Draft from October 3rd

When the lights are so faded that there is nothing beyond karma to sustain you, because when you know that who you are cannot be seen by anyone in your immediate vicinity, only by some stranger stargazer millions of years away; when that’s what it takes for someone to see your beauty, apparently, then you know that you’d better be able to believe in something beyond yourself. You better be able to focus on your future, knowing that your trail is what is seen, not your intentions. Politics is a matter of opinion. But what matters is what is lived. There is no question in regard to your life. You are either living in now or you are living in fear. And what can be respected in hesitation? Nature has no regard for your considerations. There is balance or there are accidents.

There is so much beauty around me. Sometimes I forget to watch the sun lapping on the sierra wind stirred lake waves. And I will be sitting in my cabin and drinking Jack Daniels before I remember to remember. That I am blessed. That all life is blessed. That every step forward in time is a celebration, and should be commemorated as such. No matter what may be left behind. For what is left behind is dust.

Thoughts in San Diego

Back in the land of San Diego, a sprawled sunny place streamlined with polished sport cars and gleaming SUVs, a desert beach implanted with flowers and shrubberies from all around the world. The people, too, seem to shine surfacely with some transplanted synthetic reflectant.

I always gain a sense in suburbed cities such as this that the freeways and wide-stretched streets don’t really lead anywhere, that indeed the traffic itself is the most cohesive expression of the cities’ collectivity, the only place where it’s people are somewhat gathered together and united for a brief space of time before separated and off-ramped into some outlying distant gated immunity. In the traffic there is danger, there are fatalities and accidents and fender benders, well-dressed anguished people on their cell-phones standing displayed on the side of the freeway in their full humanity, looking over the destruction of their crunched and dented vehicles as everyone slows down alongside to ogle, wondering perhaps if they too could ever be un-horsed in such a manner.

Swaths of empty pavement seem to best express the landscape of such a city, capped with a vast blue desert sky, the hint of an ocean somewhere in the breeze.

There is of course something captivating in its beaches lined with drugged out remnants of failed marriages and bronzed bodies rollerblading untouchably taunting along the boardwalks. There is some kind of laid-back but primal energy expressed in the waves on the shore that is sometimes glimpsed in the spaces between the reversed baseball caps and baggy shorted uniforms of the wannabe frat boys of Pacific Beach, a kind of stoic and vacant beauty pictured in the frame behind the halter tops and the designer purses of the moneyed sun-glassed mamas of La Jolla.

Everything is spread out and nothing is contained.

Of course what overtly plagues this city plagues every American city, and San Diego alone shouldn’t be castigated or targeted alone as completely unique, although it is certainly representative. Every American city suffers from some congealed homogenized mass of middle and upper classes. Once known as yuppies, although the term, like that of hippies, seems to have lost its force and meaning in the face of cross-pop-cultural fertilization. My understanding of the term is that it referred to the nouveau rich and their love of trendy gleaming franchises. But now it seems like all Americans–except those who can’t afford them of course–love their trendy sterilized franchises. Or maybe love isn’t the correct term, more like non-critically accepted. And who can really differentiate these days between the rich and those who simply live and spend as if they were rich? Everyone of course is simply mimicking Ol Uncle Sam in being good citizens and patriots and living in the glorious happy credit land of endless horizons, where if we all just keep on spending then everything will be ok. This is all tied in with suburbanization and sprawl and SUVs and strip-malls and Starbucks and Pizza Huts and all the other symptoms of decay erupting daily across the face of America.

Because these people, these so-called “yuppies,” are representatives of the fulfilment and end-game of the “American dream.” They are “successful,” they work kind of hard and commute to work sometimes 2 hours both ways stuck in traffic and they drive their beef-hormone and McDonald’s trans-fatty filled children to their football games in these gigantic gas guzzling machines that seem to serve more as symbols of unnecessary waste and possession of space than as functional cars. And these multi-ethnic, one-dimensional Horatios are scattered throughout the suburbs of America, J Crewed, equipped with cellphones and Ipods, and largely uninformed outside of the nightly news propaganda. And they are the hordes of the blinded cradled lifestyles that will be thrown into the cold when our nation hits the wall of economic and spiritual destitution to which it is speeding forward to so recklessly. And as I sit and type this out on my laptop in a Starbucks in La Jolla, yes, I am fully aware that I am included in this prognostication.

