The life and times of Isaac Dust
In this episode of the Head The Gong Podcast, I recount and reflect upon the latest twists and turns of my “journey” since being diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia. Happiness = Reality – Expectations. That’s what they say, and I think they might be right, so learning to calibrate expectations and hold them as lightly as possible continues to be a challenge.
Why record a cover of Jack White‘s “Why walk a dog?”
I don’t know. Why anything? Why wipe your ass? Sheesh…
(Actually, I was running an experiment to see if I could use my old BR-864 as an effects unit with my new Zoom LiveTrak L-12, and this song just came to mind, because it’s short and sweet. It worked, so I guess the null hypothesis was rejected, or something like that.)
Jimi Hendrix was born on November 27, 1942. Exactly 28 years later would be the eve of my own birth. Jimi had died two months prior, on September 18, 1970, and so we weren’t exactly “on this earth” contemporaneously. I was inside another person’s body when Jimi’s soul left his, an ocean between us. All of this signifies nothing, of course, but it’s simply my weird way of framing the following cover of May this be love, which is one of my favorite Hendrix tunes. This is the first music I’ve recorded using my new home studio set-up, and every step of the process was experimental. If there was a reason I chose this song – and there probably wasn’t a reason – it was because it’s something I can usually play from beginning to end without noticeably fucking up. Hopefully I will be inspired to keep at it and put some work into developing my own music.
I also found myself fooling around with making a video for the song, and in the process remembered that I have several videos on Vimeo. Watching them was a sentimental trip down the spiral staircase into past versions of myself, and a complex mix of emotions were pumped through interior duct work. If I recall correctly, I put the cover song videos on Vimeo because YouTube was giving me shit for copyright crimes against humanity. Given that YouTube is starting to feeling a little gross, perhaps I’ll give the ol’ Vimeo account a little action going forward.
Jolted awake once again at 4am, once again by the emotional intensity of a dream scene. I was standing in front of a TV glowing with static. Spontaneously, I made some sort of snorting noise as I took air in through my nasal cavity, and coincident with this bodily action an image began to form on the screen. Making the connection, I intentionally repeated the snort as I watched the screen, and lo and behold I could see the moving images coming in with increased clarity, as if I were turning the dial of an old-school antenna in an effort to find a watchable feed of Gilligan’s Island back in 1978.
The moment the inhalation of my snort transitioned to an exhale, the image would start to fade, but I quickly learned to control my breath in such a way as to keep the broadcast going as I cycled into another snort, which increased the clarity and allowed me to see what was actually being portrayed. It hit me in a flash. The scene playing out on the screen was one of my memories! Holy shit, I could see my memories on the goddamned TV screen!
I frantically called out to my wife, who was in the other room. When she arrived I went into another snort and began wildly gesticulating toward the TV screen. I was able to keep the broadcast going for a solid few seconds, long enough to be sure she would notice. I caught my breath and shouted to her, “Could you see it?!?! Did you see it?!?!”
“No! I didn’t see anything!”, she replied.
Shattered by the realization that the entire experience was a mere hallucination and delusion, I began to wail, which caused my wife to look distressed. I apologized profusely to her as I continued to cry and moan with enough intensity to send me back into the waking state.
So, yeah. Been dreamin’ and stuff.
Had to reschedule the ultrasound for my knee, as the process got caught up in the red tape of “workers’ comp.” Meanwhile my condition continues to slowly improve. Hopefully I’ll get a definitive diagnosis by the end of the week. Being disabled is a drag, especially when there is shit to be done around the house. Temperatures jumped into the 90s, so I needed to get on the roof to get the swamp coolers up and running. We had a new roof put on this winter, which required the coolers to be disassembled and reassembled, and in the process they were seriously fucked up by the roof crew. I was cursing them all to hell while doing my best to make the necessary repairs on one leg. Roof crew be damned, I eventually got the job done.
I’ve been messing around in the studio, mostly getting to know the possibilities and limitations of my new mixer/recorder. With all the hours I’ve logged on YouTube learning about things like inputs, outputs, mic placement, sub-mixes, gain staging, etc., I might be able to get a job as a sound engineer, but for the lack of actual finished recordings. I’m about ready to see what I can do with this new toy. If it sucks, I’ll just blame it on the bum knee, or those asshole roofer dudes.
In this episode of the Head The Gong Podcast, I give thanks for being led through the fog to a moment of clarity, however fleeting, in which tears were shed and notes were sung. Someone with a sweet smile said it this way: “It is a privilege to live out these days on this lovely planet, to see it all through to the end as much ourselves as ever.”
Media referenced:
One more dream.mp3
In this episode of the Head The Gong Podcast, I get back on the creative horse – i.e., “begin again” – by sharing some music I recently came across while tumbling down a YouTube rabbit-hole.
[p.s. I recorded this podcast three weeks ago and didn’t get around to posting it until now!]
Media referenced:
In this episode of the Head The Gong Podcast, I continue to struggle to live a creative, meaningful life.
