THE NAKED ANIMAL

We do it this way!

2006-08-31T09:31:00.000-07:00

So I'm taking my usual late night therapeutic walk a few days ago, and the streets are pretty empty as usual, when I see this lumpy old goth guy dressed all in black coming my way down Santa Monica Boulevard. I'm walking near the street, under the trees, and he's in the middle of the sidewalk, which means we're to each other's left. I continue my route, and I can see the guy getting nervous. He starts sort of twitching, and shaking his bottle-dyed Stevie Nicks locks, then he suddenly veers over to me, blocks my path for a moment, and says, "In America, we pass each other on the right, Man!" Then he goes on his way in a huff. "WOW!" is all I can say as I continue on my own way, "Everyone's a fuckin' narc these days."

A lot of people talk about how the U.S. is moving dangerously close to becoming a police state, but I think that if there are evil puppetmasters secretly designing society and its citizens to their own greedy ends that they've already engineered us into a much subtler system than that--there's a growing fear in the flabby, feeble-minded masses of people who do things "differently," which is not a problem in itself, but there is a corresponding easier readiness to lash out because of these fears due to our government's oh-so mature and even-handed proclamations and policies about foreign powers and protesters. I swear to God, people, sometimes I feel like I'm on a big ol' poorly supervised playground that's full of nothing but bullies and tattle-tales, and I can't wait to get my education over with and get out into the real world, if there is one anymore.

Categories: fucked-up

Rocky! Rocky! Rocky!

2006-08-31T00:03:00.000-07:00

Rocky rallies to rock the country out of its stupor

Today, the mayor of Salt Lake City, Utah, Rocky Anderson, gave a speech that perfectly crystallized the lies and crimes of the Bush administration and the true yearning of the people for truth, peace, and accountability. Has anyone suggested that this guy run for president? He seems ready to really kick some flabby ol' neo-con ass. Watch the speech here or read it here- it's about 15-20 minutes long, and chock full of a lot of things a lot of people have been wanting to say for a long time. And then there are little nazis in the making like this twit, who must have their say as well, I guess (yawn). Let the sheeple be sheered, I say, since that seems to be their imperative. Those of us who are still thinking, breathing, dreaming people will prevail.

The walking cure

2006-08-25T18:54:00.000-07:00

I've been feeling so misanthropic, curmudgeonly, and paralyzed by my hopelessness regarding the human drama and my still undefined place in it that all I've been doing is wandering around the house or lying on my bed in a half-conscious stupor. Two nights ago, my body had finally had enough, apparently, because it had me up and walking out the door before my manic mind or dormant spirit could catch up with it. That night, I walked for three hours, aimlessly, making turns without thinking, zigzagging through the backstreets of Hollywood while the good people of the world dreamt of sugar plums, or whatever it is the good people of the world generally dream about.

Walking in LA at night is a very old technique of mine, developed in college and mastered in my twenties, wherein I was able to glean all sorts of things about my chosen city of residence that I would never have learned at any other time but during those few wee hours of the dark, early morning. But I'm no longer looking for oddball late-night adventures or glimpses of paradise through dark shadows. My current walking spree is taking on a firmly inward character, so much so that I barely notice the other people around me as I wander--not that there are that many pedestrians about at two in the morning. What few fellow walkers do appear are all either crazy or drunk, and probably assume that I am, as well. Ignoring others unless they insist is common practice when late-night power-walking. Just in case you decide to take it up....

It sounds funny to call what I'm doing power-walking, but that must be exactly what it looks like to people. I'm not doing it to keep in shape--though it never hurts--but to lose myself in the rhythm of my steps while the bounce and motion gently jackhammer the sedimentary gunk that has so slowed down my soul as of late. I'm walking because it's the only way I can tolerate at the moment to reconnect to my own power. One step at a time. One foot in front of the other. It's a different kind of power-walking, I guess.

That first walk, I strode off layer after layer of latent rage, and since those layers seem to settle back upon me fairly soon after each cleansing, I find myself doing the same during every walk. Last night, I walked Venice Beach to the Santa Monica Pier and back so fast that I could've kept up with rollerbladers if there had been any. There were quite a few people on the beach at midnight, to my surprise; dark little human forms crouched or standing here and there, some alone and some in pairs; I'd notice them as I approached, but pass by so quickly that I didn't even have time to develop any interest about them. It felt quite good to be so detached from anything but the beat of my feet in the surf and the sound of the waves as they broke. I was hoping for lots of stars, but that part of the coast is so bright that you might as well be in downtown Hollywood. You gotta go up past Malibu to see any stars, or at least as far as Topanga, which I may do one of these coming nights.

Today, I literally stormed out of bed, into my sneakers, and onto the streets before I could rub the sleep from my eyes. By the time my mind was fully aware of what I was doing, I was down on 6th St. and La Brea--a good 2 or 3 miles from where I live. I momentarily dreaded the walk back, but once my feet headed me homeward, the dread fell away and my pace kept my spirit and mind at peace. I hate to even say what my mind and spirit are like when they're not at peace, but let me just remark here that I certainly do empathize with all sorts of terrorists during those less than peaceful times. In fact, I feel like I'm right on the edge of either hurting myself or others, and luckily, my body has found this incredibly simple way to keep me from acting on these almost-impulses. I DO scream or, shall we say, "emote vocally" sometimes while I'm walking, which, I'm sure, does nothing for my image as a sane person.

Besides, I think that absolutely everyone in the world is completely insane no matter how sane they appear to be. There's no other explanation for the mass insanity that passes for pleasure, politics, and progress. I'm realistic enough at this point to know that there's no one out there who's going to beam me up out of this mess, and I lost the ability to fly many, many lifetimes ago. But as long as I have feet that can take me from one place to another, I still believe that I can get there (Where? Ah, that's an entirely other question)...at my own pace.

Categories: emotions, transformation, healing, exercise

Your dreams are your ticket out

2006-08-23T14:40:00.000-07:00

The Naked Animal has been off wandering in his native habitat quite a bit lately, that being the forest and the mountains and the rivers, these particular ones in far northern California. In fact, I almost got my foot in the door on some land up in Mendocino County in exchange for refurbishing a century-old ranch-house, but the whole thing fell apart when my would-be contractees started changing their minds about things I thought we’d already agreed upon. Suddenly, I saw a long chain of contortions and manipulations I would have to perform in order to do the project, which would only continue to complicate my life, when my intention is the exact opposite.

I’m a natural purger and I’ve always tended toward simplicity in practice and design, so it’s no surprise to me to find myself at forty with nothing but one room of dear and useful furniture, a suitcase of clothes, and a few treasured knick-knacks to my name. Then there’s the car that’s worth less than I still owe on it, and my cat–a definite drawback when you want to do what I want to do, but I’m utterly unwilling to part with him. We saved each other’s lives, and I know that one day we’re going to be able to communicate with each other through interspecies telepathy. Perhaps I’ll become the next Dr. Doolittle....

But that’s not my immediate goal. What is it that I really want to do? Well, that question has been nagging at me for the past–oh, I’d say about three decades. So, when I recently quit my job and went back on disability due to a rare, chronic leg infection that makes my shins, calves and ankles swollen, red and very painful in sporadic cycles (it’s called Helicobacter Cinaedi–doesn’t that sound like some swanky Nero-era Roman matron?), I started thinking about it a lot. I dove into many deep, dark places in a last ditch effort to hide from what I really wanted, and then went down even further to escape the fact that it wasn’t about want at all, but about a true, deep, dire, burning need. And that need, for me–my purpose, if you will–is to heal.

I don’t even know what that means or what it looks like from where I’m sitting, because I’m sitting in a place where I’m going to have to expend all of my energy healing my highly toxic and diseased self before I can explore what my urge to heal means beyond my own field. I have a power in me that I’ve kept stifled for so long that I thought I had finally snuffed it for good, but it’s still there, burning meagerly but unwilling to go out, and it’s going to burn right through me if I don’t use it to ignite some change in myself, and in the world.

Now, where do I start? Hmmm, let me see... Well, I mentioned my cat being a drawback earlier, and that has to do with what I want to do on a logistical, physical level rather than a spiritual one. But since they’re all intertwined, let me introduce you to my second most burning need; one that is intimately connected to my first: to live completely off-grid; in fact, to grow a completely new kind of civilization that operates not against, but completely outside the current paradigm, in which I’ve always felt like a trapped animal or disoriented alien.

But back to the cat. I mention him because many already operating off-grid communities do welcome new members but are opposed to pet ownership. In fact, I recently stumbled across what would have been a perfect gig for me on craigslist: a one-year, live-in contract editing three books of a spiritual nature for an author who had also established a small, off-grid, intentional community in the Wisconsin (I believe) wilderness. I didn’t even apply because the description of the community included “pet-free.” I am of the opinion that humans have a contract with the animals they have gone into partnership with over the past several millennia, and believe that we are all going to need each other’s help as we forge ahead with our collective evolution. So the cat stays with me.

That’s my personal drawback: I always have to do things my own way. Some call it an asset, but if so, the pay-off has yet to come. My complete inability to compromise my ideals in this matter is the reason I’m not already living in an off-grid, intentional community. There are dozens around the country, and hundreds around the world, and I’ve personally visited several, but I am simply very bad at joining any already-formed group. Or perhaps I just haven’t found the right group to join. But I suspect that I really just need to start my own. Yup, I’m the type who likes to re-invent the wheel.

Actually, my problem with most already-formed off-grid (or near off-grid) communities is that they are all tainted by the dogma of their founders and/or current core groups. When I say “dogma,” I refer to either a proscribed spiritual belief system or religiously practiced psycho-spiritual therapy technique–there are many, many “alternative” paths out there, most of which are certainly harmless and even beneficial to copacetically attuned souls, but I’ve never followed one that I didn’t later find was in fact presided over by the twin powers of dogma and ego, just like every other group-oriented concern on the planet. (Sounds like a law firm, right? “Good morning, Dogma and Ego, how may I direct your call?”)

I really don’t want anyone’s psychic detritus trailing along behind me into a new paradigm–especially my own. I feel the need to shed all beliefs and attachments, even those that currently lie beyond the mainstream. (Okay, except for my cat!) What I want is to go all the way back to the basics in order to rewire my being and its connection to reality from the ground up. In this I see the seeds of a new kind of spirituality that cannot be fully grasped in my current state. Some groups, to be fair, are already finding this in their own ways. I’ve just got to make room on this planet for my own way, whatever it may be, which is what everyone in this planet is trying to do in some way, I suppose.

Meanwhile, I strive to forge a clearer vision of that path, while acknowledging that I am, in fact, already on it. The next fork in the road leads to the release of addictions and improved health, and then we’ll just have to see what that stretch presents to me on its horizon.

I don’t know why I’m posting this, really. I feel completely detached from the need for literary achievement or success in the current marketplace, so it’s not to attract attention. Perhaps it’s to attract possible cohorts, or wise words from those who have gone before me. At the very least, I hereby record my thoughts and feelings as I move through some very big life changes. (Uh, yeah, Rob, it’s called keeping a journal, and it’s not like it’s some kind of new concept or anything.) No more stories of the past–I’m sick of the past and my quasi-nostalgic attachment to it all. Present tense is what I crave, with no strings tied to either the past or the future, a creature afloat in the river of now, of no-time, of all-time-as-one. No more simply dipping my toes in. It’s time to take the plunge...

[Splash]

Categories: healing, transformation

Shadow Dancing

2006-03-11T13:47:00.000-08:00

link

Here’s an episode from my adolescence that came back to me in vivid detail once I reported that I could barely remember anything from that period in my last post:

I was 12 years old, and I hadn’t made it to the National roller skating meet like I had the two years before, so my summer stretched aridly before me without the extra hours of practice and the anticipation of a cross-country trip in August. My dad came to the rescue with the offer of a visit to the Northeast, my and my sister’s first. I can’t remember if this was before or after he’d divorced his short-lived second wife, but the main purpose of the trip was to meet his new fiancee and her eight-year-old son in Philadelphia, then go on for a whirlwind tour of Washington DC, the Jersey Shore, and New York City.

These people were to be part of my new “family,” but I’d already banished that homey concept to the hinterlands of mass wishful thinking after seeing all the ill-will that existed between the members of my own little clan, so I couldn’t have cared less about that sector of the situation. All I wanted to do was travel. I had already fallen in love with traveling because it allowed me to let down my defenses just a bit. Everyone was usually interested enough in something else to be too worried about whether or not I was acting “effeminate,” and I didn’t have to watch my every little move. By 12, I had developed an icy, arrogant, angular facade with which I cut through assaults like a highly sophisticated prey animal eluding certain death. Whatever there was of a real me was somewhere deep inside simply operating the machinery. On the plane, my dad told me and my sister that his fiancee’s son acted “weird” (a blanket term that both my parents used to mean anything even slightly out of the ordinary). He didn’t elaborate, but from the rather queasy look on his face when he said it, I could tell that I was not to be the designated problem child in this particular combination of human elements, and my little tiny self inside all that elaborate armor took a welcome sigh of relief.

Now, my dad used to be someone who was so scared of anything that was out of the ordinary that he regularly derided everything that didn’t fit into his horribly constricted frame of reference. Another way of putting that would be to say he was a bigot. He actually didn’t want us to watch The Jeffersons during our weekends at his place because he didn’t want black people on his television set, and he would fall into a lisping, limp-wristed, stereotyped impersonation of a “homo” every time he saw a man so much as cross his legs. Real men were supposed to simply rest an ankle on the opposite knee, so as to give ample breathing room to their all-important reproductive device. My dad was pretty much obsessed with drawing a wide line between the behavior of “men” and the behavior of “women,” and anyone who didn’t fit into one camp or the other was automatically “weird,” which, coming from his mouth, was like an edict exiling them from the human race. I hated him for this and secretly wished him some sort of revenge for such repulsive behavior.

I could hardly have chosen a more effective agent of vengeance than my soon-to-be little stepbrother; because that roly-poly, not-very-attractive eight-year-old kid with a thick Philly accent still ranks as one of the most raging nelly queens I’ve ever come across in my life–no exaggeration. The first thing he did upon greeting me and my sister–he seemed so excited at the prospect of siblings!–was usher us into his room and show us a full-color, almost life-sized poster of Andy Gibb that hung over his bed. After gushing a bit about how much he loved Andy Gibb and putting on his new album, he got on his bed and carefully planted a big wet kiss on the Gibbster’s crotch shot. My sister and I had no idea what to think, so we giggled nervously and silently guffawed at each other in a swirl of shock, excitement, and embarrassment.

So that’s the kind of “weird” my dad had meant, I remember thinking. I could see that he couldn’t even stand to listen to the child talk. Every time a word escaped his lips, my dad would turn away with a red face, his neck veins straining uncontrollably. I could actually hear his teeth gnash. Ha, I thought. Ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Inside, I couldn’t stop laughing, though outside I was just as repelled by the kid as my dad was. The fact that he existed at all made my years of careful facade-building completely meaningless. He was the first overtly “gay-acting” person I’d ever been around in the flesh, and there was something freeing about it, even if he was only eight. I couldn’t believe that he was allowed to get away with such behavior, and my manufactured sense of appeasement and assimilation was brutally mangled by the total lack of repercussions he experienced for his “girly” behavior.

We went on day trips to Washington DC and New York City, but I don’t remember much except the way I was constantly charting my dad’s reaction to his future stepson’s every move and utterance. In DC, the White House was much smaller than I thought it would be, and the Washington Monument was much larger. What I remember most vividly is how my dad said something nasty about him to me every time he was out of his fiancee’s earshot (I don’t remember their names). Since it was obvious that he’d already been talked down from interfering with the kid’s girly behavior by his mother (it must have been DAMNED GOOD sex for him to put up with that), he laid into him for being fat, eating like a pig, or saying “yous,” in the old-school Philly manner, to mean you-plural. “Yous all get together so I can snap a shot,” the child would say, and my dad would go, “Listen to that, he can’t even speak English!” His remarks were poisonous and continuous, and they painfully subdued me into a catatonic silence. There was plenty of tension between him and his fiancee, too, obviously over her son, and that made for extreme emotional tautness no matter what we were doing. In New York City, near the end of our day when we were hurrying a bit to make it back to Philly, my dad started walking too fast for the kid to keep up with us, muttering under his breath, “get a move on, you little fatso,” and whispering an evil little laugh. I remember with a kind of shame the false camaraderie I felt with my dad simply because I could keep up.

My dad and his fiancee fought long into the night after we got home. I couldn’t sleep at all, but my sister was safely dreamside in her own sophisticated shell of armor, and the dear little flamer was snoring up a storm. At some point my dad came out in his underwear to get something to drink, and got very angry when he saw that I was awake. “What are you still doing up?” he hissed, as if children were supposed to sleep peacefully through absolutely anything.

At some time during the wee hours, I did drift off to sleep, and in the morning, my dad, sister and I went out alone to do errands and such so that his fiancee and her son could have some time alone. Talks were being had. Peace was being made, I assumed, by the woman in the equation. As we drove along the brick-heavy streets of Philadelphia, Jose Feliciano came on the radio singing his version of The Doors’ “Light My Fire,” a slickly produced, quietly resonant take with nothing but Feliciano’s acoustic guitar as accompaniment. My dad turned up the radio loud, and went on and on about how amazing it was that Feliciano was blind, and he sang and played the guitar like that. I remember thinking that was strange logic, like the rest of my dad’s surmises about human reality: Who needed to see to be able to play the guitar and sing?

From that point on, both my Dad and the kid were a little quieter, a little less themselves; the fiancee had succeeded in modulating their behavior around each other for the time being. At the Jersey shore, where we spent a long weekend, I took center stage by having an allergy fit during which I could barely breathe for several hours–one of many such episodes I had as an adolescent, which I now see as physical expressions of my repressed emotional state of near-asphyxiation.

When we got home, my dad told us that he and the fiancee had decided to break it off. “The kid comes with the deal,” he told us, “and I just couldn’t deal with that one.” My sister and I said we understood. But as for me, I didn’t understand a thing, and I didn’t want to, certainly nothing about my dad and his feelings. I was too filled with rancor about the way I’d been pounded into the ground all my life for being different to care about trying to understand anyone else’s paltry little emotional bullshit. Now I knew that there were plenty of people out there–even little kids–who were different, very different indeed, and they seemed a HELL of a lot happier than I did.

I’m not sure how much my queeny little almost-stepbrother had to do with it, but it was around that time that I started really feeling my anger as well as my depthless fear. That summer, I decided firmly that any mother fucking tight-assed bigoty bully, well-meaning, cud-chewing, butt-stupid housewife or pin-headed, inbred redneck twit who wanted to try force-feeding me shit about what was “normal” and what wasn’t could go to hell and choke to death on the devil’s dick. I wasn’t tough enough to back this kind of anger up physically, nor did I think physical–or even verbal--confrontation was very clever, but that’s the way I felt, and I felt it so strongly that I was constantly growling under my breath, ready to pounce.

To somewhat slake this irrepressible anger, and to fulfill my truly urgent need to deflect the constant attacks I faced, I developed a weapon far more effective than answering assault with assault. It’s one that I still use today when necessary, though most of my childhood armory has disintegrated. The weapon is simply a look, but not a simple one. It’s a quick, deep, icy stare that says the following: You are so pathetically atavistic and simple-minded that I can barely believe you exist, and if you don’t leave me alone and high-tail it out of my sight in the next two seconds, you know–you know deep down in your soul–that I could inflict some nasty motherfucking pain on you in ways that you can’t even imagine in your woefully unevolved state. It’s extremely efficient, and an indispensable tool for a post-apocalyptic (It already happened, didn’t you know?) warrior pacifist.

I don’t live anymore in a place where I have to defend myself from rabid bigots at every turn, but “the ice” sure does come in handy for deflecting Jesus freaks, crazies and rampant assholes; and it works even through two layers of glass and a rearview mirror–extremely handy for the asshole-laden streets of Los Angeles. So I suppose I should thank that dear little Andy Gibb lover for waking me up decisively to the fact that, as Andy’s more eloquent brothers (cousins?) put it, “...we’re living in a world of fools, breaking us down, when they all should let us be...”

Categories: backstory, family, travel

The Wonder-who-you-are Years

2006-03-07T16:59:00.000-08:00

Me on the left: lookin' kinda girly, right?

My therapist once told me that the years between eight and thirteen are always the hardest to talk about for people, and sure enough, I could barely string two sentences together when trying to describe scenes from that era to her. Since then, I’ve attempted to write about certain events from that time, but they’re wrapped in a haze and unreachable by either technique or poetry. This has puzzled me for a while. Did something really awful happen during this time that I am repressing, or is it something more subtle, perhaps even more insidious?

I got my answer when I watched an old video of myself (tranfered from Super 8!) performing in skating competitions back in the 70s. There I am landing jumps and doing footwork and everything, but otherwise feigning nonchalance. In this footage, I perform with no expression whatsoever; I merely go through the moves. Then the camera follows me off the floor where I talk to my coach, and in one particular cut, I’m talking quite animatedly to him with my hands on my hips, fingers facing backwards. I glance at the camera; sheer terror dilates my pupils and immobilizes my face for a split second as I shift my hands so that they’re lower on my hips and my fingers are facing forward.

This was one of many things that my mother, other people’s mothers, my teachers, my schoolmates and various random bystanders told me as they gathered in a tacit culture-wide effort to meld me into the semblance of a heterosexual male, though they could see I was a big faerie: Women put their hands on their hips like THIS (hands at the level of the belly button, fingers facing backward), and men put their hands on their hips like THIS (hands just below the hipbones, fingers facing forward). I was also regularly chastised by just about everyone at the skating rink any time I tried to sneak something the least bit graceful or balletic into my routine–while other guys were mysteriously allowed to queen it up–so it’s no wonder that I was devoid of any personality whatsoever during those performances.

In fact, I was devoid of any personality whatsoever no matter what I was doing. I was so busy constantly monitoring myself for feminine gestures and substituting the correlative male ones that I had no time for an actual personality. Instead, I was furiously working away at developing a persona that no one could ridicule or tear apart so easily, lost in a fugue far more complex than the term “self-conscious” could describe. And I did a great job at it, because I’ve always put my heart and soul into all my endeavors–it’s just that many of them have been self destructive. But seriously, I’m a real artist at it. Self expression had no place in my life. I didn’t even know what it meant. What I was after was a simple respite from constant nagging–even at the expense of my true self. Is it harsh to say I took the easy road out by learning how to “pass” as “normal”? Anyway, I was a kid, and apparently kids are not to be blamed to any great degree for their own actions.

Then suddenly, I wasn’t a kid anymore. When I was thirteen, I discovered both drugs and sex, which opened a maze of conjoined, hidden, alternate universes to me, in any of which I could be myself–at least as convincingly as I possibly could considering my lack of practice in the field. But at least, in those worlds, there was a part of me that felt the fresh air for the first time since I’d begun walking and talking (too much like a girl, even at first). Not that I turned into a flagrant flamer and called everyone “Mary” or anything when allowed to “be myself”–no, my true self was filled much more with anger and fantasy, in equal parts: the anger was in response to the fact that I’d been forced to create a false self in order to survive, and the fantasy was my imagination feverishly constructing a different reality construct, where no one is forced to perform such a violent, invasive operation on himself, and everyone lives in peace and harmony. Yup, I’d like to teach the world to sing. But I’m still learning the song myself.

Perhaps that time of my life doesn’t need to be dredged up any more comprehensively than I’ve done in this post. Recounting the events of the past is only rewarding if you’re searching for their import. If you’ve already gotten emotional satisfaction from your memories without having to tell the whole damned story, incident by mundane little incident, then wouldn’t it be better to spend the time and narrative impetus on moving forward instead? Or do people really enjoy wallowing in the minutiae of reality as regurgitated onto the written page? My mother tells me that people like to read “real” things. I, on the other hand, don’t. I like to read about things that are exactly not “reality,” at least as generally agreed upon, and I like to write those kinds of things, too. So it’s somewhat troubling to me that I feel this sort of compulsion to write a comparatively nuts-n-bolts account of my wild and somewhat dark cavort through the passages of time.

I really don’t know where all this autobiographical writing is going, but I do know this: From age eight to thirteen, I formed an impenetrable cocoon about myself from which the butterfly is still attempting to emerge. Is that age difficult to talk about for everyone (according to my therapist) because everyone goes through an analogous process during that period whether they’re gay, straight, black, white or otherwise? If so, then I propose that it would be a big step toward accelerated human evolution if we all got together and got rid of the part of the growth process where people have to perfect being something they aren’t before finding out what and who they really are–if, in fact, they can do so at all after so many years of denying it. But I don’t think I’d win any votes on that platform....

Categories: backstory, psychotherapy

1001 Roads to Resistance

2006-03-06T15:15:00.000-08:00

link

For Valentine's Day when my sister and I were little, my mother used to leave little heart-shaped chocolates and cute notes outside our doors so that we'd find them when we woke up. This year, she gave us each a copy of Steven Pressfield's The War of Art, which is a completely unsentimental self-transformation manual about how to overcome resistance, which he calls "the enemy within." It's written in a swift, unadorned style, and each short chapter is padded with lots of white space, so that one can read it in one sitting for full impact. Esquire called it "a kick in the ass," and that's exactly how it's posited by its author, who wants to welcome the brave to the harsh world of art as reality rather than coax the timid to join a fantastical, more accommodating world, as so many self-helpers do. The book was such a good pep talk that I read it a second time a couple of days after my first reading. And then, because I wasn't sure I'd really absorbed it, I read it a third time. At that point, I saw that even the reading of a book about conquering resistance had become a form of resistance in my twisted little universe.

I am the Scheherezade of resistance. I can send my psyche down 1001 different paths, each of them seemingly full of promise at the outset, and each will at some point take that dreaded turn toward resistance. Self sabotage, some call it. A cyclical course of internal obstacles that keep us from realizing our potentials. Whence does this fear of becoming great in our own eyes arise? Why is it so hard to become what we truly want to be, and why does most of the difficulty come from within? Why must everything be a battle? Why must we be such fearsome warriors to survive and succeed when we'd rather be viewing cherry blossoms or watching fluffly little clouds? Maybe I'm just talking for myself here. Maybe there are some people who actually like the constant struggle, get off on it, or at least get off on making the most of it. I don't feel like fighting my demons; I'd rather we all got along instead. But apparently this is not allowed in the current reality construct. Invite your demons in for dinner and they end up feasting on you.

At times like this, when I can't get myself to finish a project no matter how close I get, when I feel that none of the work I do is any good anyway, when I feel like my life bears absolutely no resemblance to any life I might have designed for myself, yet there's no one to blame for its current state of affairs other than myself--at times like this, I feel buried alive by resistance. I know there's air out there, and that one solid push will put me in contact with it, but I whine about not being able to breathe as I ineffectually scratch at the inner dimensions of my self-dug grave. And then I couch the situation in metaphors, like I just did, so that I won't have to dig in and really examine my feelings. The truth is, my feelings are still hard to contact, even after lots of therapy that I would categorize as successful. I've evened out, emotionally--the new and improved manic depressive, with lower highs and higher lows!--but it's difficult for me to contact either anguish or joy. And in between, I feel stymied and stifled. Nothing quite gets through. Creating art is channeling energy, according to Pressfield, and that's something I've always felt was true. At this moment in my broadcasting history, my channels are crossed and clogged. Must be time for a detox...

Categories: depression, transformation

Legalize your preferred psychedelic today!

2006-02-21T16:21:00.000-08:00

Simply center a religion around its ingestion!

Ayahuasca Visions

Categories: psychedelic, politics

The Naked Animal is on ice and in the oven

2006-02-15T16:38:00.000-08:00

On ice because I'm busy watching (on TV) and commenting on the figure skating competition at the 2006 Olympics--check out the latest on my skating blog, Dream of the Perfect Double Axel.

In the oven because I've been so busy blogging that I'm heating up leftovers instead of making myself a fresh between-shift meal. But they're good leftovers. Last night, Philip made a brilliant rosemary-rubbed pork roast for "Pal-entine's Day," so I've got a few slices of that, and I've got a nice big slab of a fritatta I'd made the night before. Actually, this frittata should be called a fornata (or something like that), since it's baked, not fried. It also happens to be one of the easiest, healthiest, and most delicious "casserole"-style dishes you'll ever encounter, perfect for any meal and any size of group, and I'd like to share it with you.

Here's what you'll need for the "original recipe," though you can change some ingredients (or size, for that matter) as noted:

a large Pyrex baking dish
a baker's dozen of eggs
six medium zucchini and two large handfuls of crimini mushrooms (or any other veggie)
a hefty block of goat's feta cheese (or any other cheese)
four garlic cloves and half a red onion (optional)
salt, black pepper and cayenne to taste
a small handful of chopped fresh Greek Oregano (or any other fresh herb)
unsalted butter to grease the baking dish

Here's how you put it all together:

Thinly slice the zucchini and mushrooms (or veg of your choice)--and I mean thin, paper thin if you can. Chop up the garlic and onions, and your herbs. Now break your 13 eggs into a large bowl and beat thoroughly. Add your veggies, garlic, onions and herbs to the egg mixture. Crumble (or grate) your cheese into the mixture; add salt, pepper and cayenne to taste; then fold it all together with a wooden spoon or spatula until everything is uniformly blended. Pour the mixture into your Pyrex baking dish, and bake at 350 degrees for about 30 minutes, or until springy in the middle. For a further twist, you can add some parmesan or pecorino, finely grated, as a topping about ten minutes before pulling it out of the oven. You can also cook it just a little longer to increase the firmness, and serve small pieces of it as an hors d'oeuvre.

Yum, I hope it's not burning--gotta run. Enjoy!

Categories: skating, food

Do you feel any different?

2006-02-11T12:27:00.000-08:00

I had a festive birthday celebration at Casita del Campo, a cheesy and fun LA Mexican restaurant with a huge rubber tree growing in the middle of the main room–we got a table in a cozy room with a fireplace; someone called it a Lion in Winter table. We drank a few pitchers of margaritas, ate a bushel of chips and a ton of gooey food, then attempted to go dancing–everyone pooped out early except for my friend Jon, who I left ripping up the dance floor around midnight. It was a nice night to turn forty. There’s always a heat wave around my birthday, no matter where in the world I happen to be, and this weekend is no exception: I love that run of 80-degree days in the middle of the winter that LA always blesses us with.

All my best buds were there (well, almost–hope to see the rest on Sunday), and thanks to Lynnie, Doug, Robin, Cort and Greg, I have now hit the $300 mark on my way to a goal of $1000 for my artistic roller skating fund. Thanks, guys! Don’t get left out–donate now! No minimum!

Funny, I’d been in a foul mood for weeks just before turning forty, but the actual event changed my mood completely. It was also very cozy and uplifting to be around such wonderful friends. This birthday, I actually do feel different, the way one usually doesn’t despite the party or whatever other event takes place. Yup, I feel different. I can’t describe it exactly, but it has something to do with an apprehension of a greater depth. And then there’s the fact that it simply made me happy to enter a new decade, as if it meant anything–but I like new things and even the smallest signifier can give me a new outlook on life.

And decade-turnings are great signifiers. My friend Robin reminded me of a scene exactly ten years ago when I walked into the laundry room while she was folding (we lived in the same apartment building at the time) and said, “I can’t believe I just turned thirty.” We marveled at the fact that we’d known each other that long, and I did some more marveling over the fact that I’d known several of the people at that table much longer. It was a real treat, and it made me feel definitively the benefits of having moved through an always greater deal of time on this planet. I do feel I’m learning my lessons and appreciating the things I have rather than ruing the things I don’t have.

And then there’s the part of me that spent all day prior to my party moping around the house feeling completely worthless–I’m 40 and I can barely pay my rent!–and berating myself for not sitting down and writing rather than moping around the house. Don’t you just love the Catch-22 of negative thought-pattern cycles? I spent about four hours wallowing in the feeling that I was a completely unviable human being, and then...I don’t know, really. I decided to work out and do yoga, so I did that, and then I had to get ready, and then, there I was drinking margaritas with all my friends under a very flattering wash of pink light.

Natalie glowing by the fireplace

Time just goes like that, doesn’t it? And when you decide to go along with it, it’s really no big deal. It’s the idea of resisting it, or trying to stop it, that always makes it more painful. I don’t know–maybe I’m the only person who routinely wishes that time would simply stop: I’ve always wanted everything to stop, everywhere, for everyone, for 24 hours. I don’t know why, really. As one gets older it seems that time starts to gallop ever faster towards its climax. Or is time really passing faster now? These are the kinds of questions I mull today, as I enter a new decade ready to unfurl my wings again after a long period of restoration.

Categories: aging, friends, skating, celebrations

Papa needs a new pair of roller skates!

2006-02-07T00:12:00.000-08:00

Childhood idol Jim Bray at his peak

Meanwhile, yours truly is not going to let a little sick time set him back on the road to roller skating glory. Now that I've been skating a few more times, and feel far more comfortable and smooth on wheels than I did even as a fulltime skating kid, I'm raring to start learning jumps and spins again. I've gotten some great advice on an artistic roller skating forum, including some pointed encouragement from the current world champion of inline freestyle skating, who happens to be 35 himself; I've found a great rink to practice at, plus a coach who's willing to train me. God knows what the end result will be, but I really do want to do a perfect double axel again; I could even put together a routine and compete--I also got some encouragement on the same forum from a 52-year-old freestyle skater who just started competing again, so I'm certainly not the only middle-aged mad person on roller skates out there!

