[Mindlab]

[How tiring to be weaving wings from the feathers of freedom while grinding the ground out from under my feet with the shovel of shame]

2009-03-19T17:33:00.004-04:00

The dream was an overwhelming consensus (thriving, even, within the head) of Seba stood and stared at the uppermost top hat as the windmills spun with some volition beyond his eye's comprehension. The patterns of colors flashing above the smokestack black of each hat's flat top whirled with the wisdom only color can lend to some thing in formation. He sunk so low into the poem of colors that he missed the first part of whatever the third top hat's mouth was ending with "and damn divinity for creating in us the imaginings of perfection while being bound by our faults from calling it forth."

So here we have our intrepid adventurer admiring him's elf in the mirror of the mind. Abstracting the void into shapes or devouring the frantic becomings that arch out of the fathomless deep beginnings disguised as antipathy to our fragile fleshy kind. He's not devious, even if the faces he is practicing blend into danger where his eyes' receivers mesh with the emotional mechanism - down there be a squeltering admission of faith in the process. All the emotive clusters of twinges and tickles bellow the same deep breath - 'Tantilize us!" No matter the defeats his ego has clamored away as memories to rot into food for angels assigned to clean up after our haphazard paths plowed thru this glorious creation. They are barred from all but watching and singing some.

Seba's more aware of his emotions than most bipeds, but he's still attached to naming them, like pets or any type of color, forgetting even the dismal shreds of boundaries all such labels apply upon things that then are rooted in time, say, or space. The space of his heart doesn't often remind him of his head, though the reverse is often the case; until his heart finds space among all the straws grasped and piled to breathe between. Hollering in thumps it can easily drive awareness to the outer body, by raising temperatures and squeezing the lungs with a tightness least often found lying around after sex or, more likely, in the cracked open vein of a secret. That is what is rising in Seba's mystery - the intuition of what time has seen fit to obscure until what will soon be now. The dreams are all jumping towards the sky in the hopes that the sun's warmth will take them up to leave him cooler.

This world holds a thousand fascinations such as one extreme making a calm way for its spectrum's specter, its opposition in force or freedom, the unmaking is never undone. Seba's cloak of wishes sewn from a thousand mid-day desperate decisions only warms him with enough hope that the world will drift apart with nary a squeal, only serve to weigh him down long enough to walk, but such disparate desires never really carry one in a particular direction so much as draw out the deepest farces of emotion. The emotions tinged with fright are often found rising to the top because of these antiquated flesh sacs' need to keep in functioning order and the flavor of fear being so bitter as to drive action up from the marrow. Looking about him he's seeing how the whole of the world shatters whenever he blinks but there's no clue as to how existence is re-crafted with as much speed as it takes his mind to sharpen the colors of his eye back into shapes its grown comfortable operating among. Such dilemmas have brought Seba to the brink of laying down for a breather but even his practiced breath holds only onto the relative shallows of the deepest pocket inside his core - which is barely keeping afloat as an outlying orbital around the truer, centerer, center.

"Love fits in here" the airs whisper as if pointing, but look where he may the flatness of gravity still seems to keep even the roundest surfaces without love-shaped holes that it seems all of everything burrows towards the sun in search of filling. Seba plugs his ears to better taste the air's waste and let some fashion of electricity pass between his ears. Not knowing how his hands become encharged with the very pulse of the universe has yet to stop beings from harnessing the divinest forms of form or is it energies of energy?

None can be unsure of anything enough to really divest the soul from its previous struggles. Yet we try to remember our past as if it were a part of our future though where, in the dankest slices of self, can the last thing you were hold forth without its meaning being churned by the ever-nowing spin of one's perspective moving into the eternal horizon? Here on the cusp of everything the distances fall away creating space for an entire being to unfold all its corners of self-assumed functions, everything from draining the life from nutrimentations to the vanities every glance implants in a mirror. There's nothing different within us from anywhere else, so long as you can step back from your own head long enough to circumnavigate the currents fed from the well-spring into anything that you have yet to be in this world among each of us. The divinity we so desperately wish to touch us is beyond our grasp because it arises from within each of us. And for some damned reason inversion of the emotions may be played, but inversion of the self takes so much of a lifetime as to render the practice of anything else moot with the decay time wafts behind like an odor but even sharper in the skin than the nostrils.

Seba's lungs were never up to the task of breathing in life, which makes it handy his body can run on oxygen clustered among nitrogen. It never has been death that woke fear but often the fear of time itself and its deliberate wiggling in between each and every portion of the world he has come to move his head around or his heart towards. But the rules of this world bear little resemblance to the ideals (for calling them ideas carries not enough emphasis upon their innate desire to occur which fills Seba's head as he thoughtfully welcomes them) he would have arranged a life such as this around.

Having awoken with such distances between all the happinesses he had known and where he finds his noggin often spinning our explorer into the cyclone of the past spent in futilities, intuition is tried and he charges his guts with treason. Intuition doesn't exist in the past so much as gets blamed or congratulated as the present. So to attach his head back on right this morning, after it rolled through the valley of dreams, requires aiming it in a different direction - a direction of unexpectationalism where the past has no bearing on this next future but serves as iconic portraits his brain has painted in its best attempts to digest the times he's made it through and to better able him to share him's elf with all the others' elves wandering among what are called sunbeams, but desire to be known as God.

Looking with this new headirection with nothing but him's elf to see in the world he explodes in the realization that God felt the same way in order to begin the universe: to have company! The worlds forms and functions viewed under this light reveal entire dimensions that are unsealable without the soul's recognition of purpose beyond it's elf. "There's nothing here but mes" he's yelling off the balcony at a street waddling to and from. Heads turn, undoubtedly, to scoop up some particle of perspective on this occurrence so as to better report it to whomever will listen over the next coffee; but Seba is not able to see such actions partitioned among fleshes because it is the very colors re- flected and -fracted from beyond everything as color as touched and fed by the sun's proximate light.

Semio[tic]s, for those in the know

2009-03-13T23:28:00.009-04:00

Here's the finished assignment. I found that the instructions were slightly incorrect in that a few of the pieces did indeed touch somewhat.

Obviously I am no videographer...shoulda put more light on things. But since the puzzle pieces are all locked up in the time capsule for the next decade, what can i do?

(the written puzzle piece states "You'll see. There's nothing to hold onto...Then maybe, you'll stop trying to hold on...")

Awesomest birthday present I've gotten in a long time. Thanks mollsmoonstar and freeflow.

Re:Birth

2009-02-26T18:20:00.005-05:00

One of the absolute greatest people I have been honored to know for most of my life's wife just had a darling baby girl. Not wanting to infringe with but the tiniest of curiosities I asked him to sum up the experience of the new fatherhoodness in seven words or less:

"I can't remember life without her"

Mindlab proper

2009-02-21T12:12:00.001-05:00

Somewhere in here there's secrets waiting to be born, mysteries unravelled by song for the pleasures of loving exchange between consciousing molecules. Gone forever is the past where our masks' deep roots held together our identities as names for the few who took care to investigate the manner of matter.

Such sympathies used to be draped upon trees of misery where the glimpses beneath yielded divine madness from the cup fashioned in the restless tail end of infinity. Now the paradox is no longer embodied within those who have glimpsed the recent echoes trailing God's countenance (its nothing to be tied up in visions this day and age), it has sprouted wings of imagination to fly swiftly over the spaces between mortal pains that integrate a life into the last human mystery.

But there is no imminent death waiting on its wings of time to take from us everything we've leaned our flesh towards. Its only us who have brought the depths of death into some higher place. The growth of imagination requires fanciful playing of generation to fold upon generation that the desires of the helix threaded through our genes may spiral out tighter complexities.

Are stars creating more stars? Not around here! Our star is creating something very different from it's elf. So too is our common experience cresting into a diversity from even things strictly human.

The Mindlab is a realm of ideas fashioned from the hollow backside of a waterfall. Over this wet cliff fall all the churning bubbles caught between the waters of this river's life. From this secret hollow I can hold out a net and gather a slew of foams and deitrus accumulated by the waters' journey upstream. When I enter the lab I'm sifting through these flotsams and foams for some deeper essences. Sometimes it may be the murky yellow of a foamy froth that sets a memory free. Maybe I'm extracting rusty nails and the way the driftwood groans the metal out of its grains trips my focus into the last time a groan expanded into me. Whatever it might be, the Mindlab is where the mind can experiment with the synthesis of the myriad layers of sense.

Masks of Mine

2009-02-21T12:02:00.002-05:00

Today I woke depressed. My meditation was shot full of holes of thought demanding my attention louder and with strength such that the silence in my core was adulterated by worries and wonders. Each morning of four months now, I've sat with my's elf in the company of my breath, and maybe a friend or two - ipod & Mindfold. We go looking for the deepest recesses, or at least they seem deep as are covered by the thickest wafts of thought taking often a hundred words, images or feelings (its so hard to distinguish things nowadays) to run their course so that I can glimpse the more lasting self who always is pleased at my return and does very little to 'help' me plan or try to entertain me during my stay. There is very little I can say about myself at this point as my's elves are so often chattering about their's elves as to make heads or tails out of silence.

Layer after layer. Peel enough away and you will either find truth or nothing - can't be ever too suspectful as to know what lies behind the junctions next face - or fear. We all are defined somehows. And here I am, more real than the storyful descriptions I cast about as my shadows falling through the worlds of these pages as if my inverting into my's elf could create some personalized black hole with which to recondense all these intrusions into the fabric of matter we all share and wrap my's elf tight ever tighter into a singularized coccoon to demand of existence the expansive birth that the cosmos at large purveyed into every one of our souls all at the same before time and with each of us in mind such that the whole of me could be the same as the parts of the surroundings that each of me might mistake as some thing or some other.

And here I am still feeling insaner in this life where I have no real desire other than what comes floating past me as the deitrus of surprise or the mangled dreams that I have seen fit to carry with me thus far but without the continuing, or true, desire to unfurl for all the world. Often I can be in honesty by saying that I care not for this life or world and my dreams are to not have been born in the first place or to have the sweetness of death give my soul release from this damnable body I must look after and feel at all angles and all hours. The surges in my chest are wonders: does God not wish, at any time(lessness), to have thought twice about this infinite eternity of being around one's self posing as others?

2008 extended tagline

2009-02-10T12:16:00.003-05:00

Philosopher emerging from accounting pulls a quick one on demons who were counting on a free lunch - washing them away, clawing and thrashing, in a river of booze. Our intrepid adventurer takes to the road following the strands of friends he has spun over the web of years. Each friend has created a different life towards their dreams. Experiencing slices of others' passions and doldrums serves to melt and chip away whatever parts of his post-divorce heart are left in his chest. He's dying to the past and growing a heart towards the future. This ripples into his days slowly because liquor is thicker than the blood of a fresh heart. But, as he allows it, understandings expand self and the relationships thereof. Upon settling back onto the world he finds that the techniques of structureless days rounded by inebriation's thick bubble have been used to their maximum advantage but must be let go of now so that he can move back into the society of humans. Journeying gets lonesome tiring.

In response to a friend's quiestion of what not drinking was like...

2009-02-08T14:29:00.004-05:00

As far as not drinking it came upon me suddenly. I had been down in Naples FL visiting an old friend a few blocks from the Gulf coast. The sun doesn't set in Naples until a hundred people are drinking on the beach. So I, being my mother's son, bought a box of wine; though not her preferred brand. A box of Pinot Noir is 4 bottles worth of wine and only costs about $12. Drinking from the space bag for a few days led me to the discovery that it was horrid wine. I even had to buy beer a few times to alleviate the destruction of my stomach lining; but I persevered and even kept it in the vestibule of the tent I was sleeping in in the backyard so that I would have to face my nemesis first thing in the morning.
The flight back I spent in my journal. In my deepest sense of self there dwells a story maker and teller. As I wrote I sipped whiskys which brightened the noonday sun, but dimmed my head. The sentences weren't coming out smooth like a sunbeam's moment through a moving cloudhole, they were coughing out like a coal train's smokestack. The bender had crested the 14 month wave and was beginning the curl that will lead to a collapsing in on itself. The spree was no longer a story to tell but a rut chunnelling me through each day.
This, box of wine and all, has recently revealed itself to be a genius plot in the disguise of an alky's soulrot. I didn't crystallize any of this into wordable emotional categories until I woke up back in the hills the next day. I was in a low state of revulsion towards the effects of the beach alcohol (beach alcohol, in the winter, is much saltier and even more dehydrating than even altitude alcohol) inside my body. The sluggish character it was festering into as I continued to feed the monster; 4, 5, 8, 12 drinks a day, more, more, was seeping out of the heels of my feet and I walked through the day with a squish and wet squeaks.
So as I squished over to the fridge of bestowing that first evening of February, I found this giant sentry carved from the stone of my deep will. My desirous, sluggish, cravenly thirst - so diffuse in its methods, so scattered in its doings - has no chance of direct confrontation with such a condensed form of my's elves.
"It seems," I said "that there has been a vote within me and most of the energies of feeling have sided with this formidable intent to uncrave the numb of alcohol."
It mostly turned off, like a switch. I am treating myself to things like candlelit piano music warming the air around a mustard bath (its a bath salts mix of mustard and other herbs that open up the pores of the skin so that nastiness like alcohol residues can be released) and then a dark room and complete relaxation in the Mindfold.

Its happening again.

2009-02-06T11:54:00.000-05:00

Truckstop Living, vol 1

2008-11-16T13:22:00.011-05:00

I finally got around to getting photos from Sleg and we'll see how they inform my stories...

Let's jump right in

Here is the front door:

We did have a couple cats coming around for a little while so the No Pets sign did come down.

And the lovely cafe in the second building where we would have breakfast every morning.

My favorite drink at said cafe,

And the recipe...

Please read

2008-11-11T23:07:00.002-05:00

Newest Favorite

in response to Phreelosophy's comment on Practice

2008-11-09T11:04:00.003-05:00

*bows deep*
only a truly enlightened being could see how awesome i am (without wearing a Mindfold)

But for the real practice, it fell into me more than I into it. This recent trend certainly grew deep roots in the bloody mess of my broken heart - my ex-wife suggested taking a class again when I called her crying one morning during our Separating. As it turns out heartblood spilt is a verdant compost for growing Qi. The moment I tasted it I was home.

So when I was on the road without a space of my own and needed a way to center that did not involve possessions, a routine (such as shower or shave because those were not always available) or a bedroom, etc. this found its place in my mo(u)rning.

Of course, I have been fostering an image of non-conformity for years so doing weird spirit-summoning gestations or whatever it might look like to the uninformed only really helps to paint a picture of my's elf that keeps me malleable within others' eyeballs. So there's no hesitation on how i am perceived that might get in the way of a practice.
And verily, I say unto you, when you are doing crazy headstands because you have put a year of Chi into your centre, well, the practice suddenly becomes real.

But even that is not the payoff. The real thing that keeps me motivated to do this every day is the more in my body I am. Now as I connect that subtle movement to a sitting, breathing meditation...the mind and the body are aligning that the soul may more fully incarnate.

