La-dee-da. Time wombles up into a ball and throws itself out the window. Whoops what will we do with the rest of the afternoon? Will the afternoon go on forever? No, the afternoon will no longer be once the time strings past the third story window, glancing inside to slurp up ideas as it descends, passing by cars to laugh at their strangeness and down down into an open manhole cover. It lands inexplicably on the uptown 2/3 platform at Borough Hall station in Brooklyn Heights. It waits for a train just like everyone else. People are fazed by it, but then the the fazing goes out of phase and the time, rolling open and closed like a carpet is just another thing on the New York City train. There is a smelly man who looks at people, and a showered man who has invested time and money in his smell who does not look at people. At Fulton street, some loud young kids get on. The boy who is afraid to get his hair cut likes the girl with five piercings. Larry makes stupid jokes all the time, but people miss him when he leaves. Salt shakers are passed indiscriminately among passengers. A middle aged woman has a parrot. The parrot remembers the middle ages. We're it different times, the sly book reader would be a pharaoh, and the girl's cat his courtesan. In another scenario, Jesus rides the train and the guy who talks about Jesus is simply named Jesus and he looks at people like he's about to say something, but instead he buys a soda.

Doot-tee-do. I see you. Icey ewe. She'll find her way home. Tim-tam-time. Tim is more necessary than time to cook the lamb lime just right. Tit-tat-tang. Nothing tastes the same, but when you're waiting on lines or lives you might not notice the contours of the cucumber, rolling and unrolling in a sushi mat, sincerely defenestrated at the hard colors of the city.

NC Trees

Quick heads up here while I try to convince my lovely little laptop to act normal (for a laptop). I am in North carolina working for the Obama campaign. I will have little time for bloggery for the time being. The trees here are HUGE!! There are a lot of them! I like it. The job's pretty interesting too. Patience wallabees. There will be stories eventually.

Stick around for the twist ending!

Beginning: Meet Larry. Larry is beautiful. Larry loves the sun. Larry loves the rain.

Middle: When Larry is near strangers, he aggressively moves to gather resources. When near family members, Larry restrains himself, and shares.

M. Night Shynamanamanamakumbaya twist ending: This is non-fiction and Larry is a plant!

Hey Raleigh!

Watch out Raleigh, you don't know what's about to hit ya.
Hey Raleigh, just so you know, I should be touching down in about 48 and a half hours. Looking forward to it.
Citizens of Raleigh. Remain calm. I have come to speak the truth.
Greetings Raleigh. Prepare for six weeks of ping-pong. I am aware that your summers are hot, and your people friendly. Please be aware that my eyes are sharp and my wrists supple. I also just got some new clothing.
Sir Raleigh, this is Sir Newo. Show me your eyes, and you will see mine. Raise your chalice, and it will meet mine. Ride with me and you will notice that your eyes are closed. Open your eyes and go wake up Charlotte.

My flight arrives on Friday 10 minutes to 1 in the afternoon.
I will be there for 6 weeks in support of the presidential campaign of senator Barack Obama.
I'll let you know how it is.

Drive and Thrive (lesson 2)

At 10 o’clock this morning I took the Kimball bus six blocks to the Nova Driving School and Carlos, the self-proclaimed best driving instructor in Chicago. It was our second lesson. Carlos is indeed a good teacher, but he gets impatient with my jerky turns, breaks and starts. He also was not impressed with my sometimes lapses from “my best friend,” the yellow line in the center of the road. At one point, in the middle of the two-hour lesson, I wondered if he would stress me out so much that I would ask to cancel my two remaining lessons. By the end, we were friends again, and I had learned to make a slight but palpable breeze with the wheel and the pedals.

Fast learning is exciting, but it quickly brings out any resistance to the subject matter and/or the method of delivery. I have some of both here, because Carlos can be demeaning (de-meaning, what an interesting word) which strikes on old demons, and learning to drive is freeing in a surprisingly intimidating way. For me, that is. There is freedom in confinement, or at least a structure of resistance to fall back on.

I'm more concerned with learning to fly than to drive, and I may have held fear of being grounded by a car. This time I'm learning how driving and flying are similar. They're both about directing what's yours to direct, and trusting what's not. They both involve words starting with "trans." By the way, when I say flying, I'm not talking about piloting an airplane.

