The Deluge

The front door's frame was swollen, the hinges rusted, so we stopped closing it. The shingles were rotten. On those rare occasions that the rain briefly stopped, and the sun had the nerve to show its face, the attic floor became a night sky under our feet, complete with overflowing bucket galaxies amid our secret constellations and ruined book asteroid belts. The windows on all floors, the mirrors in every room, the crystal glasses, and every last piece from the china cabinet: we smashed it all. The Macassar Ebony hardwood was littered with glass shards and rotting food, empty bottles of imported wine and beer, cigarette filters and their washed-out packs all floating or sinking in sickly brown standing water.
I taped an m-80 to the television in our room. It was the first time I had laughed in months. You took a sledgehammer to one of the guestrooms and found asbestos. We waded it into balls and threw them at each other in a malignant snowball fight. We razed the room with molotov cocktails and then tore our hair out in frustration. Everything was so saturated, and the asbestos so effective, the room refused to burn.
Before the rain started, we bought matching designer rainslickers; dayglo yellow numbers with matching boots for his and stilettos for hers. We thought it would be cute. Weeks after it had started and we came to accept that this deluge wasn't ending, "not now, not never," she said. Seeing her in that microfiber hood and her stilleto rain boots made me uncomfortable and self-conscious. I started staring at my boots when we were in the same room.
It's been six months since we last spoke, eight months since the rain started. Stuck in this decaying mansion, the water up to our waists. We, beyond words, so sickly stuck, with nothing left to break, and nothing new to yell. No more ways to say "I love you", "I hate you." Absolutely nothing that can rekindle a flame in this marriage, with so much water and stagnation and destruction. We are complacent to the point of madness now. So here I will sit, strapped to this bloated recliner with the water at my chin. And here I will wait for the rain to stop or the world to end.

Hometown

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This is a rap song.

This is a dedicated dedication
a literal and lyrical assassination
a criminal's declaration
my critical examination

You asked me what was missing I realized its my voice
You gave me two doors to pick from I realized it's no choice

You wanted us to hope for change, I hoped for a bang, whitehouse black smoke and flames
won't vote for a name, politicians the same, federal incorporated this fucking country's a shame
you think it's a game?
They're playing people like poker chips in a hat with some shades
Shouting out “all in” bluffing full out now there's 8,000 corpses in shade
Lobbyists lounging, podium pounding, 8 million bucks to senator in trade
They're running around like beheaded chickens, and this is the only time I'll thank charles dickens
Because darkness is cheap, and these Scrooges are liking it

So let's lock and load the guns and then we'll show them our fun
This pen's still a sword that'll make them want to run
I'm talking revolution show them that we're still number one
We're more than just some
demographic tenants with some beer-goggle lenses
green smoke renters with some high high costs and
pill popping people with some low low hopes

This broken body that's surrounding me can still perform a crude lobatomy
9 millimeter tweeter and a 50 caliber speaker to blow the brains out of
those who chose to try and control we
Supposedly you're watching my back, but I'm watching your front and
I highly suggest that you get off of me with those sparkling promises, no armistice, this is all out war

Bombs drop buildings civis caught dumb luck no
this is fate its too late for repentence these tenants should of known better
like letter head of lead addressed to any motherfucker in way
because it's war, all out, automatics are okay when they're no choke full throttled on a baby on a bottle if it's working for they
And what do we do?
Bumper sticker picket protest, catchy slogans, bring them home
But their hollow points beat hollow words and their batons beat hollow domes
Hallowed grounds running red with our own empty voices

This is where the unions fought, and this is where the music stopped,
and this where the canary dropped
a couple of trivial bars like shit on cars