Practice

2008-11-06T11:14:00.000-05:00

So I have been doing my Qi Kung practice for over a year now. Every morning for 15 minutes. This is the longest and best devotion i have given to a practice yet; and the rewards are overwhelming and obvious and completely worth the effort of the routine. And the kicker, is that I don't even know the whole cycle yet.
The particular set of exercises I am working with is called the 18 Lohan Hands. I learned 8 of them before leaving Gainesville, from the best sifu I've yet worked with, Anthony. I was sorry to have to leave in the middle of the set, but it hasn't stopped me from gaining a benefit; although I am now feeling somewhat lopsided or not well-rounded so I am thinking it is time to find a way to learn the rest of the set.

A couple of weeks ago I added a simple meditation to my routine in the mornings, shooting for 15 minutes of motionless. I experimented with different postures - doing the Qi Kung Tree posture, relaxed standing, chair sitting, etc. - but ended up back at the sitting zazen pose on two pillows. After feeling ease in the posture for 15 I started experimenting with the most suspension of motionlessness I could find, even to the point of not blinking, but that proved to be too much twitching motion. So I settled into closed eyes or half-open resting lids with relaxed blinking. The ease of settling into no-moving comes quickly for me as I relax into a Chi-breathing state of mind so that my breath is the bellows for all movement in my fleshbag.

From that I have proceeded to grow the sitting meditation into a full half hour. Thus far my favorite way of monitoring the time (since I have decided to not have a clock in my bedroom) is to listen to Fahrenheit Fair Enough, by Telephone Tel Aviv. I listen to it 4 times plus one verse to get to 30. Its a beautiful, melodic instrumental that also sounds as if it is reorganizing something mechanical, or squarish, in the background; perfect cleaning routine for the Mindlab.

Day of the Dead

2008-11-03T19:24:00.009-05:00

The Day of the Dead started off in a horribly appropriate way: See-double-u's magnificent cat, Zoey, was hit by a car sometime in the night. It looks like she left instantly.
Goodbye Zoey, you had it good and now its even better.

See-double-you drove me to the airport and I flew to Hotlanta for the Carnival of the Dead. For the airport I dressed as The Financier because I get kicks out of the way people treat me when I look good. Putty in my hands. Probably why religions require such elaborate costumementation. Arriving at the (literally) busiest airport in the world I begin to wonder if Sleg is going to continue the tradition of airport Mindnappings that we began upon El Capitan (but that's quite another story and will need to be written and then written off on by El Capitan him's elf and maybe even the Spatial Galactician before it can be posted here) by whisking me off the baggage claim curb into oblivion. But no Mindnapping today. On the ride to the dump, uh, no not the dump...to the A-hole I explain to him how my costume of the businessish attire, plus wearing the Mindfold, will dress me as Wall Street. We toss around the idea of him being The Bailout by dressing in upscale all-black attire, but in reality that only happened in our heads because it was too much to explain (and he put this awesome veil-type mask on). We had to leave N at home because she was sick. I gave her some medicine.
Sleg and I fell right back into tradition and laptopped the Glenwood for their awesome selection of beer; our favorite of the night being named Heavy Seas: Small Craft Warning. Its like a Stellas Artois for your pyrate ship. That, we later realized (for one never knows when one is in the midst of Shark Summoning) was our Shark Summoning. Once you see the fins you've gotta either swim for your life (ha, best of luck) or grab onto the fin. We rode shark toward the Carnival of the Dead in some thick style that had been dredged from our pasts and tattooed across the thick breathing leather of these monsters.
At the door we were stamped with skulls and then woah. I will not divulge the inner occurrences of this particular party because there are no words to express it to ones who were not present and there's a reason it was done inside a building and not in public. Just know that if Sara Ashes throws a party, for chrissake, GO!
The next morning we found a Shark Rider's sigil on the side of the truck. It was dashed across the door and became clear when I wiped the top layer away that, indeed, the inhabitants of this truck had Rode Shark last night.
But that was long after this. I woke up on the triplicate of yoga mats that have become my Sleghome. The overcoat I had wrapped my's elf in was spotted with candlewax. But I had lit no candles. The pain started before I even woke, it actually woke me as it were. There is only one way, I have learned, to deal with such pain. Head on. So I did headstands. And jumping jacks. And dry heaves. And tried to meditate. And dry heaves. And had them hit me repeatedly in the skull with a tube of paper. And running in place. And ginger tea. And headstands and more headstands. And then when the landlord's brother came over I did a headstand to confuse him. It worked. I can do mad headstands when I am needing to summon the deepest of energies to combat the tricksy toxins that I have penchants for.

shakin' fakin and bacon

2008-11-03T18:43:00.005-05:00

So I just settled into my Asheville room after driving from Marietta to Athens to Asheville on the motorcycle; about 275 miles. I've done one other day of riding that much, from Gainesville to Atlanta(I-75) in a 7 hour thunderstorm; when I got to Fuzzy's wife's graduation party it took me 10 minutes in the bathroom to wring my's elf out. Freaking Ridiculous.
Today's ride was a bit more relaxed, but still all interstate as well - yuck and boring, no fun turns. But Western North Carolina is full of fun turns i'll get to explore now.
My body is still shaking, especially my hands, from that sick Savage one-cylinder thumper that I turned 26,000 miles on today. That's just short of 4 round trip rides from Miami to Seattle. I got that bike used with 75 miles on it. The story I have in my head is some poor sap bringing home this shiny new bike and his wife hits him over the head with a rolling pin and so he takes the bike back so I could buy it cheaper.
I bought the bike because its Savage and I could tell it would handle my learning curve. It's yellow and not many bikes are that in touch with their inner flame. I've knocked the thing around and gone down twice (for real, not counting drops on gravel parkinglots or the kickstand not locking all the way, etc.) The first time was being hit from behind in an intersection - took my back tire out from under me...I was turning left, and she right...into the same square foot of road. Neither she nor I was going any faster than 10mph but still the bike and I slid 40 feet (I measured the streak of paint the next day). I had the right gear on and got some scraped skin and a sore hip. Without my full face helmet I would have left half my face across the pavement (yeah mom, I never told you about this one, sorry). I soon bought even better gear. And the Savage was still rocking it with a slight bend on the handlebar.
The second time was me being dumb and riding too late in the rain and not stopping properly on a slick downhill stoplight. I got my's elf into a situation where I could either hit the stopped car in front of me, or dump my's elf instead. It seemed better to hit the ground instead of hitting the car then the ground. All my camping equipment lashed onto the back of the bike on the badass shelf AF made me snapped out of the bungee net and scattered around the street. The shelf popped its zip ties and flew into the woods. I was helped up in a slight daze by a beautiful girl which immediately embarrassed me into action of scooping my tent, sleeping bag, hiking boots and the rest of the scattered gear and lashing it onto the bike as quick as I could on the side of the road. Did I mention it was raining? I then rode half an hour home. The even better gear only left me with a chunk of skin gone from my kneecap, but without the cycling pants with kneepads, i likely would not have said kneecap.
The next day I wake up at 0600 with the all-consuming thought that I must find the badass shelf AF took all the previous day to fashion to my specs. So I drove (my car) back down to downtown and wouldn't you know it, but at this 6am there's a roadrace around L5P down the exact street I needed to get to. So I am in my moccasin slippers and bandanna and colored glasses walking between the crowd and the runners because behind the crowd is a steep hill and my slippers won't grip the wet grass. I have to walk like this for over 5 minutes then I slip thru the crowd and into the patch of pines where I immediately head right to the shelf and grab it and then walk the opposite direction (on the other side of the road, for balance) this time facing the runners. Their faces gripped with anguish from the hill they just climbed and me swinging the lacquered wooden shelf in a circle by one of the cinch straps that stayed cinched.
So I got some more zip ties and put the shelf on for today's ride. Then I rode. Now I'm tired.

Shining Rock

2008-10-28T15:59:00.021-04:00

C-double-you and I took a hike along the Art Loeb trail into the Shining rock wilderness. This trail runs across an entire spine of a mountain ridge, which is not unlike many ridges in the area, but for one thing, most of it burned 50 years ago and the re-growth in the area is not nearly as thick as all the surrounding hills so you have spectacular views; that and its really high up.

We hiked in Sunday afternoon as most folks were leaving. He and I talked and talked about outdoorsness. He is from the perspective that can be summarized by Ray Jardine's The Ray Way, which is a method of making and packing gear that is all about multi-use and efficiency so you can get to the middle of nowhere. I on the other hand, have subscribed to the idea that REI is
a store of the gods and have been happy to pay for their expertise so I can get to more important things like accounting. Anyhow we picked a great place to camp in a grove of hemlocks on the Southeast side of the hills to avoid prevailing winds; it was also only a hundred feet from a spring where we filled our water bottles. He pitched his tarp, and I my tent, and then we went back up to the ridgetop to cook dinner under the sunset.

The night was spent around the fire with us sharing stories of everything, as campfires in the middle of nowhere have a way to draw out the depths. I told the story of how I had proposed to my ex-wife before even holding her hand; and he spoke of things that are held in secrecy under the Code of the Campfire.
He taught me to tie a couple of knots and I have found that once I have the motions down, its easier to do without looking and to not bother my mind with seeing, but to trust my fingers. The training is paying off. After sipping the fine fine aged scotch C-double-you brought along (even his liquor bottle is wrapped with duct tape, so he doesn't have to carry a whole roll of the stuff) we put the fire out and were both relieved to find that neither of us stood by the tradition of peeing a fire out because, well, it stinks, but more importantly, isn't how you show respect to something that can disintegrate you down to molars.
I sleep fitfully because my sleepmat, the inflatable kind, has blown a seam and doesn't inflate. This has not bothered me for months as i've slept on hardwood floors on it from Florida to NYC, but when the ground underneath you is, literally, frozen, that missing layer of insulation is found to be crucial. But its hard to complain about the ice on the bottom of your tent when you wake into the sun rising off the eastern ridge.

We decided to shoot for Shining Rock, a HUGE quartz deposit a few mountaintops from where we slept. In the spirit of our adventure we decided to forgo the trail and bushwhack our way through the network of blueberry bushes. After half an hour of this we found a bunch of bushes the birds had not picked clean, which revived us to continue off in the wrong direction. This took us into the most magnificent hemlock clearing I have ever crawled through briars into. It was clearing like this after clearing like this interspersed with rhododendron thickets. We were amazed by the space so much that we were devising a way to mark off boundaries for a paintball or capture the flag game on the mountain top. But then we realized we were off track and doubled back by walking through thousands of blueberry bushes to camp and took the trail.
There C-double-you split off from me to climb the quartz boulders up to the Shining Rock. Even though these boulders that started off the size of me and grew to the size of cars and beyond up the hill were strewn about with time's degradation of the rock, I had enough bushwhacking so I took the trail all the way up. It was immense and amazing and it filled my soul with the magnificence of this evolving creation of a world. Here's a photo from the top of Shining Rock

As we packed up camp and moved towards a different spot for the second night we noticed it had not gotten any warmer even with the sun overhead, big clouds were rolling in, and the water in our water bottles was freezing, all this plus the wind was so hard it moved me around on the top of the ridges (even with my heavy backpack on) led us to decide that it would be better to just make a fire and hang out until we felt like driving home. This proved to be a wise decision as it started snowing by the time we got to the car. So we put on another layer and started gathering firewood before it got completely dark. Around this fire we shared the majority of our foodstuffs remaining, made hot cocoa -put cinnamon cereal in it because things you would not normally eat at home can taste amazing in the woods, and talked more about the intricacies of fire-shaping. Then it got really cold. So we jumped in the car and I stuck on Tom Wait's Heart of Saturday Night, which fused the mood into the night as we wound around the Blue Ridge parkway for what might be the last time of the season as icicles were already formed on the rock outcroppings which, C-double-you explained, would continue growing until they reached the ground then they would cross the road, forcing the authorities in charge of such things to swing the gate closed on this road for the season. But, he continued, rock climbing clubs, would hike the miles in with all their gear and climb the ice for the two or three weeks it was frozen enough. And people look at me like I'm crazy.
When Wait's crooning ended I offered C-double-you to pick from my collection and without my prompting he picked the best album ever, Ambient.

Arriving home we unpacked the car and let the cat in. Then I made a foot bath in lieu of a shower, because the hiking boots I bought in Colorado are still not broken in enough. I set it up in the kitchen next to the stove so I could reach the beer in the fridge as well as the kettle boiling water. I proceeded to put on the ipod and sit in that chair for over an hour munching Kettle Chips and reading about Hermes Trismegistus.
(PS I don't know how to keep the pics from loading HUGE when you click on them, if anyone does, please let me know)

Toned down for mortal consumption

2008-10-23T14:55:00.003-04:00

I just can't do it. The thoughts come so fast that I have been guzzling beer in an attempt to slow things down, but the practiced tolerance of drinking for 2008 (for honest, I have averaged, AVERAGED, 7 alcoholic drinks per day - I can drink two bottles of wine and then wake up and do it again the next day, hangovers are non-existant and somehow I can still eat one full meal throughout the day, keeping my weight at the sultry 125lbs.) has left my attempts flat on the brain lag and too expensive to continue without more income.

So the last couple of days, playing The Financier have left me face to face with the fear that i have wasted the last 8 years of my life trying to learn the game that rules the world; and now that I have no upward option but to get back into finance and accounting and making money from numbers; I can see the future: it involves me drooling in a straight jacket. Have you seen the movie Quill? All I want is ink and a pen. All I have is a calculator and a new haircut.

The desire of my soul is to dive into psychology. The bent of my mind is to think of philosophy. But the skill of my training is the opposite of these.

I thought I could reconcile all opposites in myself by playing along with them but have found I am only human, though I don't seem to have a human mind, for it dreams of things that are not in this world. How can I have ideas that are not compatible with the present situation of the world? Do the dreams that drive me mad tumble into the psychic compost for more determined minds to grow from? Is my role that of the pioneer and then to be forgotten? What do I care if it is? I won't be making it out of here alive, be it in a coffin or legends, its death all the way down.

I don't want to reproduce because I could never give possibility to these sorts of pains in the heart and head. I have seen that most people admire my ability to think, but can I tell you what a curse it is? This seeing the extremes of all these worlds that make up our variance; this obsession to explain the feelings that posess this damned body of mine. And the knowledge that there are things worth this pain and rewards worth the troubles, but from this troubled mindstate, I can easily discard them to make room for more of the sharpest feelings that I know, those of the extremest of extremes. Sometimes a loving hug draws me, but in truth its no more interesting to me (although to my biology is another story entirely) than a funny tv show...so says the downside.

How i've tried to speak with professional mind-explainers and verify that I am human, but to my chagrin i know more about the mind than those who have received papers saying they know more about the mind. Its not like I am a genius because I don't know how to apply all these marvelous thoughts I live for, but there is undoubtedly some intelligence that is beyond the normal, or at least, habitual, human comprehension - leaving me to rot under the glory of my imaginings.

(I will likely regret posting this later, but its not stopping me...)

If I am anywhere near Atlanta on The Day of the Dead

2008-10-20T12:06:00.005-04:00

This is where I will go...

One of the Ringmistresses, and my dear friend, Sara Ashes, best I can tell, came (back?) from the dead some years ago to tell the rest of us humans why not to fear the Deep Sleep. And by day she works to abolish the death penalty. Go figure.