During my summer after my junior year of college, I performed a solo puppet show in Washington Square in New York City. I wouldn’t call the show a success, but the few people who saw it were generally encouraging. An unshaven, possibly drunk man told me I had “thrive… drive… drive AND thrive.”

I’m figuring it out. How to drive. How to thrive.

It's All About the Moon

It’s all about the moon and the waves. It’s all about Johnny and Dave. It’s Mr. Mestopheles and Socrates pleading to the summer fleas to leave them alone. It’s the death of a horse. It’s the life of a life. It’s Mary and Joseph talking about the good old days. It’s Jesus and Buddha laughing their socks off. It’s Ra going Ra Ra Ra.

It’s all about convergence and ascendence. It’s all about learning how to fly.

I had a dream a week or two ago that I was spending a day at a university to decide if I wanted to go there. It was a school for psychic skills. Telepathy, telekinesis, channeling, that sort of thing. The first class I went to was taught by Uri Geller. He bent a spoon for us. On the way to my next class I walked through a series of indoor and outdoor environments. The outdoors were sunny and wonderful, with students relaxing and practicing their skills. The enclosures were adorned all over with pictures, mirrors, decorations. Everything was for sale. There would always be plenty more creations waiting to fill the space. They preferred to pass things along and get value for them, than cling to them and win the contest for most dust on their paintings. I distinctly remember noticing a trinket, sitting on a small pedestal only a few feet off the ground. There was something important about it. I felt a strong energetic connection to it. That’s the last thing I remember before I woke up.

Take out the trash, and the ice skating is smooth. Drink enough water and you’ll never have to worry about ice.

Arthur was a disaffected Briton. Arthur was an elephant moseying for grass. Arthur was a tournament chess player and boy finance understander. I wonder where he is now.

It’s been a long and winding road. It’s been an arrow straight shot to where we’ve been headed all along. It’s Elves vs. Goblins. It’s the climbing of the rainbow. It’s the blast into the sky.

I had a dream last night that we were on the beach, and all of a sudden there were sharks. I got away, but one guy got a nasty bite from a big shark on his leg. I wasn’t sure if he survived, but I think he did.

Be a good neighbor and you'll be a good satellite. Be a good nay-boar and yulb eea good sat (urn) light. I'm too fast to explain it all, but it's all about the moon.

I'm quitting my job, and I'm thrilled about it. Wholefoods is a great company- far from perfect, but still great, and working there has been nice. Still, I never really knew why I was there. I've gotten really into eating super healthy, so I'm perfectly situated for that, and my coworkers are great. There are reasons to hang onto it, but not really good ones. The paycheck can come from elsewhere. The social environment is replaceable, at least in terms of the satisfaction it brings me. The discount is nice, but getting paid more than $10.50 an hour would be even better. A lot of the customers are awesome, and a lot of them make me question the idea of the service industry. I'll have more to say about life at the store at some point, but at the moment I just want to publicly exhale.

When I quit in a week, I'll have been there for almost two years. Whenever I think about it, I get a mental shiver (a good one). It's like I've been wearing the same t-shirt for the last 23 months, and I finally get to change.

I got a fellowship with the Obama campaign. I'm not sure how long my involvement will last- 6 weeks at a minimum, November 5th at a max. I don't know what I'll do when I'm done, but I think I'd like to do more for my world and my self than maintain piles of bananas, broccoli and the like.

Possums in the Wind

A flying squirrel cannot ascend in midair. It only descends very slowly, and with enough trees around, it can splay out and soar as a thin-skinned X. A possum is a groud dweller, and when it climbs a tree, it only worries about up, down and around, because across is out of reach. If a possum builds a rocket launcher, the story changes. At first they are only concerned with the thrill of fast up, but soon they take an interest in trajectory and how best to land. Ask a vole the right question, and she'll tell you of possums found crippled, confused and far from home. Ask a mole the right question and he'll say things you can scarcely believe, for in the tactile dark of the underground the truths are more about feelings, and the close is known with inherent intimacy.