Olympic Rant

OK, I apologize if I might dismay any wide-eyed Olympian enthusiaists out there, but I’ve got to get this off my chest: the Olympics are boring. I know they are trying really hard to draw in the younger crowd with X-games events like snowboard cross, but it’s still just really boring. Sometimes I think the problem with the Olympics is that the media, from the outset, generates as much over-the-top expectation of it as they can, knowing that it’s one of those sure-fire advertising blitzkriegs like the Superbowl. So they manufacture all these stupid little flashy shorts about “heroism,” and idolize all the American athletes as much as they can–but the fact is, super specialized individual sports are just not all that entertaining. Who really cares about who got the bronze medal in skeleton racing? Who cares about the .005 millimeters that gives the gold medal to the winning athlete in the ski jump?
Or let’s talk about these ice skating dances. So these people have spent their whole life training so that they can make it to the Olympics, and yet they still never seem to be able to land that damn “triple axel.” C’mon, I’m sure it’s real hard and they’re nervous and all–but isn’t this what they’ve been training for? It’s like it’s a big relief for us–the long-suffering audience–when they finally land the damn thing.
What I don’t understand is that the scoring seems to center around whether they land their triple axels or not–and yet they do all these pretty little dance steps and arm flourishes. What’s the damn point? Why don’t they just come out on the ice, do their freakin triple axels and whatever other little difficult jumps they need to do to get points, and then leave? All that other little dancey stuff we can watch on Disney On Ice! At least with Disney On Ice they’ll be wearing tasteful apparel.
My problem with the Olympics is that most events are so specialized and bizarre and one-shot-see-if-you-happen-to-be-lucky-this-time that it just doesn’t compel me very much. I have a hard time relating to someone who has been training for 10 years or whatever to do some really hard and basically pointless task. OK, there, I let the cat out of the bag. It just doesn’t seem worth it to spend your life training for some function that doesn’t have any other purpose other than winning medals.
Something like cross-country skiing I can understand. Or that event where they ski around and shoot things. That could almost have a purpose and function in real life. Although that doesn’t make it any more interesting to watch.
If they took something like snowboard cross or speedskating, and allowed the contestants to duke it out, throw a couple of punches here and there–that might be kind of interesting. Like hockey.
I’m not fooled by all the media hype. The Olympics are kind of lame.

By the way, though: I do admit to being kind of fascinated by these speed skating chicks. Their thighs are amazing, kind of scary but kind of hot in a scary kind of way, you know what I mean? And then there’s those sleek ass hugging suits they’re wearing, and the moment when they cross the finish line and then unzip their neckline a bit and then pull off their hood and wave their long hair out of that synthetic restriction and you realize suddenly in a kind of exultant revelation that they are a Real Woman!
Sorry. I have to generate interest where I can with these things you know. . .

Thoughts in a Small Humid Hotel Room

Contained within our minds lies the key that would unveil all mysteries. But to open this door would be akin to opening the pressurized door of a flying airplane–all of what we are would be sucked out into the vacuum and there would be nothing left but space, another mystery to those who came later. Which is as much to say that we are made as much of what we don’t know as of what we know–that in fact it is not a matter of knowing at all, but a matter of accepting that one must look in a certain direction in order to see, and that what will be seen will be what lies before the path of vision. How many worlds there are beyond where you may happen to look! Can you sense these worlds without looking? Learn to listen. You can hear much more than the sound of your breathing when you are alone in your room, much more than the sounds of the outside world filtering through. You can hear the sound of something inside of you that does not belong to you. It is not important what this force is or even why it is there–what matters is that it is there at all, and that you can feel it. The feeling–what could be more important then this? This is a knowledge much deeper than whatever straightforward paths your logic can define.

