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!

Mental Collapse

I sure feel like saying fuck it! Yep. I sure do. So what does that mean? Well does it mean that I’m absolutely wasting my time getting a seminary education when I absolutely disagree with the fundamental theology I’m surrounded by? I mean seriously. This is what it comes down to. If you were a rational person, would it drive you fucking crazy, the fundamental premise that the murder of a slightly outspoken, seemingly innocent Jew, with 12 disciples, 2000 years ago, equals the forgiveness of the sins of man? That’s right folks, homeboy gets killed for challenging the status quo, and then he becomes the only begotten son of God, who God offers as a sacrifice to atone for the original sin of eating forbidden fruit and deciding that walking around naked all the time could be improved upon? Maybe it was cold. Did anyone consider that? Give me a fucking break. I can’t take it anymore. This shit is driving me insane. It’s no wonder that seminaries are going out of business left and right. They are selling a fucking message that is way out of date! News flash! God, whatever God is, is cooler than the psychotic, jealous, little freak show that would tell “His” followers that it is forbidden to worship any other God before “Him.” God, whatever God is, does not need to sacrifice his only begotten son, because he “so loved the world.” God is bigger than that. Man sacrificed man. Not God. Man made up the story. Not God. We are the storytellers felch fuckers! Get a fucking clue. Sorry I’m not feeling more compassionate today. The Goose Wrangler is having a fucking nervous breakdown. Can he complete his seminary education? The question remains to be seen.

Another Day Another Dollar

The egg shell crates fell off the machete wagon with a crash,
While Monster Bug Wars played on the Discovery channel next to reality TV on History.
It all made so little sense,
with monkeys dancing around arguing on youtube and FOX News and CNN,
and making up religions and printing money,
and singing recklessly while wearing steak dresses and meat hats and tender loin boots.
All while advocating a vegetarian diet and getting stoned.
Yes, my friends, this was modernity.
Cold fried deforested Christmas trees and post-enlightenment apocalypse,
Nuclear Submarines swimming through radioactive water off the coast of tsunami land,
the lunch lady serving glowing green sushi
while the Nuclear reactor cleaning crew
wearing their Devo suits
have a cocaine fueled party with NASA astronauts,
looking forward to their all expense paid trip to Disney Land.
All this while while I sat in my kitchen looking up at Chinese calligraphy that says "Happiness."
Yep, everything is just fine here old boy,
counting down to the May, 21st Judgement day,
the day the judges re-date the billboards if we're lucky.
and oh the blessed You Porn, now you're watching on your I-PAD,
Preparing for the St. Patricks day parade.
In the men's restroom there is a drunk blond peeing in the urinal with disturbing sensuality,
who shows off her green panties in her left hand and smiles,
but the Hells Angels are nowhere to be seen in Los Gatos this year.
So we get a sense of the cosmos with telescopes,
from within this atmospheric bubble
and monitor the ozone layer,
keeping a tight grip on the illusory control module,
Fucking in the meantime
then wallowing in guilt and wondering what we should really be doing as the days tick by
and the years add up
while we hurtle toward a guaranteed exit plan,
where our used up bodies, whether fresh or wrinkled, will stop wiggling
and be disposed of by other "smart" monkeys
or some other animate life that we no longer relate to.
And so we say ALOHA
and enjoy our run-on sentences, loathing deeply our seminary education
as psychological warfare against an already unstable mind,
and wonder why,
ever a foolish thing to do
in a universe of non-existence, where the tulips pop up frequently
if you happen to be in the right garden,
but those damn plant stems wither and stink anyway,
although not to the earwigs, who rejoice in the decay!
Yes, my dear fellows,
the gelatin is in the henhouse again,
and the fat is jiggling,
while the bully yard is giggling,
and the dark Lord approaches,
riding a white horse,
laughing in the cosmic tide;
laughing my dear friends,
as he screams into the Ether:
"Ahoy, Is there anyone there?
These damn fools actually think I exist!
Won't somebody please tell them they invented me?!"

What it is, or is it?

Everybody wants to know what it's all about. Is it delivery or is it Digiorno?

Good Morning Winterberries. Happy Full Moon and Spring.

We are nothing more than whispers fluttering our lashes on momentary glimpses of time; and nothing less than the eyes of creation, witnessing this moment, the culmination of everything that has happened since the birth of existence, and the next blink of the rest of infinity. We stand here on the precipice of a new age. What is the next chapter we will write with our thoughts and actions?

A Sad State of Affairs.

Basically crew, the old Wrangler has lost his mind. I'm afraid that my brain no longer functions the way it used to. My procrastination has become a thing of magnificence. I cannot seem to get all this work done that is piling up on me, and I feel like the mud at the bottom of the piles of tar sands in Canada. It's a sad state of affairs, and now it has even come to this. Here I sit, writing to you, the nobody reading. I have scrolled through the news so many times now, read all the interesting looking stories from across the world, I have checked facebook, and checked again, and now my boredom has lead me here, to write these blatherings while I listen to Beethoven, and think about trying to write this review of an article in the Journal of Pastoral Psychology. This is all sad indeed. I'm wearing my dead grandfathers bathrobe at 7:30 pm, having skipped the Seven Circles Pipe ceremony to do this work. I have continued to deprive my liver of alcohol, my lungs of the green goddess herb, I'm sober as can be, yet my brain does not seem to recover its wits. Se la vie. The mind is a bizarre contraption. I don't understand it. Aloha nui loa. Pray for the study cells to begin firing. Good night.

Winning! (30 second commercial seems unavoidable-MUTE!)

sludge

The dream floats down into the jelly house,
somewhere far left of mainstreet.
Lost in the spell of repetition,
the jungle fellow at a loss for words.
Is it early onset alzheimers?
There are questions about wasting time.
Too much information,
too many interviews with Charlie Sheen.
No answers
The curse of the open mind
Calm now.
Too far from mania for comfort.

Something Different.

