Tiny Thoughts

You don't need to use global warming, or the various wars in the Middle East, as a milestone for why the world is going to hell in a hand basket. Just go to a baby store. This is nothing new new for me. I have an older child. Some of the junk was around back in the day. The latest trend of having a crib turn into a bed is shocking mostly because the cribs are so thick they remind me of overpriced caskets. Remind me to build my own casket out of plywood and to get high school kids to spray paint graffiti on it; maybe it will keep them from spray painting a wall or two.

Cave people probably didn't even have animal skin, if they happened to give birth before a primative knife had been fabricated. Now you need a walking stroller and a running stroller. You need a real crib and a porta crib.

We are getting a few rooms in our house painted. This has spawned several elaborate dreams where there is a painter in our house, and so every scene in the dream has a painter in the background. Having a painter in the background is a good scene filler. In fact, I should just hire the guy 24/7 so there is always a painter in the background. The painter allows you to have an empty room, and an overfilled room with twice the furniture, in no particular order. You can do whatever you want, because you have an excuse. There is a painter in the house.

Ironically, my last post didn't do much for me to change my life. But seeing the Devil and Daniel Johnston did. Daniel Johnston is a singer, songwriter, and artist, who is a manic depressive. The easiest way to explain it, is to imagine Brian Wilson performing during the period he sat in his sand box in the middle of the living room.

I started writing songs before I even started writing songs. When I was very young, songs would come to me, sometimes in dreams. From there, I was hit with a major bulge of inspiration that lasted from 14 until I was 34. However, for the past 10 years, I've been pretty much neutered when it comes to pop songs. I don't fight it. When you fight it, you write really bad music. You can see this fight in even the best musicians.

There is a little Daniel Johnston in every one, and in my case, probably a little too much Daniel Johnston in me for my own good. Which is great, because the movie opened up that channel, which had been clogged with straw and mud.

So the morning after I saw the film, I wrote my first song in very long time. It was a song floating around for awhile, which is actually an idea for a movie. The dream had died. A movie about this person who keeps waiting to go to sleep, hoping a certain dream comes back. Eventually, the awake life and dream life merges. The life becomes the dream.

The song is a bit different. It is about this dream about a dead person. But the dream doesn't come back and is dead, just like the person. And then the song gets bigger, as the world ends, and every dies, and every thing dies. The world will end, and because the world will end, it has ended. So it is very sad. The sun stops shining. The trees all die. The ground gets cold, like an ice cream cone.

What if you arbitrarily by happenstance stumbled upon this post. At the particular time you clicked on, you were just that much more vulnerable than usual. The kind of vulnerability that leads you to join a cult or do something you normally wouldn't do, but you are in that state of mind where you just can't consider the consequences.

At which point in time, nothing in particular catches your eye, but something is jolted subconsciously. Like digging up dirt in a garden disturbs a baby worm and it moves on to somewhere else.

And for no particular reason, everything after that was different. Not different in a way you could say it was different different. But just different in that you had a song stuck in your head (a good song), that made you feel a tiny bit better, and from then on you whistled while you toiled.

I guess it has been awhile since my last post. Frankly, I have been pretty busy, or too busy, and just haven't given it much thought. Too long of a story to repeat here, as I continue to be too busy. Although as a psychologist once told me, I need to be doing a hundred things at once or I am not happy. He was probably right, as I run from work to band practice, to the garden, to the next task...

I was lucky enough to catch "Mr. Smith Goes To Washington" as I was sorting through my stack of papers. That movie and "A Face In The Crowd," a movie where Andy Griffin is a country boy turned media magnet, who secretly scorns his audience, were both way ahead of their time.

So I became political for 15 minutes.

He wasn't in the army. He wasn't supposed to be there. This was after we had pulled out. However, we did have some unfinished business. We had yet to complete all our acts of revenge. So we sent in contract workers to kill those we could not allow to live.

He started out in a small group of other contract employees. But the first day he was on the ground, the others were ambushed and killed. He managed to kill all but one of the others who ambushed the group. A young boy, maybe 12, was still alive. The boy pointed a machine gun at him. The boy started firing, but the bullets just splintered. When the gun was out of ammo, he walked up to the boy and slit his throat.

The saxophone player in the band had experimented heavily with LSD while he attended high school. Although it was difficult to estimate, he had taken acid more than 500 times. Prolonged use of acid, day after day, can create a chemically induced state of schizophrenia. During one of his final trips, he saw Pink Floyd. The Devil appeared toward the end of the concert. He decided he was going to give up acid. However, before he completely adopted his resolve, he tripped one more time. The police found him naked in a neighbor's yard. That was his last trip. He then went on to college and medical school, and was a successful surgeon.

She was the girlfriend of one of the many alcoholic guitarists I played with over the years. Guitarists, like house painters and masons, tend to drink, but so do drummers, and bassists, and carpenters, attorneys, physicians, brokers, and mothers.