I just bought a pair of starter skates for sixty bucks on the internet--and these'll last me a couple of months as I get comfortable doing single jumps and standing spins again. Once I pass that point, I'm going to need some major equipment to support my aging bones as they attempt to do double jumps and more. Mainly, I need some super-rigid, custom-fitted boot action because my ankles are already weakened and enlarged from skating way back when. The entire package for my new figure skates, including boots, plates (super-light, single-piece construction!), wheels, bearings and toestops, all top of the line or close to it, is going to run me about a thousand bucks. And that's where this post comes in, which is where you, my dear friends, family, readers, supporters, and even cautious observers, come in. It's my 40th birthday on February 10, and this is my version of the midlife crisis purchase. Some men go for a Porsche--I go for a pair of state-of-the-art roller figure skates, a much healthier purchase if you ask me. Because I'm not one of those aging fags with huge disposable incomes that all of that new advertising is supposedly out to snag, I need your financial help, and I've made it easier than pie for you to donate to my current cause!

Simply press the button below to donate to Rob's roller skates fund
via Visa, Mastercard, Amex or e-check--no minimum!!

The donation period will end once I reach a total of $1000 through online donations and mailed-in checks (Yes, if you have my address, you can also simply mail me a personal check). Everyone who donates gets a thank you in the book I'm writing (because this experience is going to be part of it) and a free DVD or digital download of my progress after one year (perhaps I'll have a "routine" by then--you'll love it!). Support a starving artist/author in his quest for roller skating bliss and publishing viability. And thank you in advance!

Also, if you're interested in my progress and my stories of skating yore, I'll be writing all about all that on my figure skating blog, Dream of the Perfect Double Axel. Meanwhile, which is where I began this post, the Naked Animal will continue on this blog to excavate the many other rich veins running through his past, present and future.

Here's to fun and fusion as I flutter, fascinated, towards forty!

Wheee!

Categories: skating, transformation

Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily

2006-02-06T15:25:00.000-08:00

I once heard or read a passage about Aboriginal Australians, who, upon being arrested and jailed for breaking "Australian laws" for the first time around the turn of the nineteenth century, would almost immediately bash their heads against the walls of their cells until they were dead. It took some time for the Australian officials to realize that the Aboriginals had no concept nor language for the past nor the future, so that their entire lives take place only in the immediate present. This is a hard thing for Western minds to understand. This is what people talk about when they say they're "living in the moment." For the Aboriginals, this meant that being locked up was the sum totality of their existence, which was so unbearable that they had to end it without dilly-dallying.

I do not know whether or not this story is apocryphal, but it perfectly describes how I feel when I am sick, which I recently was, with the flu, for over a week. I actually did bash my head against the wall a few times. It made me feel better, rather the same way self-trepanning does, I imagine. A release of pressure. I'm completely irrational when I'm ill, and I can't help myself. Even though I know intellectually that I will get better, and even though I just definitively proved that to myself by bouncing back from death's doorway, I still feel trapped and hopeless when I get ill. Everything is pointless. Nothing is working right. And the whole stinking affair will end in tears or worse. Darkness. Darkness and doom. I get angry when I'm sick. Or perhaps I'm so weak when my skin has turned translucent through fever that I let the anger that is always there seep right out through my distressed pores. Again, it feels good because of the pressure release. And then there's that painfully cathartic moment of acceptance, just as you're about to hit bottom, when you say, OKAY, FUCK IT, I'M ILL AND I GIVE IN TO THE EXPERIENCE. It takes anywhere from 24 to 48 hours for me to reach this point (plenty of time to bash the odd head or two to bits against the proper wall), where I can relax and enjoy the benefits of convalescence; though negative grumbling about my current physical state goes on unabated.

During this particular illness, I watched movie after movie on the very few premium channels we have (TCM, Sundance, IFC, and seven ENCORE movie channels), cobbling together a fever-dream film festival over the several days I had to remain in bed. The Gala Monday Morning Extra-Strength Tylenol Opening Event included Motorcycle Diaries and The Comedian Harmonists, both of which made me bawl--another good pressure release technique. I had for some reason avoided Motorcycle Diaries when it was out, and I'm glad I waited. It was so lush and visceral, especially during the scenes at the leper colony, that it continually rocked me in and out of my body, finally landing like a very heavy weight on my heart. The Comedian Harmonists was no less gut-wrenching, dealing as it did so unwaveringly with the always stomach-turning topic of anti-semitism and the Nazis.

But I've never been one to shy away from intense experiences. In fact, this kind of dark, emotional movie is far more entertaining to me than any comedy. I continued in a dark vein the next day with The White Buffalo, which portrays such a pitch-black vision of the Old West that it makes McCabe and Mrs. Miller look prettified. After that it was The Wild Bunch, one of my all-time favorites--and who could be more dark, and yet more jubilant, than Peckinpah? I wallowed in the deep human twist of it all.

That evening, I went classic with Ball of Fire and Born Yesterday. The latter I'd seen several times, always wondering how Judy Holliday beat out both Bette Davis for All About Eve and Gloria Swanson for Sunset Boulevard (a later fever-dream film fest fave)for the Oscar that year. Besides the fact that Born Yesterday was full of deeply felt schmaltz about American values in a year (1950) when the Red Scare was running at full tilt, I couldn't figure it out. That night, though, I had a revelation. She won that award for one scene--one scene in which she plays gin rummy with Broderick Crawford, which can be best likened to a fine, idiosyncratic rendition of an intricate jazz tune. Watching her brilliantly rattle off a fugue of tics and rituals that obviously make her experience of an otherwise boring game complete had me on the edge of the bed with delight, and I finally saw how she snagged the voters' hearts away from Bette and Gloria. There was sheer acting bliss contained in the gin rummy scene--a potent concoction, especially to fellow actors.

The next day I continued my fascination with the macho set (J. Lee Thompson, Sam Peckinpah, etc.) with John Huston's African Queen. I really do love that movie, and I always forget how good it really is, how finely tuned and subtle Bogart is, and how utterly believable Hepburn is. Plus, there you've got two people holding your fascination the entire time by themselves, and it made me stop and think: Would I want to spend an entire trip down an African river with anyone in the movies these days? I think I'd end up feeding myself to the crocodiles before the end of the first reel. I flipped sensibilities from ultra-rugged, roughly emotional to roughly intellectual, ultra-smart with Childstar, a beguiling indie from Canada (with a truly moving Jennifer Jason Leigh as a completely amoral Hollywood mother) that starts out with a set of cliches and goes about stripping them down to their human cores in the most entertaining way possible. Highly recommended. Another flip of the genre switch took me to Shampoo (on TCM!), which somehow perfectly evokes my childhood even though there aren't any children in it (unless you count Carrie Fisher's precocious teenage seductress). You can almost SMELL 1975 when you watch Shampoo, even though it's supposedly set in 1968. It's funny how movies that are trying to evoke a year in the recent past always end up PERFECTLY illustrating the very year they were made, instead. No one makes movies with that much pure, casual truth in them anymore.

By Thursday, I had come out of my fever, and was dealing in its place with a fuzzy head and stuffed-up chest. Cable rewarded me with Five Easy Pieces one of my favorite Nicholson movies, also notable because the first 40 minutes of it was filmed in my hometown Bakersfield and environs, with plenty of recognizable landmarks and locations. Karen Black made a perfect know-nothing, white-trash creampuff with a heart of Black Hills gold, and the utterly weird and hilarious scene during which Helena Kallianotes (as a hitchhiker in Nicholson's car) delivers a meandering monologue about "filth" while Toni Basil chimes in with non sequiturs now and then is a cockeyed classic. No one makes movies that center around such basically unappealing characters anymore, either, and that's a shame. I'm so sick of having to LIKE and RESPECT every protagonist in every film--they stuff that shit down your throat, don't they?

Friday evening belonged to Sunset Boulevard, which sucked me in for the umpteenth time because of the almost hypnotic quality of its finely mechanized script and perfectly orchestrated movement from scene to scene. That thing purrs like the engine of a...well, of an Isetta-Freschini! (And as Norma Desmond points out, they don't make cars like that anymore, either.)

Saturday, I was well enough to become engulfed in a make-up day of running errands that had piled up the previous week. Oh Joy. Now you're well--please apply nose to grindstone immediately! By Sunday morning I was already sick of being back in the land of the living, so I pounced upon the remote control, hungrily searching out something to fill in the mid-morning hours while I decided what to do with myself for the rest of the day. I happened upon The Turning Point, and you may laugh, but that one made me bawl just as hard as any of the deeper, more brooding movies I'd watched. Perhaps it was the fact that I'm hitting my mid-life crisis point myself, still quite unwilling to give up the dreams of my youth. More on that in my next post.

Yup, I turn 40 on Friday. Whoop-dee-doodle-now. By that time I hope to be running at 100 percent once more (this damned flu does want to hang on and on in its little post-fever ways), and altogether UNinclined to bash my head against a wall until I expire.

Dreamtime is once again upon me. What will its unforeseen tangents and vortices present me with next as I row ever-so gently down the stream?

Categories: illness, healing, film

Sure, I'd love to!

2006-01-21T11:12:00.000-08:00

When I walked into my classroom yesterday morning, the title of this post was written on the whiteboard in my hand: “Sure, I’d love to!” I’d been teaching my Korean students how to issue and respond to invitations, and all of them kept saying, “No, I’m sorry, I can’t,” or “No, thank you, I’m busy”; I was trying to get them to learn how to say yes. My life has been all about saying yes lately, which is a big revelation for me, because I’m used to saying no. But wait a minute, what am I talking about? It’s not like I’ve sat around on my thumbs for the past forty years due to an insurmountable indolence–I’ve done a hell of a lot; so much that I wonder if I can even get it all into one book..... Well, of course, I can get it all in one book–I’m a natural condenser and distiller. But to evoke the richness and texture of the life I’ve led in words is a particularly daunting challenge.

What I mean by saying yes, I guess, is that I’m learning to agree to my lighter side even when my tired old negative voices try to talk me out of it. No, that’s crazy, they say. Or maybe it’s just a renaissance of this kind of power in my life–I’ve had a long fallow period during which I’ve felt drained and hopeless, ready to ease on down the road all the way out of here. Well, I did ease on down that road; kinda liked what I saw at the end of it, but decided to come back and stick it out for some reason still obscure to me. It has something to do with healing, and I know I have to start on myself.

I’ve never had problems saying yes to things that feed my insatiable hunger for knowledge and adventure–even danger. I’ve always done it, instinctively, always to more or less intense results. The problem is that “intense” is not all that sustainable. What I’m learning to say yes to these days are my quirkier whims, the desires that are not serious, the ones that simply jazz me up and make me smile–things I’ve always denied myself because I’ve been so serious about myself and the way I’ve lived my life in the past. I think I may have looked joyful and frivolous at times on the outside, but I was all troubled thoughts and karmic worries on the inside. Now I’m finally learning how to take it easy on myself, and to say yes to silly little whims rather than saving all my zest for the voluptuous, grand ones, which are always quite an effort to come up with and carry out, anyway.

Since returning to the land of the living after my long sojourn into the underworld with the Lady Lymphoma at my side, I have been full of puckish little desires, and I’m finally starting to act upon them. It started with a belly dancing class I took a couple of weeks ago, which threw my back out, leading me into a deep experience of self healing, then into one of the best weekends I’ve had since recovering. It always amazes me how much more I grow while dealing with pain than I would have had the pain been absent.

Last weekend was all about skating. On Friday and Saturday, I taped the full seven hours of the National Figure Skating Championships, which boiled down to about two hours of actually skating that I watched Sunday morning. All day Sunday, I was thinking about my own years of figure skating, and especially focusing on the fact that I still imagine and dream about landing difficult jumps all the time. God, I thought, I’d love to do that again, but discarded it as a daydream.

The next day was a holiday (MLKJ day), so I went to Venice Beach to rent some skates. They only have roller blades out there, which I hate, but I got a pair anyway, and power-stroked my way down to Malibu on the cement skating path as smoothly as Hans Brinker on his frozen river.

Once I’d had a taste of the certain sort of glide that rollerblades offer, I wanted more, so that night I went back to my roots, to a roller rink, where I rented a foul pair of beige skates (quads, darlings, the only REAL kind of roller skates) with orange wheels and hit the newly re-surfaced glazed-wood floor. Within five minutes, I was whizzing around the rink on long, powerful edges as if I had just hit the floor for the warm-up at the world championships or something. What a geek! All the cool, dance-oriented recreational skaters were giving me the bug eye. But then some people who were even geekier than me arrived and started doing REALLY GEEKY tricks in the center of the rink, so I didn’t stick out too badly. It was weird how my body remembered.

For a few songs (middle-of-the-road dance hits and soul), I worked on perfecting a series of really fast dance steps that just came to me out of the blue–I think it was “The Fourteen Step,” but I’m not sure. Then I really started to get the itch to do some jumps–not appropriate at public session, but I did a few waltz jumps (just a little half turn, starting forward, landing backwards), and the landing felt so solidly pleasurable–almost in a purely sensual way–that my raring-to-go body was urging me to try something harder. I managed to quell its pleas and stick to some funky backwards footwork that impressed the hardcore rink rats and got me out of there without risking major injury. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the idea that it might be fun to coax those jumps I’d dreamed of since I was a kid back into reality.

Instead of waking up the next day to a more mature outlook on that particular whim, I was more excited by it than ever. I ignored the voices in my head that were telling me I was too old, not thinking straight, the biggest DORK in the world, and made an appointment for a private lesson at another rink, out in the valley near Cal State Northridge. The woman who’s going to teach me took lessons in my hometown, Bakersfield, with Natalie Dunn, who was world champ when I was a kid, and a hero to me and many other munchkin skaters. Her name is Jamie, and she agreed with me that it would be a hoot and that I should at least give it a try. Hey, I’m not totally unrealistic–I know I probably won’t be able to train hard enough to do a perfect double axel again, or anything like that, but I’d settle for a single one. Oh, and a double loop. I’d love to do a double loop again. Even if you don’t know what it is, doesn’t the sound of that just tickle you?

My first lesson is next Tuesday, and I will certainly keep the gentle reader apprised of any progress made in this latest foray of mine. The idea of doing some jumps again has effervesced my spirit so much that I will never hesitate again to say “Sure, I’d love too” when a quirky little voice somewhere deep inside my psyche invites me to do something purely meaningless, fun and joymaking. In fact, the lift I’ve gotten just from imagining the possibility has also reminded me that I once knew how to fly. And if I can do a double axel again (well, okay, maybe I WILL go for a double), I'll know that remembering how to fly is just a twitch of the wings away.

Oh, and by the way, my 40th birthday is coming up on February 10, and I'd just ADORE a new pair of skates!

Categories: skating, backstory, transformation

Matrilineally Meshuggah

2006-01-12T16:37:00.000-08:00

Crazy Jew

A cold Friday night in Los Angeles, December, 1984. I’m standing in line alone for Godard’s Alphaville at the New Beverly Cinema, already having devoured the entire oeuvres of Fellini, Antonioni, Truffaut and Pasolini over the last few months. Chatting briefly with each couple or group ahead of me is an Orthodox Jew in full regalia–shoulder-length sidelocks and bushy beard to the belly, a wide, fur-brimmed hat and an overcoat that looks way too warm for the weather even though it’s probably below 50 Fahrenheit (hey, that’s cold for LA). He seems to be selling something. As he gets closer to me, I hear that he’s asking people if they’re Jewish. Everyone is answering yes.

I wonder for an instant if he’ll do something crazy if I say no, but I say it anyway, even though I can feel that the rest of the crowd is silently urging me to say yes even if it’s not true. He looks interested. He explains that it’s Shabbat, and that it’s already past sunset, and that he can’t operate any machinery after sunset due to Shabbas law, even a light switch; so would I please come with him to turn his lights on for him? Oh, and the heater, too? And possibly the oven if his housekeeper forgot to do it, which she can do from time to time. His house is just around the corner. I can see the couple ahead of me silently urging me not to do it, but I tell him I will, thinking I’m about to have another multi-culti adventure in LaLaland-- I’ve been seeking these out on a regular basis since recently moving down from ultra-segregated Bakersfield (yup, that shit still happens, but not by law...) to go to UCLA.

“You’re sure you’re not Jewish?” he says.

I give him a look as if to say, What, you think I’m stupid?. “I have a Jewish grandmother,” I say, “but I’m not.”

“Your father’s mother?” he asks.

“No, my mother’s.”

He rolls his eyes and makes a hacking sound as if he’s going to spit at me. “Then you’re Jewish!” He hits his forehead, hard, with an open palm, and bugs his eyes out at me. By this time I’m sweating, and beet red under my black beret and long hair. I hear someone in the line snicker. In fact, the whole crowd is chattering animatedly now, their feathers all ruffled by the excitement. “I’d advise you to speak with your grandmother, son,” he goes on. “She must be meshuggah not to teach you any better.”

The people in line quiet down as he storms off.

“Good for you,” says the woman in front of me, a forty-something art maven type with a grinning rock-n-roll has-been guy on her arm.

“Why?” I ask.

“He comes here all the time.” Of course, I have to answer that I’m surprised I haven’t seen him before, that I am there all the time, just to show her how well-read I am in the literature of international film. “He says he’s looking for a Shabbas goy, but I think he’s some kind of pervert. Did you see that he was only asking the young pretty guys?” I hadn’t noticed that at all, but I got what she was saying. “Yeah, I’m sure he’s some kind of freak. I’ve seen the way the other Chassids look at him–as if he’s crazy, you know, like they want to stay away.” She pauses. “Did you really not know that the maternal line defines who’s Jewish?” I shake my head sheepishly. “Oh, well, I’d do what he told you even if he was crazy. Ask your grandmother about it. It’s quite interesting.” I ask if she’s Jewish. “Yeah,” she says, “Can’t you tell? I could tell you were the minute I saw you. I always do: Jews all have a little crazy in their eyes.”

the Krayeshka family in Russia

Well, I knew for sure that my grandmother’s family was crazy–but all sides of the grandparental quadrant were, in there own ways, the other three being Greek, Scottish and English, so I couldn’t blame the Kray (formerly Krayeshka) family’s craziness on their Jewishness alone. But the fact that my grandmother didn’t even find out that she was Jewish until she was sixty (I was fifteen then), due to some digging done by her niece, may have quite a bit to do with my grandmother’s particular insanity–a slow, quiet, burning type of madness that stealthily and steadily stalks the family.

My Grandma's older siblings

I can easily imagine what might have led her family to keep this integral part of her identity from her, even if I can’t quite understand it. They were Ashkenazi Jews who fled Kiev during the pogroms of the early 20th century, and when they got to America, they saw that Jews (at least those who were not rich) didn’t have such an easy time here, either. The two children were nearly teenagers, so they could not be protected from the sadness of what their people were going through–had been going through for millennia–all over the world.

Then lo and behold, another child comes. An American. Born on the very American soil of a grape farm outside Fresno, California. And she will be brought up a gentile because she will obviously have it far better that way. They are a light-skinned, fair-haired family, so it will be easy to blend in.

Ann Kray (ctr), 1925

But I’d bet keeping that secret from my grandmother was not easy for any of the family to do, not easy in the least, and I’d bet it drove them all mad, just as it did my grandmother, even though she didn’t know about it. I’d bet the overall mood in the household was, to use a euphemism that has often been used to describe both me and my mother, “high-strung.”

My grandmother’s own strange little life in that nest of secrets and lies must have been full of worries that all revolved around her, none of which she could pinpoint, all of which she could sense. It must have been a lot like my own homelife, in which everyone’s worries revolved around my sexual identity. At least I finally figured out who I was. My grandmother never did. When she found out she was Jewish, her only response, bless her vague little heart, was a bemused, “Oh, hmmm. I thought I remembered seeing those funny candlesticks they have when I was a really little kid, but I thought I must have seen it in a movie.”

Ann Kray, Shaver Lake, ca. 1938

In fact, by the time I got to know her, my grandmother didn’t seem to care much about anything. She was very “whatever”–ahead of her time in that way, since that is many a person’s automatic response to anything the least bit challenging these days. She didn’t seem to have any opinions about anything except a few things that pertained to her personal upkeep and food or television preferences. On the other hand, she was fun to be with for me and my sister (took us shopping all the time, too!), and laughed a lot; but my mother tells me that she was really only like that around us kis. She tells me that when she was little, her mother spent entire days, for days at a time, sobbing face down on her bed. When I was a kid, every once in a while, I would catch her cussing out my grandfather with a lot of hissing and a damning sound in her voice that made me hide under my covers at night.

She was more open, though, about the copious arguments she had with my aunt, five years younger than my mom, who lived in the house, and did so until the day my grandparents were carted out of there by the authorities because my aunt had neglected them all the way to death’s doorstep. She was fifty-five at the time, and a completely stagnant human being. She most definitely has OCD (my mom says she did things like wash her hands till they bled when she was little, and I could write a whole book about her other compulsive behavioral habits), and probably some manic-depression, too, but of course she never got treated, or even looked at. Back in the 1950s, when she and my mom grew up, solid American immigrant stock didn’t cop to unnatural progeny by taking them to invasive charlatans such as psychiatrists.

Throughout my childhood, when I saw her the most, my aunt Carole was a silent, shadow-like, affectless character. My mother says that, after the incident, once my grandparents were ensconced in a safe, clean place where they keep sick, old people till they die, my aunt lashed out at her about a cacophony of family concerns with a focus and rancor that she had never expressed, and that it was extremely scary. Sad to have to nearly kill your parents to let off a little steam, huh?

l-r, my great aunt Grace Kokinos,
grandpa John Kokinos and
Grandma Ann, World's Fair, 1939

They are dead now. It didn’t take long in that safe clean haven for that to happen. My grandfather and his sisters told us loads of wonderful stories; that was what he was all about, so we know a lot about the Greek side of our family–more than any other, really, since my Dad’s parents were/are (only one’s dead) extremely reticent WASPS. More than any other relative, I wish I’d been able to talk more to my maternal grandmother, even though I don’t think she would have been capable. Certainly not at the end. At the end, she grew her dyed hair out long and shaggy and wore her dirty housedresses with nylon anklets out to Denny’s for the Senior Slam breakfast, just like any other crazy old lady. Crazy old ladies generally can’t tell a person much of substance. But neither can angry young ladies or stewing middle-aged ladies or seniors who have simply turned themselves off because there is too much built-up pain to deal with–and my grandmother was all of these before she became a crazy old lady.

Her own mother, I have heard (or did I make it up?), moved to a small outbuilding on the farm at some point and spent the last several years of her life willfully bedridden–just to show how angry she was at the world, I guess. That’s a rich one. In fact, this whole story is incredibly rich and I’d like to write a novel about it–because fiction is really my only option here. My grandma’s niece, Rose, nearly drove herself insane finding the very scant evidence that she did. She’s still alive though, unlike everyone else that was involved. God, maybe I should go up and talk to her about it. I don’t know. Let me think about that one. It might be a great idea; then again, it might be an utterly mad one.

In order to save my own sanity, I detached myself from my family–all sides except my dear sister–for a good long time in my twenties and thirties. My mother and I have only recently reconnected and become truly good friends–due in no small part to the fact that she was a ROCK and GODSEND during my recent year of cancer and chemotherapy. But what brings us even closer is having outlived the madness that has sucked at us all our lives like the sea does at limpets as they cling to rocks.

Not that we’re models of sobriety and balance or anything. Then again, I wouldn’t want to be all that sane; it just doesn’t look all that fun. I mean, come on, we’re Jewish–and that art maven at the New Beverly Cinema all those years ago was right, I’ve noticed it myself–we all have a little crazy in our eyes.

Okay, now I’m fascinated; most likely to be continued in some form or another soon...

Categories: backstory, jewish, family

This is the way I pray

2006-01-09T21:02:00.000-08:00

Last Thursday, my friend Jon sent me an announcement for a free “urban fusion” belly dance class in East LA on Friday afternoon. My eyes lit up, and I RSVP’d right away. The invite had urged men to attend, and I’ve always thought that my natural style of dancing was somewhat akin to belly dancing; on top of that, Jon and I–along with a host of other close friends–were planning to go to an outdoor psytrance party on Saturday, and I thought it would be fun to get my groove on a little early.

Saturday morning, feelin' like the flames are real

Unfortunately, I found that belly dancing was far harsher on the hips than I was used to, and by the end of the class, my back was completely out of whack. It was our friendly faerie host’s first attempt at teaching, and he went way too fast for most of us, but I don’t blame him: I’m experienced enough to know to take it easy rather than go for it whole hog without the proper understanding of how, exactly, the body is supposed to be moving. In fact, I did think that very thing when I first noticed he was skipping over lots of things I needed to know in order to do the moves correctly, but I can’t help going at every new challenge as if I’m still 25, or rather ageless, since I don’t think of myself as young so much as indomitable. Ha! After two and a half hours of jarring, random hip gyrations, I was wincing with pain.

On Saturday morning, I woke up feeling as if I’d played several games of tackle football the day before–without the benefit of either helmet or padding. After about an hour of hobbling around and gingerly testing my small range of motion, I emailed Jon to say I wouldn’t be going on our weekend jaunt, rather heartbroken over it. Then I lay down on the floor and started doing some yoga–simply because it was the only thing I could do that somewhat helped the pain; everything else, whether sitting, standing or lying down, hurt like hell.

I ended up having a very deep discussion with my body over the next two hours or so, during which I fell in and out of trances, digging into the heart of my pain and massaging it back to life on many different levels. When I finished, my back had improved greatly, and I decided to go out for a walk, just to loosen it up some more. I made it all the way to Jon’s (about two miles), where I felt so much better that I changed my mind about bagging the psytrance gathering. By the time I got home to get ready for the rest of the weekend, I was feeling like myself again–or at least a part of myself that I enjoy more than most: the loose and happy, physically-and-emotionally-centered, ready-to-boogie-my-brains-out part.

What’s great, though, is that I don’t really boogie my brains out anymore. Rather, I boogie them in, if that makes sense. Perhaps a more apt way to put it would be that I dance myself into spiritual alignment these days rather than out of my head, like I used to. I dance because it does something for me that nothing else does: It wipes my marked-up mind clean and facilitates a friendly conversation between my spirit and the rest of the universe.

Later that night with Cindy--Radiate, girls!!

Out of the large group Jon had commandeered (he’s our family psytrance gathering expert), only he, our friend Cindy and I ended up stepping up to the dancing dirt. Because of our small number and resulting lack of preparation drama, we were able to arrive early and snag a good campsite like the seasoned veteran trancers we're supposed to be, and we joined the small group that was already dancing to summon the party gods. Around midnight, the party hit full swing. I went into a spiraling trance to an ultra-deep, core-stirring set by our friend Jon Mark for about two hours, then swirled and spun right in front of a speaker in the downtempo pavilion for another two, while Cindy and Jon shook their own groove thangs in their own special ways.

When I emerged from the music’s embrace, a beautiful blond in a teddy bear suit who was lounging on a cushion at the perimeter of the intimate dancing dirt yelled me over (Hey, you!) and told me that she liked to watch me dance; that I “hold that space so well.” I replied, without even thinking about it, “This is the way I pray.” I think I discovered that as I said it to her, and I’m still thinking about it. Of course, instead of thinking about, or even writing about it, I should probably just dance.

I actually couldn’t stop dancing when we got home late Sunday afternoon–I continued in my room with my cat to a mix on HBR1.com that echoed the psycho-funkadelic sounds of the party’s downtempo lounge. Being with my best buddies and the rest of my extended trance party family, and getting so very deeply into the groove for so long, took me all the way from merely better to very, very good indeed. There are mirrored closet doors across the east side of my bedroom, and I intentionally tried to watch myself dance, to see how I danced, what it looked like, because I realized I had no idea. The music has always been as intense for me: it makes me enter a world full of cell division and sprouting vegetation and sacred geometry. But I feel different when I dance now, and it’s happened quite recently: like its some kind of perfect blend of my artistic, scientific and spiritual concerns, on top of the joyous self expression and release that it has always been for me.

It was hard to watch myself because my eyes glaze over when I dance (except when someone calls me out for a moment with a smile). Things outside my personal vortex become hazy and begin to morph. But I caught a few moves–and I think I’m an okay dancer; I certainly have my own style–and I wondered, where did I get this from? I tried to imagine how I’d developed this particular style of mine, which I’m going to call “psychedelic hula,” and I realized that it had been such an organic process that I couldn’t separate it from myself at all. My dancing is me and I am my dancing as much as my verbal language is, and probably more so. I wish I could do it all the time. Or at least most of the time. Though I think I could do it all the time because it actually gives me energy–not that it doesn’t tire me out physically, because I can feel it in my muscles, but it leaves me refreshed and rejuvenated.

I also go into a serious, meditative trance when I dance, the way Sufi dancers do, I imagine, though I’ve never learned any technique for doing this. It’s a natural occurrence. I laughed when I caught myself in the mirror–I was so serious! Though it feels like belly dancing to me, it looks like like Tai Chi on fast forward with a healthy dose of flamenco and a hint of Bollywood. Now, I have studied a little Tai Chi (as with everything–a little of this, a little of that), but I could no more perform “the form” than I could do a triple Axel. My memory for movement is hideous and I’m a horrible mimic, so it’s hard for me to “follow along,” but I have an innate sense of my body and the way it likes to experience space, which I can express to its full potential in the right atmosphere. The radical party I went to last weekend was certainly that. It was home. And it was church. And I can’t wait to worship again.

But what am I saying? I can pray any time. I’ve got a big room, great music, and a cat who likes to watch. I mean, I couldn’t really LIVE at a psytrance party, now could I? (Or could I?) Instead, my life is its own kind of party, I suppose, and it seems to be getting more festive. I had turned my belly dancing back injury around and grabbed on to the cord of light that is always offered, then slips away, as one sinks into the black pit of pain and depression instead of going down, down, down, and this made me feel that I was actually making some progress. Even a year or two ago, I would have wrapped myself in a cloak of negativity and missed one of the best parties of the decade.

Before I left on Saturday night, Philip told me that he was proud of me for turning it around like I did, that I had a great wealth of self-healing powers–and that these go hand in hand with my great powers of self destruction: What I have to realize and start putting into use is that they are both the same power. I told Jon and Cindy about this while we shared some wine and hors d’oeuvres in our cozy campsite before hitting the dancing dirt, and they both thought it was a cogent and beautiful statement. As usual, Philip hit my nail on its head (he admits he knows me better than he does himself). After that particular night (and morning) of dancing, I am beginning to think that it might need to take a more pivotal role in my ever-spinning matrix of healing and self-transformation. I will surely delve into this and report my findings to you in due time, gentle reader!

Jon and Cindy after dancing--all lit up!

Categories: friends, psychedelic, music, dance, transformation

Moving life with music - Part I

2006-01-05T18:07:00.000-08:00

Last night I had a Japanese guest student in my evening class of Korean ESL beginners, and we were talking about music preferences. The Koreans all betrayed the mushiness behind their crisp, salty exteriors with a love of sappy pop songs. The Japanese woman, on the other hand, perkily reported that she didn't like any kind of music. I looked at her with unmasked astonishment. "What do you mean you don't like any kind of music?" I questioned her, and she said: "I just don't like it. I don't listen to it." She had no qualms about it, and none of the other students seemed in the least disturbed by her declaration, but it chilled me to my core. Perhaps it's corny, but music in all of its manifestations adds a textural layer to my life that weaves its way in and out of the other layers as an integral part of the whole fabric, and it has always acted as an emotional touchstone, diary and compass for me. In fact, music has often informed me of my emotions before I grasped them intellectually, and I have always counted on it to mediate my moods. Not to like music! It was akin to saying that she didn't like eating; which I also suspect might be the case: she was wafer thin.

Lately I've been experiencing a phenomenon that comes about in every music lover's life around the age of 40, and that is the usurpation of one's history as nostalgia both shaped and propagated by the media. I knew my time was coming when Led Zeppelin started hawking Cadillacs a few years back, going for the crowd that had doped its way through high school just before I arrived there. Now, it's 80s, 80s, 80s, shoved down my throat 24 hours a day, and it's mostly not my 80s, but the same mainstream (or poseur avant garde) 80s bullshit that I did my best to stay away from even when it was new. I have to say that I'm SICK of nostalgia altogether. It feels so two steps forward, one step back; or one step forward, one step back; or is it simply one step back, one more step back these days?

The poor generation behind mine is not even being allowed the decency of the standard 15- to 20-year waiting period: The 90s are already being packaged as nostalgia (Hey, We Love the 80s, so why not Love the 90s, too, while we're at it?). And it's not even real nostalgia, but ironic nostalgia, or is it quasi-ironic or post-ironic? Anyway, it's highly adulterated. We're not allowed to actually feel something real about anything unless we also sneer at it. But this is not about cynicism. That's a much squirmier can of worms than I'm willing to open today, one that takes thought and analyses.

Instead, I want to start on a new technique of self exploration, following phenomenological streams in my life to chart the interlocking tributaries between them, and to measure how they've flowed into the sea that is now me. I think this kind of subject-based life study coupled with the sort-of-chronological narrative I've already begun will provide me with the warp and weft I need for the kind of weaving I'd like to do. Okay, enough with the metaphors.

So I'll start with music, mostly because that music-despising Japanese student ("Oh wait," she added later. "I like the song 'Happy Birthday to You,' because I know I will soon get gifts when I hear it. Tee hee hee hee [giggle, giggle].") made me start thinking seriously about how integral it has always been to my worldview, my soul, and my very sanity. She also reminded me in an unexpectedly visceral way how much music has always moved me, whether down the road in my car or through the stratosphere via spirit, and I immediately wanted to put my relationship with it together and look at it, like a scientist with a new spirochete to examine under the microscope.

