Defending the (Vacillating) Martial Flux in the United States
Over three billion years ago viable life on planet earth underwent a dynamic cataclysmic shift from previous sociological norms—it began to reproduce sexually. Long before bridal veils and bachelor parties, genetic DNA was bartered in lieu of nuptial bands in order to ensure the propagation of life on this planet. In his splendiferous essay "Same Sex Marriage—Should Gays Marry?" Marc Perkel, the self-confessed "most dangerous mind on the Internet" maps out the trajectory of human reproduction and evolution, the foundational genetics under which all human beings are currently governed. "An individual needed not only to be born, but also to survive to the reproductive age and reproduce before dying" (www.perkel.com). The axis of human evolution and the future history of mankind rested solely on the fact that our ancestors sexually reproduced.
In the same article Perkel further asserts that, "Marriage was born from primitive cultures that recognized that males and females mated and as a result produced children that needed to be cared for." Marriage was not an ordained function of the Church nor was it a concern of the state. Marriage was simply a buttress between two human beings to help further augment the survival and continuity of our current civilization.
Under the dogmatic aegis of Christian and Islamic law, marriage evolved into something of a commodity. Wives were submissive to their philandering spouses and donned the occasional veil to keep their demeanor in check. The marriage of church and state would later lead to laws that, in almost every Westernized culture, placed a greater emphatic interest on the Waspish male over his subservient conjugal.
The United States as a nation was christened under this biased perspective. It's almost gospel that when the third person pronoun was historically inked into the first sentence of the Constitution, the "We" did not refer to all people currently inhabiting the states, but conversely referred to a select group of elitist patriotic fops, who donned wigs and tights, harvested fields of marijuana, kept scores of slaves, enjoyed the occasional syphilitic bout and murdered the original inhabitants of the land they appropriated rationalizing much of their uncouth actions under the name of a deity whose opinion apparently mirrored their own misguided jingoism.
Marriage in the United States was fastened under this jurisdiction. The website ReligiousTolerance.org stresses that throughout the history of the United States, marriage and civil rights have always adhered to a somewhat malleable definition. In a recent diagnosis, Newsweek magazine states that the evolution of marriage has been vacillating for centuries. "The institution of marriage has been in a state of flux, always responding to the particular needs of that era"(Kantrowitz 40). African American's were not allowed to legally marry in all areas of the United States until after the Civil War. It was only in 1967, less than forty years ago, that the Supreme Court officially recognized interracial marriage. Until 1970, there was no such notion as martial rape because it was judicially inferred that a husband owned his wife's sexuality.
The greatest sociological slap to the purported sacrosanct union of matrimony in recent years has undoubtedly been the alarming rise in divorce. Over the last twenty years, the onset of the Nuclear family prematurely fostered a generation of overtly-cynical, politically despondent Gen-X siblings; the bastards of the baby-boomers growing up in an technology-laced society where parental marriage holds both the tenuous shelf life and fleeced superficiality comparable to a stale televised sitcom. According to a recent report released by the center of disease control and prevention and estimated forty-three percent of all first marriages will end in separation or divorce within 15 years, and all first or second marriages are more likely to end in divorce today than two decades ago (www.divorceform.org). The reason so many young adults seem dubious about their society, lackluster in their jobs, incredulous towards their governmental policies is because the first civil union they ever witnessed, the union of mother and father, was a failed campaign.
Viewed from this facet, marriage has sadly transitioned to the tune of the latest zero financed marketable asset. Even mega-conservative mongrel Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family states that, “If marriage means everything, it means nothing” (Religioustolerance.org).
But in the past three months, marriage has meant something; it has meant everything for citizens previously banned from the lawful hassle of declaring public declaration their love in the confines of a courtroom or comfort of a cathedral. In February rainbow flags were simultaneously raised all over the country in support of San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom’s decision to declare proposition 22—the 2000 California ballot that defined marriage as between a man and a woman—unconstitutional in terms of discrimination.
“I don’t agree with separate but unequal,” stated Mayor Newsom is a press release following his mandate. “Civil Unions are not good enough” ( Taylor, 40).
The results were astounding. In the first week alone over 6,000 couples were granted the legalities of a valid marriage. Six thousand couples whom, in their own lifetime, faced serious struggles in terms of sexual-identification and familial consent while battling “secular” inequity and political partiality brimming with bigotry. In one-weeks time, centuries of misunderstanding and malice were supplanted by bells and bouquets as over six thousand civil unions were cemented and declared lawful by a gracious government that has gradually taken its time inserting the universal ‘We’ back into the first sentence of the Constitution.
