On the road

I'm replacing Facebook. I mean, I'm still here. I am addicted. But I don't want to see that blue outline torturing me anymore like a boxload of silicon valley kids raping my eyeballs with their propaganda for profit stream and that big blue highlighted F, fucking my face. God bless you. God bless you Donald Trump. And sir Zuckerberg sir, I only want to play golf with you or go bowling. A threesome?

Mark, I think Trump will dominate us. He always has. I'm just a half Greek, indiginous bastard, raised by wolves in America. I have nothing to share but my own story.

My name is Mud. I've been on the road or at sea since the beginning.  Marko, I'm tired of giving your F-rankenstein my intellectual property for free, in fact I am in debt, as my mental well being has also paid a price for your technology, even though I myself am on a lower wrung of your privileged class and your little lab experiment on all of us has demonstrated the alienation of people from their labors in the name of an unconsciousless class of corporate overlords like maybe nothing before it. And now we are all 2 billion of us, employees of the same company that is ripping us off for our labors.

I am not the only one. 2 billion human beings are the victim of this silicon scam. You have sold us and our data out for profit and you hijacked our government whose regulations could not keep up to protect the citizens from this monopolization of our minds and culture.

I'd suggest figuring out a profit sharing program, maybe upgrade the operating system before somebody puts you on the last rocket to Mars or we do something really dumb like continuing to destroy the living world around us like a bunch of colonizing psychopaths.

Hey Steve Irwin

God is the one you talk to, I guess, when nobody is there.

Happy New What?

Happy New Year! Did you see Trump's tweet out to his "enemies?" Happy, Happy, just be happy, while we go on raping the earth. Lots of ravens in the sky, ravens who forgive us, who seem friendly, not swooping down to pluck our eyes out like they would if they were humans who were being slowly constricted out of existence by a pervasive animal civilization that was growing exponentially across the land destroying the nature we depended on for survival. But it's the other way around. We stopped depending on nature to support us and started warping it to our purposes, disrupting the evolution of every life form on earth, including our own. Ignorance is bliss, and bliss is the American ideal. Candy bar, candy bar, kilos of cocaine, America, America, we're completely insane. All the mental illness, heroin in our veins, all to hide the pain. The sickness all around you, the sadness that you hide from, the burning shame, I AM THE CRUEL MONSTER polluting the skies, burying nuclear armaments all over the globe, I'm here to destroy your spirit, crush your nature. We're going to make you feel so alone. Can't you hear Donald saying it. So Tremendous. Ah, there, now, go forth American, back to work, notice the lack of edible foods growing in your public environments, and go out shopping, or base jump, sky dive, pole vault, bungee jump, bike ride, ski day, walk in the court yard of the prison for an hour in the sun, let's all run, let's all run, fun fun fun. Here, in a prison of privilege, a hypocrite writes. I send love and blessings to all, and I love you. I'm an American, I live in America, I'm white, male, heterosexual, a half-Greek son raised by rich Texans in Aspen, and sometimes it seems like the only action I could rationalize as beneficial is suicide, because this system benefits me, and it's not fair, and it's not good for the planet, and I feel powerless to change it, and am the very archetype of a person with privilege to do something. But we are all in this together. The hypocrisy of saying that I'm trying to do something good, to put something into our collective consciousness with the Open Mind Project or the Father of Lies book, that can help us change the direction of this psychotic train, rushing toward of an abyss of environmental apocalypse, does not escape me. It does not rush off the tongue. I'm grateful to be alive, a living, breathing, carbon footprint, a member of a collective human organism that is driving thousands of feet of pipe into the surface of mother earth to suck out the oil to burn it as though comfortably ignorant that it was down there for a reason, that nature was doing its work with a purpose. It's Apocalypse Now. Apocalypse in Greek means something revealed, a disclosure of knowledge or revelation. In our culture it usually means the end of the world. That's what the extinction of so many millions of our living relatives in the animal kingdom is. The Apocalypse is our emerging knowledge that we are responsible. We are inventing, creating, this savage civilization that is wiping out the natural world and replacing it with, miserable, self-centered, consumerist automatons chasing pleasure and happiness as our rightful pursuits when the poorest around the world don't have clean water to drink. They have to buy it from us. I can still drink the water from my tap. Our apocalypse is this big reveal, the end of the dream that there is a god we can blame. We're just left with ourselves, we who define God and create our reality. We didn't create the conditions, we are born into conditions, but we are responsible for how we respond to the conditions. It's not some external power. It's us. We conscious creators. I can quit flying, try to rationalize and justify my existence, but I really can't, not when i'm just another consumer. The final dagger has reached the heart when rational thought has crushed consciousness into a carbon footprint and we've divided ourselves into tiny molecules all separate from each other and moving constantly, and we're so totally insane that we're shooting hominids, our own, into space, and we're looking for some place in the solar system to colonize because we still haven't escaped this insane paradigm that has driven us all mad. Let's start with Exhibit A.: Donald Trump, US President. Come on America, and hey rest of the "civilized" world, everybody that can read, isn't time for our collective admission of insanity? This shit is not working. Happy "New" Year, seems like more of the same. Global calendar reset, 00000000000000000, samepage.one. Help. Little cell in big organism, hollering in the ether, help, help, help!

I'm just posting because it's something different.

Good Evening Ladies and Gentlemen.  It's been a long time, and yet no time at all, since time is a made up construct anyhow.  I have been writing a book.  It has been slow going for the Goose Wrangler.  I completely lost my mind, end of last January.  It wasn't the first time.  It all started when it never began, and a clever monkey told a story about itself that it never proved was true.

So here I am in the middle of the night, writing directly into the Googley Blogger, because I must.  I have to express myself in some other platform than facebook, where I seem to post endlessly about Bernie Sanders.

This book is about the power that fundamental myths, embedded in our culture, have on our personal, and social psychology.

I started a non-profit called the Open Mind Project a few years ago after I went to graduate school and studied some of the dominant narratives, usually known as religions, on this planet at this time.  I'm not going to try and tell you that I embarked on this journey for unselfish reasons.

I fell in love with a girl 18 years ago that I didn't deserve.  She came from a different world, and belonged to a different religion, because back then I thought I was a Christian, and her being Jewish, which Sunflower Girl was, would mean I had to change something because she wanted to be with a Jewish guy.  That was long before I went to seminary and learned that when Christianity began being Jewish was a prerequisite.

This girl, who is now a woman that I do my best to leave alone, who I screwed up with all those years ago, has been the best muse I could have imagined.  When I say muse, I suppose I mean reluctant teacher.  She set me on this bizarre path of self-so-called-improvement that has lead me to the discovery that there might not be anything to improve other than the idea that there is something to improve.  If I hadn't fallen in love I might not have lost my mind.

This book, that i'm writing out an introduction to in a blog, that I might post on the Open Mind Project, is about how the Abrahamic myth has helped build the world we inhabit, occupy, and create.  If you can read this, I count you as part of this world.

If I hadn't already lost my mind it might not have been so easy for me to admit that I was crazy. I've had the privilege of experiencing 3 major psychotic episodes.  In fact, these experiences, traumatic as they've been for me and others, have helped to give me a perspective I cannot begin to express my gratitude for.

Once a person has really experienced the irrationality of a mind that believes it's rational, that person can no longer assume its thoughts are "true."

I have trouble imagining that, as a society, we can begin to achieve sanity until we admit that we're really all a part of a very insane culture that likes to call itself civilized while it rapes its life supporting surroundings.

