Lessons 617

you try...
it slips through
like that a coffee ground
dancing it's way off a shallow spoon
for years, you scrape the edges
you dip and dunk
lapping at the current
to manipulate the particle
when instead... in underrated measure
you attempt to attune your spirit to the liquid
and realize life is all about the balance

love: an inner light that comes from within which casts it's glow upon the perspective for which we, as individuals, view all things.

If the soul, an individual, is the Earth
then love is the sun...
and each celestial body in the universe is carried on the ebb and flow of it's pull.

Mirror Mirror

I shudder to remember a time when talking meant subtle introversion. Is that something we lost? I'm serious, is that something we have to contend with now. People so scared and paranoid that you're always weary that they're leering a little too close to the surface.

I haven't thought about it to be honest. Perhaps, that's part of your issue. It's a slant, and your perception can turn everything on it's side.

So you're saying that everyone collectively is still the same level of shallow as they were twenty-some years ago?

It's not about being shallow, everyone can be shallow. This is about seeing your own shallowness in other people, and how you deal with that.

It's that and it's little things like noticing how in order to converse openly with someone I need some sort of actual context unlike in my youth where "sharing the same vibration of existence" was enough to warrant starting a conversation with someone. There's a fear in people's eyes now that didn't use to be there.

It's the same amount of fear that's always been there, the difference is that you're more fearful now.

I'm denoting a pattern with you...

You know how these conversations about "society" usually goes: You start off by making a blanket statement about the world, and I make the same statement about you. It's a basic redirect, works with almost anything really.

1

Why They Stole Einstein's Brain

What is it we did when we crossed the divide into this reality?
Did we haggle over life expectancy
bartered with the conditions of status and wealth
nothing too specific
just enough to give you a good idea of what a life might be
there's one peering in, eyeballing one on the table...
he thumbed through the listing

"in this one you get to be a white middle-class kid
who grows up in an upper-crust suburb of a major metropolitan city"

the eyes react with recognition...

"being a white kid in twenty century America"

they always add in a few intangibles...
a mother who's neurotic
a father who was forty five year union man
then the orders come through...
they flip the switch and you're set spinning
mix it up for seven months, instead of the usual nine

"plop him down somewhere in Middle America,"

and then in a place resembling an off track betting facilities
money exchanges hands over perceived outcomes

And then perhaps it's all one glorious kitchen...
some ooze meets a little goo
you add in a little random convergence
a random spike in the gamma radiation
a little vodka in the evolutionary punch
then cook it slowly

over
millions
of
years

and let's see how this bakes up in the celestial oven
a smattering of constructs
a tender and delicate balance of chemical compositions...

or perhaps existing in the mind of a programmer
until we were zipped up into this little virtual reality existence
into a file playing on someone's consciousness
as defined by it's subroutine...
the predictability patterns
linking up the chain to form a process
which enables the independent thought
to become a self-actualization algorithm
and the factors of existence
they are so infinitesimal small
that time appears bigger on the inside
and what takes millions of years happens in seconds
we burst, sprout, and explode
one day, they'll upload you
They'll shove your DNA into a C++ code
and be able to virtually interact with you
it's this crazy machine they have
powered by Einstein's brain...

and then The Oasis was Enlightenment

To focus on to far a future is ultimately self defeating

I remember an ex-nun once giving me advice
she told me that I should spend more time considering
the next ten minutes versus the next ten days
it was sort of a, live-in-the-now/call-to-Jesus... if you will
my fragile adolescent mind
imagining something so bold
etched across it's vernacular
to see the sum of time as a mere span of seconds
if five minutes were a thousand years

It reminds me of someone shouting,
"don't look down."

You know how it goes
what's the first thing you do when someone tells you,
"Don't look down"
That's right... you look down.
Unless you're one of those folk
who has either

• A. everything figured out
• B. pisses perfection into a cereal bowl each morning
• C. isn't actually afraid of heights

and regardless which of those three you are
you still convalesce in the process...
but for those of us, however, who lay outside of such revered 'distinctions'
To carry our truths across the belly of a desert floor
with each mirage, a burden
a fixation,
that disrupts the causality of existence
we'd burst if not for these trappings
our enclosures don't speak kindly of the weather
but even those things pass... such is life
at a pace... just slow enough to not notice
creeping along with the speed of a 17-year cicada

67% Triacetate / 43% Nylon

I played Silvie's Lounge tonight, good crowd... quiet and attentive. The kind of crowd that meets you head on. It helped that a third of them were musicians.

To be honest, I had gone the good majority of my entire life without wearing triacetate and nylon together and I pick the most humid night of the year when I'm going to be standing under stage lights to (suddenly and surprisingly) break from that tradition. So epic fail in the wardrobe department on my part, but this is what happens when I'm allowed to dress myself. I did also discover that I can't finish up a twenty mile bike ride just two hours before a gig starts. The very idea to me is now reminiscent of a Ponce de Leon expedition.

So (as I was saying) my skin is just radiating heat... oozing. I contend that very few of you can understand or appreciate the way triacetate and nylon feel against sunburned skin... under stage lights. What could I have possibly done? That shirt had sat in my closet gathering dust for four years before making it's way onto the stage tonight. It wasn't to be resisted, after all it was the first time I can recall fitting into the shirt (as intended)... and if not for the heat, a fedora. Damn, this humidity.

One day off and then I'm back at The Abbey Pub. Good sound system (very loud).

I always find it a little surreal, the idea of playing to a room. It's a very strange and wondrous sort of give and take that one has with their audience... even if it's just two people (which it has been on occasion) and sometimes those shows are your best ones. Those are the no pressure gigs. The kind where you can say a few things that you otherwise wouldn't. Interestingly my crowds seem to be about 99% non-republican now... not surprisingly.


...and about the shirt, the shirt looked good.

It's A 21st Century Plague

Guns are really the plague of the 21st century to me. Fear is it's symptom. Paranoia is it's fever. It's like people see this in the news and they react one of two ways... one, if you're like me, you find it disgusting and you feel this whole culture we have in America is sick on the sauce of it's own violence... and the guns do nothing but make it easier for someone to facilitate that culture and you want all guns to be outlawed and banned, or two people freak and think the only answer is for everybody to be armed so that we can ooze and perpetuate fear. It's like a cancer... you can't just simply cut it out because it's spread everywhere...