The Financier

2008-10-19T20:22:00.017-04:00

I have been working on my metamorphosis into The Financier, and in doing so I have been getting to see my contrarian nature shining through. In the land of the freaky side of freedom, my bandannas and slipshod have been sinking - as if being beckoned back underconscious after wandering past their necessary bounds. My mind is bubbling like a wet mogwai and out of the muck is arising the keen and dapper logician. The change in outward attitude of people towards me is affirming of my intents; dressed as this

receives a
very different
reaction than this

where people (keep in mind this is societally and culturally dependent) are more apt to engage on a particular level of manners to you, depending on their perceived class relation to yours. For instance, in the bandanna, etc. the Nascar fan at the mall doesn't look at me twice and expects me to step out of his way, which I must as he is larger and will probably hurt me with impact. But in the professional get-up he doesn't look me in the eye once and is nudging against his girlfriend to leave me the slight room I need to pass.

But I have known this, and tried to use it to my advantage in all circumstances (that I care a whit about). Its been an age old dilemma of mine having to gauge whether going covert and using disguises to accomplish a mission (like getting into a Masters in Finance program with an undergrad degree in Invironment) is the more likely to succeed,

Or if the situation calls for the full-frontal assault.

Either way I can oblige.

As for the recent past, I had no interest in keeping score. I had had enough of the numbers business and the way they often try to define value. But now I am feeling a bit more competitive, ready to jump back into the fray. And what a fray the economy is! I wonder if it isn't that giving me the most interest, to see something from the inside when it is not working, as opposed to bandwagoning to the top of the Dow with the rest of the would be capitoligarchs.

Dragon

2008-10-17T11:34:00.006-04:00

After my roommate got back from a primitive skills gathering in the N. GA mountains, he was trying to start a bow and spindle fire in the living room to show us how to do such a thing. We became convinced after the spindle started smoking and moved onto headstands. Each of the four of us had a particular style of head and hand stand that we showed off to the group. I have not been in a group that body-aware before and it led to The Dragon:

I've never heard of AcroYoga, but thoroughly enjoyed it.
(i conjecture that the top and the front person could wear Mindfolds, but the foundational person needs too much balance)

These are Financial Times

2008-10-14T23:23:00.002-04:00

Yes, a single link post. But you just can't get this kind of perspective inside the US. The last line drove me to post this.

Let us pay homage to Rene Magritte

2008-10-13T22:23:00.010-04:00

Rene Magritte is my favorite painter. He is the analogist of the canvas.
(if you open the first link in a new tab or page it may be easier to just use the sideways arrows above the paintings than these links, I can't decide so here's both)

Clairvoyance--egg is to bird as i am to self portrait

Not To Be Reproduced--mirror is to face as perspective is to vision

The Listening Room--size is to memory as apple is to room

Mysteries of the Horizon--moon is to individual as soul is to man

My personal favorite, Homesickness where views are to nature as black is to wings

and of course, The Treachery of Images where painting is to understanding as word is to mind.

Forestry

2008-10-12T18:14:00.011-04:00

We reached the ridgeline after hiking up the side of the Linville Gorge east of Asheville. We had been hiking a few hundred yards to the next border of burned forest for our guide, a Forest Reseracher, to take some measurements and program the coordinates into his GPS system for later data crunching. The fires here are special because one section burned one year. Then part of it and part of a second section were burned the next year. So you have three different sections: 1) burned the first time 2) burned the second time 3) burned the first and second time...setting up a great control group for a data-based inferential research to be done on forest regeneration timelines.

I was in charge of the 6-inch ruler and photographing duff, which is the layer of needles and bark scraps that stack up around trees. Here is a good illustration of how the duff burns away in a fire:

My own research consisted of gaining purchase on the unleveled logs full of branches broken off into spear points.

As well as the time lag of balance determination among carbonized tree-remains.

And of course trying to line my's elf between both a pair of foreground burned tree-remains as well as centering among the backdrop's pair of charred remains flanked by a pair of living trees.

All in all a fascinating journey that we ended with setting up camp on the top of the ridge. We built a heck of a campfire which ended with Freeflow making fire faeries.
While I urged him on.

The next day we closed up camp after being rained on overnight. This had us hankering for more than fruit and cold tea. So we went to Famous Louise's and ate in Avery County.

The view from the top

2008-10-12T18:12:00.002-04:00

New World Order

2008-10-09T23:08:00.003-04:00

This article will likely not be here long, so take a look because it is a great example of the astuteness of this publication's perspective on finance and economics.

Transforming the Bailout.

2008-10-09T22:44:00.004-04:00

And here is an interesting article that, behind the narrative, gives a good summary of the process of injecting capital into banks.

There's a lot of doubt and questions raised in the article, as I presume is being done by most medias. But there is no precedent for this unraveling of the global economy and so there is no plan of reaction. Everything that would be done at a time like this will be full of questions. I think, at the very least, its good the US is willing to reconsider its plan of action and probably mimic the European tactic. Its about time we considered more than just our own opinion.

Economy

2008-10-08T23:27:00.004-04:00

Here is a good 4 minute summary of what the bailout hopes to accomplish.

As with every huge financial endeavor involving public markets, its largely a psychological gambit. There is no way a government could save all its banks. What they are basically doing is buying the debts (like your home mortgage)which are most likely to not get paid back from the banks in the worst shape. This makes the bank look stronger financially so that other banks are willing to led it money. This is necessary because no bank has enough money at any one time, they are all tied together with short-term loans (often as short as overnight); so if a bank can't take out more loans it'll default on previous loans its taken which are due. The bank then goes bankrupt.
So if money isn't in the banks, where is it?
[taps temple with concentrating look on face]

Mush in my Room

2008-10-08T15:19:00.009-04:00

Here is the hike I took from Old Barnesville Road. My most-knowledgeable roommate gave me directions which I almost followed properly except for finding the trailhead. So I ended up bushwacking up a large hill across this stream.

To get to this view.

In about two weeks the colors here are going to make rainbows frown, oh wait, they already do frown.

Then I followed this rabbit and when I lost his trail this was sitting at my feet:

Not seeing any caterpillars nearby, I ganked it and ran.

What better place to bring a mushroom than my new room?! Those are Kiers alongside me, they are sentries for One Second Time Travelers

Crash course on Shark Riding!

Wait, what was it the caterpillar said again about taking sides?

Not remembering which side was which, I could just go for it...

Or take the middle road...

For El Capitan

2008-10-04T20:46:00.022-04:00

So I have been working with two main styles, the Headband and the Do-Rag. They both start here:

The Do-Rag then gets folded anywhere between here

(Shorter tail over neck)

And here

(Longer tail over neck)

From there it is as simple as placing the folded corner to your forehead

And let the tail droop down and away to make it easier to tie without tangling the tail

One knot

Two knot

Cool

The Headband style just takes a couple more folds...

Try and keep it pretty symmetrical at this stage

Then double one side over

And again.

Its in the above fold and this one where you really determine the width of the Headband, the more folds before getting here, the thinner it will be.

Then take the bottom-left portion and fold it over everything. It is integral to the process you don't end up with a symmetrical fold on the last one. The little lip folding over gives you stability and integrity (of shape) throughout a day's wear.

Lift it directly to your forehead so the lip is on the inside.

I generally lean over because I want as much of my hair to stand out in as many weird directions as I can coerce from it; hair gel helps.

One knot

Two knot

Cool!

Autumn

2008-10-03T09:24:00.005-04:00

Autumn means Apples!!!

The estimates of what we picked ranged from 1,300 to 1,600 in the early afternoon.

Once we hauled them all back in a truck to the house I am unpacking into the four of us got an assembly line that was more like a hypercolor zigzag around the kitchen in order to juice the apples. We had three juicers in the rotation, multiple chopping stations and an intimate understanding of why people invented the apple press.

I finally got a handle on the Beast of a juicer, a commercial juicer that has an engine so strong the entire thing waddles around the contertop and sometimes roars like a jet. Hence the ear and eye protection and why they had me outside on the porch.

So I finally got into a routine with the Beast, feeding it apple slices as fast as I could manage while the three folks in the kitchen are outchopping and over-supplying me with apple pieces. Finally the juicer's engine winds up to a loud scream and the shaking stresses the nuts holding the cover on, which cracks one of the support metal pieces.

I can tell something is wrong!

But it works out because we switch over to the other juicers that had a rest during that time and finish up 11 gallons, half of which we pasteurize and add yeast to and half of which we will ferment raw into ciders.

Detour

2008-10-01T11:51:00.004-04:00

The work in Athens is almost completed. I have met a few awesome rockers and we've had good times. Also I met a fellow into Green Energy venture capital (for lack of a better paraphrase) and we have talked extensively about some synergistic ideas. This alwasy gets me in a mood of talking ownership percentages and ROIs.

With the economy becoming real and not dreamt up by the Fed's last fifty years of creating money out of nothing and lending it to banks it could be the perfect time to be invigorating companies, helping them bloom and working without Wall Street ('s banks).

(PS don't worry about China owning the US Treasury, they're selling their children to Marlboro they won't last long)

Ashevillin'

2008-09-29T00:40:00.003-04:00

So I have packed my little 'Rolla full to the lid and even strapped Shifty on the trunk. Its probably a third of what I own, but the cream of the crop. It took most of the day because I had to unpack everything to find the things I needed, juggle some of them, try some of it on, launder some of it, then repack it all and finally tetris it into the car.

I didn't mind hanging around my folks place for the day because, well, because my folks are great, I got to watch a couple of good soccer matches and I was hoping to catch my 'little' brother who is in town because his girlfriend's mother passed away. I don't know the details but what I can piece together seems to be something like they took her off life support...not unexpected. I wanted to sit and talk with him. I have never been through such a close death before and hope he is well with it, and wonder what he is feeling.

No real breakthroughs with the musculature, but lifting things all day integrated the changes i've been making into a position of strength as I was able to move from my loose hips and manage heavy boxes at all angles using my new-found abdominal muscles.

Upside Down and the Outside goes In

2008-09-27T12:49:00.001-04:00

Inverted on Sleg's inversion bar for a few minutes this morning. I recalled something the massage therapist was telling me about muscle cells and how, scattered through every muscle are spindle cells whose function is to seize up if the muscle is over-stretched, to keep it from tearing. To get into the deeper stretching - at which level it really feels like releasing the years of never-stretched tightness, you have to slowly settle to bypass the spindle cell reflex tightening. I'm sure i'm off on the details but this is the picture I have in my mind and am navigating into the deeper channels using it as my map.

So me inverted, Mindfolded and finding the focus of tightness to be in my hips and groin and as I breathed into these places, i could slowly feel my skeleton separating, opening and closing with my breath. Even as I sit on the floor typing this i can feel the pelvic bones tentatively settling into a slightly more open position. Now the next thought is how to continue to engage these muscles which have been held tight in compensatory positions for years without over-doing it and injuring myself...how does one strengthen the psoas?

Stereolaboratory

2008-09-27T12:29:00.001-04:00

It is official. Stereolab still has it. And they were giving it away last night. I was even impressed with the opening act Atlas Sound which was a soundscape created by one geeky guy.

Stereolab did only have the one female lead singer but they played some of the songs they both sang on, which was awesome because they are some of my favorites. During these it sounded as if they were playing a recording of her singing in the background - that or one of the guys was impersonating her voice quite well.

Prana

2008-09-26T11:28:00.001-04:00

There's something about waking up drunk at 11am, feeling a bout of panic and to alleviate it scribbling out a rent check and mailing it to a town two states away. I am going to go do a headstand to Moby's 'Ambient.'

So that headstand turned into an hour and a half of yoga. Had to switch from Moby to Art of Noise (Moments in Love is a secret place that only few know about). The yoga was a payoff for all the years i've been working with my body to keep it bodying...it was the single greatest session of yoga i've ever done. My psoas muscles released opening my hips and relaxing my pelvis. I can't put into words how this makes me feel, its like receiving a new body, the sensation of the inner pelvis stretched apart what might not even be measurable in milllimeters and the consequences of my legs turning inwarder is so strengthening/releiving/releasing/refreshing that I walked around the house like David Bowie for half an hour rolling my femur balls in the hip sockets and feeling my pelvis work in symmetrical halves instead of as a fixed unit. The sensation of my frontal groin bone being moveable is both eerie, for its sudden differentness, and like coming home.

I laid in corpse pose for ten minutes, listening to Moments in Love again, breathing into my now-opener skeleton and the muscles all twisted around it. Having received a most spectacular massage two days ago all my muslces were primed for this session of stretching. The connection made obvious between the deepness into the core of my body and the awesome massage (i'll gladly recommend her if you ask me) has me pining for regular yoga instructed practice and more massages! Also I can't help but notice this occurred on a day after a night of a good deal of alcohol, lets be honest, and how it acted like a dye put in the body sending toxic flashes where it was most concentrated, in those deep tight recesses, and that instigated me to want to move my consciousness deeper and deeper into my sensation, like scratching an itch.

Having come out on the other side i'm in a post-elation downer, but am gonna keep moving towards the Stereolaboratory being constructed in the Variety Playhouse tonight. This could make it into the Book of the Greatest of Days.

Stereolab

2008-09-25T14:40:00.001-04:00

This is why I love Stereolab and why we are gonna Ride the Sharks into the ATL tomorrow night!!!

Dialogue in the Dark

2008-09-25T14:02:00.002-04:00

So the Rogue Therapist collective got together to attend Dialogue in the Dark. After purchasing tickets at the booth where Sleg said "they will pull this student I.D. card from my cold, dead hand" as we both got discounts, we began debating on whether we should Mindfold into the building or not. It ended up with Ishkur and my's elf Mindfolding into the exhibit with Sleg playing Seer. We actually got some cheering and applause for our entrance, which led me to believe the lights were on in the building so far.

Surprisingly the people who came to usher us to the lockers and take our tickets were not very adept at working with sightless people as Sleg described later, 'it was pretty funny because she had a look on her face as if you were stupid for not taking the ticket from her when you couldn't see her holding the ticket stub at you.'

So there is an interesting validation of the Mindfold training, our acuity of sightless interaction lends perspective when not Mindfolding/seeing things.

I don't want to spoil the actual exhibit by describing it here so let me just say that it is a pretty well-crafted set of experiences that you are guided through in an hour.

At the end of it we three talked about how easy it was for us to move through. The canes we were handed were more in the way then helpful, but that was probably from the close quarters and being in a group of people. They take you in in groups of seven so if you can gather a crew of like minds attend in that fashion.

Overall a great intro into being deprived of sight. And something we will undoubtedly pull from in future Mindfold introductions.

One thing I particularly noticed was that most everyone seemed to be upright when moving (judging from where people were when I bumped into them) while the Mindfolding we've played with has led us to move lower, crouched or even on all fours for more safety and efficiency when exploring unfamiliar surroundings.

Tonight's the night

2008-09-20T14:04:00.001-04:00

If I am not here tomorrow, it is because David Byrne lifted me into the heaven constructed by Brian Eno.

