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.

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.

Toned down for mortal consumption

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...)

Dragon

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)

Forestry

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.

Balancing Log

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.

Fishing

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.