As was expected, the political right contorted from wing to fist, lambasting Mayor Newsom’s mayoral perspicacity. “It’s time for San Francisco to stop traveling down this dangerous path of ignoring the rule of law.” California Governor Schwarzenegger said. President Bush publicly admitted that he was seriously “troubled” by the recent support in minority rights. Even Dr. James Dobson postulated that the current pervasive trend of Gay marriage will inevitably mar marriages presupposed holiness. “Marriage will mean nothing to same-sex as well as to opposite-sex couples. The current decline of the institution of marriage will be accelerated (Taylor 40).
The trend towards universal marriage mirrors mankind’s immortal quest of self-realization in relationship towards another human being. While discussing the elusive nature of love and mysticism, poet and translator Coleman Barks commented to Bill Moyers that, “The fact that we are multiple is not so great as the fact that we are one.”
Barks was referring to an ancient poem by the Persian mystic Shams of Tabriz in which one-third of the poem consisted entirely of pronouns. “I you he she we/ In the garden of mystic lovers/ These are not true distinctions.”
William Shakespeare also seemed keenly aware of the hearts dilemma. In his widely anthologized Sonnet 114, Shakespeare urges his readers to, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds/ admit impediments Love is not love/ Which alters when its alteration finds/not bends with the remover to remove/ O no, it is an ever fixed mark” (Cohen 1962).
Unbridled love is indeed an indelible nagging urge. I myself feel blessed to have witness the event that transpired in San Francisco and anticipate the pending cultivation of acceptance of universal matrimony within the United States. In an age where even Christian conservatism remains skeptical over the future of marriage, I myself remain optimistic, acknowledging that nothing is perhaps more sacred than the marriage of true minds in an age where coifed conservative naiveté has reluctantly become fashionable. Even over the discourse of 300 billion years, sociological norms will continue to radically shift, thus allowing future evolution into the creature called man.
Quotations:
"Each individual's journey through life is unique. Some will make this journey alone, others in loving relationships - maybe in marriage or other forms of commitment. We need to ponder our own choices and try to understand the choices of others. Love has many shapes and colors and is not finite. It can not be measured or defined in terms of sexual orientation." From the Statement of Affirmation and Reconciliation by the Quaker meeting in Aotearoa.
"Because marriage is a basic human right and an individual personal choice, RESOLVED, the State should not interfere with same-gender couples who choose to marry and share fully an equally in the rights, responsibilities, and commitment of civil marriage." The Marriage Resolution, by the Marriage Project of Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund. 3
"If marriage means everything, it means absolutely nothing. It will mean nothing to same-sex as well as opposite-sex couples. The current decline of the institution of marriage will be accelerated. Increasing numbers of couples will elect to simply 'live together'." Dr. James C. Dobson, of Focus on the Family.
Because the errant button of yer reality is so much more than just a simple stage curtain, it is a passionate pergola of corporeal longing, a recital for every botched blessing that somehow, like your body creatively configured in hard-right geometrical angles of grace, is still to come.....
Wednesday, September 14, 2005
Sometimes the wayward hippie still hatches out from my side...
Being Young and financially depleted In Bush’s America,
Jaded Jingoism and Wanting your Country Back
It’s hard for present day individuals to think about what they should be doing for their country in terms of patriotism and allegiance when they don’t presently approve of what their own nation is doing to other nations. It’s hard for a working class populace to support a maladroit-lipped president whose political chicanery has marred him with the global moniker of an international fabulist. It’s hard to personally evince any sort of emotion other than pent-up disdain and juvenile embarrassment at a man whose misdiagnosed jingoism has continued to, in typical republican stance, completely ignore dire amendments to State and Federal funded programs such as Education and Health care. It is hard to put stock in a man who seldom mentions the ever accruing national debt of $ 7 trillion, but further drains his country $100 billion in debt by orchestrating an unprecedented melee slaughtering thousands of US and Iraqi citizens in a war that appears to be nothing short of a military blunder (www.brillig.com). It’ll be hard for the bruised camouflaged souls of the infantry troops arriving back in the United States to feel appreciated for their efforts, when the American masses gradually begin to glean the disappearance of media capitalized acronyms such as WTC and WMD; entities that never again will exist in their original print forms or that perhaps never existed at all in the first place. It’ll be hard for the average Iraqi and Middle-Easterner not to seethe with abhorrence every time they witness superficial images of Americans on Television—coifed Caucasian, material driven, globally naïve about the conditions of his shared planet, oblivious that the majority of his six-billion neighbors do not have stable employment, harbor white skin, nor do they eat three times daily. It’ll be even harder for Iraqi’s who have lost loved ones not to foster future terrorist endeavors against the United States. If my country was invaded by a stuttering political demagogue who refused to heed the global shepherding and insight of the United Nations and if I lost a love one to an errant bullet, it would be hard for me as an individual not to pull the trigger, not to seek some sort of reciprocity in terms of vengeance. Junior high and high school students in our nation’s educational system brandish automatic weaponry when they feel socially ostracized or bullied in the confines of the classroom. What makes us think the same won’t hold true in the global auditorium?