Our science seems to suggest that we are part of nature.  It seems that our belief that we are separate from nature has caused us to act in ways that are not in our best interest as a species.  Our science has demonstrated that we are indeed a part of the natural world.  If we are simply a self-identified "smart-monkey" then we better not take our ideas and beliefs so seriously.  We are the self-identified monkey who named itself "Homo Sapiens," that is "The Wise Person," or smart man.

According to the Tao Te Ching, written over two thousand years ago, the man who thinks he is wise, is not wise.  Yet the science invented by this seemingly not-so-wise-person has demonstrated that it's related to all the rest of nature, including the monkeys it thought it was so much more advanced than.

This book is about upgrading our mental operating system to reflect the particular context we are met with after a few thousand years of agriculture, and the belief systems that accompanied it, which have conquered the planet.  These outdated beliefs are based on the harmful idea that we are separate from nature and have something to fear from things as they are.

The point of the Open Mind Project is to offer possibilities based on a philosophy of not-knowing. The idea is that we don't have to understand how the whole universe operates.  We don't have to believe that any outcome is certain.  We can live in the present and respond to present circumstances.

My hypothesis is that under alternative psychological conditioning we can reasonably expect different collective behavior, along with a different set of environmental consequences resulting from that alternative collective behavior.  If we change the fundamental psychological operating system of a large group of humans then we will also alter the outcomes that stem from the culture made up of those humans.  We are presently acting as a collective culture of consumption, and our so-called civilization is destroying the very interrelated natural ecosystems of which we are a part.

We put our faith in something we invented, and presently we refer to it as "the free market."  It has to constantly expand in order to facilitate a false premise of never ending growth.  The economy we've built is based on a religious assumption of a linear universe, with a beginning, middle, and end. According to this unsubstantiated assumption, about which our understanding of reality is based, there is an expectation that an external deity will interrupt observable reality and end this universe as we know it.  I argue that the more a belief in the hope of an apocalyptic end permeates human consciousness, the more influenced we will be to unconsciously bring about that end we've been taught to expect.

So are we are bringing about consequences that are to the detriment of our very life support system, a healthy earth, upon which we depend for our own existence?

This book suggests that we can, through an alternative psychological conditioning system, bring about an alternative set of outcomes.

Ebola Doldrums in the Age of Mercury

Breathing mouse shit dust in an Alcoholic's Subaru
I fear I caught the Hantavirus
Nurses on planes wearing Ebola hats
Eat cocktail peanuts
Somewhere on the horizon
A great film has yet to be made
The Sober Gonzo is tired
The leaves have changed color
Are falling
Sprinkling the browning grass with yellow feathers

A Different Perspective on Suicide

There is nothing wrong with suicide.  You read that correctly.  Keep breathing. 

We live in a society where saying that suicide is acceptable is like saying that the moon is made of cheese. 

Robin Williams killed himself.  

He has been called a coward, his death has been blamed on depression, or addiction, and all his potential (and personal) reasons for ending his life are constructed in negative terms, like he broke the rules, like we, the living, lost control of his life.  

We assume that we have the right to pronounce a judgment: that he made the wrong choice, that it was a mistake, a momentary loss of reason that could have been prevented.

When a family and intimate friends lose a loved one, there is hardship and there is pain, there is a long period of mourning, a personal, living, struggle to understand, to find peace with the loss. 

When a society loses someone who makes them laugh, who entertains them, who they did not know personally, we might do well to look at our own problem, celebrity worship, and a mentally deranged idea that we somehow have a special and intimate connection with, and ownership over, people who do not even know who we are. 

Robin Williams had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.  Most people who commit suicide have a serious physical or mental illness, some reason to no longer want to wake up and see the sunrise or feel a lovers embrace.  The things that make life worth living, no longer do.  What kind of society are we living in when someone is not allowed to make a decision not to go on living when they will be subjecting themselves, and their friends and family, to a long, drawn-out, degenerative illness, as their own life becomes more and more difficult to live?  

I know something about suicide.  My mother died by her own hand, by drinking a glass of water with a deadly dose of powdered phenobarbital dissolved in it.  She did this while I was holding her hand, while my little brother and I sat next to her, keeping her company and telling her how much we loved her. 

To watch my mother drink that cup of water, that would not nourish life, but would end it, was to witness the most courageous act that has ever been performed in my company. 

Have you ever been standing at a bus-stop or subway platform, and felt the air move as this large machine approaches, and think, I could just step in front of it?  Along with that thought, when I’ve had it, was always this immediate sense of dread or revulsion, an absolute feeling of “no-way, I want to live.” I would immediately move backwards, even if I was already a yard from the danger zone, I would make sure I was safe. 

The will to live is not something easy to surmount.  Killing yourself is not an easy task.  For a person with the will to live, pointing a gun at your own head is going to feel very unnatural.  If you’ve ever gone out shooting and someone next to you holding a gun starts to turn toward you, you get very uncomfortable, and probably tell them they should take a gun safety class, tell them to turn their ass around, and get that gun pointed in the opposite direction. 

In our society there is a prohibition against suicide, they lock you up if you try it, you are punished, stigmatized, people think you are sick.  My life, someone else tells me, belongs to them.  I don’t own my own life.  

I imagine the prohibition against suicide leads to more suicides than it prevents.  Do I know this to be a fact?  No.  But the suicide rate in the United States is certainly higher than it is in, say, Switzerland, where assisted suicide is legal, where my mother, brother, and I were able to go so that mom could be freed from her suffering and sickness.  

In a society where suicide is made available, in a compassionate way, maybe it becomes less appealing.  If my life was mine, maybe I would care more about it.  That feeling on the subway platform would return, having death right there, would make me pull back, remind me that I do want to live another day, to witness the great mystery of living.

Who am I to say that Robin Williams shouldn’t have killed himself?  I can’t even say that my own mother shouldn’t have killed herself.  It was her decision.  It was her life.  It was her suffering.  I could only witness, be there, be present, be a grown-up.  For any of us to judge someone for taking their own life demands an enormous amount of immaturity on our part, and is a symptom of what a society of emotional wimps we are.  

To kill oneself is to go against the fundamental instinct of life, it is to overcome the will to live.  If someone takes this step we should feel compassion for them, understand that their suffering may be beyond our comprehension, and understand that they may have made the best decision for them, and maybe even for their family and society. 

Of course we should offer mental health care to all our citizens, it should be a part of any reasonable universal health-care plan, and we should try and prevent and treat depression and other mental illness (suffering might be a better word for illness) and many of the other drivers of suicide, addiction, and violence. 

We also need to look at the stigma against suicide in our society, and ask ourselves whether what we are really trying to avoid looking at is what a miserable society it is that has to command its members to go on living, and to prohibit something that should be naturally unappealing, except in cases that those of us who still have the will to live might not be able to understand.      

There was no blood on the moon tonight.

There was no blood on the moon tonight. The moon was a sun. The total lunar eclipse, April 15^th, 2014, was a magical thing. A long performance, that made me aware of just how big this earth is.  We have a very long shadow.  How glorious, what a universe to behold.  Yet we forget how small the universe really is, with all its’ possible multiple dimensions, or its’ so called worm-holes, or mysteries, and imaginings.  