We are the evolution of consciousness. Which is to say that we, human beings, are the embodiment of something beyond physical reproduction, beyond matter. We are thought creators. Our bodies have evolved for millions of years to be the vessels of thought; of ideas of possibility, of creation. We are the evolution of consciousness. Where do we take this ship? Where do we guide these vessels? Do we embrace our power? Or do we continue to fall victim to outmoded thought, the creations of minds with the limited understanding of the past, that which no longer exists? We were working in different paradigms then, yet now we are still collectively living in outmoded experience, constructions of reality from our former minds. Now is the moment for the expansion of our own creative understanding, moving forward with an enlightened perspective on the present, not as simply the culmination of the past, but as something truly new, with potentialities for a different future.

Check out the New Updated Church of the Open Mind Welcome message and a few changes! (click here to visit)

Happy Groundhog Day My Friends

Well, it's Groundhog day, again; and that must mean we are all headed down to Gobblers Nob, but what with all this news about oral sex causing throat and mouth cancer, we should all just take a breath and think twice. Well, on second thought, maybe not. The weather is fine out here in Berkeley California, and the Goose Wrangler is terribly sorry about not writing you for so long. It's been strange times in the mad life of my favorite lunatic. So, please forgive us, the Lord and I, for not being more proactive about posting our drivel. We'll try to do better from now on, and we'll expect the same from you. You and the Lord that is. I'd like to hear more about your idea of It anyway. I've stopped trying to figure it out. Is it the Magic Chicken, or the Queen of Soup, the Emptiness at the bottom of the beginning, at the center of the center of the center of the Atom, the nothing at the basis of the Higgs Boson? I certainly can't be sure, so I'd appreciate your input. We are back on the wagon train after rigorous prayers and madness in my lungs, gullet, and nasal passages. We came in for landing on 01/11/11, as promised, and the landing was actually rather soft,and for our blogs name, apropos, to be sure. So here we are again, sober, writing to you dear reader, whoever you are, wherever you are, whenever you are. We love you. I love you. I thank you for my life, dear Mother, dear Father, Great Creator, the Is ever after. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Aloha. Good night.

"I AM THE DUST," said ITZIK
ISRAEL IS NOT A PLACE
IT'S A STORY
THE NAME THAT CANNOT BE NAMED
IS THE ONLY NAME













the rest is just our head

INVENTED REALITY
NOT REAL

or it's real what we make it

The Lunar Module

The Deletante is in the kitchen
reading fruit loops in the rain
There are side drops in the living room
but the sandwich makers sit lazily on parade floats
in buildings where there are lithe people dancing in barrooms
while lullaby's are sung by the Vegan Boys
in the best parade
in this galaxy of spaceships

Thanksgiving morning 2010

Sitting on Alcatraz
watching the sunrise
as the fire burns
and the singers sing
and the dancers dance
like Indians
Dancing to pray
praying for the indigenous people
praying for us all
to wake up
and stop digging each other up
digging up our ancestors and putting them in museums.

Craw Horses

Felt pens and big heaping piles of dilapidated hot dog carts
These soft cry-babies in a dream about 80 year old Charles Rangel
getting censured for ethics violations
The mental shrimp police under the table sleeping
Watching the time machine show on the weather channel
trying to figure out the news
Sucking hose juice through a Slurpee straw on Fridays
waiting for the days to change
Traveling through the universe on a disappearing wheel
Isn't this so much fun
going around and around
mentally praying for a miracle to interrupt this cranium trap?
"Gveld, gvold," Glenn Beck said gently on his show
listening to himself
and playing a special little game for oyster eaters.

11/3/10-Blackberries

It's all in the past
these mixed up universes
the slowly beating heart
under influence of barbiturates
the soft pliant emptiness whispering dreams

There are blackberries on this thorny bush
at the top of a hill in Lagunitas, California
No more paved road beyond this point
just big trees, damp earth, and hippies

There are blackberry bushes in my mind
growing along a fence
in the southern countryside of England
in 1986
next to my mothers house
with cigarette smoke and thatched roof
and it's all inside my brain in 2010
right here in the verdant California green
next to a blackberry bush
at the brightest hour of dusk
in the silence

Around the end of October 2010...

All the madness rolled in on us again from over there in the clouds near the southern rainbows where silent mornings dreamt of star bursts eating nuclear joy parades. Those are other places--now--we can't go there again. It's over. Give up. 10:00 pm, Oct 27th, 2010, stoned again. This ever engrossing dream, yet we have to let go. We must let go. There is a greater power in this universe. That One is _Od. And I turn it over to that-to that power-while that Who song plays and says "you are forgiven." An agreement? hmm. Well Scotty pants...? I don't know about that. There is a very kind joint outside that has yet to be finished--the addiction said. The higher [the higher higher self that doesn't need to get high] self has to take over, the observer has to take charge, otherwise it's more shadow, more fake mystery, burying ourselves in these substances and fun, fake union with the divine. Doing nothing all the time, experiencing ultimate connection, and yet perpetuating the lie.

Striped polo shirts and 300 thread count brown cotton sheets
Tennis shoes and a flat screen television
A washing machine, a dish rack, a kitchen table
and futuristic couch
more cars than a very small village might have,
scattered across the globe
little dancing fairy girls
and nothing talking over and over again
about the very thing it knows something about

An Introduction to What Comes Before It After it in the Backwards Book

It was so up and down, inside out and right side in, under water and under glass, and looking at myself through a dream of some future that never was. So I lost the game and shut down the computer and said nothing out of some care for what you thought. You. Audience, the ones who don't read, who leave me lonesome before the page, the illuminated screen, the past placement of the dream. So it was lost and it was found, and under California maple leaves with a squirrel taunting Kingston from the tree, I bid you hello again. That's now, and now I'll open the pages of the notebooks and try and find some semblance of scribbles and transcribe them to this machine and we'll celebrate this nothingness, in the midst of nothing, as everything unfolds from the midst of this earth orbiting this sun, while we zoom out with telescopes, through our little orbs called eyes, into the past, and make up stories about meaning and shoot each other with inventions, talk politics, eat snakes, and take seriously the myths we call religion. Up slick mind head dreadful bears. Beware.

