Wednesday, March 16, 2005

Poems for Mara-Arya and Lady Benzedrine

Mara-Arya and Lady Benz are finally going to meet each other in a couple of weeks at Bosch!!!!!!! I'll be absent (you know, whole nobel conference for burgeoning geniuses in Paris and all that.....) but I thought I'd share a couple of poems inspired by the yin-yang of my poetic heart. In the past year, M.A. and L.B. have more or less ben the feminine essnece in my life, and for that, I'm eternally grateful.........

Have a great conference, oh, and arya, try not to fall on your ass this time!

Love ya's.....
PALMS



My wife reads palms.

She holds them up in front of her face like a child’s
first Christmas ornament her eyes
tracing ridged constellations across invisible
boundaries planted in the recipients palm.

“Think of it as a photo album of everything
you have ever felt, a biography of touch.”
She says smoothing my fingers into a placid
oath pledging allegiance to latitudinal

skids fenced across the limp fruit of my wrist—
a dashed horizontal trench, calculus of light
skin blushed into the coral pulp of thumb.
My wife blinks into a pond of fingers

Smiles across the peeled callous shell
drip of wood, the season a father
instructs his six year old how to clutch the winged
timber of Louisville slugger.

The glimpse of chin hushed over a bubble of small
knuckles chanting rote bedroom introits
visualizing the cumulus squeeze, the electric
nighttime bolt of deity.

Or the scratchy anxiety of Homecoming autumn
errant scabs nervous balm
oyster hands oblivious how to navigate
the edifices of the female body.

My sins, of course, she can see those too.
A fish line casting ripples
below the surface of pigment cropped
lid—toolbox of lies

She espies the denim rags of my vocation
greasy dead-end splats daubed
fingertips waist slumped over a rusty
hood like a question mark all

day tinkering with oily machine innards all
my life—a failure.
My wife tells me not to worry. That the curved
crescent bow swerved

cul-de-sac assures me covenants of laughter
the quiet hush of spring,
the secret hymn of a husband still getting-off
while he observes his lover

draped in the calm still morning quietude of winter
when gruff moisture abandons his
sentences in alphabetical buds, licking the salt
white from her thighs.

Sunday, March 06, 2005

I'm such a romantic sop at times it's not even funny.....

"The Passionate Shepherd to His Love," by Christopher Marlowe.
The Passionate Shepherd to His Love

Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That valleys, groves, hills and fields,
Woods or steepy mountain yields.

And we will sit upon the rocks,
Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks
By shallow rivers, to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.

And I will make thee beds of roses,
And a thousand fragrant posies,
A cap of flowers and a kirtle
Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle;

A gown made of the finest wool,
Which from our pretty lambs we pull;
Fair-lined slippers for the cold,
With buckles of the purest gold;

A belt of straw and ivy buds,
With coral clasps and amber studs;
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me and be my love.

The shepherds' swains shall dance and sing
For thy delight each May morning;
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me and be my love.

Wednesday, January 19, 2005

Stuck up ShitCreek without a paddle (ii)

.....Things do get better. Mom loaned me the two hundred bucks I needed to splurge on books. I sit in front of GORGEOUS Niki LaMontagne in Seth Katz zany Grammar for verbal masochists--Niki (not Hippie-Nikki, for those keeping tabs of my tottering love life) is studying to be an elementary school teacher, hails from Minnesota, has shoulder length chestnut hair and a face that looks like an unblemished snowfield on Christmas Eve. I could feel her breath clouding up the back of my neck all during Katz' introduction to preopositions and pronouns.

Awwwwwwww!!!!!!!!

Wittle-Davey-has-a-whittle-cwush.........

I also have Prof. Chambers for Fiction class. There was a mix up in directions and half the class met half a mile away in the GCC. After fifteen minutes of menial patter I volunteered to hoof (more like sprint) the distance to Bradley Hall where I discerned that class was already in progress.

Chambers is an old school Harvard graduate and a distnguished Veteran of the literary scene, and when I arrived to class, out of breath, Chambers asked me simply, "Where the fuck have you been?" (Those were his exacts words).....followed by,"Well delegate, run back over there and round up your truant friends."


Monday, January 10, 2005

Live, Damnit!!!!!!

Uncle Jack's i.e., J-London's Birthday is WED!!!

Jack London said, "The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time."