My first deep contact with music happened the day I got kicked out of nursery school in 1969. Stevie Wonder was singing "Ma Cherie Amour" on the radio in my mom's Chevy station wagon, and it was the first time I had ever differentiated one song from the miasma of environmental noise that squeezed its way through my toddler’s nervous system. I completely disappeared into that song, and wandered out when the commercials started up again, dazed and wanting more. More, more, more! I sucked up music from my environment like an anteater does its scurrying prey. I remember, sometime very soon after being initiated by Stevie in the station wagon, standing outside someone else's screened off patio in our Downey, CA apartment complex and listening to "Summerbreeze," the entire song, on their radio, certain that I was hearing "blowing through the jaspin of my mind," and almost as certain that "the jaspin" was a special part of the brain that processed memory.

In fact, most of the pleasure I derived from listening to music as a very small child--mostly on AM radio stations--came from extremely idiosyncratic misunderstandings of pop song lyrics, my all-time favorite being "Rickey Don't Loose that Gumba," (by Steely Dan) in which "loose" is supposed to mean "free," and a "Gumba" is a ferocious animal similar to a mongoose, in a cage, and the singer doesn't want this "Rickey" person (also the name of my only male friend in second grade, when the song came out) to let it out for some reason. Now, the really BIG thrill I got from this song was my imagined understanding that "Steely Dan" (of course, I thought it was the singer's name, didn't you when you were a kid?) was actually not talking about a REAL Gumba, but a metaphorical one, which was a ferocious, mongoose-like part of this Rickey's personality. I thought I was very sophisticated at the time for figuring that out. Never mind that the lyrics following this line made absolutely no sense if my theory were true. The point was that my imagination was getting a work out, and that is something I've always treasured more than just about anything else. Of course, when my friend Rickey's mom told me that Rikki (a woman, not a boy) was being advised not to lose a phone number the singer had given her, the banality of it compared to my own fantasy shocked me. I went straight out and bought the 45, my first music purchase.

Shortly after that, I got my first real album (not a Disney record with a picture book and songs from the movie)--in fact, it was a double album: Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, which my mother had forbade me, but which my grandmother happily bought me for my birthday. After that it was all over. I left childhood behind very early, and secretly dreamed of being a sexy rock 'n' roll star with a deep voice. From that point on, I was far more aware of what I was listening to, and I started to consciously shape and texture my world with the music I took in, as if through my pores. At times, music felt like a second skin I could don at will to protect the first one. I hung out all the time with older kids, and made a point of reacting to music the same way they did. And the music had to be good. And new. And preferably obscure to semi-obscure. In Bakersfield, that was a challenge not to be taken lightly.

To be continued...

Categories: backstory, music

Self therapy: anger excavation

2006-01-04T14:35:00.000-08:00

link

Hello, good to see you. How do you feel today?
Angry.
So what else is new? And what are we angry about today?
How about everything?
How about being more specific?
Okay, I can sum it up for you in fifteen words or less: I'm angry because the world is not the way I want it to be.
How old are you? Ever heard of a thing called reality? Giving up childhood illusions and all that?
What, so my anger is not even a valid emotion?
No, I'm not saying that. It's valid. It's just not useful, at least in its raw state.
Okay, I know what's coming next. You're going to tell me to transform it, to perform some sort of emotional alchemy on myself, right?
Something like that.
But why am I not allowed simply to express it?
How would you do that--express your anger in its true state?
Don't think I haven't thought about it. I've had visions of terrorism, but of the non-violent sort. You know what I'd really like to do? Strip naked, stand in the middle of the intersection of Hollywood and Highland and let my body convulse at will while screaming my head off till my voice gives out.
Well, I'm sure you'd be carried off and shot up with thorazine before you reached that point.
Yeah, I'm sure. But at least I will have done it.
And what will you have done, exactly? What will you have accomplished?
Release.
But you've released and released and still you find ever more anger to be released. What would it take, in fact, to release it all?
I don't know. Perhaps it's a matter of who witnesses it.
Why do you need others to witness your anger? Do you think they're somehow culpable in its long, ineluctable fomentation?
No, it's mine. It's my anger, I guess. I'm not angry, really, at anyone out there. I've forgiven all the people I've been angry at in my life.
Then do you think anger is useful to share?
I guess I do. To let others know that their own anger is nothing to be ashamed of.
Do you think everyone is as angry as you are?
How could they not be?
Some people might say, "How could you not be happy?"
Crazy people.
And they might think you're crazy, too.
Okay, I understand about different viewpoints. But I still think everyone really is angry deep down inside, if over nothing else but being a spirit trapped in a physical body. Don't you agree that it's often unbearably frustrating, not to be able to make your body do what your spirit wants it to do? Like fly and such? How could anyone not be angry about the way our physical reality works when our spirits are so much more expansive?
What about the way your life works? Isn't that the only thing you're really angry about?
God damn you, yes, I suppose it is. I love the world in fact. The only thing I hate is my own inability to traverse its inherent obstacle course with any ease whatsoever. Wait a minute. No. I AM angry at the powers that be. What is wrong with that? What is wrong with being angry about fanatics and bigots running the world into oblivion? What is wrong with being angry about a population that is so glamorized and transfixed by its own culture that it can't see beyond the spotlight? What's wrong with being angry for all those people who are too sick and tired and downtrodden even to afford the luxury of being angry? What's wrong with being angry about the fact that there's so much unecessary pain in the world, and that I seem to feel all of it, all the time.
Nothing, as long as you don't turn it upon yourself in some destructive way.
But then how DO I express it if I can't be a crazy naked screamer?
I don't know. Like this, perhaps.
Like what, sitting around talking about it?
What's wrong with that?
Nothing, I guess, but I'm still angry.
So, do you think you can do something useful with that anger, or do you think you would have an easier time simply releasing it?
Is that even possible? We've already talked about release.
I'm not talking about screaming and yelling and punching pillows. I'm talking about true release.
Again, is that possible?
I'm sure of it.
But who would I be without my anger?
So you use it as a security blanket.
I guess I do. But it's no longer cogent to my purpose.
And what might that be?
Healing.
Can you see yourself healing your anger, maybe even helping others to heal their anger, or even healing the immense wounds of anger that keep the world at war?
So now we're talking not about transforming or expressing, but about healing? I don't really know what it would mean to heal one's anger.
Then maybe you're not ready for it. In fact, maybe we all need to get just a little bit ANGRIER before we're really willing to do something about it.
No, I'm ready to get over it. In fact, I AM over it. Well, I think I am. Still, I wonder what to do about it. All the things I'm angry about. I think about how I might use my anger to change things all the time, but I can't think straight because I'm too angry.
It's really all a matter of focus, isn't it?
Something else I think about all the time, but can't seem to nurture into reality.
Well, think about it some more, then, but not too hard (and not too soft), or it'll escape your grasp...and we'll continue this conversation during our next session.
Sank you, Doktor!

Categories: healing, emotions, transformation

Assume the position

2006-01-03T22:00:00.000-08:00

Skating, one of my many "if only" discarded talents

I had a two-week vacation over the holidays, and I sobbed my heart out (boo hoo) all morning yesterday just thinking about going back to work. My first day back (today) was not as harrowing as I'd imagined. I was able to take on my English teacher persona without much discomfort, though I must say that working a split shift is absolutely dreadful. Going to work twice in one day has a wearing psychological effect that is difficult to sustain. And the relief of getting home from work twice does not offset it. Though I've managed to start using my time productively between shifts (1:30-6:00pm), it still kills me to get up the gumption all over again for that evening class (6:15-9:15). And then it's a late dinner, going to bed on a full stomach, and barely any time to decompress [violins come in here]. Okay, I ADMIT IT--I DON'T LIKE TO WORK, no matter what the job. All I want to do is dance and sing and heal and cook meals for large groups of people (for reasons still hazy to me), but I can't seem to get those passions in alignment with my personal support. In fact, I have no developed talents for any of those things. My life has been all about writing. But writing is getting to me. It feels so removed from the source. Words never quite say what they mean, and meaning itself is so elastic as to make words mere playthings.

Yet I can't say that in general, for I greatly enjoyed reading during my vacation--something I have no time for while working because all my "free time" is spent writing. I sometimes find it unbearably ironic that I'm creating more words and more meaning for the world when there's so much of both already out there that I'd really like to take the time to sit down and study to my heart's content. But I have to work. I have to do. I have to generate product. And sell it. Or sell my time, which is my current situation. It would be nice to harmonize my passion to live and my need to survive. I do believe I can do it in this lifetime, and I'd like to say I'm going to do it lickety-split, but my life feels terribly amorphous and quantum these days: all possibilities existing at once, none of them working their ways into physical reality--at least at any pace discernible to the human eye.

I can see that this is quickly becoming what I'd call a "classic" journal entry. My first impulse is to censor myself and say something clever, make it all into an entertaining piece of inoffensive prose, well-crafted and bloodless. Or maybe I'm being too hard on myself. Anyway, censor be damned, the journal entry continues:

What would I do if I didn't write, which has never made me much of a living anyway? Well, I really don't know because my psyche and soul are barricaded in by a confounding number of walls based on beliefs that I find repugnant, but somehow can't help buying into. Beliefs such as this: that I'm too invested in my life as a writer to give it up; that I'm too old (forty next month) to take off on a whole new tangent; that I really don't have any talent for any other form of expression; that I really don't have any talent at all, just a certain skill for stringing sentences together. And there ya go: I got to that point. That point where the other voice in my head goes, "Wait a minute here. You're not that bad. What are you talking about? Why are you taking yourself so lightly? Why denigrate yourself when you've actually achieved a great deal? Be grateful. What are you so resentful about? Your mind works like a clock, against all odds you're still alive, and you live with a wonderful little family in a nice, comfortable apartment. What do you want, a million bucks and a McMansion? Why can't you just be happy?" And then I think, well, higher-(and rather preachy)-self, that's a question I've been asking myself all my life.

Now, let's see. Maybe it's time to go over this again. Why am I not a happy person? ... You know what? I can't think of one reason off the top of my head except that it's a habit. Like many things. Unhappiness is merely one in a panoply of long-running addictions that have all outlived their usefulnesses. A funny, very pundit-like friend of Philip's swears one needn't so much get rid of old habits as replace them with new ones. Like eating carrot sticks or meditating instead of smoking cigarettes or pot. Like drinking water instead of wine or eating fruit instead of chocolate. Like hoola hooping or hiking instead of sitting around in a foul mood. Like stretching instead of sitting hunched over in front of my computer, wondering what the hell I'm gonna pull out of my ass next. Like loving myself instead of hating the world. Like loving people as much as I love animals, plants--even things. Like doing all the things I know I must do to heal myself instead of just planning to do them someday. Like realizing that someday never comes instead of hoping that it will. Like being happy with the center instead of always having to go to extremes. Like courting balance rather than derangement. Like transforming anger instead of letting it transform me. Like expressing myself instead of worrying about how I am going to express myself, and what effect it might have on others. Like being happy instead of being sad. Sounds so simple.

On. Off. Zero. One. The endless flip of the switches. The machinery of the duality whose expression is life itself. Would we suddenly stop living if the myriad forces that naturally oppose each other suddenly merged? Life is repelled by such merger, I think. The fact that it always remains one step away, or experienced only in certain ways and fleeting moments, as through sex or ecstatic dance or other transcendent practices, is what keeps us alive; the reaching for it fuels our will to live. At the end, we'll merge, soon enough, back into the soup of energy from which our tiny spoonfuls of existence are drawn. Ah, metaphors. They make it so easy to attractively gloss over things you really don't understand. "Oh words are trains for moving past what really has no name"--That's by Paddy McAloon from "I Couldn't Bear to be Special" by Prefab Sprout, a new-wave art band of the early 80s whose lyrics still resonate with me. That line in particular is one of my favorite sentences in the English language. And it expresses beautifully and exactly the conundrum I find myself in these days, as a writer who is sick of words, or at least sick of my own manufacturing of them, and who is going to stop generating them for today (and their little meanings too!) as soon as he finishes this sentence.

Categories: addiction, emotions, meaning, healing

Hello once again

2006-01-02T14:51:00.000-08:00

further notes for an autobiographical strip search; world traveler module, 1989-90, Asia; inspired by a rather titillating feeling of absurdity that overcame me during the celebration of a moment in time about 39 hours ago (happy new year)...

me contemplating the Taj Mahal, Dec. 1989

Time is arbitrary in India. The difference between Nepal standard time and India standard time, for example, is fifteen minutes, so residents of border towns are obliged to change their watches whenever they cross the imaginary line, and change them back on the way home. This constant temporal flip-flopping renders time a slippery concept on the sub-continent, at least if one enters it from the north. But localized technical aberrations such as this do little to explain the overall discombobulation of time in India. Time is simply a far more spirited, multidimensional and elastic phenomenon there than most westerners can easily imagine. Take a little trip with me, and I'll show you...

When my boyfriend Leon, my friend Nina and I entered India at the Nepalese border on a cold December morning in 1989, the sun slid into a buttery sky at five a.m., illuminating an already bustling border town. Spindly children ran across the unpaved street carrying sweet beige tea to groups of chattering men while silent women with stern, slick hair opened gift shops and drugstores for the early tourist influx.

Before we could divest ourselves of a few rupees to obtain provisions for our long bus ride to Lucknow--home of the nearest train station--we were ushered into Passport Control with the rest of the group we'd traveled with from Kathmandu the night before: six lanky Norwegians lugging skis to their Kashmiri mountaintop destination, a group of German lesbians headed for the holy waters of the Ganges at Varanasi, and a few other wayward travelers like ourselves, courting any new experience that might arise.

The bus was scheduled to depart at seven. The passport officials took so long humming and shaking their heads over each of our visas that we thought we might miss it, but we boarded at five 'til, charmed by the way things always seem to work out just right, no matter how last-minute, when traveling.

The seats on the bus were not wholly uncomfortable and, with our luggage stowed on the roof, there was even room for our knees. The driver was dressed in layers of gauzy white, and bore not a passing resemblance to Pearl Bailey. He puffed his ample cheeks out as he rewrapped his turban, tighter this time, giving the effect of a quickie facelift. The Norwegians jumped aboard with their last-minute purchases of bidis and Life-savers. The engine chugged to life, then all activity seemed to detach itself from the tyranny of time.

The driver leaned from the bus entrance like a wide-eyed tourist on a San Francisco trolley and called out in quickstep Hindi, then English, "Leaving for Lucknow!" A few crimson-clad women carrying macrame shopping bags straggled out of aquamarine doorways and took the last empty seats. Nina, Leon and I conferred with each other: of course, he's just trying to fill the old heap up. After all, he's gotta make a living.

For the next large chunk of time, people crawled out of every nook and cranny of that tiny town, and the bus continued to fill. First, we rearranged ourselves to fit three to a seat, then four, then children and small women were placed on laps. Soon, people were jumbled together in jigsaw proximity, limbs splayed into the air, torsos twisted to fit narrow crevices. When I managed to catch a glimpse of the dainty gold watch on the wrist of the plump, red-saried woman who was perching on my shoulder, it was already ten o'clock. Time for a coffee break.

A few lanky men peeled themselves away from the top layer of bus humanity to follow the driver to a tea shop down the street. The rest of us shifted in tiny, painful ways while we watched them pop gooey gulab jamun into their mouths. Nina tried in vain to open the window nearest her; the man sandwiched between her knees reached up and hit it with his forearm. It quivered, dropped and crashed to pieces in its cavity. By eleven we were on our way. I was pleased to have found a practical use for my years of yoga and meditation practice.

The two-lane highway we barreled down sloped so precipitously on either side that I was amazed the bus didn't roll off into the marshy grasslands we passed. Two hundred miles out of Lucknow, we slowed to a stop where a band of young men and women blocked the road. A student uprising, we thought. A woman in a jeweled, brocaded kurta and a man in dingy white Ghandi-like robes approached the bus. The driver talked to them in hushed tones for about fifteen minutes, then made an announcement in Hindi to his passengers. The woman on my shoulder leaned down to us.

"You are understanding?" she asked.

We shook our heads, no.

"He is saying the woman is high caste, fighting against too many lower caste people getting government jobs, and the man is lower caste, fighting against too many high caste people getting government jobs. So they will be stopping transportation services all over Uttar Pradesh to be making their point."

"Both sides together?" Leon asked.

"Yes," answered the woman, "both sides fighting together."

"Then whose point will be made?" I countered.

The woman shrugged. "Does not matter. The driver is saying they will be throwing rocks and puncturing tires, then we will be getting it mended, then they will be letting us through."

"Why don't they just let us through now, then?" asked Nina.

"Ah," said the woman, wagging her head, "it is not proper yet. They must be making us lose much time."

Nina and I nodded as if we understood. Leon looked irritated--never a good sign. He'd seen similar meaningless political oddities in his native Soviet Union. And he was never one to be kept waiting gracefully. Again, time had taken an unexpected philosophical turn.

Rocks were thrown, windows broken. Everyone ducked as best they could, and, miraculously, no one was hurt. The passengers cheered when the front right tire gave up its air with a loud pop. Since there was nowhere to turn around on the road, the driver ground the gears into reverse, and we sped backwards for twenty minutes to the last roadside town. There we were allowed off the bus to purchase Nehi strawberry, grape or lemon soda--the only refreshments available at the gas station where our tire was being repaired. There were thirty-year-old Nehi posters and advertisements all over the place. Leon and I figured a Nehi representative had been the last dealer in "western culture" to make it that far into the hinterlands.

When it was time to reboard, the Norwegians climbed on top with the luggage. The three of us followed their lead, spreading out between duffel bags, using bedrolls as pillows. The driver yelled up at us to get inside the bus, but when none of us made a move, he started the engine and forged ahead. It was a little scary feeling we could be catapulted off the roof with every rock we hit, but it was worth the exchange for space and fresh air. As promised, the band of high caste/low caste protestors let us pass, and even waved and yelled greetings at us. They seemed to be having quite a good time, mingling and drinking beer and even dancing: time bandits on break.

We stopped at the next little town to let off a few passengers. This time, the driver climbed up on the roof and told us we would have to get inside the bus or he would not continue. He explained that he had been caught with passengers on the roof in the past, and fined five hundred rupees. Nina, Leon and I decided we didn't want to do anything to rock the bus any more than necessary, so we reluctantly slithered through the sea of people inside and wedged ourselves on the corner of a seat near the back. The same red-saried woman sat on my shoulder. "Hello once again," she said.

The Norwegians were not as cooperative. They sat on the roof smoking bidis and yelling back at the driver in Norwegian, which did nothing but make him angrier. Soon everyone inside the bus was yelling back at them in Hindi and broken English. A few men near the front started rocking the old heap from side to side, hoping to pitch the Norwegians off the roof. They only succeeded in making several of the passengers sick. Nina was one of them. She clutched her stomach and groaned. I watched her face drain of its usual rosy color and fill back up with a sickly violet-green.

The Norwegians finally conceded when the driver threw their skis off the top of the bus. They wiggled their way into the crowd cursing in English, and continued to smoke their bidis once they had situated themselves like fenceposts down the center aisle. Nina was beginning to show signs of intense nausea. Her forehead was iron-hot. A little over a hundred miles to go, and it looked like we were free and clear from here on in. I stroked her hand and told her we'd go to the doctor as soon as we got to Lucknow.

A few minutes later, a cloud of dust spread across the road, obscuring the driver's view. As we slowed to a stop, the dust cleared to reveal a huge mob of people, all holding rocks and bottles and sticks. The driver got out and yelled something at them. A young man and a young woman came forward. This time the man was dressed well and the woman was clad in rags. They whispered in each other's ears and giggled like lovers as they approached the driver. The three of them huddled for a few minutes, then the man and woman each yelled something, which caused the mob to break into two factions and lay down their weapons.

They then retired to a small village that was set off from the road beneath a few immense banyan trees. Within minutes, women and children from the village had set up a lean-to and started selling tea and freshly made chapati to the bus passengers and the few mob members who were brave enough to strike out on their own. The driver and the two spokespersons sat in conference at the only table, and their very own tea boy hustled fresh hot water and batches of steaming chapati over to them as they discussed strategies.

Nina was going into convulsions. The over-sweet chai didn't help. A group of curious young children who were too young to help their mothers with their new enterprise gathered around Nina and ran their hands through her long, blond hair. The red-saried woman, who introduced herself as Mira, explained that they probably hadn't seen anyone with blond hair before. Some of the village women came over, too, and soon Nina was encircled by a small mob of chattering people, all grabbing at her hair and stroking her white skin, ignoring the chartreuse tinge. An undeniable product of her guilty-liberal, Marin County, California upbringing, Nina was embarrassed and annoyed by the attention but loath to shoo the crowd away. Mira took over, swatting at the children like flies and chastising their mothers for letting them misbehave so brazenly. Nina's fever was rising, and I was afraid she would pass out if we didn't get her to a doctor.

An hour or so went by. The three strategists now seemed to be having a sort of party, sharing smokes and passing around a bottle of homemade moonshine the driver had kept stashed in his voluminous white garment. Leon was so irked that his usual steely composure was beginning to visibly melt. He was beginning to throw up his hands and gesticulate in an extremely Russian way, indicating a silent cry that went something like, "Oh, why is the world so full of idiots that do nothing but plague me and make my life miserable?!!" Mira advised us to go over and tell them my friend was sick. I asked her to do it.

"They will not be listening to me," she said. "I am part of this because I am Indian. But you can play like you are not understanding. Go try."

I hated pulling rank as the privileged Westerner, but I was really beginning to worry about Nina, so I thought about it for a moment...then convinced Leon, who had a far more imposing affect than I, to stride over to the table and say, "Excuse me, but my friend is very ill, and I need to get her to a doctor."

Before he could even add a polite request to get moving as soon as possible, the driver stood up, threw a wad of rupees at the teaboy, shook hands with the two spokespeople and shepherded everyone back onto the bus. He cleared out the front seat for Nina and Mira while Leon and I perched nearby. Looking at his watch, he said, "Time will be flying now," and started the engine.

The bus reached alarming speeds as we zoomed by the several bus stops on the way into Lucknow. The driver wouldn't stop to let people on or off; he kept smiling back at us triumphantly and patting Nina on the knee. The passengers who had wanted to get off at those stops were apparently caught up in the joint cause of getting this beautiful, tall, very ill, blond American to the doctor as quickly as possible, for they cheered along with the driver. I wondered if he was going to pay them off, or even drive them back; what were they getting out of this? A good story, probably, just like me.

When we reached the Central Station at Lucknow, twilight was just beginning to spread its garish pinks and oranges across the sky. The rest of the passengers exited the bus in a state of flushed excitement; some of them came up to us and shook Leon's hand.

"You see," Mira said, "you have been doing something we would all like to be doing. But we Indians are not making things work. Instead we are only making time."

She showed us where to find the station doctor, and gave us her phone number in New Delhi in case we should pass that way. We thanked her and waved at the driver, who winked at me and gave me the "OK" sign.

Nina threw up in the gutter on the way to the station doctor's office. Her face slowly regained its true color, and she stopped grasping at her stomach.

"I thought I was going to pass out," she said. "I can't believe we're really here."

The train to Agra was three hours late and counting. We washed up, played seven-card stud with two men from Bombay in the waiting room, watched a Tamil soap opera on television, drank A&W Root Beer (Lucknow's answer to Nehi) and ate delicious onion fritters made by an old woman with a little portable cauldron. At midnight, the station was still hopping. Trains due at six were just pulling in, and a noisy musical was playing on the waiting room video machine. We dozed sporadically and played twenty questions.

Our train came, finally, as we knew it would. It was crowded, too, but much less crowded than the bus. No one complained about the train's not being on time. No one apologized, either. In fact, no one seemed to notice. Nina, Leon and I were too tired to care. As far as we were concerned, we had all the time in the world--or in India, at least.

Categories: backstory, friends, travel, India

Good ol' fashioned family holiday - Part VII

2005-12-31T12:34:00.000-08:00

Spin Cycle - New Year's Eve and beyond: Enter the Hoop

When the sun got hot enough for me to strip off my hat and scarf, I decided it was time to go down and listen to Jon’s set, the morning slot, 8-11, which started out promising, but was nipped in the bud by a visit from a ranger: a barrel-chested silver fox with wrap-around mirrored sunglasses and a Dudley Do-Right chin. Rafael, who is the lead organizer of these gatherings, talked to him for a long time while Jon went deeply ambient on the turntables, feigning new-agey calm. Finally, some sort of deal was struck. The ranger ambled through the campsite, which I suppose held about 200 people or so by the morning of New Year’s Eve, with a very placid drug-sniffing shepherd, found nothing, and left us alone for the rest of the weekend. It’s good to get that kind of thing over with early. When I was in Goa in 1990, we always paid off the cops (and had a drink with them) long before the party even got started. Not to imply that any money changed hands here. I really don’t know what happened. It seemed much more subtle than a baksheesh exchange.

Once we had the place to ourselves again, Jon spun me into a twisted dancing marathon. I had decided to wait to dance until I could actually not stop myself, and my body dove me into deep, grinding movements for hours on end once the music overtook me. Anyone who didn’t know me probably thought I was crazy, but gently, not madman-crazy. But then again, almost everyone there was gently crazy after some fashion or another. I imagine that I must have looked like I was doing a long forgotten ritual dance from a lost civilization–and if they danced like that, it’s no wonder they got lost. Mostly, I disappeared into some cryptic, non-rhythmic track of the beat-heavy, multi-layered music, where I tangled with chords and surfed intermittent waves of barely audible spoken word snippets, or went off on a tangent until it disappeared into the brightening sky.

At dusk, I threw on my poncho from Peru, which had acted as a communal blanket at the edge of the sandy dance floor all day, and went on a comprehensive hike of the entire canyon with Will, Natalie and Elena. It was to be a casual sunset viewing, but it became a real trek, complete with serious safety decisions and on-the-spot bonding sessions, all as the sky went black and a crescent moon barely augmented our hard-to-carry lantern.

When we got back, Will and I cooked turkey dogs and chili for everyone while Natalie and Elena went to take a “nap.” Lynnie joined us. Jon and I did a touch of A; Lynnie did too, but only one drop, which she said did nothing. It was creeper stuff; stuff that made you think nothing was going to happen until you slowly realized it was happening.

For me, this was sometime after midnight, when I realized I had disappeared into one of the speakers. I spent the next two hours spelunking my way through its circuitry while this guy named Bob spun a wicked hardcore trance set, which Jon aptly called the “Rolfing” of trance (Jon’s style is more sensual Swedish). Bob had his long hair tucked up into a beige ski cap, and it curved into a stony comma atop his head so that he looked like one of those Incan priests with curved helmet-like diadems (or is it Mayan, or Aztec? Sheesh. Never trust me with world history...). I didn’t make my way out of the speaker so much as get ejected from it when Bob finished his set some time between dusk and dawn (I seriously had no idea), at which point I actually got to observe what was going on around me.

There were more people there by then, including lots of sweet hippy kids from the neighboring cities, and a few performers. Our faves were The Hoolagans, two radical showgirl chicks who spin these hefty, black-hose hoola hoops while dirty dancing [They’re superstars (hooperstars?) now!]. When they finished their show, they left some hoops out for the crowd, and Will had become an expert during my time within the speaker. I sat on a rock watching him spin the hoop, doing an economical little techno dance and hopping from rock to rock from time to time, and it was just so entrancing and so beautiful that I got a little hysterical–laughing, then crying, and laughing again. You know how I get when something really hits me (or do you?). All fluid and overwhelmed.

The next two hours were packed with images that were so irresistibly entertaining that I felt as if I were part of a secret, sacred circus. I kept remembering a soundbyte from Bob’s set, something about what was your life like, was it interesting enough to make a movie about? And I thought, oh yes, definitely–already, yes–but I’ve got an even better one planned. Stay tuned. My mind went on a gentle surf through a spiraling series of poetic twists and turns about all this as I watched the crowd: a fire spinner dressed like a silent movie diva, and another spinner, less flamboyant in performance style, dressed as a sort of medieval handmaiden, quietly looped infinity into the sky with streaks of flame. The romance of fire...

A slim, pale, tall girl with a haughty air, dressed in Russian snow-princess winter regalia, with a high-waisted black fur-lined coat and a fur hat, strode regally over to a rock, sat down and straightened her coat, then crooked each leg up daintily and removed her big, clunky, mudcaked hiking boots. Later, she took off her hat, under which she’d been harboring a little blond buzz cut that made her look like a big silly fairy instead of a severe princess of the tundra. The power of hats...

A skinny boy in big pants and a skinny girl in a tiny pink t-shirt circled around each other in Spirograph patterns, kissing when they met. But the boy’s true love was a little yellow glowing ball that he kept moving in a continuous, spiraling caress around his body. Boys and their toys...

A circle of people huddled around the fire. A circle of people huddled around a bottle of wine. A circle of people huddled around a bong. A circle of people huddled around a teddy-bear backpack. There was a big projection show on one of the canyon walls, but I barely watched any of it, I was so entranced by my immediat surroundings.

And all the while, Will spun the hoop. No, I won’t jump through that hoop, sir, but I’ll sit here and spin it around me for a while. Would that do? Of course, the hoop became an overarching all-encompassing metaphor for me, the way Lunch use to be (see my eponymous untitled novel for details), the way religion is to most people. By dawn, I was testifyin’: Hallelujah for the Hoop!

Natalie and Elena showed up, refreshed from prolonged naps, sometime just before dawn, having slept through the midnight hour. But it was no matter, since the party was still going strong. I started to wind down just as they were starting to trip. I had a nice, slow, sweet touchdown to planet earth while lounging on a furry blanket and watching the one-night-only revelers (mostly teenagers who’d probably had to tell their parents that they were going to a party in town–wait a minute, what town?) dance their final, happy-sad dances and say their good-byes.

I danced a little more as the morning made itself unmistakable, and spent the rest of the day barely moving from my poncho at the hearth camp. I shudder to think about the random junk and goodies I must have eaten that day, but it all tasted damned good. Will stopped by now and then with his latest reports on all the cute guys passing back and forth, which was entertaining, but I could not be bothered sexually, and that was very relaxing, as was nearly everything I had experienced on the entire trip. It was the best New Year’s celebration I can remember, and I’m already harboring dreams of a four-wheeler for regular desert revelry, as boondocky as it gets.

But then, as Jon and I discussed before Lynnie and I left the party around dusk on New Year’s day (the sounds my car made on the road kept up the trance soundtrack of the party, and I barely noticed I had left until I was home in bed), how much inspiration do you need before you actually take it all in and settle down to do some work? Good point, but not an ultimatum. No, I see the future becoming organic, ultimatum free, with no dead-ends or decrees. Yay for me, I’m an optimist again.

Epilogue: sometime in January, 2001
HOOP-dee-doodle-now!
Lynnie and Will each bought a hoop from the Hoolagans–Lynnie had gotten stuck in the machinery of the hoop for a couple of hours herself while the sun rose. The hoop appealed to me, but aside from a couple of half-hearted attempts, I didn’t enter the hoop until last weekend, the day after our little hearth camp family met for dinner at Natalie’s house because we couldn’t stand to part yet. That Saturday, Jan. 6, under a pale waxing moon in the ice blue afternoon sky, the hoop let me into its confidence. It did so for about five hours straight, during which I listened to a few new CD’s I’d bought, and found a few of my old ones that made good hooping music.

The hoop is good. The hoop is my friend. The hoop understands, and still it spins. I go outside for a couple of hours every day in front of Lynnie’s apartment building and hoop my head off, and when it lands back on my body it seems to be better arranged. I’ve already created a makeshift CD and water holder system with goods from the Army Surplus store on Hollywood Boulevard, but Lynnie and I are thinking along the lines of something a little more chic–how about a little cropped vest with CD holder on the front, along with a side zip and pockets for cell phone, wallets and keys, and a refillable water pack on the back, equipped with a little straw that could hook onto your headphones, allowing the fanatic hooper to sip water throughout his or her ecstatic possession by his or her hoop of choice?

His, her...wouldn’t it be nice if there were only one gender? Sheesh, how much simpler language would be. Language is responsible for the slow, ineluctable foment of many wars, I’m sure of it. I think if one were to get every person in the world to hoop at the same time while listening to the same music, peace would reign forever and ever. Not that I’m that big a megalomaniac. Just a maniac, plain and simple, and I continue to spin as I am bid.

Postscript, 12/31/05

Another new year is upon us. Welcome. The Naked Animal cannot believe how fast time seems to be passing. The whole experience I just finished blogging seems like it took place just yesterday, and yet, it also seems like a lifetime ago. Isn’t that the paradox of time in a nutshell? I still have the hoop (as you can see in the pictures I’ve posted)–it’s been well-battered by many such gatherings and copious home use over the intervening years. During my recent illness with cancer and attendant chemotherapeutic ordeal, I hooped almost every day. I had non-Hodgkins lymphoma, so I trampolined, did yoga and hooped to get the lymph system circulating again. I’ve never been able to do anything remotely fancy with it. I just stand there and let it go. Lately, it has folded itself into my sporadic meditation practice. I’ll hoop for five or six minutes in each direction with my eyes closed (I almost wrote eyes “clothed”) while practicing a combination of deep breathing and visualization exercises. On the physical plane, it’s also great for your abs. Yes, the hoop is good. I may not still believe that it can save the world, but it is a good thing. If you plan to hoop yourself, make sure you get a real sturdy adult-sized hoop made out of heavy black rubber piping rather than one of those flimsy little toy store affairs. Even if you’re a little kid (aren’t we all?)....and a Hoopy New Year to all!