Here and Now

I should really open the window and air out all this cigarette and weed smoke. But this a/c is just barely combating the setting sunshine pouring through these dirty blindless windows. The big box fan humming away underneath my windowsill helps a bit, but I don't like the way it blows around these piles of books and papers littering my floor, or the Blackbeard flag hanging from the wall opposing me.
I should really get a chair. The way my back is resting on this under-inflated air-mattress that takes up a good forty percent of the room is less than pleasing, to say the least. But its such a pain in the ass trying to inflate this ungodly large bed (in an ungodly small room) with nothing but a manual bike pump. As I sit on the carpeted floor of my room, pecking away at my keyboard, I take a drink from an almost cold beer and replace on the floor beside me, my pipe, ashtray, cigarettes, lighter, and cellphone...the necessities. The beer helps to combat this humidity and stagnant almost cold air.
When I stand up, there will be grass clippings stuck to the back of my extended legs, all the way up to the ass of my pants. Its a little hard to see the layer of grass that follows me from work back home and upstairs to my room everyday because of the similar green it shares with my carpet, but walk on it barefoot and you can feel it. Look on your socks and you can see it.
I really should clean this place up. I would unpack the rest of my stuff from those cardboard apple boxes sitting in the corner next to the bookshelf, but where the hell to? One corner is already devoted to this unnecessarily large bed, another to cardboard boxes, dvds, and the empty cd cases leftover from a stolen book of cd's, a shoebox full of my important financial papers (student loan overdue, overdrafts, debts, and the occasional confirmation number from a payment made), and my bookshelf.
Which happens to be filling quite well. I had to sell a good portion of my collection a few months back to stay afloat, but with working two jobs and one of them being by a used book store, its growing and evolving. I can honestly say that I am not trying to create a visually impressive collection though, I just really like to read.
The Blackbeard flag hangs between this corner of literature and the next corner: a sewing table posing as a desk.
The desk is entirely wood and well constructed. You can tell someone put a good deal of time into it, and I only wish I had a better use for it. I have a desk in my room, but no chair. Therefore, even though I call it my desk, and that is even though I only call it a desk in the first place, it mostly serves the same purpose as any other horizontal surface to me: it prevents things from falling. My desk keeps gravity at bay for empty beers, pocket knives, a picture of Shadow, some pictures of friends from years past, an unplugged alarm clock, a broken pipe, a rolling machine...I could keep going but I suppose “refuse” about sums it up. Except for the photos, of course.
I had almost forgotten my box of photos. I horde photographs. Most of them are my own, snapshots of a family of four in California, a family of four plus one dog in Overland Park, pictures me and my brother and my dad, or me and my brother and my mom, my 16th birthday party, Japan, then Maui. There would be a 35mm camera in my room if I hadn't gotten it stolen on Maui. I hold on to pictures of my parents before my brother and I were ever born. One of my personal favorites is my dad, no older than 25, standing on the side of the highway in front of a sign for the town of Tightwad, flipping off the camera.
Anyways. The empty space beneath my desk is the area I like to call “Billy's Shit”. Billy's Shit is the leftover random items left behind by room's last rent-payer, Billy. When I look at this area, I see no individual items. Its a solid mass, an intertwining, enmeshing, somewhat cube shaped pure abstraction of items.
A few small high school print making pieces adorn the walls along with my flag, a Ralph Steadman poster, and some empty canvas bags that used to hold 50 lbs of green coffee beans before we roasted them at my evening coffee shop job. I am astounded to find that there are no cobwebs in my room. Maybe its the way my walls bend inward about five feet up from the baseboards at a forty-five degree angle and then flatten to form a ceiling parallel to the carpet, giving the room a trapezoidal shape. Maybe spiders hate trapezoids.
My room is clutter. Its slightly overwhelming, but at the same time this is my clutter. There is a certain comfort to be found in that. I couldn't really say I cherish most of these things, besides the photographs and a handful of books, but all these individual items in this mess of a room together create a picture of who I am. Looking back, I am not necessarily proud of this picture, but it's mine.

Cheers to Kansas City

Disinterested , disaffected adolescents idolozing demons
Pentagrams and crucifixes six six sixs
Pent up rage at distant church steeples
Wishing lightning bolts at angels so said steeples topple

Drug dealers doling dope in dimes
Its a life style baby no emotion no excuses
Its a get by life through guile and guns
Keep us fucked up, keep us thinking this is fun

Dissatisfied drunks dropping out of school
Discombobulated drunks dropping off of porches
Like live fast, die young dreams to fruition
Like I've seen the best minds of my generation...

A city lacking substance, a scene lacking cause
Pentagrams and pot, beers and bongs
Spray paint, crumbling curb, twisted tweaker, vulgar bum, stray cat, and a blood smear
Stay not or you will rot like abandon hope all ye who enter here
A city mind numbing, back breaking, drunk biking, blacked out then sleeping
strung out and hungover, bummed out and looked over
Bracing themselves for another night drunk over

Down by Law(s of Nature)

aka "New twists on old ramblings"

“It's gone on like this, for three years I guess.
We're drunk all the time, and our lives are a mess.”
-Mountain Goats

Grandparents drown in nostalgia, wondering where their heros went, while kids drown in drugs trying to keep up with their heroes. Dad is stranded in an ocean of debt, treading water, while mom dives and searches for the bottom after the sinking of their marital maritime vessel. Her lung compacity is astounding. She holds her breath and swims down and down. Down through Zoloft, through t.v., pop culture, debt, and her son. Always and forever downward. The son will be gone soon though. He has given up on money, pop culture, television, Zoloft, divorce, marriage, heros, parents, and grandparents. His faith remain in drugs, beer, sex, doomed relationships, and the friends that make it all possible.

Paint a rose on my nose and hand me my rightful crown. I'm the King of the Pits and I can't be usurped. Ruling over my kingdom of the disowned tar-eyed citizens with utter apathy, nothing will change. If it did we'd be refugees and somehow worse-off than before. How do you kill a hermit? Banish them to society.

While I'm at...

Grant me the slumber time contentment
that escapes me in the day
And the waking hour happiness
that we all deserve

Sitting outside the Half & Half cafe, just off the Damen stop in Chicago. Drinking a red-eye, coffee and espresso in one glorious cup of pick-me up, and its the first thing I've been able to buy myself for a week. Seeing this city without a pot to piss in, a window to throw it out, or a single dollar to pay the fine for improper disposal of waste has convinced never to move here.
As I sit contemplating the events that lead me here I look up from my cup to see a male to female transvestite walking by, designer from head to toe, the clothes and the body, heading toward the train stop. Some fixed-gear freaks sitting next to me, surrounded by mirror images of himself: chrome bags, tight shirts, and rolled pants, ventures to call out to him/her "What up, man?" I couldn't help but smile to myself at his impeccable execution, both consanants of his accusation drawn out by a fraction of a second and the slightest increase in pitch on the n made sure no one could miss the attack. His goony friends began to chuckle and without missing a beat, niether startling nor turning to face her attacker, she began to give a Vogue worthy strut down the strip of crumbling concrete that was her runway. As she reached the stairs leading up to the trainstop, she pirouetted in true supermodel fashion before continuing up the stairs. If it was an afterthought or the finale of her original master defense plan I couldn't say, but half through her ascent she stopped, turned the group as I observed from my cooling cup of coffee, and her hands grasped the sides of her skin-tight black shirt. The hands, still gripping, began to move toward the sky and the shirt followed, exposing a chiseled six-pack, ribs visible beneath the skin but not so much as to look unhealthy, and as we watched wondering when this display would have run its course, the shirt continued up until her too perfect breasts failed to drop from beneath the shirt but revealed themselves, too proud and too full of silicone, too big and too firm, to us and the laughter of the gear-heads stopped, jaws dropped, and she walked off to finish her day a winner.