We’ve zoomed so far back in time trying to find out how it all began, made our projection of the totality of things so huge, so immensely beyond our mortal comprehension, that we’ve forgotten where we are, the only place there is in fact, for a human being to be. Right here.  Right now.  Where else is there?  Sure we’ve launched ourselves into space, but we were earthlings in space.  It wasn’t exactly outer space, nowhere even close to the edge of the sun’s orbit.  We haven’t left the neighborhood.  We are in orbit down here, and we are in orbit out there.  A few dozen earthlings went to space.  How nice.  Nothing like a little field trip to fuel the imagination and take us a little further out, into our science fiction adventure in forgetting our nature. 

What does it mean for earthlings to launch themselves off their life support system, their source of life, their home?  Can there be any rational explanation for it, or does it lead a clear thinking person to believe that these astronauts and their admirers, these imaginatively deluded, self-identified space colonizers, have forgotten that they are the earth? 

We are not separate from this planet, well, at least not according to evolutionary theory.  Here we are, billions of years in the making, uniquely suited to life on this planet, in this solar system, breathing this air, in this peculiar and unique atmosphere.  Really, where do we think we’re going? 

We can watch a performance like the moon, in the shadow of our home, getting comfortable in the darkness, turning off all the lights.  Even when our earth shadow turns off the lights on the moon, which turns our big night-light in the sky way down, one could still have a snack, in the faint glow of the golden orb in the night sky.  Tonight it was like the sun, about to set on the horizon, all soft orange and glowing, and it’s the moon, doing it’s same old thing, but longer, endlessly held there in a faint glow of perfect roundness, in our shadow.  On and on, held in our view, moving slowly nowhere.  Where did we lose track of our place in the solar system, passengers on this orbiting planet, full of blood, wet with the tides of the moon?

They call it a blood moon, but we are the bloody ones.  We are the one’s naming things, giving meaning to things, making up explanations for the universe, creating alternative universes with our imaginations, in concert with our inventions.  Telescopes: to take us further away from here and now, showing us images of a past we’ve convinced ourselves is comprehensible to us.  But we are always here, now, whether we are seeing backwards or projecting forwards, we can only ever do it from here, inside our minds.  We think we are the inventors, but we are inventions of the earth, conscious creators, in a little holding pattern of mental projection.  Someday if we return to sanity, we might even call it what it is, a type of collective psychosis.  But it’s an interesting adventure anyhow, in the light of the moon, halfway out of the shadow of our mother planet, reflecting brightly the light of our energetic seed, sunlight, as we orbit just so.  We think we are going somewhere, but we’ll always be now here, which means we are going nowhere. 

Where else is there? 

Here, now, then, there.

Two weeks ago I was laying on my belly in a little guest-room in Hawaii, turning right to look out at the broad pacific ocean.  I'm addicted to distraction.  The sound of notification chimes from my phone. I ignore it, but am tempted.  I'm constantly drawn back into Facebook, as though pulled, from a physical aloneness, into the digital public square.  There must be peers there, yes, but is it an illusion of togetherness? We seem to move ever so imperceptibly toward this falsity of companionship.  Where are these people? The implicit suggestion of the photographs and posts is that we are busy living, thriving, in a real world.  Yet, here we are, day after day, in the same digital sphere, called back, like salmon returning to our birthplace, to spawn.  If it's so real, so deep, so satisfying, so present, why are we sitting with our faces attached to a screen, updating this moment into a public journal; as if to say to each other "Hello!?" "Greetings!"  Here I am.  Living.  Here I am, I exist. The public square, the village, evaporated into ethereal digitation.

Collateral Damage and the 2nd Anniversary of My Mother's Suicide.

Ooh, how spicy are the consequences of public display in the blogosphere.  An angry ex.  A Jennlapse.   But at least the lunatic is writing again.  Yes, a few days ago we wrote the previous post, and a recent breakup had brought up feelings about that unattainable gal from Long Island that seems to always pop up on the periphery under circumstances of uncertainty.  Then a mysterious "friend" sent a link to that post to my beautiful ex-girlfriend here in Mountain town.  A sweet girl, a tumultuous relationship, another addiction that was nearly impossible to give up.  Are we just addicted to quitting?

For whatever reason, I've been conditioned to write about things that might be better kept private on this here blog that nobody reads.  And I'm glad to be back online.

So that brings us to the two year anniversary of Take off day.  I'm pretty sure that two years ago today, my brother, my mother, and I, were in Zurich.  When my brother and I left Switzerland, there were only two of the original traveling party still alive.  My mother had chosen to end her life, with dignity, grace, and steadfast bravery.  Scroll down for a couple years, (and I haven't written much the last few years), and you'll probably find a post about my mother's exit from her body bag.  I didn't keep that a secret either.  So, what you see is what you get.

Adios Mom.

FD  

Missing the Boat

Aloha, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, and Jenn.  Boy did I ever not get this, it took me so long to understand.  Here I was, posting this picture, with this quote, on the Open Mind Project Facebook page, as though I had some understanding of it, or could have any claim to living up to it.  How very far from the truth.  Alas, I am one who has been guilty of loving in the least freedom giving sense.  It is the way I loved the girl I have never been able to forget about, but that I most certainly drove further from my heart, than her great geographic distance already had her placed.

I had to be loved with that needy desperation to understand how impossible and destructive of real love, it is to be in relationship with that need.  If "she," variously called the grouse, Jenn, the muse, the madness, etc, the one I never could quite forget about, ever did love me, I must have destroyed it early on.

But, does that mean that the love is gone?  I don't think so.  The end of love is the beginning of freedom.  The end of love is only an illusion, a mirage of loss.  Love never ends, just like nothing, in the real sense, ever ends.  Nothing is permanent, no life, no love, no human being, nothing mortal, alive, existent.  But Nothing, The Nothing, is itself permanent, in the sense of being the vessel of all existence.  The Great Nothing, the Void, Sunyata, or Emptiness, the space in which all matter exists, is the womb of all creation.  Just as the self is an illusion, in that no matter how deeply we look into our "selves" we, upon honest reflection, are likely to find no permanent, enduring self, a being separate from the consciousness which is experiencing and discerning life through it's limited scope of understanding, so to are disconnectedness, or ultimately impermanence, just an illusion, because in our most certain demise, our individual concepts of our "selves" will pass away, and what endures is the continuing thread of existence, whole, unified, and undifferentiated by the self-centered consciousness of I.  And so, we are always all in this together, infinite little miracles, particles of existence, integrally laced into the larger whole, which is itself at home in the vast emptiness that is the womb of everything.

Real Love, like Real God, or any other expression of that essence of beauty, truth, permanence, Importance, which we cannot express in our limited language, or as Anselm defined it: "that than which nothing greater can be conceived," cannot end.  Nor can it ever be effectively expressed by a need, a desperation, a self-centered feeling of lack, which seeks some external stamp of approval to fill it.  That love, which expresses itself as need, is also an illusory form of love, because it stems from an illusory self, a self that feels it needs something to make it complete.  So, instead of sending "her" another email, with this picture along with an apology for all the neediness, and self-centered illusion of love that I have been lambasting her with the last 15 years (including the last 3, which have consisted of a persistent effort to "leave that girl alone"), I wrote a blog post, in some hope (hopefully not a need) that she might find me pleased with her freedom, her smile, and happiness, if only glimpsed for a moment, in a glance at her Facebook page, and the view from her seat in the western wilderness. 

Good evening friends,

Franklin Delanor. 

Rehtaeh Parsons Case Solved By Anonymous In Two Hours - Shared with Global News for Android -

A Message from Father Christmas

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls of all ages! This is the big white man with the long white beard, and the red jacket; the one who knows whether you are awake or asleep, who knows whether you’ve been good or bad, the one with all the Hoh, Hoh, Hoh’s!  