At an early age she developed a chronic and deep cough. Something much more suited for a poor Russian village peasant in late 19th century. She was once thrown out of her second grade class for coughing too loud. As a teen, she took up smoking, which only further complicated the life long condition.

The guitarist was quite intelligent, attending a prestigious university. His father was a renowned psychologist. Notwithstanding the incredibly large consumptions of alcohol on his part every evening, he managed to perform adequately in his schooling. They would drink themselves into oblivion each night.

Unfortunately, I was drawn into this ritual on a few different occasions. Once on my birthday, she started kissing and grabbing me. The cigarette and alcohol diet for a young woman didn't leave her unattractive. But aside from her being the girlfriend of the guitarist (he was pretty good, not worth breaking up the band over), when she was drunk, any physical attraction I may have had was soon lost.

We were playing a gig and I was with her around a corner from everyone else in the band. I kept pushing her away, and she kept trying to kiss me. "It's your birthday." During one of these exchanges, the guitarist happened around the corner.

"Get off my girlfriend."

"Dude, I am not doing anything."

He lunged at me with a drunken fist which was too slow to connect. He tried wrestling me, but I redirected him and he fell to the ground. I walked back to the rest of the band, and had my singer friend back on me on the whole birthday story.

When school was out, they invited me to their office campus party. I drank one for every three of theirs. The gin tasted like drinking paint thinner.

A few months later back in my home, they showed up a party. This time she was all over my singer friend. Thankfully, she had honed her skills and was able to avoid detection.

Back when I was in this period of car-lessness, and having to wait at the bus stop, an act that is worth experiencing a few times just for the sake of empathy, I recall a particular Sunday, when the bus was either way off schedule or I didn't have a schedule and had just missed the preceding bus.

The bus stop was next to a waist high retaining wall. It was either late spring or early fall. The sky was especially bright, and lit up the concrete so that is was almost difficult to look at the white sidewalk and the white retaining wall.

I found a twig on the sidewalk and started flapping it against the retaining wall. It was sort of like a very primitive wash bucket bass. I decided then and there that if faced with solitary confinement, I might be able to amuse myself tapping my fingers on the metal bed frame. If you can amuse yourself in solitary confinement, you can amuse yourself anywhere.

Aside from the upper class, and back then there was little else than the upper class and the rest (the balance being almost exclusively peasant folk, and poor poor peasant folk at that), the idea that people pursued happiness was an unheard of luxury until the twentieth century. Ironically, our search for individuality and the more widespread abundance of wealth and leisure time has done little to improve upon any sense of contentment or calmness. It isn't that we are so obsessed with being happy or being entertained, it is that the everyday distractions are akin to being a fly trapped between a screen and a window. Buzzing around, smashing into the glass, smashing into the screen.

It is no wonder then that the divorce rate is so high. People can't get along with themselves, let alone anyone else. So they bicker about meaningless subjects, like money, because one person wants to spend their little pittance differently than the other. So they get divorced, which then costs them five times as much. Their dispute over 100 dollars, costs them thousands of dollars a year, and if there are children involved, helps undermine the well-being of the next generation.

We are all guilty of this. We all have a sense of entitlement, expectations. We deserve, because.

Life is not short for most of us. It is a long pause. In this pause, we find ourselves in repetitive behavior, making the same mistakes twice, four times, eight times, a hundred times.

Over the years, my interaction with the homeless has been intermittent. At one of my jobs there was a guy who would stand in front of the office building where I worked babbling and holding out his hand. One Christmas day I went into work, and he was ecstatic because some conservative looking man had just given him 10 dollars. He approached me and asked me what to do with the money. He was torn as to whether to spend it at once, or use it over time. "Man, I could take the bus 10 times. I could sit down, and the bus is warm..."

Every morning, my short commute these days takes me by a church that is a men's homeless shelter. I see all the men waiting for the bus, most of them going to labor ready, I presume. As most of us know, there is a new kind of homeless person, one who works, yet still can't afford housing.

There is a woman who doesn't get the benefit of the men's homeless shelter. She sits on a bench all night. She used to sell jewelry, using a street cart. I guess her jewelry days are over.

Yesterday, I needed to kill some time, and it was raining. So I went into the downtown public library to read some magazines. The whole periodical section was filled with homeless men. Two men were sitting across a table from each other. It was if they were married. One asked me where a certain street was. When I told him, he said, "See I told you so." Then, they proceeded to argue about who was always right, and at one point they threatened each other to take it outside.

I read some back issues of the Progressive. The answers are so obvious, but unfortunately we need to undue at least 6000 years of history.

Before I left, I used the men's room. There was a guy in the single stall mumbling to himself about smoking a cigarette. He was carrying on a conversation with himself much like the two men arguing over the location of a certain street. He seemed a bit agitated, so I got in and out as quickly as possible. I had seen a movie the night before where a man slit his own throat, and the guy in the stall gave me a vibe that he either might do that to himself or to me.