Sacrifice Yourself for Your Life

Because you know that everything good that comes to you comes because there was something before that you gave away, or that you will need to give away in the future. Blessings never come without pain. And so every benediction of love that comes your way is edged with the awareness of suffering, because you know that behind every joy lies an incredible sadness, behind every connection lays emptiness. Without the oscillation of emotions, you can look out of a spaceship into the night of a half of the globe’s cities and view the connective star hustled patterns of human life and know of it’s beauty, and know the distance which gave to it form.
You can stand in the night of your particular backyard and look up at the indifferently humming stars and know of their intimate relation to you and all of your mundane personal intricacies.
Because you can not transcend, let’s set the romantics straight. But you can grasp the totality of what you are in any given moment. So strength, you see, is not achieving some climactic pinnacle of divinity in your life from which all other points thereafter and before will refer. Strength is the steady patient nurturing of every moment in your life, the bending, flowing, expanding strength of roots, the strength you find in plants when you can bend them endlessly but never break them. Sacrifice your desires, your expectations, every dream and ambition that you ever had for this person that you thought you knew so intimately. Sacrifice yourself so that you may live.

Travel

You go there because there is nothing there to remind you of yourself. Who are you here? There are no predefinitions of what you are supposed to be, no established perceptions limiting the scope of your ability to change like the wind over the grass. The only thing that you are is what you yourself have held onto and retained imprinted throughout your thoughts and subsequently, your actions. You hold over your own head your limitations now, no one else can see anything but what you give to them. And you find that you are the same person that you always were, when you suckled on the back of your hand all day long, when you fell on the rocks and scraped up your legs, when you experimented with being self-destructive, when you first opened up your heart to another–what is it that has changed? What has changed and what will continue to change are the new worlds that you can perceive within yourself. The world sees what you have seen within yourself, even the dim lit crevices you pushed away in fear. What you have embraced the world must embrace in turn, because every portal opened within an individual is the creation of a new world upon the world that we thought we once knew. And we all must grapple together with what each person’s tormential beauty has unleashed upon us.

Rompiendo

Illusions built within the mind swaying, lulling ourselves into an incurable belief in infinity. There is within us an amazing capacity for suffering, for love. Intricately linked, there is no excluding either Huascarán or las pampas. It is not either one or the other. It is not life or death. It is all, every little thing carved from the void, separately pieced into a spiral necklace of the earth.
In our shame we are naked before the judgment of a god, the dreams covering our eyes lifted to reveal solely vulnerable soft skin, nothing more, nothing less. We are pathetically beautiful. When the illusions inevitably crumple the world sweeps within to pick apart the ruins of our hearts. We follow our inner narratives to the end, until we fall from beyond the edges of what we allow ourselves to imagine and inevitably hit the ground to return to the earth. Each time that we are broken a piece of light shines out from the space where we once were. How many times must we be broken before there is nothing left to break? You must be broken from your blindness to see. Broken again, again and again until there is nothing left of yourself to be taken or to be held. The world will carry away your pieces to build other dreams no longer yours.
What is it to dream? What is it to be awoken to another world in which the dream has no application?
What is it to love with one’s eyes wide open?
To live is to suffer. Anything else would be an illusion.

El espacio de soledad

I am sitting in yet another Irish pub, drinking chilcano con pisco (way too sour for me) and feeling the space of solitude about me. It is something that I have grown accustomed to and even grown to cherish in a certain way, even though it can be difficult at times. Something about my pride prevents me from sucking it up and forcing myself to befriend all of the Irish and Kiwis, etc, that surround me in these kinds of gringo hang-outs. It is linked in some way to my distaste for being an outright tourist. It is too easy, perhaps, to give in and just converse with other similar young travelers on the circuit and get wasted. This space of solitude, for me, is equated in my mind with the maintanence of integrity. If someone is capable and willing to traverse the space required to get close to my heart, then I know for certain that they are true. And I will be true to them for life in return.

