Merry Christmas To All

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From all of us to all of you.



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Namaste.



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Ancestor Skull Mask For Spring Collection

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Have you been out in the world of late?


There is a deep craziness afoot in it.



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Keep your hands inside the ride at all times.








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I know y'all are sick of hearing it, but I am both:


1. Incredibly, abundantly blessed.

2. Crazy as a shit-house rat.



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I'm having a hell of a time at it, though.





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I wish I was a better man than what I am. Or I wish I'd learn to accept my shortcomings from what I think I should be. Or I wish I'd just buck up and be however it is that my ravenous ego thinks I ought to achieve.


I guess I can just try to accept that I don't.


don't do any one of them.



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How is it that I have won the one woman I love?


What a prize to have her in my life.



It is my undoing and my salvation to love her.



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She is the reason they made the whole of this place, the secret that pulses in the heart of every nucleus of every atom in the known world.



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I am the dark energy of it.



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we are kali & shiva and brahman & indra, and bonnie & clyde and calvin & hobbes.



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we are the world and all its terrible storms.





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Also, rest in peace, Detective Dietrich.  Every day I try to be as good a cop as you were.

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Namaste.




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The Radiance of Disassembly

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In the past couple of months scientists have discovered that:

1. There are probably at least three times as many stars in the Universe as previously thought.
2. Life probably exists in environments previously thought off limits, as evidenced by the ability of a certain bacterium to utilize arsenic rather than phosphorus in its cells. Phosphorus is one of the structural building blocks for DNA and was always thought to be essential for life. No phosphorus= no DNA= no life. Wrong again.
3. Jonah Lehrer writes in this week's New Yorker about "the decline effect." Basically experiments that were done in the past with strong reportable effects, such as, say, the effectiveness of second generation antidepressants, are found to have a much weakened effectiveness when replicated later. And this trend, this "it's strong when we first discover it, then when we go back and look some more, it's somehow weaker, across the board," is being found everywhere they look. Psychology, physics, medicine. It's as if the universe gets habituated to our own knowledge and we have to go look somewhere else again for the key. We find it, the universe takes it back out of our pocket when we're not looking.



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Offered in support of my increasingly strong suspicion that we are living in a magical realm that could not get any stranger and still maintain a semblance of habitability. Sure, things seem pretty solid and reliable on certain scales, our own body-sized scale, predominantly. But venture beyond the visible and graspable and things begin to dissolve. They get decidedly squirmy.

It sort of reminds me of the set design for a play. Looks pretty good from the audience's perspective, but if you get up on stage and poke around, you see all kinds of ropes and pulleys and doors that go nowhere and windows that are only painted on.

It's like how we look back three or four hundred years and laugh our asses off about how stupid humanity was, the things we believed, but we are always going to be trapped in the dark ages of knowledge.

The horizon endlessly recedes.


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Having lost my faith in God, I am rewarded with a numinous connection with the universe exactly as it is.


Vast.

Infinitely strange.

Unknowable as the mind of The Lord Our God.

Plus, it has good food.

And vodka.

Sex.


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Woot.



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I was thinking about my separateness from 'the field of being' last night as I was falling asleep after reading some more of Dan Dennet's book, Consciousness Explained. I mean, I know that I'm not really separate from it, that's just an illusion foisted on me by my brain. But it's a durable, unshakable kind of feeling, this "I am me, and everything else out there is not me."

So I was lying there, breathing in and out, slowly and deeply, and I slowly realized that there was this little engine of transference going on inside of me. I was taking in stuff from "out there" and then I was turning it into little bits of "me." Right? I mean, that's my blood, that's my hemoglobin, my oxygen feeding and fueling my body.

So, with every breath I'm turning a little bit of the Universe into myself.

And with every exhalation? You got it. Turning a little bit of myself back into the Universe.


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And this? It made sense to me. In a visceral way. In a way that my guts understood. That my reptile brain could grasp. I know it's hardly a revelation, or a new idea in any way, but it struck me as such last night.


And of course, the same thing is going on all the time in every single cell in my body. Which is made up of elements that had to be forged in the dark heart of a star more massive than our own sun, billions of years ago.


I was gathered up from the dust.


To that selfsame dust I shall return.



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But I am not the dust and never was.








I am the dance the dust does while the wind of life blows through it.






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And that's good enough for me.



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Namaste.


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crowbar

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It were good.



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We stayed at our favorite hotel and took long soaks in the deep Japanese tubs, got twisted and beat up by tiny Thai women, ate incredible food, and generally made sluts of ourselves.

The fucking De Young was mind blowing.

I don't know how, but we also managed to get in the Mission district, North Beach, Scrap, Ocean Aquarium, and more.


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We went to Angela's gallery. Got to see her incredible work in person, which is a whole other thing. She's doing the work, there's no doubt about it. Got something by the neck. The gallery was closed when we went, but there was a woman working on some kind of installation piece and she let me in so I could stand in front of that art and get blasted.

How cool is that?


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The painting above is from a bar we passed, closed down a few years now. I saw the sign and fell in love with it, so when we got home I painted a copy of it that now hangs over our refrigerator.


Also cool.



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Meanwhile, yet more rain, which seems fine to me. And a last extra day off, and the weekend ahead of us.



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I got insects in my brain.



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Namaste.