Neither Accepting Nor Rejecting

Jiddu Krishnamurti, born in Colonial India to a Brahmin family and raised by Charles Webster Leadbeater of the Theosophical Society, rejected his pampered upbringing after he experienced what he later called "the process". The Theosophical Society had expected Krishnamurti to fulfill the role of a long-awaited World Teacher and had groomed him from childhood specifically for this role. At the age of 27 Krishnamurti began to experience a feeling of immense pain in his neck accompanied by a hard swelling. His symptoms worsened from day to day, coming to include delirious ramblings, loss of appetite, and others until he appeared to fall into unconsciousness, although Krishnamurti recounts that he was fully cognizant during this time. This first experience of "the process" was followed by a sense of "immense peace", and a recounting of having experienced divine bliss. His experience of the process would happen on an almost nightly basis for the next two months, and intermittently from then on. Krishnamurti's experience proved to be a spiritual happening all his own; a path to some sort of enlightenment taught to him by neither theosophists, priests, nor gurus. To be taught of spiritual matters and paths to higher consciousness by a society ones whole life and to then experience one never mentioned by them must have been jarring to say the least.
Because of this, Krishnamurti chose the dissolution of the Order of the Star, a branch of the Theosophical Society created in his honor stating that the moment a person chooses to follow another on their path to mental and spiritual freedom they have ceased to follow the Truth.

Yesterday morning, while pouring boiling water on my coffee, the kettle's stream found its way from the french press holding my coffee grounds to my right hand holding the press. I heard the hiss of hot on cold and imitated it with a sharp inhalation, "Tsssss," before I realized what had just happened. Whether I muttered "fuck" or saw the already reddening skin of my hand first I could not say, but immediately afterward my mind slipped into a sort of meditation whose source I cannot readily identify, but that has been my reaction to pain for quite some time.
To say that I began to concentrate on the pain comes close to summing up this meditation, but it does not capture the true essence of it. As the hue of my burnt skin continued to darken, rather than letting pain overwhelm rationality, I found myself looking at the skin, watching its transformation and by caressing it with my left thumb felt its rough texture become smooth. More importantly though, as the red turned to maroon turned to rust, I set my awareness not on the pain, but on the sensation of pain; on the relationship between skin, nerves, brain, and the communication occurring between the three, telling me to hurt. After about a half minute of simply observing the pain, it began to become just another feeling, neither enjoyable or not.
I convinced myself of nothing, not trying to brain wash myself into believing this tingling that should have seared felt good and not trying to ignore the screaming voice of a million years of instinct urging me to recoil from pain. In this space between acceptance of my pain and denial, there was solace. There was a calm set aside from the judgement of my physical feelings. It was a somewhat eerie calm. The coffee steeped in its water unaffected, my roommates slept in their beds undisturbed, and the world moved on unaware of my pain and unaware of my accomplishment.
It was in this silence that a quote that had sat at the back of my mind for weeks, thrusting itself into my consciousness in between thoughts, made yet another appearance. When the words to a song could not be recalled, there it was. When my worst depressions overwhelmed me with embittered thoughts and gave me but one second of silence before starting on a new barrage, there it was. When things were alright and when things were fucked, this riddle of a quote would baffle the extent of logical dissection and its optimistic mystery would pull me through with its simplicity.


During a brief period of free time a few weeks earlier I had found myself watching videos of speeches given by one J. Krishnamurti, having remembered the name after watching Zeitgeist: Addendum which included a brief audio clip from one of his many lectures. After his dissolution of the Order of the Star, Krishnamurti continued his lecture tours but his focus changed to radical new topics. In his eyes, the only remedy for the problems of humanity was a revolution of the mind. The world could not attain any sort of lasting peace until its population saw past its own governments, religions, nationalities, and the infinite boundaries that they separate one another by. This change was not something that could be brought about from the outside though. It was a process each individual must undergo by dealing with their own mental hang-ups. In order to save the world, we must save our minds. When asked how a person could begin to do such a thing, his response was that we must view ourselves "neither accepting nor rejecting."
Neither accepting nor rejecting. We live our whole lives seeing things from our own perspective both physically and mentally. We have two eyes converting images into electrical impulses interpreted by our minds to tell us whats happening, and more importantly we have a self-conscious telling us what to think about it. This is how its been our whole lives. Everything impulse physical and mental is either accepted, thought to be good, moral, beautiful, tasty, or rejected, thought to be bad, amoral, ugly, or disgusting. So as great as it sounds to say that all you have to do is neither accept nor reject, just how in the fuck does one go about doing so?