Thoughts

For those of you who happen to be reading this blog & have read my writings in the past, I’m sure you’ve noted a discrepancy in style and content. I am well aware that this blog has turned from introspection outward to a diary style superficial action oriented narrative. This is the unfortunate by-product of the lack of either the means, space, or time for me to fully digest the experiences I am currently undergoing, and thus, I am unable to write any more eloquently or profoundly about them. So please take all of this with a grain of salt and understand that this is me largely unfiltered, in a foreign land alone attempting to come to grips with who I think I am and what I think of other people. I write and keep writing here in this forum because this is really my only link to the world from which I came, my link to those I love, and I hope that you will read this and continue to read this and understand why I write.
There are of course many things that have been going on in my head that I haven’t been articulating thus far. I’ve been thinking about the hordes of those living in poverty here and elsewhere. I´ve been confronting some of my perceptions of the “other” and about what I think I can do and about what I want to do to change my own life and perceptions. These are ideas in the making, that I don’t have the space right now to form.
On another level, I’ve still been processing Toby’s suicide. It’s something that comes back to me almost every day at seemingly random times. I kind of push it away mentally because I really don’t know what there is to think about it anymore. I had thought originally that I would find some kind of peace with it but that doesn’t seem possible to me anymore. Peace really only comes with time, there isn’t anything I can do or say that will make it better. It’s not something that hurts so much anymore as just kind of throbs in the background, and I feel a kind of deep-seated confusion and frustration about it, like when there’s an itch that you can’t possibly reach, and even if you could, scratching it would only make it worse.
I’ve been learning how to deal with expectations, as in not having any. Expectations only serve to create disappointment. I build up these castles of illusion and then when the sea of life comes to sweep me away into change then its disillusionment time again. I guess that’s part of being human. As long as I am building these castles with the full awareness that they are meant to be destroyed, then it’s alright I suppose.

Idiomas

Learning a new language is teaching me about the importance not simply of words, but the connections which bind them together and imbue them with immediate and specific meaning. The words themselves are only meaningful within a context, a framework, a sea of personal signification. Because words express feelings, they express a flow of thought, the spitfire sparks of synapses in response to stimuli. They are cars transporting desire and love and life and death.
The hardest part for me in learning a new language is trying to force myself to accept irregularities within the language that don’t make any logical sense. I have to just accept that I have to memorize this shit and live with it and learn to use it. Another hard thing for me is that when studying, I will think that I understand and remember what I am studying–and when I sit down with a piece of paper I do remember it–but in actual application in real life I won’t be able to use it.
A language is not academic–it must be utilized, because it is not through memory or understanding of grammatical laws alone that it is learned–it is learned by the slow and stubborn process of opening one’s perceptions to a new way of being, of seeing, forging new connections in the mind between visualizations and words. You have to learn how to think in a new way, and this is why my mind rebels–it wants to figure shit out based on my prior understanding. Just got to jump in and start swimming

Vida

What is life? What is it to live? We travel to lands where even the sky speaks in different languages, we look into plated museum displays of ancient mystery–mysterious because of its ultimate uknowability. What is to be found beyond the established habitual confines of what is daily taken for granted? Only new forms to be learned, new boundaries, new vistas, new habits. But this shock of the new also jolts us into wonder. Wonder that we are alive, wonder that such temporal forms exist. Life is here, within us, even when the world has changed all around us, we are still what we were–an accumulation of things that could not be taken away or let go, the residual impressions of the river of life passing through us, the endless movement of fragments yearning for their source. Whether molded to cookie-cutter standards or strangled to the point of suffocation or wild like horses on the plains, it is life. Life flows ever onward beyond the grasp of conscious perception. We can get used to anything.