California

OK, this is really getting tedious. The post modern apocalypse is well under way and I'm just not sure how much more I can stand. We are so uncool that we have made being uncool the cool thing to do. Being hip nowadays basically just means dressing up like an idiot taking a number of different things that were hip and "new" at some time in the last century or so, pretty much before there was the internet, and then throwing it down on yourself and hitting the town. So go for it. Mustache, tight pants, a scarf, a number of tattoos, converse shoes, some plaid, some checkers, a fedora, a bouffant, which was already regurgitated under reputation of hip in the 80's, so you are pretty much double reusing it. Cool. It's just that everybody (generalizations are cool) out here in California, and I'm really speaking especially for the bay area here, as I'm not spending too much time anywhere else at the moment, is just so totally uncool trying to be cool that I just don't even know what's happening anymore. I've completely gone insane, and I'm going to Brooks Brothers immediately, but wait, it's all so fucking hip, that I'll even be hip if I try to not be hip by dressing like a preppy unhip person who shops at Brooks Brothers, because some other hipster trying to uphip the other hipsters has already gone full on Brooks Brothers because it's so unhip that it's now hip. It's just ridiculous. Hip. You are loud, obnoxious, smiling incessantly like you're posing for a facebook profile picture, spouting off in your little group of collectively stylized individuals each individually stylized and collectively hip, so much so that you seem to forget that you are living in La La land and you think you are cool. You think this is all so cool. With your little Matthew Dear and the Band show. Matthew Dear with his little Bouffant, with his trumpet player with his little Bouffant, with his drummer with his little Bouffant. Matthew Dear with your tambourine and your tight fitting vest. Dude, please stop. I want off this merry-go-round, and I want off now. The Talking Heads were awesome. They were cool. They were hip. You doing them is not cool. I'm not cool. I'm not trying to be cool. Or am I? The problem is that not trying to be cool is the cool thing to do now. So to be really cool maybe you have to try to be cool, because that's just gotta be the hip thing to do if everybody else is trying to be uncool to make sure everybody knows they aren't trying to be cool. Are you getting the picture Matthew Dearest? Is there any other option than suicide? Suicide is cool because it's proof that you aren't trying to be cool, because like to kill yourself you have to be really depressed, and that's not something you can fake like you can fake hipness by shopping at Brooks Brothers, growing a mustache and showing off your tattooed arms in a short sleeve collared shirt buttoned to the top and finished with a bow tie and a sweater vest, along with a gold tooth and a gangster accent, remnants of times past when you thought that was cool. I miss New York City and I miss Aspen Colorado, I miss Barcelona, Spain, places where assholes are really assholes, and not just pretending to be assholes because they think its cool. I've traveled all over this world and never been to a place like California, so full of people who think they are cool and willing to be totally uncool to prove how cool they are because they think being uncool is cool. California. What a bunch of hype. There may be real people out here somewhere. But they are lost in translation, lost in a sea of sweater vests and tattoos and people too hip to be cool. I'm an asshole. Sure. I'm a critical prick in the midst of post modern apocalypse. It's over. We're post history. Information overload is waiting for you to turn on your computer and put your mouth around the fire hose called the internet. I'm drowning in it. I don't know about you. We're watching reality TV on the History Channel. Where is the reset button?

Captain

don't listen to that brain, it does not know what it's thinking.

OK Crew

Cawbirds. Let's just admit the game, and get this going. From now on we are in training. Let's get to it. We have work to do. Let's get to it. LGTI.

The Time Harpoon Salutes Mrs. Westinghouse

Well, well, well. Here we go old caw birds.
Ho Down Brown Town just came into town with his girlfriend Wes.
Oh Home
Smokie smokie hot cake taco.
and Hidei-son on the jumbo-tron popping prick on Downtown and Wes,
Oh Home parade, by criticizing their sushi eating as fake Japanese,
unlike his oh so precious traditional food.
No avocado in your shrimp tempura roll,
in your mind head on this day in 1975 with his ocean head with its mind medicine
Inside your own head cheese medicine man,
I'll eat my shrimp tacos my way with my head cheese and peanut sauce on the side please
and fuck you with your pivotal face swine herd
Your uncle Buck ate the taco truck
I'll peanut threaten your lamp shade fluid, Dweeb!
and go ahead and watch me as I eat my cabbage
Go ahead.
Eat it.

The top of the car stuck down
Tragic head cheese and the prince got robbed
Snatched the bills straight from the hand of the dealer-man into the hands of the french madam
and you know where she went, don't you?
Out of the house and into the kitchen,
the dining office of the flying dog ranch,
who ate the flying squirrel and bit off his nuts
like a true harpoon of the 90's
Oh yes
that was the truth of the matter, was it not?
hmm?
Franklin, did you not slide the harpoon handle down the avenue through the robotic arm?
I thought so.
The denus is in school
a compulsive procrastinator,
a hound of forever more,
a small vine of handies in the mind head house.
Didn't you think so mrs. Westinghouse?
I thought you did.
I knew you did.
Oh how dare you boy, have you really lost your mind?
Oh, I certainly did Ma. Can't you tell?
His alien space ship as the man reported
out here on the space hat
with the neighboring beings watching us on their monitors,
watching all the movies at the same time,
while we live them and make our own.
Just as long as we believe something, or ask ourselves what we mean.
What do our stories mean?
What do they say, these stories of ours, as they go,
as they lay themselves down the line,
one mark at a time,
rotating through their pages on the merry go round
inside our heads
as we invent reality and go to concerts and pack our brains with slime
Theology, history?
The blathering time harpoons,
Fogging up the place.

