wings of life

In time I believe it will all come to fruition. In time, but I am an impatient bastard, cursed with a lackadaisical attitude on the outside of my insides, and a heart that wants to do everything NOW, in the grandest possible way.

I’ve realized why I want to recommence CultureFlux – why it has been gnawing at me for so long. I am completely, head over heels, deeply, gloriously, unapologetically in love with Wonder and with the people who create it. I wish to promote it in every way possible, and CultureFlux, quite honestly, is the best vehicle I have found. The best vehicle that I have found to bring these people to life in their own words, to show who they are; larger than life, driven, passionate, true to their dreams. True to their soul. I see it. I see it, I see them, because I am them, for as long as I could remember and I want to be a part of it and more, because even as the world crumbles around us, we shine. We fucking shine so brightly that I think if who they are gets out there, even to only a few, it will inspire those few. It will inspire them to realize that while it may not be easy, it is most certainly possible, and the world they want is out there. When I was younger, much younger, I only had dreams. The world has changed – in my life, in my heart, in what needs to happen. THIS is how we fight.

I’ve fought my own battles, a living testament to the power of the mind, I simply chose to live and to dream larger and more beautifully of what could be, wanted so much more, dreamed of being on the stage again over and over and looking at all of the beautiful people and this was the vision I kept in my head, this was the vision I fought for when I had to press the button for the nurse because I didn’t have the strength to even turn enough in the hospital bed to put the bedpan under me. This was the dream in my heart when I pushed them away, finally, and for the first time after being injected with paralytic chemicals because even when I was unconscious I tried to rip the tubes out that breathed for me. Even when I awoke I couldn’t talk, couldn’t even write. Bobzilla, as much as I loathed him for not letting me die, saved my life – and when I woke up, I hated him for it. Fucking HATED HIM… just. let. me. go. away…

Come touch me here so I know that I’m not there.

I don’t hate him anymore. Alive, awake, living, and now I piece together all the parts of my past to make me whole again. Now…

Now it may be time to let go of the past. Yeah, I should be dead, ashes to ashes, spread me in the Sea so I never stop travelling…

So now I try to dredge up the passion, to forget that I should have been dead a few times over, to thrive again. To be who I once was. I’m not going to lie – it is difficult…

But how could I truly live if I didn’t jump again? Of course I am afraid. Of course I am uncertain.

Of course, I need to keep fighting.

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Buried so deep above ground

I look at the screen. Raise my reading glasses above my eyes, lower them, raise, lower… I can’t tell. Sure, they’re better for reading even though they’re scratched, old, these reading glasses with the black/ice blue frames that I bought a few years ago at a dollar store with my friend Tuesday, who is much younger than me and now blind due to diabetes and I haven’t talked to since living with him at Maitri, these reading glasses that work fine for reading but make the font on the screen far too real, far to contrived. I take them off and set them on my cluttered nightstand. They remind me of him and I don’t know how to reach him. He was such a beautiful boy, a strong boy, watching him go blind was more painful for me it seems, but he never really let on. We all just lived there in the hospice, and died if we were ready. When. When we were ready. When they were.

I wasn’t.

I heard about a year ago that he made it out alive, one of the only that I knew and liked, truly liked, that lived. Thirteen dead in twelve months. Fill up the empty space to be made empty again. Hell, we’re all just energy anyway, empty space and light. Tuesday was most certainly light, with his bleached white hair and his street-hustler wit. He could barely see himself but was worried about over-bleaching his hair. We all grasped the most ridiculous things to remember that we were human, remember who we were before…

But who am I now? Buried so deep above ground, losing myself to keep myself alive, but I lived and now… now I have forgotten how to live. It seems so damn wrong, so backwards. I fought to survive so that I can live, wake up early every morning and scream at the day “Give it ALL to me, I’m ready!” run out the door and not look back until the day and night and I am done. I want to write the story of the survivor, the “miracle” as the doctors and nurses called me, but I need to BECOME again, to reach, to fly, to dig down deep for a passion that is buried somewhere inside of me and rip it out of my chest, look at it closely and simply say “Oh, there you are. Lets fuck shit up again, set the world, any world, any dream, any size alight. NOW”.

Any moment now, any day. I mean come ON, it’s not like I didn’t work for it, fight for it with my life, with everything I had inside of me to give and more, to make it through the pain and the days and nights and weeks of wanting to die and just have it all over with to give up now, to forget why I am here, to finally have the burning ends of the candle meet in the middle. It can’t be like this, but it is.