I’m the one who comes to your home in the night, the one you leave offerings for, milk of the holy cow, and sweet, tasty, morsels of cookie manna from ovens.  You know what I like, and you aim to please me so that I shall reward you in the hereafter-coming year.  That’s right, I’m Santa Clause, most people call me Santa, but just try moving that n to the end.  You can see my Santa Claws.  With just the move of that one letter, my letters transform into the name of that oft disparaged nemesis of the being who’s birth I come to remind you to celebrate!  Satan?  No, I’m Father Christmas.  But you won’t find me in the Bible, nor will you find me in the North Pole. 

Your parents, at some point, will probably fill you in on the fact that I’m not real, if you don’t figure it out for yourself.  But it’s pretty amazing, considering how many pictures there are of me everywhere, or simply how many car commercials I show up in, that so many adults seem to know that I’m not real.  

Well, they tell you I’m not real, but so many of you still leave me milk and cookies, so many of you bring your children to sit in my lap.  What are you trying to do to yourselves?  

Are you trying to train yourselves to believe in a white bearded being who flies through the clouds, surrounded by cherubs, I mean elves, and judges your actions and either punishes you with coal or no presents, or rewards you with stuff? 

I’m just curious.  This is a pretty incredible cultural phenomenon, in case you haven’t noticed.  Just listen to all the Christmas music on the radio, see all those Jesus stories on TV, look at the big Christmas tree in Washington D.C., how about CNN, FOX News, and other news outlets, showing one Christmas related story after another?  Christmas is a Christian Holiday, in case you didn’t know.  Have you noted my remarkable resemblance to Jesus’s father, as depicted by Michelangelo, one of the first images of God in a simple Google search for God? 
Weird, right? 

Now go shopping, I command thee.   

    

 

It's Not the End of the World

         Since Dec. 21st, 2012, is upon us, and since I can’t seem to get away from advertisements for End of the World celebrations in Aspen, I must speak up and defend my consciousness from this assault.  I’m sorry to be the bearer of good news, but I must inform you, despite your highest nihilistic hopes, it’s NOT the end of the world.  Belly Up, our little local music venue, is having an “End of the World Party.”  There are lots of “End of the World” parties on this day of “planetary alignment.”  There are rumors of a “cosmic shift,” or a “radical transformation.” But rumors of some predicted Mayan apocalypse are an insult to our archeological and anthropological education.  The mainstream seems to be missing the information boat, the one carrying the facts, rather than the imaginings.   

         One fact is, the Mayan’s don’t have an apocalyptic cosmology.  We do.  The Mayan astrologers and priests, who created this calendar that we have interpreted as heralding the end of the world on the equivalent day in our own calendar, Dec. 21st, 2012, did not see the end of this particular period of time as being the End Times, but just the beginning of a new B’ak’tun.  A B’ak’tun, it turns out, is approximately 394 of our years long.  20 B’ak’tun’s make a Piktun.  In the equivalent of our calendar year, October, 13th, 4772, (two thousand seven hundred and sixty years from now) 20 B’ak’tun’s will have passed, and the Mayan calendar will go to the next Piktun.  Hopefully we will have reset our own calendar by then, and will have based our new calendar’s start date on something more hopeful than the supposed birth of a nice young man who got crucified for nothing more than speaking his mind.  Either way, you can discern, from these few simple facts, that the Mayans did not plan for the world to end this Friday.   This is not the end of the Mayan calendar, it is the end of one particular measurement tool within the Mayan calendar, and the beginning of another.  

       We have taken a tiny sliver of out-of-context information about an ancient Mesoamerican belief system and filtered it through our conditioned western lens.  As Sandra Noble, director of the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, stated: “For the ancient Maya, it was a huge celebration to make it to the end of a whole cycle.”  That Dec., 21st, 2012, heralds a doomsday scenario or a cosmic shift, she calls, “a complete fabrication and a chance for a lot of people to cash in.”  Unfortunately ideas have power, and our psychology as humans is not so impermeable as to be unaffected by these types of false beliefs.  

         These beliefs, which continue to bombard our consciousness with the idea that a deity is counting the days till “He” comes down and ends everything around us, and either punishes or rewards us individually, for eternity, depending (like Santa Clause) upon whether we’ve been naughty or nice, are not helping us create a better world.  Since our minds have been conditioned for centuries with this idea about the coming apocalypse, about the end times and a judgment day, the collective consciousness of the so called “civilized world” is littered with this thinking.  When another story comes along that fits nicely into this widespread narrative, it is very difficult for even “free thinkers” to tell the true from the false.   

           Every time one of us talks about the coming “cosmic shift,” or the “transformation,” or “the End of the World,” we are actually reinforcing a narrative, which paradoxically serves to prohibit the very “cosmic shift” or “transformation” that we are hoping for.  When we are dealing with an unsustainable economic system, climate change, deforestation, nuclear weapons, nationalism, religious divisions, and other perpetuated ways of thinking that create violence and oppression, it seems normal that humans would hope for a transformation of their thinking that would liberate them from this problematic reality.  But the belief in some external change-maker keeps us psychologically limited, whether consciously or unconsciously, from actually creating the change we hope for.  Will belief in an externally created utopia help motivate us to make real changes which might create a more utopian world?  Or if the end is coming, then what is the point in making the changes we see as necessary around us?  Beliefs in a coming end, or transformation, create a paralyzing layer in our consciousness hindering us from making changes that might help us begin to build a better world.  Next time somebody tells you the end is coming, try telling them that, no, it’s not.  Have a very Merry It’s Not the End of the World Party.

The Facts of Life

Seriously, isn't it about Tebow Time?

Created with cinemagr.am

Mitt Romney on Beliefs

A Dog Sand and Beach

Begining with a haiku? Sure.

Reflections on blue
Green water of Pacific
A dog, sand, and beach

Why start with a haiku? To calm the not calm maybe. Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you are a nut. I just had another breakup, maybe the most abrupt and dramatic of my career. I'm left with questions about my sabatoging of my own relationships. The mind can be a terrible device for calamity creation. My own mind, which has its positive characteristics, seems a bit too good at picking out what is wrong with any given situation, and then focusing on it. This mental twist may be good for sociological study, but it is not beneficial for cultivating relationships. Aloha.

How about a green recession? - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

More Perspective

Airport Update

Gracious me! It's been a long time brothers and sisters. I'm at the Denver Airport, sitting at the Woody Creek Bakery and Cafe, another seemingly Aspen Valley spun business expanding into the exosphere. I'm sweating profusely. Miles, a young Army reservist who was sitting on the plane next to me on the Aspen to Denver flight, was telling me how, because he only cares about enjoying life (we only have one after all), he likes to drink and smoke and get crazy, and I was saying, for the same, only one life, reason, I'm sober. He asked me if I drink coffee. I responded in the affirmative. He told me that he had me cold, I'm not sober. My sweat glands don't seem to think i'm sober either. Between my ADD medication and a serious caffein habit, young Miles may have my number. Relativity may be a flawed theory, but in this case, I'm going to plead it. At least i'm relatively sober. Compared to getting stoned from morning till night, and getting nearly drunk every day by sundown, this caffeination may be some sort of dangerous super sobriety. I'm agitatingly aware of my feelings of agitation. This is no drunkenness, but I'm still avoiding my study of the prophets with this blogpost. So ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters both Gonzo and greedhead, I wish you all safe travels. Aloha.