Perhaps what is most significant is that it’s hard for a nation so inundated with projected marketable graphic images; a nation who is more justifiably worried about yearly trying to make their own individual financial ends avoid melting in the heat of the current recession; it’s truly hard for a nation to really empathize with the current conflict transpiring in Iraq when we already seem to have been collectively inured to Yahoo headlines detailing digits of the number of lives daily sacrificed in crossfire. It’s understandably hard for an American to slap one palm over their chests in pledged fealty while his fingers are monopolized right clicking images or padding down his own pockets in search of much needed forgotten funds. Being alive in America today a valid vacuity is prevalent among those under thirty--a feeling of emptiness growing up under the posh quip of social-slackers, the askance appellation of the Gen-X slogan serving as our umbrella, shielding us from the governmental plutocracy that has recently dominated politics. Sometimes today it’s just plain hard to understand what’s going on.
*
Not that we didn’t try to have any say in the matter from the outset. The United
States as a whole is a nation of political mutts and zealot inbreeds, famous first home of fanatical European flotsam and jetsam. A nation constituted under the notion of a foppish White man’s God. A nation whose boarders were significantly broadened through the butchering of its own native inhabitants. A nation who employed techniques of appropriation and attrition in order even though this fleece was entirely hypocritical to the documents that stated that all men were apparently endowed with certain innate parities granted through social impartiality. A nation whose divine conceit spurred the concept of Manifest Destiny into a religious caterwaul that ironically mirrors the current Bush administrations current plunge to wreck global havoc while simultaneously burrowing our nation ever-deeper into financial arrears.
The irony is, unlike our coined European, African and Native American heritage, we are a very embryonic nation long overdue for our waterloo. Historically we are still perceived to be a fledgling nation who in germinal stages of world leadership has who—somehow-- has unquestionably produced the most unprecedented republic ever chronicled in the canonized discourse of planet earth. At no other time during its evolution has mankind lived more comfortably. At no other time during the history of humanity has mankind engendered a accelerated utopia that continues still today, to serve as a global paradigm while, paradoxically, still grasping for its own national identity—perhaps still lodged in the political incubator, waiting to formatively peck at the shell of its own global individuality and collective ethos. Waiting for a message of hope to hatch.
*
On the eve of the current gulf war I had already been living in Bush-Regan era for almost 80% of my lifetime. Like most of my peers I thought that the war was completely unfounded but felt that the best way to voice my opinions was to protest passively. The last two years of my life had left me emotionally and financially pillaged. I was working eighty-hours a week at two jobs, living in the back of my ’92 Oldsmobile station wagon living off of starbucks and camel filters. I had just unexpectedly planted my father into the earth the previous spring, and my mother, because I was open about my vocation to write by dropping out of college, indulgently declaring myself an autodidact and academic insurgent (wryly noting that the all-too-obvious fact that there would be far more sentences in my novels than there would be scripted on my $80,000 caligraphic inked square) wanted little to do with me.
On the eve of the second gulf war I had lost everything. Riddled with debt, I worked as a teacher assistant at an alternative school during the day where I was cussed out every hour by students and superciliously informed by an insufferable social “mediators” that I obviously knew nothing about the lives these children were coming from. That I knew absolutely nothing even though I had spent fifteen years banging around the jaundiced hallways of academically deficient Peoria schools. Even though I myself lived off cafeteria lunches and had a mailbox that seemingly resembled a gas cap. Even though I myself worked third shifts at the campus library to afford the one three-hour educational class at Bradley University, the school where my Grandmother worked, where my father had received his Masters’—ironically, the school where I had originally dropped out of and the school whose infinite Campaign fund, amazingly, telephoned my Mom’s house soliciting cash only hours after my father had capitulated to cancer.
I apparently still knew nothing. Even though I was coerced into working around the clock, the majority of my cash siphoned back into Swords Hall to help finance the one class I later dropped due to yet another death. Even through all this, I obviously had no clue of where the future loud-mouthed Peorians of tomorrow were coming from much les where I as an individual was going.
I did however know that on the night of the second gulf war convened I was able to keep my hair pulled back in a pony tail and I was able to realize that, even through poverty and loneliness--twin dualities so rampant among working class Americans today- I was somehow blessed to huddle in the back of my station wagon on a dead end street, thousands of miles away from the erupting bombs of Baghdad, where people were killing each other—where global hatred and national contempt were festering, where a planet’s fingertips were itching for the discover of weapons our president swore were stashed somewhere in Iraqi soil.
Weapons that he was sure would prove mass-detriment to a nation who was already suffering from financial hangovers, feeble education and various healthcare crises.