Also, I need to send a shot out to my brother Joe. Joe has long red hair, wears thick glasses, smokes cigarettes, drinks like he lives inside a fish bowl....Joe always has a smile plastered into the freckled dents of his face. He is the first to crack jokes in public--he is a perennial college student, writer, guitarist, dilletante poet....Joe received a full-college scholarship in gymnastic and Diving and ( oh, yeah) Joe scraps around campus on crutches. Joe lost his right leg to bone cancer when he was nine....all this and he still can do a back flip off a hi-dive with one foot or "his tail" as he calls it....

Joe's making plans to go down to Tennesse. His ambition is to be the first ambutee to traverse the Appalatian trail. Try telling me that he won't succeed.

ATTA boy Joe!!! Maybe its just the girls I date, but I'm tired of always hearing people bitch about petty material driven commodities. Never once have I heard Joe grouse about his leg--not once in the two years I have known him have I ever seen anything less than a smile and a stately nod.

Thanks JOE!!!!!

Your antics inspire me to, in the words of the late Amanda Davis, "Write like my life depended on it!!!!!"

Wednesday, December 22, 2004

Let Me Sleep It's Christmas Time--1997 (ii)

I drove and I smoked. I chased golden splashes of autumnal light. I took deep slurps of java. Occasionally I fired up a cigar, zipping down a forgotten country road, wondering what would happen if I left everything behind me. If I discarded the worthless putt-putt I was steering behind an abandoned Silo in a small town. If I hopped a train headed west, everything I needed stored inside my fingertips; stored inside the wild contours of my heart, the picture of my beloved crinkled inside the folds of my wallet.

I mused over Buddhist adages--how the Dhamapada insists that the further one travels the less one knows. How my mentor Mark-Andrew had a tatoo of the phrase, "He who does not know where he is going, will go furthest," eteched into his flesh.

I clung to these adages like a life vest as I traveled into the open pastures and harvested meadow land christening the majority of my state. I then laughed out loud, thinking of mock X-rated adages we had memorized over lunch trays in junior high.

Confucious says: It is good to meet girl in park, but better to park meat in girl.

"Life," I thought, pumping my elbow as I reeled down the drivers' side window and yelled out into the thick cool flaps of Novemeber wind, "How serious can you take it?"

I had no itinerary, no destination, no port. The gravel swerves and tortuous sways of the road shepherded each subtle tilt of the steering wheel. I passed through towns with population less than three hundred. A water tower and a Casey's General seemed to be the social hub for the entire county.

I was lost, yet I had never felt so sure of where I was going.

I've always secretly despised individuals who could make it from point A to point B with such ease and facility. Despised them then, anyway. I abhorred my siblings for escaping the genital wart of P-town; hated them for accomplishing something with their parental approving artistic medium. I hated peers who could attend college classes without having to work full time. Hated them until I read the introduction to William Gaddis' RECOGNITIONS where author William Gass posits that art, like life doesn't obey the linear trek from point A to point B--It's more like you're on the Eisenhower in Chicago during rush hour and you've missed your exit. You can hear the clamoring din of gridlock surrounding you. You've already gone through a pack of cigarttes and you're trying to shovel through the glove compartment to locate a map--to find out just where you are. The cell phone is ringing off the hook; whizzing an annoying tune your ex-girlfriend programed because the theme song from DAWSON CREEK gives her romantic nostalgia. A grandmother driving a Mercedes behind you is giving you the finger and just as you locate where you think you are headed on the map--you realize that you are holding the map upside down, and then you realize that it's not even the map of your own state--it's not even a map of your damn country--it's a map of Canada and all this time you THOUGHT you knew where you were headed, you really had no fucking clue.....Yeah, Gass asserts, life is like this, and thank God.

I continued to drive, the faster I drove the more time seemed to melt into a button of past experiences that no longer seemed to mattered. I thought about lovers, about poetry, about the concept of an aged, dottard God whose meaning seemed to differ from continent and tongue yet whose message remained constant. I thought about the borders of language; about universality of physics-- the cosmological tilt of the planet; our solar address, the aquatic bulb of planet earth, heavily turning its countenance of riddled land rashes into the solar lens of a nuclear hearth 93 million miles away.

Throughout his inspiring creative-surging lecture series Joseph Campbell notes the spiritual importance of a "Sacred Place"--a place of "spiritual incubation" a palce where you are free to be completely yourself--a place where you can let the long tresses of your hair stream freely from your skull.