Goose Wrangler

Off Facebook

Wow, I just deactivated my Facebook account. What a trip. I've been on that damn site for what, going on 4 years now, 5, years, 6 years? I can't be sure. It was getting out of control. I needed a break. I have a strange feeling that I just unplugged, and while I've posted infrequently to good old Soft Landings and Sober Gonzo, I feel like I'd be better served putting my energies outside my Academic and theological endeavors into my own work. Facebook is like some kind of energy sucking vortex. I'm tired of telling 800 people what i'm doing all the time. At least nobody reads this blog. I'll start telling you folks what I'm doing all the time. Right now, I'm listening to Warren Zevon, "Empty Hearted Town," writing a paper for my Master of Divinity senior seminar. Life is strange my dear song-birds. I love you. The Grouse, the old love Jenn, her birthday passed a few days ago. It's a mystery. The universe unfolding as it does, infinitely blossoming like a flower that never dies; and here we are in the midst of it my dear friends. Conscious witnesses to the present moment. Creators of the future, prisoners of the past; at any moment we can break free. Our habitual thoughts are all that are holding us back. It's time to rocket ourselves into liberation. It's time to plant the seeds of a new reality for our descendants, for our human family here on earth. It's time to bury the lie that we are separate, and build something beautiful from the decaying nutriments. Imagine what our children are capable of if we stop teaching them that they are selfish, fallen creatures, and instead teach them that they are glorious creators, vessels of infinite consciousness, social creatures who care more about the greater good than they do about their individual selves. What messes have we been making as a result of the rotten messages we've been getting? New ideas. Freedom from the Known. What's possible? It's up to you.

Happy Birthday Bob Marley and Mr. Goose Wrangler

Groundhog Day

Well, it's Groundhog day, again.
Sludge.

Thousands of Years of a Perpetuated Lie

Seeing the stars' reflection on the lake by night,
The swan is disappointed,
mistaking them for lotus shoots.
So, even seeing a real lotus shoot by day,
he will not eat it.
When once deceived by a liar,
one will doubt even the truthful

-attributed to Nagarjuna by Tarthang Tulku

Aloha Whispers of the Ghost Faced Bandit

Things to do. GoogleNews.
Work to be done. Facebook.
3 papers, 2 overdue, got to get to work. History Channel.
Fox News.
CNN.
Another Republican debate,
In the Idiot village called America,
With a big violent claw gripping helicopters, spaceships, and a nuclear arsenal,
unmanned drones manned by conscious-less politicians and corporations.
Welcome to the TV show yellowjumpsuits.
We care.
We are human.
We are one family.
We want to leave a healthy world for our grandchildren.
We want to unite the peoples of planet earth and manifest a sustainable reality.
We may be cynical.
We may be insane.
Is there any other rational reaction to insanity?
Look around.
Telescopes peering back 13.7 billion years.
Trying to figure it out.
We can't even figure out the present
and we're telling ourselves that the end is coming
6.7 billion years in the future.
What does that even mean?
Can we even just address our own short lifetimes?
Our impermanence?
Have we been trained by a couple thousand years of an unhealthy religious belief system
that has taught us to expect that the unreal will somehow become real.
that our mortal bodies,
these socially constructed selves
will somehow live forever
somewhere else
or in some alternative present?
Existence as we experience it.
With our claws.
Life feeds on death.
Decay and resurrection.
Some days you eat.
Some days you get ate.
Come on lunatic asylum.
WAKE UP!!
It's not so difficult.
We've been trained to be asleep.
Been trained to think that the way things are,
the miracle of existence itself
is something to fear.
is a punishment for some act of our ancestors some time in the distant past.
Adam and Eve.
They made a mistake.
So we die.
Sorry folks.
That's a lie.
We made it up.
You can call it a story.
But in our present world of literalism.
Numbers.
Math.
Science.
It's a story that's not true.
It's not helping us create a more beneficial reality for all our brothers and sisters.
For our descendants.
It's a lie.
Life is a miracle.
Death is not a punishment, unless we are executing it.
It's the price of life.
Fox News.
CNN.
History.
Swallowed by the lie.
Spitting itself up.
Over and
Over.
Again.
What about the present?
NOW.
Freedom.
This is all there is.
What else is there
Outside the mind?

Colbert Super PAC Rocks!!

The Colbert Report
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I Need.

Did you hear about this scufuffle outside the Apple store in Beijing? You want to talk about the end of communism? Wow, here is another nail in the coffin. This is a success story of consumerism if I've ever seen one. People were rioting for bread in France before the revolution there. They were hungry and they'd had enough, and they said, "we're not going to take it any more!" Fast forward a few hundred years into present day Beijing, a city that just a few decades ago was far from friendly to the capitalist machine. People in parts of Africa, or American Appalachia, or even far west of China, might be starving, but these chubby faced consumers in BeiJing are hungry alright, hungry for the most up-to-date version of the I-Pod. They want an expensive consumer telephone, they want to add a letter to their I-Phone 4. They want to make it a 4--- "S". They probably have a working cell phone, but they want the coolest, newest, me me me, I I I-Phone. Welcome to consumer marketing at a pinnacle of its success. These people have been made to feel like they need this stuff so badly that they are acting like a starving, angry, mob. Do you long for a Tiananman square without billboards of psychological make-you-want-things-you-don't-need magic? You probably already have a phone, but you are ready to riot because you are pissed off that you can't purchase this item so desperately low on the Maslows hierarchy of needs, right now, right when you want it, now. You are Beijing? Wow. The disease has spread and with enthusiastic power. Was it someone's goal to turn the people of the earth into thoughtless greedheads? More, more, more. Yep. We are eating the Apple all right, and we're feeding it to China, and we're not stopping there.

Who do you say i am?

The Messiah? Hah.
I am who you say I am.
See, you are the storytellers.
You tell the story.
You make the meaning.
You are the conscious creators.
You are the meaning makers.
This mortal man sitting on the balcony
worshipping the sun on his face
isn't the One,
even though he and the Father are One.
The Spirit of the valley is Female, never dying,
The Dark Mystery,
The Receptive Principle,
The Empty Space within and without the entire Universe
you've created with your mind.
This is it.
What's that?
Nothing,
outside Everything;
Make it what it is;
Tell a nice story MindHead;
Let it be so.

What are you doing in my tent?

Haven't written much
Early Winter 2012
Hardly a Haiku

Infinite Symbols
Bubbling up from the mind
Flying through the sky

Royal Tenenbaums
On the Television set
Life is too fast now

The Burning Man for Badasses!!??

American Juggalo from Sean Dunne on Vimeo.

The Fool on the Hill.

When Joshua gave his Dharma talks, 24,000 moons ago, there were no nuclear weapons there, no other place to go. Then was now, but not now then, as we're running down the show. There seems to have been an error then, not so very long ago; because we're acting like we bloody think, there is somewhere else to go.

Turkey Day

Happy Thanksgiving
Happens to be good first line
For Haiku poem

If that wasn't enough
That line was six syllables
So go fuck yourself

No No what terror
That's an awful thing to say
With no seasonal reference

Are you having trouble
With the holidays
Now that your mom is dead?

And the form of your Haikus
Is straying more and more
From the 5-7-5 form of its ancestry

Try one more old boy
For the sake of the quiet
In the autumn trees

Parade

Madman on parade
Another Christmas morning
Standing in the sand

Aspen Fall 2011

The streets are covered
In the temple of the heart
With bright yellow leaves

Haikus for October 6th

Rain in Berkeley
and the movement occupied
Protesting Wall Street

Steve Jobs took a trip
clear out of his body bag
joined mom in the sky

I have too many stocks
to start protesting Wall Street
what a conundrum

Not much enjoying
These haiku poems today
They seem quite contrived

What's the point then mr.?
Why no seasonal reference?
Syllabic constraint.