Realizing this, that night in my station wagon, I felt like one of the luckiest fuckers on the planet. I realized that prejudice was a social hurdle that needed to be vaulted over for global assurance; I realized that the only country today, in our technology accelerated wireless culture, is the globe. I realized that, throughout all my gypsy wanderings and vagrant lifestyle, I would never be searching for something that was never there in the first place.
I was the luckiest human being alive.
Jaded Jingoism and Wanting your Country Back
It’s hard for present day individuals to think about what they should be doing for their country in terms of patriotism and allegiance when they don’t presently approve of what their own nation is doing to other nations. It’s hard for a working class populace to support a maladroit-lipped president whose political chicanery has marred him with the global moniker of an international fabulist. It’s hard to personally evince any sort of emotion other than pent-up disdain and juvenile embarrassment at a man whose misdiagnosed jingoism has continued to, in typical republican stance, completely ignore dire amendments to State and Federal funded programs such as Education and Health care. It is hard to put stock in a man who seldom mentions the ever accruing national debt of $ 7 trillion, but further drains his country $100 billion in debt by orchestrating an unprecedented melee slaughtering thousands of US and Iraqi citizens in a war that appears to be nothing short of a military blunder (www.brillig.com). It’ll be hard for the bruised camouflaged souls of the infantry troops arriving back in the United States to feel appreciated for their efforts, when the American masses gradually begin to glean the disappearance of media capitalized acronyms such as WTC and WMD; entities that never again will exist in their original print forms or that perhaps never existed at all in the first place. It’ll be hard for the average Iraqi and Middle-Easterner not to seethe with abhorrence every time they witness superficial images of Americans on Television—coifed Caucasian, material driven, globally naïve about the conditions of his shared planet, oblivious that the majority of his six-billion neighbors do not have stable employment, harbor white skin, nor do they eat three times daily. It’ll be even harder for Iraqi’s who have lost loved ones not to foster future terrorist endeavors against the United States. If my country was invaded by a stuttering political demagogue who refused to heed the global shepherding and insight of the United Nations and if I lost a love one to an errant bullet, it would be hard for me as an individual not to pull the trigger, not to seek some sort of reciprocity in terms of vengeance. Junior high and high school students in our nation’s educational system brandish automatic weaponry when they feel socially ostracized or bullied in the confines of the classroom. What makes us think the same won’t hold true in the global auditorium?
Perhaps what is most significant is that it’s hard for a nation so inundated with projected marketable graphic images; a nation who is more justifiably worried about yearly trying to make their own individual financial ends avoid melting in the heat of the current recession; it’s truly hard for a nation to really empathize with the current conflict transpiring in Iraq when we already seem to have been collectively inured to Yahoo headlines detailing digits of the number of lives daily sacrificed in crossfire. It’s understandably hard for an American to slap one palm over their chests in pledged fealty while his fingers are monopolized right clicking images or padding down his own pockets in search of much needed forgotten funds. Being alive in America today a valid vacuity is prevalent among those under thirty--a feeling of emptiness growing up under the posh quip of social-slackers, the askance appellation of the Gen-X slogan serving as our umbrella, shielding us from the governmental plutocracy that has recently dominated politics. Sometimes today it’s just plain hard to understand what’s going on.
*
Not that we didn’t try to have any say in the matter from the outset. The United
States as a whole is a nation of political mutts and zealot inbreeds, famous first home of fanatical European flotsam and jetsam. A nation constituted under the notion of a foppish White man’s God. A nation whose boarders were significantly broadened through the butchering of its own native inhabitants. A nation who employed techniques of appropriation and attrition in order even though this fleece was entirely hypocritical to the documents that stated that all men were apparently endowed with certain innate parities granted through social impartiality. A nation whose divine conceit spurred the concept of Manifest Destiny into a religious caterwaul that ironically mirrors the current Bush administrations current plunge to wreck global havoc while simultaneously burrowing our nation ever-deeper into financial arrears.
The irony is, unlike our coined European, African and Native American heritage, we are a very embryonic nation long overdue for our waterloo. Historically we are still perceived to be a fledgling nation who in germinal stages of world leadership has who—somehow-- has unquestionably produced the most unprecedented republic ever chronicled in the canonized discourse of planet earth. At no other time during its evolution has mankind lived more comfortably. At no other time during the history of humanity has mankind engendered a accelerated utopia that continues still today, to serve as a global paradigm while, paradoxically, still grasping for its own national identity—perhaps still lodged in the political incubator, waiting to formatively peck at the shell of its own global individuality and collective ethos. Waiting for a message of hope to hatch.