I've dubbed my sacred places, with respect, by the moniker"vagina"--a place of pyschological rebirth; that golden November afternoon I landed in one of my vaginas--and I emerged different, changed, reborn.

Someday I plan on writing an autobiographical account entitled "Matthiessen Grace" about my sojourns to Matthiessen state Park, located near Ottawa, Illinois. It is my vagina--my creative womb; a place where I can let my untethered soul soar naked amongst the thick stalks of wild trees.

Everytime I leave Matthiessen Park something changes. I come home changed. I come home to new lovers; new employment--one time, to the sudden death of my father.

The park is arrayed in wildlife vectors--a huge waterfall coasting through the center of a park--hollow dells; a dented geological souvenir of the last Ice Age that somehow escaped us.

Over the years I've promenaded under icy waterfalls, skipped across hidden paths, bathed naked with hippies in the nearby Vermillion river, smoked weed with with peripatetic gypsies, felt at peace with the earth.

That Novemeber afternoon seven years ago, I ended up in Matthiessen State Park, about two hours north of Peoria. I was all alone. I escorted my heavy thoughts beneath the vacant garments of skeletel trees limbs. It was autumn, rich with hard-candy leaves; bouquets of lavender and orange flames raked across the pasture in a tidal wave of leafy foam.

Deer brushed throughout the park that day. I counted more than fifteen brown blurs cantering from the corner of my eye. I sat in front of the lower dells, watching water gush and flow from the bottom of the falls. I was all alone, my heart bleeding down my chest, into my stomach, feeling, for the first time, full.

I left that the park that night late; the indigo eye-liner sky gently sealed its lids into darkness, I drove home. I removed the photograph of Megan and instead thought about my co-worker, Jana; the girl I flirted with incessantly at work. I drove home, still smoking, still skiing through speed limits, but I drove home and returned to that place I had I had left ten hours earlier, that palce that I seemed to be coming back to after all this time.

Monday, December 20, 2004

Holiday Blogg-Nogg

Spent the last few days traveling around Illinois, engulfed in a constant stream of holiday commerce. Merry Christmas Migraine. Finished all my Christmas shopping w/out going too much in debt (indulged court side seats at the Bulls-Celtics game this coming January--holiday splurge for myself and my best friend, fellow sports writer John "yer mom's SO HOT" Danish)....

Bumped into my ex-girlfriend Kristina in Barnes-n-Nobles. I hadn't seen her in about five years and I didn't recognize her. She blinked her eyes and called out my name and I shrugged my shoulders unphased. She was seven months pregnant ( !!!!!) and has been mara-married for about three years. My mom was with me--Mom always LOVED Kristina and after accumulating the gall to re-introduce myself to the girl I took to East Peoria's 1996 prom;(Memories to dancing to "KILLING ME SOFTLY") after staring into the blue-willow pools of her eyes and feeling blessed that I don't have a morgage and a family to furnish with my unfinished novel, I told my mom that, "Ooops, there goes 'yer ex-daughter-in-law."

Mother and Kristina have always had a Ruth and Naomi type of rapport. When I finally broke up with Kris, I think my mom cried more than I did. Actually Kristina has a fat ass (sad but true) and on prom I kept picking her fat ass up and twirling her around, as if her Lane Bryant assenting torso were the width of a baton.

I got a hernia two days later.

It was weird. I guess sometimes the romantic residue of a person stays inside you even though you'd rather they leave. One time Kristina and I were watching a video in her parents basement, having a typical high-school post-prom pelvic thrust make-out session and later on the night, after I kissed her porcelain astro dome forehead goodbye and guzzled my vehicle across the banks of the Illinois river, only then I noticed that sometime during the night, Kristina had doffed her necklace, a sliver cubed K, and had clipped it around the contours of my own neck. I have no clue when she could have done this--it wasn't like I was conciously monitoring her every slight feline movement--but sometime that night she pinned her love around my neck and I didn't realize it until hours later.

Seems like a metaphorical mirror of life--shit happens and you don't realize it until later---the ramification of our every crazy longing--our art having effects on total strangers.

