as an octogenarian reflecting back on my life. From that point of view, I imagine that my biggest regrets will have to do with the extent to which I allowed my deepest, juiciest intentions to wither and shrivel in the face of ignorance and/or self-imposed paralysis. Many have expressed to me over the years that I have a talent for this thing or that. Writing, music, counseling—these things immediately come to mind. In fact, these three things are quite clearly the three things I’d like to focus on right now. I’ll start counseling classes in a matter of weeks, so the prompts and prods from the structure of the graduate program will more or less force me to engage on that front. Writing and music, however, demand more intrinsic motivation and discipline, and here is where I always seem to surrender to my demons. I’d like to declare, “Not this time!” or otherwise make a big show of how things are going to different this time around. But I’ve broken too many promises to take any of my “drunk talk” too seriously. The thing is to actually do that which is worth doing.

[Not-so-random thought]: I’ve been reading through Henry Miller’s published letters to his friend Emil Schnellock. In 1931, Miller was living hand-to-mouth in Paris, never sure from where his next meal would come or where he might spend the night. He was also struggling mightily to find his writing voice. He was finishing his first “proper” novel, which he had been working on for years, and he was also anxious to begin working on his “Paris book”—the book that would become Tropic of Cancer. On February 16 he wrote:

Here I am, still muddling along with the book. At the very end and can’t put Finis to it. And sick and sore about it…disgusted…hate it…think it the vilest crap that ever was. […] Somehow only a meager portion of what I feel and think gets expressed, and that nearly drives me crazy. Sometimes I believe it’s because of the form I have chosen. This book, for example, has been so carefully and painstakingly plotted out, the notes are so copious and exhaustive, that I feel cramped, walled in, suffocated. When I get thru I want to explode. I will explode in the Paris book. The hell with form, style, expression and all those pseudo-paramount things which beguile the critics. I want to get myself across this time—and direct as a knife thrust.

Later, on August 24:

I just finished the book and must wait now until payday for funds wherewith to mail it. […] I start tomorrow on the Paris book: first-person, uncensored, formless—fuck everything!

Incredibly, Miller was interviewed more or less on his deathbed, at the age of 89. He didn’t seem full of regret, but rather “alive to the end.” May we all be:

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Imagination

I’m rereading Henry Miller’s The Rosy Crucifixion for the umpteenth time. Each time I come across the following passage, like I did tonight, my mind sparkles and I become wide awake, exalted. Thanks Henry, again.

The prisoner is not the one who has committed a crime, but the one who clings to his crime and lives it over and over. We are all guilty of crime, the great crime of not living life to the full. But we are all potentially free. We can stop thinking of what we have failed to do and do whatever lies within our power. What these powers that are in us may be no one has truly dared to imagine. That they are infinite we will realize the day we admit to ourselves that imagination is everything. Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything God-like about God it is that. He dared to imagine everything.

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Digging…

It’s Friday morning and I’m doing my thing. This. The dust has settled now from the shakeup of my relocation, and here I am, feeling a bit lost, wondering if this whole narrative I’ve created about my life, this so-called journey of self-discovery, has been nothing more than a fantasy, a game I invented to give a sense of meaning and drama to the particular sequence of choices and random events that have delivered me — more or less in one piece — to this fine Friday morning. The internal knot I’m picking at right now has a dimly foreboding feel to it, like stifled waves of nausea. Deeper still there’s a sense that I’m missing something very, very important, something that is being communicated to me by everyone and everything all the time, yet somehow remains elusive for being so glaringly obvious. If I would just turn the dial a hair to the right or a smidge to the left, I would be tuned in clear as a bell, but I seem to have forgotten the basic things, like what a dial is what a bell sounds like.

It seems the fog of amnesia has settled over me, again. Yes, I’ve been over this ground before, I’m certain of it. Whatever is being communicated to me is something I already… fucking… know. Been here, done this. And yet…

Until the age of 30, the rules of the game were simple: every thought, emotion and action of any significance was wrapped up in the grand project of finding “the one” who would love me the way I needed to be loved. With each “failed” relationship, I understood a little more about the folly of such a project. At 40, I can note — with more than a little gratitude — how each morning I emerge from sleep to the joyful discovery that I am not alone. In fact, I wake up each day to the knowledge, rather unsettling at times, that I presently have everything the 30-year-old me ever truly wanted, and everything that any human being could reasonably hope for. And yet…

Am I spoiled rotten? Have I gotten too soft? Perhaps my edges were forged by the years of burning angst and the constant hammering of struggle and failure. It’s as if I don’t know how to be… comfortable.

