What She Gathered In The Wood

*



If he doesn't fear you, he has failed to understand you.


*



The thing is, he must fear you, but this must not turn him away.




Then you will have found a woodcutter to build you a home.




*



He who goes into the thicket with spear and blade to kill the hart.



*







*



The last few days of sickness reduced us to laying on the sofa and watching Battlestar and touching each other in the mindless, comforting way that a parent touches a child, or the way two old lovers do, not unlike petting a good dog. Full of affection and tenderness, absent of desire or need or demand or rebuke or reconciliation.


Nor did it fail to heal something in us.



*



Now we are apart for a spell. It is good to take leave from each other from a place of strength and calm. It is bitter and hard to do so when things are already fragile, for you fear one of you might enjoy the distance too well.

There isn't ever any guarantee. The past does not buy you a ticket to the future.


Knowing that, you sign on anyway.


*


The woman has been my great good blessing in this life, all I ever wanted for true and in ernest.


Still, I'm greedy for her and begrudge each day spent without her, like throwing gold out of a coach window on the way to town.



*

Still, I walked the dog on the beach in the golden light of the late afternoon and there was the salt tang of the sea in my nostrils and the thrash and boom of the green water against the rocks and the cries of birds in the sage and I thought I might could live a whole lifetime without setting foot inside a building again or looking at a computer screen or getting in a car.

I was meant to be a pastoral nomad.


To raise beasts and to go on raiding parties against the soft villagers and to sleep by a fire on a wide steppe under a hard and glittering night sky.


*


"uhg."



*


Namaste.



***

just pull this thread as I walk away

*

It is raining.

The woman on the verge is packing up. She's got a one-way ticket on the next flight outta here.

She's gotta go take care of her momma.


*


She is the best human I know.



*



I been sick a week now, coming out the other side of it just as the woman on the verge is going down hard. And now she's got to endure that whole joyful airline experience while she's sick as a dog. And then when she lands she's on the clock taking care of mom.

All I gotta do is lay around in my own mess, missing her.



*


It don't seem fair, cuz it ain't.


*



I think we have watched twenty-seven episodes of Battlestar Gallactica in the last three days.



We ain't no damn good.


*



The wild woman of boreno yet remains in her gilded cage. She passed her six months a couple of days ago. We are damn proud of her.


And the tiny, crushed bird in our hearts that once was hope yet stirs, flapping its crippled wings and bleating, turning in circles, somehow still stubbornly alive.


You don't get to choose what happens. You just get a say in how you carry on about it.



*


It is a sweet kind of sadness to sit in a quiet house while the rain falls all around it and your woman packs her bags and she's leaving, but she's not leaving you.



*

Godspeed, woman.


***



Namaste.



***

love is the engine of the world

*


I'm back home after four days in Vegas. A trade show for guns and various tactical gear. State of the art, bleeding edge ways to kill people, plus gambling.

I didn't gamble.

It was fun, in a kind of nightmarish way.



*


But best of all was coming home again. To the woman on the verge and the bull dog. To our home sweet home and the stillness and quiet and deep, deep comfort of it.

The love in our home will knock you down. It does me.


*


I'm nearing fifty and I'm still a mystery to myself. Mostly I can't figure out why I can't fix what's wrong with me. These stubborn flaws. Bad for me, bad for those around me, bad for the world, yet I can't get a handle on them.

Can't or won't, one.


Ah, well, what's interesting about perfection?


Not a damn thing.


*



Last week I found the skull of a small animal on one of my runs. I picked it up and brought it home and asked the woman on the verge if she could clean it up for me.

Which she did.



Run and tell that, home boy.



*





I'm going to make falafel tonight. I'm craving musky flavors melded with garlic and bright lemon, bread and yogurt and kalamata olives, crunch and chew and smoke and thrill.



*


There is stone at the center of my heart.



***


Namaste.


***

Fighting Fighting

So, I spent the last three days getting my killing on.

Spartan Training Resources founders, John and Steve

This time it was at Spartan Training Resources' Tactical Pistol course. That is my brother, Steve, on the right. He and his buddy, John, started their own training company after running the firearms training for the  local police academy for the past several years.

This was their first class. They invited ten high-speed operators from around the county to attend their shake-down class and give them feedback before they open it up to paying customers.



*

Two-man tactics

*

wounded malfunction clearing

more team tactics

empty hand combatives

knife defense

the dishwasher working knees

Steve handing out some pain

***



I think they're going to do okay.




*


The three day class started with the basics- grip, stance, sight picture, trigger control, etc, and built on that foundation step by step, introducing movement, wounded drills, team tactics, combat mindset, close-contact shooting, all the skills necessary to prevail in a dynamic lethal-force engagement with a pistol.

Then on day three we went into the gym and pressure tested what they taught us, using airsoft guns and rubber knives and dedicated, live opponents to see if the shit really worked.

And it did.

