Re:Birth

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

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

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

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...

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.

Truckstop Living, vol 1

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

Newest Favorite

in response to Phreelosophy's comment on Practice

*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.