Maybe I’ll invent a new game, create a new project and lose myself again in the drama of it all. Maybe I’ll stop all this navel-gazing and focus my creative energies on those less fortunate, those who would consider it a luxury to wrestle with my itty-bitty demons. Trouble is, I’ve been there too. I’ve been the martyr and the saint. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’ve been over every inch of this territory, wherever the hell I am. It’s just that my tracks have been covered up, and I can’t remember for the life of me what it was I discovered here that seemed so earth-shattering at the time.

Whatever it was though, it was somewhere deep down.

Better start digging.

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Unwinding

I do a very idiosyncratic meditation practice of sorts that has evolved over many years — a little song and dance I call “unwinding.” Basically, I just lie on the floor, on my back, and do nothing. I inhibit any and all voluntary movements as I wait for anything that feels involuntary, any movement that feels as if it’s happening of its own accord. For the first several minutes I may only get a few twitches, but eventually, if I tune in enough, a whole series of movements will begin to emerge, and I follow them wherever they go, as long as the sense that it’s all “just happening” is driving the action. After a while, I might be bouncing all over the room, or end up on top of the refrigerator (this has actually happened!).

The sense I get during these movement meditations is that I’m literally unwinding various patterns of tension and inhibition, like the way a twisted rubber band will follow its way back to its slack form in precisely the reverse pattern with which it became twisted. At the end of this unwinding I feel incredibly clear and free, and I’m often showered with insights for hours.

Of course, it’s not always a super-intense experience, as the whole thing is about dropping into what’s actually going on in my body, not about trying to make something cool happen (although admittedly I’ve fallen into that trap many times). For whatever reason, I only do this practice every once in awhile, when I feel particularly compelled, which is usually when I’m particularly wound up. (Inconveniently, this has tended to be at like, three in the morning.) It’s only recently that I’ve explored this on a regular basis. That’s because it’s only recently that I’ve had the time to regularly indulge in such extended periods of purposeless. In so many ways, this “no job” period has been far more glorious than I imagined it would be. I know it won’t, can’t, and probably shouldn’t last forever, but I definitely can see myself getting in the habit of taking these extended “me retreats” more often in the future, should I continue to be so fortunate.

On the surface it might seem a bit self-indulgent to spend so much time navel-gazing, so to speak, but in my experience the benefits of such sustained inner focus usually extend far beyond my little Bob-o-sphere. Disconnection from my deepest intentions leads to disconnected experiences, disconnected actions, disconnected habits, disconnected relationships. Any investment I make in reconnection leads to, well… reconnection. It’s as simple as that. In short, the quality of my experiences–i.e. of my life–has always depended, in large measure anyway, on the quality of attention I’m able to bring to any given situation. Taking the time to truly unwind (as opposed to getting pleasantly distracted from being wound up) has consistently led to increased clarity of attention, refinement of sensitivity, deepening of self-awareness and, ultimately, a greater capacity for open-hearted communion with my fellow humans.

Or I’m just being self-indulgent. Who the fuck knows…

Anyhoo, I’m not sure how I got on that tack when really I just wanted to drop by the ol’ blog to post my recent cover of Roy Orbison’s “Crying”, which has until now been confined to Facebook and Twitter. “The Big O” was one of the first musical voices I heard growing up, as both my parents were huge fans. This song got lodged somewhere deep in my marrow before I knew a thing about heartbreak. When I recorded this the other day I wasn’t thinking about any of the numerous girls who crushed my corazon over the years, but rather of this town in which I’ve felt very much at home for eight years of my life, and to which I must now bid adieu. Sweet, sweet Carrboro, you will be missed…

Crying by Isaac Dust

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Ten more days

Ten days left before becoming officially “not young anymore.” Yikes. I’m not happy about it, but a man has to keep moving along. Ten more bowls of cereal. Ten more walks around town. Ten thousand more thoughts bouncing around my skull, telling me things like “You should start journaling every day again”, and “You should start recording songs every week again”, and “You should carry a digital camera around and start taking pictures during your walks.” I suppose there’s really not much difference between taking a picture and recording a song and writing in a journal. It’s all about capturing the moment, putting a frame around it so it can be revisited later. But why do this? Why should I start doing any of these things? Am I trying to freeze time, to deny the inevitable? Ten days. It may as well be ten minutes, or ten seconds. As soon as I imagine the sand in the hourglass it’s already as good as gone. But while there’s nothing I can do to slow things down, I can pay closer attention. Better attention. And that’s really what I’m hoping will come of the journaling, the recording, the picture taking. Each of these activities focuses my attention in some way, tunes me in to some bandwidth of experience I habitually fail to notice. So yeah, it’ll probably do me some good to start doing these things more often. Still, I’m sad to turn forty. At this moment, I’m noticing the banana sitting on my desk—my mid-morning snack. It’s a bit past its prime, covered in brown spots. It’s not rotten mind you, not inedible, but still, it would have been tastier yesterday, or two days ago. In ten days, it’ll be rotten to the core. That is, unless I eat it today. If I eat it today I can spare everyone the stink and the fruit flies.

