God damn it, you've got to be kind.

EVERY GOOD THING:

"Life Story" by Tennessee Williams

After you've been to bed together for the first time,
without the advantage or disadvantage of any prior acquaintance,
the other party very often says to you,
Tell me about yourself, I want to know all about you,
what's your story? And you think maybe they really and truly do

sincerely want to know your life story, and so you light up
a cigarette and begin to tell it to them, the two of you
lying together in completely relaxed positions
like a pair of rag dolls a bored child dropped on a bed.

You tell them your story, or as much of your story
as time or a fair degree of prudence allows, and they say,
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
each time a little more faintly, until the oh
is just an audible breath, and then of course

there's some interruption. Slow room service comes up
with a bowl of melting ice cubes, or one of you rises to pee
and gaze at himself with mild astonishment in the bathroom mirror.
And then, the first thing you know, before you've had time
to pick up where you left off with your enthralling life story,
they're telling you their life story, exactly as they'd intended to all
along,

and you're saying, Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
each time a little more faintly, the vowel at last becoming
no more than an audible sigh,
as the elevator, halfway down the corridor and a turn to the left,
draws one last, long, deep breath of exhaustion
and stops breathing forever. Then?

Well, one of you falls asleep
and the other one does likewise with a lighted cigarette in his mouth,
and that's how people burn to death in hotel rooms.

For the misanthrope I sometimes am..

----

It so happens I am sick of being a man.
And it happens that I walk into tailorshops and movie houses
dried up, waterproof, like a swan made of felt
steering my way in a water of womb and ashes.

The smell of barbershops makes me break into hoarse sobs.
The only thing I want is to lie still like stones or wood.
The only thing I want is to see no more stores, no gardens,
no more goods, no spectacles, no elevators.

It so happens I am sick of my feet and my nails
and my hair and my shadow.
It so happens I am sick of being a man.

Still it would be marvelous
to terrify a law clerk with a cut lily
or kill a nun with a blow on the ear.
It would be great
to go through the streets with a green knife
letting out yells until I died of the cold.

I don’t want to go one being a root in the dark,
insecure, stretched out, shivering with sleep,
going on down, into the moist guts of the earth,
taking in and thinking, eating every day.

I don’t want so much misery.
I don’t want to go on as a root and a tomb,
alone under the ground, a warehouse with corpses,
half frozen, dying of grief.

That’s why Monday, when it sees me coming
with my convict face, blazes up like gasoline,
and it howls on it sway like a wounded wheel,
and leaves tracks full of warm blood leading toward the night.

And it pushes me into certain corners, into some moist houses,
into hospitals where the bones fly out the window,
into shoeshops that smell like vinegar,
and certain streets hideous as cracks in the skin.

There are sulfur-colored birds, and hideous intestines
hanging over the doors of houses that I hate,
and there are false teeth forgotten in a coffeepot,
there are mirrors
that ought to have wept from shame and terror,
there are umbrellas everywhere, and venoms, and umbilical cords.

I stroll along serenely, with my eyes, my shoes,
my rage, forgetting everything,
I walk by, going through office buildings and orthopedic shops,
and courtyards with washing hanging from the line:
underwear, towels, and shirts from which slow
dirty tears are falling.
–Pablo Neruda, “Walking Around”

THE ASTRAL WEEKS RULE IS NOW IN EFFECT.

But I am your friend.

Listen.

Dear everyone,

DON'T WAIT. DO IT NOW.

NEW RULE:

If you knew about Keith Jarrett before and NEVER BOTHERED TO MENTION HIM TO ME, we were clearly never friends.



But I.
I am your friend.

Listen.

Traded a massage for a photo session with a pro today. Tomorrow I'm doing training on two new hirees. Things are moving right along. Thought you might like to see what I've been buried in the last month:

www.cloudbodyworks.com (Rudimentary site, and way too flowery, but it's up.)

My bodywork studio:



(I hung those curtains myself. Badly. BUT WITH A DRILL!!!)



Simon and I built up all that stuff behind me together.

My office:



Avec du vin, naturallement.

My business motto is, "...higher..."



Je suis une badasse.



The end. :)