A possum from the northwest arrived and said that to fly well, eat plenty of leaves. Ten for every nut and nine for every seed. A possum from the southwest appeared and told of how to dream like the birds and live like a dream- fly by belief, believe by flight. A possum fron the northeast came with a stack of books and directions to find more. Read these, he said, and the airy words will teach you all that is known about flight. A possum from the southeast had a jolly belly, and he said that to fly with elegance, and especially to land with grace, the best way is to be light and to be light you must laugh. Laugh when your possum muscles tense. Laugh when you don't know where to land. Laugh when things are funny, and laugh when they are not.

I chat with the little creatures. I hum with bears and talk with jackals. I do my best to hear their words. They speak of seasons, long rhythms and short ones. Beats, harmonies, convergences. Once in a while, when they trust the ears around them, I hear tell of a few possums who soar in all directions including up- possums who no longer have use for a rocket launcher.

Bring book. Charge ipod.

I'd like to go to Gloucester England. I'd read and listen to my ipod on the plane. I'd go to newly formed crop circles and maybe time it for the apparently famous music festival. I'd go to pubs if I'm still a beer drinker. Surely I'd go to other parts of Europe too. I'd go to Amsterdam and marvel at the bikes, flowers and windmills, and then I'd get high, and I'd marvel at the bikes, flowers and windmills. I'd go to Greece and feel big. Greece isn't a place of small things, but I imagine it's a place that makes you feel big. Who knows where else I'd go. Perhaps you have suggestions. Perhaps you'd like to come along. If you came along, we can talk about this and that on the flight, and you can borrow my book and ipod. We can feel circular and high and big together.

The Wurgsome

Wiggled by the wash, the wurgsome waited angular, adjacent to the bagel nascence, anticipating strips of bacon.

West of Nerk and ssssouth of ssssslither, I bade the djembe all come hither. They roll upstairs or at least get high. Meadowthings might not get it. That's alright. It's allalright.

Wouldn't it be nice to be a boulder, with time so slow and seasons sentences. The moss would shiver colder but the boulder is wiser with its heat, or perhaps just sleepy with its needs. It doesn't sire new desire. It knows the sun and that's enough.

Waffled by the juvsome waiter, the wurgsome whispered to the menu, "what sort of sustenance can i send you? and as you wend down time's uneven river, what would you like me to deliver? menu menu, worth a quarter, what do you think i should order?"

Lists, Mid April, 2008

TO DO
Tell the truth. Tell it often, and with a smile. When you're done, say "Have a good one," or "I love you good night," or something like that. Tune up and charge the mana batteries.
TO NOT DO
Use masochism as a weapon against those who care about me.
HABITUALLY
Notice yellow things, dust bust, ghost bust, say hi to the cat, exercise, feel the harmony in the world. Read.
NOT TOO MUCH
Spiraling unhelpful thought patterns (bust 'em), unhelpful eating, unhelpful drinking, unhelpful smoking, being unhelpful, being unrealistic about how much you can help.
QUOTE OF THE DAY:
"There are as many paths to enlightenment as there are people on the Earth." J.J., Real cool guy.
GOOD:
Biking all over
Friendly customers
Friendly busdrivers
Playoff hockey

AMAZING:
Hot cider (fire to earth)
Vision quests (earth to air)
Buck 65 (air to liquid)
The lovely serpent of DNA and kundalini (liquid to fire)

PERSON I DON'T KNOW OF THE WEEK:
Daniel Pinchbeck, Author of 2012: The Return of Queztalcoatl. I'm about halfway through. Great for buses, cafes, and the abode.

THING I LEARNED TODAY:
It's easier to feel what's beneath the skin if you use a lighter touch.

The Finer Things in Life

Fish noises!

I never knew that herrings were so amazing.

A Persuasive Advertisement for a Ride of Undetermined Length on a Time Boat

Hero comes to save the day, lead the way. In a suit and a sweatpants, your point is moot, here's how I dance. The hero follows the crowd ahead of them, keeping a nice straight spine despite any internal resistance. Toes are stubbed gracefully. The march leads to April, who has flowers and knows her Leonardo.

Eros thumbs through the newspaper, and fingers through a notebook. The hero learns that Eros is the god of chaos. Eros learns that heroes don't just divide and conquer they unite and bonk her.