Today at lunch I was reading proofs for my professor upcoming "dazzling" novel WHITE LIGHT. I had a batch of my own poems scattered like leaves across the table. One poem was called AFTER SEX MY GIRLFRIEND AND I TALK ABOUT WHERE WE WERE WHEN CHALLENGER EXPLODED. I wasn't paying attention and the waitress (whose name was also Kris) told me abruptly: "I was in fourth grade."

I had no clue what she was talking about until she pointed at the title of my poem. I didn't intend for her to read the poem, but she kept on my prying.

"I was in first grade" I told her.

"They took us in from the cafeteria. They had it playing in all the classrooms." She said.

"Everyone made a big deal because a teacher was in space." I said.

After I saw Kristina last week--I swear--it felt like I was wearing that unsuspecting silver necklace once again. I could feel the cold steel slinking down my neck as I watched Kristina give my mom a hug (?) and then lumber, very pregnant, out of the wooden dentures of the bookstore. All the joys and lies of that dubious summer came back to me and I could feel her--her clean mouth and sunset eyelashes--her silence--could feel all of this, as I made a lame joke to my mom about the one that gottaway......

____________________________

Early in BEFORE SUNSET Jesse (Hawke) informs an interviewer that he wants to write a novel that takes place solely during the discourse of a pop song. I've been having writers block lately (which has transitioned into writers avenue; writers suburbia; writers continent) and so, as a holiday activity, I figured I'd plagerize this idea. The pop song is called "LET ME SLEEP IT'S CHRISTMAS TIME" is one of Pearl Jam's most beloved B-sides. I'll let the bloggs speak for themselves, but it'll cover a young man looking for himself around the holidays--ardently searching for joy....

Tuesday, December 14, 2004

Alpha and Omega Omlette

Showed my screenwriting teacher the romantic see-saw of BEFORE SUNSET/BEFORE SUNRISE. He told me that, seeing Julie Delpy on screen, he felt that, if he could some how touch her--she would save him. Heal him.

Watching those two movies again for me was weird. It was the first time watching BEFORE SUNRISE since multiple grunge-infested viewings in the mid-late nineties--In real life I'm OLDER than the two lovers (yet I still feel twelve, perks o' my profession) and watching the movie I felt older; or at least emotionally mitigated. It was interesting.....

Monday, November 15, 2004

Look wayward Father....

It's Novemebr 15th. My father would have been 57 today.....


Dadaism


First syllable sacrificed inside crib’s wooden prison
Vision strayed by stringed mobile heaven
Tip of tongue slowly combing against my soft palate

Scraping out forged syllables, collections of warbled din
Subconsciously ferried back into the world
“Da-Da.” I squeal, swirled by plucked verbal arpeggios

Stretched lips coated with pockets of pleasurable drool.
“Da da da da da da da da da.” I chant
Amused by my babbled nocturnal pushed out hymn

Voices reverberating against pastel oceans of childhood
Lotus tongue blossoming inside
Oval mouth, dank hovel of infancy burrowing words

At this time in my life have no other particular meaning
Their Alphabetical slants and curves
Sloughed naked, the invisible marrow of language

Oblivious I am ordering the towered form of the Father
To appear in the attic above my vision
Unaware my mantra has any other particular meaning

Than breath loosely attired in the slim bib of sound
This was not suppose to be the first
Cohesive word that slipped out my bubbly orifice

It was suppose to be a request for the maternal scent
An innate longing to plug
The coils of the umbilicus back into my swirled navel

Fasten the bridge inside the fertile maternal goddess
Between whose thighs I slid
A scatter of diced chromosomes late for the harvest

With breadcrumb lips and hirsute beard his shadow
Shields, his limbs coddle
His son-- animal whose limbs have been reaching

Up, into the ceiling, waiting for the scent of Father
To hold him. All this time
Saying his name without knowing what was meant.

Much later in life I optically shuffle over the origin
Of my first jarred rasp
Definition of the supplication for union with Father

Word randomly culled from French-German dictionary
By self-deemed artistic prophets
Constituting a noveau movement whose apparent meaning

Expressed polar opposites of what was initially meant
How I realized this too late in life
How much evil there is in a stick light

How sin can bleed baptism into a wayward vein
Come a fourth-century later
Yang freshly unfurled from the silhouette of Yin

When I found myself overlooking the crib
An embalmed echo of my first sound
A casket grin, never to hear those words again.

David A. Von Behren
-from VITRIFICATION
2003, SIZTA in a SUNDAY DRESS PRESS

Thursday, October 28, 2004

Got a light?