Intermission

2008-09-16T14:54:00.001-04:00

El Capitan is onto Greece here's an excerpt of what he's up to

My days are filled.. keeping me busy. I needed this. I'm trying to make this a monastic-like experience for me. Instead of wearing brown robes, worshipping, and vows of silence.. I am working hard for a job that's pure and I'm trying to better myself. I wake up at 6:45am, do 20 minutes of yoga that is hopefully helping my back (I've got problems with it). I then walk the gauntlet of house dogs (about 13 of wildly varying kinds) to the main house. I make some coffee, make a lunch for later on, and grab an apple. Then I jump in the junker of a car called a niva. I love it. I drive all the unmarked Grecian streets to the kiwi farm/dog shelter. The shelter is all outdoor fencing. I check on all the dogs. Food and water. Then I muck (pick up shit). I've got several new cuts and scrapes by the time I get out of there. I head up to the kiwi farm and do a specific chore that day. Weeding, trimming, securing of the trees, or maintenance on the watering system. Stuff like that. Then I pick all the new cherry tomatoes that we'll use in the salad at night. Eat lunch. Then I go do some construction. Like heightening the fence for one of the dog areas so that new ones can't jump over. Somedays I'll drive around the island putting up flyers for the shelter. Then I'll go home and immediately go down to the beach. Clearest blue water. dive in and try to swim to another smaller island not far out. So far, I can get about half way.. but I've been lengthening it everyday. Then I climb the side of a narrow cliff to get to a hotel that has a piano I can practice on. After that, I go home and take care of any chores I need to do.. take a nap maybe, then get woken up for dinner with everyone. We sit outside in a courtyard and have a nice hearty meal. Then its late and I have to get up early so I go to sleep. That's about it so far.

I have been stateside re-visiting friends, and extracating the idea from my brain that I finally see settling down as the next great adventure. That and I am a bit tired. Yeah, not working for 9 months and I am tired...

But here is what i've been up to:

The view from Grapefruit rock, north of Asheville NC

Balancing Log

2008-08-26T18:10:00.001-04:00

We had half a bottle of rum left and needed some coconuts so we headed to the beach where fellows use cargo bikes to bring loads of them to where main street ends into the beach. They use machetes to slice them right to the quick and then a straw easily slips thru the meat and into the liquidy goodness (an interesting cultural aside is that the word for this last layer of meat the straw is poked thru is the same word for virgin). We have to sip out mouthfulls of juice just to not spill the overfull nuts. Then we have to drink more to make room for the rum.
This is the most refreshing cocktail I have ever concocted and to be carrying it down the beach with our Mindfolds cocked on our foreheads is only dampened by the sheer weight of the coconuts. The green outer shells are hard as rocks and its very easy to imagine their weight only being slowed by a skull in freefall from a tree. El Capitan is explaining to the that they actually peel these monstrosities to get down to the brown frayed inner hulls that are more spherical and sold to grocery stores i've frequented.
We stroll and sit and sip and refill until the mixture hits the perfect taste which just so happens to be when we empty the rum into the nuts. And so are we, emptied into nuts.
The drunkness was coming on in waves that didn't wash back out to sea. After we reached the elephant who had been petrified and overturned by the tide, we hit our stride. El Capitan dashed his shell on a rock and wove a dance of gratitude to the coconut goddess with an offering up of the meat tossed into the insatiable sea. I just tried to chuck my whole 'nut into the waves, but only succeeded in throwing out my arm and watching the 'nut roll lopsided into the tide.

The offerings commensurated, we next found our selves at the Balancing Log...It was composed of a pair of driftwoods where a 20' whitewashed tree kept a decently flat line from dune slope to an overturned trunk that caught it between its now uppermost tendrils. The balancing log extended another 5 feet beyond the stump which brought into play twisting as well as the leverage beyond the fulcrum of lifting the heavier, longer end from the sand; And, we found, if performed well, lowering you gently to the sand.
We each walked it unfolded and did particularly well for carrying cocorum in our innards. I went first Mindfolded. Slipping the device over my eyes while I was already balancing over the widest section, stably set on the ground - so the feet knew what they were doing already - it was the rest of the body that became folded in confusion at the blackness emanating from the middle of my rum'o'nut and vision. Banking on my feets' solid notions of gravity I took off walking my tai chi steps of silent slowness with the left side leading as it is apt to do. I left my mind in shock of the darkness i flung it into and moved from my feet up, using the Centre and my arms to keep the momentum proceeding across the log towards the sea's loud waving. This worked to align me with the solid centre of the log beneath the solid centre of my feet until I came to a slight bend in the log which my eyes, i have no doubt, would have easily processed and I might have not have even consciously noticed it; but as it were, visionless, this little bend came upon me with all the suddenness of the floor falling out from under me. And I re-routed all my energies from balance to evacuation of the current predicament into the shifting, but soft, sands about a foot below.

We continued this, taking turns on the log with the non-balancing (or should I say simple-balancer for we are all balancing just about all the non-laying-down time, take a look for yourself) acting as Seer for the appearance of passerbys so as not to frighten them by our extrasensoric prowess and futuristic appearances (though we are all living in the future, its just that some of us don't like to admit it); and to take better photos.
As time moved the day around us and our antics pumped the cocorum thru bodies, my abilities faded and I never did make it as far as my first run. El Capitan, on the other hand, only progressed until he actually made it to the fulcrum stump Mindfolded!

This beget a new era of things to fear for not only did the stump's tendrils curl over the Balancing Log to create a foot obstacle, but the slow turning and leveraged raising of the log beyond the fulcrum moved it from a mostly 2-dimensional balancing act to a 3-dimensional ground-quaking out from under you carnival surprising of the folded mind. Beyond the immediate dangers of the log's movement was the imminent danger of dismounting or being spun off into the tendrils of roots when losing your balance at the fulcrum.
We never did make it to the end of the log Mindfolded as the leveraged twist & turn always broke the tentative balance we had worked to engender up to that point.
*** *** *** *** *** *** *** ***
A note on the fantastic drink of Rum mixed with fresh coconut juice: Coconuts, David told us, work to detoxify the kidneys unusually well. As a consequence, mixing the alcohol with it actually provides a vehicle for more alcohol than usual to be absorbed by the kidneys. This can lead to problems. Do not try this at home; but call me if you are interested in trying it at the beach.

Southern man don't need me around anyhow

2008-08-26T03:58:00.001-04:00

Woke today to southern rock blaring from somewhere. My left earplug had come out sometime during the night. I'm finding the brand (name unrecalled) has a plug life of approximately 2 weeks. But it is extremely good at blocking out sound until then; after that they start to wiggle out and the powers are entirely compromised by the slightest leaking. The music changes into some Elton John that I fortunately don't know the words to, but I close my eyes tighter nonetheless for fear of which Elton might be in the room with me; the musics that are now full of my awareness and Elton's got me hooked. The trick is now to figure out where exactly Elton's rocking it from and i've ruled out the room i'm in's ipod because my slightly unplugged left ear is feeling the shape of the sound as more linearly conical, coming thru a smaller space before widening into the room, not as emanating from within this room in a more spherical shape.
David's truck pulls away after a short bit, ruling out the car stereo. The music's in English so it must be from the house and i'm tromping down the handhewn spiral wood staircase and the volume is increasing and we're back to the southern rock guitar screeching and i finally locate a stereo system where it is on shuffle track #115 - mp3...so this pain could have lasted a good long while. I press stop. I go back to sleep.

Mindlab is more than just experimental, its about results!

2008-08-26T03:52:00.001-04:00

Just achieved a phenomenal feat of dexterity, and have blown my own mind in the process. After a deep 45minute Qi Kung session, i sat and started juggling to Dead Can Dance's - Into the Labryinth. I juggled the 3 yellow 'have a nice day' smiley-faced balls we got in Mindo, for 11 minutes. [End seriousness.]

Fishing

2008-08-26T01:51:00.001-04:00

The fishing trip was to start at 9am with us dropping the lobster nets on the way to the fishing spots.
This, of course, did not occur. Beach time worked its relaxations over and then though I woke at 8am and was ready by 9, 10 rolled around and David was still not back from the farm. So I went to breakfast; skipped the cheese and loved the bread. I do need to replace the calories I've not been getting from all the alcohol i've not been drinking during these days. The calories are lacking but so is the extreme activities (though an ocean swim for an hour is quite the workout...and I miss Shifty, the old bike, is sitting in Marietta feeling as ansty as I, no doubt.)
So I fill up with my second Ecuadorian breakfast and wonder why I am eating an out-of-schedule meal before getting on a small craft to sail the choppy seas for hours, but logic hasn't stopped me yet. The gang's all back and up and ready to start something, but instead of fishing, I watch them make breakfast. So much for the early start.

At the beach we help to roll the boat down to the sea on logs, rolling it over the pair until the back one spits out at our ankles, jumping it and stopping it with feet, then dragging it back up by the ropes tied into grooves cut into the logs on which we roll the boat. Each log rotation moves the boat 5 or 8 feet forwards with everyone pushing. But even I can see its merits over plowing sand with the hull.

Then the cowboys came; and their cows claimed that stretch of beach in a very convincing manner. My delicate sensibilities rejoiced that we had already gotten the boat into the water and didn't have to barefoot it across the cow trailings.
It ends up being seven of us in the 15' boat, along with piles of nets, cooler with ice for the fish and beer to lend critical mass necessary to keep the ice colder longer. Our backpacks were in mega-ziploc bags to waterproof the contents; I had not expected to be getting that wet.
After pushing the boat out deep enough to engage the motor, we busted through the breakers and that put us into bobbing across the yet-to-be waveswells, where every time the hull of the boat cut into the swell a thick foamage of seawater would sting my skin and soak my clothing. This plus the cloudy day's winds brought me to chilliness so when we stopped to drop the lobster nets nearby Shark Cove (I suppose lobsters would find a banquet under the mannerless, slob sharks)
I had to take my shirt off to dry my skin, which is when the sun came out to burn my sunburn. So I took a hint from the desert folk, while El Capitan took to Invisioning the sun. David was translating that the boat over there was oystering, and the tube over the side was an airhose that was connected to a pump on the boat that sent oxygen somehow to someone on the ocean floor who was stuffing them into bags. The real fishermen took to laying out lobster nets and this required slow motoring as the nets were untangled which, contrary to high speeds that continue a rhythm of breaking through every wave, let the swells have their way with us while moving horizontally across them, lending an up and down swaying to the side-to-side swelling and dropping. This multi-axis noodling of my inner ears led them to be downright uncooperative in providing my stomach with the proper coordinates for Down so it knew which way to push the breakfast. We stopped shortly thereafter and that settled things.

(The fishermen in Shark's Cove!)

Then we got to drop our lines. The second or third time I let mine drift to the bottom I got a great tug and slowly brought up a sharkish looking creature the length of my forearm. El Capitan is laughing "You caught a shark," and i'm thinking, now they're Really gonna be after me, and David is saying, its a Manta Ray, or some kinda ray, and the fishermen are taking it off the hook and its being really not happy, until they drop it into the sea and its gone looking for something other than shrimp on a hook. Being somewhere in the hundreds of Nautical Feet (that's measured with sea legs) from shore, the swelling waters kept the boat at a continual bob, which wasn't unpleasant. The real fun occurred when a wave broke that far out and we had to throw ourselves onto the wave-side of the boat so it wouldn't flip.
The only thing caught over the next few hours were those waves, though we did routinely lose our bait to nibblers and bottom dragging. We passed the grande cerveza around the boat and each got a few swigs per beer. Every other bottle or so we'd wind up the lines and motor over to another spot to try our luck, because the skill was getting us nowhere. This meant getting wet for 5 or 10 minutes and not quite drying out over the half hour of catching nothing again. This made for a dermally painful routine. A few casts into nothing-yet El Capitan hollers "Oh! Whup. Here we got something now." The line he's tugging on is taut and David is laughing, "that's no fish, its a rock."
"But its pulling back." The rod was in an arc towards the water. "That's the current pulling the boat away." He starts telling the fishermen 'he's got a rock' in spanish and everyone's laughing, because we are exposed to all the elements under this noonday sun, ocean wind and saltwater, the beer is successfully keeping the ice ready for any fish we might catch and the anchor's made for catching rocks, not shrimpbait. Without oyster-walking there is no telling what he had on that line out at Shark's Cove, but the line popped free, the bait was gone and it was suggested we motor on out of this current where the fish find it harder to feed in the faster waters.
Its around this time in the afternoon when the cold spray sun temperature differentiations all over my skin have sunk deep enough to meet the beer throwing a party in my stomach where i've feared to put but a few crackers into but for fear of the continual sway of this small boat. As we were first motoring out David asked us gringos if we got seasick. El Capitan talked a picture of the three-dimensional gyrating a small airplane swims thru and what level of more disconcerting it is compared to the ocean's rocking. All I can say is "we'll find out. Never been in a boat in the ocean for any real length of time."
Breakfast steadily became a retroactively worse idea as the day rocked by. When the swaying infiltrated my digestive tract giving the sensation of movement to part of my body I should not feel move, I would first take a technique from the Fold and close my eyes to concentrate my balance into my limbs in contact with the boat so that the whole of the rocking sensation would be dispersed into the hardness and lifting away of the wood seat, the moisture and pressure when swayed into one hand's support or the other or the intertwined twists of gravity swerving my spine at many intervals up and down it where my crown is being tied to my base with cables of energetically lubed inter-reactions i've been winding each morning around my breath.
If that didn't suffice and the swimming of my insides persisted i'd move into a focusing technique i've been augmenting in my juggling practice [more on this later]. Picking a spot on the horizon and laying all my attentions into viewing it. Pretty much the opposite of the previous technique, but the Mindfold has me pivoting around sight these days. Between the distraction of feeling into, and focusing away from, my gut worked to keep my fluids rolling in the right direction.
As we swung around another cove with no fish and only two bottles of beer in the cooler, we came upon the fishingest boat i've ever sidled decks with. It was about 50' with large sails and anchored in the cove's lapping shallows. It had 6 or 8 hand-dug canoeish boats laying crosswise across the deck walls with the central one still holding a man hardened by 10,000 days on the open ocean who was manipulating the intricacies of fishing line amongst a variety of slicing, grappling and yanking devices stained into rust with the salts and bloods. Maybe it was the salts soaking into my skin or the sun's deep heat in my blood, but my eyes were drawn and tunnelled to this man who could crack pescidian spines with those worn out hands whose wrinkles of prunage didn't need his eyes to guide the lines thru the metal's rings. The fishing lines mended themselves thru his hands.
David was chattering across my headtop to the most literate-looking (is that a wrong statement? [i've opened the blog so anyone can comment this is a great chance!]) man on the vessel and I couldn't follow it between my mind's magnetism to the hard fellow's simplicity and ducking the canoe tips overhanging their boat's walls while trying to keep hold of one to assist our rudderman in hovering our craft within the boat's orbit so the dialogue that I had completely lost the line of could continue. But I picked it up again pretty quickly as a ring of fish was handed across to our boat and numbers were being tossed through the air. I was asked if I had any cash, small bills on me. I lied, "nope, didn't bring any money with me on a fishing trip." Why did we pay for to rent (that's how my mind shortcuts spanish, not conjugating, infinitive is such a great concept) for to rent this boat to fish, if we are only to purchase freshly caught, extremely large meatful fish?
It takes all the sealegs El Capitan has to get to his ziploced pack and dig out his wallet, to find he had broken the $10 into lesser bills and so David had to pry off a couple of fish from the ring to hand the fish back with the cash and a bottle of our beer. But our cooler needed the room, I rationalized, and we drank the last bottle on our way to the next batch of fishless waters.
"Okay, I got something this time,"
"Another rock?" David asks just to get a laugh out of the crew, but we can see the line is bobbing and weaving with a life of its own and he gives it a tug to set the hook into fishflesh. After a minute of reeling against the zigzagging line he pulls out a fish the size of, well, smaller than a breadbox; but it was of an edible variety so it was unhooked and tossed on the boat deck to suffocate to death while flopping around for water and spritzing its torn gills' blood around.
El Capitan says to me, without looking at his vanquishing foe, "Now I remember...when we used to go fishing we always threw them back."
The last thing reeled up from the depths was on a straight line simply unwound from a spool with a hook and bait, no rod or reel, by one of the crew. It was a puffer fish, the kind that pushed Homer so far as to listen to the Bible; as they were dehooking it it puffed and bloated making the flaccid skin pouches that dangled from its body into points growing in some pie-based ratio with its belly. To avoid the spines the crewman had to grab it by its eyesockets pressing the balls into the poofy head to gain purchase and yank the hook from what might be its 'lip' or 'cheek.' It got tossed back.
The sun had been behind the clouds for the last while which gave my lobstering skin respite but kept the moist chill sinking into my bones so it was delicious to call it a day.
As we were using the log system to roll the boat up the beach, David returned from taking the rods and tackle back to the house and killed my landlubbing with the words "the cistern is empty. We are out of water until tomorrow." The warm shower I had held onto through all those gallons of cold oceanspray sank away from me into the depths of imagination. It was replaced by the sobering cold water of a neighbors outdoor rinser.