Now I know I’m not dead yet, that I’m healthy and likely to have many good years ahead of me, and that no one near forty (or older) wants to hear anything but positive spin when it comes to aging. Wisdom, and all that. But the brown spots are starting to show, and that fact means something to me. I’m not sure what it means, but I don’t want to gloss over it. I don’t want to turn away too quickly from the pangs of fear and wonder, from the slightly nauseating mysteriousness of it all. Birth, life, decay, death. Why not dwell on it a while? The times in my life that have been marked by the most personal growth have been those times when I’ve chosen not to turn away from uncomfortable feeling and thoughts. When I’ve stopped and turned toward what’s been nipping at my heels.

The last time I felt real terror was when I saw a man sneaking through the sliding glass door into my bedroom. It was about three in the morning, and it took me a moment to realize what was happening. When I finally realized a stranger has just broken into my home, I sprang up to my feet and, standing on the bed, I tried to scream. The sound that eventually came out of my mouth sounded like… well, I’m not really sure. Strangely, “a grizzly bear having an orgasm” is what comes to mind. Whatever it sounded like, it scared the doo-doo out of my wife, who had been snoozing soundly. In the end, the would-be burglar turned out to be my microphone stand, which I had set up a few days before. What does this has to do with turning forty? How the hell should I know? I’m only 39. For ten more days. But I’m guessing it has something to do with breaking the spell of illusion. Buddhists say our entire sense of self is an illusion. So who is it then, really, who’s turning forty? This physical organism? Scientists say that every cell in the human body is replaced every seven years, so that like a tornado or a whirlpool it’s really only the pattern that persists, not any particular object or thing. And everyone knows that each night we dream an entire universe into existence, only to forget about it before we’re done emptying our bladders the following morning.

Whoever “I” am, I was right about journaling. This is fun. But I was wrong about the banana. It turned out to be perfect. As far as taking pictures during my strolls through town, I’m not sure I have an eye yet for drawing out what’s most interesting:

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Good sane fun

“If you want to catch a falling leaf, you have to be where the leaves are falling.” That’s what a little birdie told me, so I intentionally changed my route to work this past week so that I walked under as many trees as possible. It’s the only ritual I observe religiously. I simply must catch at least one leaf every fall. (And it has to be fresh from the branch and caught before it hits the ground. Nothing off a roof or blown up from the ground will do.) If I fail in this, it means that I’ve given up the ghost; that I’ve gotten old; that I’m no longer paying attention to what really matters. Maybe that’s a little melodramatic, but at the very least a leafless fall would mean I’m probably not walking around outside much, or I’m too often staring at the ground lost in my head, or listening to my iPod, or talking on the phone. My mindful strolls have been keeping me sane for years, and it just so happens that the number of leaves I catch each year is one of the few quantifiable measures of my degree of saneness. Best-case scenario, I’m taking a stroll to work or around the block and, without making any special effort whatsoever, a leaf just happens to float down near me and I reach out and grab it. Or, better yet, it just hits me in the face or drops in my lap. That’s the best-case scenario mind you, the one that most captures the Zen spirit of the tradition. But sometimes a man has to do what a man has to do to catch a leaf, and it’s almost November and the leaves just aren’t falling this year, at least not when I happen to be walking under a tree. The last time I was leafless this late in the season was the year I had knee surgery. I went out half-crippled and waited under a tree for an hour before getting the job done. Having not yet reached that point of desperation, I decided to start with a route change. And although the new route did take me under a fair number of trees, I couldn’t convince the air to stir up so much as a light breeze. By Friday, things were looking so bleak that I resorted to chasing squirrels up a huge oak tree, so that one of them might rustle a few leaves while running for cover. I’m not sure how that affected my sanity score, but in any event, it didn’t send any leaves into the air. On the way home from work I walked back the same way. Again, the wind wasn’t enough to blow a single hair out of place. As I approached the mighty oak, I noticed a huge hawk hanging out on the ground under it. The squirrels were all hiding under cars in the parking lot, terrified. Neither the hawk nor I was destined to make a catch right then and there, so the hawk took off and I headed home and then to Washington DC for Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity.