The Transfiguration
by Edwin Muir

So from the ground we felt that virtue branch
Through all our veins till we were whole, our wrists
As fresh and pure as water from a well,
Our hands made new to handle holy things,
The source of all our seeing rinsed and cleansed
Till earth and light and water entering there
Gave back to us the clear unfallen world.
We would have thrown our clothes away for lightness,
But that even they, though sour and travel stained,
Seemed, like our flesh, made of immortal substance,
And the soiled flax and wool lay light upon us
Like friendly wonders, flower and flock entwined
As in a morning field. Was it a vision?
Or did we see that day the unseeable
One glory of the everlasting world
Perpetually at work, though never seen
Since Eden locked the gate that’s everywhere
And nowhere? Was the change in us alone,
And the enormous earth still left forlorn,
An exile or a prisoner? Yet the world
We saw that day made this unreal, for all
Was in its place. The painted animals
Assembled there in gentle congregations,
Or sought apart their leafy oratories,
Or walked in peace, the wild and tame together,
As if, also for them, the day had come.
The shepherds’ hovels shone, for underneath
The soot we saw the stone clean at the heart
As on the starting-day. The refuse heaps
Were grained with that fine dust that made the world;
For he had said, ‘To the pure all things are pure.’
And when we went into the town, he with us,
The lurkers under doorways, murderers,
With rags tied round their feet for silence, came
Out of themselves to us and were with us,
And those who hide within the labyrinth
Of their own loneliness and greatness came,
And those entangled in their own devices,
The silent and the garrulous liars, all
Stepped out of their dungeons and were free.
Reality or vision, this we have seen.
If it had lasted but another moment
It might have held for ever! But the world
Rolled back into its place, and we are here,
And all that radiant kingdom lies forlorn,
As if it had never stirred; no human voice
Is heard among its meadows, but it speaks
To itself alone, alone it flowers and shines
And blossoms for itself while time runs on.

But he will come again, it’s said, though not
Unwanted and unsummoned; for all things,
Beasts of the field, and woods, and rocks, and seas,
And all mankind from end to end of the earth
Will call him with one voice. In our own time,
Some say, or at a time when time is ripe.
Then he will come, Christ the uncrucified,
Christ the discrucified, his death undone,
His agony unmade, his cross dismantled—
Glad to be so—and the tormented wood
Will cure its hurt and grow into a tree
In a green springing corner of young Eden,
And Judas damned take his long journey backward
From darkness into light and be a child
Beside his mother’s knee, and the betrayal
Be quite undone and never more be done.

ZLAD!!!!




Yes, I am the Anti-Pope.
Like a lion kills an antelope.
Like a hammer hits a cantaloupe.
Like a neck in a hanging rope.
Like a germ in a microscope.
Like a witch reads a horoscope.
Like a cutter stabs an envelope.
I am the Anti-Pope.

NOBODY thought to tell me about Zamzar? FREE online file conversion for every type of file: documents, music, video, photos, whatever... You know all those fucking .wma and FLAC files you can't play on your iPod, and your MacBook won't accept the free conversion software? No problem... NOW.

I'm appalled.

Ho. Lee. Shit.

You will in no sense regret clicking this link.



This is the most ordinary of the set.

Whoa. Whoa.

Voicedraw.

VOICEDRAW!!!!!

I'm sitting here re-reading Alan Watts interviews because I'm trying to find the exact quote where he says something like We are the eyes and ears and hands by which the universe comes to know itself. I can't find it, but I'm startled to discover that this interview says most of what I just wrote, only friendly-like.

I decided I wanted to tell you about day 4.
I am sorry I wasn't able to tell you sooner, and that now everything is different. But then, if you'd been to Vipassana, you'd already have expected that.

Day 4, we received the teaching of Vipassana.

Prior to Day 4, they told us, we were just learning to meditate, Anapanna-style, the practice of observing breath. So we had no idea what we were getting into, really. Well, I didn't. I am just all about the "beginner's mind." Unfortunately.

On that day, suddenly, my bravado fell to pieces. God, each day was so long. The way they are long right now.

Today, in the hospital, I tried to teach my dad Vipassana.

I touched his head. Here. Here. Here. Touched his neck. Here. Here. Here. Here. He said, Ohhh my nose ITCHES. So I touched his arms. Here. Here. Here. A few fingers to a space. Here. "Just focus on where I touch you," I said.

This is the essence of Vipassana. You hone your mind's ability to focus through Anapanna, until you can feel the subtlest sensations on your most numbed millimeters of flesh, and then you use that sharpened mind to feel every single piece of your flesh. One tiny portion after another. Noticing what sensations exist on the skin. Giving no more importance to the feelings of pleasure than to the feelings of pain, or itching, as the case may be. You refrain from reacting. And in refraining from reacting, you break your mind's old habit of REACTING in general, and pain itself becomes a mere sensation, and eventually... you can become truly free.

Just before receiving the Vipassana teaching, I remember crashing naked against the interior shower wall, wet and blinded by soap, crying out in my mind, God, God, God... wishing I had memorized The Sermon on the Mount, trying to remember if the line went, Blessed are the Humble, for they shall see God.

Because I am not humble.

Me, with my desperate need to be a special little snowflake, making little art projects all over the landscape, as if that were not totally self-indulgent.

Oh, god, I cried.

All through Vipassana, poems I memorized years ago--preparing for the possibility of prison which always seemed ever-present, in my mind--popped into my head. On that day, about to enter a state of true physical suffering, from which every single person would leave the meditation hall hobbling like elderly people, this was the poem that clung to my mind:

Now I'm aware that I am alone
in the vast openness of the sea
And cause the sea to be the sea.

Just swim.
Just swim.
Go on with your story.
--Dainin Katagari Roshi