Baseballs

The Yankees are making a comeback against the Rangers,
with Georgie Boy W. in the stands watching his old team
and its making me want to root for the Yankees;
and time is getting eaten with the shapes on the Persian rug dancing on the floor;
and a whole lot of marijuana out here in California that I'm not smoking,
yet my brain is moving slower than it ever has before
and I'm totally sober in my red shirt and plaid shorts
with baseball music playing in the background,
the seventh inning stretch
instead of anonymous meeting attendance.
A ball and two strikes
and the whole universe unfolding.
7 billion Messiahs dancing and fucking all over the planet
And another Texas Ranger just got struck out by those damn Yankees
while George Bush looks on
and the baby in the E-trade commercial trades on a smart phone on TBS
and the Yankees take it,
winning the first game of the ALCS playoffs, October 15th, in the year of our Zord, 2010.

4/21/09

As the plane plummeted from the sky,
the calm pilot said:
"well ladies and gentlemen,
it's time to say your prayers."
He felt a tinge of joy as he saw the ground rushing up from beneath.
"We'll meet again in the next dimension."
Then he smiled as the world of illusion exploded
and he flew into the emptiness
to begin another dream

Late April 2009

The dirty little imp
with his hairy green spine
crawled back into existence
his nose covered with floss
his fingers numb

addiction

I'm addicted to facebook. I'm admitting it. It's sucking my life away. I keep going back to check it. Scrolling down, down, down. Thinking of things to say... who said what, who is where, ooh, pictures... what, hmm. Let me just comment on that. I have this to say and that to say, and lets debate the semantics of the meaning of existence, and I just can't shut up, and I have papers to write, and things to do, and wait, wait, wait, let me just check to see if anyone commented on any of this idiotic drivel I have written, or let's see if someone commented on my comments on their comment always trying to intellectually one up someone. This is a problem. Brain damage. Brain damage. DUH DUH DUH. Facebook. Wee. My brain is floating into the ether-net. DUH-m. DUH-m. DUH-m. I'll just post some incriminating pictures of myself to disqualify myself from credibility amongst the judgmental element of Facebookers... or business community, or who cares. My life is an open book. A FACEBOOK! No pay, nothing, just free advertising for the corporate interests who pay to get exposure amongst the loons like me who are so lonely that they just post their lives away, like, "hey, hey, hey, it's me. I exist! I exist! seriously, like I actually exist." Or do I? Is there nothing more than this glowing screen of pixelated information in front of me? Scroll down, down, down. What's going on down there? Is my brain stem down there somewhere?

just saying

you may never meet a man more proud of the fact that he worked as a butler.

Another Sunday in the Lodge. Good One.

Well howdy pardners and pardnerettes. Howdeedoodee? Felt like I should haw feld the old lench volt, so here we go. There was a mighty good sweat tonight out in the dome. The french clipped swelderhouse came back home. With his ear bags dragging and his hair fine cool, the dog faced singer now was high on his mule. And so many folks now so exited about medicine. This meeting, that meeting, peyote in their headicine. Now we all know we all know not, but some do know they like smoking pot. Many of these, like red road wayans, are up on the wagon, running, like I, from those boozy smoke dragons. So then we begin to see the green doctor in their eyes. They've been shown the light, but then it gets a little foggy so they wanna see it right. Back to the doctor, more medicine to be explored, but we are the medicine, we are the door. The button in the dirt that makes colors in our eyes, is just another molecule that can really warpitize. It's all true, my dears. The year doesn't even exist. 2012 and the new age twist. What is 2012? Now. What do we know? 2012 is now, 2012 is 10,000 years ago. A year is a social invention, full of good intentions. Time is more than flexible. It's empty. See look, there's plenty. See what the doctor says. He'll tell you what's in your head. What's in your head will tell you what the world means. What the world means will tell you what's in your head. Which is me just saying what I just said. The flower blossoms. The tree grows. The life eats life eats life eats life. The molecule eats itself; is what it is. IS.

Huh?

What's up with the meat dress? It seems to be the talk of the town, but seriously, I mean seriously? Are you kidding me? What is wrong with this Gaga woman who everyone is gaga about? It's not like the meat dress is even an original idea, it's been done before. Some designer even takes responsibility for it? Gross. I mean have we as a culture gotten so dumb that we get off on the post post modern apocalyptic irony of something so obviously obvious "look, I'm a piece of meat" symbolism, combined with the conspicuous consumption built right in with enough meat to feed a small village, going to waste adorning the body of a woman who seems to just take everything Madonna did in her career and make it just a little more ridiculous and expect everyone to praise her and give her awards, which is exactly what we are doing? What? I really don't get it. Maybe she is just so very clever, and the joke is on us, because we are awarding her disgusting, offensive, unimaginative, sensibilities, maybe for no more reason that we are in the midst of a disgusting, offensive, unimaginative consumer culture with our heads so deeply buried in the sand that we can't even to stop and smell the rotten meat, and the rotten idiot wearing it. Did she at some time in the not so distant past make a bet with some customer at the strip club and say "listen, I bet you a bindle that I can make millions of dollars dressing like a tramp on acid, acting like an asshole, frequently wearing Elton John glasses, and just generally being a symbol of a society sinking to the bottom of the delusion pit?" If she did make that bet, then I applaud her. She wins.