He rows. He rows because it's his job, and because it's fun. He goes two ways at once- first reaching Europe like reverse Columbus, then across the Pacific like neo-Cook. In France they give him a rose. In Hawaii they roast a pig. They were already there on that little-used beach, and the pig was done at the moment the ship landed.

Cheerios for her, for the earthly bird gets the worm. Cheerios for him as he groggily looks out on the water and sees Madagascar/Thursday approaching. Madagascar is just a way of looking at things, but Thursday is coming whether you like it or not.

Mad at gas cars? Worried about lack of flurries? Step aboard my time boat. The more people on it, the better it floats.

Wonkavator!

It's been a few days since I started another blog, so I figured I better get on that. I also realized that the two posts I had planned in my head were about 1) Hilary in Bosnia and 2) My life as a barn owl. In the interest of a little blog consistency I've started the Wonkavator, where I will be depositing all my political thoughts. The Welcome Cat is for sports and Thank Dog will continue to be about thanking dogs and whatever else I feel like sharing. Thanks for reading.

D is for Do It!

I came across a cool interview in the Monthly Aspectarian with a revolutionary in the music learning field. Apparently this guy has people reading music and slowly playing Bach after one weekend, and writing their own songs after two weekends. I haven't gelled with an instrument in a satisfactory way since middle school, so this was nice to read. It's never too late to become a rockstar.

The interviewee, Duncan Lorien, also discusses the resistance he runs into from people who think that it takes years to become a good piano player, and there are no two ways about it. That makes enough sense. A prolonged study leading up to competence is the expected norm for non-savants. I'm not convinced it has to be that way though. While acknowledging that there are people who have thought about this a lot more than I have and would disagree with me, and that these statements don't come close to describing all teachers, I see these issues with some conventional music lessons:

1) Boring.
"Today we'll start with scales, and if you get those, I'll show you 'Mary Had a Little Lamb.'" It's really not much harder to teach someone three blues chords and "Why Don't We Do It in the Road."

2) Elemental over Logical.
Lorien points out that learning piano generally starts with middle C. It was probably around my 3rd or 4th piano lesson that I could identify middle C consistently on my own. Not bad, but here's how Lorien introduces the keyboard:
If you look at a keyboard, you have white keys and you have black keys. If you look at the black keys, they are arranged in a pattern. Groups of two, three, two, three, all the way up the keyboard....
Now imagine a group of two black keys. When I say a group of two, I mean two. A group of two as opposed to two taken from a group of three. If you imagine a group of two and now look at the white note in between that group of two black notes, the name of that note it D. D for Duncan. Now what is the white key to the left? C. What’s the next white key to the left, B and so on.

"This is Middle C," is an isolated fact. The D pattern is consistent and recognizable. Minds are into that shit.

3) Sequence of learning tailored to piano not student.
That's an unfair generalization to many, but perhaps not enough.

All this is not to say that piano education is flawed (it is, but what I'M trying to say is) if there's something you've wanted to learn but you've been convinced that for you it is unlearnable, give it another look. It may have been the process, not the processed. You now have one less excuse to not be a knitter/neuroscientist/rockstar.

(I'd like to be all three, and knitting honestly looks the most daunting to me.)

The Welcome Cat

While I've enjoyed assaulting you from all sides with every topic I feel like tangoing with, it's time to realize that this is at least two blogs. In celebration of sports, the culture of analysis and silly but meaningful commentary that's grown around it, and whatever wongles I can contribute, I've started a sports blog. I moved the MLB preview over there to get it started. It's called "The Welcome Cat" and you'll find it right here.

I figure I've got one blog going, why not two? Maybe three if I decide to do a separate political one. You are welcome to check it out at your leisure.

The Fates Have Interns...

...and they don't always have the elegance of the senior weavers.

When the Possum Met the Sun

When the possum met the sun, he was deep in his burrow. He was alone, safe from predators, with no need to forage. He heard the humming of the grass above him, and felt the truth in the dirt. The sun entered welcome and unexpected, connecting with the possum at his chest. He wasn't burnt, he was connected, and for a moment, he felt no need at all to burn anything. Not his food or his anger. He had a new fire, more complete and wiser than the harsh wisps and licks he was used to. There was no telling how that light would look out in the open, but deep in his burrow, the possum was wonderful and content.