Getting Ready

Who are we and why do we live there? Always gathered into journeyed pools of light, the human being falls down stream to find itself already defined. I’m learning the value in preparing oneself for the unknown. It seems there are constantly arising these complete voids between now and then, and if you don’t have some kind of a map or a gameplan, then there is nothing but anxiety. I’m not talking about itineraries and erecting barriers of scheduled safety necessarily, more along the lines of developing a purpose and direction in my drifting. What exactly is it that I wish to gain from visiting this foreign country for an extended period of time? I will tell you, in brief, my goals: to drink beer made from maize, to hear some live local music, to dance Peruano style, to learn the language as best I can, and to eat some good seafood.
I’ve spent the last week shaking my booty in San Francisco, and now that I’ve warmed it up a little, I’m ready to get out of this country and shake it somewhere else. Two more days, and I’m there.

something in the details

The smell of nag champa settling into the carpet. The swirl of yellow leaves in storm winds, husks spiralling into the lake, sprawled wetly across the road. Cold drizzle on your jacket, the warmth when you come into the dining room and shed your outer layers. The headlights of a car in the night rising and dipping. The shock of the water when you jump in, the almost instantaneous numbing of your limbs as they descend into the void. Habanero sauce hitting the back of your throat. An uncorking of a bottle of wine with dinner, this time a musty Bourdeaux. The darkness which always comes too early now. R&B in the afternoon, hung over on the couch. The light and the darkness. The loneliness and the comraderie at the edge of a vast emptiness.

Waiting for Winter

Sippin on some green fire, thinking about the desperation inherent in much of human interaction. The desperation of seeking to avoid being alone. The desperation of seeking to be accepted. Desperate and passionate and hopeless.
Being alone with oneself is almost taboo in this day and age, without a TV, or at the very least, a radio. Being alone and plummeting to the source of your consciousness without attempting to distract it continuously.
I guess I’m getting older. I’m beginning to enjoy this feeling of loneliness. Because just past the loneliness there is knowledge, and beyond that there is the blessing.
I wait for people to come to me, and if they don’t, well, then I’ve got other things to do. Writing is one of them. Drumming another. Reading. Listening to some dope music. Studying some Spanish. Or just suppin on some good old green fire and speculatin on the bigger picture.
In other words, I think sometimes I can recognize that the world lies within me, waiting to be birthed. Just waiting to be fed and nurtured, just waiting for me to drop my ego and fear and live consciously. Just waiting to give itself to the world outside as soon as I can let it go.

Inner Outward

There is a place within our souls untainted by the touch of external things. Find this place and expose it to the light of the moon, sun, stars or any source of flame you can see. It is here that gravity unknown exerts its dark force upon all the universe. It is here that you find that you have been alive and awake for as long as you remember, and as long as you remember goes far past your birthday. You extend far into the future, here. Here there is wisdom never to be unearthed by any archeologist but it is writ in the annals of shamans and schizos and MCs. It is everywhere. It is nowhere but in the deepest heart of every person. All of these things, all of these things flow past like the wind on your surface, and you are balled up at the bottom, holding your breath, watching the dream of shadows moving somewhere almost beyond comprehension. Let them go. You know what you know, and no one can tell it to you. Everything in your life exists to awaken you to yourself. Listen to the silence in the deep, surrounding you, encompassing you. Release your breath. You flail, you struggle, but there is only one thing that can reach you here. It is nothing that can hold you, but it embodies you.

Believe me, I know of this loneliness. And I believe that it is something that can be shared.

someday somewhere the sun

Not alone, never alone, consciousness penetrates everywhere. Even in despair you can sense the eyes of the world there. Yes, you stand on the edge by yourself, but you are a particle captured in the flash, a wave brushing out against the sky, a piece of something beyond so deeply interwoven throughout your own senses that most of the time you don’t even understand your own feelings. What is this force that waits behind your eyes, that crouches within your body, unseen and unacknowledged by most of the transient surface world? Everyone knows without knowing, waiting for the swell to break, for the image to be framed, the silent eyes sucking all of the world into one stomach that is forever hungry, and when an individual stands up against the crowd they see what they want and it is never enough. But every sacrifice is a piece of a heart thrown into the flame. Higher and higher the awareness of light is spread. To know itself, life must tear itself into pieces. We look into each other’s eyes and know ourselves somewhere already lost and we move and we move and we need each other desperately and we are alone and we are hungry and we are standing and we are shadows and we are mountains and valleys and we are all together in this together, we are all horribly, terribly, beautifully tied to each other like a puzzle without a purpose and when my heart is empty of everything
then maybe I will be ready to meet you.

