fake story true story holy spirit

Fake story the first time I tried to ride a bike went well for about 18 seconds. The paternal push and steady guide led to renewed symbiotic confidence for both in the exchange and then I was free: Free to ride in a straight line for exactly 9 seconds. Then I figured out how to turn right into oncoming traffic. I got run over by a bus and was reincarnated as a 1980's-style ten-speed bike. A banana-colored bike whose first and only true owner was a different dad on an opposite coast. For a couple weeks I helped him get to his job with new confidence and autonomy, shiny new bike that I was. He started to get in shape, more newbikeesque himself, change his whole outlook things looking up etc etc. Then one Saturday morning I was stolen and sold to a bike repair shop and broken down into spare parts. That slowed the reincarnation process a bit but eventually I came back as a mosquito. That was something one could really get the hang of: finding cool people and drinking just a little bit of their blood. I hope I continue to be reincarnated in this fashion. It's something I'm good at. True story: My kid and another kid and I are hanging out we got on the piano for a little bit. My kid approaches it like maybe Cecil Taylor or Albert Ayler would've at a very young age, like he'd just found 88 perfectly symmetrical boards waiting for a hammer and nails. The other kid approached it like Erik Satie would, with a dancer's sense of balance and whimsy, in search of the first melody. I don't think they really understood each other's approaches, but it was beautiful to see in aggregate. When I got on the piano myself, rusty, dazed, it was like riding a bike for the first time and trying to decide between the competency of a tottering metric near-straight line and the chaotic bliss of letting gravity velocity and sheer chance do their collective thing. Brothers and sisters, which is the true representative of Holy Spirit? Conceptualized as tongues of fire but people couldn't be jazzed were it true fire could they? Oh many readers know that I would personally be inspired to receive only metaphorical fire. So we must be talking prophetic fire, aha, or maybe true fire is the call to action.

radio silence

So George Clooney and Sandra Bullock get lost in space. Two minutes into the movie they run out of oxygen and the remaining 285 are dedicated to their silent decomposing fading toward the edges of the solar system. For the sequel eons later their capsule burns on entry on some other inhabited planet. It's a love story in which a passel of alien teenagers on an alien camping trip are briefly impressed by a bright flash as the capsule burns on atmospheric entry. They all spend the rest of the movie pondering the significance of the falling star that graced an ordinary alien Saturday night. Theirs is a culture that has never seen a falling star. Two aliens, Zomyx and Klukweg, fall in love that night, and a good part of the film is dedicated to the triumphs, minutia, alien child-rearing, and ultimate fading from the scene. The other teens go on to relatively fulfilling alien lives. One becomes a dentist, another an accountant. Another a kind of alien elevator repairman. Ascent and descent, a mechanical recreation, a kind of poem or paean that many partake in, without knowing. For the remainder of their lives they all find themselves looking to the night sky as a reference point, awaiting a second flash of light or falling star, to confirm through repetition what they'll swear to themselves and to anyone who'll listen that they actually saw. But it never recurs. The third film in the trilogy is devastating in its simplicity. Only normal lives lived by the descendants of Zomyx and Klukweg, generations removed from the singular experience of those alien teens. No direct remnant of the original story remains, but these lost souls find themselves strangely dissatisfied, still looking to the night sky instinctively for a trace of some miracle. But nothing happens, only radio silence, and the final ten minutes of the film are only darkness, radio silence, a forever ellipsis.

natural selection/monkeys with typewriters edition

Implied in the bones of trees collected in water underground in the soil in the latent sky in the still holding together of nature despite our every abuse to its liver Implied in the rolling bending sixths of Misterioso in the chills one gets watching someone nail it on dumbass American Idol maybe even in indie rock or the avant garde Implied in evolution in the profusion and elegance of species in physics in the ineffable multiplicity of the universe Implied in babies, kids, in the light that lights the dying eyes of elders, the love and care people show each other when push meets shove So if all of this is (infinite) monkeys with (infinite) typewriters all the more it’s worth wonder and admiration scratching one’s head/hanging onto one’s hat Worth reverence and attempts at grace and honoring the singularity of the now its unbreakable tie to past sacrifice and future possibility the sheer stupid luck of existence by any reckoning Written on the cusp of spring, from a fucking Greyhound bus

replacements

The other night I received my four year sobriety coin. I was smiling, and I told my home group that while I first thought I could do this by myself, I knew now that that was wrong. I wasn't just saying shit I thought they wanted to hear. It was also what I really felt, or at least wanted to be truly what I did feel. In 2009 I knew I needed to stop drinking--the warning signs were myriad, bright and garish-but I was naive about what it would mean to go without medication I'd relied on for my entire adult life. The question for me has been about replacements. When I make progress it's because I'm being conscious about replacing alcohol with things that are actually good for a person: exercise, therapy, meditation, acupuncture, music, literature, being there for my family of choice and my family of origin, connecting with new friends and reconnecting with my old ones, seeking to reconnect with my sense of creativity, purpose, and destiny. When I falter it's by passive aggressively embracing death, isolating, hiding, falling into fear of a past I've never outrun, by overeating, by misgauging and poorly modulating my emotional, spiritual, and professional responsibilities on any given day, by looking at smoking as a solid alternative. In any moment I have a choice about which route to take, about which tendency to feed and push along. And if I sought your advice on the subject, which would you suggest.