*
On the eve of the current gulf war I had already been living in Bush-Regan era for almost 80% of my lifetime. Like most of my peers I thought that the war was completely unfounded but felt that the best way to voice my opinions was to protest passively. The last two years of my life had left me emotionally and financially pillaged. I was working eighty-hours a week at two jobs, living in the back of my ’92 Oldsmobile station wagon living off of starbucks and camel filters. I had just unexpectedly planted my father into the earth the previous spring, and my mother, because I was open about my vocation to write by dropping out of college, indulgently declaring myself an autodidact and academic insurgent (wryly noting that the all-too-obvious fact that there would be far more sentences in my novels than there would be scripted on my $80,000 caligraphic inked square) wanted little to do with me.
On the eve of the second gulf war I had lost everything. Riddled with debt, I worked as a teacher assistant at an alternative school during the day where I was cussed out every hour by students and superciliously informed by an insufferable social “mediators” that I obviously knew nothing about the lives these children were coming from. That I knew absolutely nothing even though I had spent fifteen years banging around the jaundiced hallways of academically deficient Peoria schools. Even though I myself lived off cafeteria lunches and had a mailbox that seemingly resembled a gas cap. Even though I myself worked third shifts at the campus library to afford the one three-hour educational class at Bradley University, the school where my Grandmother worked, where my father had received his Masters’—ironically, the school where I had originally dropped out of and the school whose infinite Campaign fund, amazingly, telephoned my Mom’s house soliciting cash only hours after my father had capitulated to cancer.
I apparently still knew nothing. Even though I was coerced into working around the clock, the majority of my cash siphoned back into Swords Hall to help finance the one class I later dropped due to yet another death. Even through all this, I obviously had no clue of where the future loud-mouthed Peorians of tomorrow were coming from much les where I as an individual was going.
I did however know that on the night of the second gulf war convened I was able to keep my hair pulled back in a pony tail and I was able to realize that, even through poverty and loneliness--twin dualities so rampant among working class Americans today- I was somehow blessed to huddle in the back of my station wagon on a dead end street, thousands of miles away from the erupting bombs of Baghdad, where people were killing each other—where global hatred and national contempt were festering, where a planet’s fingertips were itching for the discover of weapons our president swore were stashed somewhere in Iraqi soil.
Weapons that he was sure would prove mass-detriment to a nation who was already suffering from financial hangovers, feeble education and various healthcare crises.
Realizing this, that night in my station wagon, I felt like one of the luckiest fuckers on the planet. I realized that prejudice was a social hurdle that needed to be vaulted over for global assurance; I realized that the only country today, in our technology accelerated wireless culture, is the globe. I realized that, throughout all my gypsy wanderings and vagrant lifestyle, I would never be searching for something that was never there in the first place.
I was the luckiest human being alive.
Friday, April 08, 2005
A Golden Feather for Sister Arya (Very Old, unfinished, but oh well)...
-Here's an unfinished entry from exactly seven months ago that I half- wrote and then forgot about until today. Since Lady D and Mara-Arya are meeting each other for the first time tonight, I thought I'd splatter some memories from the first day I "met" Mara-arya.....sorry it's unfinished and wordy (when they do our blogging troika "blography" I pinkie-swear I'll have the entry buffed to perfection)....
Have a wonderful weekend!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
***
At the end of the day there were finally feathers. I'd been looking for feathers all day. Looking for feathers all my life it seemed--as I stumbled out at bed at three a.m. that morning and arrived at the bus station. Looking for feathers when I arrived at Midway four hours later and shuffled my thoughts past the baggage carousel to the Orange line. Looking for feathers as I zipped into the hard vertical rectangular shape of the city, flanked by fellow commuters toating briefcases with blank- copier paper expressions plastered on their morning faces. Looking for feathers as I scrambled off the Orange line and arrived at the Library stop. Looking for feathers as I strutted my dreams beneath the thick shadowy film blanketing the lively morning bustle of Chicago traffic in a thick silhouette veil. Looking for feathers as I entered a Starbucks (no feather), poured copious amounts of caffeine down the oral chute, ruffled the Sport section of the Trib and inwardly bitched over another inexplicable Cubs lost! ( How come they always need wings in September to float into the post season?)
I ambled down Adams, early September, looking for feathers, arriving at the Steps of the Art Institute at 9:30 still trying to rouse my way into consciousness. The gray, damp used-tea-bag flavored clouds had gradually begun to drift, revealing a golden pond of sleek autumnal sky perfectly placed above my forehead like a halo. A group of Senior Citizens, some with cardboard faces and bolled cotton hairstyles, had begun to form a line outside the Art Institute in the crooked shape of a Question mark. I sip my coffee, anxiously strutting between the two Chrome Lions that guard the entrance of the building like sentinels, waiting for my freind to arrive.
My friend Arya uses feathers in her lectures. When I trek around my hometown of Peoria and see an errant feather bristling across a spare patch of earth, I sometimes think of her. I seem to somehow have this weird correlation towards strewn objects. I think of Uncle Mike when I see loose change scattered on the sidewalk like petrified confetti. I think of my Dad when I see surrendered ponytail holders lying listlessly on the ground. It seems like certain abandoned articles connote a deeper, almost mystical significance.