My favorite poem about smoking by one of my favorite poets Billy Collins. Guess this poem only applies to the devout smokers such as myself and Lady Benz and to (hack-hack) excuse me (haria)....

The Best Cigarette

There are many that I miss
having sent my last one out a car window
sparking along the road one night, years ago.

The heralded one, of course:
after sex, the two glowing tips
now the lights of a single ship;
at the end of a long dinner
with more wine to come
and a smoke ring coasting into the chandelier;
or on a white beach,
holding one with fingers still wet from a swim.

How bittersweet these punctuations
of flame and gesture;
but the best were on those mornings
when I would have a little something going
in the typewriter,
the sun bright in the windows,
maybe some Berlioz on in the background.
I would go into the kitchen for coffee
and on the way back to the page,
curled in its roller,
I would light one up and feel
its dry rush mix with the dark taste of coffee.

Then I would be my own locomotive,
trailing behind me as I returned to work
little puffs of smoke,
indicators of progress,
signs of industry and thought,
the signal that told the nineteenth century
it was moving forward.
That was the best cigarette,
when I would steam into the study
full of vaporous hope
and stand there,
the big headlamp of my face
pointed down at all the words in parallel lines.

-Billy Collins, Sailing around the room alone

Friday, October 22, 2004

"Laughed and made love and were born and died"

"I remember in college listening to a professor explain that many painters chose colors that were in fact far more muted than the actual, outside world. The real world's palette was much closer to a sunny Monet than to a pallid Pissarro. It was as though painters were afraid to be so bright, so exposed, so opened to criticism. This always struck me as it relatd to fiction writing. In the real world, experience and passion are intense. People loved intensely, grieved intensely, laughed and made love and born and died, and all of it was pretty intense. Yet so many modern novels seemed to miss that--even to deny it. In modern fiction everything was distant and intellectualized. Relationships started and ended and you sighed, yes yes, so true, and the book was over."

-Dan Allan, author of Lisa33

Saturday, October 16, 2004

"It Signifies a Search for Truth, for Enlightenment, at the same Time."

Hello Brother D,

*smiles*

It was such an interesting dream. I have been going through your blogs regularly and I found this just before I left for work. Because of Ramadan it's quite a sleepy place right now and activity is low so it gives me time :)

First of all amazing dream. I must say it is definitely interesting to find someone else dreaming about someone who's like their 'universal dual'. I'll try to decipher this dream to the best of my abilities. Here goes.

" Perhaps you are not getting enough love in your active life which is usually what dreaming of falling in love signifies. Also more importantly it signifies a union. A union of both the masculine and feminine aspects of yourself. However as I read I really do feel there's the strong element of union in the dream.Passion runs through you deep and you accept it [the hot lesbians] and you find that you are trying to find out who you are as a writer and develop your Self through this process[the workshop]. Her presence there makes it seem as if you are at peace and finding a harmonious co-existence between what she represents and what you are. I believe she is your eternal muse. She wouldn't have a name as yet perhaps but most definitely as you find yourself exploring the creative realms of this existence she is connected to you by the base of your existence. Basically it shows in ways that writing is your essence and this 'muse' is an integral part of you. It also shows how you have come to be at peace with her.

However you may not be happy at all in reality hence her presence in your dreams to compensate for the lack of it in the awake state.The presence of a swimming pool shows your need for love and that you'll only be happy when you truly find it. You find yourself re-evaluating your relationships with people close to you. Perhaps you find Uncle Mike to be at the centre of all this and you realize that things around you might be changing in ways and also that you might actually be doing all you can to please him.

People you come across are opening up to you in ways that you probably don't understand. You feel that almost everyone is falling in love or finding a sort of peace in ways. People around you moving into it faster and faster, but you are slowly finding a sort of peace with your muse. It feels as if you in the process of seeking harmony with your elusive muse you don't mind what the world does. While with her you are comfortable with who you are in society keeping your clothes on, and you don't really need to change.

It could be that you still see the side of yourself when you were a child coming back. The innocence returning in ways. The person youwere would've surely grown up to be just like your father was. It's as if a part of yourself realizes it and realizes that there has in someways been a diversion of paths but you are comfortable with it.

However you also find yourself increasingly dependant and there isalso an explicit need for a fatherly figure showing in ways in the dream.