Spurt of Sweet

2008-08-20T15:12:00.001-04:00

Steely Dan is on the tuneage. David is blending a fruit, Badella. On the same counter El Capitan is slicing apart a can to make a key to pick the outer lock of David's courtyard. I'm predicamenting the bingo tickets we've bought to redeem for gamepieces for the local Coop bank as the ladies David has been trying to woo into dancing and drinking with us later in the night will likely be at the Bingo.

I want nothing to do with such revelry. What I want is a bicycle, the night breeze and something up like Material or Eno's brighter rackets on the ipod.

We have gotten back from visiting David's farm where we bought a fresh chicken from a neighbor. I got to carry the bag past the kitten who had just been tossed the intestines. The bag was still warm and liquidy.

And no matter how much Steely Dan we listen to while cooking the bird soup, the breadfruit he boiled up still tastes exactly like chestnuts. The badella turns the vodka into a tasty drink and the seeds that he left in are fat pumpkin seed encased in a slime goo like a comet you catch with your teeth to try and crack open for the spurt of sweet.

Experiences in Buoyancy

2008-08-20T14:55:00.001-04:00

The first time in the last decade found me floating freely in the ocean. I still don't float even with the salinity contributing its buoyancy beneath and along my spindly fleshings. I have to wave my legs along the currents, and arms when the swells come for my head. This unsettles me because I picture the afternoon sun and shade splattered across the sea, catching the lights as glitter on its rippled waters, scattering shine all around my silhouetted wafting - lazy along the swells. Even if I don't look tasty, sharks will often take a bite of something, and their amazing in-mouth receptors can analyze the basic nutriment content to determine whether it is worth eating before they even swallow it; hence many people get bit and survive because the sharks don't like what they taste. But it doesn't stop them from tasting.

The sharks never leave the rider's head.

Rising and dropping with the swellings breaking into waves somewhere behind my head direction releases my mind from its grasp on the sharks its inviviating, from the motions to keep my face in the air, lets go of the sunburn, saltburn and burning deep in the heart. Into these spaces wash the full sensation of buoyancy, and here not my heartlove, but the part of the body where it can touch the breeze and love the autumn chill, rises and falls into love with this deep sensation. The mind folds around closing the eyes, releasing that kind of hold on the world. Release.

I've held with many things over the life thus far: hands have held books - first true touch of love - and the eyes held in thrall of such mystery of words handed them to the heart and imagination. I've held music with my ears and my soul; it was my first contact with god and why i'm in this thing deep. I've not been able to set down things such as desire, facts, money, dreams and love all to different ends. So here i am asking the sea to hold me for the subtle thrill of floatingish. The oceanwater laps into my ears whispering of whence the blood of mine came and where i will return it to when its done with me.

Speaking of Blackness, we've tried the Mindfold in the sea, and the waves laughed it off our faces no matter our techniques; also it held saltwater in the eyepockets and that stings (so I am thinking to get a pair of goggles and painting them black).

El Capitan and I are now playing with the waves. Diving into body surfing or diving into the oncoming waves. It makes no difference as we are tossed about no matter which direction we flow. We refine a game which I will refer to as Dancing Foundation, and El Capitan calls Wave Bashing, and so go the techniques, where you must set one foot into the sand -- such a step for me to take thinking of all the creepy crawlies who undoubtedly drift on the fringes of land and sea above, surely a crab will think my foot appetizing -- and the rest of the body is free to move as wanted, but that one foot must stay in that place (pivoting is allowed). We stand on the edge of the invisible chain that jerks back on the waves, causing them to break and tumble over our miniscularity.

In the face of an oncoming wall of water I hear El Capitan holler to charge his ball of energy against the inevitable and as the wave tumbles me around my pivot foot but I hold my toehold in the sand and he's yelling the same when we can get our heads back out of the water, I breathe in the fresh air and the realization there is no way I could have experienced the expansion i've incorporealated in this Ecuadorian Escapade without being guided by a Rogue Therapist (stay tuned for variations on this theme).

Thank you El Capitan for your parts in this!

Piscean

2008-08-13T15:02:00.002-04:00

...Beach of Canoa

[As I sit to write all this in my journal, I have put on this George Harrison album, Brainwashed, which I have never tasted, the first song has hooked me:
"If you don't know where you are going
Any road'll take you there"]

I headed into the ocean with my backpack and shirt and sunscreen underneath and stood for ten mental minutes at least, bandanna'd and all; allowing the motions of all other beachgoers to wash away from me as the waters waved across my ankles, slipping the sand out from under the feet and my heels sank into the sand much quicker than the fronts of my feet as I gave my time and legs to the sea. It lapped across my decisive steadfastness, sampled my flesh and footmind; things were whetted and wetted and like sinking into the sand, my mind sinks into my inclinations and past -- into my depths.

[As I am writing this in my journal, George Harrison is singing
"I’m a Pisces fish and the river runs through my soul
I’m a Pisces fish and the river runs through my soul

And I’ll be swimming until I can find those waters
That’s the one unbounded ocean of bliss
That’s flowing through your parents, sons and daughters
But still an easy thing for us to miss

Sometimes my life it feels like fiction
Some of the days it’s really quite serene
I’m a living proof of all life’s contradictions
One half’s going where the other half’s just been

I’m a Pisces fish and the river runs through my soul
I’m a Pisces fish and the river runs through my soul"]

The Ocean wants me Today, Mr. Waits.

I strip down to my swimmies, stow my pack and wade into the shallows. This is the smoothest beach i've been to, so few shells and rocks and things to confound my feet into feeling the old fears; feet, the awarest part of the Piscean body (Pisces signs: Sun, rising, Mercury and Venus...sorry I was late being born mom, but I had to time it right!) I dig deep into the stillness in my depths and see that under the crashing craziness of the uppermost ocean is a deep stillness I can feel with my feet. I lift them from the seabed with bouyancy and armstrokes. I speed the swimming as a wave comes at my face, and I dive down into the realm of Neptune's mysteries. Coming back up beyind the wave shows me an oceanfull of them. I start catching them with my body, kicking quickly to grab something beyond hold -- to be grabbed by the velocities of the waters caught up in the wave -- and am churned and flipped. My bouyancy acting as insitgator of lost upness. Not even the Mindfolding i've done has prepared me for this type of unseeing.

I have swallowed water many times, but this time was to the chagrin of my lungs and I had to take a breather from holding my breath. But, even with a stomach of salty waters I re-commit to riding The Waves with El Capitan coming into the water late in his latest shorts concoction of sewing the legs of his pants up underrolledneath. We fought the waves by standing strong and even punching palmfulls of energyballs into overhead crashing waters that could crush us at wrong angles. We body-surfed the flows, and many times I had to duck out early as I was too far up the crest of the wave for fear of going over with the foam, into the crashings. But this fear is a real, rational fear that I am kinesthetically determining in the moment; not the fear i've been carrying over the last 10 years or so...that of the Deeps as exhibited by me quavering at just the idea of frolicking in rivers and lakes even, let alone Mother Ocean, anywhere I could not see my feet, is the best way I can calssify it; imagining the beasties and creepy crawlie feelings to be snakes, nibbling animals and the most marvelous of all, Sharks. This was the way I both pushed away my Piscean nature and feared for its existence against the jaws of the deep.

I am floating on my back, laughing as a child- receiving flashes of my life's pleasures and committing a re-orientation of mind via this delicious Buoyancy, my body's disengaging from the gravity, even if ever so slightly and the power of the ocean's waves, goodness and my o my...
I have Rode the Shark into the deep beyond. My path is clear (not determined, but open), my self is reunified, my mind has folded and Grace is salty and floats me with immense swells where the sky opens up and drops away suddenly, and I shudder and sometimes there is a crash and I may get upended with sand in my caw; but I am healing in tune to the pulsings of the worldflow.

I felt little difference as the change occurred within me, because it wasn't an immediate flip of a switch, but the culmination of times spent, most recently with El Capitan Rogue Therapizing me into Mindfolding the falls of Mindo, the waves, the spent slick surfaces of bubbles finally making their energies' way to the shore of this beautiful town, to wash my feet, my piscean pleasure and pain of fear of the Ocean's deeps. My deeps getting released from the dam behind which i've trapped some of the more powerful methods of living I could incorporealate. The change completes into my soul. So the simple act of bringing this all into focus with the every of my senses brought my soul back to me. I find surprise in how recognizable this integration feels.

["You've got me between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea" comes on David's ipod. George Harrison is in the room with me. This is beyond me. Even I am at awe at this concretization of thoughticles; and Teilhard de Chardin laughs from the corner of the Noosphere]

When we got back to David sitting by the coconut cart where they will hack a coconut to just the right spot where a straw can be stuck into the milkhole, 50 centavos for the freshest and most nutritious drink on earth, El Capitan saw he had missed a phone call on his cell so he needs to get his computer to the internet.

Later, at a beachfront 'staurant just behind the ramadas, my face burns, though the rest of me seems to have absorbed the sunblock properly. El Capitan is servicing a client in the States from an internet cafe just down the road from this beach. I am staring at this magnificent ocean that I have walked along a thousand times as a thousand different people, and here it is the same ocean as Always.

My's elf & mind & soul all folded together today.

We met in the waters of the Ecuadorian pacific and put the past behind me. For so long now i've proclaimed my greatest fear to be Sharks and the devils of the deep blue sea; in fact many times i've said it is my Only Fear.
So if i've broken through this fear...will others rush in to fill me?
Am I washed free of fear?
Is my acceptance of the world's deep an increase of the complexity of integration into the psychic matrix of Being nearering my soul to the centrality of eternal Love and heartRending bliss through the immersion in the fires of my own fear?
Will this meta-fear, into which I've poured all my urgings away-from-harm, burst open as a pinata and scatter all the little fearlings of my soul into the world again?

I care not as I am with the Sea again.

[a note on the usage of the word Psyche (and its derivatives such as Psychic or other words I makeupify using it as the root)
"The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul, opening into that cosmic night which was psyche long before there was any ego-consciousness, and which will remain psyche no matter how far our ego-consciousness extends."--CG Jung
"The deeper 'layers' of the psyche lose their individual uniqueness as they retreat further and further into darkness. . . . they become increasingly collective until they are universalized and extinguished in the body's materiality. . . . Hence 'at bottom' the psyche is simply 'world.'"--CG Jung
Just so you know I'm not talking about mind-reading...more like Mindfulliving]

Mascaramente

2008-08-13T14:57:00.001-04:00

Taking cue to color the night with the frame of reference inspired by the bat that flew into the screenless house a bit ago - it had a definite pattern it wove between the two lights, spirals and infinite figure 8s and me cheering its mosquito-gorging habit. I slip into the Fold and make my way downstairs and to the gateway of the courtyard. I can hear the group of folks across the street, but am not ready to engage as my Spanish is small and my introversion is large. I stay in the threshold for some unmeasured amount of time, with the sparse conversation washing over me but not receiving much of my attention unless its in English, which means its directed towards me.
"Mindlab, they want to know what you are doing..."
"Tell them I am working on echolocation," and I crane my neck out like a giraffe to twist my head's ears about the doorway. "How many of you are there? I thinks its four."
"Including me?" El Capitan asks...which means its a group of five.
"Yep."
"Nope."
I sink back into the darkness.

El Capitan approaches me from across the road inserting himself into my fold.

"Hey Mindlab"
"Yeah"
"You're kinda freakin' people out a little bit."
"Well that is not what is wanted"
And so I turn back into the courtyard and slip the Mindfold off to navigate quickly up the stairs and into my journal.

Why didn't I just take it off and approach the group of folks? Disperse the enigma and integrate the personhood; step into their camaraderie and move on with the night?
Because i am weak. I'm out of my 2008 element. I don't really want to stand outside next to a truck and drink. I want to drink then do Mindfolded cartwheels on the beach, I want to walk down the beach forever in the moonlight. But I am tired. I want to sleep in a bed, not on the padding of wicker furniture on the floor. I am worn.

The full frontal Mindfold approach into this night disproved the something I hollered from the hammock earlier this afternoon when the spirit moved me, "the Mindfold is not bound by language barriers." To which El Capitan responded from the kitchen "Who said it was?"
I found the statement, temporally reversed, added effect and cause into occurrence and deja vu.

Manta in the Morning

2008-08-13T13:55:00.002-04:00

[Insert gratuitous awesome photo of self El Capitan took in Quito at the International Phenomenon called Shooters.]

El Capitan and I are on the bus to Bahia waiting for it to leave the gate. We've been here for 1/2 hour between buses and i'm strung out from riding the sharkbus all night without even knowing we had gotten on it.

It all started at the Quito station when I was concerned my big bag would not make it into the luggage storage so I kept pestering the employees for to stow my luggage. It was finally time and as retribution for me being a worried gringo making their midnight shift that much more buggy, they had me carry my own bag from where they had set it down earlier and stow it myself. Fine, so long as it is on the same bus as I am.

We all clamored on the bus and organized into assigned seats. El Capitan is saying "this is the nicest bus i've been on in Ecuador, i feel funny," as he is maneuvering his carry-on bag so the juice in one mesh pocket and the vodka in the other side's mesh pocket won't slide out over the 9 hour ride. I got the window this time, and since we are driving all night, its not for the scenery, but to lean up against while sleeping; we try the seats reclining and they lie almost completely flat, so sleeping appears it will be much easier to achieve than i had first feared.
[I am in a place called the Surf Shack, where i can get both coffee & whiskey and internet along with breakfast. There are a couple townies working the place, cooking my sausage and eggs, and smoking and singing with the Beatles; one gringo just walked in with a waterproof ipod and grabbed his surf board that was sitting against the wall behind me. Almost unplugged my laptop with one of the fins. He turned to apologize and saw my face below the bandanna and realized that I was pretty easygoing. His smile turned to a laugh as he saw the half-finished whiskey shot yet to be poured into the coffee. Pretty neat town. Let's get back on the bus...]