The return was difficult. He got a sort of traveling sickness on the way back, though he'd only gone somewhere by connecting to the huge sphere, impossibly huge, inexplicably equal to the moon from our point of view. He needed all of the next day to feel normal again. Now it's back to foraging, burrow maintenance and the like, but the possum knows he has a new friend, and he'd like to visit again sometime.

Moonday Marbles

Hey superfriends-

Been having some technical difficulties get in the way of posting lately, but I wanted to drop in and say that I basically went on a vision quest in my dreams last night. I do that once in a while. It was fun. Scary at points, because a rogue government, possibly our own, was shooting missles at us. There was also a potentially dangerous dog-lion, some steep downward climbs and a mean old lady. The good parts included lush vegetation, the rewards of shifting and/or maintaining a perspective at crucial moments, deceiving the dog-lion by using a second door, and becoming the leader of a ragtag group of Oberlin students and Wholefoods employees. Also, I got to meet Conan. He was relaxed and funny while we hid from the missles in a train station. Tremble the Cat woke me up for breakfast mid-quest, and after I got back to sleep, I went right back to the journey from where I'd left it. I rarely do that with dreams, but you can't leave a quest in the middle. Well I guess you can if it's just not all you dreamed it would be, but that was obviously impossible in this case.

Thanks for reading, and remember: Monday is all in the Mind.

Current Animal: Coyote

Been looking at different objects in the room, trying to focus on two at the same time. Trying to see it all at once. Trying to have visual units in my mind that are less separated. Hoping to make it all feel more connected from the ground up. The soil of the senses to the flowers of the mind. Coyotes like to beam their identity over large swaths of the world. They beam it at each other, and at the dens they roost in, the fields they run, the rabbits they spy. There was an old Coyote who I liked to say, "Don't blame me, I am what I see!" Sometimes when we run together, each of us is everyone else, so that everyone's a little bit different, because each lacks himself. When you make a catch, you're back to you, and you want to make sure you get a good portion of it. It's strange how no matter who you become over the course of the day, at the moment you wake up you are only yourself.

Head Fake

The other night I had a headache. It was on the bad side of fun, but the good side of incapacitating. It didn't keep me up. Tremble the cat woke me up at 7ish the next morning and the headache was monstrous. It was nearby train tracks. It was bad conversation that you can't even hear but you know it's bad. It made movement offensive. It made chairs defensive. I did a visualization trick that I've used to wipe out past headaches, but no dice this time. I massaged my temples and did some energy work, which didn't kill it, but was enough to get me back to sleep.

When I woke up it was Tylenol Time. My understanding of pain-killers is that they shoot the messenger, not the message. Whatever was a problem is still a problem, but at least now you can't feel it. With that in mind, I told my body to try and work out whatever issues it was having while I blocked the pain with drugs. Shook out two pills, and already had the water ready to go (had been sipping since the night before). As I was about to take the first, I noticed my headache slipping away. I've noticed that with other drugs too- sometimes they hit you just before they hit you.

Just for kicks, I faked taking the pills to see what would happen. I picked up the first, pretended to swallow it, then repeated the process for the second pill. The headache was gone in 5 minutes. It didn't come back. The pills are still on the table.

The placebo effect is not something restricted to the control group of clinical trials. It happens every time your body expects something and reacts accordingly. More than a few sparrows and giraffes have trouble opening their noses to certain ideas about this. People can get drunk, pass out, even throw up from non-alcoholic beer as long as they think it's alcoholic. People on strong medications often develop side-effects not associated with the med (the "nocebo" effect). One person even cured his real measles by pretending to fling them off with a fake magic wand. Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself here. All I'm saying is that I got the effects of Tylenol by pretending to take it. I kept the song and dance, I just took out the actual drug. Drugs work, but it's not just chemistry- if it is then what the hell is up with the guy throwing up in the trash can after 5 O'douls? Bodies know how to heal themselves, they just need to be convinced that this is the time and place, and drugs can help with that. (So can other things.)

There's more to say about this, but I'll leave it at that for now. Rock over London. Rock home Chicago. Avocados: where would you be without them?