I loathe people who think they deserve things for any reason that has to do with the way life is, the people who say “I gave a dollar to the homeless guy, I’m nice, I didn’t yell at the asshole who ripped me off because I know Karma will come to my rescue, so why does bad stuff keep happening to me?” Fuck you, you’re an idiot. That’s why. You shape the life you live in, you create the world around you, and quite honestly, I think that Karma is nothing but ourselves knowing we did something wrong instinctively so manifesting something wrong to make us feel better about ourselves – and/or, the ways of those who taught us being so far steeped in our psyche (wow, no personal issues with the people who raised me here) that in order to completely break free of them we create something that we know they will never, ever in their lives accept. We’re just finally giving them a reason to not accept us that we can understand. Substitute ‘you’ and ‘we’ in the above diatribe for ‘I’ and ‘me’, and we’re getting closer… but where was I? Oh yeah. Deserving things. Having a “right”.

Inside of me there is a battle between two forces. One that says that I now have a right to rest, but another, stronger one that dreadfully misses and wants back the person who could feel his heart beating with such a passion inside of his chest that he cried at the perfect words to a song, that ran outside of his tent in Austin to dance naked and alone in the rain because that’s what he felt like doing, the person who didn’t let anything stop him from wanting to be more, who loathed contentment and comfort, who was unafraid to spread his wings and jump.

Is that it? Am I afraid for some reason now? Or am I just weary?

There is the language of far too many unwritten dreams inside of me, the insatiable desire to show the world how wonderful it really still is, even with all the shit happening around us, and just simply be the spark that ignites it all. I want to instigate, to inspire myself and others, to wake every morning and KNOW that the world is mine, is OURS. To Fuck Shit Up.

Is that so much to ask?

I worked for it, and goddamn it, I deserve it. So two years in a bed took their toll. So I don’t have the energy I once did because of it. Things have been getting better, I will admit that. When I moved into my third floor apartment I could barely make it up the stairs, but now I don’t think twice about taking three at a time. I look at pictures to remind me of what I went through, and that helps a little bit… but I also remember who I was, just flesh wrapped around dreams, will, and a passion for life, for something better, and realize that at 2pm I am still in bed writing this.

Perhaps this is my wake-up call. The introspective rant that reminds me that I need to write, to run, to live, to breathe, to stretch everything I have so that the pain of it wakes me up again, and I can stretch further without fear. To be the person I know is somewhere inside for me, to be a better man for the beautiful someone who is almost exactly who I wished for. The desire to survive doesn’t end with just simply staying alive, and I’ve gotten to comfortable, too complacent. I am a creator, a creator of me, over and over again. I am a chameleon, I am somehow immortal – but mortality is a ruse. A hoax. We are light, we are energy, and energy never ceases to exist…

Time to tear off these mental burial cloths, spit out the dirt, and fucking breathe life again. It is time to live.

I just need to remember how.

Dreams, Awake & Sleeping

5.6.13

Six AM. I drink whiskey from a cup called ‘DREAM’, a gift from a beautiful woman who knows me at least well enough to know that, and more.  A dreamer, a dream weaver, dreamcatcher. She seems to like this about me now, but there have been those in the past who did as well at first. At first.

Still, just as the others could not be compared to any previous, she cannot be. This is what I know, what I have learned if anything is to not only survive, but thrive. Grow. Teach. Be patient. Above all, keep who you have become but be open to who you could be. Don’t look for those who you need in order to dance, open yourself to find your own. You cannot depend on anyone to let them be who you are, for what is the cost if they spin away?

The love remains. If it was honest and true, the love will always stay, even if they don’t.

Some people tend to judge the quality of a relationship by time. The longer, the better. While in some relationships this may undeniably be the case, it is not by any means the rule. Don’t trust me, remember and realize that I speak the truth. It is not the comfortable which makes us grow, it is the learning who we are. Sometimes that involves vast amounts of sorrow and vows to never love again, but ultimately we are creatures of love. Creatures that sometimes find it in everyone, sometimes take a lifetime to find that we are perfectly happy when we find we love ourselves. Oddly enough it is seemingly always that when we allow being alone that someone comes into our lives…

Show me your soul and I will show you mine… if you’re patient. It has been kept in hiding for so long, so many sacrifices to simply stay alive, to breathe another day, to be able to continue to dream.  Many sacrifices and countless triumphs, but I am only becoming again. I don’t know who I will be this time, yet still who I was is still somewhere in me, and I continue to shine. It is the people I call friends and the dreams of who I desire to be that keep me alive, keep me fighting. I have forever in front of me.