Click Here and Go Visit the Sober Gonzo out on the edge of Insanity

"16 Super Earth's Discovered" [Click here for CNN story]

Here is a perfect example of the insanity of modern Astronomy. Maybe this should really be considered criminal. Certainly it is false advertising. It's just another example of the way stories are warped to make us think things that are not based in reality. "one of the planets might even be inhabitable!" Under the right circumstances it could have water... WOW!! One out of 16 super earths... well, shit friends, we may as well just use up all these dime a dozen resources here on earth, because there are just tons of planets out there that could support life. I mean this is EARTH, but these others are SUPER EARTHS!! AWESOME!!! I think I just wet my pants I'm so exited!! GEE WIZ, lets shoot some more rockets into outer space, or hurry up and get some space hotels built up there just outside our atmosphere, barely 60 miles above the surface of our earth... I mean think how much closer that will get us toward the SUPER EARTH! Now wait just a minute friend, now tell me how far away that SUPER EARTH is again? Only 35 light years? Sounds pretty darn close... So outer space, like outer f-ing space, is about 62 miles above the surface of the earth, that seems really close. But we've gone all the way to the moon and the moon is like 240,000 miles away. So hey, if we build a rocket launch pad on the moon, that should really help us get over to the SUPER PLANET right guys!!?? I mean 240,000 miles must be pretty close to a light year, and this great, in fact SUPER, planet is only 35 light years away. So tell me how far away this life supporting super planet really is guys? Well, OK, 1 light year is 6 trillion miles. So 35 light years is only 210 trillion miles or so, which looks like 210,000,000,000,000... so our non-existent waterless, atmosphereless, lifeless, moon launch-pad will put us about 210,000,000,000,000 minus 240,000 miles closer, which is around 170,000,000,000,000 miles to go. I'm not so good at math. But it sure sounds SUPER to me.

Happy Ganesh Chaturthi! In India there is a great celebration going on to celebrate and worship this son of Shiva and Parvati.

Balderdash

Kisses on the 80's station
Emptiness on the horizon
Pictures of tacos drawing pictures in the rain
The machine gun biscuit ranch making its way toward stardom.
Is anyone listening?
The Rise of the Planet of the Apes film
Is there a reason for these fragments?
Who invented language?
Were the dictionary definitions written by an elaborate Balderdash game?
Lao Tzu, another dead guy who is known by a name
that was not the same
when he was poking around the material realm.
That guy is said
to have said
"Do the great thing while it is still small."
It would have been written, or spoken in Chinese.
Mandarin or Cantonese, you ask?
What is Chinese?
Another word from the Balderdash dictionary?
Another wise man once advised
"don't eat poo."
Could that wise man also have been Lao Tzu?
Whose named rhymed with Tofu
signified in Chinese by this: 豆腐
which sounds like "doufu"
but looks nothing like tofu.
Language in the post modern apocalypse
where is it?
Is the past 3 years ago,
sitting in a small room in Spain,
on the 5th floor
listening to the church bells ring in the night,
looking out through the open shutters?
Andalusia,
where the kite surfers fly,
and the ancient church bells ring,
tolling the end of coherent meaning.

Give me a break Lane has to be around here somewhere.

This is where the Goose Wrangler is hiding out, unsuccessfully wrangling 10,000 peacocks.

The 10,000 Peacocks

This relaxing meditator is contemplating emptiness. As you are doing your walking meditations, one must tread lightly, to avoid stepping on living creatures or peacock poo.

The Cuckoos Nest

July the 5th, 2011. The peacocks are meowing loudly, shrieking in the night. The walls of Annex 8 don't seem to have been painted since this was a mental hospital many decades ago. Now this is all a part of The City of Ten Thousand Buddhas. I should be doing my reading, but I'm shooting this message out from behind the lines. In the monastery, roommate across the room, punching in these letters on a cellphone key pad. The buddha. Wake up comes at 4 am. The monks live in what was once the maximum security unit for the criminally insane. The animals love it here now. The monks are much nicer to them than the mental patients were. Aloha.

More from the post-post-modern apocalypse

Seeing a picture on the cover of a recent Aspen Daily News online paper, of a couple of pasty white folks (like myself), from the “Logo Ligi African Dance Company,” dressed in their Ghanaian garb, prancing like a couple of natives on the carpeted floor of Aspen’s Pitkin County Library, reminded me of the lovely post, post-modern apocalyptic dilemma our multicultural society so enjoys these days. That’s right Aspen, I’m following you from afar, continuing to observe and report during my self-induced exile at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, CA. I miss Aspen. Oh, how I miss Aspen. Berkeley is like living in that picture of the Ghanaian dancers, brought in all the way from Boulder (just a bit of a shorter trip than from the real Ghana), day after day, week after week. It’s a tortuous affair of cultural appropriation on a grand scale. It’s like living in a psychiatric ward of slow driving, self-consumed individualist spiritual exploration; of burnt out hippies who seem to have given up trying to save the world and become obsessed with self-applause, cloaked in the idea that they really are saving the world. No, I’m not talking about Aspen. Am I? You have never seen so many dream catchers hanging from rear view mirrors. Are people sleeping in their cars? Speaking of cultural appropriation, I did an internship this past year at the Seven Circles Foundation, so I’ve spent most of my Sundays, the past 12 months, in a sweat lodge, or the womb of Mother Earth, as Uncle Fred Wahpepah, the 81 year old Kickapoo and Sac and Fox elder who leads the lodges, calls it. This is probably to the consternation of the educators at my Seminary, who I have thus far found unconvincing in their Christian message. They would like to see me join some Christian denomination. Yet, despite my time here thus far, I just can’t seem to wrap my head around the idea that an innocent, peace loving, love preaching man, son of God or not, had to be murdered, in order for my, or anyone else’s, sins to be forgiven. And while many of the Christian communities are just about as diverse as the predominately white Seven Circles Foundation, it’s important to remember that they are culturally appropriating a religion as well. We rarely think about it this way, but it’s true. Christianity was started by a Jew named Jesus, or Yeshua, as he would have been known; and in the beginning of Christianity you had to be Jewish to be Christian. All the disciples were, as was Paul, who, like a good corporatist, came up with a great idea for expanding the consumer base for this burgeoning community of believers, this new Church. Yes, good old Paul, or Saul as he would have been known before his conversion, came up with a clever ploy which ended up exporting the guilt man inherits in the Jewish story B'reshiyth, or Genesis, the origin story of mankind in one small region of the ancient near east, to pretty much the entire world. Woohoo! Thanks Paul. Mahalo! He invited the gentiles into the new Church. “There is neither Jew nor Greek in Jesus” (Galatians 3:28), he told us. But to make the crucified and resurrected Jesus relevant to the gentile population, he had to export the Hebrew story that made a crucified Jesus relevant in the first place, in a Hebrew context. So now we all need the innocent man to die, the sacrificial lamb on the cross, so we can then be saved by the resurrected Jesus, back from the dead, like in a grand old Horror movie. Except if I was a Greek, or some other Pagan, some Celtic or Germanic tribal human being, living alongside other Ghanaian dancers, I didn’t have a belief that I had been kicked out of the Garden of Eden. I didn’t need to be saved. That was a Hebrew story, and Jesus was a Hebrew solution to that literary conflict introduced pretty early in the pages of the creation story. But that story won the game, at least thus far. Christianity is the largest religion on the planet, followed in second place by Islam, another belief system borrowed from the Jews. That good old Abrahamic bloodline, so many folks seem to want to be in the club. Well, as far as my seminary education, this is about what I have gathered, so I thought I would share it with you. The modern cultural and belief system appropriators, admittedly, many of us pasty white, who are looking for something new (or old), are often dreamers, people who care about the planet, who think we can do better as a human species. Many of us see one human race when we look at our fellow human beings, understanding our different colors, cultures, and religious belief systems as adaptations to particular contexts of particular times and places. We see our different colors as having something to do with the distances from the equator that our later ancestors lived. Some of us may have taken an anthropology class and discovered and invested our belief in the story that our entire species evolved in Africa, which in this meta-view, could actually be understood as the home continent of even the white Ghanaian dancers on the cover of the Aspen Daily news. Yet so many of us who care, who want to change the world, are falling into the same trap that the counter-cultural movement of the 1960’s did. As anyone who has recently checked out US foreign or Federal Reserve policy has noticed, the counter-culture movement failed. Capitalist, Greedhead, military industrial complex, hawkish foreign policy, advanced weapons systems, coal burning, oil drilling, fast paced modernity, is still moving along at a rapid clip. But what are the dreamers doing? Still dropping out; the very problem with Tim Leary’s advice nearly 50 years ago. Tune in, turn on, and drop out. Was Leary working for the CIA? That advice is music to the hegemonic ear. Here, have a party in a nice little isolated spot like Woodstock, listen to loud music, take Acid, smoke pot. The machine keeps rolling on. Now our modern counter-cultural, self-defeating, self-important, festival of hedonism is even further away. Burning Man. Black Rock Desert. 50,000 hip, young, radicals, who couldn’t put themselves farther from anywhere they might actually make a difference, spending months of time, money, and energy planning temporary art installations which will be dismantled or burned. The status quo is laughing. How many other examples are there? Big ideas, and big parties of meditation, chanting, sex, drugs, rock and roll or techno music, in the middle of nowhere, or late into the night, so the people who actually care are asleep during the day, or skiing when the planet is still getting raped, the drones are dropping bombs in Pakistan, and Nuclear Weapons are being traded on the black market like baseball cards. The machine keeps rolling on. I don’t know what the answer is. I went to seminary. Maybe all the hippies and radicals need to join the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines. We are all traveling along in the belly of the ship, having a party, and pretending that we are in control. But if we want to shift the route that we are sailing, it’s time we take the helm. Aloha Aspen, Colorado. That’s where I live, no matter where I am. I hope to make it back sometime. Peace.