And as I sipped my coffee, rubbed my right hand with left thumb, and let that phrase reverberate through my mind "Neither accepting nor rejecting. Accepting nor rejecting. Neither..Nor rejecting..Neither nor." I could almost feel the connection, as my synapses fired and a million neurons that had always longed to touch made that ecstatic bond. A feeling is a feeling is a feeling. An affectation of one of your physical senses is a sensation, an affectation of your mind is an emotion, but we use the same word for both interchangeably. They are feelings. I do not believe it is a shortcoming or failure of the English language that a feeling can be used describe something both concrete and abstract.
To think about it now, the whole experience forms a logical progression explaining beyond a doubt that indeed, there is an invisible disease largely unknown to us festering in our individual minds and as our consciousness collectively. It is every time you are unsatisfied with your reflection, every time you hate yourself for your bank account, every time you regret your past, every time you fear the future, every word you've never said and all the ones you wish you hadn't. When you want your mortal coil to reach its end now, and when you're more than willing to cut it yourself please remember that it is not really you. There is a plague on our emotions. These emotions that have tinted everything we experience are not entirely ours. This sickness twists them to its will, and the only way to remove the sickness is to step back from our emotions long enough to see it growing there.
When you see it it will be a sickening green, gleaming with slime and pulsing to your own heart beat. The veins thinly veiled beneath its thin outer membrane bulge and trace million paths, all leading to nothing but misery.
And even then you must neither accept it nor reject it, and through this ambivalence you will rob it of its power and watch it unlatch itself, fall to the floor, and give one slight quiver of a death rattle before it dies.

"An old dream is dead and a new one is being born, as a flower that pushes through the solid earth. A new vision is coming into being and a greater consciousness is being unfolded...A new strength, born of suffering, is pulsating in the veins and a new sympathy and understanding is being born of past suffering - a greater desire to see others suffer less, and, if they must suffer, to see that they bear it nobly and come out of it without too many scars. I have wept, but I do not want others to weep; but if they do, I know what it means."
Krishnamurti writing in the bulletin of the Order of the Star (The Herald of the Star, January 1926, published in London).

April Showers

There's dark clouds creeping over the city right now. Everything is turning gray, but for some reason it doesn't depress me like it did. It has been maybe two weeks, but these same clouds two weeks ago would have driven me up the stairs and to the bottom of many cans. Packs of cigarettes would tremble in my presence, aware of their inevitable immolation. The gray would have its way with me.
But, having survived yet another winter of discontent, having weathered the storm, having survived the part of me that wants myself destroyed, I see can finally see that the other colors aren't really getting grayed out. The green of grass and trees and the yellow strip of a no parking area along the curb become if anything more vibrant. There's nothing visually appealing about concrete and asphalt, but these creeping clouds turn the sunlight silver and it saturates these fields of suburban sprawl and I find them...tolerable.

Gotta go to work, work all day
It keeps me busy, prevents me from spending terribly too much money, and I'm finally get back in shape. The weather does affect (effect?) my mood quite a bit, but the horrible truth of the matter is that money does so too, and probably even more. When I'm poor, I can hardly find the motivation to do anything. Just..sit here a bit more, should I try to go hang out, find out if the roommates are home, clean myself? No. I'll just..sit here a bit more.
I'm telling myself that working outdoors is whats improving my spirits and I know that it's partially true. But the horrible, awful, depressing in itself truth is that money has such a strangle-hold on my emotions that I revert to thirteen every time I'm running short on money. Text-book depression.

Gotta go to work indeed, time to make the coffee.

Oh to be the life of the party
The big cheese, cock of the walk
Listen to my stories
Speaking skills impecable

Oh to be extroverted
Crazy and flirtatious
Listen to my voice
So loud you can't help it

Oh to be sweet
A dear, a doll
Listen to me
I'll swoon you in a heartbeat

Oh to be confident
Sincere, honest
Listen to what I say
Because it comes from the heart


I know I fucked it up. I had my fair chance. But every time I tried to come clean to you, the words stuck in my throat and resulted in an uncomfortable coughing fit. A sidelong glance at you, caught in the act, resulting in a careful investigation of my shoes. My knees point toward you, hands yearn to move just a few...more...inches. It always ends in paralysis. I would tell you how I feel, but my tongue would turn to stone; my hand would finally grasp yours, but its tendons become taught; my legs would span those last few inches and touch yours if those last few inches weren't so fucking far. Yes, we are friends. Great friends. And it's great having you for a friend. I'm perfectly...content. But to be content is to settle for less than say: happy, marvelous, fantastic.
I've settled for content for so long, and now I know its secret. Contention is the opiate of the masses. We settle for being content and tell ourselves it's good enough. Sure, things aren't great but we get by. We're content. It's just good enough. But I want to be ecstatic. Like when my day has been shit and we sit and talk until six in the morning. It's ecstasy to me. I love your intelligence, your less than perfect past, your ability to make do, your love of books, your smile, your eyes, your style, and as a result..or rather as a culmination of this and more..I love being with you.

I hate that I fumble my words around you. I hate it when I mistake actors in front of you and when I can't think of the book I want you to know about. I hate knowing that I'm not an idiot and knowing I make an ass of myself in front of you constantly. I hate how fucking self-conscious you make me. I hate that I can't picture myself ever having your confidence. I hate myself for writing these things I'll never say to you.

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it

It's common knowledge that traditional Japanese houses were a fairly simple construction using wooden frames and rice paper partitions between rooms. They were easily destroyed by the tsunamis and torrential rains, and fire too on the elemental flipside, but equally easily rebuilt. A caveat of these rice-paper walls that one does not initially consider is the utter lack of sound barrier from one room to the next. Because of the obvious drawbacks of this arrangement, the Japanese cultivated the “thousand paper screen” barrier in their mind: an intentional blocking of audio from adjacent rooms because one could not or wished not to hear it.

There are 1,000 paper screens between my head and my heart, and 10,000 between heart and mouth. As many barricade head and mouth, and we will suffice to say that there are an astronomically large number of pure wooden barriers dispersed between the passages of the the three. My mouth is a gash in a paper bag, and my tongue origami paper steeped in beer for weeks. To try this soaked origami tongue of mine for folding into dialogue is a futile effort, with each fold further bringing me further away from my desired product.