"It's spiritual litter," I tell my friend, later in the day, tossing out the dregs of a cigarette.
"I have this problem with littering," She'll tell me later, picking up the pinched filter and depositing the butt into an empty coffee cup.
*
Wearing my favorite pin stripe blue blazor that once belonged to my father, I squatted on the cement lips leading up to the Art Institute and waited, my elbows resting on my thighs for support. There was no feathers visible. There were only crones hackeling stale rhetoric behind me and the thick stream whorl of traffic blurring my vision. Each vehicle ferrying different lives, different stories; each vehicle dashing off to a different port, a different destination.
Each car flying down Michigan avenue without the assitance of wings.
Forgoing the quest for feathers while waiting for my friend, I begin to see myself. There was a young artist with a thick-leashed brown ponytail sipping his coffee next to one of the Lions. There was an old man dressed in a derby cap and wry smile, heavily puffing on a cigar. There was the man in the bussiness shirt and even shorter haircut, sitting on the same ledge of stairs where I sat, in the same posture that I was seated. His bussiness pants were the same exact pattern as my father's coat. We exchanged glances several times and volleyed coy remarks. It was as if we were both waiting for the same person to arrive. Fifteen minutes later, a female arrived and squatted next to him and kissed him. He looked at me as if he had just won something we were both competeing for before escorting his prize into the annexed mouth of the building.
I still waited void of feathers. I have seen my friend only once and was afraid that i might not recognize her. "Of course I would!" I thought. "How could I not? We're 'blogging-buddies.' We know everything about each other. It's like we're inside each other's body and thoughts every day, only instead of cells and blood vessels, everything is composed and connected with words and images and something called 'Mara.'"
Arya has long black hair (nostalgia button). A woman walks up next to me with long black hair and an upside down boomerang smile. She has a sheet of black hair that sway's like how I imagine Arya's hair would sway, but she also has a huge ass. Huge ass. It's ten-thrity and I'm starting to worry and I hate staring at the fat ass because I think she feels that I'm checking her out. She inches closer. "Arya?" I think to myself. The closer I inch the weirder I feel. I approach her and her face swivels the opposite direction. No. Thank God. Definetly not the soul I'm waiting for.
"Perhaps Arya won't come." I think to myself. Outside of blogger our g-mails are quick raindrops of exchanged rhetoric. Perhaps she came and I missed her. Perhaps she's busy. Perhaps she forgot. I envision taking the early bus home and finding a wicked e-mail stashed in the empty space of my g-mail: "This is what happens when you chase your Mara." It would say. "You wind-up feeling completely empty on the inside and utterly alone on the out."
*
But, no. She shows up! Fashionably stepping out of the wing of a taxi in stylish four-inch heels as if chicly jutting out from the side of a limousine. I recognize her immediately. I recognize her hair and her forehead and her cheekbones. She's dressed like a rockstar on the way to a fashion show. Black top, cool jeans with a swirled dragon embroidered on the thigh, earrings the size of planetary loops, sunglasses. Streaks of blonde shoot her through black hair. For a moment I think about nonchalantly milling around the front steps and waiting for her to notice and approach me. But I can't. Next thing I realize is that I'm in front of her. Helping her assemble her child's stroller.
"Been a long time my friend!" I think I said first, or maybe I said "'Bout time your wayfarer ass showed up!" or maybe I said something else. I can't remember verbatim what my first non-typed out words to Arya were, but I remember watching her smile and apologize inceassantly for being late before we quickly hugged and then tucked her six-month old daughter into the pouch of the stroller, entering the Art Institute via the side ramp. The weather is now completely golden and a feeling of pending seasonal transition lingers heavenly in the air. I still have yet to spot a feather, but I have finally found an angel of a friend pushing her newbron child by my side. Entering the building I feel very happy.
*
"I was thinking that maybe we both should've brought our laptops so that way we could blogg our conversations out to each other so we'd be more comfortable. People would think that we were playing battleship or something."
She laughs. We enter the building. Typical of spiritual siblings who can't take a compliment from each other "Mara-Arya" and "Captain Universe" are bickering within the first five minutes. They are in front of the cash register. Captain Universe insists on paying, handing the cashier a wad of bills. Mara-Arya jostles her elbows and guts Captain Universe in the stomach.
"No way." Mara-Arya says.
"My friend, my pleasure. Put your money away." I halt out my arm over her limbs. She has a credit card thrust into the cashier's face.
"Put your money away." I tell her. "It's on me."
"No," She says. She's much more adamant in person than she is in her blogg. It's almost like we're jockeying for position at the start of a race. The cashier has my wad of bills in his hand and then Arya literally reaches her hand across the counter and forcefully removes the bills from his grasp shoving her plastic card into his face.