The Post-Modern Idiot and Chuang Tzu

People walk around the village, laughing to themselves on cellphones. Funny times in the village. The Idiot and his master, the Great Clod, do Nothing. The Idiot watched as the Great Clod blew life into the Universe, shaking the heavens until the foundation of existence was formed. Then the Great Clod rested under the Universe tree and watched Nothing on TV. This was a time of relaxation for the Idiot and the Great Clod, as the earth developed and humans began to kill themselves and each other in more and more imaginative ways. Inventing nuclear weapons, they laughed at cell phone messages, flew into what they called space, inches outside the atmosphere. All the way to the moon they went, which was about 5 minutes away. The Great Clod sat a few more inches away, right next to them really, in the shade of the Universe tree and watched Nothing happen. Planets in orbit, galaxies colliding, people running around, molecules popping in and out of existence. Nothing felt the Great Clod sitting inside her, next to her extra lively Universe tree, near the witnessing Idiot, who felt something for Nothing, as he watched the magic of the Great Clod's Way emerging from the center of Nothing. It was all a magnificent thing to imagine in the light of a full moon, the whole circle in view in that moment, for some descendent of the Idiot, who stepped off the speeding treadmill briefly, in the midst of life, to walk into a reflection of where he already was, in the womb of Nothing, deep inside the Mother of Everything.

I rarely post movie reviews, and this is no review it is a WARNING

Whatever happens DO NOT see the Tree of Life. It is a giant turd wrapped in pretty pictures, close-ups, and pseudo-subtle-existential questions with a couple of dinosaurs thrown in for good measure to get across the point the movie never makes in its dull, tortuous, journey of plot vagueness. They could have told the uninteresting story in 10 minutes, instead they interspersed the dull tale with a bunch of National Geographic stock footage, to draw out the horrid experience. Maybe they were thinking that if they kept you locked in your seat long enough and showed you enough pictures of galaxies and swimming you might forget what a shitty movie you just watched. Not likely, but leaving the theater you will feel reborn and thank the lord you did not have such a "normal" family. Watching your mother die is almost less traumatic than enduring this film. I REPEAT! DO NOT SUBJECT YOURSELF TO THE TREE OF LIFE MOVIE! You are better off finding a nice quiet isolated hill or mountainside, going there, and sitting alone for three days and nights with no food or water. You will also learn more.

Dying

Mother in a blue metal house
between two factories
in the swiss countryside
The crows come
A hawk circles
Life and death in the rat parade
Goodbye to the Squirrels
Aloha to the wingnuts
Off to the universal tide
for mom
The waves roll back
and the whispers of another morning
send a shadow down through the trees
and somewhere down there in the mud
a flower blooms

Mental Terrorism

Well the excrement is thick these days kemo sabe, washing up on the mind shore like oil spill scum. These rats of faith, pouring out fear on the masses, amassing billboards of lies. This is nothing less than mental terrorism and we call it freedom of speech. Burying positive potentialities of our consciousness under dark, spirit crushing mud. Tomorrow is the 21st. Judgment day. There is poison in that cool aid. See you all on Sunday. We are all going to die. But very unlikely that we all die at the same time, except in cases of wrong place wrong time. But that's just life. More shall be born, and this psychotic way of projecting our fear of death, our self centered attachment to our individual selves which culminates in a theology of a faith in an eternity of me, myself, and I living in eternal award or punishment is just the limited consciousness of the past, of a psychotic, lonely, judgemental god concept without a wife, with a son he sacrificed on the cross. We could really draw a prettier picture of a god that might help us stop lying to ourselves so vigorously. Know nothing. Know Nothing, and you might find yourself closer to God. Not that there is ever actually any separation in the first place, outside our minds. Aloha. Now is it. Here it is. How can the world end right now? How bout now?

The Old Sober Gonzo Certainly Wasn't Always Sober. This was Sometime in 2008 We Think.

Bright, and not yet early, or early, but not yet bright? I can’t be sure. This seems one of the great dilemmas of our time. Are we crazy? Or can we just not sleep tonight because there are so many voices, and faces, and people we haven’t seen in too long, and they seem to be really popping around in the unconscious, but after a couple of sleeping pills (prescribed of course) I found myself in the living room spinning records and reminiscing about a camp on the coast of South Carolina, (or maybe it was North Carolina) where homesickness gave me lime disease. In the world of the conscious unconsciousness, induced by strong benzodiazapenes, dream and reality mix, you are awake, and only the sudden silence as the records run their course, breaks you from your still keen statuary bliss. They need reloading.

The records are old and dusty and beautiful, a bit of Hollywood remakes of the “Music of the East” mixed with a classic exercise record… a bit of stretching and what not, and now for the overture: I spent a few minutes adjusting the minisculescentes, the little tweaks and tone, beat, switch grab the toe slide, etc, etc. So now the Platipus is licking all around the edges of the glorious sounds of Frank Chacksfield and his most astounding 1950’s record which takes us Inside the Mystic East. It is like a Broadway show of jazz inspired, cliché, Orient delights. Some choice songs off the album may give you an idea of the immaculate way in which they enhanced the Asian vibes: “Japanese Sandman,” “By an old Pagoda,” “On a little street in Singapore,” to name just a few. I’m feeling giddy.