My spine is papermache, and a caricature of its bona fide vertebrae and meninges composed counterpart. It was crafted with enough skill to be recognizable and visually convincing from a far enough distance, but when pressure is applied it falls apart. Take two: it's not so much that it falls apart, or crumbles, and although the word collapse comes close it's still just not right. No, it's more like they compress. I picture a tree being felled in the woods by two lumberjacks with a pit saw. It falls forward, the base having lost the structural support to maintain all that weight, and the sound rings true to me: the creaking and cracking followed by fiber ripped, and I mean fucking torn asunder, from fiber by that awesome downward momentum. But even though I have felt that sound inside of me, the physics of it just don't match up.

This collapse, or rather this compression, starts at the top. Where my seven-times folded paper skull nods on imitation C1 vertebrae, and fails to swivel on its poorly pasted together mockery of the C2. That almost impossibly thickly folded skull gets water-logged in stormy weather and becomes the right hand of a sadistic accordion player gifted with retard strength. He crushes, and the paper mache compresses straight down to my tail bone, clearly making no attempt to resist. I can promise you this though: no light-hearted polka music is created in these instances. My papermache spine becomes an accordion shrieking one tune of destruction while producing no (noticeable) long term damage. When the weather clears, the paper uncrumbles, uncompresses, and some how its shape and more or less integrity are preserved. When the opportunity arises it can and will return to its original paper-masquerade.

The art of discovering the composition of your own anatomy is tricky, and perilous. Do you really want to know what it is you're made of? However, when I began to realize the flexibility (this was the same time I began to understand the risks of my combustible nature also) of this thing that is my wooden byproduct self that I came across a wonderful discovery.

With nothing more than a two foot by three inch piece of yellow construction paper, a common household staple gun, and the patience to fray this paper length wise hundreds of times, I was able to provide myself with a tail. I've always envied and hated that ultimate heart-on-their sleeve quality of animals with tails. The tail acts very much independent from an animal's conscious mind. It keeps an animals balance without being told to do so. A dog does not choose to wag its tail any more than it chooses to tuck its tail between its legs. My realization of this made me hesitant to procede with the “operation,” but what better way to see past all the bullshit excuses and false fronts we put on for others without realizing it?

The tail is there though now. It's most certainly there. It hangs down to slightly above the back of my knees, tucked in my left pant leg. That's it. It pretty much just hangs there. Not once have I felt it wag, and sometimes this concerns me. Because it's not that it doesn't move at all, but from time to time I find it sliding further along the birch tree bark of my legs, moving to my inside thigh, attempting to tuck it self between my peeling paled wooden legs, were it not confined to a single pant leg. So there I'll be, my paper bag face gashed in a crecent moon smile to expose my yellowing shredded pulp novel fragment teeth, showing the world just how fucking happy I am, but I can feel the dry grating of construction paper on birch, it scrapes off the dying white bark with a faint rustling like leaves sound and I have to hide the bark pieces falling from my pant leg. It makes me nervous, because if my tail were to continue this revolution around my leg, from back to inside thigh, and make its way any more forward, anymore around the circumference of my leg, an onlooker would probably mistake this involuntary and unwanted belying of my poor mental condition for...to put it very politely something else entirely. To put it less politely, a raging hard-on running half the length of my leg.

I have a confession to make concerning this whole tail business: part of me wants an amputation. Staple remover: check. Paper shredder: check. But I just cannot bring myself to do it. Maybe this construction paper tail that refuses to play along in my daily game of charades (sounds like...happy?) is refusing me the ability to do so. Sure, maybe. Or maybe I'm just not confident enough to admit that I need it. As much as this paper tail needs the spit ball synaptic messages rocketed through a hole burned into the bottom of this seven-times folded skull, down this papermache spine of mine, and into it to know how to tell its truth, my truth, I need it to tell the truth. And to tell the truth, I really think I need it.

Opinion Letter

I was up at the coffee-shop today smoking a cigarette when I made the poor choice of opening up the Kansas City Star's opinion section to the letters from readers section. Between the caffeine, nicotine, and sheer anger I felt after reading an article refering to pro-choice believers as being pro-death, I felt it necessary to write this up. It was longer (and better I think) before I tried and failed to get it down to 150 words or less, but it's been almost 7 months since I made a post...or wrote anything for that matter, so I figured I'd put it up on here:

Pro-death? I stand firmly in my belief that death is the best thing since sliced bread. Everyone should try it at least once. Or how about you call me pro-abortion; I think everyone should have at least one. At this point, the pro-life use of ideal-twisting slanderously misleading names for the pro-choice faction has become an appallingly accepted fact of life in Kansas.

The fact is pro-choice has nothing to do with death-wishes, murder, or even the acceptance of abortion. It is the recognition that no matter what your beliefs, backed by Biblical excerpts “proving” the creation of life at the moment of conception, they are a mute point. If you are horrified by abortion, don't do it. Tell your friends and relatives not to do it. Write a letter to your local paper's opinion section saying you don't agree with it. But do not think that your non-acceptance of abortion gives you the right to pass judgment on others. We are pro-choice, no more and no less. We will continue to defend womens' rights to make their own decisions concerning pregnancy and abortion.

I do not refer to pro-lifers as being anti-choice, anti-women, or anti-freedom. To do so would be admittance of my own inability to articulately oppose them. If the pro-life movement ever chooses to drop the petty name calling, they may one day have to explain what it is about choice that scares them so much.

Oh and by the way, I'm 21 now!