Categories: backstory, family, friends, holidays, psychedelic, music, trends, travel

Good ol' fashioned family holiday - Part VI

2005-12-30T11:06:00.000-08:00

12/30/00 - A peek through the interstices

Camille Flammarion

Lynnie and I proceeded from Ridgecrest to spend New Year’s Eve weekend at a gathering (with a group called Integral, to which Jon had recently introduced me) in Red Canyon Wash in the far east quadrant of the southern Mojave Desert badlands. For those of you who don’t quite know what I mean by “gathering,” you can call it a rave, but with the caveat that every rave has its own unique personality, like every person who attends. The gatherings I’ve been going to lately have been small and intimate, mostly centered around psytrance music, more casual and adult than the raves you hear about in the news and such, with the implicit goal being to create a collective alternate universe during the time we have together. Another useful way to think about it in “mainstream” terms is as a miniature Burning Man without the effigy. To maintain a certain amount of privacy, these gatherings are always held in places that are out of the way and often difficult to get to. This was no exception.

We blasted Heart’s Greatest Hits on the way down to the I-10 and out to Indio. “Even it up, even it up, even it out, baby!,” we screamed along; “Ah-oooh-yeah-ah...BARRACUDA!!” At dusk we bought a styrofoam ice chest, packed it with the perishable part of a hundred-thirty dollars worth of low-prep groceries, and stuffed everything into the remaining space in the back of my teensy car. It was already filled with our luggage, camping supplies, and booty from the Goodwill in Ridgecrest, which we had raided before beginning on our way. There we had greatly enlarged our party gear trousseau with a grey corduroy blazer, a teal prom dress, a sparkly Indian tunic, a magenta and green Vera scarf, a fuzzy red Maude vest and three feather-disk wig-caps a la Liz Taylor 1970 or so, none eventually worn–but it’s always nice to have options. We’d also bought a little folding chair and a needlepoint sampler, still in its circular workframe, reading “Orange Marmalade,” with a juicy Seville in a rustic floral halo.

About ten miles off the freeway, we met up with a U-Haul and a motorhome looking for the same party on the confusing circuitry of roads, and, at a crossroads, we held a small debate about which way to go. We decided to turn right. After a mile or so, it became evident that the road we were on was actually more of a motocross track. The U-Haul and the motorhome got stuck there, but my faithful little Doris Daewoo made it out across the moon-like terrain, and we reported the lost souls to the gathering organizers when we finally arrived in the right place: a gently winding canyon about a mile or so in length, with sheer, brittle walls of a hundred feet, about a hundred feet apart. Notice the name: Red Canyon WASH. Luckily there was no sign of rain in the extended forecast.

Jon was already there, along with his friend Will and the two women we’d met on Christmas day, the potato cookers, Natalie and Elena. They fed us beef stew, and we wandered around the grounds, checking out our temporary home. At first I thought the girls were stuck up, and they thought I was obnoxious (we discussed later, with much laughter about the often erroneous quality of first impressions), but we warmed to each other by the end of the night, and the six of us formed a nice little shared hearth camp. We also had private sleeping domains far flung from one another. Natalie and Elena had settled in pristine silence way back in a tributary canyon, where the non-stop whump-thump of psy-trance couldn’t reach them. Jon and Will were at the end of the canyon in one of the few campsites where, not only were you close to the sound, but the speakers were pointed right at you. That was a little too intense for me, so Lynnie and I set up down the road. We christened our camp by hanging the “Orange Marmalade” needlepoint on our tent just as the dusky night went pitch dark. Settling down to sleep, I soon realized that our peaceful little suburb was far more hopping than I had imagined it would be, full of bubbly chatter and private late-night boombox grooves.

I decided around five A.M. on New Year’s Eve morning that I was, in fact, not going to sleep before dawn, and probably would not sleep the whole weekend. After a few dramatic moments of utter distress over the prospect of such sleeplessness, during which I wrung my hands and pulled at my hair like an actress in a bad horror movie, I bundled up and walked to the dead end of the wash, where a grove of boulders connected to the riverbed above through a damp grotto fashioned by their interstices. I sat on the highest rock and watched the sky turn pink over the faraway mountains, doing my best to fade away and radiate.

Categories: backstory, family, friends, holidays, travel, psychedelic, music

Good ol' fashioned family holiday - Part V

2005-12-29T11:36:00.000-08:00

Death Valley Suite, finale
Movement 4: 12/29/00 - Moderato con brio a la notte

Night Photography by Jerry Day

Lynnie and I ate our first truly hearty breakfast of the trip the morning we checked out of the Phoenix. At the Exchange Club, Travis had been replaced by a bony old okie guy with nearly the same hyper-friendly and efficient affect as our red-headed boylet. I had an Ortega and Swiss omelette that made me belch like mad all day long. We said goodbye to Beatty with long, thoughtful browses through the antique shop and the general store, then passed the thousand-mile point on my trip odometer as we headed toward the Wildrose Charchoal Kilns at the south end of the park. They were on the way to our top secret New Year's eve destination, so even though we'd almost overdosed on sightseeing, we thought we'd give 'em an ol' look-see.

The kilns were up another of those “gravel” roads. Instead of bumping along in my little hatchback with its wimpy tires, we parked at the mouth and hiked up: three and-a-half miles, straight uphill. “High profile” vehicles whizzed by at seemingly regularized intervals, dusting us with layer upon layer of desert soot. The kilns themselves were immense stone hives that were used to turn lumber into coal for a nearby mine a hundred years ago. They now serve as tourist attractions and intense echo chambers. The walk back was a breeze, of course, relaxing enough so that we could forget about the chore of going up the hill and simply pat ourselves on the back for getting so much good exercise. Yay for us, we have firm buns!

At sunset, we stopped at Panamint Springs, Death Valley’s third and most remote resort, thirty-five miles from the nearest gas, as we found out when a group of French tourists arrived in their rented Hyundai, its fuel gauge already on empty. Just before making our final pit stops in anticipation of hitting the road for a couple more hours, a huge family group of Indians arrived, about twenty of whom were women in colorful saris, and they all got in line to use the one bathroom out ‘round the back of the diner. My sister followed behind and almost hopelessly waited her turn. I, on the other hand, scrambled up a miniature mesa behind the motel and peed against a willow tree. Ah, the delights of vertical urination.

On the two-lane road through Trona to Ridgecrest, people kept flashing their brights at me even though I had my low-beams on. That was truly annoying, and another theme running through my life. I don’t care what level you think you’re existing on, but you’re too loud, too wild, too bright for the rest of us. Just knock it off, would you!? I hate it when, even reigned-in, I prove too unruly for general consumption, but of course I secretly relish it, too. Then again, we are just talking about headlights here, aren’t we?

Ridgecrest provided us with our first ethnic food in a few days–some soggy chile rellenos and gray refried beans, along with margaritas that tasted like pineapple candy. We stayed at the Budget Inn, where our friendly East Indian proprietor took our thirty-eight bucks and provided us with the “special” room because we were a “special” couple: two queen-sized beds in a large kitchenette suite that was decorated in true Indian “the in-laws-are-coming” finery, with color-coordinated scalloping on the pearlescent wallpaper, matching the paisleyed bedspreads, matching the handpainted tiles in the bathroom and the kitchen area. Oh, and LOTS of sparkles in the acoustic ceiling. I was sure that this was where mother-in-law-sahib stayed when she visited from San Diego, or New Delhi, or Ft. Lauderdale.

When I went out on the balcony to have a cigarette, I watched our friendly, bobbing-headed proprietor follow his chattering wife around, going in and out of rooms and checking license plates on the cars in their lot. The place was spotless and well-maintained, and I was sure that she was the cause of this. Though they were speaking whatever Hindi or Bengali dialect they spoke, I could hear him going, “Yes, Dear. No, Dear. All Right, Dear. Whatever you say, dear,” just as plain as if they’d been speaking English. But for all the careful attention this couple obviously lavished on their roadside moneymaker, they still could not avoid the curse of the lumpy pillows. Oh, did I forget to tell you that all of our pillows were lumpy on this trip? By this point, I had decided it was something about the desert air that rendered polyfill rocky. Usually, something like that would bother me, but the desert had lulled me into its vast, unworried rhymes and rhythms. By the time I fell asleep, I was feeling as smooth as a well-tumbled stone.

Categories: backstory, family, holidays, travel

Good ol' fashioned family holiday - Part IV

2005-12-28T10:42:00.000-08:00

The Death Valley Suite, continued
Movement 3 - 12/28/00: Allegro non troppo, con molti scherzini

photo by A. Granger

Lynnie and I decided to wake up early and have a full day of valley-combing. I was dressed and out by seven to check out the continental breakfast in the lobby. On offer were glazed or jelly donuts and coffee that tasted like it was made from twice-used grounds from a never-cleaned machine. What did I expect? Betty, the white-haired proprietress, in an influenza-induced stupor, coughed up loogies dramatically and swallowed them back down while I paid for another day. I spent a long time calibrating dried milk and sugar levels for maximum coffee drinkability. A brain-dead couple around my age were manning the continental breakfast table, but Betty kept having to tell them what to do.

“You get them donuts?” she said. “We out a’jelly already? You got that decaf goin’?” The woman manning the coffee makers started making more coffee, and Betty said, “don’t use that one over there” (indicating the coffee maker in the corner) “because the water leaks on that one and you’ll have a big nasty wet mess on your hands.” Right after she said that, the coffee helper woman went directly to that coffee maker and started pouring water in. Her husband (I presume), who was still sitting in an easy chair beside a plastic ficus and most decidedly NOT getting the new batch of donuts from the shop across the street as had been suggested by Betty, said, “Hey, are you sure it’s all right to use that one?” And the coffee woman went, “Yeah. Just shut up and sit there.” He shrugged, and cracked a dopy grin at me as I exited with my heavily doctored java.

Our first stop in the park, after listening to Rickie Lee Jones warble while we rolled across the hilly highway for an hour, was Ubehebe Crater, a large geological anomaly surrounded by a bevy of smaller anomalies, like a pimple and its attendant blackheads. We ran straight down into the gaping hole left by the volcano's last eruption (millenia ago, darling!), where the temperature dropped about twenty degrees. We then decided that one of the sheer walls on the opposite side of the crater looked like it was plenty scalable, and that we were going to climb it. In fact, there seemed to be a little staircase leading all the way up one of the slim gullies.

“Seemed” would be the operative word here. It was doable, but pretty scary, and about a third of the way up, it became less plausible to go back down than it was to continue climbing. We kept grabbing onto rocks that would come detached from the wall itself, and crumble apart down the cliff. There were one or two places where Lynnie and I had to stop and figure out how to keep going on our own terms, each taking a different route, but we finally scrambled our way to the top, and took a picture of the wall after walking around the crater to the other side again. We were sure it had been, oh two, maybe three thousand feet, but we later found out the wall was about 800 feet tall. Still, that’s about eighty storeys, and that’s pretty good for two city kids in trendy sunglasses and walking shoes.

From Ubehebe, we headed to Scotty’s Castle, where I learned that we were on one of the few discernible circuits in the Valley: Ubehebe, Scotty’s Castle, the Dunes. This was our, and obviously a host of other small groups’, plan for the day, so familiar faces kept popping up here and there, and it started to feel at times like we were all being slowly shepherded into someone else’s conceptual art piece.

I like the story behind Scotty’s Castle, which was definitely “Death Valley Scotty’s” own conceptual art piece. He was a known con artist who was a stunt rider in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, and basically squatted on public land in Death Valley while trying to con bankers and such back east to back a non-existent gold mine, for which he had created an entire narrative and cosmology. He finally landed on this guy Johnson, a wealthy insurance broker in Chicago, who liked him, believed him, and sunk a whole lot of money into his “mine.” Scotty figured Johnson would never come out to Death Valley, but he did the very same year. He was immediately aware that Scotty had swindled him, but he fell in love with the place, and felt he had struck a good bargain anyway. He also liked Scotty for some reason, as did his wife Bessie, a tiny little thing of good old California breeding, who had graduated in the first graduating class of Stanford and become an erudite Methodist preacher. Scary. There’s a picture of her sitting on a rock with a parasol along the spring at Scotty’s Castle, age 50 or so, in the 1920s, with a little chiffon ribbon around her salt-and-pepper bob and a sly, coquettish smile on her plump, tiny face....

But back to her husband. So here’s this clean-cut old-school robber baron type who just falls in love with Death Valley and sees in it the promise of solitude (even back in the 'teens of the last century, people were loathing the hustle and bustle of the city–how things have changed, right?). In order that his wife will join him, he’s gotta build a house, and he decides to build this Spanish gothic monstrosity with all the modern amenities for millions of dollars, and let Scotty say it’s his, built on the profits from his gold mine, so that Scotty can deflect all the public interest and be left in peace. The Castle was never actually finished because the Johnsons lost all their money in the crash of ‘29, but this weird symbiosis between Scotty and Johnson went on for something like thirty years, while Bessie tended to guests and preached three-hour long sermons to the workers of the castle’s land and grounds. Wicked weirdness in the west.

The tours of Scotty’s Castle are conducted by true history geeks who dress up and pretend it’s 1939, the year Bessie Johnson started giving her own tours of Scotty’s Castle to defray upkeep costs. Just imagine the comments. I know you can. I gleefully joined in, coming up with the answers to our guide's little interactive questions when the rest of the crowd was too dull, and nodding a lot and chuckling politely at his tongue-in-cheek-ad-extremis explanations. The place is a trip, full of odd Spanish and Flemish antiques and custom made furniture, plus a zoo of wild artisanal tiles, dishes and textiles, all in their original states, just as they were lived with. It’s all very Thurston and Lovie Howell in the desert instead of on Gilligan’s Island, circa 1920s instead of 1960s. I guess Scotty would be Gilligan. I mean, it wasn’t actually Gilligan’s island, right? My favorite feature at Scotty’s was the opposing fireplace and fountain in the living room, creating fire running up the west wall and water running down the east wall. Totally western Zen.

Of course, nothing can compete with the Zen of dunes. From a distance, say about twenty miles away, the Death Valley Dunes lie on a southern slope like a sprinkling of sugar, like someone sifted out a few artful handfuls across the alluvial fan. Closer up they are monuments to organic geometry: Intersecting, three-dimensional sine waves curving on multiple axes, changing with the wind and the weather but remaining in sync, always occupying the same amount of space, if not the same exact space, sharing a stranded supply of velvety, post-Pleistocene sand. We trod across them for almost an hour before reaching the highest one, whose back we scaled as if it were a sleeping brontosaurus. A German family was at the apex of this great dune, talking very loudly, until one by one the children of the family unit slid down the face, and the parents marched in tandem back down along the ridge. Lynnie and I stopped at a mid-back hump, and watched a pair of air force SSTs spiral around each other in the sky, trailing long, thunderous moans that ripped through the purpling furl of the heavens.

Back in Beatty, we hit our third casino, the Exchange Club, smack in the middle of town, across from a never-opened coffee and candy place that had constantly taunted us with the promise of espresso during our stay and a bar whose neon signs read: “Cock” and “Beer.” Hmmm. Lynnie decided to break her burger and dinner salad routine, so we both ordered the special–All You Can Eat Spaghetti–from the plodding waitress...that is, we did so after she took almost half an hour getting us a glass of water, then took the orders of a couple who had come in after us. After a few minutes of consultation with various clueless kitchen personnel, the waitress advised us that they were out of the special for the night. Guess what the people who came in after us had ordered. That’s right: spaghetti. I had a BLT and a cup of chili, and, of course, another glass of that fine Burgundy they serve out in them parts. Despite the spaghetti fiasco, or perhaps because of it, we were rewarded with Travis.

Travis was about thirteen, with feathered red hair, round glasses and a hauntingly professional manner, and he hostessed that coffee shop to within an inch of its saltines. He was so heartbreakingly intelligent and efficient and friendly that everyone in the whole restaurant was following him around with their eyes, half-amused, half-tragic smiles on their faces–even the rednecks who didn’t quite understand where that smile was coming from. I wonder if Travis will make it out of Beatty, and where he will end up, finally, and what all the bovine waitresses of Beatty will think of it.

Categories: backstory, family, holidays, travel

Good ol' fashioned family holiday - Part III

2005-12-27T09:30:00.000-08:00

The Death Valley Suite, continued
Movement 2 - 12/27/00: Largo, stacatto e bianco

Badwater by B. Klimovski

It feels almost sinful waking up late in the desert, where people rise with the sun and the free “continental” breakfast in the motel lobby is cleared up by nine. We microwaved bland, mealy breakfast burritos at the Union 76 Mini Mart (Beatty’s jumpin’est joint, 24/7), and were on the road by noon.

Our first stop was Furnace Creek Ranch, where we stayed when we were little; the first people we saw there were a little boy of about eight and a little girl of about six playing together in the date palms. The place was hopping with tourists from all over the world. Just standing on the veranda outside the steakhouse I heard Italian, Chinese, French, Japanese, Hebrew and Spanish. I decided the Valley must be in the midst of a very serious international P.R. kick. After buying a twelve-dollar bottle of bad Coppertone for my face, we went to check out the Furnace Creek Inn, a madcap, pink 1920s oasis a little further down the road, with a terraced garden that must use up millions of gallons of water a week in its quest for eternal greenness in the midst of the dust. The place had been redone recently, a little too Hilton-esque for our taste, and the grotto-like underground restaurant with a natural spring and waterfalls running through it had been replaced by a formal dining room on the second floor that looked like a swanky Sizzler, so that was another comestible establishment crossed off our list. It would be back to Beatty for dinner again for the Campbell kids.

But first, a visit to the lowest point in the western hemisphere: Badwater, an immense salt flat in the basin of the valley, 282 feet below sea level. This is one of Death Valley’s major attractions, so the little parking lot off the road by the outhouses was packed with cars, and the near end of the flat was teeming with people for about half a mile out. But we had already decided to hike all the way across the flats (five miles each way), and we left the crowds behind after fifteen minutes. Half an hour later, the people looked like ants, and soon they disappeared altogether. Time passed secretly as we crunched across the salt, which had cracked into a series of fragmenting discs, curled up at the edges, sometimes inhabited by hordes of tiny stalagmites. It looked like a mega-magnified image of dry skin under a microscope. Sometimes, corners of discs would break and crumble, but it was impossible to leave footprints on the salt. There was no telling how many people might have navigated the discs before us. For all we might have known, we were the first.

Suddenly, something caught our eye way off to the south. Lynnie thought it looked like a sculpture of a horse. As we approached, it became clear that it was no such thing. Instead, it was a rudimentary scientific instrument made out of PVC piping, wire and metal boxes, designed by a team at the U.S. Geological Survey in order to measure the rate of water evaporation in different parts of Death Valley. Lynnie took its picture, and it soon disappeared behind us as we continued across the flats, swallowed up by the vast white glitter of the salt.

On the other side, after two more hours of crunching discs, we came upon something that looked like a placid lake from afar, but turned out to be another spread of salt, this one flat and curved at the edges, uncracked and pristine. We lay upon it and listened to the most intense silence I have ever experienced, disappearing into the salt. When one of us finally moved, it sounded like an avalanche, and the outside world jumped back into its cloak of reality before I could slip through a rip in the fabric. The walk back, like all walks back, was shorter for some reason. Our car was one of the last left in the parking crescent, and we drove back through the Artists’ Pallette (near the Devil’s Golf Course) at sunset while a tiny sliver of moon appeared in the sky like the Cheshire Cat’s grin.

We spent our cocktail hour in the bar at the Furnace Creek Ranch. More hardrock from the jukebox courtesy of Lynnie, including “Fat-Bottomed Girls” by Queen and “Tube Steak Boogie” by ZZ Top, in which the vocal track had been tuned down so that easily-offended travelers couldn’t decipher the lyrics.

Stoney was our cordial and capable bar manager. We stood by while he had a long discussion with two blonde dykes about how white wine was not supposed to be served at refrigerator temperature, which was usually a frosty mid-40s (Fahrenheit), but at a cool, not icy, 56 degrees, at which their “wine cellar” (a waist-high fridge with a glass door) was faithfully set. Stoney’s wine offerings went far beyond the usual burgundy, chablis and rose (wine-in-a-box) to include several California cabernets, merlots, chardonnays and sauvignon blancs, and anyone could tell that Stoney was proud of his expert ways with the nectar of the grape. The lesbians conceded huffily and retreated to their rooms with their 56-degree chardonnay, which was strictly against house rules. Stoney rolled his eyes and shook his head as they left. There was this old guy who looked like George W. with a bouffant staring at me a little too intensely from across the bar the whole time, with that expert mixture of curiosity and fear that people like the George W. clones of America have developed in order to scrutinize people like me (i.e. “weird,” according to them) in public. Outside, a tiny Chinese couple in a huge rented Land Rover smoked cigarettes and looked at pictures of their day on their digital camera while an Italian family stood on the stoop between the steakhouse and the coffee shop arguing about which one to patronize that evening.

As for us, we went back to the Phoenix, watched a dorky reality show on the Learning Channel about friends setting up (soon to be ex-)friends on blind dates, bundled ourselves up and walked to the Stagecoach, Beatty’s premiere casino, whose searchlight could be seen from a hundred miles away, a white shadow swaying on the dark desert sky. Our way was lit by the stars and three or four streetlights, each of which was decorated with a heartbreaking little Christmas doodad, my favorite being a single red candle meekly glowing in a ring of holly.

The holiday quickly evaporated in the every-day’s-a-holiday monotony of the casino. Something unmistakably groovy was going on in the far corner: A bearded man in a black suit and hat sat on a low, dimly-lit stage at the far side of a large, empty dance floor, playing the theme to the Pink Panther on two slide guitars splayed before him like a harpsichord, with lots of puckish slips and glitzy slides. The walls were punctuated with pink-lit columns filled with water, tiny bubbles constantly rising upwards, wiggling to the wa-wa of the music. We dissolved into those tiny bubbles for a few minutes, then went to Rosa’s Diner for dinner, where the usual cows were tending the pasture, and my “petite filet migon” was a not-very-good New York strip folded up to look thick and wrapped with bacon to hide the seams.

I was rewarded however, with eighty dollars off a five-dollar investment on the Triple-Seven slot machine. And then the universe gifted me the spectacle of Dora, the floor manager, gruffly paying off a jackpot on a Wild Cherry slot, taking a Polaroid of the winning spin for the bulletin board with a cigarette hanging out of her eternally frowning mouth. Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

Categories: backstory, holidays, travel

Good ol' fashioned family holiday - Part II

2005-12-26T09:03:00.000-08:00

Post-Christmas:
The Death Valley Suite
Movement 1: 12/26/00 - Andante non specifico

"The Last Supper" by C.A. Szukalski, photo by A. Granger

twas the day after christmas
and all along the road
not a creature was stirring
not even a toad

the desert was intensely beige
the panorama vast
the highway, lined with desert sage,
made me drive too fast...

...the desert is a sleeping leviathan, the Loch Ness monster encrusted in sand. Sometimes it becomes so quiet that you can hear its shallow breathing...

We made our way north up I-127, which slices through eastern California, breaks free into Nevada, then dips back into California somewhere just north of Death Valley, our destination. The drive, as with all drives in the desert, was monotonous and trance-inducing. Somewhere in the upper right quadrant of my brain, a cryptic twist of circuitry was making sense of the ragged tattoo my tires were rolling out on the erratically rutted road.

Lynnie said Eric had stayed at the Phoenix Inn in Beatty, Nevada, just northeast of Death Valley, and it goes without saying that I was leery of the prospect due to Eric’s previous praise of the sulfurous Royal Hawaiian in Baker. But the Phoenix turned out to be an okay joint: basically a plot of well-maintained double-wides, with three moderately spacious rooms on either side of each. Beatty is an almost transparent tiny desert town, full of people adept at hiding in plain sight. It’s the kind of place with a bulletin board at the general store with notices reading, “Excellent double-wide with redecorated wet bar on 1.5 acres: $12,500.” Double-wides are the thing in Beatty. The really poor people live in the ramshackle 19th century houses that line the few streets, relics of Beatty’s shortlived heyday as a silver mining town in the 1880s. My favorite dwellings, though, were a heady grouping of really old mobile homes just west of our motel, squatting biomorphically amongst 50-year-old weeds, adventure pods grounded for good on an alien planet, their hopeful floral curtains faded and frayed, TV antennas growing out of them at odd, jointed angles like eyes on long-forgotten potatoes.

Before checking in at the Phoenix, we went a little further on to Rhyolite, a ghost town/outdoor art gallery a few minutes south of Beatty, where, in the 1980s, a visiting European artist created a series of white fiberglass molds of flowing robes around non-existent bodies that float like ghosts above the rubble of the slowly decaying townsite. I almost got stuck in one, as the model the artist used for these robes was deceivingly much smaller than I. Lynnie took a picture of me in my confined state. When I was little, my mother took a picture of me when I got stuck in the pots-and-pans cupboard. Trapped Rob–a photographic theme in my life.

Back in town, we had lunch at the Burro Inn, one of Beatty’s three casinos, and its most down-home of the batch. Country music blared over the ring-a-dinging of slot machines, and obese strip miners in Harley shirts downed their post-shift burgers and six packs while a stone-carved retired couple stared at us apprehensively over their grilled cheese sandwiches. I had a glass of “burgandy” (two dollars) and a spicy chicken sandwich, while Lynnie began her desert marathon of hamburgers and dinner salads with “blue cheese” dressing, which more often than not a little too closely resembled the house standard, ranch. Waitresses in Beatty, we found, were uniformly bovine. They’d stand around chewing their cuds, and if you happened to be lucky enough to catch one of them scanning the room from the corner of her eye, she’d give you that scared, but aggressive, cow stare, then pretend she didn’t see you and resume rumination. It’s all part of the plodding haphazardness to which desert life is prone, especially Nevada desert life, which is far more abstract than its California counterpart.

The office guy at the Phoenix had told us about this spectacular canyon that we had to see at sunset, which is when we found out that you really need a four-wheel drive (a “high-profile vehicle” in local parlance) if you want to do Death Valley right. We went about a mile on a “gravel” road, according to the map, whose large jagged rocks could have been considered gravel, I guess, by some race of beings about fifty times our size. After much bone-rattling we eventually turned around and enjoyed the sunset from the freeway, whose gentle dips and curves we got to know like our own nervous systems (which is to say sporadically, in spurts of recognition), over the next few days. We explored Stovepipe Wells, one of Death Valley’s three mini-resorts, and had a drink in the bar, where Lynnie played a selection of raunchy 70s hard-rock on the jukebox, but decided not to eat in the restaurant: Death Valley’s version of good food runs the suburban haute cuisine gamut from Chicken Cordon Bleu to Trout Amandine; my mind filled with unpleasant images of extra-large Lean Cuisine packages in industrial-sized microwaves.

To escape the upscale redneck tone of the Wells, we left the park and went way low down, to dinner at the Sourdough Saloon, Beatty’s answer to Cheers, where everbody knows your name--because they're all the same: The bartender was a butch number named Deb, the resident cute n’ giggly chick went by Debbie, and the dark-haired siren with the leathery tan and slim cigarettes at the end of the bar preferred Deborah. Deb made killer Bloody Mary's with tons of horseradish, and we sipped them between bites of a large sausage and jalapeno pizza, of which I ate the lion’s share. Conversation at the bar was halting and monosyllabic, but somehow full of camaraderie, and we became momentary stars when Debbie asked us where we were from, sending the whole room into an inexplicably frenzied hoot and holler over the fact that we hailed from L.A. At least we left them laughing.

Thirty degrees was the temperature, I’d guess, as we walked back across a few vacant lots to the Phoenix. The sky was full of stars, but what did my eyes land on first in the midst of this great sparkle? Orion. Why do I always see Orion, no matter the season or time of night--or even part of the world? “Plastered to the sky with dislike” is what I used to say about him, meaning me. It wasn’t quite dislike, though, that night; no, something more like patient watchfulness.

Categories: art, family, holidays, travel, backstory

Good ol' fashioned family holiday - Part I

2005-12-25T11:20:00.000-08:00

In 2000, my sister and I went to Death Valley for the holidays, then hooked up with friends for a New Year's eve gathering even further out in the boondocks. Over the next few days I'll blog my journal entries from the trip, 5 years ago to the day, starting with Christmas day:

1. Runners

On Christmas day, My sister Lynnie and I decided to go to my friend Jon’s house because he couldn't go on our planned pre-new year's Death Valley jaunt. We ended up at his hideaway in a Studio City canyon around two. There was a full Christmas dinner, complete with gourmet-level turkey, the recipe for which Jon told me he got from a trick after fucking his brains out. Always multi-tasking, that Jon.

We watched Logan's Run as our alternative to It's a Wonderful Life. Farrah Fawcett is sooo bad in that, and the whole thing gets cheesier and cheesier and triter and triter every time I see it, yet so heartfelt; so in a way I do get the same sensation that most people do from watching IAWL. The concept of Carousel still tickles my mind, though. Where do they go when they explode, back into the energy supply somehow? I want to have Michael York's body in Logan's Run as my next physical look.

Just before we left, as it was getting dark, Natalie and Elena arrived and cooked potatoes. Elena sat in a corner by herself, but I couldn't tell if she was shy, snobby or high. Natalie is a bona-fide mad-woman of the highest caliber. More on them later.

We departed around six. It was pitch dark by then, and we stopped for coffee at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf on Laurel Canyon before leaving town. It was packed with loners and stray pairs, defectors from family drama, like us. My whole molecular structure changed as soon as we got to that first gap between civilizations on the I-10. I like space, I decided, and I like it empty.

2. Bun Boy

After a couple of hours, we decided to stop in Baker for the night instead of going on to Death Valley and arriving at 11 or something like that. As we discussed this, we passed a billboard with a piggy little cook-boy with a chef's hat humping a big phallic thing. It was hard to tell that this thing was supposed to be the World's Tallest Thermometer–134 feet tall to commemorate the hottest recorded temperature in the western hemisphere: 134 degrees in August, 1914. Why this commemoration took place was not clear, but the thermometer was erected by the Bun Boy Motel, Restaurant, General Store, two gas stations and gift shop just a few years ago. Basically, Bun Boy is about half of Baker, and the thermometer’s their big power symbol. Pretty primal, huh?

Back to the Bun Boy himself, the one on the billboard, the mascot of this captain of Baker industry: Here was this elfin cook climbing up the thermometer with the most lascivious, tongue-out look on his face. Lynnie and I laughed about it for several minutes straight, and this began a long chain of laughing fits and silent time that ran throughout our trip.

3. Sulphur Burns

When we got to Baker, we cruised the strip and settled on the Royal Hawaiian, on the western outskirts, less flashy than the den of the Bun Boy. Lynnie said her boss, Eric, had stayed there and thought it was cool. Eric is a magnet for all things cool.

The old lady behind the counter was straight out of the Ozarks, and I couldn't understand but every other word:

"...folks...got...double...the...floor...forty-five...got...on...second...for fifty..."

"We'll take the cheaper one," we said. The woman was impressed that I knew my license plate by heart, and by this time I was able to decipher her:

"Yep, that's a man atter ma own heart. I gone out and bought a car and the first thing I did was memorize me that license plate number because so many-a those dang new cars look exactly a-like, and you can't even find it in the parking lot."

"Mm-hmm," I said.

As we walked out of the office, there was an overwhelming stench of sulphur in the air–so strong that it made our eyes water and noses burn. It smelled like about a million rotten eggs eaten by some abominable desert sandman and farted out of his nasty ass. I mean, this was bad! And so was our room, which was not in the old 50s part of the Royal Hawaiian, in the stucco bungalows that arch off the peak-roofed, palm tree-framed gate. No, ours was in the back, in a newish, crumbling dingbat structure that we decided could only be a crack house. The room was severely repulsive, from its linoleum bedroom floor to its defunct television to its stained and cramped shower. We considered it for a while. Lynnie was ready to leave immediately. The thing that finally convinced me was the fact that my box spring was completely torn and eaten up inside, nearly hollow. I imagined rats. We exited back into the sulphur and once again into the office we went.

"Some'n wrong?"
"Can we, uh, not stay here and get our money back?" said Lynnie.
"Why, what happened?"
"Nothing happened. We just don't, uh, want to stay here."
"Awright. Ya didn't do nothin' to the room now, didja?"
"No, of course not," I chimed in.
"Well some people would outta spite. There's people like that."

We got our money back, and I thought it was funny that she was probably one a’those kind of people herself.

Bun Boy beckoned. We paid eighty bucks for a room that was just a tiny step above Motel 6. Baker's a total racket. In the morning, we ate at the Bun Boy restaurant, where we paid seven bucks for eggs and bacon. I think Bun Boy needs a little more competition in dear old Baker. The gift shop had odd stuff. Example: a black porcelain-faced baby-doll in a body-hugging white fur jumpsuit complete with hood. Actually, it was more like a white fur body sock. There was a line for the women's bathroom, and you would have thought it was about 1965 judging from the
waiting ladies' hair-dos.

We bought some chilied mangoes at a funky mini-mart across the street, and got Turkish coffee at the Mad Greek Cafe, where you can get anything from a stewed lamshank with tatziki to a trio of fried taquitos. There's a picture of the guy who opened the place in there with Dean Martin; or is it Frank Sinatra? By the way, the sulphur smell (?) was only strong around the Royal Hawaiian, but it was always in the air. Baker is such a hell hole. Funny where Greeks end up. Greeks, and Jews, wandering, like me.