the glacier arrives

Neural plasticity in extreme slow-mo or stop time captured by zero patient enough photographers: one step forward, a thousand steps back. The beauty of neural plasticity in this style being that moving in reverse at an average pace of -999 steps per, subject will arrive backwards at the right location. Less glacially the image could be captured by one step forward by some rotund guy and he falls into a kind of self-inflicted canyon for a year. Think Dagobah bog but with 100 drunk/demented/unforgiving Yodas, or that biopic scene where Bruce Lee fights his demons only substitute some white guy much more out of shape. The demons are better educated, better toned and our Mr. Smith's carrying just some kind of Nerf weapon, and he keeps digging himself further in, been down so long it... The glacier is busy but rest assured he hasn't forgotten you, he's on his way. The glacial profession one not so much of on-time delivery or reliability as its norm (you get what you pay for) only now scramble its compass or momentum. Add an ellipsis that in some Virginia Woolf way encapsulates a million years... and the glacier arrives. Something to promise your grandkids their great great grandkids will see. Geologic time as a precedent for a before work routine, or for the response to overdue correspondence. The spacetime continuum as a boundless storage place for disappointments and fears. Eastern Standard Time as an awkward collection of societal near misses and almost-there-for-yas. The glacier arrives and is met with zero fanfare, an empty town, a blinking neon sign for Vacancies. "The Glacier Arrives" the avant garde musical, with Korean opera as its inspiration, one beat per year. The Glacier meditation: focus on breathing for a split second, then panic for a year or so. If you realize you've stopped focusing on your breathing for Christ's sake you fuck get back to it. Don't feel guilty feel SUPER GUILTY and maybe if you meditated more it wouldn't function so flabbily. The glacier arrives: slow blog movement. In my next dispatch (July 2068?): live Tweeting the reluctant death bed scene.

reveling and reckoning

When I'm older I hope Ani DiFranco's still out on tour. The way I picture it it's 2042 and she's biggest on the Six Flags circuit. I'm the septuagenerian double-fisting super-sized Diet Cokes, my hearing aides cranked to max, standing right by the PA. I don't think the way she plays guitar and decorates those open spaces it with intellect and depth of feeling will ever lose resonance for me. It means more the older I get. On the other hand I hope it's just her and not a full-band. I can't imagine that cymbals and I will still be on speaking terms at that point.

After the show I'll speak to her and here's how the conversation will go.

Me: [something articulate]

Ani: (long pause). Wow, no one's ever put it like that before. Can we be best friends?

Me: Yes.

Then I'll freestyle rap, spinning a long history of human pain, reckoning, and ultimately reconciliation. She'll beatbox. Then we'll ride some demented centrifugal roller coaster together and I won't throw up. Which by then will likely constitute my full concept of a romantic hangout.

Me: [something articulate, and cadential].

Ani: (Longer pause). Thanks man, I've been waiting for this conversation all my life.

Fist bumps are exchanged. Exeunt all, smiling.

Hoagiefest generation/frank admission/kicking and screaming

The eldercare term Sandwich generation implies a single sandwich, a single squeeze or sandwiching if you will. For those among us with more complex conundrums I'd like to re-appropriate from Wawa branding the term Hoagiefest.

Hoagiefest generation -- n., a generation or subgroup of the same finding itself navigating a pile of caregiving sandwiches. Some are classics, some are shortis, some are two-foot party subs. There are many, hence the fest.

Image: the family caregiver stands perched on one end of a seesaw while clowns throw a bunch of sandwiches at her.

Image(alternate): as the family caregiver sleeps, restlessly and half out of his mind, a posse of clowns piles hoagies one by one until he wakes up to find himself covered in Wawa hoagies.

What is to be done, brothers and sisters? We must eat a lot of hoagies. That is the nature of the Hoagiefest.

I want to admit here that caring is alien to me. I love, I really do, but I also connect with my relatives and family members like an alien from another care-free planet, like a sci-fi android discovering a new type of experience, Emotion. Being called upon to do what's right is to grow comfortable in "social situations," replete with "conversation" and "eye contact."

As reported in these pages, a few years ago I gave up drinking. And as these pages also inadvertently chronicle, drinking had played an essential role in company morale. Without it I felt lonelier, more depressed, crazy. The choice seemed to be to start drinking again, health consequences and genealogical tendencies toward alcoholism be damned, or to do some work.

That concept of work has me starting to dip into AA. A couple of months in I can report two things with certitude. First, I think it could help. Maybe it already is. And, there's the part I find controversial: these meetings mostly take place in churches. I have been on church premises more in the past three months than at any point in the past 15 years. No one has to drag me there kicking and screaming. I just head straight for the basement and it all works fine. I feel hope (bullshit aside) and somewhere outlined in the far future is "peace," something I did not envision prior.

One of the things people argue in the rooms is fake-it-til-you-make-it on the spirituality question. For those on similar fences, when asked to close a meeting by repeating the Our Father in a group, I suggest that you replace in your mind the word Father with Hoagie. This simple transposition strips the prayer of most of its patriarchal vestiges (most but not all, dear reader, for if a hoagie has gender it must be masculine). The remainder is downright innocuous, possibly even containing the seeds of a code to live by.