"You know you've found the right school when that paper gets you an A"

WRONG!
You know you've found the right school when that paper gets you an A, and it's not because your cynical comparison of Maharishi to a Unicorn was taken as genuine praise.
It's decided. Live with life in Fairfield until May of next year and then get the hell out Dodge (...Fairfield). Up until two weeks ago I was enrolled in "Foundations of Physics and Consciousness."

As the instructor, John Hagelin, describes it this physics class is "An introduction to cutting-edge knowledge of quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, superstring theory, astronomy, and big bang inflationary cosmology and their relation to human consciousness."

As the dropped-out student, Sam Klinkenborg, describes it this physics class is "A physics class that picks and chooses interesting points from the aforementioned topics, describes them in scrupulous and yet somehow vague ways without any kind of math to be seen and asking students to regurgitate Hagelin's analysis of how these points related to Maharishi Vedic Science."
I cannot tell a lie. I can tell a lie, but right now I have no need to. After missing the first 3 days of the class, I spent some time catching up while ignoring my teacher's insistence that it would be nigh impossible to make up my missed work and still stay on the same page as the rest of class. Quite frankly, I've been into (into in the hobbyist sense of the word) quantum mechanics and superstring theory for a while now and was at least somewhat enjoying the class. So, I did indeed catch up, and did pretty damn well at it too, and only then did I sit back for a minute to review what I had just "learned". I'm not going to go into too many details though, because really all that had been happening is summed up in my earlier post about "jacking off transcendental meditation". For example, my physics class's first night of homework was "Cite evidence, from scientific research and personal experience, that the practical application of the unified field- Total Natural Law- through Transcendental Meditation produces holistic positive benefits, free from negative side-effects." My homework was to back up a statement the teacher had made during his lectures on the first day concerning the product (TM) of the school he works for.

Longer story shorter, I dropped the class on the last day dropping with a "withdrawn" grade was possible and vowed to work my ass off to make holiday money before I return to KC on the 19th of this month. I've been opening the coffee-shop I'm working at up here, which entails waking up at 5:45, working at 6:15, and then spending the last hour before my shift is done trying to curb my urge to disembowel every fucking customer. WOW! I didn't even realize how much ire I held for the customers here til that came out. I'm gonna have to save my description of the customers, most of whom are Ru's, which is a demographic that deserves its own post.

That's pretty much the current situation in nut-shell. I dropped my class, I'm working alot, and I'll be back on the 19th. Actually, I guess that's my current situation in a nut-shell. For one reason or another, I much prefer blogging about the things up here that piss me off than the things I enjoy. So I'll finish once again with the addition of the fact that I actually thoroughly enjoy many things about this town (cold weather and copiuos snow fall aside), there are quite a few cool people to spend my time with, and I've yet to become horribly addicted to World of Warcraft which means that even if I don't consciously realize it there are plenty of things to keep me busy up here.

Remember Spawn?
That shit fuckin ruled!

Lil Edit: I didn't realize it's been almost 2 months since I made a post on here. Reading oldest to newest, it's pretty clear that my initial optimism about MUM has been slowly but surely replaced with brutal resentment which I credit to my mental laundry-list of bull-shit I've had to put up with at this school already. These blogs really don't even scratch the surface and maybe some day I'll actually take the time to write it all out...actually I was supposed to do that about a week ago for some people getting petitions together trying to make some changes to the rules and required classes here.

Is Enlightenment Attainable?

The short answer is yes. Luckily for me, the long answer is yes followed by 2-3 paragraphs backing it up in a truly A+ fashion. Cosmic Consciousness, according to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, is the birthright of every person. Over the past millenia we have forgotten our birhtright, our deserved state of consciousness, and as such have built a world that runs in seemingly deliberate opposition to it. As they says it is always darkest before dawn. As hundreds of years of night finally break over a world ruled by money, corruption, and expansion, we have seen the first rays of light radiating over the horizon in the form of a meditation technique allowing an effortless state of transcendence brining a new brightness to the life.
And look! Off on the horizon. See it? You can just make out the silhouette of a magnificant horse. But wait a second, look again. Look closer now. Why, that's no ordinary horse! It's a Unicorn! And as you stand pondering the glorious image of a unicorn standing off in the horizon at dawn in your mind's eye, you realize the whole thing was actually just a beautiful analogy.
The unicorn was Maharishi gallantly galloping toward you bearing a message of Transcendental Meditation so you too may bask in its warmth. Like Helios, drawing the sun through the sky behind his chariot, Maharishi Mahesh Unicorn has carried an effortless path to Cosmic Consciousness to our seemingly eternally nocturnal planet. And indeed, as the Sun shines on all objects the same, Transcendental Meditation makes us all equally capable of attaining Cosmic Consciousness, so long as we have purified ourselves. As pure as snow, as pure as Penta Water, as pure as...say, a unicorn on the horizon at daybreak.



You know you've found the right school when that paper gets you an A.

Kaliyuga- The Age of Chaos

Not having a laptop means I'm virtually never in front of a computer when I want to blog. I'm going to get an EEG scan of my brain in 15 minutes so I must be brief:
Here's a youtube link for our final from my first class, "Kaliyuga." and also Part Two.

I have much to transcribe and no time to do it at the moment.
If you ever feel like you're stuck in your place, just remind yourself that the universe is comprised of nine plus one (time) dimensions and no matter where you are or who you meet, it/they are nothing more than viberating loops of string.

Dangit...

When I was laying in bed last night I had an idea for a post that I actually thought would be as enjoyable for others to read as it would have been for me to write.