"This ones on me." she says, smiling handing me the crumpled bills and the next thing I know we're inside the museum next to each other not knowing exactly what to say.
*
Arya's noticeably nervous. I'm cracking too many witticims and lame jokes hoping that our social icebreakers will melt and cool off the initial nerves. I'm whording the conversation. Arya's voice is benevolent and chimes. I like the way her voice sounds in person. I'm talking about myself too much. We're looking at art. Gazing at Matisse and Braque and Picasso. We both say the word "Titian" at the same time and smile and look at each other. It's old lady day at the museum and all these crones are stationed like Mannequins in front of timeless works of antiquity. We keep getting 'stuck' in front of these crones who won't shut up talking about neo-classicism. Periodically Arya scoops up her six-month old, a fragrant rose bud named Jada May and coddles her, leaving me to push the plastic stroller.
"I've never done this." I tell her.
"Nothing like bring your newbron up on Boucher."
**************
End of story--when I arrived back at Midway there were feathers everywhere. It looked like an angel sorority had just had a pillow fight. So many feathers!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
*****
I made a big nest of feathers and planted the gift my friend gave me in the center so that it looked like an egg
I've been seeing feathers for weeks. Long, narrow swift-shaped plumes flopped in front of my tattered Doc Martens as I would trek to and from classes--as I exhaustively
Have a wonderful weekend!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
***
At the end of the day there were finally feathers. I'd been looking for feathers all day. Looking for feathers all my life it seemed--as I stumbled out at bed at three a.m. that morning and arrived at the bus station. Looking for feathers when I arrived at Midway four hours later and shuffled my thoughts past the baggage carousel to the Orange line. Looking for feathers as I zipped into the hard vertical rectangular shape of the city, flanked by fellow commuters toating briefcases with blank- copier paper expressions plastered on their morning faces. Looking for feathers as I scrambled off the Orange line and arrived at the Library stop. Looking for feathers as I strutted my dreams beneath the thick shadowy film blanketing the lively morning bustle of Chicago traffic in a thick silhouette veil. Looking for feathers as I entered a Starbucks (no feather), poured copious amounts of caffeine down the oral chute, ruffled the Sport section of the Trib and inwardly bitched over another inexplicable Cubs lost! ( How come they always need wings in September to float into the post season?)
I ambled down Adams, early September, looking for feathers, arriving at the Steps of the Art Institute at 9:30 still trying to rouse my way into consciousness. The gray, damp used-tea-bag flavored clouds had gradually begun to drift, revealing a golden pond of sleek autumnal sky perfectly placed above my forehead like a halo. A group of Senior Citizens, some with cardboard faces and bolled cotton hairstyles, had begun to form a line outside the Art Institute in the crooked shape of a Question mark. I sip my coffee, anxiously strutting between the two Chrome Lions that guard the entrance of the building like sentinels, waiting for my freind to arrive.
My friend Arya uses feathers in her lectures. When I trek around my hometown of Peoria and see an errant feather bristling across a spare patch of earth, I sometimes think of her. I seem to somehow have this weird correlation towards strewn objects. I think of Uncle Mike when I see loose change scattered on the sidewalk like petrified confetti. I think of my Dad when I see surrendered ponytail holders lying listlessly on the ground. It seems like certain abandoned articles connote a deeper, almost mystical significance.
"It's spiritual litter," I tell my friend, later in the day, tossing out the dregs of a cigarette.
"I have this problem with littering," She'll tell me later, picking up the pinched filter and depositing the butt into an empty coffee cup.
*
Wearing my favorite pin stripe blue blazor that once belonged to my father, I squatted on the cement lips leading up to the Art Institute and waited, my elbows resting on my thighs for support. There was no feathers visible. There were only crones hackeling stale rhetoric behind me and the thick stream whorl of traffic blurring my vision. Each vehicle ferrying different lives, different stories; each vehicle dashing off to a different port, a different destination.
Each car flying down Michigan avenue without the assitance of wings.
Forgoing the quest for feathers while waiting for my friend, I begin to see myself. There was a young artist with a thick-leashed brown ponytail sipping his coffee next to one of the Lions. There was an old man dressed in a derby cap and wry smile, heavily puffing on a cigar. There was the man in the bussiness shirt and even shorter haircut, sitting on the same ledge of stairs where I sat, in the same posture that I was seated. His bussiness pants were the same exact pattern as my father's coat. We exchanged glances several times and volleyed coy remarks. It was as if we were both waiting for the same person to arrive. Fifteen minutes later, a female arrived and squatted next to him and kissed him. He looked at me as if he had just won something we were both competeing for before escorting his prize into the annexed mouth of the building.