My wife and I got to our hotel room (near Dulles Airport) late, crashed on the king-sized bed, and drove to the West Falls Metro station at about 9:30am Saturday. If not for the fact that thousands people were trying to get to the National Mall by noon, I’m sure we would have made it to the rally in plenty of time, as it’s only a twenty-five minute train ride from West Falls. As it turned out, however, the trip took us five hours, so we didn’t set foot on the mall until the rally was in its final few minutes. The crowd was unbelievably massive (the estimate of 250,000 sounds about right to me), and my wife and I are both under 5 feet 7 inches tall, so we saw and heard next to nothing that was happening on the main stage. What we did see was people. Lots and lots of people. People dressed in goofy costumes. People with goofy rally signs. People waiting in line to get into the Metro station. People waiting to get on the trains. People crammed into trains, pressed up against the walls and windows and each other like in a jelly jar full of gummy bears. The truth is, it was pretty insane. The truth is, we pretty much missed the rally and didn’t really know how it all went down until we got home late last night. And the truth is, neither one of us was too disappointed. We showed up, and somehow that felt like it was enough.

So I don’t have any personal photos to share, and I can’t share my reactions to the show Stewart and Colbert put on. I missed all that. I did take away a few important things from the experience, though. First, I feel a lot better about the state of our country and about the basic goodness of the people who live here. When we finally did manage to squeeze onto to the Sane Train heading for the mall, we found ourselves packed in a tiny corner, shoulder to shoulder with every type of person imaginable—men, women, children, black, white, brown, Asian, Middle-eastern. We all had sore feet and full bladders. We were all missing the rally. But we still were kind to each other, made room, gave up our seats, shared the streaming video on our smart phones. I’ve had phrases like “People are morons” and “People are assholes” bouncing around inside my skull for too long. It feels good to think to myself “People are basically decent and good at heart.” Second, I realize now more than ever that it’s far more fulfilling to take action when I’m inspired—even if the results are disappointing or even painful—than to wallow in cynicism or surrender to the pull of inertia. Better for me to enjoy or even suffer the consequences of pushing boundaries than to snooze away in the comfort zone. Finally, I have a renewed appreciation for my wife. She was super-busy, but made time to keep me company because she knew how inspired I was by the event. The day could’ve gone a lot smoother and we could have had a lot more fun, but we were there, together (along with about a quarter-million of our fine friends). Your welcome, Jon Stewart!

And thank you, Jon Stewart! The needle on my sanity meter is moving in the right direction (I hope).

Oh yeah… And while talking to my Mom on the phone this morning, strolling around the block telling her about the rally, a leaf hit me right in the chest, sticking there long enough for me to make the official catch. I still plan to take the tree-covered route tomorrow, but I won’t be concerned about which way the wind blows, or if it’s blowing at all. It’s all gravy now. You still might see me diving onto someone’s front lawn or running out into traffic to chase down a floating leaf. You might even see me chasing a few squirrels. But from here on in it’s just good sane fun.

Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear
Jon Stewart – Moment of Sincerity
www.comedycentral.com
Rally to Restore Sainty and/or Fear The Daily Show The Colbert Report
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Weary hearts

A song that descended from the Great Unknown on January 2, 2008, while I was living in Mexico. I finally got around to singing it:

Go Beth, go catch your breath
Just slow things down a little bit
One day you’re gonna be okay
Just watch your worries float away
Like whispers on a breeze
Messages on stormy seas
Like memories of a dream
Nothing’s ever what it seems
Rest your weary heart

Wake up, my little sleepy head
You don’t wanna spend all day in bed
Get dressed, take a walk with me
We’ll watch the leaves fall from the trees
Like young hearts into love
A shooting star from high above
A tree onto the ground
And we’ll be there to hear the sound
And rest our weary hearts

[Narration: 1) Henry Miller, reading “Third or Fourth Day of Spring” from his book “Black Spring”; 2) Myself, talking to myself in “el cuarto”, Mexico, 2008.]

<a href="http://isaacdust.bandcamp.com/track/weary-hearts">Weary hearts by Isaac Dust</a>

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Megalopolitan Maniac

Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company is a blog devoted to my very favorite author, Henry Miller, and yesterday’s post reminded me how much I love Miller’s Black Spring. The final chapter is called “Megalopolitan Maniac”, a riff on Miller’s struggle to find humanity within the crush of modern city life.

“Never more loneliness than in the teeming crowd, the lonely man of the city surrounded by his inventions, the lost seeker drowning in the common identity”.

To me, Miller’s writing is–among other things–about transcendence through creativity and self-knowledge. He ends “Megalopolitan Maniac” with these words:

“Tomorrow you may bring about the destruction of your world. Tomorrow you may sing in Paradise above the smoking ruins of your world-cities. But tonight I would like to think of one man, a lone individual, a man without name or country, a man whom I respect because he has absolutely nothing in common with you—MYSELF. Tonight I shall meditate upon that which I am.”

Word.