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!