Categories: family, friends, holidays, travel, backstory

Nuclear Family Xmas Shout-Out

2005-12-24T12:03:00.000-08:00

On Christmas Eve, I am thinking about my dear little nuclear family, long exploded and re-coalesced in an alternative form.
We were happy together, or attempted to be, for the most part. My mother tried very hard to make us happy, and we smiled when she told us to.

Even my dad and I were happy together, it seemed, until we actually had to face one another.

My sister and I, being each other's map, stars, compass and shoreline, were always happy together, especially left alone.

Christmas Eve, when I was a kid, was formally observed at my paternal grandparents' house, where everything was cool and coordinated in icy colors. The mood was icy, too, and I was never comfortable there. Neither were my parents, and their own problems always seemed to intensify by the end of the evening.

On Christmas day, however, we got to wear our comfy clothes and go to the kozy Kokinos household, where my maternal grandparents and Greek great aunts would joke and play and make the day fun for everyone. Family drama took a much-needed break on Christmas day at Grandma and Grandpa K's house.

Here's a picture of me and my sis from one of the last nuclear-family Christmases we attended. I have no idea exactly what year it is here (and I would love to recall what was in those gifts we're opening), but it's obviously the 80s!

This Christmas Eve, my sister's on her way to the desert, my mom's on her way to the ocean, and I'm hanging out with my cat and my other family, Philip. My dad is probably with his dad. We exchange cards via mail. My sister and I still spend Christmas together all the time, though. We used to celebrate the holidays in Vegas every year for the sheer otherness of it:

Tomorrow, I'll start a serialized blogging of a holiday journal I made five years ago, describing a Christmas and New Year's (2000-1) my sister and I spent in Death Valley, then at a gathering in the deep boonies of Eastern California. It's nice to be out in the middle of nowhere at the verge of the new year, nostalgically observing the shift in the calendar against the backdrop of timeless infinity.

And it's nice to be cozy and warm on Christmas.
Happy Holidays from the soft spot in the center of a very hard nut.

Categories: family, holidays

What's the Buzz?

2005-12-23T16:20:00.000-08:00

Every time I look at you I can't understand
How you let the things you did get so out of hand
-Judas to Jesus, a la Tim Rice

When I was little and started wondering why we didn't go to church, wondering what religion was and all that, my mom, bless her soul, took me to see Jesus Christ Superstar (the timing happened to be perfect, I was six or seven, and none of us knew we were actually Jewish yet--more on that later...). The movie left a huge impression on me, mostly because of the music and dancing--I had to have the double album immediately, and played it relentlessly. I can still sing most of the rock opera's entire libretto by heart, and often do. So it's no surprise that I was delighted when I happened to catch it on the Sundance Channel yesterday. I thought I would check in with my favorite tunes and have a little nostalgic sing-a-long, otherwise going about my business. But I was ineluctably drawn in by the amazing performances, especially by Carl Anderson as Judas (pictured), the truly rockin' score and, most of all, the woeful human truth and soundless depth with which Andrew Lloyd Webber, Tim Rice and Norman Jewison (as the film's director) infuse the ever-debated, often mangled, story. In fact, after decades of delving into all sorts of theological studies both mainstream and fringe (including further films on the subject), I find that Jesus Christ Superstar's telling of the tale, with its compelling evocations of the complicating machinations of ego, politics and mob consciousness, and its simultaneous focus on the idiosyncracies of human emotions, still holds up--perhaps the best of all. Thanks, Mom!

Sundance will continue to broadcast the film throughout the holiday season, so screw Frank Capra and his damned Wonderful Life, and get on the bus with JC and the gang for a journey to the nitty gritty of the Christmas spirit. The entire cast is on fire, the staging and sets are beyond-belief groovy, and because Norman Jewison had the clout and vision to shoot live in Israel, the landscape itself is integral to the experience--look for some astounding long shots and creative uses of natural stages. On top of all that, the words and music work in a volatile synergy--it's definitely the most well-crafted, most honest and most passionate piece that the now-hallowed duo of Rice and Webber ever created.

As for the rest of the holiday hoopla, as the soul-stirring Yvonne Elliman (playing Mary Magdalene, making me cry) sang: Try not to get worried, try not to turn on to problems that upset you. Don't you know everything's alright, yes, everything's fine....

Categories: holidays, film

Deeper drives the wedge

2005-12-23T09:35:00.000-08:00

link

yes, even more notes for an autobiographical strip search

In third grade, my best friend was a black girl named Bernetta. Every recess and lunchtime we monopolized the strip quad between the third and fourth grade classrooms with our improvised, technique-free gymnastic tumbling runs. What we did have going for us were speed and fearlessness. We even started doing handsprings and flips on the black top, just to get a rise out of someone. Sure enough, we caught the attention of the playground monitor, and were pulled aside on separate benches under the monitor’s watch for the rest of the period. Keep it on the grass, the monitor told us when the bell rang.

After school, I would sometimes go to her house to hang out. There were always plenty of people there. It was a large, plain white house with a numerous family, all with their own friends. Something good to snack on never failed to manifest, and everyone was laid back and friendly. The house was a little stuffy, but the windows were always open. I felt comfortable there.

I felt weird about having Bernetta over to my house; I wasn’t sure why, but it gave me a queasy feeling to think about it. Finally, though, I overcame my mysterious squeamishness and asked her over after school to practice our tumbling and watch TV. We took our time walking through the semi-gated community to our spacious ranch-style house, where we luxuriated in the air conditioner and ate graham crackers with peanut butter while watching old sitcoms on television.

I think my mother was napping, but at a certain point she got up, newly made up, in a colorful dress, and immediately asked Bernetta to stay for dinner. We were having pork chops, which were pan fried with Shake ‘n’ Bake; not one of my favorites, but Bernetta seemed pleased. We were out in the backyard practicing one-handed round-offs (I had to pick up the dog poop first) when my Dad came home. I could see him looking at us across the patio through the kitchen window, and talking to my mother.

Despite a nagging inkling of disaster that gave me goose pimples, I took Bernetta in through the sliding glass door to meet my dad. They said hello to each other, and my dad turned away to unpack his briefcase on the kitchen table and read some report. I looked at my mother, who was firmly turned towards the sink, rinsing lettuce, then Bernetta and I crept out the laundry room door. As we headed toward the lawn, we heard my dad through the open kitchen window whisper-yell, “I don’t care. I don’t want that little nigger in my house.” Yup, that’s exactly what he said, and we both heard it clearly. I suddenly understood my dark premonitions.

Bernetta and I could barely look at each other, but we stopped in our tracks, then took a left turn toward the rear gate. We started running when we hit the driveway, and didn’t stop until we had reached the other side of the neighborhood. We were still in shock and unable to exchange words on the walk to her house, but we laughed and pointed at things, and conversation started to flow again around her mother’s dinner table.

But we didn’t talk about it. Our eyes communicated with their liquid eloquence, but we knew we couldn’t handle putting it into words. I remember watching TV after dinner and telling her, out of the blue, that my dad thought I was a sissy. She said, “Hmmm. That's wrong," and I shrugged. Her mother asked if I wanted to stay the night, so I called my mom. She said no, after speaking to my father, whom I could clearly hear in the background, and arrived in her blue station wagon in what seemed two minutes to pick me up and take me home.

I was secretly stewing, but I let my confusion and indignation run acid through my arteries while I carefully choreographed my good-little-boy front. As long as I didn’t make any waves, the parental units seemed to behave on a more even keel. I hated being around them. I was terrified of both, though I couldn’t pinpoint why. They made me paranoid, nervous, uncomfortable. It was probably because my mother was an always perky repressed anger bomb that could detonate at any time for no reason, and my dad was a sometimes surly, sometimes overly enthusiastic alcoholic, but I only had incipient inklings of those notions at the time. In my childish wish-life of love and order, I formalized my parents’ barely contained havoc: I thought of myself as a scientist clandestinely examining the weird and wily ways of these all-too-humans, and I tried to ignore what these ways were doing to me. Instead, I imagined fantasy worlds.

I imagined that a spaceship would swoop into my backyard and, finally, after god knows how many lifetimes, pick me up from this out-of-control freak show of a culture. I wanted to escape my parents, yes, but I also felt at a very early age the cold shadow of the narcissistic patriarch looming over the planet, and I swore I wouldn’t let it get me. At heart I connected with Ferdinand the Bull, and I spent a lot of time under trees, all alone and daydreaming. But I was not inactive or unadventurous. I would go on treks around the local park by myself, bushwhacking through juniper clumps and climbing whatever tree looked most accessible. I had the usual scratched up shins and parade of bruises to show for it, of course, but I had experienced a series of three quite serious accidents when I was about five that were still fresh in my mind during grade school.

The first took place in our backyard, where we had a department store jungle gym with a red metal rod in the middle, hanging from chains. I loved to swing on it, fantasizing about becoming the man on the flying trapeze. One day I was getting cocky about my expertise, and as I jumped off for my Olga Korbut dismount, I let go too late. My chin smashed into an upper bar on the jungle gym as I jumped, and the force made my teeth rip clear through my tongue. Half of it was hanging by a string of twisted flesh when my mother found me. In my memory she is screaming and hyperventilating. It was a Sunday, but we were finally able to find a doctor who was willing to come down to his office and take care of me. I don’t know why they didn’t just take me to the emergency room. The hospital couldn’t have been that far away.... My father had to give me the local anesthesia shot because there was no nurse on duty. The doctor stitched my tongue back in place, and the thread later dissolved, leaving a slight ridge that I can still feel. I ate nothing but ice cream and apple sauce for weeks after the incident.

As soon as I was deemed fit for normal duty, I was back in action. I had a new bicycle–a red, white and blue number with a three-tone banana seat and shiny tassels on the handlebars. Christine from across the street had a brother named Russell who always wanted to “wrassle” with me, which was my idea of hell. “Wrestle,” I told him, “not ‘wrassle,’ and no, I don’t want to.” He was a year younger than us, and these days, he’d be immediately diagnosed with ADD. Back then, he was just “rambunctious.” I called him hyperactive, and got slapped by Christine for it. Russell was always coming up with hair-raising stunts for us to do, and I always went along, as long as it didn’t involve “wrassling." Once he got his own bike, it was all about jumping curbs, popping wheelies and racing in the middle of the street.

After exhausting our usual repertoire one day, we decided it would be fun to ride across the steep slope at the side of our house, from either end–a game of chicken with the added obstacle of an incline. It was tough keeping our balance at such a slant, but I mastered it after the first couple of times. Russell wanted to try it on my bike because he thought my bike was better. In fact, they were virtually identical, but Russell was the kind of kid who always wanted to use other kids’ things because he thought they were better than whatever he had. I used to notice that and wonder about it, but I couldn’t figure out what it meant. My mother told me to be nice to him, with an implied “or else.”

So there we were at opposite sides of the green strip, he on my bike and I on his. Christine chanted ready-set-go and we were off. As we passed each other, the world went wobbly. I don’t know exactly how it happened, but somehow we wound up in a tangle of legs and spokes. I felt a piercing pain in my left shin and yelled, seeing that the pedal of my own bike had jammed into my leg all the way to the bone. I yanked the bike off me, and saw an almost transparent white liquid lacing the currents of ruby blood. My mother came out, screamed, carried me to the couch, and wrapped a string of towels round and round my leg. A doctor came to the house, and I must have been given a sedative or pain killer because the rest was a blur. I remember crutches, and that the wound was too open for stitches. Even now, I often reach down and touch the scar, which is about an inch wide and shaped like Iceland.

And to complete this trilogy of kindergarten catastrophes: It is winter in Buena Park, unusually cold for southern California. Every morning the gutters are iced over solid. It is grey and cold and the trees are groaning skeletons, and no one is up and about yet. I practice my skating moves on the glassy ribbon at the curb, gliding along then turning, or jumping off the curb to land with my leg in a bent, baby spiral position. I’m going along pretty good, thinking, hey, I could be in the Olympics I bet, and suddenly my legs fly into the air and my head clunks on the curb.

I passed out for a bit, then woozily walked into the house and told my mother what had happened. Of course, there was blood, so a damp cloth was quickly wrapped around my head, and I was directed to lie down on the couch. My father said not to let me fall asleep. I watched TV, half cross-eyed and dizzy, and heard my parents talking about the possibility of concussion, which at that time I thought was something to do with an orchestra. I have no memory of any medical care, but we ended up going to Van de Kamp for breakfast. I had spaghetti, as usual–a habit that was invented specifically to drive my parents crazy, and it worked–which I promptly vomited back into my plate and all over my pants. Dinner was cut short, and I was watched carefully for several days. Again, I ate nothing but ice cream and apple sauce until I felt well.

These three episodes create a living triptych that hangs in my memory museum; it is known as “A Young Seeker’s Introduction to a World of Pain.” There are many other works in the series; so many, in fact, that a new wing had to be opened to house them. As I grew up, these injuries became far more often psychological than physical, but they pierced even deeper, dealt mostly as they were by the two people I was forced to depend upon. I continued to get myself into dangerous physical situations now and then, in later life always wondering if I were actually just taking out my anger on myself. But most of the pain I kept inside, in festering emotional quags untended but not forgotten. And a lot of it is still there--like soap scum and rust stains, that kind of pain leaves shadows even once it's scrubbed clean by therapy and time.

After the n-word incident, Bernetta and I stopped hanging out together, wondering why but letting it happen anyway, because confronting it was too painful to imagine. I became a loner, sitting outside the main playground on the lawn where we waited for the bus in the afternoon, reading two books a week.

At home, I started sneaking into the living room after midnight to watch the late late show on TV. I became a budding expert on the Hollywood classics that way over the years. I'd keep all the lights off and sit with my face about two feet from the set and its extremely low volume so that I could hear Bette or Joan or Rosalind, and hypnotically eat a whole box of sweetened cereal during each movie. I used my allowance for my stash of Captain Crunch with Crunch Berries, Count Chocula and Honey Comb, and kept the boxes under my bed. I'd go to sleep stuffed to the gills with corn syrupy goodness at three in the morning, then wake up at seven and have french toast heaped with butter and powdered sugar for breakfast. At lunch in the school cafeteria, I traded main courses or vegetables I didn't like for dessert. I stopped for a candy bar or two or three, depending on how much of my allowance I had left, almost every day after school, and I ate a huge chocolate sundae with the works nearly every night after dinner. I didn't need teachers, parents, or even friends anymore: Sugar, my first and still most ineluctable addiction, had taken sweet, safe hold of me.

Categories: backstory, bakersfield, friends, addiction

Boys Don't Do That, Part II

2005-12-22T10:58:00.000-08:00

yet more notes for an autobiographical strip search

I learned in therapy recently that when a family concentrates all of its attention on one member’s perceived problem to the avoidance of all others, then that person is what is known in psychotherapeutic parlance as the "designated patient." When I was seven or eight, my father’s chronic paranoia about my sexuality went critical, resulting in an incedent that is seared into my memory like a brand is on a piece of cattle’s hindquarters. It is one of the standouts in my gruesome repertoire of childhood horror stories.

It was second grade, and aside from making the sturdiest clover chains on campus, I was also king of the monkey bars. I could twirl around the parallel bar non-stop for what seemed minutes, and skip two, sometimes three, at a time on the traveling bars. The tidy sandbox that housed the spare array of juvenile gymnastic equipment was occupied mainly by girls, but there were two other boys there all the time, one Chinese and the other Mexican. Sometimes we would sit on the rotting wood frame of the sandbox and talk. I don’t remember what we said to each other, but the three of us were somber and soft spoken. I fantasize that we talked about what it was like to be such outsiders, but I’m sure we weren’t that psychologically advanced. One day, the Chinese guy brought one of his grandfather’s newspapers for us to see, and we sat for our entire lunch hour marveling at the distinct personalities of the various pictographs.

My monkey bar days came to an abrupt end over dinner one day, when my dad told me he had heard I was playing with the girls on the jungle gym and I had better start playing with the boys. I knew immediately that Mrs. Ashbeck, my second grade teacher, had deceived me, or maybe it had been the principal or one of the other teachers, or the concerned mother of another kid who had talked about me at home. Suddenly I felt like everyone was talking about me, all the time, no matter which way I turned. You’d better play with the boys tomorrow, my dad warned, and I’m going to send your mom down there just to make sure you do. I scoffed at that, though I could see that my mother was as afraid of my dad–the dinner table terrorist–as I was. My little sister gazed intently at her plate as if she were reading messages from beyond in the swirls in her mashed potatoes. I asked to be excused, and was allowed to go, but not before my father grabbed my arm and told me to think about what he’d said.

How could I think about anything else? My dad’s words ran laps around my head while I vainly tried to read a particularly gory excerpt from the unexpurgated Brothers Grimm. I was shocked and delighted by the fact that, in the Grimm version of Cinderella, the stepsisters cut off toes and slice heels to fit into the glass slipper, but to no avail. I can see the fragile shoe filled and spattered with almost-blue blood, and sense the stepmother’s desperate disregard for her daughters’ well-being in the face of a possible royal marriage. But even this circus of craven carnage, absent from all other versions of the story, couldn’t capture my racing mind that night. Quietly, I played both records of Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, which my grandmother had bought me against my mother’s wishes. I huddled next to my junior executive stereo turntable with my knees pulled up to my chin, rocking back and forth to the beat.

The next day at school, I played with the boys at lunch recess just in case someone actually was spying on me. Soccer was just coming into vogue across America, and all the WASP jocks of the first three grades were engaged in a ferocious game. A few other kids jogged on the track that encircled the playing field. I sheepishly followed in the wake of one of the teams, cheering and pumping my fist when "we" made a goal. As I loped along, I saw them: my mother, in a smart dress and Jackie-O sunglasses, holding the doughy hand of my little sister, whom she had just picked up from her morning shift at kindergarten. These surreptitious sentinels stood like statues on the other side of the chain link, and though I couldn’t see my mother’s eyes over the distance or through the dark glasses, I was sure she looked straight into mine when I spotted her. My stomach leapt up to join my ferociously beating heart, and I started sweating uncontrollably. I couldn’t believe she had actually followed through with it. Absolutely sinister.

Why was I so surprised, when I knew my mother was only subconsciously on my side? Her behavior and remarks had always proven otherwise, so this was nothing out of the blue. For some reason, the collusion of my entire family made this incident far worse. Otherwise, it had been things like this: I get out of the shower, one of my first alone, and wrap a towel around my waist, then one around my head, turban style. My mother gets a queasy look on her face and says with some urgency, "Boys don’t do that." Of course, I ask why, and she is flummoxed. "They just don’t," she says; and then, apparently referring to an instinctive tropical dancehall swaying of my hips that I was entirely unaware of: "And don’t treat that towel like a skirt." She helps me dry in a hurry and rushes me into my undeniably boy-style pajamas.

Something like that–that’s forgivable. She can’t help being horrified because that’s how she’s been programmed by this psychotic, bigotry-fueled society. But this spying on me at school signified a deeper hatred of who I was and who I was going to turn out to be. At dinner, the coup de grace: "Your mother tells me you were just running behind a team acting excited at all the right times," says my dad, already red in the face. My mother can’t look at me; she strangely focuses all her attention on my father’s left ear. Of course, I denied it and after a while the embarrassing topic lost its hot status and passed away quietly like an unloved great uncle. But I was angry about that one for a long time.

Twenty-five years later, I confronted my mother about it in a drunken rage. She pooh-poohed it–it was all in my head–and I smashed up her kitchen with a wooden spoon. It was a messy and cathartic release of long-brewing fury; one of the...no, perhaps the only one I’ve ever allowed myself. My sister, who was there to support both of us but stayed out of the action with brilliantly finessed detachment, tore up her room, slashing posters and smashing furniture, when she was a young teenager, just to let off steam. I remember that afterwards, her face was flushed with triumph. I had always been too good on the outside to do things like that–such a big, good, smart little boy!–though I writhed and seethed inside.

Around 1995, I interviewed Harry Hay for the now-long-defunct Los Angeles Reader. He had just published a book of his collected writings, so the lasting crusades of his life of activism were fresh again in his mind, and his anger–even deep into old age–was palpable. After talking in earnest to me for over an hour about his theories regarding gay people as a third sexuality, in touch with the other side because of their very otherness and historically regarded as the shamans and healers of various civilizations, he got into the stickiness of actually claiming that place in society today, when gay people are almost globally feared and hated, or, conversely, objectified and glamorized into cultural submission. He also pointed out that, on our side, we’re clamoring for inclusion in the straight, middle-class lexicon and lifestyle, which further hampered his vision of gay people carving out a unique and useful societal role.

At the end of our interview, he turned to me and said, listen, I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time, and I really don’t have the steam to go forward with it, but you might be the person to do it: I think that all gay people should start a mass class action lawsuit against their parents for the entire childhoods of habitual, ritualized abuse they received, making them unable as adults to express who they are, or, indeed, to even know they are. I argued that this was like the approach of Western medicine–attacking the symptom instead of rooting out the cause. But he insisted that it would be a major step forward.

Decidedly not my style: I’m not a blockbuster activist. I prefer to make my inroads quietly, like this; what I’m doing now. Besides, all voiced ideas somehow make it into the realm of everyday reality eventually. Case in point: While rummaging around the Web to see if anyone else had taken Harry up on his lawsuit suggestion, I found this: a reported law on the Staten Island books stating that "It is illegal for a father to call his son a 'faggot' or 'queer' in an effort to curb 'girlie behavior.'" Mind you, all I've found is a listing on "dumb law" sites or "joke law" sites, so it's clear that people don't take this kind of thing seriously, and I'm not sure if it's even true or not, but if it is, I'm sure Harry's chuckling with appreciation somewhere. And so am I. Because name-calling is just dumb. Big, strong, smart boys simply don't do that!

Categories: backstory, bakersfield, glbt

Boys Don't Do That, Part I

2005-12-21T09:36:00.000-08:00

further notes for an autobiographical strip search

In my handful of early memories, I feel unbearably perceptive, as if I were born with an old soul's supply of Weltschmerz. I must have appeared extremely astute to my mother as well, because she sent me to pre-school when I was only two and a half. I was big for my age, but I wasn’t nearly as verbally expressive as the four-year-olds who were my classmates. To make up for this deficit, I was hyperactive and sporadically violent. I am supposed to have started lots of playground scenes, one in which I bit a little girl on the cheek, leaving marks that she reportedly still has signs of today. I don’t remember being that aggressive. As far as I was concerned, I was a good little boy. Strange, maybe, but good. Like this:

Our task for the afternoon is to fingerpaint using various flavors of instant pudding, which we can tint with any combination of non-toxic food coloring. It is all easy to clean, and all edible. In fact, I surreptitiously take a few heaping fingerfuls in an impromptu taste test before deciding on my medium. I finally choose Pistachio for its pleasant softness and the cheerfulness of its particular green, which needs no tainting dye to enhance it. I take a whole bowl full and smear it across my newsprint painting pad on my miniature wooden easel. As I work, I pick up a gob and maneuver it downward in a zigzag or whip it into a spiral on the diagonal. Soon I disappear into the pistachio pudding, ski along its slopes, navigate its textural nuances. The teacher has to shake my shoulders firmly to break me from my spell when it is time for milk and cookies.

And then there’s this:

My mother had been asked by my nursery school teacher to come and pick me up because I had coerced a classmate of mine to touch the steaming wax paper envelope over which the teacher’s assistant had just run a hot iron in order to melt the crayon shavings contained within. This led to much crying and scolding, and apparently I was insubordinate as well as sadistic. When my mother pulled up in our 1967 olive green Chevrolet Estate station wagon, she yelled at me for acting like such a baby–I was expected to be very cognizant and adult at three years old for some reason. Not just a good boy, but a big good boy, mature for his age--or so they thought.

Now Kindergarten–that did feel grown up. I attended the after-lunch shift at a grade school about six blocks from our house, and I was allowed to walk there by myself. This was suburban Orange County, California, circa 1971. Could you imagine letting a five-year-old walk six blocks by himself anywhere these days? Sometimes I walked with the kid from across the street, Christine, who was from Alabama, and said "crowns" when she meant "crayons." You wanna play with my crowns? I envisioned a sort of beauty queen contest.

Most of the walk to school involved traversing a weedy field studded with electrical pylons. It ran about four blocks between my street and the street the school was on, flanked by fenced-in backyards. When I was alone, I shuffled slowly and stealthily through the field, catching glimpses through the spaces between pickets of people lounging by their pools or coddling their roses. I stopped and talked, for a long time, out loud, to the many curious cats who stalked the tall grasses at the field’s perimeter and, more gently, in low, conspiratorial tones, to the imperiously immovable ones who basked in the sun beneath the humming wires. I babbled with the lady bugs who napped intermittently on small leaves. I even talked to my shoes, assuring them they would soon be clean when I accidentally stepped in a mud puddle.

I was much less adept at talking to people, except for two little girls in my class. We would play restaurant together in the toy kitchen, with us as very egotistical and demanding chefs and the rest of the girls as our staff and customers. Meanwhile, the other boys would usually be playing something like cowboys and Indians or dodge ball. My teacher gave me lots of worried looks and finally, during recess one day, pulled me aside from my culinary imperatives and emphatically encouraged me to "get some fresh air" with the other boys (it was a kick ball day). I went outside and moped around the jungle gym until it was time for the teacher to read us into napland.

Some time in the summer after kindergarten, we made the trip up to Bakersfield, where I’d been born a few years earlier, and where we ended up staying for the rest of my childhood. There was some kind of party at my mom’s best friend’s house, meaning best friend from high school; maybe fourth of July–it was over a hundred and the pool was a big feature. There were about twenty people there, I"d say, eight of them children, five boys and three girls. I evened the balance by joining the girls in a Barbie fashion extravaganza–cooled almost to cold by the white noise and frosty breath of central air, while the boys played some sort of aggressive ball game in the pool.

This was well into the party. We’d already played Marco Polo and practiced our dives, eaten cheeseburgers and chili dogs from the barbecue, got in the pool right afterwards despite our parents’ boozy warnings to wait half an hour; and marveled at the new pet turtle that slowly stalked the square of lawn beside the pool while the adults downed copious liquor, lounging on the swanky new patio furniture.

By the time I was ensconced in one of the girls’ bedrooms, free of sweat and brashly pairing a magenta jacket with an orange miniskirt on my Malibu model, the adults were good and sloshed, and I knew that my dad was the most bombed of all. I could hear his loud laugh through the tightly-sealed skin of the house, desperate and adrenaline-fueled. Some sort of ruckus started up, and wouldn’t you know it, it was all about me.

Now I could hear their voices clearly. Why wasn’t I out there playing with the boys, who by that time had switched to a dive bomb contest? Where the hell was I? Seconds later, the door to Jane or Jennifer’s bedroom slams open, and my dad is there, screaming at the top of his lungs that it was disgusting that I was in there playing with dolls, or words to that effect. Boys don’t do that. His face was red and laced with strained veins as he yanked me up off the floor, toppling over one of Barbie’s dressing cases in the process, and forced me outside.

I did one big dive bomb just to please my irate father while everyone else in the whole place sat still and stony with dumbstruck grins on their faces. I tried to splash my dad, who was standing at the side of the pool encouraging me with undue enthusiasm, but I only got his bare feet wet. Most of my not dismissible splash watered the oleander hedges on the other side of the pool. I got right out, wrapped a towel around me and followed the creeping turtle around, pretending to be unwaveringly fascinated. This seemed to mollify my dad just as much as the bomb dive, so I kept it up until the party started disintegrating. I became one with that turtle, nothing on my mind but the snugness of my shell and the sureness of my exruciatingly slow progression, even if it was around in circles.

This became the dominant theme of my childhood. My parents were constantly worrying about and discussing my proclivity for playing with the girls instead of the boys and what to do about it. My father tried to teach me to fight ... once only, due to my complete unwillingness and lack of natural pugilistic talent. My mother called my little friends’ mothers to make sure I was really over at Jack or Jimmy’s house like I said I would be instead of at Ann-Marie’s. I soon realized that not only my parents, but everyone else’s parents, and my teachers--and just about everyone else in the world, it seemed--worried about and disccused my gender confusion with great concern. It became the hot topic, shadowing any other problems that may have been brewing--and there were many.

Categories: backstory, bakersfield, glbt

Gone fully over

2005-12-19T10:01:00.000-08:00

I've spent much of my adult life looking for a good way to meditate, and finding several good stopgaps along the way, but it wasn't until last year that I hit upon sound as a way to meditate, and most especially, the singing or chanting of a mantra. You can use almost anything as a mantra, and if you're into gurus, then you can get one from one of them. I toyed with many self-made mantras over the years, but my mantra of choice has turned out to be something extremely formal and ancient: The Heart Sutra. It was "given to me" one May Day a couple years ago by a faerie named Mama Love. She sang it to me while I lay in her lap next to a roaring fire after a full day of festivities, and said, "that's your song." I didn't know exactly what she meant, but I started singing it all the time--in my car, while cleaning my house, and of course, in the shower--taking its tones into parts of my voice that I hadn't explored before. And when I sang, I found I went into the kind of natural meditation that you sometimes find yourself falling into while doing a repetitive task like sweeping--except that it was a hell of a lot more enjoyable than sweeping. I've also delved into ayurvedic chakra toning (another technique imparted to me by a faerie) and make that a more intermittent part of my meditation routine (if you can call the freeform, spontaneous practice that I do a routine), but the Heart Sutra is a daily necessity. Singing it three times through at least once a day has become as necessary to me as drinking water. Sometimes I'll sing it over and over again in my car, experimenting with a new tune every time. Here's a link to the best translation of the entire sutra that I've found, and here's the mantra the comes at the end: it goes (prounounce "e" as "ay"),

Gate, Gate
Paragate
Parasamgate
Bodhi, Svaha!

You can either chant it fast, with four beats to a line, or sing it with your own melody and meter, eight beats to a line. It's fun to drum along, and especially fun to harmonize with others. The mantra means:

Gone, gone
Gone over
Gone fully over
Awakened, so be it!

You like? I'd love to hear a big gospel choir riff on it. Or a really big campfire round. Don't forget to sing with heart. It's an opening and focusing device for all-encompassing, omniscient, omnipotent love power.
Word.

Categories: meditation, love

Blur tactics

2005-12-16T16:52:00.000-08:00

You'll never make it out. As in figure it out. Decipher. And as in get out. Escape. It's always too far away, fading into the distance, or too close, disintegrating into pixels. The portals keep moving. The puling puking king children of the teetering tottering hill plunder and sunder to win the game while they try to tell us there is no game. It's all real. Except all that weird stuff that we tell you is not real. And oh yeah, we're not in control--some guy named God is, and he's never wrong, so just shut up and get with the program! Yeah, right, dumb-ass. Are you crazy to think what you do, or are there many many others who think the same way, and do most people think they're crazy too?

Who are these people who think, do, say, wear, write, read, drive, buy, sell, make and own the things that make them "most people"? Are they really most people or do they just have the best PR? Why the insistent jones for judgment? Are you this or are you that, what makes you tick, what makes you fat? Do you sweep your problems under the rug or air them on the line for all to see? Do you be who you are or what other people want you to be? And do you even know who you are? What you are? An animal? Yes. A spark? That too. The flesh and the flame. Not matter, not light, but somewhere in between, in that everyman's land, we live, our whole existence spent in a battle to balance the two--or, even more quixotically, merge them; an impossible dream that in the end we die for, spinning plates crashing to the ground to the nervous, oily glee of the popcorn-munching crowd.

And then, I suppose, we no longer have to sew these little stitches of meaning in time; these words of mine, so dear they are, and yet so far from their source by the time the needle of thought is threaded, and the stitch is made, that the fabric bunches up, and the thread breaks, and then you lose it, and you have to look around for more--and, oh, where was that last spool of sky blue, or was it gray? And then some people lose the thread and simply keep on sewing as if nothing has happened. And sometimes what they make is beautiful.

But no matter how hard you try, how minutely you examine it, you'll never make it out. And in the end it all goes by before your eyes, I've heard, in a quick flash, like film rewinding; you now have the evidence, but all the pictures have turned out blurry, and no one will believe you because there you are, still systematically stitching away on a tiny corner of a huge quilt that other people may or may not be working on, living to die and dying to live, but not really living; working hard at trying to live; alive, at least. And who believes pictures, anyway, or anything else that we experience through any one or combination of our five everyday senses?

Faulty little programming loops, those first five. It's the sixth that holds the master control, but of course, that does not exist. At least that's what most people think. Whoever most people are. The ones who don't get angry, I guess. The ones who are okay with it all. Who think it can't be changed, so why try.... The "whatever" people, collectively, with a great, disgusted sigh, turning in any semblance of responsibility or care in exchange for a shuttered little life of pimped-out comforts and condolences. And sitting there judging. Tsk-tsk-ing anyone who advocates something better. So scared they are of having the black-out curtains pushed aside. So scared they are of anything too bright, too sharp, too hot, too deep. Anything that doesn't look like a big fat titty (or a big fat dick, depending on your preference) to suck on, eyes closed, like a baby. So scared they are of...everything. So scared. Shivering little kids on a carousel gone out of control, pissing and shitting themselves as the world tilts and whirls, having no strength left for anything but holding on. Just barely holding on. Hold on.