The dream shows that there is a recognition and approval for your harmonious existence. You and your dual are getting recognized by people you don't know and people you come across. It also is helping you come to a sort of peace. This aspect of the dream is quite literal and you do find yourself surprised that you get support and recognition from people you don't see on a day to day basis.

However as the dream progresses it seems as if you are being torn apart from what you truly love as you progress with life. You are returning to where you began from on this journey and it's taking youacross a turning point of your life. I'm not sure how much of this is true but it seems though that there is going to be a major change in your life and you do sense it. It's interesting how the previous dream and this dream both point to that. A major change and progressing in this change seems to be taking you away from what you are recognized for
actually be doing all you can to please him. People you come across are opening up to you in ways that you probably don't understand. You feel that almost everyone is falling in love or finding a sort of peace in ways. People around you moving into it faster and faster but you are slowly finding a sort of peace with your muse.

It feels as if you in the process of seeking harmony with your elusive muse you don't mind what the world does. While with her you are comfortable with who you are in society [keeping your clothes on] and you don't really need to change. It could be that you still see the side of yourself when you were a child coming back. The innocence returning in ways. The person you were or would've surely grown up to be just like your father was. It's as if a part of yourself realizes it and realizes that there has in someways been a diversion of paths but you are comfortable with it.

However you also find yourself increasingly dependant and there is also an explicit need for a fatherly figure showing in ways in the dream. The dream shows that there is a recognition and approval for your harmonious existence. You and your dual are getting recognized by people you don't know and people you come across. It also is helping you come to a sort of peace. This aspect of the dream is quite literal and you do find yourself surprised that you get support and recognition from people you don't see on a day to day basis.

However as the dream progresses it seems as if you are being torn apart from what you truly love as you progress with life. You are returning to where you began from on this journey and it's taking you across a turning point of your life. I'm not sure how much of this is true but it seems though that there is going to be a major change inyour life and you do sense it.

It's interesting how the previous dreamand this dream both point to that. A major change and progressing in this change seems to be taking you away from what you are recognized for.

However it also signifies a search for the truth, for enlightenment at the same time. Perhaps what you love is going to change in ways and you'll find it as you quest for it. As you progress along this path you tend to rebel less and give into most poeple's wishes and sometimes it would be painful but you still proceed. It does seem thatin the process of searching for her or rather what she represents [which seems to me to be your creative muse] that you are struggling and lack confidence in pursuing the path and it also does seem to be keeping you grounded and on your feet.

As you progress on your quest you find that there's an exuding strength in ways growing in you, but at the same time you find yourself bound. However the binds do seem to be growing weaker and your spirit growing in strength."

This is definitely another amazing dream. I must say that you have been having really powerful dreams. Perhaps you are undergoing a majortransformation of sorts from within. Only one can say how it is. I do hope that this interpretation was satisfactory. *smiles* somehow I feel there's much more to be said but I have to look into it deeper.In case I find something more which I feel I will. I'll get back to you :)

take care my friend and may peace find a home in your heart,

Always Aashiq

Thursday, October 14, 2004

Gonzo Fiddles while George Burns......

Shhhhhhh.....I found out that just today, my muppet-grooving classical musician composing cool boss Squirrel just started a blog.

http://squirrelystew.blogspot.com

Make sure to drop by and tell him how cool and loyal of a worker you think David is on the Reserves desk!!!!!

Wednesday, October 13, 2004

Don't Forget!!!

Uncle Mike's giving a lecture a week from today, Wed 20th at the house of Worship in Wilmette at 2 in the afternoon. If you happen to be lolling around Chicago and environs feel free to stop by and harangue. My hair isn't as long as it use to be but I'm still rather easy to pinpoint.....

....oh, and I feel extremely selfish asking this but keep me in your prayers. My boss thinks that my rashes may be staph infection (!!!!!)...there's been outbreak here in P-town and you know me, gregarious lad that I am.......daniela, I'm just gald we decided not to make out last night! *smiles*

Sunday, October 03, 2004

...When Credit is due.

Here's ACE's kick-ass analysis of my dream!!!!!!!!