But deep inside of me there is a place that needs solitude. It is a sanctuary built to weather storms, to look up at the sky in silence and listen to the crack of the lightning, the roll of the thunder. It is a place to dance naked and alone in the rain and see all that is around me; see that I am everything around me. Let me have my sanctuary, and I will always come back to you.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The Lion, The Giraffe, and Meredith (…a dream…)

5.8.13

It was a strange dream, one for the books. I awoke remembering almost every detail:

Somehow (a needless word for a dream) Meredith & I were at the house that I grew up in, looking for something to bring to a shindig that Zac was having at his home with KFC and Pabst. Why Pabst? I don’t know. It makes even less sense than KFC. We were talking about a video she shared on FaceBook that was a song redone by….. jeebus, by Culture Club, but insanely dark. The video was some crazy thing where towards the end a woman in it seemed to rip open her head and jump out of the screen at you, very much like the videos that people share that you stare at a spot or something and some ghoul suddenly appears, knocking you back in your chair…

I was looking for a cassette that Aleph made for me about 23 years ago (and I still have, labeled as a name he isn’t anymore – ‘A  ____ Tape’, as I thought that who would like it… when suddenly at the ground-level window to my room, there appeared the heads of a giraffe and a female lion poking in and checking things out. I wanted to feed them something, so I looked around and all I could find were some pretzels, which they seemed to appreciate and like.

Then, a pickup truck, armored in the way you just know things are in a dream and with small protected windows, drove up the incline of my street shooting what seemed to be compression grenades in the air and spraying a slightly burning fluid/acid from it, trying to get all of the wild animals away, as the people in the pickup were responsible for their escape. While this was happening I began freaking out a bit as I didn’t know where Ruby was and I didn’t want her to be alone, afraid, and running off. I ran out the back door of my house and down the hill to the truck, found a long heavy bar and tried to break the driver side window of the truck, which I couldn’t break. I wanted to find out what was happening.

The truck started driving back up my hill spraying the burning fluid, and I chased it up to my house. It kept going and I went inside where Ruby was thankfully safe with Mer. We were trying to figure out why there were a giraffe and lion at my window, and I remember at one time there was a tiger inside of my room. It liked the pretzels also, but I remember wishing I had more to give it. More pretzels? Sure… but what I really wanted was a big slab of meat to make it happy. After all, how often do you have a tiger eating out of your hand?

It was truly great to see Meredith again, but WHAT THE FUCK IS INSIDE MY HEAD???

Alright, dream people – decipher this one.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

5,10.13

4:42am

…and my mind wanders. Quite honestly, it wanders most of the time, but at this hour, when the rest of the City is sleeping and most is silent save for the street sweepers out of my backof thebuildingwindow, it gives me much more of an excuse to ramble.
1 – I miss my tent in The Enchanted Forest. I think of it, Bean, Albert, Baruzula, T and all of the others, human and better, all of the time now, wanting to go back. Wanting to go back to the Grandmother Tree. Back to a strangely complicated simplicity. It was a dance that made sense, all of that empty space and points of  light, just as everything is… us, the Universe. There is no such thing as time. It is all still in my heart as one.

2- I look at pictures of who I was less than two years ago, and remember. I remember and am amazed at the power of the mind, of love, of will. It is not a pleasant thing to look at these, but it reminds me of strength. Is it wrong to inspire myself? Absolutely not, as it is unlikely that I could have done this alone. I try to be strong, stronger every day – but it was love that gave me hope and  the will to live. To live when the thought of giving up was so much more enticing. I have the heart of  a vagabond, a voyager, and that would have been the ultimate journey – but I also love to take you with me in the words I write, and I don’t know if there is WiFi after death. Or laptops. Or fingers.

One day I will, but not any day soon. Hell, I could probably be hit by a bus tomorrow and shake it all off, asking the wreckage “Is THAT all ya got?”

This is why I write my name like I do. I learned about life not through the people who raised me, but in the Sea, swimming, surfing, learning when to bend like a reed and when to fight like hell. I have carried that lesson with me, just as learning when riding a motorcycle with English Don or Steg von Heintz taught me to keep up with the best, or die.

I kept up. I kept up and then some fucking more. I learned how to ride, I learned how to build a bike, and after a few more years… I taught myself to fly.

I fly through words, I escape this pain through love, laughter, and strength. The exact same strength you have inside of you.

What I have lived through is not unique by any means. It is only my life, how I chose to live and learn from it. How I CHOOSE to. I choose to write, and suffer, and learn. I loathe the complacent. I loathe the mundane.

This is a story that is weary and told too many times, but… I was written off as dead. Twice that they know of, more that I do. My Mother made a good person. My Father does not know I exist. YET.

Out of a New Years night they made me, born on a new moon, a dark moon. It is up to me to make it full and beautiful on the horizon.

I leave you with pictures of a man who wouldn’t die and this:

1. BE the person you love, live the life you dream of, fight like fucking hell for your dreams – and start today. Tomorrow is only an excuse of the tragically complacent.
2. You are all far stronger than you could ever fucking imagine.