Hold on. That's all I have to do today. Just... hold... on... and... don't... fall... off.... Okay, I think I can handle that (he says breathlessly, then continues a blood-curdling scream)....

et cetera

Happy Friday!

Categories: fucked-up

Refocus at Ford

2005-12-14T16:45:00.000-08:00

Well, I'm glad Ford came through and told the AFA where to go--especially since I have a Ford Focus I'm still paying off! And they're not just going back to advertising merely their Jaguar and Land Rover lines in the gay mags; they're really giving the AFA a nice, big raspberry and expanding their gay-targeted advertising to include all eight of its automotive lines. It's nice to see a big corporation actually barking back at the attack dogs of the right instead of leaving it up to all of us yappy little puppies. Good business, too. I know lots of fellow fags with Jaguars and Land Rovers, and they're all bitchy queens who would can the company in a flash at the first sign of a slight or slur, and trade in the trash for a Mercedes. Big disposable income market, us queers, with no kids (for the most part) and a seemingly genetic predisposition toward the finer things in life. Subsumation by the big money market machinery is the price we pay, I suppose (and some would say our reward), for increased cultural integration. Hmmm, think I'll remain on the fringes, thank you very much!

Categories: glbt, media, news

Whee, I'm a pagan!

2005-12-14T15:05:00.000-08:00

According to this fascinating spiritual quiz, I'm a pagan, which I'm sure is no newsflash to those who know me. But like my friend Monica, the Late Bloomer, whom I thank for her post about the quiz link, I'm rather averse to the ritual aspect of paganism. I prefer a quiet, inner connection with the sacred; and if not that, then sex--and you don't need fire or charms or chants or totems to make sex sacred.

Though I've gravitated mostly towards pagan expression, I've always been drawn to Buddhist thought, except for two major components: that the world is naturally full of suffering and that the ego is a thing to be conquered or done away with in order to reach enlightenment. I'm more of a western thinker on that, following Freud, because I believe a healthy ego is an essential part of a fully functioning human being. The problem is that the human ego is genetically flawed by millenia of dysfunction, and there are very few examples of people in the world who actually have healthy, fully beneficial egos. So Buddhism, though I love its primary concepts, scored well below Paganism, which was followed closely by Atheism (beautifully described in this wickedly crafted piece of prose, also suggested by the Late Bloomer), then Agnosticism. The Judeo-Islamo-Christian "one-god" traditions trailed behind at an appreciable distance. Like I said, no surprises, but the quiz was good, asking questions from a variety of interesting angles so that I really had to think about my beliefs.

Frankly, the only belief I really have is that everything is alive and everything is connected. If that's enough to name me a pagan, so be it, though I tend to shy away from labels of any kind. But since we're going there, I'll go further and brand myself a very troublesome kind of pagan: an intellectual one. Paganism becomes rather opaque when one's natural process of feeling is to first filter everything through the apparatus of the mind. It makes direct contact with the divine rather difficult. I tend to blah-blah-blah when I should just be-be-be; I SO want to figure things out, even if, in the end, there's really nothing to figure out. I was at a radical faerie beltane gathering a couple years ago sitting around in a circle of faeries going blah-blah-blah, and I heard one of the others--a super-gravitational, strong-and-silent earth-anchor type called Wolfie--say, "He's a talker." The tone was distinctly unamused.

I find the whole thing amusing. Words. Meaning. Names. Beliefs. Groups. Outsiders. Talkers. Thinkers. Doers. Dousers. Yankety yankety yank. explanation. definition. revelation. mediation. meditation. obfuscation. preoccupation. I've had the meaning of life explained to me to my mind's satisfaction a million different ways, and I've stalked it down from all different angles with my own leaping grey matter, but I have yet to feel it deep and solid in my flesh and bones. Perhaps I'm afraid if I do, I will combust with bliss then and there, becoming nothing but a soul spark. Now what could be so terrible about that?

Categories: religion, faeries, spirit, transformation

Mind over money

2005-12-13T15:19:00.000-08:00

art

I've been thinking about money a lot today. The less one has, the more one is forced to think about it: how to get more of it, what bills to leave unpaid till next month, what three stores to hit for groceries because no one store has the lowest prices on everything. Being poor takes a lot of planning. Especially when you work full time and you're still poor, like most of the people I know, or even know about.

But I'm not talking about plain ol' everyday mulling over financial matters. I caught The Little Drummer Boy, parts I and II, on TV last weekend, and the second one devotes its biggest production number (starring the voice of Zero Mostel as a greedy tax collector) to a song about how the creation of money from the barter system and its subsequent management by rulers keeps true power from the people and secures an imbalance of wealth. An interesting topic for a children's Christmas story. Then again, The Little Drummer Boy is all about reclaiming a kind of personal power that transcends the ephemeral evils of whatever system happens to be in place.

That's all fine and well, and watching the Rankin & Bass claymation classic, with its slow, meticulous shots and languorous storytelling by Ms. Greer Garson (sounding like she was full to the brim with Christmas cheer during the narration of Part II), was a true refreshment from the cynical, hyperactive, degrading crap that dominates today's rotten heap of children's entertainment; but it incited as well as relaxed me, putting a constantly buzzing bug in my ear about the entire phenomenon of money. What is it? Where did it come from? What does it represent, both physically and figuratively? And why the hell can't I seem to amass more of it for myself?

Yeah, I know what some of you are saying: true abundance does not equal lots of money. That's all well and good, too, but it doesn't eliminate the daily struggle to procure even the simplest of basic living necessities.

So today I came straight home from work to start googling the history and meaning of money, because the buzz, for some reason (probably because I can't afford to pay my car insurance this month), was deafening this morning. I've tried searching the topic before--because money is an issue that has plagued me all my life--without gathering much enlightenment from the Web, but today the Internet was willing to grant my request for further clarification.

I started by bouncing off The Little Drummer Boy's Bible-era setting to a Bible quote (one of the few I know): "the love of money is the root of all evil," or something like that. Right off the bat, I found this excellent, extremely simply written paper by a liberal thinker on the Origin of money; it does a better job than I've ever seen at explaining the history of the human economic evolution from barter to gold coins, to secured paper money, to unsecured paper money--and the inherent dangers in this progression.

From the other side of the political spectrum comes a blog entry from the calico cat that charts the love of money to an even deeper root--the quest for status, which the writer believes is something we can never escape. What we can do, she says, is "ensure that competition for money results in good for society." Ha! Easier said than done.

And here's my favorite: a rant from a hardcore libertarian about how the corrupt money system and the erosion of the right to bear arms are intimately entwined--its immediate political message may be centered around a hot issue (gun control), and possibly not on the side you'd choose, but its combination of quotes and research that go back to the words of our founding fathers effectively illustrates out how far we've faltered from their far more, well, libertarian vision; and the essay does a chilling job of outlining the current unstable, unsupported economy of electronic money.

Like all really big problems, the remorseless corruption, manipulation and hijacking of our personal freedoms through the unmitigated corruption, manipulation and hijacking of the money system draws cries of outrage from all sides of today's multi-faceted political arena. Wouldn't it be great if we could get past all those emotional issues that center around religion, sex and violence to the core problems that we're all in agreement about, and then really change some things rather than playing an endless game of tug-o-war?

Dream on, dreamers....

Categories: culture, abundance, meaning

Naked politics

2005-12-12T16:40:00.000-08:00

I teach English to a group of college-aged and 20-something Korean students in (surprise!) Koreatown (L.A.), and almost every morning they bring up some question about the world that leads to a discussion about politics. Then we discuss it some, and then they protest that they're not political, or, even better yet, that they're "not interested" in politics.

The other day, one of my youngest students was dealing with the fact that he was an underaged foreign national with no green card whose older brother's house (where the student lives) just went into foreclosure, who needs to find a job right away, who doesn't speak English worth a side of fries, who doesn't have a high school diploma yet needs to be in college to stay in the country, and who has to come up with $3000 to bribe, um, excuse me, pay an administration fee to the Korean army to further defer his mandatory draft status. It also turned out that he and his brother weren't able to get financial help from their parents because their father's independent import/export business got hit hard by the latest IMF loan sanctions.

So we got into a discussion about the World Bank and the structure of a capitalist society, and then moved on to a somewhat analytical rant about the greed that seems to motivate all business and politics and international affairs, and after half an hour of heated remarks, he goes, "Okay, enough, you know I'm not interested in politics." He may have been being sarcastic. My Korean students can be extremely enigmatic and darkly humorous at times.

Then another student walked in, got a load of our conversation, and told me exactly why he wasn't into politics--it took me a while to figure out what he was trying to say, but we finally got to the understanding that he believed the realm of politics to be full of nothing more than playground fights magnified globally. Aside from a dark sense of humor, some of my students also display a profound wisdom about human folly. In fact, the two often go hand in hand, don't they?

We decided that the way to end this fight, at least in America, was to abolish the party system and have nothing but a bunch of independent candidates running for various offices. That way, no one can go, hey, I'm on this side, or hey, I'm on that side. Each candidate must articulate exactly what he or she stands for, and each voter must take the time to understand what each candidate is about. This system would forcibly stop the blight of knee-jerk reactions and get the public really thinking about our government again--you know, by the people, for the people... sound familiar?

At that point, the same student who had summed up the business of politics so succinctly also put a quick end to our discussion by refusing to believe that voters could be successfully encouraged to be so inquisitive and thorough in their engagement with government. We went on to reading a story in their textbook about a girl who runs away from home to follow her dream to become a dancer. They all decided that she had made the right decision.

I also think it's the right decision for America to wriggle free from the stifling laps of partisan politicians to a less cosseted political freedom--in a land beyond the brittle, yet for some reason insurmountable, walls of the musty old ideologies that require people to take sides. Our current political climate may seem to be moving away from conflict-based ideologies towards pragmatism, but I think we need to go much further. I propose a democracy that operates on a free system of bare-ass naked politics, in which each person is held accountable for everything he or she does or says and believes in, and nothing anyone else does or says or believes in.

And while we're at it, we can get rid of the presidency and put an informed council of citizens in the oval office. And we might as well get rid of our borders with Canada and Mexico, too, and... oh hell, I'm getting ahead of myself now. Time to do something truly mundane to get grounded again, like go to the laundromat. Oh how fun. Politics be damned. I gotta wash my clothes and go to work and fix dinner and clean my room and go to sleep and get up to go to work again and... yeah, I get my students' point. Sometimes I'm not all that interested in politics, either.

Categories: politics, fucked-up, transformation

The Elusive Line

2005-12-10T16:55:00.000-08:00

Notes for an autobiographical strip search

If you’re going through hell, keep going.
–Winston Churchill

All I want is for future generations to go ‘Fuck it. I’ve had enough. Here’s the truth.’
–Johnny Rotten

"Storyline" - compulsive sickbed art by R. Campbell (me), Feb. 2005

Welcome Spiel: an inquiry into the author’s intentions

Students of the everlasting enigma, I offer you here a humble case study on the subject of human experience–my own. Every life projects a pattern onto the universe, leaving its unique indentation in the many dimensions through which it moves. Here I begin both an excavation and exhibit of my own life’s journey through time, in which I’ll examine the many snags and tangents along the way to my current state of still-incipient integration.

So without promise of further chronological adhesion, I start at the very beginning: my earliest memory; the moment, in fact, that initiated me into full psychological awareness. I was about three. My baby sister was asleep in her crib at the end of the hall, and my mother was having lunch with a neighbor lady in the dining room. Alone in my room, I was lolling on the bed staring at the ceiling, feeling lazy but full of suppressed, random energy. This is how I think I felt, at least. I really didn't become aware of anything until some indeterminable time later, when my mother walked in on me smearing my own shit across the walls in arches and loops.

Suddenly, everything came into focus: the smell of my own excrement, the texture of it in my hands, the tedium of having to wash the walls and repaint, how my dad would react, what the embarrassed giggles of my mother's guest meant, the slimy feeling between my buns and thighs. I even remember looking at what I'd done and thinking, hmmm, it's not very good, is it? It was obvious I had no natural talent for painting. Going deeper, it was the first time I had been definitely aware that I was an independent entity, with my own thoughts and volition, and that each of my actions sent echo waves into the environment, like the circles generated by a stone thrown into a pond.

And so I was delivered into cognizance to the look, smell and feel of my own shit–a cheeky bit of sardonic humor that was just the first in a long line of jokes the universe seemed to play on me until I figured out I was playing them on myself. But that took another thirty-odd years.

I remember my mother hastily carting me off and cleansing me in the bathtub with the water running, and nothing else specific about the poo-painting incident; but other memories come flooding back to me from that point. Many come in mere snippets: My dad bound and bandaged after having been burned at an oil refinery, stretched out on the couch, carefully sipping a cocktail, using his good hand to guide the glass to his mouth without moving any other part of his body; sitting on the sloped, open side yard we shared with our neighbors while my babysitter smoked pot with the long-haired boys from next door; playing giddy-up on my uncle Steve's knee, and the worried look on my mother's face because I liked it so much; getting out of bed one night and stumbling into a small party my parent's were having, smelling the sickly sweet pong of tropical booze concoctions and wondering why they were all being so loud; posing in front of the TV like a geisha in training, legs tucked neatly beneath me, nibbling demurely at my quarter-cut grilled cheese sandwich so that it would last through an entire late-morning rerun of Bewitched.

Other memories come in complete chunks, and can be examined either whole, through the inner eye's special 4-D viewer, or in sequential narrative. For example, here's one I view in my inner screening room fairly often:

It's springtime, and the lower-grades quad is blanketed in clover. Mrs. Ashbeck has taken her second grade class onto the lawn to listen to her sing and play her harpsichord, or was it a zither?.... I have a vision of her wearing a kimono. She played Sakura, and sang the English lyrics, which were also in our music books: Cherry bloom, cherry bloom/Gently swaying in the air/Soft the colors everywhere.... While she sang, I sat with three girls from the class (I almost said other girls) and made chains out of clover flowers. Bees buzzed around us, and we flinched and yelped if one came too near. On the other side of a beech tree sat the manly boys of the class, yelling and slapping at each other a lot, not paying attention at all to Mrs. Ashbeck's earnest strains. I looked over at one of them, and he held his arm out then flicked his hand down at the wrist with a look on his face as if he had just passed a big silent but deadly fart.

Not long after that, apparently through nothing more than the power of calling the information forth from the universe, for I remember no source, I found out what that limp-wristed gesture meant. Somehow, by keeping my eyes open, by scouring the movies and television for clues, I figured out that this gesture was one in a canon of words and gestures used to denigrate gay men; and that I might be one of them, though I wasn’t sure what it meant at the time. Way back in second grade, there was this other second grader using body language I didn’t know to tell me that he thought I was a homo, and that he had a certain disdain for it–a complicated message that I would hear over and over again in my life from that point on. That day, I just shrugged and went back to my clover chain. Then I got lost in Mrs. Ashbeck's warble and the twang of the taut strings under her ivory pick. And then I got lost in my own thoughts.

When the recess bell rang, I continued to sit there next to the beech tree, absentmindedly counting the blooms on my clover chain rosary. Mrs. Ashbeck came up to me, put her hand on my back and said, You all right? I nodded, then watched her wobble across the tufted lawn in her high heels to the cafeteria. As I turned back, I got beaned in the head with a soccer ball. Once I recovered from momentary shock, I was horrified to find that absolutely everyone on the small playground was laughing about it. I stood up and kicked the ball back as hard as I could, and it soared over the crowd of seven-year-olds onto the kindergarten blacktop. The mob bounded after the ball as one entity while I sat down under the tree and resumed disappearing into my own little world.

I was still sitting there when Mrs. Ashbeck came back after lunch. She told me to come into the classroom, so I followed her without a word, watching my feet and sweating suddenly, sure that I was in trouble, though I couldn’t imagine about what. Instead of the admonishment I had feared, she gave me a new reading book, the fifth-grade reading book, Bold Journeys, and told me not to tell anyone else, since the rest of the second grade gifted class, as gifted as they were, were just starting the fourth-grade reading book, Ventures. Sheesh, that must have been a smart group of little kids. I remember an insatiable hunger for knowledge that gnawed at my insides and kept me very highly strung, and by that time I was as deeply into words and reading as I could manage to bury myself.

A few weeks later, I got moved up to the third grade gifted class, and found that I was even further ahead of them. After a few days sitting small and insignificant under the spiky, collective glare of what seemed much larger children, I went back to Mrs. Ashbeck, and began Bold Journeys by myself, in a little corner by the windows. Everyone stared at me and talked about me all the time, but I didn't care. In fact, I loved the solitude that the disdainful fascination of others afforded me.

But I'm not here simply to rattle off a string of memories. I have the distinct feeling that piecing my life together into an entirety that can be viewed whole from many different angles is integral to my continued healing. I also have the urge to tell the truth, whatever that means, and I figure the best place to start that open-ended project is with myself.

How does it all coalesce, one's experience of life? Once gathered, does it remain cryptic and unwieldy, or does its sheer bulk demand a settling into form? My memory is a miasma of images, thoughts, impressions, phrases, sounds, smells, tastes, euphorias, madnesses, rises and falls, breathing, eating, flying and crashing, having sex and longing for it, dancing, dreaming, screaming, hiding, acting the part and fighting the battle; protecting myself from the awful, mundane truth of everyday reality. The best anyone can do is to weave these motley strands into connective relief, to create a distinction from, but vital connection with, the rest of the human drama; to map the effect of the self on the diorama of life. I've seen it in a dream, this elusive line:

I am walking along a bluff on the central California coast when everything goes blurry; my surrounding environment morphs into a moving mass of pixels, each differentiated only by chromatic gradation, creating a pointilistic watercolor effect that causes the scenery to look as if seen through someone else’s pancake-thick eyeglasses. I panic, stop in my tracks. From behind, a tap on the hip. A thin, toddler-high being with translucent violet skin and a shock of white fur atop his (her?) pointy skull appears at my side, lays a bony hand on my back and, with his other, gestures out to sea. In the distance, from a flurry of azure, teal and coppery silver pinpricks, appears a continuous line of curlicues and twists, loops and arabesques, standing out in all dimensions--a bright, pulsating plait of red and orange. It looks like a DNA strand that has been pulled to its tensile limit, then released with a jerk, or a freedom-drunk guitar string freshly sprung from its time on the frets. That, he says, and I definitely feel it's a he at this point; but he doesn't say it, he just beams his communication straight into my head: That is all it is.

He traces his fingers across the lunatic line, now mimicking the frothy white tattoo a skater cuts into the thick, steel-blue skin of her local pond. When I reach out to grasp it, it writhes in my grip, snakelike. I leap on its back to learn the secrets of its undulations, and the conceptual bronco bucks me awake. The freestyle pattern fades, leaving momentary traces on the quaking screens of my still-closed eyelids like a sparkler does in the silk heft of summer nightdark.

Now, a real dominatrix of a muse has gotten hold of me. She wants me to turn away from the fantasy of fiction and write something real. She wants me to write about my panic and my horror, my irate urges; to flip the sleeping lids of my volcanos and free my searing underground springs. She wants me to write about what it's like to feel that your always on the outside, and why it is that I keep running away, again and again, and what it is I'm running from, when I know that no one can escape either the self or the all-is-one.... Hmmm, I think, as she tells me all this in a calm, but unmistakably firm, manner, bright red lips taut with authority: Hmmmm..., I say. I'd like to see that myself.

Categories: backstory, Bakersfield, glbt, healing

Imagine Coming Together

2005-12-08T16:26:00.000-08:00

The day John Lennon died

On this day twenty-five years ago, I arrived at high school early, being a good little Freshman, to find one of the senior girls setting up a bunch of candles and signs around a blackwatch plaid blanket in the midst of the low-hanging fog in the main quad.

"What are you doing?" I asked, as she bent down to light a dish of votives.

"Didn't you hear about the assassination?" she said, incredulous at the thought that I might not have heard. "I'm holding a vigil... and anyone else who wants to join..."

I looked at her with a vacant, perplexed expression, mostly because I really wasn't sure what a vigil was.

She gave me a look that carried with it a silent "DUH!!", and fished a sign--the homemade kind that protesters carry--from her stack, then shoved it in my face. I was staring at a picture of John Lennon. And yes, I remembered having heard about his murder on the radio while getting ready for school--probably deciding which terry cloth polo to wear with my new light blue cords and cleaning the scuff marks from the acid yellow swooshes on my Nikes.

After that, she didn't talk anymore--like a nun beginning a vow of silence. Instead, she gestured to me when she needed some small bit of assistance or another while devotionally going about the construction of her shrine. She wore a black beret and an outsized black overcoat; her eyes were ringed in thick kohl. She eyed my California teen hottie look, then reached in her bag and pulled out a wad of black ribbon. Laboriously, with a tiny pair of nail scissors, she shredded me off a length and tied it around my arm, then patted the knot she'd made with a great deal of pride in her handiwork.

I then joined her on the blanket, barely brushing the edge of it while she sat cross-legged in the middle, letting her big overcoat fan out around her like the court robes of a Heian princess in mourning. From her apparently bottomless satchel she pulled a creaky-looking old casette recorder. She clicked the play button down with some difficulty and "Imagine" started playing from the tinny, monophonic speaker. As soon as Lennon's voice came in, she (I've forgotten her name, if I ever knew it) started weeping. Her dripping black eyeliner soon made her cheeks look like some sort of trippy batik fabric, behind which I could still glimpse the milky farmgirl glow that had always belied her ever dark, now blacker than black, exterior. I started getting misty-eyed myself just examining her. I didn't feel any big connection with Lennon at the time, but I did like the song, and knew it well.

The signs that she had spray-painted were alternative slogans based on Lennon's words: "Imagine there's no MURDER", "Imagine there's no HATE," "Imagine there's no FEAR". I felt safe on the blanket with that distraught girl on that quiet, foggy, early morning; in the etheric embrace of a kindred spirit.

"This is cool," I said, but she was completely distracted by an overflow of emotion. I quietly gathered my books as she rewound the tape--which made the machine give out a loud, tortured screech that would become a constant in the day's soundscape--then nodded gravely at her and started to make my way to the library to avoid all the other people who had begun arriving at school. Many of them were stopping in clusters and obviously laughing and judging, from a safe distance, the weeping girl on the blanket, and me by osmosis. I got unnecessarily embarrassed for both of us, while she remained oblivious of everything beyond her shroud of sorrow.

"I'll be here all day," she suddenly yelled in an almost cheerful voice as I crossed the quad. Sheepishly, I waved back.

And she was there all day, just like she'd said she would be, quietly trickling tears the whole time while Lennon sang his song over and over and over, each repetition punctuated by the fearsome screech of the machine. Other outsider types trickled in and out, smoking cigarettes and drinking booze out of brown bags because they knew they were so bad-ass that not one of the school staff would approach them about it, and singing along with the song when their mouths weren't otherwise occupied. All the while, the girl in black sat there like an oracle, concentrating the sorrow surrounding the event in her own body and radiating it outwards to gather all of us in. A few times while passing between classes, I stopped to watch a counselor or teacher confront her--only when she was alone--about going to class, but she always managed to convince them of the power of her convictions, and they retreated like abashed children after stern reprimands.

During the upper-class lunch period, during which I often ditched algebra, I joined the vigil, which had been gathering steam all day. Along with the requisite stoners and loners, some cheerleaders had made their way to the blanket, perching like preening birds along the edge. They were followed by a few stray jocks and some random geeks, and soon there were a couple dozen or so kids from all parts of the spectrum humming along or singing, mostly out of tune, to the song, all signs of clique-defined rancor dispelled for that one wonderful lunchtime. At some point, a couple of beer-drunk rednecks who'd been to Taco Bell dropped off a whole bag of crispy tacos for the vigilees with friendly nods of their baseball caps. I began to see the magic and depth of Lennon's effect on people.

Having only heard the Beatles on the radio up to that time, and on my mother's one record of their music--the first--I soon started exploring further, eventually becomimg transfixed by the White Album, which I listened to at least a hundred times over a period of about three months. During that time, I shed my California golden boy feathers and grew a darker and more complicated outer plumage that was more consistent with my inner workings. By the time I could drive, I was firmly entrenched in my own deep mourning for the world I feared would never come to be in my lifetime--the one Lennon described and apparently died for. My constant, heart-held and head-nurtured vision of a world like "Imagine" is the one thing I can sincerely credit with the fact that I'm still alive.

I keep thinking that everyone and everything will come together naturally; that we won't have to go through some big reckoning or upheaval or conflagration to get past the strife we've sewn for so long into strawberry fields, or wherever we go when we're living in a world of freely flowing peace, love and understanding. At least I can imagine it. If you can, too, then please join me in doing so, and let's see what happens. I hold a firm conviction that the human imagination is a far more practical tool than anyone has ever, well, imagined.

Categories: tributes, backstory, Bakersfield, language, music

Something so wrong

2005-12-07T16:51:00.000-08:00

There is something so wrong about this;
something so very very wrong about all of it
that it burns, it burns, it burns, it burns.

Categories: news, fucked-up

One of those... oh, fuck it!

2005-12-07T14:10:00.000-08:00

I woke up on the wrong side of the bed today. Simple as that. Have I mentioned that I was manic-depressive?
I think I have.
Yes, you have, dummy.
Hey, I didn't say I was schizophrenic, too.
You may not have, but I could take the reins and say it at any minute.
Shut up.
You shut up.
No.
Okay.
Okay.

Oh, excuse me (myself & I) there, now where was I? Oh yes, the whole manic-depression thing. I see it very clearly as a habit of my own ego now, and I'm evening out, but I refuse to flatline. I used to go through peaks and troughs, and now it's more like hills and dales. Today's just one of those dales.

Actually, I just looked up dales in my handy OED, and it doesn't mean what I was hoping it meant; namely, shallow valleys. Instead, it's a medieval word for a portion of land, related to "dole." So I really mean shallow valleys, but we'll stick with dales because it sounds better. If you want a better image, think of the difference between the violently jagged pattern a lie makes on a polygraph test (before) and the shallow sine wave a simple logarithm describes as it somewhat follows a solid, continuous line (now).

Oh, fuck the metaphors. I'm grumpy. Pissed off. I'm mad because the world is not the way I want it to be, and though I know that's a wholly juvenile kind of thought pattern in which to indulge, I sometimes can't help really getting good and angry about it.

I woke up singing the 1985 Dean and the Weenies post-punk anthem "Fuck you," which I do more often than I'll admit here. Anyway, whenever that happens, I know it's going to be one of those days. I snarl on those days, and snap. It's a wonder I don't froth at the mouth.

I've loved "Fuck you" ever since I first saw the now out-of-print movie Mondo New York back in college (or so), for which legendary NYC drag queen Dean Johnson and a few of his friends created the song. I haven't been able to find a recording, or even the lyrics, anywhere, so I'll give you the few lines I know, from the end of the bridge. They're classic, a sort of mantra when I'm having one of those days:

Fuck the welfare state
Fuck the prime interest rate
Fuck thermonuclear war
Fuck Mary Tyler Moore!

And then the simple chorus comes in with a sort of drop-kick bass and a strum-thrash of the usual punk chords: "Fuck you...Fuck you...Fuck you...Fuck you...." I can loop that for hours in my head when I'm having one of those days.

I really wish I had a recording of that song on days like today, so that I could blast it real loud in my car with all my windows open wherever I go. What I did find instead today was a wealth of information about what Dean Johnson has been doing in the past 20 years, including a radical diary of the NYC drug and club scene from 1979 to 2004, and a very recent, truly incendiary debate with gay mag The Blade about public sex. Johnson may be a 6'6" drag queen, which is enough to make anyone an a priori starlet, but he's also a good writer, and a cheeky chronicler of what it's like to live way, way, way outside the mainstream.

But his career has been kept marginal by both the demands of mainstream society and the culture dealers themselves who, though they are often gay, manage to also be more homophobic than most straight people. That means gay artists are stopped at the gate to success by gay gatekeepers (especially in entertainment-related industries), who, as Johnson told the Advocate in 2000, "are either in the closet and afraid of being outed or out of the closet and afraid of being accused of having an agenda." His short-lived turn-of-the-millenium band "Velvet Mafia" was named as a cynical nod to music industry giants Barry Diller and David Geffen, who have been named as the lynchpins of said crime ring by various journalists .

You've heard of "black-on-black violence," right? Well, what Johnson (always an activist as well as an artist, which is the main reason he hasn't had a big career) is talking about is gay-on-gay repression, and it's rampant; it goes on in a lot of industries, and I've felt it myself: the manipulative censorship, the constant judgment, the final axe on the tender throat. Here's a description of the final blow Johnson took, also the last entry in his diary:

2004: ... Record company informed us they would not be releasing our CD after all. Decided never to waste another minute dealing with record companies and released our CD without much fanfare. A week later the police closed The Hole. Now Triple XXX is over and I'm unemployed. But I did make this great CD, so if u want one, look for me with the other homeless people down on St. Marks Place. Oh, I even managed to turn a good trick last night; 43 years old and still getting paid for sex. Is this a great country or what?

So to all you people in power who are constantly crushing those below you in order to stay in control of the very narrow "big picture" that transfixes your visions, no matter what your race, sexuality or other minority or majority affiliation, here's a big bloody FUCK YOU from me and every other person who's ever been kicked in the teeth by y'all!

Oh, and by the way, bless your little fucked-up hearts, too. No really, I mean it!

There, I feel better. The day's looking up.

And fuck you, too!

Categories: glbt, activism, HIV-AIDS, 1980s, music, tributes

Set yourself free

2005-12-06T17:05:00.000-08:00

My life in the garden of cracked oracles

Several weeks ago, I went to a big outdoor party in downtown L.A., where I had a run-in on which my mind keeps sticking like a scratched record:

link

I am standing as close as possible to a Tesla coil demonstration around dusk, close enough to feel the charge in the roots of my teeth when the canned lightning crackles and whips. A scruffy, 20-ish guy with a very troubled look on his face and a deep V cut between his brows like a child's sketch of a bird is watching me intently, his back to the demonstration. I ignore him for a second, hoping he'll just go away, whatever his trip is, but he doesn't. He just keeps staring at me with a look both defiant and beseeching.

"Hey," I say, all "we're-at-a-party-so-we're-all-automatic-friends," but he's not buying it. His intensity is making me uneasy. "Hey," I repeat. "How are you?"

"I don't know," he counters, snaking his neck up, eyes narrowing suspiciously. "How are you?"

"I'm great," I say, and turn my attention back to the electric branches that grow and disappear in the darkling air. His eyes are accusatory slits. "And why don't you know how you are?"

"I don't know," he says. "Do you?" Before I have time to ask how I should know, he's up in my face, saying one of two things: Either he sayw "Set yourself free," or he says "Gimme some weed." I'm not sure which, and it's been teasing my mind ever since. I can still see his face, with its dark, hurt glare: far too overwrought for a mere approach to a possible pot connection; more appropriate for conveying a prisoner's angers and desires to his jailor. It was only there for a moment, though, for he left immediately without waiting for me to answer: another sign that he wasn't waiting around for me to come up with the requested greenery.

Now, if he did say the latter, of which I keep trying to convince myself, it would be easy to write him off as some grimy interloper who thought the Burning Man Decompression Party sounded like a likely place to score, and who thought I looked a likely suspect. Don't ask me why--whether it's drugs, a handout, a willing ear or all three, I always seem a likely suspect to the craven, the homeless and the chronically isolated.

If he said the former, however--"Set yourself free"--which I have the sinking feeling he did, he joins a long line of lunatics, loners and archetype lovers who have been channeling cryptic lines of existential import at me since I can remember. My head is filled with the ominous statements and riddling admonitions I have collected over the years through my interactions with those who, because of their detachment from the reality we all (attempt to) share, may have a keener connection to the other side. I hesitate to think that they are, in fact, more connected, though I feel it, because it would mean that there are legions of entities on "the other side" (wherever it is) who are trying to contact me, but not coming through clearly enough. Sometimes I feel like Denzel Washington in the movie Fallen, in which a demon chases him from one unsuspecting body to the next, so that every person he passes in the street turns to him with a sly, knowing grin and says something completely mysterious in ancient Aramaic.

My cracked oracles mostly speak English (some not as well as others), and I usually can't decide whether they're pulling these things they say from some etheric information bank or from the yet uncharted territories of my own head, or from both at the same time. Many have turned to me completely out of the blue and said something approximating, "You have an important contract with society. You'd better get to work!" There's nothing like a little nagging about an entirely obscure cosmic responsibility from perfectly mad strangers to keep the confusion at a roil.

The most indelible, and possibly most clear, of these communications, though it was anything but easy to take in, came from a radical faerie named Bluebell--a funny, tottering, pot-bellied creature with the mannerisms of someone extremely cute and tiny--who informed me before broaching the "special message" he had for me that he was both schizophrenic and a highly honored ex-military officer with past access to extremely delicate information. "That's the truth about the military for ya," he said. "They put loonies like me in charge of all the important stuff."

We were sitting in the small triangle of shade made by the patio overhang during a mid-June weekend retreat at Starland Ranch, the So Cal radical faerie digs, waiting for the blistering desert sun to dip below the horizon. We'd been friendly already. I like crazy people. Especially the ones who know they're crazy and simply take it on as yet another unruly component of their complicated lives. So we'd been chatting up a storm, because he was also wonderfully intelligent and witty; but what he said next nearly made me go screaming into the hills: "I am the owl of the desert," he said, "and you are my chosen messenger." Or something very near that. I was caught in stunned silence between howling with laughter and screaming with rage.