I get to situating ipod, in the left pocket, thread the phones under the warming shirt and up to the ear holes, bandanna off-gulp-because the knot presses into the back of my head so i can't lay back, Mindfold onto the forehead, 2.5mg of Melatonin sublingual under the tongue and curl up El Capitan's sweater into a tube to be my neck pillow so the head doesn't roll with every bump and turn, I slip my earplugs into my right pocket, next to the change purse, for ease of access if the ipod doesn't work its minimagic.

Selecting the pre-made Chill playlist of Eno's smoothest, The Habibiyya, Moby's Ambient and the like, I find that the most relaxing of these sounds have no way to drown out the roar of the bus engine which, even though these windows don't open, roars and rumbles into my ears past the phones and garbling the fragile ambient musics of my favorites. So I crank up the volume, which is a paradox to the floaty sounds drifting among my ears.

This is working for the first short while until we pass the city toll booth and exit Quito, where the television comes on and without lifting my fold I determine it is some sort of Knight Riderish action flick that contains untold thrilling car chase scenes judging by the routine tire squeals and minimal dialogue I can't make out, or truly, don't want to pay any attention to; focusing the slivers of my mind that are still awake towards the magic album "If Man but Knew" which I have moved onto infinite looping. The mideastern acoustic has enough waves of sound to pierce thru the surrounding rumbles enough to make it followable thru the night's churning sonic juttings from the beast's engine, brakes and televised inanity. I settle into the slow groove they are digging out of the communal psyche's malleable thoughtstuff; I let my eyes weigh heavier and heavier.

But the action flick is stunning me at intermittent blasts and I am forced to turn the tunes up again. El Capitan is back from trying to take the empty pair of seats behind us when we stop outside of town for the last batch of riders. So we're back to bumping elbows and knees. I can tell we leave the paved road when the bus - heavier than my last mental image of God - is hopping along the riveted road as if we were on the moguled slopes of the Andes, not the muddy roads. Its all downhill from Quito's 9500' to the port city. The momentum behind us makes the curves around the mountain sides full with gravitation. With the switchbacks hidden from us riders by the driver's cabwall, the movements occur as sudden jerks and we are all swaying in our varieties of sleep. I am teetering with a feather's smoothness on the edge of dreamdom so i don't want to tense to fight the convoluted spirals we take around these mountainsides. I suggest to the mind awake that we are on a roller coaster and letting my body go limp around the center of my being is the interest gathered from all the Chi work i've invested into me.

The melatonin is kicking in and my brain thinks my brain is telling my brain its time for my brain's thoughtwaves to settle into sleep sinking synchronization into the spaces of time being taken to arrive each swerve of the bus at its condition of physicality, the feelings become less and thicker, slower. Adjusting the ipod brought a second trickle of sense into curve with the bus' swervature helping to line mind with the body's predicament.

Walking the line between waking and sleep for 7 clock hours means i have been absorbing the Habibiyya's one album something like ten times through. A fleeting connection between this notion and the time mother walked in on her teenage son lying asleepish on his bedroom floor with White Rabbit on repeat, and her illustrating confusion at my preferences and my confusion from being roused by the outside world from my inner respite merged into that oddness where one can't follow another into Life -- swings the line i'm walking like a tightrope into awareness. Sensations come rushing in to fill the higher crest of brainwareness amplitude with swimming, swaying sensations, but overall the total darkness held deeper sway. Changing from The Habibiyya to Songs of Green Pheasant (as introduced to me by the Illuminated Mar-Mar), though it lasted only a single listen through after the sweet sublimation of drone of the lasting night that Man almost Knew settled the curves into the brain's creases. I needed an album that was entrancing enough to drift sleep along this rocky road but sharp enough to cut through the myriad of busship noises as we rolled thru the moon's night. The answer came from the Deep Forest. First of the glorious albums of my musical youth. My original Morpheus.

Awakening in a foreign town after an entire night of off-road bussing up and down the Andes just short of the ocean was one of the least noticeable most extreme experiences i've had.

Chinwig

2008-08-09T13:06:00.001-04:00

The fourth (unsolicited) chinwig grab occurred last night. El Capitan and I are in an Irish bar finishing the night off early with a last beer. He is Mindfolding the patio while I am looking over the terrace feeling the friday night's pregnancy of revelry readying to explode like streamers into the dark night. The neons colors and overlapping of loud musics thickening the air. I am caught up and floating more than standing, until a short frenchman speaking english that I am not listening to has breached our night. He's trying to cheers us, El Capitan makes a deft move of raising his glass within millimeters of a perfect, mug-centered clink with the man's. Now he is turning his fragmented attention to my distance and pulls me back into my body with harsh sounds, which I find to be him speaking to me when I turn to give him an empty look.

He tries to raise his glass to me, but I am more interested in the distance between things right now, than bringing them together. So I turn away from this intrusion. He doesn't understand or thinks I am being funny, but I speak not a word and turn back to the night that has swelled more in my absence. He's trying again and I am wasting valuable thoughtspace ignoring him so I turn again to say No, when he grabs the chinwig and gives me a swift waggle.

That settles it, I hold up my mug to his lowered glass of some sort of liquor and cocacola drink on ice. This makes it simple to clink my glass at a higher angle than his and pour a good dollop of my beer into his drink. In his condition there was no way for his eyes to reach all the way down to his hands to catch this so we both turn away happy.

I go back to staring at the sky above the city and hear it calling me to dreams. We leave our beers unfinished and head back to the room.

Seriously, what is with this? Four men have waggled me by my chin in the last month.
(How can I get the ladies to join in?)

The short list

2008-08-09T12:48:00.001-04:00

Things that I could do without in Ecuador:
* Cheese, I love thee, but ye loveth me not here.
* Kissyface greetings. Especially the taking-leavings where I am not as able to slip away unnoticed without brushing cheeks and making puckering smoochy sounds.
* Smoking in most every establishment
* Walking around at rush hour, there are no emission regulations, on vehicles, as discernible by me.
* Haggling is the closest approximation to the opposite of my methodology I have yet experienced.
* Overrun of dogs and consequent lack of cats. El Capitan tells me the dog population has decreased dramatically and he misses that (Dogs they rule the night). But to me there are still too many; they just wander the street which so far is interesting, but i'd trade it for cats.

Things I hold in the highest:
* Fresh juice, everywhere all the time. This is heaven for what was an Odwalla-for-breakfast (at lunchtime) drinker.
* Plates of the day. Since I can't really understand Spanish at talking speed, I usually view ordering Almuerzos (lunch) or Meriendas (dinner) where you get a soup, juice, plate of rice, meat and veggies/beans and a desert for less than $2 as a gamble and sometimes i lose but its fun with chance!
* Not getting carded for anything! Finally I appear old enough.
* The climate right now is perfect warmish in the days then cooling at night.

Welcome to the MindLab

2008-08-06T01:20:00.002-04:00

Alright, El Capitan made me promise I wouldn't talk about the injections I had to give him for his back pain. So don't ask.

Into the Fold

2008-08-06T01:03:00.002-04:00

Once at Shooters I seemed to have stepped into a voidhole and fell into myself. Deepression and ignoring everybody all night except to order a drink or two. Even when folks were referencing me or speaking to me directly I was ignoring. I was feeling not thrilled being in Quito after the idyllic Mindo, but after a couple of hours of this deep silence something clicked in the back of my head or somewhere near the back of the head and I decided to move into interaction.

Just a bit ago when I was writing the outcome of the JW Marriot escapade at the bar here, one of the patrons tried to speak with me as I was writing. I ignored the words because my head is already full of them and that's why i'm writing can't you see that? So I got to the end and the click and I said,
"thank you for your patience, Atlanta and No."
Like I said I had gotten to the end of writing at that moment but faked it a bit more to let her mull it over. Yeah, I'm a player, but its an entirely different game i'm into.
"Wait, oh, let's see...where are you from and, wait, no hmmm. I can't remember the second question."
"I set down my pen, removed my glasses and was rubbing the bridge of my nose..."
"Uhm" she's had many beers at this beyond midnight point "oh yeah, are you tired?"
"Correct." And I pull the Mindfold down from my bandanna over my eyes.

The world shrinks as the majority of my sensory intake is reduced to a vast black (with the rare faulty pinprick of light from the nose area that needs to be revisited by the manufacturer; might just have to buy the whole company to fix this issue) not a complete eradication, mind you, for when the eyes are open within the fold they are still active and the brain portals they feed are still open accepting the darkness as if it were the picture of the world currently surrounding the mind. The initial urge is to fall into this security and act upon it as if it were truthed. But in this instance the dispellation of such comfort was in the shape of a crowd's roar at something I mentally picturated as a whisp of draft by my cheek that did make me reflexively jerk my neck and head back a half an inch.
"The bartender's sister just tried to kiss you." El Capitan is chuckling and probably rolling that 50 centavo piece across his knuckles while standing behind the bar.

I sat on this for a moment trying to imagine why the initial gambit into this Mindfold was for a stunningly gorgeous girl to sneakify me in such an abrupt manner. We certainly have not exchanged any meaningful words across the language barrier; now you can see why my theory of how stunning I look in this attire is brewing! So I realize I need to play this one cool and I turn to the asker of drunken smalltalk questions, and say "can you tell her to try again?" I sit back with a lilt to my head and stroke my chinwig. She starts "por favor," and I jump in both hands on the bar "I didn't say please" and flash that looney smile that I can't hold back at times. If they are going to be introduced to the Mindfold I ought to make sure its memoric. Too many beers girl swings her voice hole towards my unseeing sound receptors and I focus in on her head which says "it doesn't translate without the Please." I could care less, I've made the ruckus, now I settle into listening for silent movements and am rousing laughters with my dodgings that most times were for nothing, surely not kisses.

The girls of the bar enjoyed this and similar sillinesses narrated by El Capitan's experienced Seership over the situation. So much so that they invited us to go dancing. Which is when the following Mindfolded recordation of the conversation on the previous page of my journal captured the hilarity of the night's merciless pouring of darkness into the Mindfolded open to receive such nonlumination. The next day the sightless writing was easy enough to make out because it took up the whole page.
"Wanna go dancing with us?"
"I didn't even go dancing with my wife."
"You have a wife?"
"Not anymore, I wouldn't go dancing with her."

For pete's sake, its Reggaetone. Have you ever had to listen to that schlop?

Antihystemeticos

2008-08-05T22:26:00.002-04:00

We have rode the shark into the JW Marriot, where El Capitan and I are posing as guests to try to get him some anti-histematicos for his ankles and elbows are swelling in massive quadrants of bug bites which are itching a great many times more than mine from the same flying ant/fly that literally slices open your skin and latches onto the large drop of blood that swells out of this invasive technique.

We came in with the plan of walking past the front desk and him asking "so i'll just see you in the room?" to me and me acknowledging that and heading for the room. But once we got to the door and the doorman was straight out of Cinderella, with the coattails and all, I feared they might require some sort of clearance for the elevators, so I just said "yeah i'll see you up there, but i'm gonna make a call" because I saw the phone sign.

I stood in the booth for what seemed to be 5 minutes talking to myself about a deal gone south and how I was going to have to stay an extra day or two to take the clients out to a meeting and no i'm not seeing anyone on the side how could you even think that? I'm in the hotel right now, and so on. Once I figured he had the time he needed, I ventured out into the vast open air lobby and was hoping he had not gone through with the plan of meeting me on the 6th floor somewhere. He came trotting up and said "they sent me to the gift shop but they didn't have any. The front desk is looking for something now."

We are a few days past laundry day without having properly observed laundry day. I have the patched up pants (mother did a fine job, i'm just saying), my journal sticking out of the back pocket and the bright yellow bandanna dangling long all pirate style over my redneck and the Mindfold strapped on the forehead just because, well two reasons, you never know when you need the Mindfolded and let's be honest, it looks good on the bright colored bandannas on my handsom head (See Dr. Mindlab post for a good illustration of what I mean) and I haven't shaved in a month.

El Capitan is still wearing Frankenpants and his badass leather jacket and even though its 11pm on a Sunday night and all the pharmacies are closed which is why we are trying to swindle the JW Marriot out of allergy medication, he's got his flight shades on his head. So we are chilling with me writing this feet up on the coffee table wishing i had my ipod, and El Capitan is fiddling with his phone which is ringing. In my journal I am writing that he is faking a call that is all business-like so that as we sit in the lobby and he paces Frankenpants up and down the tile floor saying things like "I'll call him at 6am tomorrow, sir," and "oh of course, I know what is wrong its the (made-up sounding computer part name) underheating" I really did think he was just keeping the shark ridden, but upon further clarification it was in fact an actual business call beyond perfecto in its uncanny timing. But that's just how El Capitan rolls.

I am trying to look intent on intently writing all this down as he comes and taps me on the shoulder. I get up and he nods over his shoulder to the concierge who is following us to the door. I see that the VIP treatment is occurring so I adjust the Mindfold straight on my head and slip this book back in my pocket -- its my very first page in this new journal that is a size smaller moleskine than the previous batch which means it fits in my back pocket i never should have left it in the first place bigger is not always better -- and we head to the revolving doors, but the concierge steps in front of us to Cinderella's charioteer who leans his head much too far over for the top hat to stay on without adhesives and is nodding to the man's words to boot. That was when I knew this whole thing was a farce and I needed to keep my guard up. A bit too smooth. El Capitan is both listening to what is being said and translating it to me.
"He will send a car to pick up the goods from an open pharmacy or I can ride there. Then in Spanish "I'm just gonna ride there because I will want to meet my friend out after that."
And before we know it we are being usered towards a car that has been magically appearancized in the roundabout that nobody ever drives their own cars thru, but is only driven in by drivers. I take one look at the SUV and think of my thrilling experiences in Ecuadorian pharmacies and opt for trying to call the folks one more time (mom it was busy the three times I called on Sunday) before getting to that drink that we passed up for hopeful pharmacy journies earlier. I tell El Capitan this in as few as words as possible so as to not hinder his swift ride and I have to admit, a churkle which is a manly giggle, slipped out of my throat so I hurried away from the overcivilization and towards Shooters. But something got a hold of my idea machine and it came back with 'wait and wave to him as he's being driven to the pharmacia to get one last laugh.' So the car came around the circle and out of the hotel to pass me on the corner sidewalk waving with both hands and even kind of hopping like a fool to make sure he sees me. Which made the car stop. Whoops. I'm on my way crossing the street on the hopes that I don't get wrangled back into such a translatable drama, 'cause I sure don't want to get in that car.

So I am yelling over my shoulder "just wanted to get one last laugh in I didn't mean for you to stop."
"No no no," he's yelling back "it was perfect what you did. I was going to get him to stop at some point."
"But why didn't you just let him take you there?"
"Because he'll do it for a lot cheaper" and the taxi he had hailed as we were crossing the street stopped at his feet.

More Falls!

2008-08-05T13:42:00.001-04:00

We hiked out of Mindo and down a dirt road. Everything is massive and verdant and beautiful and there were many places to take a photo like this one.

We followed banners across the dirt road into a banana plantation and up the hills. We passed a great deal of swingable vines. El Capitan became Indiana for a swing. We reached the first falls and I was lagging and when I came around the corner off the bridge of two bamboo poles strapped together, he had already scrambled to the top of the falls.

Having taken my time and the trail I had a less accomplished pose.