The Orphanage

On the way there, I pointed out a billboard for a new history channel show about life after humans. It seems the history channel has become expert at the important skill of remembering the future. The guy driving- I wish I could remember his name- said, "It's like we're over ourselves. We're ready for the next thing." We made jokes about how the human condition has been done, played, the horse is dead- you can show reruns, but there's no need to keep beating it.

Horse aside: A lot of expressions were once something you might say literally in the context from which it came. What I want to know is, was there ever a time when someone might say, "You're wasting your energy Jim, that horse is dead." When is it a good use of energy to beat a live horse? This isn't an animal rights thing, I'm just confused. I guess it could be about horse racing. Maybe it's such a good expression, that after the first time someone said it, it's rise to idiomatic stardom was unstoppable. I wonder if it will fade as horses occupy less time in the media and our minds. A lot of their camera time came from being "noble steeds," but these days are steeds are made of metal, eat gasoline intead of hay, go really fast, and usually don't get named by their owners. So what's happened to the cowboy? I'm not sure, but I'll say this: Last night I watched a few hands of professional poker. Cowboys outnumbered non-cowboys 3.5 to 2.5 (one guy had a mixed aesthetic).

We arrived at the Orphanage. It's capitalized, because it's not actually a place where parentless children eat porridge and are in bed by 8. It's a place on the south side of Chicago where on Sundays, you can pay $10 at the door and then spend the rest of the night enjoying amateur bands and yummy, mostly vegan food. A girl tossing a flag around, sometimes to the music, sometimes to her own beat, says "Welcome to the Orphanage," when you come in. The bands I saw were talented and expessive. The dance floor was generally occupied by just 1 or 2 people, but they all put on great shows. The first dancer was a fantastic hula-hooper. She had a fluidity and trust with the hoop that reminded me of some pairs of swing dancers I've seen. Next up was an older guy in a mostly young crowd. He was also the only dark-skinned black person there. He had been sitting alone on one side of the room until he got up to dance. He boogied his heart out, loving the music and the attention. If you'd tweaked the context a little- made him your uncle, made it your high school, tinged the environment with more negative judgement- it could have been a cringe-worthy affair. But it was a relaxed place that offered a respite from the snerks and sneers of some other worlds. I heard somewhere that your body needs waking rest in addition to sleep. The Orphanage rested a part of me that I can't put my finger on, but was probably working overtime. Humans have been mapped over and over, but some muscles you don't know about until they relax.

Beezlehop and Sneezlepop

Beezlehop and Sneezlepop
Walked into a something shop
"Have you any Nothing?" Beezlehop asked the shopkeep
"There's no Nothing at the Something Shop," she replied, fast asleep.
An eavesdropping salamander said "I've had nothing for days.
If something's what you want, perhaps we can make a trade."
The salamander all is life never had a better day,
He kept things green and purple, and gave the rest away.
Beezlehop and Sneezlepop walked away with nothing.
Free from all the silly things over which they'd interacted.
Free from everything that had kept their love distracted.

MPD

There are intelligent and knowledgable people who doubt the very existence of something we can define as Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD). To them, MPD is a fake. The line drawn around it is incorrect. It doesn’t actually follow the observed energy flows. The patterns that are gathered up disperse at the slightest thing in all different directions.

If I recall correctly, it has little neural consistency- multiple identities welcome various brains, and the neuroanatomists of the world have been unable to draw a picture of what your brain looks like when there is more than one person in there. Furthermore, some people who have it seem to defiantly challenge sense. They have 1000 personalities. One of them’s a duck. Two are Abe Lincoln. As they go through their day, their minds are like the House of Commons on a bad day with some comic book characters thrown in. You could make a good case for not bothering with the specific symptoms, and just calling them crazy.

To me, MPD is real enough, it’s just more mind than body. To some, perhaps including some of the aforementioned neuroanatomists, minds are less real than bodies. I think that focus has helped advance Western medicine by leaps and bounds, but it is time to start filling in that medical blind spot called the mind. (That might be a little harsh, but remember, among neurologists, Oliver Sacks is the exception, not the rule.) Many physical issues merely reflect unsolved mental problems, as the body tries to cope with clashing instructions from the mind. Perhaps MPD is the mental reflection of a spiritual crisis. The soul needs to express itself, and if the mind won’t let it, there will be tension, friction, a buildup of energy. One can only sustain so much. Clouds burst, dams collapse, or maybe drainage systems are installed or some of the flow is rerouted, perhaps into an alternate personality.