Now, normally, when crazy people (admittedly or not) start spouting prophetic gobbledygook at me, I turn on the ice machine--frosty glare, cold shoulder, icy tone--and they are repelled. I'm quite good at it. But for some reason I didn't turn it on that day. Maybe it was just too damned hot. And maybe I really wanted to get to the bottom of the great well of ominous declarations and directives that was constantly gurgling up at me from the lower depths. Inspired by the latter thought, I confronted him.

"Listen," I said, "every time I'm in any proximity to anyone insane or otherwise connected up to other forces, I'm fed a slew of sickly woo-woo slop, and I'm sick of sucking it up!"

He was very quiet for a moment, then turned his head coquettishly and regarded me from the sides of his eyes, teasing in a colorful drawl, "I might be able to help you with that." And then he turned serious all of a sudden and said, in an almost monochromatic voice an octave lower, "Yes. I've been authorized to give you some answers."

"By whom?" I asked in a snide lilt.

"By God," he said, calmly dismissing my sarcasm.

"Okay," I said, "I'll bite. Ya got me. Lay it on me."

He took me to a bejeweled bench under a spreading pepper tree (Now, why hadn't we been sitting in its copious shade before?), where he told me that God had told him (Yes, THAT God, not the Christian one, but the Jewish one--he made a big deal out of me being Jewish [officially, matrilineally]) to tell me that he had come especially to save my life and to help me do my job. He told me I was a minister of truth to the masses, in fact if not in name, and that all those messages I had been getting had been dire pleas from "my people" for a voice, for "my people" have no voice because they are too sick and tired to speak.

"My people"... I didn't connect at all with the messianic message behind his words--have in fact fought long and hard to rid myself of messianic urges, which is why I'm not capitalizing the word as is traditional--but he tapped a full-to-bursting mine of emotion deep within me that was centered around the sick, the insane, the forgotten, the downtrodden. I took one deep, sharp breath, then sobbed my heart out for what all the rotten greed and injustice has done to our garden and to us, its natural inhabitants, over the last couple of millenia. I felt silly about the impetus, but the crying was indisputably real, and meaningful and cathartic, as all releases should be.

So there I was with this now very powerful-feeling being who was plumbing the emotions about the human family that had been hidden behind my self concern for such a long time, and I was thinking, my mind hiding behind my veil of tears, that maybe he wasn't full of shit after all. Apparently, Aquarii can't help wanting to heal the whole world, and he was allowing me to feel that; but according to Bluebell, that was actually my aforementioned "job." My contract. Hmmm. My first task? To heal myself.

A-ha! I thought. Caught ya! This whole trip had boiled down to a cliche: "Healing starts from within." Yeah, thanks, I can read that in any number of pabulumized New Age tomes. I know that, but do I feel it? Yes, I'm starting to. And I'm on my own path with that, thank you very much!

I sat there post-sob doubting him again, then he keyed into another important aspect of my life that has caused me lots of pain over the decades, and that is my desire to be part of groups who constantly keep me on the outside: my own psychodrama, really, not theirs, but I keep playing it out. In this search for a psycho-spiritual tribe, I've made my way into the nether regions of every fringe you can imagine only to find that I was always out of my element, now matter how hard I pressed to get into it.

"Your people are not with the snake people or the faeries or the acid heads or the nirvana chasers," he said. "In fact, you have felt that your life was in danger at various times within these groups, that they wanted to get rid of you. And I'm here to confirm that all that is true."

A chill enveloped me, along with a newly spinning whirl of evening wind, because what he had said was right on the money.

"They don't know it," he continued, "but many of them are highly invested in remaining special and remaining outsiders, and they instinctively attack anyone who's not. That is the antithesis of who you are."

At that comment, I really let loose with some bawling and wailing--he had touched the thing that lies at the core of my belief in humanity: that we all have the power of sacred love and wisdom within us, and that we all must find our own ways to set it free and to change the universe in whatever small way feels most right to us. I believe we each have our own "contract with society," and it basically charges us with the sole responsibility of being exactly who we are as powerfully as possible while helping those around us to do the same. This is diametrically opposed to how our status-seeking, power-hoarding, hierachical phantasmagoria of a society now works, and I have always felt that I was grinding against the gears of civilization.

I told him all this in a rush, and he nodded, simply, once, with authority. Then he did something so powerful that I can still feel a surge of expansive energy when I think about it: He got very close to me and drummed my thymus (in the middle of the chest) firmly as he incanted what sounded like poetry in a language reminiscent of lost American Indian tongues, old Hebrew, and, yes, ancient Aramaic. The words were round and whole, like perfect tones on a musical scale, and he intoned them straight into my ear, like secrets. I understood the strange language as if by osmosis, and it got my emotional body revving at an even higher charge, so that I felt my being was caught in an all-enveloping multi-dimensional kaleidoscope of feelings that was crunching and reconstructing my core into a variety of perfect, fractalized forms that felt useful for enhanced energy channeling.

Whew !

link

That was many months ago, and the opening effect of the entire event still widens within me, whether its generator was crazy or not. In fact, it made me see that a little well placed insanity is a good thing when it comes to successfully countering the madness that engulfs us.

If you don't feel absolutely stifled, perplexed and flummoxed by the madness of this imbalanced world, good for you. In fact, GREAT! Tell us how! I know most of us are still working on it--reconciling inner and outer forces to gain a semblance of peaceful equilibrium. I can't give "my people" (whoever, wherever you are) a voice--that's up to them--but I can exercise my own with the power I know it has, and urge others to speak, think, and act for themselves, in their own interests--and yes, in the interest of the entire human race if they feel so moved.

As for me, I intend taking the probable advice of the scruffy young kid at the Tesla coil demonstration: to set myself free. No more crushing guilt, transfixing ego, visions of savior-creating sacrifices, or messianic fugues. Just me (and my shadow if it wants to come along). We're all our own "second coming," all our very own saviors and greatest teachers. Besides, if Christ was an actual person, he was most certainly trying to open up people to the same kind of inspiring, equalizing information; but those in power don't like effective discussion of its right dispersal, which is why he was killed, and his teachings twisted into one of the most erosive forces to personal freedom ever to assault the human race. I like to think that I have freed myself from the yokes of any and all religions, and any other proscribed system of faith, wisdom and/or feeling. Life ain't any easier this way, but it sure as hell feels a lot better. It feels free. It is free. I am free.

Set yourself free...

My gratitude to Bluebell, the wackiest, wiliest shaman this side of the Mississippi, and to that scruffy kid at the Tesla coil demonstration, even if he did just want to get high--and there ain't nothin' wrong with that, either.

Categories: backstory, emotions, faeries, freedom, meaning, mysteries

Get your water body waving

2005-12-05T17:38:00.000-08:00

This is a picture of what Dr. Masaru Emoto calls the "gratitude crystal," which he says represents our highest selves in manifestation. This morning my sister sent me this link to a wonderful mixture of art, science and spiritual activism that is connected to Dr. Emoto's theories about the consciousness of water and how it responds to human emotion and thought forms. The "Go Gratitude Experiement" is a series of 42 right-brained multimedia messages about gratitude by artist Stacy Robyn, inspired both by Emoto's work and by her own 42-day retreat into nature, during which she began to see the pattern of gratitude in everything.

Following is a quote from her vision statement:

Immediately I envisioned a wave of Gratitude rolling across our planet, re-connecting our water bodies to Love . Passed person to person, heartbeat by heartbeat, this wave would roll through our bodies - mostly water - to create a massive tide of change by simply focusing on Gratitude.

A vision to behold, indeed.

Quickly, I began to visualize what this wave might LOOK like, size-wise.
So I put a number to it - one million people. Here are a few calculations for you:
(Remember - on average, our bodies are 70% water)

One gallon of water weighs: 8.33 pounds
Approx water weight of 150 lb. person: 105 pounds
Gallons of water, per 150 lb person: 12.61

This means one million people gathered in Gratitude will create a 12.61 million gallon wave of water, weighing an impressive 105 million pounds, rolling across planet Earth.

No devastation, no destruction…just Love and Gratitude invisibly waking the heart of humanity.

If that piques your curiosity or revs your synergistic creativity engines, sign up as I did to receive the full 42 day tour of Robyn's artwork around this concept and symbol, and let's get that wave flowin'!

And then maybe you'll help me devise an event in which the entire world stops everything and laughs at the same time for ten minutes straight. Alternatively, they could all hoola hoop for the same time for ten minutes straight, to the same scientifically-constructed music. I just think it's going to take more than thought (i.e. a mixture of thought and action) to get some good energy flowing against the negative tides that tend to carry us along these days. And I can't decide whether more people would find laughter or hoola-hooping easier. Believe me, I run across some people to whom laughter is an alien concept, but then, not everyone can get the hip action going for truly effective hooping. What do you think?

Categories: art, evolution, meaning, transformation, visionaries

A good solid dose

2005-12-03T14:02:00.000-08:00

reality link

As we begin milking the weekend for all the comfort it's worth, pushing out concerns of the world in an attempt to make true relaxation possible, meditating on the positive: it's all going to be okay, it's not as bad as it seems, good will out, etc., I find myself instead longing to take a good, long, slow look at bitter reality. I want to take it in and feel it instead of attempting to keep it at bay, and reveal the ways in which the powers that be pull my strings against my silent will so that I can begin to see the strings, and snip them. Not that I'm such a puppet--far from it; but I can't help feeling that I'm still being boondoggled by the dominant culture no matter how free I feel my mind is.

With that in mind, I started reading my favorite blog-sized doses of reality, and soon stumbled upon a good solid dose worth studying and savoring on mediacitizen, where Timothy Karr, longtime investigative journalist and now campaign director of the Free Press, conducts "a crash scene investigation at the crossroads of old media and new." Karr is the best kind of activist--a smart, informed one--and his latest post is the most complete, well-documented indictment of the Bush administration for its "assault on the media" that I have read. It is also posted at the Free Press, and I can't tell whether the article is his own work or that of the collective Free Press staff, but no matter what its provenance, it's a piece everyone who is interested in the continued freedom of speech should read. It exposes the hijacking of our reality by the fundamentalists now in power in our country without too much excessive rhetoric, and does a good job of explaining the process of media disempowerment and the implications of an unimformed citizenry to the lay person.

And now that I'm a slightly more informed member of the concerned citizenry of the bitter reality that we all must alchemize in any way we can to keep on keepin' on, I'm going to take a tiny little dose of the blue pill and forge out into the glamorous, saturated colors of this gorgeous, two-dimensional Los Angeles day for a nice long walk into them thar hills.

Power to the people, people

Categories: politics, media, reality, transformation

Every day is cat blogging day

2005-12-02T16:24:00.000-08:00

Wheeee! - this is my baby, Tetsu, who turns six months old today. Here, he's wriggling in ecstasy, one of his favorite pastimes. He was a stray who my friend Jon picked up along with his mama, brother and two sisters (all of them completely different) about four months ago--now the two girls live with Jon, and another friend has the other boy. There are so many stray cats around that I was glad to take one, even though I wasn't quite ready, psychologically (who am I kidding? I'm never ready psychologically for anything...). I'm so glad I got over the slight apprehension I had and took the plunge into cat cohabitation. And so are most owners who may have been reluctant at first. Cats are complicated, fascinating creatures, and developing meaningful connections with them can be just as challenging and as rewarding as doing the same with any human (and often more so, I'm sure). Tetsu has added a new dimension to my life whose power I am just beginning to explore and understand.

I had never wanted a pet before, and he is my first. We have fallen deeply, shamelessly, head over heels in love with each other. He's my familiar, my little witchy kitty, and we talk to each other both silently and in our own code of snarls and miaos. He follows me everywhere, expertly weaving around my feet, sometimes leaping to my shoulder from afar with a conspiratorial glint in his eye and kissing my ear, or standing up on his legs to greet me when I get home. Aside from being a whirling dervish of mischievous, gymnastic, extra-sensory energy, he's also a little love bunny, who loves to be petted and scratched in those hard to reach places, and held and talked to. I love it when he curls his paw around my finger just the way a baby does. We've formed a bond that is deeper than I had ever suspected a human-animal relationship could be. I really didn't get it before I got tetsu. But I do now--I really, finally get the whole concept of "unconditional love"--so this is my one and only "Friday Cat Blogging," to introduce the new love of my life (who needs boyfriends?). If you'd like to see more of Tetsu and hear the truth straight from the cat's mouth--and not just on friday--check out Tetsu's very own blog, i am a cat too. As a nice complement to a certain puckish quality, he can be quite contemplative, spending long hours staring out into the blue as in the picture below, pondering eternity... or that squirrel running across the telephone wire, or that piece of fuzz stuck in the window screen....

Happy weekend to all from the Naked Animal and tetsu neko tallywack, the blogging cat!

Categories: friends, family, cats

Day Without Pity

2005-12-01T16:00:00.000-08:00

The best statement of one of December 1's top appellations (for others see here), World AIDS Day, came as a blanket message to all members of the online dating (ahem) service I use. It read simply:

Every year, people around the world designate December 1st as World AIDS Day. This day is set aside as a time of reflection--to remember the friends and loved ones lost to AIDS, to heed the lessons learned, and totake encouragementt from the progress that has been made.

We urge you to join us in speaking out about AIDS while we work to tear down
the walls of silence, stigma and discrimination.

We remember those we have lost and look to a brighter future for all of us.

It takes a gay man to be that dry yet that deep about it. This is something we live with every day, and have for over two decades. Today is simply a day when the grieving and fighting we do all the time is hit with the public spotlight. Ta da!

Next month, I celebrate the 21st birthday of my first HIV diagnosis, and, among a lifetime of other learned or instinctive survival techniques, the banishment of self-pity has been key to my longlasting wellness. Since the "Day Without Art" sub-moniker seems to have fallen by the wayside, I suggest a new secondary title: Day Without Pity. That's right, all you guilty liberals and clueless conservatives: I don't want to hear how sorry you are, or how badly you feel that so many people are dying. I don't want to hear some plastic newscaster intoning phonily about the great work that has not come to fruition because of the many dead creative types. And I especially don't want to hear President Bush spout yet more unholy propaganda out of his eternally lying mouth about how "compassion and honesty" will overcome the continuing global problem of AIDS. I'm sure he would be surprised to see those words actually put into action, and I'd bet a mint that he couldn't give you a proper definition for either.

And while I'm at it, I'd like to also add that it would be great if people would stop using red ribbons (or yellow ribbons or pink ribbons) to show their "awareness." Y'know what? If you're human, I'll just assume you're aware of the major issues in the world unless you're a total hopeless greedy narcissist (gosh, that sounds like some people I could think of). In fact, I think we should reverse the ribbon thing, and ask those who DO NOT stand in EVER-READY SOLIDARITY with the rest of the human race NO MATTER WHAT THE ISSUE to wear a black ribbon indicating that they think about no one but themselves at all times and that no one should attempt to bother them with anything that does not directly relate to them and their self-centered quest for status amongst the legions of the fellow self-centered. We could also institute a gray ribbon for good people who are just having a bad day.

Now, I'm not one to be manipulated into emotion by any outside force, and especially not by commemorative traditions, but this morning I woke up already doing what manhunt so kindly reminded me to do today in their polite message, and that is to remember. My newly-waking head was full of images of dead friends. They were having a party. I don't remember if I had been dreaming about the same thing, but when I opened my eyes, their celebrating faces were brightly flashing across my inner screen. And who would have been throwing the party but Fred? He was as pale and bleached and drained as he had looked the last time I saw him (helplessly lying in a hospital bed two days before he died, endlessly and expressionlessly watching I Love Lucy reruns the way a baby sucks its thumb), but smiling and as glamorous as he ever was on earth--which was more so than anyone you'd care to name, famous or not.

In fact, for me, Fred was a living integration of all 20th century culture and style clashes, both outward and inward. He was a rock-and-roll hellion with a kitten's soul, a bold self-promoter with a serious lack of self esteem, a jaded and beautiful loser with a dorky achiever's enthusiasm, and a bigger snob than any other snob could ever be when around other snobs, but a staunch believer in the power of the downtrodden masses. His sense of humor, as he showcased so brilliantly through his inexplicably hilarious staging of the 1980 Adrian Lyne film, Foxes, was an instinctively perfect blend of irony and earnestness that always made me laugh and cry at the same time. He played the Cherie Currie role, who was made an example of so that Jodie Foster and the other less famous co-stars could learn a big lesson about wild living, so he got to have a big dramatic death scene, which he milked for all it was worth and had the whole audience in stitches long enough for the laughter to become painful. And then he died not long after, in a slow, sad, unglamorous way.

I only knew Fred by sight for years, starting with the early 80s at the Odyssey (a new-wave teen nightclub that used to be near La Cienega and Beverly in L.A., which burnt down not long after my 21st birthday...), where I was a weekend interloper from Bakersfield hoping I was cool enough to fit in at the happenin'est hang in the big city. Of course, I wasn't. And in my mind, I was even less cool than I actually was, so I mostly pretended to be really into dancing alone while secretly yearning to be part of this or that group, whose antics I clandestinely viewed threw the frond of long, bleached bangs that hung in front of my face. I got away with it because dancing alone was cool back then when we were "New-Ro," or whatever it was, though I'm sure a lot of us learned how to look cool dancing alone in a very existential way just because we were lonely.

I remember very clearly seeing Fred for the first time, because he smiled a cryptic smile at me, whose question mark I carried with me for years. We were each standing on the side of the dance floor, alone, smoking a cigarette, barely, nonchalantly nodding our heads to the beat of Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart." It was my favorite song then, and it still is my favorite song from that era. The other night at a local gay bar (the Gold Coast, which happens to be the bar I used to stop at for a Gibson [God, how I thought that was SWANK!] on my way to the Odyssey all those years ago--it's still there, with the same bartenders and everything), A DJ who looked to be about my age played that particular song. At first, I was like, yeah, right on, now this is MY 80s, fuck all that other simpy nostalgia shit that's going around like the plague these days...and then I clouded over...and then I had an almost out-of-body experience of being back at the Odyssey over twenty years ago, feeling electricity run up and down my spine because Fred had nodded at me, and smiled that cryptic smile, making it clear that he liked the song, too, acknowledging that we both liked it, that we both got it, whatever it was, that we were both standing there doing the same thing, basking in the rich elusiveness of it all--a simple greeting between co-travelers on the same plane of awareness; and I burst out crying, right there at the Gold Coast, my tears blurring the red and blue spinning lights to deep purple.

So Fred's been around even stronger than usual for at least a few days, now. He didn't just pop up this morning because it was World AIDS Day, though I did spend the entire early hours seeping tears like a subterranean wall. His memory comes and hangs out with me all the time, the way he did in the last several months of his life, when I finally really got to know him. We'd met and hung out a few times over the years since the Odyssey because my 90s boyfriend, Philip, was a friend of Fred (tiny, tiny world, my dears). We even acted in a play together (Queen of Angels by Jim Pickett, another of the fallen in the long battle with HIV), which Philip directed; in which Fred played the mute sidekick of a sadistic ringleader, and I played the ghost of a beautiful boy who had died young of AIDS. But it wasn't until Fred found out that he was HIV-positive not more than a year before he went, and turned to me--already a "longterm survivor" all those years ago--for advice and support, that he really opened up to me, and we became friends. 1995,1996. Back then, we both thought we were on the verge of something big, like dreamers always do, and we became so open to each other about our feelings and ambitions and hopes and dreams and darknesses in such a short period of time that I'd even go so far as to say we became family. We were, thankfully, not in love with each other, but grew to love each other deeply.

When Fred died, I experienced a huge wave of guilt about still being alive for so long when people like Fred were finding out about it and being swept away before they had had a chance to adjust to the idea. He had a big funeral at a big-ass church where his many worlds came together, and then those of us from his late-night, talented angel, rock-and-roll tenderness world gathered together for a big-ass party in a big-ass suite of rooms downtown, where we danced our asses off to his seemingly endless collection of classic songs. At some point, I led the Hustle, as if we were part of some corny teen disco movie that Fred was satirizing from afar. Fred had been such a serious connoisseur and meticulous collector of his favorite music that we danced all night without a repeat, and the aggregate effect of all those songs that he had held so dear made me feel as if he had become part of the atmosphere in that place, and I drank it in, deep.

And I carried a bit of it outside with me--we all did, all of us fellow partiers, I think--and still do. And every time I think about Fred, I think, GOD DAMMIT, FRED, WHY'D YOU HAVE TO GO?, even though I know it's a futile, self-pitying question, and I cry a little bit: for Fred, for all the people I've known who've died, for all the people I know who are still alive, and yes, for me, a little, but also for our country and the world and the whole universe, whose current collective problems I know I'd have a little more insight into if more people like Fred were still around...and I'm crying right now, so I'm just going to post this motherfucker. No art today, in the tradition. Over and out.

Categories: friends, inspiration, tributes, glbt, HIV-AIDS, 1980s, death, music

Down the dumb hole

2005-11-30T15:30:00.000-08:00

I was cruising the internet recently in an attempt to gather information about my theory of the day: that the number of countries and world renowned thinkers who hate us is multiplying in direct ratio to the rate at which we're getting collectively dumber, causing an isolating ignorance that is perhaps the most insidious invader of freedom.

One phrase popped into my head: "Dumbing Down," or more precisely, "The Dumbing Down of America." I wasn't sure of its provenance, but I took it on as I do most such memes, as a clue from the collective consciousness. I soon found out that the phrase originated with lifetime educator Charlotte Thompson Iserbyt's book, The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, which indicts an elitist cabal of social engineers for making our children stupid systematically in order to create a new legion of completely mindless consumers and menial workers. If that sounds like science fiction to you, just look at how many other educators have agreed with, and applauded, her.

Now, whether or not you believe there's a totalitarian plot afoot by the moneyed elite of the world to turn the rest of us into drones for the satisfaction of their queenly coffers or not (remember, even paranoids are right 10 percent of the time), you, like I, if you know how to read and use a computer, are probably wondering why the lowest common denominator seems to be holding ever firmer sway over nearly our entire culture, and how on earth it continues to fall lower and lower. I sometimes feel helpless in the face of so much bluntness (hey, I get razzed even by my FELLOW ENGLISH TEACHERS for using "big words"), which is one of the various reasons I escape so often into the sharper contours of the dark side, where people don't go around in a fog pretending everything's okay. Finding a new kindred soul or even ranting with my friends (about the same things, over and over again) always brings a little light to the subject.

What really brightened things up that particular day was that my "dumbing down" search unearthed some of the smartest, most incisive writing I've run across in recent memory, yielding no less than five solid, non-repetitive pages of worthwhile links. Many of these links were to great blog posts, such as this one from one of my favorite radical anonymous sites, and this super-concise observation of the phenomenon by Bob Geiger, the blogosphere's Yellow Dog Democrat. Here's one by Shalana Millard for the Democratic Underground, in which she perspicaciously points out that the only thing scarier than the possibility of the radical right having stolen the election through fraud is the possibility that everyone (i.e. more than half of the voting public) really is stupid enough actually to have voted for Bush.

And here's my favorite of the batch, a beautiful manifesto about the problem, its causes and its possible solutions, written by Manuel Valenzuela for the Axis of Logic, a thoroughly marked crossroads of liberal viewpoints on modern culture. Valenzuela's piece has a bewitching cadence that is sometimes strongly (and charmingly) reminiscent of Yoda. It's the technique of beginning a sentence with an adjectival phrase that does it: Falsely happy are the ignorant, for they know neither what they know not nor that they know not. Things like that (though not that exactly, don't worry).

But outrage and eloquence prompted by the dumbing-down problem is not an exclusively liberal response. Here's an article from the conservative Eagle Forum that (with typical white male defensiveness) equates the dumbing-down process with emasculation, and here's one from right-wing talk show host Neal Boortz, whose comments I am surprised to agree with 100 percent.

The conundrum in all of this is that the liberals are attacking the conservatives and the conservatives are attacking the liberals for a problem that runs much deeper than the schisms between opposing political or moral (is there a difference anymore?) ideologies. We have all been giving up our own personal power in exchange for the shepherding comfort of a powerful civilization for so long that we have no concept of what the freedom to enjoy our own power might unleash.

But the dumbest mistakes of all in this hugely erroneous equation are people like me, who know about all this,know about it and feel about it in deep, resonant ways, yet willfully court denial in order to get by in our already stressful enough lives (thank you very much!), relying on some kind of vague spiritual/cultural sea change (it's bound to happen, right? turn, turn, turn...)while the fundamentalist religious fanatics who are hijacking our reality from all sides adamantly go about their almost instinctive business of sending us all even further down the dumb hole.

Being an idealist, though, I see the acts of some Democrats who are vocally reneging on their previous gift of imprimatur to Bush's war machine as evidence of a coming turn in the complacency-vs.-involvement tide. With this post, I burst through my own membrane of complacency into full involvement in my own destiny, and remind myself that right thought without right action amounts to right nought but rot on the hot dot.

Huh?

Anyway...Fly! Be free!

Categories: education, politics, conspiracies, culture, freedom, trends

Blame it on Plato

2005-11-29T17:30:00.000-08:00

jellyfished brain cells

What follows has turned out to be what amounts to a collection of thoughts pursuant to an autodidact's master's thesis on the subject of comparative philosophy and the nature of reality. If that sounds too serious for you, read this instead; it's a recent post from "Uncommon Denominators," Joe Kane's blog about his "peculiar struggle for a commitment to principle-based living (absolutes and ideals) as a young American in a swiftly decadent culture." It's mostly about movies, but we're talking about the same thing.

For those who don't mind following the truly necessary noodling of a right-brained intellectual (which means I take things in through the apparatus of the mind first, not necessarily that I'm brilliantly book-learned, though I haven't done too bad as far as the reading of world texts goes in my life; and also that I do it in a completely idiosyncratically creative, disorganized fashion [that's the right-brained part]), allow me to continue my quest for philosophical soundness.

In an earlier post I referred to one of my premier vital links, the Anarchology Research Society blog, as "a thoroughly academic philosophy that mirrored my own idea that every single thing in the universe, from the tiniest quark to the universe itself, is a true, integral whole in and of itself, and that we interact synergistically to create copacetic collective entireties." In Anarchology, these various entities are described singularly as "a truth moving through its freedom" interacting with other truths moving through their own respective freedoms to create collective, or "plural" freedoms in which they may move together; and these plural freedoms nest inside each other like paragraphs in books to form a protective shell of universally known stories that amount to a system of agreements that come to be regarded as the immovable elements of reality.

Hmmm, I don't know if I explained that very well, but it was a damned good stab. The far more erudite and scientifically rigorous Anarchology Research Society seems to be a small group of student and professor scientist-philosophers who are in the process of creating a new theory of life in the universe that redefines what we see and experience from the bottom up. I say "seems" because there is no information about the blog authors, except that they are indeed the authors of the blog, anywhere--and they don't answer comments. I say "in the process" because the blog leaves their theory hanging with a final entry entitled "What is Truth?", which ends with the final tantalizing lines:

So truth, even cosmic truth, is subjective.
We will continue this discussion of Truth in the next letter, 'What is Freedom?'

Now, what I mean by "from the bottom up" is the most important part of what I mean, because it strikes at the very heart of what is wrong with our world today (insert any take on that topic here, and I'll most likely agree). The "bottom" is the very first basic unspoken assumption that we all make when thinking about absolutely anything, and that is, in simplified terms, that any being is separate from its environment; when he looks at the world around him, he is viewing something different and apart from himself. This is the core import of what is known as Plato's Doctrine of Forms (circa 4th century BC), upon which all modern science and thought is based. On top of the viewer being separate from her environment, Plato also posited that the environment itself was separate from--was in fact but a shabby stand-in for--the pristine integrity of absolute truths, which were supposed to exist as actual entities in their own ethereal realm (somewhere outside the cave, in a realm where only the Philosopher Kings were wily and brave enough to wander...[harumph]).

It's interesting that I should have entitled my first book as a play on Plato's simile of the cave. I didn't know what I meant, really, back then, except that Plato's Garage was my way of philosophizing in a more than glancing way about cars and our symbiotic relationships with them. I didn't quite know what I thought about Platonic thought and what it has wrought, but since reading the wonderfully written Anarchology Research Society blog, I've realized that the subject-object worldview that Plato forwarded into reality so efficiently is in fact responsible for all of the schisms that manhandle, maul and haunt our minds, morals and civilizations: good and evil, love and hate, lustful and chaste, fate and free will... the list goes on and on. I also think Plato was an elitist, a philistine and a self-repressed homosexual, which thoroughly explains to my satisfaction his intense pushing of the idea that sex was an earthly distraction to be transcended in favor of more enriching activities, such as contemplating those precious perfections that existed elsewhere. Plato was basically the west's first famous self-hating faggot (just look at that face), and the schism between sex and spirit that holds the world in its murky grasp is the most insidious branch of the great river of thought that we somehow got directed into thanks to the dear ol' dysfunctional dad of Western thought (yeah, Plato), and in which we're still flowing, haphazardly, further and further away from integration into separation and conflict.

Argh, I need a mediator sometimes. Someone to bitch slap me when I get too fancy on my homely soapbox. The point is that there's an alternative to the Platonic subject-object paradigm, and it's just as old, perhaps even older, than Plato's deal. It is known in psychological parlance as subject-subject reality, as opposed to subject-object. The Anarchology Research Society gives credit for formalizing this way of thinking to Zeno, a contemporary of Plato's and premier member of a rival school of thought informed by Xenophanes idea that "all is one." Hmmm, very interesting. Sounds kinda new-agey, right? Jung also touched upon the idea of subject-subject consciousness, and these days, Harry Hay, who brought the idea to the cultural semi-fore through its integral position in the philosophy of the Radical Faerie movement (a gossamer, diasporic web of fabulous flouncing freedom fighters with whom I strongly identify; it's one of my sidebar's vital links), is credited with its re-introduction into the framework of human thought. It is also the basis of epistemology, and of ontology, both of which strongly inform such "futuristic" scientific things as quantum physics and artificial intelligence research. On the other side of the planet, and through osmosis on this one, too, now, it's responsible for the tenet of nonduality that dominates all Eastern philosophies and religions.

I believe that the idea of "all is one," also known as "omnology," is even more ancient than the ancient Greeks or even the more ancient Asians. Again, I hark back to the kaleidoscope of arcane knowledge that my Turkmenistani ESL student displayed last semester. We were discussing world religions, and he brought up the research of a Russian scientist who has been finding references in ancient texts to obscure phenomena, such as ocean currents and the exact movement of the stars, that scientists have charted only in the last hundred years. We spent that entire class period discussing the possibility that we harbor within us prehistoric, probably innate, connections to the kind of wisdom we now think of as being either ultra-complexly scientific or ultra-unprovably metaphysical. Proving nothing, we both nonetheless decided it was probably true.

That student was very good for me because we ended up having the sort of dialogues, ironically, through which Greek philosophers plied their theories. He helped me refine a lot of my ideas about the world through these impromptu lessons (in which the teacher became the pupil), and, in essence, led me in a roundabout way to the Anarchology Research Society, which finally pushed me off the fence about the effects of Platonic thought upon reality and its horrors.

What it all amounts to, in the end (or is it in the beginning?) is that I can finally, truly believe in my innate understanding of the "all is one" idea because the Anarchology Research Society has made my mind understand it. For someone who, unfortunately (I think [tee hee]), still uses his mind as the default filter for most things that fall within his radar's grasp (though I am getting better at letting my emotions do the walking and talking), that kind of intellectual gateway is key to a fuller self-understanding and healthy integration, both of which I'm courting with fervor these days.

If you're also a seeker of synergy and feel flummoxed by the insane indelibility of the schisms that keep us from being whole, but you can't seem to "just let go" like all the new agers have been telling us all our lives, take a look at the Anarchology Research Society blog. It may not have the exact same effect of opening previously-closed doors on you as it had on me, but maybe you can follow its signals through the Web to find your own intellectual links to intuitive urges. I'm not a hundred percent sure why yet, but I feel this connection is indispensible to our arsenal of attributes as we transform our reality into a more balanced and less terrifying one. It has something to do with another "New Age" (damn the denigration of that term through charlatan-laden marketing brouhaha!) notion about the merging of science, philosophy, spirituality and art into one universal discipline of creativity-nurturing and wisdom-cultivation. Or something like that.

With a sigh of relief, I'm glad to defer that topic to a later post, since I now have to get ready for my second shift at the ol' ESL "college," (Can I just say how much a split shift SUCKS?!) where my evening students will either be half asleep, ready for a nightcap (or six) or rabidly demanding serious grammar drills. I just love to be kept guessing, I really do.

And thanks to you fellow confused intellectuals and other interested bystanders for noodling with me!

Categories: transformation, philosophy, faeries, healing, holistic, synergy, omnology

Peddle that flesh

2005-11-27T12:33:00.000-08:00

Mommy, Mommy, I wanna be a human billboard!

Okay, I know I may be coming late to this phenomenon, but people are actually getting ads tattooed (some permanent, some temporary) on their bodies for cash. I don't know why I say "actually," though, since it surprises only some ativistic, prudish gene deep in side me somewhere. An outrage, I say! Have you all gone completely mad?!