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girldance

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I took the week off from work. Tomorrow the Woman on The Verge and I are off to The City. There will be art and museums and noodle stands. There will be long soaks in Japanese baths and Thai Massages and trips to the secret tropical fish store and the Scrap warehouse and breakfast at the Red Door or the Ferry Terminal and Dog Eared Books for browsing and and and. Japanese hardware store. Dick Blick's. Maybe City Lights and North Beach if there's time, but there won't be.


We love us that damn city we truly do.


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It's okay to pretend that you will be spared.



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Namaste.



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And She Could See A Nearby Factory

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The beauty of this world is my undoing.


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Everywhere there is a great unraveling. Ask anyone, they'll tell you. Our friends and families are dying. Our minds are going. Look at what happens: Chickens get killed, dogs change breeds, husbands go crazy, poets disappear in mid-air, a woman dedicates her whole being to the protection of her hands from papercuts, a doll's fishcoated legs are fused together, here a wild woman hangs onto butterfly wings, while across town a different woman crochets three hundred black roses to hang on a wall in a room she does not live in, somewhere behind the salt barn hummingbirds make war upside down, far down in the deep south mommies go crazy in silence, up in the wild pacific northwest a crazed musician decorates her walls with fly-smeared covers of The Paris Review, and everywhere folks are sad as hell.


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What can you do?


You can't do nothing.


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Love for the world is all there is.



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Namaste.



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Fireflies

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This post is for you.


I began this blog as a way to make a space for my writing and artwork and to wrestle with my demons and the things that interest me.


Then you showed up.


And you stood on the edge of the circle of light thrown off from the bonfire I was dancing around, and you watched. Smiled sometimes, cried others. You wandered off.


Came back.


Brought someone back with you. Maybe you brought a chair and cooler full of beers or a sweet-potato casserole.



And this place became something larger and grander than it started out to be.


It became holy.



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So, this post is my dance of thanks to you for coming here, again and again, and adding your particular warmth and oddness to the circle. For sustaining me in my hours of darkness and indolence, sloth, stupidity, anger, desolation, despair.

I am the richer for it and I acknowledge the debt I owe to each one of you.


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thank you.




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Namaste.



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(my god, this post is smarmy sounding. fuck it, though. it's heartfelt and sometimes heartfelt sounds like a hallmark card written by a kitten. I can't help it.)


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Sitting Still For It

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Dinner is black bean soup with toasted cumin seed creme fraiche, yogurt marinated chicken kebabs with aleppo pepper, and more caesar salad and crusty bread.


Thanks, Smitten Kitchen.


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And the Woman on The Verge.



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Mostly her.



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What I love about the Woman on The Verge is that she is as strong and independent as an oak. She makes me feel better when I look at her. So strong. So alive. So creative and single-minded. She's out in the studio right now making a brown velvet coat lined with a blue fabric with white dots. Yesterday she finished her drapery coat with feather boa.

Ever day it's something new.


And the great good luck of my life is that she loves me. Despite how well she knows me.


She is my true north, my true heart, my true love.



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I will die a happy man no matter what befalls me, because I found her and gave myself to her. She is my practice, my religion, my salvation.


And yet a billion, billion lifetimes of loving her is insufficient to my needs.



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My dream life is so rich of late, it threatens to overswamp my waking life. The other night I was a kind of vampire hit-man. Immortal because I was already dead, and pledged to bringing back to life all those murdered by the living demons of the world.

The thing about dreams is not the plot or images, but the way emotion sweeps through you like a great, lost music.

That's why no one gives a shit about listening to someone else's dreams. You might as well describe Glenn Gould's Goldberg Variations to a deaf mute.


It's the goddamn feeling of the thing that can't be conveyed.


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But it lives inside you.


It is your secret life, a second life given to you at no cost.


Do with it what you will.



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Just a reminder, the world doesn't have to get any stranger than it is.


You need only to regard it.



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Namaste.



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Behind Enemy Lines

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Last night I made caccio e pepe. Grown up mac and cheese. Spaghetti with romano cheese and ground pepper and a little bit of cream. Half a baguette to make croutons for the caesar salad, the other half in the  oven and then slathered with butter. Some brussels sprouts halved and roasted with garlic and lemon. A bottle of Opolo Zinfindel to go with.


Ruck me funning.


Simple ingredients, messed with as little a possible. Heaven on a plate.


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I better make something a little better for us tonight. I mean better for us. Not better, for us.



Like that could even happen, Napoleon.




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The world is full of incredible and amazing people.



Why am I so quick to judge and dismiss nearly everyone I encounter? Why am I so impatient with them all?



I carry my hell around with me.




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All I need to do is put it down.






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Yet I refuse.








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At least I eat good.




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Namaste, ya sons of bitches.



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And She Even In The Face Of Guns, Obstinately Refuses To Tell Where They Went.

VIOLETS SISTERS AT HER COMMAND, ESCAPES, BUT SHE REMAINS A PRISONER, AND SHE EVEN IN THE FACE OF GUNS, OBSTINATELY REFUSES TO TELL WHERE THEY WENT.

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More rain yet falls.








It makes a nice sound in the world.






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Time for weekend breakfast. Coffee and toast and grilled sausage and eggs. A day to be still and silent. Contemplative. A day free of any kind of expectation. A day of small tasks done with mindful attention. A day for kindness to self and others. A day for tender self-regard. For yet breathing in the rain-dampened air and for feeling the solid earth beneath our feet. A day free of recriminations, hurry, worry, bother, or scurry.










A day for the world to reveal itself or not, as it is moved to do.



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Namaste.




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