"Dream Interpretation:Well it's interesting that you see a log cabin because that in itselfyou're undergoing a transformation of sorts, it's mostly uunconsciousand that you're moving towards a self-reliant, independant yet humblemove. I guess it being built means you've just transformed to thisphase and that it feels positive.It's like a period of ill health, depression and the like are gettingover in ways and there's a pleasant positive change.In ways the woman basically shows that you're being slowly nurtured asyou seek escape from the past in ways and find that you need theemotional nourishment which you are getting from this person who couldbe yourself or the expression of your ideal person at its purest andmost refined.

This dream shows several elements of harmony and peace in fact it doesshow that you are quite happy in the current situation and happyenough to seek for more knowledge and let it out in the open foreveryone to see. For it is part of the quest.As you proceed on this journey you get a whiff of the sought afterspiritual enlightment in ways and aware and more in search of thetruth than ever. However you get this in small doses rather than inmuch bigger ones and at the same time there's an aspect of yourselfwhere you look back into the past as you move forward.

It sounds as if you realize the peace and harmony in your life.Perhaps she is your creative essence and she holds you onto thisessence of existence as you find yourself travelling across thiswonderful path. Your dream's intro show way too much signs of harmonyand contentment as if you have gotten over certain demons of the pastand are finally in a state of peaceful nourishment as you seek thetruth.

I think perhaps that you are feeling a sense of being torn fromeverything that you were used to, things that you had accepted in thepast and finding a peaceful communion with this being. It stronglydoes feel as if she is an element of yourself that seeks unity withyou. Perhaps your muse in terms of creativity. It feel so since shegets you to read and what you perceive as you do so. However as you doso a part of yourself, the active aware self, finds itself morevulnerable than ever because you are exposing yourself.

You find yourself thrown out of your comfortable shelter where you'dnestled where you'd once perhaps found harmony and now you're out ofall that and vulnerable. As you find yourself vulnerable you perhapsfeel that you are facing adverse situations and it threatens the veryexistence of that side of yourself you so wish to nurture. The side ofyourself that you feel needs nurture. Bears signify obstacles but theycan also be death and renewal. So it could be that in ways you arepreventing a type of renewal by trying to nurture what is.This obstacle of a creature obviously is testing your own commitmentto yourself, the side of yourself that you so need nurturing and triesto destroy it by destroying your commitment to your pursuits or youravoidance of certain pleasures[this is what the genitals rep.] and youface this obstacle and beat it and obtain a victory, a personalvictory.

However as it does you become whole, they no longer exist for theyboth represent aspects of yourself that has come and gone. Perhaps inyour quest to save a side of yourself you have unknowingly destroyedit. Perhaps it was necessary, perhaps not.However you realize it's absence and it leaves you feeling a bit'cold'. You are experiencing a major breakthrough there, but thelasting appeal of it perhaps depends on whether you can remaindetached from it or not.It's interesting that you feel isolated and alone literally in yourdream because that is what cold usually means. But perhaps you havelost a bit of yourself that you used to identify with and the loss ofit makes you feel lonely within but not the sense of loneliness thatone would usually associate with the word[I wonder if I am makingsense].This is a very powerful dream. I wonder how you must be feeling afteryou dreamt it."

Thanx again for your analysis, ACE. 'Yup, all the cool people congregate around daniela. Just goes to show why her blogshare is through the roof....

"We are the music makers and we are the dreamers of a single dream."
-Wily Wonka

Saturday, October 02, 2004

Stainglass Invite

Readers of the Recital residing in the Chicago area are more than welcome to attend an upcoming lecture given by Uncle Mike WED, Oct 20th at the Baha'i House of Worship in Wilmette at I believe 2 pm. Uncle Mike is a delicious, insightful story-teller. He seems to take as much joy in communicating with the individual audience as he does in relaying delightful anecdotes coated with spiritual manna. His lecture is supposed to be corrleated with a musical number so it should be intriguing. For more info feel free to gmail me or contact the house of worship.

Also, if you attend and notice a short-haired lad lurking in the corner, don't hesitate to harangue and say h'llo.

Friday, October 01, 2004

What we Love most, We Grow to Resemble

After I wrote about the notorious "Megan Mara" last weekend I felt free. People who know me know that I love writing and have written a couple of shitty manuscripts and have sacrificied alot (mostly materialistic merit--no brand names for this luddite) to try to make ends meet while still trying to write the best I can everyday. When My girl Arya told me that bloggin' rivaled smoking as a wonderful, magicful vice that will make you cool because "everyone's doing it these days," I was immediately hooked after my first drag and spent the whole summer exhaling my smoky thoughts into a cyberlaced ashtray. I try to keep bloggin' separate from my novels, screenplays and books (yeah right) and I mainly blogg because I feel a special, mystical rapport with those who regularly visit my Internet apartment, lounging around with their feet up on my confessional coffee table while simultaneously fueling my creative flame.