As fate would have it however, whatever part of the brain is in charge of my motor skills either decided that laptops are the devil's way of providing people with the sin of convenience, or it just went plain retarded for a minute while I was at the coffee shop the other day. While I was attempting to unravel my mouse cord to plug it into my opened up and powered on computer the cord lassoed around my vente (read: 20 oz) cup of coffee and corralled it directly on to my laptop keyboard. In the movies computers spark, fizzle, and smoke when these kinds of things happen. It's about ten times more aggravating in real life though because it just up and shuts off. No theatrics, just one minute it's your desktop on the screen and the next it's black. Kind of like life...if coffee could instantaneously kill you I guess. As if spilling coffee on my laptop wasn't enough of a dick-slap from god, within the next 8 hours following that event I spilled water on my school notes while still at the coffeeshop and spilled red wine on the white carpet in my room.
I've been letting the laptop "air-dry" for the past few days with no success. When I got back to my room from class today there was actually a light flashing on it. Me, being my ever-optimistic self, thought for a minute that my luck had changed and if I just plugged in the power it would magically work. I was wrong. It turns out the universe is a dark, cold, and lonely place and we all die in pain.

The point is, I was GOING to make an awesome post last night that I just KNOW you would have loved. Unfortunately, the lack of a laptop, the fact that the school library is only open til 9 p.m. (this actually makes it one of the most "night-owl" friendly buildings in the entirety of Fairfield,) and my bedtime is somewhere closer to the 11:00-1:30 range, means that what you're getting instead is a blog about the amazing blog you could have gotten last night. If only I could remember what it was...

That's made out of sand.
At least cool things are happening somewhere in the world...
kill me now!

More Frustration and More Fruition

Well, it just came to my attention that I've already lost my class schedule for this next year. I happened to catch the student adviser a few days ago and got to go over my open blocks for this next year and I must say, ended up with at least a few gems. Lots of basic stuff like Science of Creative Intelligence (a full month devoted to jacking off about Transcendental Meditation. The class is a month of watching Maharishi giving speeches in the 70's and then restating it in 2-3 paragraphs while touting TM and bashing on other meditation techniques), Maharishi Vedic Science (so far as I can tell the same as Science of Creative Intelligence), Composition (I have nothing to add here, but feel like I should add parentheses again), Bee-Keeping Certification (fucking sweet), Biointensive Agriculture (how much food can you grow in your own 10x10 raised garden), Something about Green Architecture, and other necessity classes.
I'm mostly just pumped about the bee-keeping and biointensive agriculture but wanted to bitch about SCI and MVS. My homework tonight was 2-3 paragraphs comparing the results of a paper called "Differential Effects of Relaxation Techniques on Trait Anxiety," which sounds like a highly intellectual piece of work and probably is. Unfortunately, the only section reprinted for us was a paragraph composed almost entirely of trivial details about the test environment and one sentence stating "Transcendental Meditation had significantly larger effect size, and meditation that involved concentration had significantly smalled effect." My homework was to write 2-3 paragraphs about that single sentence. I had to jack-off Transcendental Meditation once again.
The part that really got my brain reeling about what is being passed off as sound scientific education is the fact that at the bottom of the single xeroxed page we were given from this article is a cut off sentence starting with "While positive results often have been reported, it has not been established conclusively whether any of these procedures are more effective than others or whether,-". Comma, nothing. Or whether WHAT!? Or Whether Kenneth R. Eppley and Allan I. Abrams were conducting this test on a grant from someone with vested interests in TM? Or whether some patients were secretly dosing themselves before the tests? Or fucking what!?

I started on another rant a second ago but kind of lost steam...it's really really weird being tired at midnight. You get the point.

I'm thinking about being Tony "Raja Ram" Nader for Halloween.

What the FUCK

am I doing here?

Mixed emotions, good new habits, and bad old habits are the name of the game these past 7 days. If this last week isn't testament to the duality inherent of reality, I don't know what is.
Fairfield is a beautiful little town and with little Iowa towns comes that little Iowa silence. No more sirens and parties carried on the wind, just that unmistakable screech of semis on asphalt and trains ripping through the middle of town.
The weather has been far from anything worth complaining about: mid-80's all week with low humidity and sunny skies. And about 40% of the kids around here are of the amiable type, more than willing to partake in small talk and enter into that form of acquaintanceship that warrants a sincere "how's it going?" when you walk past them on campus or in town. The nights dip down into the 70's and feel great as long as you planned ahead and put on an extra layer before venturing out. They sell 40 oz's in Fairfield, and I've been making up for many missed opportunities to drink 40's in this past week. There's one making its way through my liver right now in fact.

But the night-time is also when I start to doubt my ability to live here for 4 years. From what I can tell the only people active in this town after 9 p.m. are the home-brahs of Fairfield and the Ethiopian kids that smoke cigarettes en masse in the parking lot and cast glares that make me feel like dying every time I walk past them. Ya, the 40% of kids are awesome and easy to coexist with, but the other 60% of the students and probably 90% of the townies in Fairfield have such a propensity for that death glare that I have to debate whether or not reaffirming my social pariah status is worth a cup of coffee before I venture out into town.
Being a smoker in Fairfield is kind of like being an untouchable in old Hindu caste system so far as I can tell. Lighting a cigarette in town and you are assured a ten foot circle of uninhabited space with you as the center. Try to find greens and you'll (at least at this point) end up paying forty dollars for a quarter...of shwag. Go ahead and re-read that last sentence, I thought I'd heard it wrong the first time too. $40 for one quarter of an ounce of disgusting months old bricked up greens (browns may be a better term).