Art Fruit = Fart

‘Artistic’ energy is like organic farming. Forces must be in balance, must be cultivated, understood, worshipped. Crops must be rotated so that the soil is not depleted. Love and dedication. Sustainability, beyond oneself, is the keystone. For life, growing aware of itself, either wishes to reproduce or destroy itself. I wish someday to be able to pluck a sprig of fresh parsley from my garden, chop up some of my own carrots with the good earth still clinging to its crevices, my own nurtured garlic, some washed and deep green spinach, sauteed with Tamari and chili paste, poured steaming over brown rice cooked in a cast iron pot over an open fire. To rely on nothing but knowledge and worship for my life. The reason why I write is because I am capable of it. I am able to express a bounty beyond myself that I can nurture, that I can pluck out and present as a host to you, my cherished guest, a platter of my love, of the universe here in my heart.
Enjoy!

Meaning

Everything, people say with a nodding of their heads, happens for a reason. There is some greater underlying purpose to the random personal dramatic events of our lives. Not necessarily due to some god or divine intervention–simply to say that things happen as a matter of karmic inevitability–that as individual entities weaving our lives into a cosmic whole, we must undergo transformations in consciousness to cope with the greater responsibility of being much more and much less than ourselves.

I am sad and lonely as always, but with a much greater weight. Because I know now that everything that I hold against other people will come to light despite any illusions of shadow.

Everything that I am must be shared. Everything that I am is subject to change. Everything that I am is nothing and everything and stands and falls as the basis for understanding with you.

Love Parade SF

Damn it’s been too long since I’ve really been able to shake my ass freely, to get the whole body moving to music that’s good enough so that it is only natural to move to it. Dancing all day, all night–it’s soul therapy is what it is. The rhythm moves through the limbs like divine wind. Pictures are made in the air, barely visible breathy traces of color and sound. Interpreted narratives of the body, spiritual made visceral. My ass shaking like a salsa drum beat, salt from the sky. There’s water and liquor and other things but all that really matters is that you move according to something beyond mere convention. That a light opens in your head and flows through out. The wallflowers know that there must be death in freedom, and they fear it. Some pursue their fantasies of freaking. The movement of dance is past desire, even as it creates it. It is past confinement in observation. It must be performed. It must be enacted. It must be lived.

randomize

Listening to some Floetry, feeling incredibly sore a day after a massage. I’ve been aware lately of the disparity between my professional image and who I feel myself to be. There are hurricanes apparently sprouting from out of thin air everywhere. Global warming perhaps. I know the seasons where I live have been pretty weird too, if not on quite that dramatic of a scale. Time, it is said by everyone in that kind of “the weather is nice today” workplace conversation, is speeding up. I have heard all ages and types of people noting this occurrence in their lives. The summer passed swiftly for everyone. I am looking forward to a near future of ceviche and un-American women. Today was the kind of day where reading and drinking of matẻ and sauna and lake jump and sauna and lake jump and a couple of beers occur. I was realizing today how pointless the daily news is without a deeper underlying narrative or understanding of events. It’s just like Britons Crash Tank Into Iraqi Prison to Free 2 British Commandos, or something like that, and there’s just no basis for any kind of interest, except for, oh, look how fucked up things are in Iraq, tsk tsk. The world is going to hell in a handbasket. Oh well. Guess I’ll go buy a big SUV and say fuck you to everyone else on the freeway. Create me a little sanitized smoke free environment immersed in white noise and convenience.