We also got a basic intro to Krav Maga from Eric, who runs a Muy-Thai/Krav Maga/Jits dojo in town. Eric is a certified bad-ass, professional Muy Thai fighter, high-level Krav instructor, former Marine, academy trained, the whole shooting match.


He and his assistant Lisa kicked our asses but good.

Lisa working the tombstone bag with Eric

Eric's dojo, the Budo Ryu

*


There are lots of places you can go to learn how to run your gun, lots of places that will teach you how to shoot really, really well. There are places you can go to learn how to shoot and move, and think tactically, and win a fight with armed assailants. But they almost universally see the pistol as the be-all end-all tool for the fight. Not many schools are working at integrating empty-hand defense, knife defense, ground fighting, and striking into the defensive pistol curriculum. South Narc does it in his ECQC classes, which I took last year and let me tell you, that fucking opened my eyes.

But most places don't have the width and depth of experience in combatives and pistol work that my brother has. Gun guys tend to stick with guns, and combatives guys tend to stick with rolling and striking.

The future is in integrating the disciplines. Just like how mixed martial arts took a bunch of different styles of fighting and tested them against each other- it showed what worked against a dedicated opponent and what only looked good in a kata but broke down in the real world. Eventually a mix of stand-up striking and kicks, a BJJ based wrestling game with locks and submissions, and a ground-and-pound game emerged as the most functional and lethal combination, and that's what we see today in the fights. You can't just be a standup striker, or a jits player, or a kickboxer. You've got to integrate all the necessary skill-sets, and that is a completely different game.

That is what my brother is doing with Spartan Training Resources. I think in another ten years we're going to see a lot more of it. Especially in the .mil and LE world, it's just necessary. It's not optional. I don't think it will take off too much in the civilian world, just because it isn't as comfortable as standing on a range and poking holes in paper targets. It's hard, and it hurts, and most folks, even most gun folks, won't want to do it.

*


I love the fuck out of it, myself.


*


I am really proud of my little brother. He is a total stud. He can kill you just by looking at you, but he's the most easy-going guy you'll ever meet. I will never be as tough as him, but he gives me something to aspire to every day.

I love him like a brother.


Ha.


*



So, that's it from me. No art, no poetry, no cosmic deep-thinking, no food porn, no alcohol, no despair, no moodiness.

Just fighting fighting.


***



Namaste.



***

The Pit

*


I do not have any kind of understanding.


*


Nor can I make progress, nor stand in place.


*


I am dragged relentlessly back into the pit.



*




All the pretty things in the world seem cheap and tawdry and beyond sad.



*



I know that these feelings, too, are a figment of my imagination.





*



Above all this, the sun still shines and the moon glows and stars without number ignite in the silence of space.



*



Namaste.



****

Self-portrait as Tycho Brahe

*


"lotta ins, lotta outs, lotta what-have-yous floating around in old duder's head, man."



*



I read this book a million years ago called "Water Dancer" I think, by Jennifer Levin, about this girl long-distance swimmer, and her coach was called Tycho after Tycho Brahe, because, I think, he had his nose busted apart by an oar or something. Not cut off in a duel by a sword like the original guy.


Anyway. That book always stayed with me. Something about long distance swimming, the isolation and cold and difficulty of it. That and the lesbian sex. It kind of stirred me up at sixteen. But also the thing about Tycho Brahe.

About working your whole life on a thing and being all wrong about it, even though it wasn't really your fault. About working in isolation and quietness and fighting despair and being wounded. Being wet and cold and always going back into the cold dark water. Of your own volition. Or compulsion.

About losing everything and what that does to you.

As practice for the next time.


*


I love the dark night. The cold sea. The distant and pitiless stars.


The sound of the sea and of my own pulse in my ears.



*


There can be no escape for us.



*




Namaste.



***

2011 Year of Our Lady of The Horse Head Skull

*




Another silence is upon me. Advance and retreat, like the sea and like the sea always restless.






Happy Brand New Year.




*




I'm reading Christopher Koch's The Quest for Consciousness and finding it a revelation. Although intended for a general audience, his book goes into great depth and detail on the nuts and bolts of neural processing, primarily of visual stimuli as processed by the primary visual cortex, as a means of attempting to locate the neuronal correlates of consciousness. His idea, developed in his work with James Crick (of Watson and Crick, dna) is that not only is there no difference between the brain and the mind, there can't be, and therefore there must exist a physical, tangible, identifiable collection of neurons and their specific activity that correlates exactly to one particular conscious experience. Whether he's on the right track with this or not I can't say, but I am having the time of my life exploring in such detail the physical processes of stimulus through-put, especially when I keep in my mind Dennet's idea of the impossibility of some sort of Cartesian "inner theater of the mind" where these signals are finally "displayed" on a conceptual stage for the little man in my head- the movie of the external world, as it were.