I still waited void of feathers. I have seen my friend only once and was afraid that i might not recognize her. "Of course I would!" I thought. "How could I not? We're 'blogging-buddies.' We know everything about each other. It's like we're inside each other's body and thoughts every day, only instead of cells and blood vessels, everything is composed and connected with words and images and something called 'Mara.'"
Arya has long black hair (nostalgia button). A woman walks up next to me with long black hair and an upside down boomerang smile. She has a sheet of black hair that sway's like how I imagine Arya's hair would sway, but she also has a huge ass. Huge ass. It's ten-thrity and I'm starting to worry and I hate staring at the fat ass because I think she feels that I'm checking her out. She inches closer. "Arya?" I think to myself. The closer I inch the weirder I feel. I approach her and her face swivels the opposite direction. No. Thank God. Definetly not the soul I'm waiting for.
"Perhaps Arya won't come." I think to myself. Outside of blogger our g-mails are quick raindrops of exchanged rhetoric. Perhaps she came and I missed her. Perhaps she's busy. Perhaps she forgot. I envision taking the early bus home and finding a wicked e-mail stashed in the empty space of my g-mail: "This is what happens when you chase your Mara." It would say. "You wind-up feeling completely empty on the inside and utterly alone on the out."
*
But, no. She shows up! Fashionably stepping out of the wing of a taxi in stylish four-inch heels as if chicly jutting out from the side of a limousine. I recognize her immediately. I recognize her hair and her forehead and her cheekbones. She's dressed like a rockstar on the way to a fashion show. Black top, cool jeans with a swirled dragon embroidered on the thigh, earrings the size of planetary loops, sunglasses. Streaks of blonde shoot her through black hair. For a moment I think about nonchalantly milling around the front steps and waiting for her to notice and approach me. But I can't. Next thing I realize is that I'm in front of her. Helping her assemble her child's stroller.
"Been a long time my friend!" I think I said first, or maybe I said "'Bout time your wayfarer ass showed up!" or maybe I said something else. I can't remember verbatim what my first non-typed out words to Arya were, but I remember watching her smile and apologize inceassantly for being late before we quickly hugged and then tucked her six-month old daughter into the pouch of the stroller, entering the Art Institute via the side ramp. The weather is now completely golden and a feeling of pending seasonal transition lingers heavenly in the air. I still have yet to spot a feather, but I have finally found an angel of a friend pushing her newbron child by my side. Entering the building I feel very happy.
*
"I was thinking that maybe we both should've brought our laptops so that way we could blogg our conversations out to each other so we'd be more comfortable. People would think that we were playing battleship or something."
She laughs. We enter the building. Typical of spiritual siblings who can't take a compliment from each other "Mara-Arya" and "Captain Universe" are bickering within the first five minutes. They are in front of the cash register. Captain Universe insists on paying, handing the cashier a wad of bills. Mara-Arya jostles her elbows and guts Captain Universe in the stomach.
"No way." Mara-Arya says.
"My friend, my pleasure. Put your money away." I halt out my arm over her limbs. She has a credit card thrust into the cashier's face.
"Put your money away." I tell her. "It's on me."
"No," She says. She's much more adamant in person than she is in her blogg. It's almost like we're jockeying for position at the start of a race. The cashier has my wad of bills in his hand and then Arya literally reaches her hand across the counter and forcefully removes the bills from his grasp shoving her plastic card into his face.
"This ones on me." she says, smiling handing me the crumpled bills and the next thing I know we're inside the museum next to each other not knowing exactly what to say.
*
Arya's noticeably nervous. I'm cracking too many witticims and lame jokes hoping that our social icebreakers will melt and cool off the initial nerves. I'm whording the conversation. Arya's voice is benevolent and chimes. I like the way her voice sounds in person. I'm talking about myself too much. We're looking at art. Gazing at Matisse and Braque and Picasso. We both say the word "Titian" at the same time and smile and look at each other. It's old lady day at the museum and all these crones are stationed like Mannequins in front of timeless works of antiquity. We keep getting 'stuck' in front of these crones who won't shut up talking about neo-classicism. Periodically Arya scoops up her six-month old, a fragrant rose bud named Jada May and coddles her, leaving me to push the plastic stroller.
"I've never done this." I tell her.
"Nothing like bring your newbron up on Boucher."
**************
End of story--when I arrived back at Midway there were feathers everywhere. It looked like an angel sorority had just had a pillow fight. So many feathers!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
*****
I made a big nest of feathers and planted the gift my friend gave me in the center so that it looked like an egg
I've been seeing feathers for weeks. Long, narrow swift-shaped plumes flopped in front of my tattered Doc Martens as I would trek to and from classes--as I exhaustively
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.....
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.
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.
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."
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!!!!!"
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.
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....
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.....
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
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
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
-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
*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!!!!!
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*
....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
"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.
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
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
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