It’s been a strange summer. Strange in the sense of a vibe, a mood that has permeated my consciousness. I have not lived particularly well these past few weeks. I stay up too late, passively consuming distracto-tainment until I can’t stomach another bite. My sleep has been shallow and restless. I’ve burned days obsessing about trivial matters, all the while in full-on avoidance mode, ignoring whatever intentions were set down on the previous night’s to-do list. I’ve had time to burn, and I’ve burned it, but not well. Not with gusto. But there’s always a new day, today, this morning, right now. I’ve missed myself. Missed the man with the fire in his belly, forever striving to get at the meat of the matter.
The night before last I was suddenly pulled from a dream in which I had been holding my younger brother in my arms. He was having seizures, one after the other, each one more threatening, more violent than the last. I got down on the floor and wrapped myself around him, trying to prevent the convulsions from breaking his neck. My mother was in the room, looking on in horror. The seizures would not stop. At a certain point I understood what was happening. He was going to die at any moment. I cried out with every drop of fear and anger I had left within me. “He’s dead!”
The emotions were so intense that some sort of oneiric panic button was pushed, summoning an invisible hand to reach down into the depths of the dream, grab hold of me, and pull me up through the layers of consciousness and into the bed. The dream extraction happened so quickly that I was still in the process of crying out, and I woke to the sound and sensation of a monstrous whimper squeezing itself through my face, which was still frozen with sleep paralysis. My first clear concern was whether or not my wife had heard the noise. She has heard me whimper in my sleep before, and I find these incidents to be somewhat shameful. She seemed to be sleeping soundly, so my mind then turned to the wake of the dream, and as it faded into oblivion, an idea began to crystalize in my mind through a series of associations.
You become what you take in… What you attend to determines what you are aware of… If you consume chaos you become chaos… Patterns of attention become states of mind… When your attention is captive, you are captive… When your attention is free, you are free.
I don’t know what any of that has to do with my brother dying, or the strangeness of this summer. It just seems important. Important enough that the invisible hand made sure I would see it, think it, write about it.
And now, the day.
2-27-2017
OB,
How’s it hanging, homie? At this point your balls must be about knee level, eh old boy? Just razzin’ ya, dude. Truthfully I feel for you. Already at 46 I’m struggling to accept the slings and arrows of time’s ruthless onslaught. If you’ve actually made it to your mid-eighties, I can only imagine the indignities you confront on a daily basis. I’m reading “Henry Miller – The Last Days”, by Barbara Kraft. She just happened to strike up meaningful friendships with both Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller as each was living out the last year or so of their respective lives. I’m at the point in the Miller book when Henry is starting to decline pretty rapidly, right around his 88th birthday. There’s only about forty or so pages left in the book, and there’s only one way this thing is going to end. Even though I know it’s going to happen, that it already happened in fact, it still has me feeling uneasy. It’s hard to read about the dying of a man who, to me, represents life lived to the absolute fullest. If Henry couldn’t overcome the inevitable, no one can.
I wonder if you remember this, OB, this thing that I do every now again as I’m falling asleep next to my wife. I’ll imagine a future me, a very old man like yourself, who is lying in bed alone wishing more than anything in the world that he could experience just one more night spent holding his dearly departed wife. I then imagine that this old future me is granted the power to travel back in time to experience that one more night of marital bliss. Of course, the precise moment in the “past” to which this old me travels turns out to be the present moment, wherein I am actually and already in bed next to my wife. Suddenly the normally taken-for-granted comfort of spooning takes on a level of intensity that is usually reserved for long-awaited reunions. Pretty weird, huh? But probably not any weirder than writing letters to oneself.
There’s no way for me to know whether or not she is still with you, OB, so I apologize if reading this is painful. I often remind myself that I must commit to the highest level of self-care, so that if one of us must experience the pain of losing the other, I am making it more likely that it would be me. I just can’t bear the thought of my wife having to go through that ordeal. I know, of course, that I have no ultimate control over such things. This drive to survive is hard to reconcile with another tendency of mine, which is to want no part of modern medicine. Left on my own, I think I would be disinclined to prolong my life through artificial means, should I become say, stricken with terminal cancer. I know, I know, OB… It is pure madness to speculate about such things, but I can’t help but be curious about how you are dealing with all the terrible things that come with the territory of oldness. Miller seems to have dealt with it all with the utmost courage and dignity. Still, there’s no sugar-coating it: being really old seems pretty awful.
I’ve got to stay focused on the challenges of 2017, OB. I found out the other day that, due to excessive state budget cuts, I may get laid off from my job in a couple of months. Everybody at work is freaking out, hoping that they won’t find themselves on the chopping block when it comes time for the cleaver to come crashing down. Me, I’m fairy chill about it, given that I don’t really like the job all that much anyway. I do need the money though. I wonder, OB, what your perspective is on such matters at this point in your life. This whole orientation toward the future, the worrying about it, preparing for it, dreading it, aspiring to it, worshipping it. What happens to all that when the future shrinks down to a tiny slice of borrowed time? Once the jig is up and your goose is cooked, where does the mind wander, if it wanders at all?
Maybe I will get an answer from Miller somewhere in the final forty pages.
Until next time,
Young(ish) Bob.