Last weekend I spontaneously stumbled upon "Mara Megan's" photograph on-line and I wrote about her. As with any creative endeavor, the artist is more or less only a filter; all the refulgent glory and harsh experience this amazing life we lead entails pours through the imagination and fingertips of the "artist," and he tries to make sense of the crazy world through sentences and sound, through music and movement.

Everyone who has been in love knows exactly what it's like to see a picture of that goddess you once lived for who is no longer answering your prayers. By it's definition Love involves a physical exertion and a spiritual giving; sometimes pouring every emotional-riddled cell out of your body, into the ocean of another person's heart awards the Lover only with a saddled feeling of loneliness and failure.

What's amzing is that we still love. No matter how many emotional welts and romantic bruises we've doctored up in the past, we still accumulate the courage to reach down into that corner of our soul that is still capable of giving; that abandoned dusty, cobwebbed festooned corner of our psyche that is still capable of somehow connecting with other human beings and pouring everything that is inside of us out for the health and nourishment of another person.

Seems like this semester perfectly mirros the foreheads of previous lovers. I'm trying to do too much. I'm swinging the bat furiously over the plate before the ball has even left the captured palm of the pitcher. Everything I turn in the prof's seem to like at first and then they tilt their head in a vexing, rusty windmill reminiscent fashion, as if they are overtly baffled at what I am trying to say. This hurts, but naturally, I suck it up. Work late hours. Try not too smoke too much (ditto on the 'yeah right)......I think Whitman called it right-on, well over a century ago.

"I once loved a certain person ardently and my love was not returned
out of that I have written these songs."

After I blogged about Mara last week I somehow understood this: Every girl that is awarded a mystical slant on my left palm has heavily settled inside my chest like a granite anchor. Last weekend, after blogging about Mara's delicious tongue kisses, it sudenly felt like all that cement I had stowed up in various vectors of my heart had finally chipped away. That the cement wings were finally able to offer a little flap in the dierction of the sun at dusk.

I love writing and I love the activity of swirling words into a freightrain sentence. But last weekend, bam, I felt free, I felt unfettered. I felt like finally, I kissed a punctuation mark on the perfect forehead of a past love.

So we continue to throw ourselved into the shadow of our crazy lives. As Fitzgerald notes at the end of Gatsby, "Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further…And one fine morning - So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."


...PEACE

Thursday, September 30, 2004

When I peruse the conquered fame

I've had this poem by Whitman lodged between me ears all day!!!!!

When I peruse the conquered fame of heroes, and the
victories of mighty generals, I do not envy the
generals,
Nor the President in his Presidency, nor the rich in his
great house;
But when I hear of the brotherhood of lovers, how it was
with them,
How through life, through dangers, odium, unchanging,
long and rong
Through youth, and through middle and old age, how
unfaltering, how affectionate and faithful they
were,
Then I am pensive--I hastily walk away, filled with the
bitterest envy.
-Walt Whiitman

Political ethos...

My philosophy is this...voting for John Kerry is alot like wearing a condom. It may be initially uncomfortable for you and your partner at first, but it's just a responsibilty that you have to take. A precaution to ward off future headaches.

That said to each his own.

Wednesday, September 29, 2004

Hymn of Praise for the Sunflower Sun

Praise and adulation--my loans fianlly came in this morning. $3000! I can finally eat!

Uncle Mike and I, in lieu of paupers cuisine, made spaghetti using sloppy joe sauce last night, if that tells you anything...

The loans came at the last possible conceivable moment, but they came. yesterday I lost ten pages I was trying to "post" on a blackboard assignment and then I dropped a class...more w's on my academic transcript than a dot com address and hell if I care (I'm still a full time student even with the dropped class). Been a crazy ride so far, but at least I ain't been buckled in the passengers seat. At least i know the color of the blazing sun I'm driving into....

Off to buy food and pay bills... send a shot out to daniela and arya, crazy cyber muses (and emotional pillars) whose collective smile splashes eternal kisses concevied in the moment..... Thanx for keeping my spirits aloft!