But no, that voice rarely wins out in the long run. I was moved, if somewhat bemused, by this woman's story, which gets to the heart of the matter: Money is our collective problem, and we'll do anything to get enough of the stuff to live, even if it is degrading and dehumanizing. So there. As the highest-paid "living ad space" who is not a celebrity to date (the fad started in the early years of this century with a world-class boxer being paid $100,000 to wear only a temporary tattoo ad), she now has a permanent tattoo on her forehead that broadcasts the name of an online casino. Her price? A measly ten grand, but as she bluntly puts it, "To me, $10,000 is like $1 million." I'm more in the "$1 million is like $1 million" range, but I get her point. Money is hard to come by. And selling your flesh to the highest bidder is far more preferable to slaving away in some menial job while being grossly underpaid and casually oppressed by lower management dickwads. Yeah, I totally get her point. I'm interested to know if there's any fine print about how she has to respond when asked about the ad. I wonder if she has to give a pat, marketing-developed reply per contract, or if she can just say, "Go fuck off and look it up on the internet yourself."

Madison Avenue apparently sees this as an "interesting development," but not much more, populated by misanthropic philistines as it is. What I mean by that is that mainstream advertising must be offended by the in-your-face-ness (ahem) of the living ad space phenom because it involves far too much icky personal negotiation and agreement with the consumer, whom they prefer to keep at the long-arm-of-the-media's length and manipulate from afar. The puppet is far too culpable in her own string-pulling in the human ad space scenario for the taste of the tastemakers.

But for cagey companies like the afore-alluded-to online casino (I won't actually say it's name here, 'cuz I think I should be paid for that, like everyone else, tee hee), which brings the consumer in on the hideous all-encompassing joke of capitalism's ability to brand all that it touches, daredevilishly balancing lowbrow ironic humanism with state-of-the-art profit growing, it's a case of market-psychology synergy that is opening up yet another previously unpredicted niche in the ever-mutating global economy. And it comes courtesy of our sparsely-populated, but always culturally-enchanting neighbor to the north, Canada, oh Canada.

Here in California, I knew a few white trash godlings in high school back in the early 1980s who were way ahead of this trend--there was one with the Pontiac Trans-Am firebird insignia tattooed on his chest. And then there were the legions of random bikers who were willing to have the Harley insignia tattoed on their arms or (in truly mid-century macho fashion) on their calves. It's a working class tradition, really. At least now they can get paid for it.

If you think you're ready to sell your body to the man, check out this site, and this one, where you can register to be paired with advertisers who want to buy it, in the style of an online matchmaking service. Think about it: It's just like being whore, only you don't have to (get to?) have sex as part of the bargain.

Now that's progress!

Categories: news, culture, marketing, trends

Caressing the Conundrum

2005-11-26T15:34:00.000-08:00

art link

Every meditation or self transformation course, seminar or workshop I've experienced in my lifelong search for inner and outer peace has urged the development of one essential skill: neutrality. Supposedly there is an integral power to a neutral viewpoint that allows one to make decisions that are beneficial to the whole rather than to one side or the other.

Yet I've always felt an essential disconnect between the neutral zone and the world of action. When I find myself in a neutral state, whether through meditation or any other semi-conscious equilibrium management technique, I feel all-encompassing as well as completely isolated, and the urge to speak or act in any way whatsoever escapes me. Being neutral feels good because things don't bother you, but in order to reach that state, you have to step back far enough from the turning cogs to see that the whole machine really doesn't matter in the long run; and when you do that, the impetus to oil the moving parts and keep the factory running on schedule to meet market demand disappears. At least in my experience. If one lives in a quantum universe, how can one truly care about which side of the quantum envelope is opened as possibility becomes reality?

It seems impossible to decide what to do once one realizes one can do anything.
The sum of knowledge is the gap between what you know and what you know you don't.
The actions of commerce take place on the battlefield between ethics and economy.
The commerce of actions takes place between self concern and the good of the many.
Life is a fusion of matter and spirit that partakes of both but understands neither.
The mind is a wall between reality and illusion on which one scribbles grafitti.
Language is a technology we use both to create and to fend off the great unknown.
Even our most expansive theories can't untie the original knot of creation.
God is not an answer. All is one is not an answer. There are no answers.
Life is a fusion of matter and spirit that depends on caressing the conundrum.
It is lived most fully in the space between this and that, which has no name.

Meanwhile, the waking world demands that thoughts be named, decisions made and actions taken to further goals. So I think I'll decide to take a walk to clear my head--if only that were possible!

On second thought, who says caressing the conundrum is not sufficient action in and of itself? I think I'll instead spend my time more thoroughly investigating a blog I've just found that delights in the unabashed, non-stop caressing of the conundrum: Visible Origami.

Go ahead, live the paradox. Intuit the unknown. Quantify the void. Weave the mystery. Dislodge the mote in the unseeing eye.

And to all a good night.

Categories: philosophy, meaning, mysteries

A Great Deal on the Latest Realities

2005-11-20T05:06:00.000-08:00

A Wayward Guide to THE NAKED ANIMAL and his Vital Links

Oh, words are trains, for moving past
What really has no name.
--Paddy McAloon

link

Sometimes I get so wrapped up in the search for meaning in a meaningless universe and the struggle to succeed in a heartless system that it takes a steady, driving attack through many layers of bullshit to get back to my innate sensibiltites. And what are the innate sensibilities of the Naked Animal? They are simple; singular, in fact: The Naked Animal believes in the Golden Rule, and that's about it. Remember that one? Do unto others as you would have done unto you.

Yes, that's sophisticated English to some eyes, I know. In a recent casual survey, I found that nine out of 15 American adults over 30 could not tell me what the Golden Rule was, and five of those puzzled over the meaning of it for way too long once I uttered the phrase. Never fear, for there are thousands of other ways to say or describe it: What goes around comes around; What goes up must come down. Karma, some call it. You get what you give. It's the basis for all world religions, we learn it in kindergarten if not earlier on the secular side, and every pop star in the world has crooned about it in some way, yet real-world evidence of its machinations is slim. The best of us struggle often futilely to treat our small circle of closest loved ones with the respect we all deserve, while the stress of our daily lives keeps us from reaching out to people in need the way our hearts would like us to do.

Or maybe it's just me. I'm an idealist. And I'm not a frustrated one. I believe that consistently nurturing my ideals, in myself and in the world, is a worthwhile cause even if none come to fruition.

You really don't have to worry about believing in anything else if you follow the Golden Rule. Entrenched beliefs are harmful, anyway, as they can stop us from growing; one stays most salubrious with as few as possible blocking up one's circuitry.

What would a world in which the Golden Rule and no others in particular were meticulously followed look and feel like? Balanced, peaceful, full of straightforward, unsyrupy love. In other words, a hell of a lot different than the one we live in now. Our world's so out of balance that it's a wonder we don't go spinning right out of orbit into the nearest black hole. We can't see each other for what we really are or anything else for what it actually is because we don't even know ourselves. More and more people every year make tons and tons of money helping other people find themselves, or get in touch with their "spiritual sides" (as if they're flat, with two opposing surfaces); it seems like we're all struggling and pushing to get somewhere...but where? We've all been packing our bags for so long now that we've forgotten how to lock 'em up, send 'em through security, and actually board the flight.

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"Finding out is the booby prize," my comrade-in-arms Philip is fond of saying when I get wrapped up in the what, why, where, when, who and how instead of the everlasting now. That used to really get my hackles up. "But I want to know," I'd whine. "I want to know what we're doing here and why we're doing it and where we're headed, and I won't stop searching until I find out."

I still haven't stopped, but I've realized that the search is its own discovery. And since I've gleefully jettisoned my need for resolution, my mind has expanded, making room for new information, which can't help but come rushing in at about six megabytes per second these days (Thank you, Comcast!) if one is willing to open the floodgates.

One day, my floodgates wide open as usual, I set out to find a thoroughly academic philosophy that mirrored my own idea that every single thing in the universe, from the tiniest quark to the universe itself, is a true, integral whole in and of itself, and that we interact synergistically to create copacetic collective entireties. Within a few minutes, I'd stumbled upon "Anarchology," an unfinished symphony of philosophic thought (which I'll be taking a more thorough look at in a later post) that takes complexity theory one essential step beyond its analytical roots. In a balanced world, the collective realities we create would continue to multiply in logarithmic progression to the greatest benefit of every single component of the master sum; in an imbalanced one, they stagnate and crust and confine, causing a great deal of pain and malformation in all sectors, like cancer tumors.

To use a less harrowing image, I'll turn to the good ol' web. Ever since I was a little kid, I've had a strong native understanding that everything was intimately, multidimensionally connected. That's what Charlotte's Web was about, at least to me. Throughout my childhood I saw and heard and read echoes of this web analogy in everything. I only slowly realized that everyone else in the world did not necessarily think this way--an important understanding for any budding idealist, since one can't be an effective idealist until one sees that one's ideals may not reflect everyone else's. At that point, idealism becomes a sort of activism in that one is just another human fighting for what he thinks is right, no matter how lofty one's conceptual framework might be. My job now is simply to do everything in my power to repair the oh-so-tangled web we've collectively woven (and the one I've woven around myself); and if required, spin a new one.

In fact and also in a virtual manner, that is already happening. Not only was I able to find academic validation of my childhood-spawned all-is-one philosophy that day, but I also found an analog or annex to everything that obsesses my mind and feeds my soul. This is reflected in the "Vital Links" section of The Naked Animal's sidebar, which represents my "chosen reality"--you know, like a "chosen family" instead of a nuclear one. The connections there create a template for my own version of the new and improved human web. The sentences I string together here over the coming months will hopefully help to fill in some of the gaps.

link

With projects like BBC's h2g2, an online "guidebook to life, the universe and everything," fashioned after Doug Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and spearheaded by the author himself, the Internet is filling in lots of gaps very quickly. It is now, at the very least, an ever-more complex interactive catalogue of human thought and knowledge; couple that with the way the Web works, through synapses and connections that scientists have compared to frontal lobe activity, and we've got a virtual collective human brain in the making. We can already manifest almost anything we want, be it resonant or discordant, material or etheric, at the fiddling of a few buttons. It always thrills me when fantasy crosses the line into reality. Now where are those personal jet packs the space age promised?

According to Howard Bloom, probably the world's most active evolutionary thinker and writer, even more amazing things are just around the corners of our minds. Bloom is a scientist who is systematically merging science, spirit and art to create a "Grand Unified Theory of Everything in the Universe Including the Human Soul." Almost unbearably energetic and prolific, Bloom has already written more than any normal person could read in a lifetime. His website-that-ate-Manhattan, "Howard Bloom's Big Bang Tang Tango Media Lab," not only contains over 3900 chapters of the ever-expanding Theory, but also a multidimensional journey through the past, present and future of the human experience that fuses all disciplines, specialties and other paths into "a common search for creativity, empowerment, and truth." If you ever wanted a definition of life in ten words or less, there ya go.

There's enough solid thought and raw passion in Bloom's work alone to completely redefine reality towards a radically better way of living for the whole world, and he's just one in a large, interconnected circle of elastically-inclined geniuses, Buckminster Fuller, another unabashed idealist, being my all-time hero of the genre.

Bloom is running a close second, though. He comes complete with his own bullshit detector and a sly way with cynicism that covers the pessimistic viewpoint before its afficionadoes have had a chance to say nay. This is an important additional element to transformational science and philosophy in today's world, where cynical thought processes have become so ingrained that we are made to feel embarrased by earnestness the same way we're urged to feel ashamed of farting and burping--all three phenomena being entirely natural human processes.

I disappeared into the Big Bang Tango Media Lab for about 12 hours straight one day last week. Though I barely scratched the surface of even one of its many layers, I came away with an intensified feeling of awe and understanding that is now blending into a kind of instinctive wisdom that words cannot navigate.

Then I disappeared into the alternate universe of blogs, and it created the same transcendent effect. Here's a blog, for instance, by a respected but unheralded professor in Finland who's doing the same work Bloom is doing in his own quiet, academic way.

But it was the pulsating patterns of random insights and personal stories posted by my fellow less-informed seekers and observers that sent me, with a sort of scientific precisioin, into a state of ultra-productive lucid dreaming. The ability to engage in and produce a spontaneous combustion of wisdom and spirit is by no means confined to the superiorly-educated and well-publicized.

Now, I think I've introduced enough melding of science, philosophy, spirituality and art in the above paragraphs and the rest of my sidebar links that I don't need to philosphize about it any more than I already have here. My own philosophical construct (remember, the Golden Rule) is incredibly simple and I like it that way, though I do enjoy taking the old gray matter out for a brisk romp on a regular basis--don't want it to get flabby, y'know. Please explore my links at your leisure to expand your own inner and outer universes, and follow where they may lead--most likely to your very own chosen reality.

Meanwhile, I'll be doing what I think I do best: looking at the everyday in novel ways to reveal connections unseen from other viewpoints. Now that I've synthesized this cache of inter-connective information, I feel I can get on with it. I don't promise any arrivals at glamorous destinations, but I do guarantee an interesting trip.

Bon Voyage!

Categories: philosophy, spirit, meaning, omnism, anarchology, leaders, transformation

The Web is like a giant Petri dish

2005-11-12T09:25:00.000-08:00

A few days ago, my roommate got a link from a concerned friend about this drug, designed to combat homosexuality and effeminate behavior. I saw immediately that it must be a hoax, and clicked on the little "No on Prop 313" button in the lower right hand corner, which took me to this blog, concerning the writing of an article for the New York Times by an ex-gay born-again Christian fighting against Prop. 313, which would outlaw the use of the drug. The one post on the blog is many pages long and feverishly written, and the 136 comments the post received are equally impassioned. The whole thing is thought-provoking and even feather-ruffling, as well as being well-written and entirely fictional, and I'm sitting there going, Wow, this is a true specimen of native Web art--though it seems that many people have taken it for the truth, which makes it all the more scintillating.

Dig a little deeper and you'll find this: an intensive interview on homomojo.com with the creator of the blog and related "ad," one Benjamin Leo, a New York City engineer who also happens to be one hell of an experimental writer/artist. The interview works in tandem with the project itself to delve into the attendant issues (fear of homosexuality, the insidiousness of the drug industry, internalized homophobia--there are many) and to discuss the related topic of multidimensional art that blurs the line between reality and illusion...and as it blurs, it disappears for a moment, fusing the two in an embrace of holistic truth.

Now that's good Internet!

Categories: language, art, glbt, issues, blogs

The Elusive Groove

2005-11-11T13:49:00.000-08:00

The Animal has been extremely busy unraveling the mysteries of the universe while practicing the fine art of manic-depression management, the former being a piece of cake compared to the latter.

Being manic depressive is like being a tiny diamond needle on a vinyl disc that can't seem to get in the groove. You scratch through it as you skid up and down into wells and over hills on either side of it, and you get a hit of its synergistic power as you skip across it, but it remains frustratingly out of your control to stick with it and simply let the music play.

I used to create extreme sine waves with my dives and flights for radical experience and instant enlightenment, but now that I'm a little better than before, my deviations from the groove are less dramatic. I am able to traverse the dark and the light with the same intent I have always had in my rises and falls--to create and/or gather useful information and experience--without having to go nearly so high or so low to fulfill it, and in between I manage to surf the groove for days, even weeks at a time. The groove is not outrageous or any other adjective of extremity in affect. In fact, the groove feels just right. The music that rattles around your head is broadcast over the loudspeakers of your life when you get in the groove, and it feels just right.

Still, there's work to be done. When isn't there? Just right feels a little uncomfortable to a being who has never really experienced the Mama Bear phenomenon before. So the Animal still has highs that are a little too unstrung and lows that are a tad more grueling than he'd like in his attempt to reconcile his maniacal self to the gentle balance of grooviness.

This past week I allowed myself to become completely embroiled in the petty disturbances of self maintenance, most especially making a living. I started out on Monday exhausted after an over-indulgent weekend (Just in case anyone was wondering: Yes, it is possible to have too much sex.); and when I get tired, my always-lurking bile-spewing, pessimistic, unrepentantly harsh side takes over.

On Monday and Tuesday, I railed endlessly against the gross inequalities and foul misuses of power in this world like a demented preacher, screaming at the top of my lungs while smoking a cigarette, swilling black coffee and listening to psychedelic trance music real loud on my way to work. My poor, meek Asian ESL students didn't have a chance: If they weren't ready with an answer, I went to the next student, and the next, and the next, if necessary. And they were being blessed with none of "Rob's super-kooky ESL moments." Das Instruktor was on patrol, and taking no prisoners. One of my usually talkative students was so flabbergasted by it that he couldn't get one sentence out the whole week, and I relished it, as he was also spending a lot of those sentences airing his bigoted views about the American populace.

And now I'm relishing it even more, because I'm through with that school and its impossible Japanese-style bureacracies. The administrator there, a Japanese woman about my age, had made such a virtue of paperwork and formal etiquette that I have an ongoing image of her wrapped head to toe like a living mummy in sticky, red tape the color of blood, her words muffled by the wad that's stuffed down her throat. Thursday was my last day and, of course, I had about six pages of completely pointless paperwork to do. On Monday I'm off to teach at a school that openly shares with its teachers the fact that most of their students wouldn't be there if they could stay in the U.S. without a student visa, and trusts them to behave accordingly without having to adhere to a bunch of tight-assed rules and regulations. In addition, I don't have to either wear a tie or drive to the valley anymore. So life started looking a little better by Thursday afternoon.

On top of that, I got cable internet installed, which thrills me with its speed, and ordered a complete cancellation of all phone company services, though I won't be getting a new cell connection for a few days yet, and that made things feel even lighter.

And then, just to make sure I got the most out of my little trip down depression lane, I realized that I had no idea how to set up a local area network to include my roommate's wireless computer, even though I knew I had all the equipment I needed (namely, a modem, a router, and all the right cables). Both Philip and I nearly had apoplectic fits about it this morning, realizing that we were going to have to pay the cable company something like a hundred bucks plus twenty extra per month just because we were too computer illiterate to figure out a simple connection. I was so uptight about it that my heart was pounding way faster than usual, my nerves felt hot and I walked around the house screaming profanities like a Tourette's Syndrome sufferer, scaring the hell out of my sweet-as-hell cat.

And then Philip and I sat down together, made a few calls, did some prying and finally figured it out. It turned out that all we had to do was turn everything off, connect it all up the way we wanted it, then turn it all back on again. Et voila! Not only do we have much better internet accessibility than we used to have (SBC DSL) for less, but suddenly the wielding of worldly powers was within my realm of talents again. I felt in control of my own reality as I hadn't for--well, really, it's been a couple of weeks to tell the truth; a couple of weeks of feeling like life was nothing but a futile attempt at immortality, doomed to be crushed at the feet of the monsters who had hijacked our reality and recreated it in their own vile images.

But now I say, "Filthy Monsters, I DENY you!" and poof, they are gone, only misguided humans and misguided groups of misguided humans with impossibly large and dysfuctional egos once more. And I apologize to my roommate and my cat, though I'm still fiendishly gleeful that my repulsively racist now-ex-student felt the lash of my demon's hooked tail....

And now I've got some of my favorite music playing in the background, and I'm in the elusive groove. The groove is a simple balance between inner and outer forces. The groove is what people are talking about when they talk about living in the moment. It's the line between the yin and the yang; in fact, it's the infinity symbol that the two lines of opposing yin-yang entireties make when overlapped, endlessly spinning like a hoola hoop around the hips of your own gravity's center. When you're there, you're there; nothing more and nothing less; and there's little to do but enjoy the flow and its fluctuations, which flutter like bright moths on your event horizon.

Yet despite the fact that I get it, that I feel it through and through, feel the truth that it is and the gentle power that keeps it spinning, I'm really still not all that sure that I deserve to be here. I know that's silly, a trick of the ego, yet I can't help getting annoyed at that little voice that urges me to see myself as less than whole and perfect as I am.

Hey, you! Yeah, you, buddy, back there in the peanut gallery. You shut your mug while the show's running or I'll have to come back there myself and straighten ya out! Ya got it, buddy?!

There, that should do it. That's about it for manic-depression management today. More on the Animal's other recent endeavors (i.e. unraveling the mysteries of the universe) in the near future. Don't you just love the near future?

Categories: depression, transformation, work, groove

Final warm-up: a multiple metaphor

2005-11-01T13:37:00.000-08:00

"Skaters, this is your final warm-up."

This is one of maybe two- or three-hundred tunes, jingles and snippets that randomly take hold of my mind, popping up frequently like those flashing website ads, at the top of other thoughts, distracting my attention.

I was a figure skater as a kid (that's me at eleven in the picture--gold medal, woo-hoo!), and "final warm-up" was the term competition announcers used to signal our last minute of practice before we'd have to wait in the wings for our respective turns to perform. I was a high-strung child with no native self esteem to speak of, so I was working without a center, and no matter how prepared I was, you could always lay even money on whether I'd skate a flawless program or wipe the floor with my ass--I was roller skating, the white trash cousin of ice skating--same tricks, same everything, except we weren't on TV, we carried 20 extra pounds of weight in wheels, bearing and plates on our feet, and we skated on a rubber or cement floor covered in a creepy rubberized glaze instead of a pristine sheet of ice. At the Bakersfield Civic Auditorium, in the center of my hometown, where the state championships were held every summer until recently (they moved to glamorous Fresno), we skated on the basketball court.

In my adulthood, the once-dreaded term has taken on a cozier connotation--it signifies the beginning of the televised figure skating season, at which annual point I become a temporary ESPN2 junkie for the next six months. I've been following the epic evolution of the sport of figure skating, absolutely rapt, since I started skating at age seven. When I quit at fifteen in favor of concentrating on my education (and on the usual--sex, drugs, punk rock, etc., though I did manage to graduate cum laude from UCLA in '88), it became my vicarious way of participating, a phenomenon that is unsettlingly analagous to the way an ex-high school quarterback will latch onto Sunday football as a lifeline to the physical and mental rush of competition, and to the fulfillment of a talent that he still feels must be lying latent somewhere deep inside his aging bones.

I don't spend the rest of the year thinking about skating or keeping up with what my favorite competitors are up to, so the season sneaks up on me, which can be a delight. Last Sunday I was deep in research about the nature of time, when I was rewarded with a noontime bon bouche of Skate America--the season's first open invitational. Lots of skaters wiped the ice with their asses (and you don't just get bruises on ice, like in roller skating, but wet, half-frozen bruises that thaw into inky blots), but their were a few amazing highlights that sent chills through my nervous system. In fact, some of the best moments of skating that I've seen have made me bawl like a baby with wonderment and appreciation. Yup, I'm really into figure skating. It's the one geek card I carry. And if you're as big a nut as I am about it, you'll soon be able to read my analyses of the ongoing drama on my new figure skating blog.

But I wasn't all that tuned into the skating that was taking place onscreen that day. No one captured my attention the way it was yearning to be captured, so my mind got fixated on the phrase--"final warm-up." I repeated it over and over, silently, in the endless, surreal conversation I've been having with myself since the dawn of my cognizance, touching off a string of metaphorical associations.

First, it was ninety degrees in the shade after two weeks of downright chilly weather, and I felt that Los Angeles, always obliging when she wants to be, was giving us her "final warm-up" before slipping casually into a cool, damp quartet of months. YES, we do have weather in Los Angeles--it's simply custom designed to fit the ever-morphing idiosyncracies of the city and its population. Along with the skating season starting and the time change--always a discombobulating event, even if it does happen twice a year--this tender afterthought of summer helped to form a triple-headed announcement of a cyclical shift that is always profound, if familiar.

I also feel that I've reached my own "final warm-up" period. After a year of battling cancer during which I learned more about myself and my connections within the universe than I had in the previous 38 years combined, I have broken through many walls that used to seem impenetrable, and I'm finally taking on the management and development of my life with the vigor and dedication it deserves. I'm ready for my close-up, and I'm goin' for the gold. Now, I'm not sure what kind of gold, exactly, it will be, but I'm going for it nonetheless. No more false starts. I take my place in the arena and face the crowd.

Last night while I strolled through the Halloween free-for-all on Santa Monica Boulevard I was faced with my political self, and I took a good look at it for the first time. I have long pussy-footed around my truth so as not to sound too radical to people who are naturally more content with the flawed world and more solidly third-dimensional than I am, but it has done nothing for me except cause undue frustration, and I'm sick of it; we're in far too urgent a situation for such dissembling. The truth is that human culture is in peril due to America's lack of meaningful leadership. As the wealthiest country on earth, we carry a sort of noblesse oblige to lead the rest of the world, most of which looked up to and emulated the US until recently, humanely and creatively into the future. Instead, our country is being kneed in the groin by the same kind of fundamentalist fanatics that have disabled and disenfranchised much of the Middle East. And anyone who believes that Bush was actually elected to the presidency either in 2000 or last year is courting willful ignorance, which has probably now passed baseball for the title of America's favorite pastime.

So there I was entering the fray with my roommate and brother-in-arms Philip, who had thrown together a truly SICK gender-fuck drag at the last minute,
when I heard someone on a bullhorn yelling out that it was time for Bush and his incipiently theocratic regime to go, that if we enjoyed walking the streets half naked in freedom and pleasure, we should take a look at our government and see how they were threatening those rights and forcing passion or dissent in any form into the dark corners, where they can be quarantined (okay, he didn't say exactly that) - and that there was going to be a mass action tomorrow, all over the country, in which people would leave work at noon and gather on the main thoroughfares of the major cities and demand that this ineffective, narrow-minded buffoon of a CEO leave the boardroom of Americorp immediately, and that the corp itself be radically redesigned. (I use the corp moniker with impunity because there's no other reason for nations or borders than economic and commercial ones -- I dare someone to refute that.)

Despite the kaleidoscope of critters on the street, I was drawn to the voice, where I picked up some flyers and read all about it, poring over the words that so closely echoed my own deep feelings while I slowly inched through the crowd, oblivious to the mellow madness through which I passed.

I'm looking forward to cocooning through the winter with my healing self and my lovely, lovely figure skating, but it's getting harder for me to comfortably and casually cocoon. Life has gotten too prickly. I used to think that if I couldd make myself happy, then the fucked up world could go fuck it's mother fucking fucked up self (see here for how poisonous I considered civilazation two years ago, when I began this blog, then forgot about it), but after many years of trial and error, and finally running away from society altogether--and bang into my own mortality--I've found that a major reason for my unhappines is the state of the world. Especially our dear country. The beautiful, brotherhood, sea to shining sea and all.

Just over half of us voted last election, but most of us sure do find plenty of time to complain about what's going on now because of that. It's no wonder that the conservative press villifies the liberal press for being whiny--I hate to say it, but it's true. It gets tired hearing how stupid right wingers are and that they're doing everything wrong when we're willing to kowtow to them the minute they swing their little dicks around, as when the entire Senate wimpily gave Bush the right to march into Iraq. Let's cut the hypocritical crap and do something about it. It's time. This has been your final warm up. We are ready to meet the enemy. The cavalry is not coming to whisk us out of this on its intergalactic horses. Intention now must become action, for the sea of change does not favor underdeveloped currents. Posting about this here is my first truly concerted contribution to turning the tide of stupidity and intolerance, and I'm thinking about staking out my own corner along Wilshire Boulevard tomorrow (I'm thinking Wilshire and LaBrea, in front of the old diner there) to join the action whose tenets so moved me on that sweet, warm, final-warm-up kind of night that Halloween turned out to be this wicked year.

Happy All Soul's Night, and to all a good dose of lovin' from within and beyond.

Categories: politics, snippets, backstory, skating, holidays, weather, recovery

Wholly holistic wellness (Batman!)

2005-10-25T13:55:00.000-07:00

"Ora"

While celebrating my twentieth year of good health with HIV, I found out I had cancer--stage four non-Hodgkins lymphoma--and went through a year of both Western and alternative treatments, thanks to which I am now cancer-free. When I began, body misshapen and in constant pain, I figured that if I weren't going to self actualize, finally, that I might as well use the banana peel at hand to slip on out. Something in me was stronger, though, than whatever was dragging me down, so instead of seeking solace in death, I embraced the process of self transformation, employing all the techniques I had gleaned from my many years of searching for healing to guide me.

As the tumors and grueling chemotherapeutic side effects slowly melted away during the spring and summer of 2005, I had a breakthrough on many different levels. On the physical plane, I felt better than I had in years--my oncologist had estimated that I had probably been growing tumors for close to three years before I was diagnosed (in a state nearer death than living) in the summer of 2004.

And then something happened that still astonishes me: Through an extremely efficient course of psychotherapy, as well as the effects of bouncing back so successfully from the brink, I was finally able to both completely dissolve my festering resentment towards my parents and heal my ego. It may have taken almost forty years of extreme effort, but in the final days of these twin processes, my machinations felt as pragmatic and mechanical as unclogging a plugged pipe. Away went my fear, anger and pain down the drain, and in their place now flourish a great compassion for the people my parents are and an ego that is a functioning partner in my survival and success rather than a petty terrorist.

These two basic but resounding changes have been reverberating with positive energy throughout the several intertwined layers of my being: not only physical, but also emotional, intellectual, environmental, social and spiritual. I have not made it anywhere, nor is there anywhere specific to get to on this cyclical journey we're all taking, but I have made a major shift that I had been pushing for ever since I learned to walk, and because of it I am now changing--yes, and healing--at a faster pace than before. I feel that this is happening on personal, cultural and more etheric levels all over the planet--we are slowly (because it always happens slowly when time is of the essence), slowly evolving to solve inner and outer conflicts by widening our perspectives and courting synergistic, rather than antagonistic, relationships between our many selves and with others.

So...

THE NAKED ANIMAL is an ongoing analysis of my own journey toward multidimensional health and wellness, and an idiosyncratic documentation of humanity's analogous process.

The Naked Animal is concerned with continued human evolution, dedicated to creative exploration for the truth behind longstanding psychic and cultural conflicts, and intent on fusing the schisms they have created.

The Naked Animal courts ever greater universal synergy, makes connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena whenever possible, and never loses sight of the fact that cause and effect work in one great web that spans all dimensions.

The Naked Animal bares himself and the world to total, honest scrutiny because nasty old wounds need lots of fresh air to heal.

The Naked Animal encourages copious comments from all and sundry.

The Naked Animal is a laboratory, information hub and energy source for the many new paradigms that are springing up on the fertile, bowing backs of the dying old ones.

The Naked Animal is stripped down and geared for transformation, hungry and always hunting for further clarification.

The Naked Animal is always what it seems and often what it dreams.

Categories: healing, cancer, HIV-AIDS, psychotherapy, evolution

A day in the hive

2005-10-24T14:01:00.000-07:00

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Yesterday was a challenging day, as autumn came on full blast to heat up the melancholy swelter that always hits me on Sundays, anyway. I had just spent two relaxed but eventful weekend nights, and I felt like I was just starting to get my mojo going when the reality of Monday dawned upon my still-dreaming brain the minute I woke up to the cold, damp gray of a late-October Sunday. Now, I know it's no use perpetually living in the future, because you end up never paying attention to what's actually going on; but I just couldn't kick the dread of Monday out of my head yesterday, and I spent the entire day on the verge of tears.

One bright spot, though that didn't stop me from wanting to start bawling the whole time I was there, was a baby shower for my friends Lisi and Sandra, who are about to be the proud parents of a bountifully burgeoning bundle of joy. It even got sunny just for a couple of hours during the party. I must admit that I think lesbians make better parents than gay men, from my own experience. I don't like to generalize in general, but generally, women are more grounded than men, no matter what their sexual preference. I know women are the ones caricatured as flighty, high-strung and absent-minded, but men have their heads much higher in the clouds. And then they're also better bull-shitters, so they can make you think they're grounded when they're not. There now, GOD, does that sound stupid generalizing about FIFTY PERCENT of the entire human race! That'll teach me!

In any case, Lisi and Sandra are such a delightful pair that I can't imagine their child having anything but an ever-more-wonderful kind of life. There were babies everywhere at that party, from swaddlin' to toddlin', seemingly falling out of the sky to putter or pule, putting a new twist on the phrase "baby shower." Then there was the non-breeding crowd, who sat around eating ethnic meats and designer cupcakes and talking about the fact that a pet was quite enough, thank you very much. However, one guest with a Corgi (and various other pets at home) admitted she wouldn't mind having a few kids to add to the family.

I was bemused by my own feeling of being slightly left out, since I've always felt that my not procreating was the only smart thing for myself and the public-at-large. But for just a second there, I thought, sheesh, what's my part in this whole chain of life thing? And then I thought, Ah yes, the artist and the satisfaction he or she is meant to get from her or his creations...the progeny of my fevered brain, friends, is what I freely offer to that chain.

(And can we please come up with a non-sexualized pronoun to use someday soon, people?!)

Back home at dusk, I ditched my chores (doing laundry at a Sunset Boulevard laundromat on a gloomy Sunday is not advised for those with a history of suicidal tendencies), flopped down in front of the TV and watched perhaps the most insistently tragic and eerily beautiful movie I could have imagined: Dolls by Takeshi Kitano. The Japanese have a melancholy streak many rivers wide, and this movie explored several currents that run through it using the framing device of a dramatic and stylized Bunraku epic. It was stately, somewhat inscrutable, and full of moments that reflected perfectly the tension between the sweetness and the harshness of human life, and this combination of effects acted like a skeleton key to unlock the cache of tears I'd been collecting throughout the day. I sobbed heartily for a few minutes...okay, it was half an hour...and simply let myself be sad. Okay, I said, it's all right to be sad, cry it out, wipe your face, go to sleep...tomorrow's another day.

And it worked. I slept well; woke up early--but not in any better a mood. I still dread Mondays, and I do hate playing the role of the "Everybody's Workin' for the Weekend" drone. And yet there's something... somehow...soothing... about it, too... ... ...twitch twitch...buzz buzz...the queen is calling!...must feed the hive...buzz buzz...twitch twitch...

Categories: emotions, friends, film, Japan, work