monkeyplus1

I leave colored chalk near the sidewalk in front of my house; my kids play with it when the weather’s nice enough to go outdoors. Hell, I use it a lot, too.

Not surprisingly, people that walk by occasionally pick up the chalk when we’re inside, and write their own messages.

Someone recently wrote “PEACE IS POSSIBLE” and then mis-drew a peace-sign (it was missing one of the spokes). It was written by a woman - the handwriting was feminine, and I suppose I have a hard time imagining some guy in this neighborhood walking by and writing that sentiment.

You don’t get more idealistic than that. Assuming they were referring to the middle east, I can see it being peaceful, maybe after mankind destroys itself. Horrible thought, and it’s sad that I’m probably right.

It doesn’t seem like peace is part of human nature, not with men in power. Men rule the world, that much is hard to debate, but especially so in the Arab world where women are severely marginalized.

And so long as men rule the world, there will be war.

Today there was a bunch of graffiti drawn in chalk. One said, “werewolves are the new cocaine - tell your mom”.

I have no comment on that one, seriously, wtf?

I’ve been out of sorts all week. Fighting burnout at work, while at the same time, getting a tremendous amount of work done. And, I’ve been sure to give myself time to unwind and relax before picking up the kids from school.

On Tuesday, we went to skate the half-pipe my neighbor built in his back yard. Although I wish I was learning this twenty years ago, that’s not going to stop me from trying now. That soreness is just catching up to me today, two days later. I’m slowly getting used to where my center of gravity goes when the skateboard starts up each side of the ramp.

Yet somehow, for all the things going well, except for a disagreement with the wife, the three pounds of dogfood in my skull seem a bit scrambled, unfocused. It would be easy to blame this on my recent conversations with my secret oracle, trying to understand its jibber-jabber, but it has been supremely interesting food for thought.

DEADY-DEAD, DEADY-DEAD.
BOUGHT THE FARM.
SAILED FOR THE WESTERN LANDS.
KICKED THE BUCKET.
ATE THE BULLET.
SHUFFLED OFF THIS MORTAL COIL.
TOOK A DIRT NAP.
PUSHING UP DAISIES.
THE BIG SLEEP.
RETURNED TO THE SOURCE.
PUT THE GODDAMNED YIN TO THE MOTHERFUCKING YANG.

“Don’t be afraid of dying. Think of it happening every night. You go to sleep, you die for a day.” A couple of bong-hits, and Jack was feeling philosophical.

“Yah, but you wake up the next day, same person. How’s that death?” asks Mick, wry smile, half-serious. Devil’s advocate.

Jack repeats the quote, sticking his chest out and raising his finger for dramatic effect, “the Adept dies every night.”

The Adept. The one who has passed the Fear test, and continued onward. Downward, upward, who is to say? Onward, nonetheless. No need to mention it out loud.

“Dies every night…and wakes up every next morning as the same person,” adds Mick, now laughing to himself in sarcasm, seeing as to how Jack was taking it serious, and probably fighting the urge to grin.

“No, not the same person. If you have enough pieces, you can build something completely different,” notes Jack.

Mick smirks, and hefts a half-full beer bottle in his hand, thinking of his next (sarcastic) move.

Finally, “if you have enough pieces, the harder it is to pull them together, get your shit together, get something done that day. Get paid.”

Jack says nothing, shifts weight on his other foot. Yeah, he’s right. Looks off to the side.

“Got to be a citizen in the morning,” he says out of the corner of his mouth, then takes a deep breath.

Gritty’s been sitting in the sidelines, a little too faded to have added to the volley, but after a pause of ten or so strange seconds adds…

“..Wakka.”

Wakka = I understand. Ok. 10-4.

Wakka, Wakka = right on, man.

Wakka, Wakka, Wakka = OMGFAWKYES!!11!!ONE!!

I was walking by a coffee and pastry shop today. Groups of housewives, a few babies-in-arms, were sitting there in the mid-afternoon, having coffee and talking while their husbands were out making the money.

One handsome woman was holding a full D-cup breast in her hand, waving the wide, brownish-nipple in the face of a hungry baby, all the while undistracted from the conversation with a friend.

I wasn’t a breast-fed child. The site of a plump nursing breast juicy-full of milk, a nipple begging for soft-chewing and suckling, just does something for me.

It begs an unanswered question.

No, I’ve tried to answer the question. I enjoy trying.

But I’m careful to balance the desire with satisfaction. When you get what you want, you no longer want it. I want just enough to keep on wanting it, and not a bit more.

WAKKA.mp1 to earth, you read me? over.
(you have to say “over”)

This stupid head keeps popping up unexpectedly around the house. The other day, I jumped out of my pants when I saw a head in my bathtub. It’s my daughter’s toy, but there’s no telling where she will unwittingly leave it.

It gets me every time!
It cracks open the door to Chapel Perilous, I stutter and freeze up, like a scratched CD, with the tiny hairs on my neck standing straight up!

YEOW!!!

If I were a cat, my back would arch, fangs bared and ears fanned back…HISSSSSKKKK!!!!

There is that split-second feeling of shock when your eyes see something that the brain cannot immediately identify and categorize. It’s not even surprise, but the precursor to surprise, some primordial revulsion to the unknown.

TERROR.

Sometimes I get the same chill effect when I’m walking down a sidewalk and I see a lump of something by the wayside, and all of the sudden it hits me like a lightning bolt that it is a animal frozen in the grip of death. I wave of cold, paralytic terror and revulsion washes over me. And sometimes, it turns out to be a paper bag, or a discarded sock… some inanimate object.