Once Again

Instead of the idiocy reflected in the video we ad libbed last eve, we thought it prudent to try and write something a little more rational. So Happy Jewish New Year my friends. Shana Tova! This time of Rosh Hashana is a time of reflection for the Jewish faith. I'm taking a class this semester at the Center of Jewish Studies at the Graduate Theological Union, called Cultures of the Jews. It is important to note the fact that it is not called culture of the Jews. There is not one culture of the Jews. This is a religion and a population that has changed over time, been influenced and has influenced the majority cultures they have lived amongst. They have lived in Palestine, Egypt, and throughout most of the rest of the world in the Jewish Diaspora. They have spoken different languages, been influenced in different ways, but there has been something that has tied this people together over thousands of years, and kept them somehow separated from their neighbors. They have held some Jewish culture or identity which reminded them of their difference, and they have chosen it, and embraced it. At different times, like in the times of the Maccabees, there has been active conversion by the Jewish people of gentiles into the Jewish faith and tribe. At times in the past the difference between Jew and non-Jew has been much more fluid. It is important to remember that Abraham was not a Jew, and he was the father of both Isaac and Ishmael, one, Isaac, who became the father of Jacob, who became Israel, and Ishmael who is known as the father of the Arab peoples who would give birth to the Muslim faith. David himself is the great grandson of a Moabite. If we go back further in the Hebrew Bible which is the foundation of both Christianity and Islam, we find one people. "Now the whole earth had one language and the same words...And the Lord said, "look they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another's speech." (Genesis [B'reshiyth] 11:1-9) Indeed we have been confused, but even here in the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, we find in the origin story One people, scattered and dispersed and confused by different languages. It was this one people who were the mothers and fathers of the Jews, the Muslims, the Buddhists, the Scientologists, the Hindus, the Christians, and the rest. According to this story, these first people were the mothers and the fathers of us all. It was only after we became confused that we began to see ourselves as separate peoples who built up faiths and cultures around ourselves, blocking ourselves off from our fellow brother and sister human beings and began to identify ourselves as us and them. My people, your people, well even in the founding story of the Jewish people, it's right there, we are all one people, if you just read back a few pages before Jacob wrestles with the Angel who is afraid of the light and gets "blessed" with the name Israel. (Genesis 32:26-28) Within the field of Anthropology we find the same phenomenon, they identify this people and that people and focus on all the differences, but if we just go back far enough in their discoveries, we see our common heritage, and find all our hominid ancestors emerging in Africa, the Greek word for which is Ethiopia. So if we go back far enough we find that we are all Ethiopians, every human being alive on earth. We are all one people. And if, as the Lord states in Genesis 11:6, that "nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them," then we can most certainly begin to manifest our oneness again, which has been hidden from us for thousands of years by our confusion. We have proved our creative capabilities by our inventions, the microchip, the cellular phone, the rocket ship and space station, the walls we have built up around ourselves in our cultures, we have been marvelous creators, creating what we have proposed. It is time now, in this time of reflection, to propose we all come together again and create harmony, peace, unity, love, and respect for our Ultimate Creator, that which gave us the power of creation. So much power was put in our hands, and it is time we used it for good, for truth, justice, and righteousness. It begins with all of us acknowledging that we are one people, one human race. We are all Jews, we are all Muslims, we are all Buddhists, we are all what we are, perfect and imperfect, empty and whole, we're just a bunch of lost Ethiopians longing to know ourselves again as who we really are.

Shana Tova u'Metuka

The management would like to apologize for the two caw birds of the Goose Wranglers aging face that you have to deal with in a row in the these previous/following posts (depending on your perspective). We're lost in the wilderness, certainly did not anticipate this clawful craw. So be it. all the very best from the guilty conscious of the wrangler in his sludge pit. PS... be reminded that in the following video, should you weather it, Kingston is whining in the background because he wants to go out.

Good Evening...

Good evening crew. If there has not been much posting, or if it has been drivelific, we do apologize. This has been an interesting summer. Thick sludge has been slivering through our brain stem holding us deep below the surface of the sand. The Mad Professor is spinning on the record player downstairs. Tomorrow we return to the schooling sandwich of seminary. Tomorrow the Goose Wrangler has his first preaching class. To put an end to this third person silliness, I'll say I'm nervous. I am nervous. HM-2244-01 (545) Preaching: Theology and Praxis. Here we go. Embarking on the great adventure, walking in the footsteps of Crawdad, getting shoved into the sveld nibs. Here comes Mindhead little twiddly winks. Are the seminarians ready!!?? This is going to be a trip.

Who is G-d... What is the Zord? What does it not want?

Out here witnessing creation is a pretty amazing experience.
Don't you think?
Look around Kemo Sabe.
What do you see?
If you have eyes that see, do you see colors?
Light.
You have eyes made of molecules.
Bodies of nuclei.
Popping and Jiving DNA.
You know what Zord is?
Emptiness, Void, Everything, the Great Creator, The ONE, ABSOLUTE, ONE?
The whole enchilada?
What's that?
Everything.
And you are looking at it.
Out from those two eyes made of molecules.
Wow.
Right?
What are those molecules made of?
Empty space, inside empty space, inside empty space,
little circles of energy popping in and out of existence, and spiraling perfectly,
and you can see, and it all just looks still.
Blink.
Open.
It's all there.
Close your eyes.

Know how long it took G-d to create the ability to see, to witness Its own creation?
It took forever.
The first thought.
The birth of the entire Ultraverse.
The primordial ooze.
Now.
Here we are.
Creators.
As the eyes of Creation, WE have the power of creation.
We've been around a long time.
We are descendants of the primordial ooze.
We are the dinosaurs who survived.
We are that we are.
SEE.
Where are we going?
What are we doing?
Who are we?
WE.
Creators.
Ultranet.
Mindhead.
Here.
We don't want to destroy this creation.
We don't want this to end.
Creators.
We manifest IDEAS.
What are WE thinking?
Any good ideas?
Any bad ideas?
What do WE not want to do?
What does MotherFather G-d not want to do?
Stop seeing its creation?
We have to be mortal to witness creation.
Death is the price of life.
Here we are.
Open your eyes.

March 11, 1999, Wat Umong, Northern Thailand (from the journal)

Love is a flower garden watered by tears (quote written on a tree)

Look at everything and find nothing
Look at nothing and find everything

Here I sit,
Beside a peaceful paradise
Thinking thoughts already pondered.
Wanting to bring pictures home to prove something
I cannot let my minds knowledge suffice.
Lone Ant marching in the shadow
Inches away another individual in the sun
Over leaves and over stones
stepping softly in their home.
I object and do deny
their right of passage by and by
And why?
For moments of whistling sadness do I sit and watch the rooster
sounding his royal screech?
Now rooster watch me watch the fly eat me.
Why stop it, though I want to so badly,
Is it not true that I am only being my best, even if only to give life to a fly?
It's OK

I am food
I am self
I am nothing
I am food
I am self
I am everything
Life is life
Life is food
Life is sex
I am sex
I am life
I am
I am full
I am empty
As is life
There is no beginning and there is no end
but there is.
There is no plot
There is no climax
but there is.
So I am what is
where I am
So I should know what is
where I am
But there is what is without self
and this is where one can find peace
For when there is no self
there is peace
and there is.