Here is the dawning morning, sitting here draped in an old American flag and contemplating the future, sedated and elated, enjoying the gentle tug of war between ambien and cocaine. There are only crackles and pops on the phonographs. Excuse the author for one brief interlude. We are now back to square one. The breathing. Swedish yoga with a techno beat. The gentle voices, “chin down, inhale breathing in, exhale breathing out. Hold the pose, just breath. In, out, in, out.” Just breathing, just gently breathing, as we question the future, the choice between man and machine. Finding ourselves the slaves of our creations, watching as the scavengers lurk in all the highways. The rhythm is what is important. Some things are meant to help a man extend his vildormationalsticsam. At the potential expense of what he is familiar with, and what he cares about, when a man is called must he answer? Which pill must he swallow to put his body in the game. This is not what we call a sissy fight. This is the pedal hitting the metal, and we’ll be damned if we are not prepared with the weaponry of the future. Our weapons are the Owl, the Coyote, and the spirit of Peyote. All the little pioneering adventures we embarked on in the name of what we must do, are all moments when we come to terms with our innermost demons, these fun loving imps who most often live in our unconscious to keep us balanced, but then you see them, sprouting their little wings on to freedom.

We are the mothers of our own inventions. And some may be from pharmaceuticals, especially when we must write at all costs, so as to prevent total collapse. We need drums, noise, beauty, and bliss. The adventure as it should be. We have to keep expanding. Did we want to get sober, to clear away the mystery, and return to the fold of the great know: the secret world of happy, joyous, and free? Once you want to quit drinking, once you’ve really faced the fact that you can’t do it like normal folks. The need (you made it very clear for a long time that it was only a want) to drink almost everyday, even the ones designated as nondrinking days. The sauce is always near. But the important thing is to remember that it is all an illusion. The tasty beverages, in their bottles and carafes; ah how I love red wine. It has been my faithful lover, but even she may be turning on me, at least at the bars here in Aspen. The right amount of drugs at the right time can really induce that marvelous insanity on which we all thrive, because the little tastes we get from the little reflectors around us, temporarily allowing us to reach around the stubby imps, these little nuclei of chemicals, as they challenge our brains in conversation. But they become addictions. These are the illusions that offer us visions of delusion. The geniuses of our substances, they deliver us that very genius with one hand, yet with other hand they take away the capacity to profit from it. So the circles go round and round down here at the bars of society. With one hand it giveth, with the other it taketh it away. Once we reach the point where we actually want to be sober, trouble most certainly approaches. This state generally follows many heartfelt oaths to abstain for a while, a week maybe, a couple of days, many a negotiation with the mind and liver and then the sudden realization that a coke habit could really expand my spiritual development. Insanity is the mother of invention.

I’m stepping down to the porcelain bird plate to give another prostration before Charlie [white lines]. The point I was trying to make is that coherence does not always come in the most straightly straight ways. Just make it conscious. Prescription medications are a keen and recommended way to keep one sane, and out of involuntary institutions (although you realize that we often think we might be happier on the inside where they take care of you and relieve your every stress with a pill or shot or hot plate of food).

Ah… That short little glimpse. The circle round the dime, it’s the purity that you seek. The truth without the lie. Pure god, not just the helpers on the path… we must question everything, including why we are afraid to say this, to go against the accepted norms of society.

Have to take a nap. The healthy life proceeds. Round and around we go. Still drinking, doing the drugs, oh don’t you know. Just moving forward. How fascinating. Following the path… what path? The path down this crazy road, toward some destiny.

5/9/11

Donald Trump palace estate,
The slow road home
To an empty brain
The lone ranger on parade,
Walking softly in circles
Searching for a sign
Waiting for a miracle that already happened,
Mumbling idiocies
With his earplugs in,
A cigarrette between his lips
And jive;
anger pouring out his nose tubes
Watching tv
And scrolling through the same old news.
Stocks went up.
Stocks went down.
Sun came up.
Sun went down.
No wait
The earth just spun around.
Standing in the shadow of the earth
The other side bathed in light.
Over here in the darkness
We have a lamp on
Burning the light
Scribbling in a notebook
Made of dead trees,
Watching the texture of dry paint
On a light yellow wall.
This is a month we call May.
2000 years since 2000 years ago.
24,000 full moons or so,
Since a storied crucifixion.
Lots of ideas out there.
Lots of stories.
Lots of people.
Gospel of Ramakrishna on the bedside table
Under a book about Freemasonry
Under the "holy" bible
(New Revised Standard Version with Apocrypha)
All illuminated by a Goodwill lamp,
With what looks like Sharpie squiggles
That could be another language.
Over here on the other side of the world
In the shadows
In what would be the darkness,
Except for electrical outlet in the wall
Powering the lamp
That appeared on a Goodwill shelf
A few thousand years after a campfire someone had
A few thousand years ago
Burning dead wood
That was powered by the Sun
So there was light in the darkness
On the other side of the world
In the shadows
As the orbit continued
And the rotations ran their course.

More from the post post modern apocalypse!

The Parade Continues into the Night

So the last one was rough, so we thought we would include our assignment for a baptismal rite for worship class. It's not your average fare, but you might get a laugh. But if you are having a hard time, like this lunatic is at this very moment, then may you be blessed. May light shine down upon you my brothers and sisters, and may we unfold beauty, truth, and miracles. Blessings upon you.

This rite will be non-traditional and would be performed on either children or in adult "converions." If there is water nearby, either open ocean (cleanliness to be taken into consideration), or fresh clean lake, or slowly moving river water, then these would be fine for either full immersion, or dipping and splashing depending on the initiates preference. If landlocked or in a church setting, a wading pool, bird bath, or a small bowl with blessed water can be substituted.

Leader in Normal text, initiate or family, people in bold. The theoretical initiate in this case will be named Frederick.

Welcome All to this blessed ceremony where we will cleanse Frederick and welcome him with open arms, offering the blessed life-giving water upon him, to symbolically cleanse him of all impurity, anger, pain, sadness, and confusion. God will come down in this way, blessing and purifying this water, and it will be poured over our dear friend and family member Frederick symbolizing his membership in the human race. (or he will be submerged).

Frederick, do you acknowledge that you are a member of the human race, born of the same blood as all other human beings, with your origin here, on this mother planet?

I do.

Frederick, do you acknowledge the Oneness of the Universe, the interconnectivity of all life and interdependence of all living beings?

I do.

Do you promise to work in this lifetime for the betterment of our human race, to take care of, and be conscious of, the planet which sustains your life, in its rotation around the power source of the Sun, to consciously work to leave this life supporting planet in a better, more healthy state, than it is today, for your relatives, the descendants of the human race, respecting your ancestors and The Great Spirit in this way?

I do.

Then Frederick, with this water, I initiate you into the fold of the Universal Spirit. Be cleansed. Be purified. By the power of the Universal Spirit, I wash all impurities from you, all negative energy from you, may all lies be swept away, washed away, be gone, may light surround you, may love surround you, may peace surround you, may you be happy, may you be well, may you be free from suffering. May you go out into the world Frederick and bring light, love, hope, faith, purity, joy, and truth into the world. Iwatchupa! Wetaha!