MPD is an extreme case- most people find less jarring ways to be more fully themselves (and that issue is virtually universal among humans). Those who define these things, and those who use those definitions may do better to call MPD a solution, not a problem. The problem is whatever required a second personality to solve. Whatever therapies are used should look toward finding a solution that harmonizes better with the person and the world around them.

What did we look like to the gemsbok?

The gemsbok believe in nothing. They shoo each other away with their horns. They play the piano while the sun sets. When the sun sets on the gemsbok it leaves them in a pitch black African night. There is nothing but darkness and the wishes of the wind and the light step of predators, and the gemsbok believe in nothing.
Some years ago I was at the Museum of Natural History on the Upper West Side with Jarnow the Penguin. We walked amongst the African mammals. Speaking at and to them. A few creatures hanging out and acting natural in their natural habitat. A day in the life. The monkeys permanently playful and relaxed. The lions and tigers never asleep.
We reached the gemsbok. They are savannah mammals similar to oryx and gazelles, with long horns that could spell the end of anyone who became acquainted with them. All the other animals had been angled toward each other. They were interacting in one way or another. The gemsbok were different. They stood in formation with the middle one in front, and the other four fanning behind. They stood straight ahead looking out the glass like they could see us. Sentry to the painted grasslands behind them, all day watching humans walk over, look at them, make noises muffled by the glass, and walk away. Jarnow said: “We are gemsbok. We believe in nothing.”

Plantalk

It’s good to commune with planty things. They sing wallows at your knees. They snangle to the breeze. They gobble up the sun and dance in the rain. They help out bees and live on trees. They know shit. In our world of synthetic caves where we dwell, eating honey and pawing at salmon, we have more control over the elements we experience, and our bodies are keeping an eye out for dinosaurs (I know I know) and staking out territories and mates. Sure our minds are incomparably different from the other creatures but our bodies are not so different. There are a few unique physical attributes of the human being. Upright, good at throwing, etc. Those made it advantageous to become super smart over the next however many thousands of years. The platypus’ situation back in primordial times made it advantageous to be an egg-laying mammal with a duck bill and a poison foot. All in all I like our deal better, though I can think of more than a few dicey situations that would have been solved by a poison foot.

Our bodies may know flora and fauna in ways minds don't. To minds, poison feet belong in punchlines and comic books. Plants supposedly slurp up CO2 and produce O2. I guess that makes them pretty C removers. Bodies ain’t so wordy-termy-mathy. Human bodies have relationships to the other beings that may be disfigured by over-labeling. That doesn’t matter as long as you can put those words in the laundry hamper long enough to talk. That’s a good way to wash off potentially infectious meanings. It's enjoyable maintenance

Current animal: Bear

I am a bear.

I wander my heated cave, eating raw honey and talking to the cat. I do stuff with my mind and fingers. I dream big. Inside I am awake, but outside I sleep, and I dream of life in front of a podium and infinite confetti. Outside I am awake, but inside I sleep, and I form a new animal to be when I find the pattern to this labyrinth. The bear thing appeals to me, and it's found a home in my solar plexus, but the inner shapeshifter calls, and if I'm going to sprout wings I ought to find a more aerodynamic body.

To bear or not to bear. I can't bear it. Bear with me. It's hibernation in high bear nation. It's too bad our friend was eaten by bears. Bear in mind that we will need 14 ball bearings to cross the bearing strait. Tonight on Jay Leno: Dennis Kucinich (applause) and... a bear (applause) musical guest, Young MC. Hey, nice goatee. Actually it's a beard. Hey nice goat. Actually, it's a bear.

For those of you considering bearing, hopefully this has given you a sense of what it's like. For those of you who are or have been bears, you know just what I mean. Even if you've been eaten by bears in the past, maybe this could give you perspective of what it was like for the bear. I'm not sure where it's coming from, but this cave has wifi, so holler at your bear!