America

Another day

Sitting at Bleu Sky hotel Indian restaurant

Overeating chicken biryani and drinking chai

The freshman class has arrived

Really packing it in

Twice as much as i needed

There really isnt much to worry about

All luxury problems

In the midst of illusion

Test it out and figure it out for yourself.

Really think you know whats going on here?

Keep thinking

Well

moving on

I'm feeling better this afternoon

And chai really does taste better with sugar

All these students cruising around

and it's just life

And it does not make sense

No matter how much sense they try and make of it

This is a miracle

Floating around in the midst of madness

In the midst of existence

In the midst of Nothing

Doctor Who?

Making circles in the solar system
Hanging Christmas lights with spaceships
Building space stations
and talking to God on a cellular phone
Suddenly looks up
and sees Doctor Who on the shelf
in red letters
A Journey Through Time
on a bright yellow sign
Drink some tea Goose Stranger
and eat your weight in slime
The gelatin is in the hen house
and there's lipstick on the vine

Drunk (from October of 2004)

The thrown book spins through the air
and slides off the dark wooden table
onto a chair made of pine branches
The faces are soft
feelings jagged
Here
watching the rose petals darken and shrink
The lonesome flower drips tears
petal after petal
falling into the darkness beneath
The dying petals leave nothing
but emptiness that wants to be a flower

sober is the hardest drug I've ever done.

Brief Poem Break (Sweat Brain)

Sveld Nib tree man
Walking into the apple store
behind all his friends
Forgotten in a foreign country amidst everyone
Trying to find success
Rushing toward inevitability
Rushing nowhere
Busy on the move
Diamonds
Diamonds forever
Rings and smoke
wafting through the ether
in the soft crusade
All the little Jewish Children
cut us up into pieces
Drowning our tidbits in wine
Sucking out our nutriment
We're all Jews now
Velge Nilge
Transvictumtorium
Does that make sense to you Glench Ditch?
If not wee haw, then fledge nidge and slime
Have a nice time.

29 July Year of our Zord 2010

Sitting on San Pablo outside Casa Latina
Reading "The Shape of Suffering" by Thanissaro Bhikkhu (Geoffrey DeGraff)
Slowing the mind down
With the music filling my ears
Inside my skull processor
Through little plastic ear phones
Everything is moving and everything is still
It's all happening and nothing is happening
Suddenly there is a bottle of wine and a little bag of weed at my house
Not in my body
But right there waiting
Cocaine in Chico
Time to move to another house
Thinking with ignorance
Craving arising

I mainly relate to crazy people
The true bums
These are my people
Like nameless man
But my pockets are bulging with money and possessions and they have nothing
This illusion looks a lot different for them
And it's all perspective
They are the Jesuses
They are the Buddhas
These people
The poor we have a war on
They are the Masters
Not the Dalai Llama flying around in first class

The clouds are parting
Pushed quickly East by the wind
And the sun is behind them
And the clouds are running East
Across blue sky
Above a dilapidated Svennson Volvo specialist shop
With a girl walking by toward Siva Devananda Yoga hidden on Delaware
And a little old black man riding by on his red scooter in front of scaffolding
In the midst of Pattica Samuppada, dependent co-arising
In the midst of Nothing
In the midst of Void
Somewhere in the midst of the Big Bang
Here we are
Riding the Ether

A Tea Party

Hey crazy heads! You see this picture? Tea party? What this picture proves is what a free ass country we live in, and how completely different the two men on the sides are from the man in the middle. Now I'm not saying Barack Obama is some kindof saint. He is not. He is at the helm of a dangerous government, engaged in two unjust wars in the middle east, where we are bombing human beings with unmanned drones and claiming some sort of legitimacy. Our own citizens are preyed upon by private corporations which enjoy the rights of individuals. These corporations have the protected right to brain wash the population in a rabid consumption driven ideology. No, Obama is no saint. But if we were living in a state half as psychotic and sick as either Soviet Russia under Lenin after the Red Terror began, or Germany under Hitler, that sign would not only be quickly taken down, but the people responsible for making it would be arrested and quickly put to death. Instead, in this waste of freedom called America, the sign will be put on the news, and probably a good half of the media will applaud the sentiment of the Tea Party movement. Live Free or Die! Hah. This is some weird ass freedom my friends. This is a fallacy of freedom. You are free to obey the laws of the State of America, you are free to do as you are told, you are free to be a competitive individualistic automaton. You are free to reap the benefits of the oppression and poverty that people in the third world endure so that we can walk into a coffee shop and pay three dollars for a coffee, where somebody only made three dollars working all day to grow it. We are damn lucky to be free to drink the American cool aid, and we are damn lucky to be free enough to talk about how free or not free we are. Obama is no Hitler or Stalin, if he was, you can bet that the sign would never have been put up. All those people carrying signs or wearing shirts with that Obama Joker face would just disappear, never to be seen again. Bye bye. If the tea party thinks Obama is a Hitler or Stalin, they should prepare themselves for the Gas Chamber, the Gulag, or the firing range, but instead Obama is trying to give them health care. What kind of tea are these people drinking?

Smells like it sounds

Are you insane Kemo Sabe? Does the pope eat chicken wings? How pure and true and lovely are the intentions of Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck? I can’t answer any of these questions. I’m still knee deep in sludge and we’re two years from the apocalypse, although I’m not convinced that the calendar isn’t off and 2012 actually happened in 1945, and the four horsemen actually rode into Hiroshima and Nagasaki snuggled up in twos on atomic bombs like bats swooping down from Hell. Well I’d like to think that was a bad enough horror show. Everyone needs an optimist once in awhile. Hi.