These signals, and I'll stay with visual input since that's what Koch is laying out so beautifully, begin when individual photons of light strike individual cells on the surface of the retina. The eye does not see anything, it's more like a big grassy field upon which light falls like rain. There is a small, hard-focus area dense with cells, the fovea, where visual input is the sharpest and clearest, and it falls off towards the periphery dramatically. There's a blind spot where the optic nerve feeds into the retina where no visual input exists at all. We don't notice this blind spot because the primary visual cortex fills in the missing data from the adjoining input. We also move our eyes around the visual field constantly, bringing things into focus one at a time- but again we have the experience that everything is clear and sharp because of the signal process blending the primary visual cortex does for us.


On and on.


The point is, that with Dennet in Consciousness Explained and Norretranders in The User Illusion, (among others) is that I have a pretty good grounding in the philosophy of the neurobiology of consciousness, but Koch is providing a hands-on, nuts and bolts tour of the factory, as it were.


It's helping me shape and process my own conception of what's happening inside my own bony vault, what the physical processes are exactly that make up my own deeply personal experience of consciousness, of the world both inside and outside my 'self', whatever that is.


*




It's seriously, deeply, wildly enjoyable to me.




*




What is trying to coalesce is a synthesis of the concepts of physics, geology, biology, evolution, neurology, philosophy, etc. into a whole that makes sense to me. What I'm imagining is a frothy, thrashing sea of tiny random fluctuations in potential energy that momentarily coalesce into complex assemblies that then explode with unanticipated emergent properties that give rise to something we'd call "real" and "tangible." Stars appear when minor variations in the density of helium and hydrogen atoms are acted upon by the gravitational force and those atoms get gobbed together, tighter and tighter, more and more, hotter and hotter, until something reaches a triggering point, et viola, you have a star. Similar processes are at work in the creation of planets, including our planet. Find the right location, where liquid water can exist on the surface of a planet, and you set up the conditions for the basic chemistry that results in completely random, but ever more complex molecules to form and grow. Give them enough time and you get the building blocks of life, and we're off to the races. The engine on our planet is DNA, and it moves through every living organism- meaning we're all basically the same thing- little biological experiments conducted by the completely random reassembly of Adenine, Thymine, Cytosine and Guanine, over and over, world without end, amen.


Our consciousness, our experience of ourselves and the world, also arises organically from this same process. If we look at the animal world we can see approximations of our own sense of being alive all around us. Look at the great apes, the chimps and monkeys. Look at dogs and cats. Look everywhere. It's a continuum. Jesus Christ, look at the wild variety of pre-human experiments in the fossil record- all the hominid species that came before us, or even existed with us- Homo Neanderthalensis fled the scene a scant thirty-thousand years ago.


We are a naturally, organically occurring physical process.


Now go look out at the stars again. Probably three hundred billion of them in this galaxy alone, and maybe a hundred billion galaxies altogether (although keep in mind we only can account for approximately five percent of the total mass in the universe with the stars and galaxies we know of- there's all that pesky dark matter and dark energy we can't account for.) Every five minutes scientists are finding another planet orbiting a star, just last week they announced they'd found one that was in the right location to support liquid water on its surface, and I'm left with the inescapable conclusion that life exists throughout the whole of the universe, in unimaginable variety and complexity and strangeness, but also in utterly familiar forms- because it's the same everywhere you go! I mean, still its true that the vast, vast, vast majority of space is utterly empty, and so are the vast, vast, vast majority of planets empty of life, but there are so many many many many of them that there are probably effectively numberless iterations of earth-like planets that support life something like what we've got here, and therefore, since the processes are everywhere guided by the same physical laws, consciousness is alive everywhere. Not everywhere, but scattered throughout the whole of the universe, just like light, just like matter, just like energy.










*












It's all one, man.












*






So, my plan is to relax.






Have a good time. Eat good. Drink wine. Walk on the beach and in the woods, in the sunshine and rain and all forms of weather. Hold hands, kiss, embrace, get all skin-on-skin. Make art. Stand in the street and scream. Chase bad guys. Shoot guns. Drive fast. Fight. Write books. Doodle and dawdle.


Push away from the table with all the chips or flat busted.




*






I wish you the very best year ever.




Go kick its ass!




***






Namaste.






*




(PS- Go read this essay by Oliver Sacks on what neuroplasticity can mean to you this year, today, right now!)




I don't understand why everyone doesn't spend all their time trying to figure this shit out, man. New facts have come to light... I'll tell you what I'm blathering about... I've got information man! New shit has come to light! And shit... man, she kidnapped herself. Well sure, man. Look at it... a young trophy wife, in the parlance of our times, you know, and she, uh, uh, owes money all over town, including to known pornographers, and that's cool... that's, that's cool, I'm, I'm saying, she needs money, man. And of course they're going to say that they didn't get it, because... she wants more, man! She's got to feed the monkey, I mean uh... hasn't that ever occurred to you, man? Sir? 

"No, Dude, that had not occurred to us."




***