Even though these were the only falls pictured on the banner, we pushed on. Higher and higher up the mountain. We crossed the stream many times and I had to have a go with getting lost in the Mindfold as I tried to climb to a boulder for a pose. Getting back proved to be something of a trial. [video]

Up the mountain and up even more. El Capitan reached windedness and I scouted ahead. I saw what I needed to and returned with a peeled and unpeeled orange off the trees over the bend. I handed the unpeeled one to El Capitan and said "here's for a spot of energy until we get to what appears marvelous. Let's go."

"Have you tasted these oranges already?" El Capitan asks as he sucks on that beautiful orange orange. "Nope, I wanted you to have the first one."
He spits it out. My mind races, is there some poisonous orange disease in the Andes I don't know about? Have I just killed El Capitan? I better hurry up and taste mine.
I tear a hole in the peel, at least we'll die together. I suck the horribly sour juices out of the unripe orange. "Sorry, man. That's horrible." And we toss the oranges aside. Then this picture takes us.

As soon as you crest that last hill, you can see it. Its the biggest waterfall i've ever experienced alone (Niagara is huge but so are the crowds). Must've been 120 feet. But no more than a stream you could step across at the top. The pictures are laughably weak in the face of this fall's majesty.

So I convince El Capitan (believe me, his antics are over-represented because I am more often carrying the camera, not because he is gullible or easily convinced of the potential hilarty that could arise from whatever we are doing) to go tag the waterfall. I am skipping the first set of photos, because when he touched the falls, he was blocking his own arm from the camera so it wasn't official. The second round he went in with Gusto, he was going to add this Cascadas to his repotoire of tagged falls and I was cheering him on...until he slipped and then I started laughing. He was right in the falls again.

The face of a true Waterfall tagger.

Frankenpants

2008-07-31T18:19:00.001-04:00

After we dried off we made it to dinner where Capitan said "you know, its gonna be a cold night in these shorts I made today." To which I replied, "we should get some whisky, needle and thread and and go to the park in the middle of town and sit down to let me watch you sew," (from my perspective this turned out to be a most brilliant idea). We spent the rest of dinner trying to learn the words for needle and thread. We procured the prementioned items with little resistance and got the pant legs out of the trash from the room and headed to the fountain in the square.

The amount of laughter that came out of my mouth over the next hour of sitting by El Capitan and cheering him on in trying to sew his pant legs back on, was likely in some way proportional to the amount of Clan Macgregor (proceed with caution) that went into my mouth. But that would be to simplify things, and the method of sewing El Capitan was inventing began with the words "you know, I planned on sewing back in the room, because then I wouldn't have to sew these legs back on..."
"Heavens, don't sew your legs!"
"...while i'm not wearing the damn things."

A note on this second picture, I did not purposefully put the bubbles in the shot I like to call Bubbleworld. The camera elves did that with a perfect eye for detail, because if it makes you think of faeries dancing about to cast a spell, or fizzy lifting drinks, then you are on the right track.

While this was going on, people were strolling by and we got three reactions. One was to look away as if some poor chap sewing his pants together was a disgrace; the second was for people to take a double-take and see that, yes, he is sewing his pants together, and laugh their fool heads off, this we counted as a success; and then folks of our age and nothing better to do would stop by to talk, and share a drink. I had to continually turn away a swig of puntas from the Licoria store owner's son. He kept trying to invite us to his place because there was going to be chicas, but we had to point out that El Capitan needed to sew his pants together and wasn't in any shape to go anywhere until that was completed. They taught us the Mindo handshake before they left - a right handed slap, then a fist punch (to the other's fist, jeez).

"Sewing underneath my legs is the worst, i'm just gonna go with it and hope it holds."[Frankenpants]

You will notice in the shot called Frankenpants that he did not bother to line up his right leg in such a way that the tear away above the boot is actually from years of that heel stepping on what used to be the back of the pants. I can't finish the Frankenpants until I mention that not 5 minutes later one leg tore off very quickly. We stopped in front of a bar and he re-did it in a matter of minutes, being a professional on-body sewer at this point. A few kids came by to laugh and we exchanged the Mindo handshake which impressed them. After laughing at El Capitan and his pantalones, to which each time El Capitan replied "earlier today I needed shorts, but now I need pants," they inquired about the Mindfold. But weren't much interested beyond the sleep mask aspect. Some people just don't get It.

But we do.
We went to second dinner at Out of Babylon, again. We got there and it was totally dark so we asked the folks outside if the restaurant was open (and most whenever I say We did something involving the Spanish language, that means El Capitan did, or he forced me to stand up for myself and butcher a simple sentence); and they said of course, it was just that the power was out and we'd have to eat by candlelight if that was alright. I said in English "alright? we don't need any light at all," and I slid the Mindfold down over my eyes with a straight face.
The next pictures are of a game in which we 'Mindfinded the scotch.' The ingredients you need for this are 1)Mindfold 2)Scotch 3)a restuarant that doesn't mind you bringing your own scotch in 4)candlelight for the mood and photo ops. This was a basic game where the Seer takes a glass of scotch and places to the right or left in front of the Mindfolder who then uses whatever technique they find appropriate to take their guess by reaching their right or left hand out for the drink. If they are correct and find the drink, they get a sip, if incorrect, the Seer receives the sip. We played a good 10 rounds and each of us had better than 50% success, thanks, quite possibly, to my faulty memory. We also were able to enlist our server for a round and he got it right, and took the entire 2oz shot instead of a sip, because we forgot to tell him that part of the rules.
Here is me with my challenge laid before me.

Ohhh i'm wrong.

Here is El Capitan with his challenge laid before him.

Success!!

We then went to the bridge for a final toast to Mindo, and here is mainstreet Mindo at midnight

Las Cascadas

2008-07-31T18:18:00.001-04:00

(Yáll will have to forgive me, this computer is not fast enough to upload the mentioned videos here...i´ll get to it soon, but here are some photos to hold you over)

Rogue Cascadas Therapy
Mostly I want to let these videos speak for themselves. But the backstory is that we came upon the waterfalls when a few other sets of folks were already there. These videos were taken in the lower, smaller falls where the forces in the water were still extreme enough to pull you around. And what you can't see is that the riverbed went from golf ball sized stones that supported your weight to a fine sand that your foot would sink to the ankle making movement into the swirl that much harder. [video me] Now what you have just witnessed was more than just the first ever Mindfolding of Mindo's Las Cascadas, but you actually took part in a bit of Rogue Therapy, whether intending to or not, because I was facing a subset of my biggest fear ever: Sharks, and the subset being, things-that-touch-your-feet-when-they-are-underwater-and-i-can't-see-them-anymore. But in its own way, the Mindfold made facing my fear easier, because trying to walk through a whirlpool to touch a waterfall when you can't see anything makes the whole experience enormous and easily fearable so i didn't focus on the minor more irrational fear, I had to wade through the big fear.

El Capitan makes it look easy...[video]
We played in the bottom pool for a bit, waiting for the groups up there to disperse. Then we cimbed this rope up a rock about 20 ft at an enormous incline. I used mostly my arms as I couldn't trust my feet with the slipperiness of the thin layer of moss that grew in the waterfall's spray area. Once we got up to the pool of the major falls, pictures became useless because the falls had actually carved out a chamber over the aeons, and to get to them took two freeswinging cable bridges to get across the whitewater between the two falls. Then we had to strip down to our swimsuits and leave the backpack (and camera) to traverse the narrow channel where the river had let itself out of the enormous cylinder its waterfall is pouring through. The waterlevel went from ankle deep to swimming in moments. We had to work for every stroke forward, and the sound got so that we had to yell next to each other. The air was filled with water, the most pregnant cloud, almost unbreathable as the foam churned feet over the water. We sidestepped the frontal foamage and worked around to a nook that took climbing up slimy rocks, not even thick moss could withstand the constant barrage in here, to sit in the crevice; egg-shaped and 15 feet tall it must have been caused by a waterfall of floodwaters 50 times the fall's current size. It was exactly the type of nook Golum[sp?] would talk to himself in. I tried to swim from the side into the waterfall, but got to shivering uncontrolably from all this time in the cold waters and I didn't trust my strength once I got into the outer waves of foamy waters. But El Capitan went back to my bag with me and took my Mindfold and went until he was swimming and put it on and then swam into the churning of the waterfall. "I imagined myself in a galactic vortex where time was sped up to the point that stars were going thru their life cycles in moments. I was wading thru the fabric of time and space and the closer I got to the central black hole, the more violent the churning of space all around me." Spoken like a true mindfolder.

Las Cascadas were mesmerizing and we wished we didn't have to go, but the last run of the Tarabita was at 4 and we didn't want to miss it and get stranded. We did the hike back up and it started raining. I bundled into my rain jacket which became immeasurably useful going out into the open sky in the middle of the Cloud Forest and speeding thru the open sky at 15 mph and the rain is coming in sheets. A miracle of physics allowed me hunching over in a ball with my back to the direction we were going effectively shielded my legs from any rain at all and me, my backpack and pants stayed 95% dry. This proved more important since we were going to wait with the Tarabita drivers to give us a ride down the mountain. But it ended up that the drivers believed not everyone had come back by 4. We waited for 45 minutes until the drivers gave up on waiting and shut the thing down. We headed down just hoping the fellows had made it back across and the drivers had just not recalled.

Shark Surfing
As we were in the back of the truck, heading down the potholefull road, in the Cloud Forest's not-really-rain it quickly became hard to hold onto the roll bar in the back of the truck; and doubly so when the Mindfold came out. The Seer had to call out branches of overhanging trees to duck from as well as just having to hold on at every bump you can't see to predict. We decided to move past the Mindfold quickly and into a branch of Shark Riding that we came to call Surfing the Shark. In a full standing position we let our hands hover an inch from the roll bar so that we could grab it at any moment but other than our feet, didn't touch the truck. Rolling at about 15 mph we could do this for a good thirty seconds at a time until we hit a turn that was too tight, or a hole too big, so that we would grab the roll bar and steady. After a bit of this we started working with our central Chi energy in ball form spinning it like a gyroscope to keep in constant, flux of balance with the rolling truck. Speed, rain, washed clean in a waterfall and Minfoldsplorations of the day got us in the high-sped giddiness where we were yelling about the spinning ball of Chi invisible but tangible in our hands and hollering like on a rollercoaster, until we heard laughing behind us and we turned to see another truck full of folks watching our antics of balancing and losing it and laughing uncontrolably. The Cloud Forest had descended upon us all.

La Tarabita

2008-07-31T17:58:00.001-04:00

The next day, Tuesday, I woke early enough to have breakfast for the first time in Ecuador. I wasn't impressed. I still am not able to eat before noon, which had been easily solved by sleeping past that, but at 10 I was not ready for runny pancakes or eggs, even as fresh as they were. So I had whisky in my coffee to get some calories...as we were going to hike to the Las Cascadas. For lunch to take with us, El Capitan was set on finding sandwhiches of cheese and tomato.
"I love cheese so much that I don't want to let Ecuadorian cheese ruin my love for cheese." The first night in Quito I tried a pizza and the result was a broader conception of Cheese.
"Why can't you just consider the cheese here as another kind that you don't like as well? And just eat it because it will nourish you?"
Fine argument El Capitan, but i'd rather eat fruit and nuts. Nuts I already had on me, and fruit I purchased from the back of a truck and was informed I got ripped off paying 25 centavos for 2 oranges (I just finished the second one now and it was worth a great deal more than 12.5 cents). But El Capitan has been pointing out my weakness in the area of negotiation. And I am the first to admit I hate the banter and price changing. To me if the price you are asking is not what I want to pay, then I walk away. I have always had a distaste in my mouth for haggling and don't intend on playing that game. It feels too much like confrontation for me.

So we started down the road that would lead us out of town and encountered a contingent of United Statesian girls about college age who asked us where the waterfalls were.
El Capitan: "Well its about an hour and a half hike more or less straight up this mountain, then you have to pay $5 to take the Tarabita across the valley and hike another half an hour down into the jungle. Basically as you are going, you need to always turn onto, or take the road that looks like it could hold a car. And the flip flops you are wearing are not going to hold up to these hills." The girls turned around.

As we progressed up the mountain we went from 2500 meters to over 4400 meters in about an hour and a half. Of course the Mindfold came out and we realized the person who is giving directions of how not to step in puddles or horse-droppings, is in the position, relative to the Mindfolder, of 'Seer.' El Capitan had a daunting task when I was folding the upward hike, because it was during a section of great mud and puddles. We wove through the gauntlet without me so much as getting a foot wet based on following his footsteps' sound. Each time a truck would come by carrying a load of people each paying a dollar for the ride, we would step aside and wave at them.
"Okay here comes a truck going back down."
"Yeah I can hear it."
"Strafe a la derecaha, to the side of the road."
"Here good?"
"Yeah now wave."
And I step forward to keep my balance as I toss my arm up to wave in the direction I hope is the truck, and I hear a splash around the area of my foot. So I pull it back quickly.
"Well, now they know you can't see in that thing."
It is always a bit of the fun to see how long you can keep those around you outside the Fold, before inviting them in.

We sauntered up to the Tarabita with our Mindfolds up on our foreheads. And El Capitan asks after his friend Angelita, but Ramiro tells him she no longer works here, but is still in town. El Capitan explains how he saw Angelit and Ramiro on television in the States. Some travel show that went across the Tarabita and filmed these folks running the machine. The Tarabita is a double wide ski lift car that you face each other in and is suspended by a cable the thickness of my scrawny forearm, powered by something akin to a lawn mower engine and operated by the pilot who stands on the outside and holds on. El Capitan got to ride for free as Ramiro told him he was a Guide of Mindo, having brought a few folks through here, and often was given the honor of piloting the Tarabita.

There was something about crossing that chasm that put us right in the line of fire of inanity, because as soon as we got off on the other side, El capitan went under the lean-to for waiting passengers and asked for my knife and started sawing off the legs of his pants. "Even though these are my good khakis that I wear when flying, I just need some shorts right now."
"That's why I am carrying a pair of shorts in my bag." Even fools know some things!

From this came an impromptu photo shoot in the Andes...

This one I call "Rogue Therapist"

En Mindo

2008-07-31T12:19:00.002-04:00

El Capitan had made it clear that this was his town off the beaten path. The buildup to this consisted of talking of Casa de Cecilia and the Tarabita, where Angelita worked and would let El capitan drive the Tarabita, which is the cable car that goes across a pair of cables, much like a ski lift, only instead of going up a mountain, it goes from one peak to another over a river-cut valley in the Cloud Forest to another peak. More on this later.

So we leave for Mindo on a bus which takes us to Media del Mundo, a tourist-oriented experience that is placed directly on the Equator that I can't tell you much about because El capitan just talked his way into the place for the ATM, avoiding the $2 charge, where he was able to get money out of my account but his was in lockdown because he tried to use it out of the USA. Then the adveture began.
We walked across the street from the attraction to thumb a ride to Mindo, because we didn't want to take the bus the rest of the way into the Cloud Forest, we wanted to hitch with a pick-up truck to ride in the back for the view. This took about half an hour until a fellow about our age with an empty pick-up truck came along and stopped for us. He actually asked us if we wanted to ride in the cab, but we both hopped right in the back.

The ride took about an hour, so of course, this happened.