So what is the clawmeister up to? Well, I have ceased all ingestion of placebos, greens, blues, whites, liquids, etc. etc. The lamotrigine is all dried up in my shriveling brain stem and the nothing is crawling all over me like a thick damp blanket of sand. This haw. I could consume it with melancholy rage. When was the festival? Witnessing our foolishness head on and unmedicated is like sticking my face on a treadmill made of asphalt and napalm. Wee. This is so much fun. Reality. Eat a dead rat and suck a claw horn saith the swine herd.

Motivation? What’s the point? Why am I doing this? Why am I playing the fool? What am I doing trying to save the world and battling seminary? Why am I not just getting an MBA and trying to siphon the last bit of life off the planet and the rest of our souls like a normal person, a nice, well trained, little humanoid coddling the balls of the Master dollar and drinking my individualism cocktail through my me mouth thinking this is it? (as if my me mouth isn't individualistic enough, which it certainly is... as I worry about hair loss.) Why do I worship the nothing? There is no I; see? Just this felch experiencing this, trying to keep his mouth shut between the blinks of birth and death. Poof. I’m gone. I was never even here. I wouldn’t even know if I’d been here the whole time. Just like you, and you and you and you and you and the rest of us experiencing I AM. What? Nothing.

These are all just letters. Words on a page. Or a digital page now. These are all just ideas. None of this even exists. It’s all upside down and inside out and symbols for a thing that can’t be understood. It’s right here. In between the symbols. See the empty space, inside the empty space, between the spaces between the shapes. Ain’t no time like now. This is the end times as soon as we start the beginning.

Aug. 5 2002

I’ve seen these things before.
The war, the discothèques, the Jews and the Indians.
I’ve seen before me on the giant screen, the sickest prejudice of all.
So I put on my hat.
But I threw away the poems, forgot the dreams.
Awake.
Without cool moon pools twinkling along the earth plain.
I’ve forgotten them all, and in turn they’ve disappeared.
I put on my hat.
Innocence, pure paradise.
What prejudice could be the worst?
So much worse than human killing human in the middle east?
Worse than the murder, rape and kidnapping of Africa?
The worst prejudice is that which prevents the answer from landing on our doorstep.
What if there is no enemy?
I put on my hat.

Late summer or fall 2002

Teardrops
Soul crackers
Crumbling brick chimneys
The silence

I saw the inside of a microwave
Through a tinted windowpane
Folded bath towel on the kitchen counter
Huge rocks hurled through my windshield
Someone stole my skychair
And the world is ending

2012 right around the corner
Hold on to me
There is nowhere to go
Hold each other on this spaceship

I shimmied along the ground like a drugged lizard
Hidden behind a two foot wall of cement
I flat crawled along the ground
A speeding maniac
Pursued by an unknown monster
2012 coming round the corner
Comfortable in the shadows of the darkness in which we live
Behind the wall light is moving closer
I am the reptile running along the ground
Hiding from the light
Ever stronger behind the barrier
The hesitation
Murder, ceaseless slaughter, rape, sickness, storms, fire, conflict, anger, hatred, envy, Business

2012 coming round the corner
Better watch out
Slipping filler whiskers
Busy talk, busy time, world on the move
Problem time
The treadmill of busyness
Keep it moving on the track
Terrorism
You know
We better bomb Iraq

Evening drive to Oakland and the City

Some sunsets from Hawaii.

That brings us back to God

So I was closing my eyes in this darkness and saw the skull and heard the people talking about evil, and where is God because of death, and we were back to fear and blah, blah, blah. So they were asking what is God, and who is in control, and the scientists were smashing particles together looking for the missing link, the smallest invisible particle of them all, and we were all afraid of dying, and thought there was evil, and, and, and- Wait. Where is God in all this confusion?
If we are temporary and beneath this flesh on my face is a bone dry skull someday, and then dust a few days later, isn't God still infinite? The God which encompasses all existence, the Big One, which is behind all the universes, planets, stars, cells, particles, and atoms, behind even ourselves; isn't that One infinite?
If that God is infinite, the Big One, the Great Creator, it not only encompasses the entire universe, but we also, therefor, all exist within God, as we are part of the same universe which God encompasses. The infinite God must encompass all the manifest realm if this is all the manifestation of the God of Creation.
So despite the skull that awaits my face, I am more than impermanent, for like the universe, I am also a manifestation of God.
Remember, all the universes of universes are Its creation, Its manifestation, and so also are all the molecules.
In the darkness I saw the spinning helix of DNA in all the lovely colors we draw it in our pictures. Complex as the universe and infinitely creative, that DNA molecule is another manifestation of God. The more complex it makes itself, the more complex we become. Here we are, big complex conglomerations of molecules, considering ourselves, and existence, worrying about our temporary skulls, which are like hermit shells for the DNA of God.

Paw breath of infinity

Aloha.
Not much to report. Squelch in the blender in Hawaii. Debating peyote. I'm so utterly sane, I can't stand it. I long for madness. This sludge brain quieted by lamotrigine, longs to move at the fast pace of old. But alas, the race car brain ever ends in sanitary splendor in a comfy psychiatric ward playing ping pong.
Smoke my claw horn wee haw! And we'll all sing songs like Ding Dong Daddies from Dumas.

Leave that girl alone.