BUT
On the upside, the teachers as M.U.M. know their shit and they want you to learn it. They're not just here to teach it; they want you to learn it!
My first day of Transcendental Meditation training was yesterday and I, after a year of failed attempts to integrate meditation into my life, find myself looking forward to tomorrow morning so I can dive into it again. Take it from a skeptic who's never been able to get into meditation before: TM works. After a 20 minute session you feel like you've just woken up from a good nap, had a shot of espresso, taken a bong rip, and smoked a cigarette.

Not to mention that in September, as part of my Base Camp class, I'll be camping, canoing, hiking, and caving in the Ozarks for a week. And a few months after that I'll be learning physics from none other than John Hagelin, most widely known for his contributions to the documentary "What the Bleep Do We Know!?"!

So yep, I probably left out quite a few points about the ups and downs of this week but drinking a forty will do that to you. Before I finish though I will add, although I think it goes without saying, that I miss Kansas City and everyone it entails to me like hell and can't wait to make it back for a weekend.

My first homework assignment in 3 years!

How is Maharishi's understanding of meditation and consciousness different from the view that was standard in the West in 1958?

When the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi arrived on the scene with his revolutionary rethinking of ancient mediation techniques rooted in the Vedas and Upanishads, he forced the Western world of 1958 to rethink their definitions of meditation of consciousness. In many ways he taught us that the absolute converse of our thoughts on these matters was closer to the truth. The general thoughts toward meditative techniques and the nature of consciousness in and before this time, as well as in the public eye today, were largely the result of thousands of years of separation between the time these books were written and the time these practices were “perfected”, leaving ample time for reinterpretation and misunderstanding. By closely re-examining these ancient texts and the conclusions that had been drawn since, he was able to form what has come to be known as Transcendental Meditation- a return to a purer more effective form of meditation than the arduous, exclusive, and often mystic forms that had formed throughout history.

In a time when meditation was an esoteric tradition reserved for practitioners of foreign, generally Eastern, religions to transcend the physical world or empty the mind of all content and emotion, Maharishi proved that in actuality meditation is a natural tendency of the mind that may be perfected with minimum effort and requires no subscription to any one religion or belief system. Meditation had gone from a harnessing of an already present mental process to promote full functioning of the brain and nervous system to a rigorous, often self-depriving, system of mind reprogramming entailing years of pain-staking practice, and even then results were not guaranteed. Rather, Maharishi taught us that the task is effortless and fail-safe. Its very effortlessness is what guarantees its results.

The results of these meditation techniques at the time, given their metaphysical or supernatural nature, were also considered to be beyond the realms of scientific and mathematical quantification. On the contrary, because the results of Maharishi’s meditation, Transcendental Meditation, are natural in every sense of the word and happen on a conscious and subconscious level (to a large degree the desire of meditation is a better cohesion between the two,) the results can and have been proven in more than anecdotal form with the advent of brain-monitoring technology. Therefore, the idea of meditation as a form of access to altered states of conscious has given way to meditation as access to healthier more aware states of what could be called normal, or control, consciousness rather than entirely new forms thereof.

...I hate writing conclusions. Seriously, if your memory is so bad you need a recap of what you just read, re-read it! Luckily it's not technically an essay question so I think I'll be okay.

T-Minus Negative 9 Hours...

and counting.

Day one at the Maharishi University of Management. A socially awkward (read: retarded) freshman at an incredibly tight-knit private school in rural Fairfield, Iowa hoping to get a degree in sustainable living as quick as possible and get the hell back home. Until seven a.m. this morning, I was a twenty-year old barista living in Kansas City, working in Johnson County, and making a point of hanging out with friends and fucking with strangers. Six hours before that I was forced to say good-bye to the only girl I've kinda-sorta liked (bullshit, I love her,) in a long time while we re-assured each other that it's not even a big deal.
Kansas City, Missouri to Fairfield, Iowa: you take 35-North to 34-East and just keep driving until you get there. Right around four hours, depending on traffic. Sure as shit, not even a big deal. Two steps, a few hours. Position yourself within two feet of her, take one sure-footed step forward, and push your lips against hers. One to two seconds...depending on traffic. That's not a big deal.
Indeed, not a big deal. It's everything else that amounts a big, depressing bum deal that has officially been dealt and now I'll have to deal with. I'll apologize in advance; I've been reading Tom Robbins and have a bad habit of thinking/writing like whoever I'm reading: Newton dropped the bomb of gravity as god, the ultimate force affecting everything we know, but it's not just her gravity drawing me in. And no, Einstein, it's not just light-beams reflecting off her into my optic nerve that attracts me to her, although your unified field mumbojumbo does open some intriguing ideas. Not just her sound-waves in my eardrums nor tiny pieces of her huffed into the olfactory organs. I can't say for sure it isn't just harmonized electromagnetic brainwaves sending euphoria straight to the brain, but I can say that even if that is the case, at this distant to waves have grown too few and far between over distance to still be effective.
It's probably none of the above, something else entirely beyond the realm of science, or that something else and all of the above. But I believe her body could keep me in orbit without gravity, I would still search for her in infinite dark, imagine her smell with no nose, listen to her voice without ears and I find myself constantly trying to tune in to her waves.
Form and light can be captured with picture, sounds can be broadcast with cellphones. But scratch and sniff is more imagination than marvel, and at this moment, pictures and cellphones are about as legit as scratch and sniff to me. To buy: one NASA-sized space satellite to tune into her brain, suck up her waves, and beam them down on me. It's no big deal, but what ever kind of tiny deal it may be, it absolutely sucks.