The scenery was amazing as we plowed through clouds and around mountain roads much too fast and often on the wrong side of the road. We pulled up on a dirt road off the main road where the driver told us that we were pretty near Mindo and offered for us to see his house if we didn't mind the 1 km walk back to this main road. We went for it. The house he and his pregnant wife live in is in the middle of the Ecuadorian coutryside. He built the house himself and they both work as biologists studying the forest. The house itself was an amazing loft-style open air home with the downhill side, we are still 3-4,000 meters up in the Andes, of the house is almost completely glass. We didn't stay long because the drive to his house was observed to be more than the suggested km. And he (can't recall his name) wasn't able to give us a ride because he had to study. The hike back wasn't too bad even though I had my nifty pack double full and all on my back while hiking thru the thin air.

We reached the main road which fortunately had a bus stop right at our road's terminus into it. Funny thing about busses in Ecuador is that they are not always well-labeled and often just have a person hanging out the door to holler the destinations as it passes you and you better hail it quick before its gone; most especially because we are in the middle of a straightaway downhill stretch that declines at least a thousand feet before turning. We watched a few busses fly by, and tried to simultaneously hitch a ride the rest of the way. Neither of these things working we decided to hail the next bus and just ask when the 'Mindo route might be by...it, of course, was the Mindo bus. So we hopped on. Unlike the first bus, my large pack didn't fit in front of my seat, so I had to put it in a seat by itself, which worked because there were empties, but it was the first imperfection of my bag. El Capitan left a large amount of his items in Quito with Pablo at his hostal, who is full of impeccable trust. I, on the other hand, wanted to bring the full bag so that I could try it out on overland travel.

I liked Mindo better than Quito from the start, "this is more my speed," I told El Capitan as we were walking thru the town the first evening. For a start, there is about 1/10,000th the number of people here. We went straight to Casa de Cecilia which was full of a group of tourists who seemed to be a school group of high school kids. So began El Capitan's ranting against the growth of tourism in Mindo, which just last year had been off the map. Cecilia had a young lady lead us over to her sister's Hostal and during the walk she stated that she was going to go to the University in Quito, to study the industry of Tourism. El Capitan, your dream of a hideaway town in Mindo is fast being fed to the generation growing up now.

After securing the room, we headed straight to Fuera de Babylon, where I ate freshly caught Mountain Trout straight off the bone, with, you guessed it, plantains! The ahi, each restaurant has its own version of this salsa type hot sauce that is on the table in a bowl, was delicious, better than most I have tried -- not too many onions. But then the same group came in from the hostal next door and filled the restaurant, we finished our cerveza grande that the waiter would go and purchase from the store next door each time we ordered one, and hit the road.

Then came the puntas. Sugar Cane distilled into fire water. We went first to a convenience store and bought a small bottle of water. El Capitan started dumping the bottle out on the ground, and I hollered "just like an American," which got the bad part of his attention. I drank most the rest of the water so we had an empty bottle, because if you don't bring your own bottle it comes in a bag like you bring a goldfish home in. So we paid 25 centavos for the small bottle full and bought a pack of cards for ten times that amount, because "trust me," said El Capitan, "there's just somthing about puntas that makes you want to play cards (we never did make it to the card game).¨ He led me around the streets to a gravel pile where we sat under the streetlight to sip the puntas. HA! After my first gulp I told him "no more of that juice until I have something to wash it down with." And so I bought my first Coca Cola of the year. Didn't really help, just made the sweetness sweeter and the burn worked in some evil synergy with the Coke chemicals so that the next morning I knew what I had done. But before the morning came, we wandered back into the main street and sat to watch about 15 people, mostly high-school aged i'd guess, play futbol in the road. I sat there talking about how in just a minute I was going to join in, but after a ball was kicked towards us and I missed it from the curb, El Capitan's laughter explained my dexterity better than I felt it. "I really was hoping that you were going to play futbol last night with your adept movements on the sidelines, I could not wait to see you get shown up by girls half your age!" But that was not to be because we had finished at least 10 ounces of the puntas and sleep was soon to come.

Saturday night

2008-07-27T21:28:00.001-04:00

So we broke down and went to an American-oriented restaurant. We expected to pay greater than $10 for our meal and drinks, each! Around here that's gourmet cuisine.

As we are sitting in the second story of this restaurant a double decker bus passes by with a horn and drum section in the second story and partiers hanging off both deckers. Its the party bus, El Capitan explains, but its only really worth it when you can get on the top level.

Between the first and second party bus, I noticed a Security Guard, they are hired all over the place to secure stores and restaurants and wander the sidewalks, who was ducking behind a bush 2 feet tall in a planter 2 feet off the ground. He has no clue that i am watching him as he busts a can of beer open really quick and downs a good gulp. Then he pulls some pills out of his pocket and hits another deep swig to swallow down the meds. This is all on the sidewalk in the downtown/L5P area of Quito where everyone is rocking the saturday night. Then he dumps the last of the beer into the planter and saunters off to direct a car to park in a space that ends up being too small for either side door to open and let people out...

And if anyone is wondering, shyness does not go away even if you can't speak the language. If anything it makes one more selfconscious about the silliness that one speaks out loud to others. Which all in all has spent me towards the inwardness and writing that i started an over-borders trip with the intention of in the first. Introspection is the mother of intention (or at least it sounds good).

Tomorrow we leave Quito and start some adventures outward bound. Don't have a clue what might happen next. I expect to take some photos or at least get confounded between lack of language and geographic knowledge. Nonetheless, a good story will come of this nextness!

Divinity amidst pearls

2008-07-24T13:33:00.001-04:00

El Capitan gave this tale in his summary storytelling style over a dinner of beans rice and pork/chicken and fried plantains; if I recall correctly he was trying to entice me into visiting the Amazon rainforests:
"So I paid this guy $45 to take me down the Amazon river where he left me off at a trailhead where he told me that if I followed it I would come upon a village where a bus routinely came through carrying canoes back upriver, then he bid me goodbye. I followed the trail to the village alright, which was empty except for an malnourished parrot. But fortunately the bar had some crackers and a bottle of rum which the parrot and i shared for two days until someone came by and i was able to get a ride upriver. I got back to the guy who left me off at that town and told him he was wrong. I hate backtracking."

While he was talking a man came in with a traditional harp and set it up on one of the restaurant's chairs, which prompted this story:
"I made a laser harp out of two way mirrors set in a top and bottom plank of wood. It was set up so that any one laser, there were three, could be interrupted with your finger and that would produce a particular note. Stroking through multiple lasers at the same time or in quick conjunction would produce the appropriate sounds. I only made it with three notes, but it is only limited by the number of two-way mirrors."
What? WHAT?! Where is this instrument?!?!?!?! Se la via de El Capitan.

Quito is a big city; we took the bus which El Capitan mentioned was actually progressing in that it had maps of the routes in the terminals and turnstiles you had to pay to go thru. Then on the busses themselves, there were digital signs telling the next stop. Which is just about when he turned to me and said "there goes the store we are looking for..." Walking from the bus stop back gave me a good taste of the traffic, literally, my throat started burning and as if I wasn't having enough trouble breathing the thin air my lungs felt even more stuffy and clogged.

Another interesting thing is that ATMs give out $20 bills but there is both a large counterfeiting issue and El Capitan has actually received some fakes from the ATMs; generally storekeepers just tear them right in half. Also most places don't accept 20's. I used two $10s at different places and both times they had to scrape for change. And he says that once we get out of Quito into the smaller towns $5 might not even be accepted, so we are storing away all our $1 and Sacajawea dollar coins, judging by their ubiquity seem to have been shipped en masse from the states; which makes cents because the front of the coin resembles the native Ecuadorians.

Shhhh Fup

2008-07-22T20:08:00.001-04:00

So I am sitting in the bar that El Capitan has DJ-ed at for a year and the music is part his. This song "My Shit's Fucked Up" is playing and I am probably one of three people in here that know this is a Parental Advisory song. Foreign in a foreign land.

Tuesday

2008-07-22T18:48:00.001-04:00

Last night I left El Capitan's favorite barro, Shooters, after just the second drink of the day. Felt weird, hazy and weak but not sleepy tired and my digestion will not stop bubbling away all this took me home early. Fearing the worst i took the roundabout way to the hostel so i could both avoid the dangerous night streets and get myself some Bismutol.

The store clerk said something too fast thru the iron gate the transaction was taking place between. "Two dolares somethingsomething" So I held out my hand full of change and she took five 50 centavo pieces and gave me the pink bottle and a few pennies.

The currency here is the US$ all bills are the exact same as the stateside, but you can only break $20's in American-catering or very large establishments, wish I had known that before I came down! Oh and casinos are glad to take your 20's. The coinage is a mix of the US and Ecuadorian, though they are the same size and weight and would work in either country's vending machines.

So I got back to the room and am feeling much better the Bismutol remains unopened and I am asleep by 1am. I sleep thru 11am thanks to the Mindfold and earplugs. I hopped out of bed with a mind full of "Super Trooper" by ABBA, and a body moving nowhere that speed. I play the song on my ipod as I fall into my Qi Gung routine. El Capitan is hunched over his swarm of cables, drives and computerations. My routine consists of slow, intentional movements accompanied by a deep breathing. As I was moving through the postures I found the breath lacking as if i was breathing empty air. I had to tone it down and finished off the set with a refreshed body and woozy head.

I pack my day bag for a trek around the New Town section of Quito but that additional moving around completely took my body by surprise and I started getting the spotty, flashy light flickering seen in the eyes and felt in the head like a mix of brain cotton and unexpected levitation.

So I lay down. I let El Capitan go towards internetting and I take to breathing. Breathing. Deep and long and counting from Zero to One hundred and back down in Espanol. This took a long time so that I caught my breath. The nausea faded and my head settled back into my neck.

I must have trundled along the edge of conscious passing out for a good 20 minutes but came out in the end. Fascinating feeling if not for the slight suffocation I had to breathe past. So it looks like I'm going to need to be aware to breathe more over the next few days.

All this is so very weird because I have walked miles around Quito and never felt out of breath.

The best news of the day (beyond Super Trooper in my mente) is that I am still hungry and everythings coming out alright. I have a water filter (REI) that is actually a ceramic filter with holes smaller than parasites (I hope). I have filtered a few batches of tap water with it and that's been fine. But I do shower and brush teeth with it straight which i feel is a good first step into assimilating whatever organisms might be foreign to me in the water, because once we venture out of the city the water quality will only get worse.

Living Routines

2008-07-22T18:41:00.001-04:00

So for over 7 months I have been on the road now. In that time I have spent a great deal of time in a variety of living situations and been immersed in others lives for days or weeks, sharing space, weaving around others routines, being as unobtrusive as I can into others hospitality, etc.

For the last three or four months no one has been closer to my humanness than Sleg. A major reason that such a relationship has worked is because our routines and lifestyles are so very well matched that we are close to ideal partners in, well, whatever we partner up for, living included. In fact we knew this early on when we were the first duo in history to run for, and lose, Co-Class President of the senior class of our high school. Its not just anyone you can live in an abandoned truck stop with.

On that note, El Capitan and I had a heart-to-heart in the Magic Bean, a Western culture catered-to-steraunt, about our living styles, communication processes and the foundational assumptions that shape our understandings of what the other says or does (anything from body language to full-blown activities that confuse the tenuous grasp on reality either of us has at any given moment), methods of encountering a variety of sticky situations

Variety of sticky situations:
Traffic
Avoiding accostment in the street
Purchase of items not sold in stores

Another element of this mix is that he has spent most of the last few years living alone, while I was married then Slegged. One element of this is that sometimes El Capitan talks to himself and I assume he is speaking to me – eaves-dropping is applied retroactively once he verifies he was talking to himself.

The altitude has not affected me with nausea and headaches but it has dried out my sinuses which was good when I first arrived with a clog in that area, but now my nasal system is very dry and a touch raw. I am drinking a minimum of 64 ounces of water, often fortified with fizzy vitamins, per day but still feel dried out.

The sun is as bright here as on ski slopes or in the desert. When it comes out you squint or shade your eyes. I am listening to a couple of podcasts on learning Spanish, each are 10 or 15 minute blocks and are a good way to shake the dust off my unused decade old study of the language. I am guessing we will stay here a few more days at least while I get comfortable with the speed of life, conversation and driving before venturing off the beaten path. I am already looking forward to trying to find some whitewater rafting. I am also wondering why I didn’t bring my hiking boots. I was trying to pack light, but that might have been going too far.

I am traveling with an REI bag set. And let me take a minute to tell great story about REI and why you too should shop there. I shopped for two hours trying out every bag in the size range I was looking for, for my car-living days. Bought one. Enjoyed it thoroughly but it revealed itself as too small. Took it back after 6 months of use, and believe you me it wasn’t in resalable condition, sans receipt or even my membership card and got a complete refund which I put towards this bag [link, nope i looked forever for this link and its not around]. I am curious to see if it is too large for taking with me everywhere or whether I will leave it here at the Harley Hostel with Pablo who is an adopted father of El Capitan, or whether I will take it on our travels around the rest of Ecuador (and wish I hadn’t).

Ecuador

2008-07-21T15:04:00.002-04:00

So, El Capitan y mi have made the leap. We Mindfolded (I am suggesting the Spanish term for this to be "Plegarmente" but anyone with more knowledge than me should help me refine this; my best translation for that made up word is: To Convolute the Mind) the first class flight where El Capitan actually ate a 5 course meal with a folded mind!!! Super Rock. The stewardesses asked after our escapades in the psychologiscape and we definitely made at least one convert. ROGUE THERAPY.

Then El Capitan performed a bit of Rogue Therapy on me when he had to talk his way into the country as a previous deportation showed up on the Immagration computers. It was a graceful performance combining straight face, fake lack of knowledge of Espanol and me posing as the helpless amigo. To round it off, once we got in, he thanked the lady by saying "Arrigato." Priceless.

So I was not able to take advantage of the privileged drinking in the Business Class cabin as I feared the altitude of Quito (its pretty near Breckenridge where I required a tank of oxygen delivered after altitude sickness demanded an excruciating toll on my lowlands southern body). But the second day here we found a Shark in a casino and Rode it all the way to this morning's retribution. For those of you who don't know (and Sleg, will you please forward this to our Rockford Connection?) Shark Riding is the extreme of urban adventuring; because, as everyone knows, when you encounter a shark, the only option is to grab a hold and not get eaten.

We had a routine set up at the blackjack table where we each went in with US$20 and took the US$2 minimum table by storm. We would rotate hands sitting out so that we could maximize our time and 'free' food and drinks. We lasted more than 3 hours (with El Capitan giving me a late boost of cash-winnings-inflow so we could keep playing until our last round of drinks came around the table). The pit bosses made weird clicking noises every once in a while and I could not discern the meanings, if anyone knows what they are all about please let me know. We intend on returning and playing a hand mindfolded. I know, I know.

Alright so moving on from that, the spanish language is slowly falling back into the front of my thinking, but its very humbling to not have a clue what people are talking about. We are in a hostel in Quito that is named after Harley-Davidson motorcycles and are hanging out at Shooters somewhere in the New town section of Ecuador. I have yet to get a decent map in my mind of the city.

The altitude has interesting effects on the climate (at least I am hypothesizing it is the altitude and its thin air that leaves the temperature at the mercy of the sun in the sky or lacking such....) where the days are hot and the nights cold. We are stocking up on supplies and settling into the culture before moving from Quito into the rest of Ecuador. I stil have to find a cord for the camera that Robbiedog lent me before I can start downloading pics, but swing by again in a bit and you can see what I am talking about.