Is anyone else out there feeling a little dissatisfied, a little lonely, a little strange? I keep checking Facebook, browsing Google News, The New York Times, the Huffington Post, and I'm coming up short. Maybe it's just because I can't seem to stay in one place long enough to keep a close group of intimate friends, but I'm just always looking out there, searching, seeking, running. The news is terrible. War, oil spill, patriarchy, oppression, politics, criminal governments, unemployment, rape and murder. Not so nice. Facebook is empty, there is everybody looking happy, all the time. Here is what we did. Here is me looking pretty on a beach, out drinking with friends, at this great concert, at a wedding, etc. etc. etc. Does anyone get depressed anymore? Judging from the Facebook updates it wouldn't seem so. If there is any depression going on it is usually cloaked in some vague cynicism. "I'm depressed." Then someone writes "LMAO." yea. hah. hah. hah. It's no wonder there is so much drug and alcohol abuse, at least that is something you can do socially which usually involves turning off the computer. "Hey pass that joint..." hah. "LMAO." I wonder how many people use their little computer video camera to film their suicide. A sad thought. And someone would laugh.
I'm not considering suicide or anything. But drugs and alcohol, I sure consider those sometimes. I bought a packet of Samson rolling tobacco today. A little fresh brown death to keep me rooted to the ground for a change. Nothing special. The Grouse defriended me on Facebook. LMAO. I was actually going to defriend her after she really laid down the law and made it clear that I need to move on. I think it was something to the extent of "Nothing is ever going to happen between us, you're not Jewish, I'm looking for someone who is Jewish and who will fit into my family. Quit living in a fairy tale, life is not a novel." This may have been a gentle way of saying LMTFA (leave me the fuck alone), and I have to admit that I've put enough nails in the coffin of our non-existent relationship to feel compelled to respect her request. But I still think life is a fairy tale, and who is she to say that this isn't all a novel? I mean it makes about as much sense as, say, walking around on a planet orbiting the sun in a vast universe of mostly empty space. But who am I to say?
Well who am I. I am the nothing that creeps in the night. I am a manifestation of the void, just another lunatic, another fool, another dreamer. But I love you. The Big You. The holy family of our human race. I even love Glenn Beck. What a guy! Each and every one. Starting with the one who started the whole damn show of opening my wounded heart, and her name was Jenn. The universe in my novel has been unfolding ever since. But she did tell me to LHTFA. So I guess that means i'm getting another chance to walk into the unknown. OK then. I'll just see if there is anything new on Huffington post, check for some interesting Facebook status updates, and maybe write one of my own that says something like: freedom from the known.

From Fall 2002

7 years of childhood
Never did grow up
Old coffee syrup in an empty cup
I was never understood
I’m an old kid in a wrinkled suit
Life’s voice is dull and quiet
The news a gentle riot
In the kitchen eating fruit
Monuments in kitchen doors
Everybody getting laid
Mommies pimps and daddies whores
As candles burn the soft crusade
It seems like life is a bit less real
Death wanders across the plain
And a very dull pain that I can’t quite feel
Here I’m staring in the mirror again

A Poem from August 2002

Here is the ceremony
Nights full clear sky moon
Twinkle twinkle sparkling leaves
Aroused by the gentle wind

The full moon whispers
and the slow fools wander now as the gray hallucinations pass
The August warm midnight acrobatic climax
Only a light shiver of cool crispation touches my skin
To signal the coming of another seasons change

Everything is tingling in the melonish wetness of life
as the time approaches when life drys out
grows brittle with age
falls
and is taken by the earth

Tonight we are all together in the light midnight sky
The glowing white magic circus moon
The cloud illuminator
Fantastic white sky beacon
Master of the evening that is not death

Gray hallucinations on the ground.

Into New York 2009 the Jelly Version

The madman on parade. Driving through the night on a mission, questioning his own dedication.

A Brainstorming Session

I had just arrived in New York chasing the Grouse in May of 2009... Trying to tie it all together. I'm probably better off just writing. But for those who can power through 7 minutes of blathering, this is one step on my way of getting to articulate this deep stuff without the help of substances... calmer and calmer on the way to the Nothing.

Done for.

Lost inside the fools spaceship
Head wrapped round the orange rind
Slope eared
Drowning in phlegm

The sickness licks the eggplants
Caressing the sharp quills
Pulling them softly
Preparing for the operation

The King tortures what he loves the most
Loves it so much he tortures it with no intention but love

Man.

The Man-beast
Inventing himself upside down
The terror-show
With Claws
The Television

Longing for insanity because it makes more sense
To be sane is to be totally lost
So we sit softly after anonymous meetings and talk about wanting to drink
They just look at me

What goes on in these heads?
I can't very well go telling them who I am
Start ranting and raving about how we need to start the revolution
Giving orders
Starting the show
No

Or is it time?
The clock is ticking down

Do we all lack the same balls?
Are we all sitting around waiting for ourselves to look at ourselves and say
"Hey, isn't it about time we saved the world?"

Isn't it about time we woke up
opened our eyes
and admitted that we're all crazy?

We're all gonna die
We're all alive
This isn't really happening

But wait

This is really happening

What are we going to do about it?

Keep our heads stuck firmly in the ground
Comfortably numb
Slump faced and glazy?

Where are you Ubermensch?

I need help
I could really use some encouragement
I could really use some help

My dog is hurt
I'm tired and insane
I don't know how much time is left
My heart is bigger than the universe
It's killing me

The Wrangler on the Way to Louisville, KY...

This was on the way to NYC chasing the Grouse (That's the girl)... we told everyone we knew the story about going there to find her, but we didn't tell her. Then we moved into her neighborhood. Well, it didn't go as planned, as you might imagine. But more on that later. Here is a video of our approach into Louisville, and a short pit stop there... more on that later.

Sitting down and Wasting time

Listening to Robert Hunter "Aim at the heart"
Singing "Here I am,"
I'm right here
Alone in the midst of us all
I'm right here
Waiting
Singing the nothing rainbows
while the sheep dance in the fog breath
Listening to the universal song
We've been singing since the beginning of time
I'm right here
Waiting
Alone in a digital cave
Whispering a silent song of sad dilapidation
To the sky tops
I'm right here
Yet you jabberwalk in the meaninglessness
Busying yourself with slime
Bury me in the rose bush
Fool
I'm already dead
Watch me while you waste my time
Leave me whispering to the rainbows
While the petals droop
and decay
Hunched over and worthless
Wasted away
Another savior washed downstream
While the silver crested star beam
Turns darkness
In the slivers of time