These “shocks” serve as an unexpected reminders of my own mortality. It is said that death is always an arm’s distance away, and that some day, it will reach out and tap you on the shoulder.

William S. Burroughs called it “the Fear”.

I remember the Halloween I spent in Boise, Idaho, after the summer of my 21st birthday. I had procured a potent psychedelic, and was alone, performing a certain ritual.

It was dark, and I had a candle, a dagger, a bowl of water, and incense burning. I was seating on the floor, and had completed the preliminary banishing, defining a protective barrier around myself.

I noticed a shadow on the couch. I thought it was unusual, I hadn’t noticed it before, and it suddenly grew, and the room grew dark. My blood suddenly ran cold and my heart started pounding in my chest. The Fear hit me like a train, and the shadow took the vague shape of a person, and stood up.

I stopped breathing for a second, and the shape grew, looming over me, off to the left, coming right against the boundary I had drawn in the banishing ritual.

Some part of me knew it could come no further. Some part of me recognized it as my own. Perhaps my death embodied itself for a moment, it suddenly felt intimate, familiar. It was like falling asleep on my arm, rendering it numb in the middle of the night, suddenly feeling some strange hand in your bed, startled until you realize it is your own hand that’s merely numb.

I laughed. I’m sure it was a crazy, cracked-up laugh, but the shadow shrunk down and disappeared as fast as it came.

HAHAHAHA!!

“Wisdom which a wise man tries to pass on to someone always sounds like foolishness.”
-Hermann Hesse, “Siddhartha”

What is the point of all religion, or all spirituality, for that matter?

Some might say that people need belief because there are still many mysteries that have not been explained, so religion provides a perspective that there are higher, Divine forces at work, and to put our trust in them.

The world can be a lonely place to mankind. We’re somehow set apart from animals, we fit clumsily into nature. Science, while continuing to give us power over nature, also continues to underscore how mysterious the universe is. We have no machine as complicated as a cell in your body, no software as complex as DNA, no computer as powerful as the brain, and no work of art more beautiful than the weather. We’re insignificantly tiny compared to the cosmos.

People have always figured that there has to be some architect for all this grandure. Man didn’t make it, surely someone must have.

But religion and spirituality do more than provide a blanket story, or a place to file the unexplained. Through ritual and/or prayer, they try to provide a communion with the bigger picture.

Even in the occult, Magick or whatever fringe spiritual arts, the whole point is to bridge the gap, join Man with God, join the sub-atomic with the galactic. The smallest is a mirror the of the largest. The vanity of Men purports that God created Man is his image, which is a human-specist version of the same sentiment. That there is only ONE-ness. To the Buddhists, overcoming Samsara - the illusory physical world, to reach Nirvana.

I had the pleasure of reading “Siddhartha” by Hermann Hesse last week. It’s not very long, I read it in one day, though I found the English translation from the 1922 German original to be a little stiff.

The message of the book, I believe, is that for those that have a deep spiritual hunger for that One-ness, religion and spiritual teachings will never be enough.

The path of self-denial, isolation, and withdrawal will not be enough.

Indulgences in the sensual, the pursuit of money, sex, food and luxury, will only make your spirit sick and eventually fill you with self-disgust and Thanatos, the urge for self-destruction.

Siddhartha is raised in the priestly Brahmin caste, in India around the time the Buddha was alive. He is an exceptionally bright kid, and devours religion, but it still does not quench the hunger in his soul. He leaves his father to join monks, who live in isolation and conquer the demands and passions of the body. He excels at this, but he leaves it years later, still not having found what he’s after.

He even meets and has a conversation with the Buddha, and with deep reverence, tells the Buddha that he cannot follow him as he’s realized that Enlightenment will not come through any amount of teaching.  The Buddha nods knowingly, and leaves him on his way.

siddhartha finally realizes that he’s so thoroughly abstained from any kind of physical involvement in the world, he is going to go to the city and see how the world of men lives. He finds a beautiful woman, and tells her he wants to know everything about love and sex. She says to have her, he must be clean, dressed well, have a job, money, a house, and give her presents.

Siddhartha learns from a merchant about money, and as if it were a game, comes to be very wealthy by means of the incredible self-discipline he has gained as a monk. His lover throroughly exhausts him in every possible way.

One day, after a realizing he is completely disgusted with himself, leaves the city suddenly and without word to anybody, and takes nothing but the clothes on his back. He thinks about committing suicide. He eventually ends up working with a ferryman on a river, drawn to the peaceful surroundings and the sound of the river.

Many peaceful years go by, and by chance, his former lover and a little boy come to that river on their way to go see Buddha before he dies. She is bitten by a snake, and just before she dies, recognizes Siddhartha, and explains that the little boy is his son.

Time goes on, but the boy, used to living in wealth in the city, doesn’t adjust to this hermit-like existence, and rejects Siddhartha. The more patient Siddhartha tries to be with the boy, the more the boy resents him. Eventually the boy runs off, back to the city, breaking Siddhartha’s heart.

The ferryman Siddhartha lives, who is also an old man by now, rarely speaks, but when Siddhartha finally breaks down and tells him how much his heart hurts, his friend quietly listens.

When Siddhartha is done talking, his friend says that he knows the sound of the river is why Siddhartha chose to stay there, when he could have drowned himself or gone some other way. His friend says that he became a good listener by listening to the river, and that right then, the river was laughing at Siddhartha.

Siddhartha spends much time listening to the river and its many voices, and comes to realize himself after all. The end of the book is exquisite, and I will say nothing more in hopes that you might read it.  I’m not often moved so much by a book, but this was quite exceptional, and highly recommended by yours truly.

xoxo, mp1