The Dark Knight Rises

The Dark Knight Rises

Walking now to the movie theater. Gonna catch a midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises. My seventeen year old, Paolo, says he has a seat saved for me. Three rows from the top. Theater number eight.

Walking down the middle of the unlit residential streets at 11:30 pm, had a few beers, in no way drunk. Pensive perhaps. Pondering. Postulating. In my life now this is maybe the theme. The Dark Knight Rising. Me. Returning to the world. Crawling out of my Batcave and reanimating; resurfacing. Become strong once again. Empty street. The night country. The proving ground for those in need of testing themselves, of struggling to rise. Of manifesting once again that which had been before.

Inside my own head, mostly, watching, mostly. Surveying. Appraising. Ending that which needed ending. Scripting and then acting out my own rise to liberation. To some modified but no less real or effective power.

Movie has ended. Standing off to the side of the theater watching the credits play out. Movie house trash on the floor, spent tickets, broken kernals, chewed out gum. With the others I wait for any possible new trailer or sneak peak or reveal to be shown as the credits finish rolling. Suoerman. The rumor is a spot for some new Superman flick. 

He rose. The Batman. He rose. We here are rising. Here in the midst of this megalopolis of burdens and of sorrows we rise. And I am rising and once more I shall return to being the master of all that I survey. And why not. Why not claim that which is the birthright of all, the right and the access to achieve confidence, solidity, safety, and in the end, a knowledgable and knowing quiet.

To that end I will rise up and in my awakening I shall allow others also to awaken, by my unbending so shall others unbend their atrophied limbs and souls as well. Here in this small slice of time in this place in this life will I make my stand. Here in the ruins of that life which I have lived shall I straighten and plant my name above any and all doorways. I shall and I am.

At home now readying for my trip through Morpheus' realms. Content now each evening as I rest, no longer twisted right through with the dripping wet chains of turmoiled love, of the mighty wind of relationship gone awry. No longer do the nights promote the cuckhold stink of spoiled honor or of inevitable decay. No, i have passed now through tbe membrane, travelled fully to the other side. No longer need I cower from the shame of my own self judgement. In my life today, in tje exact centet of my being, there exists a steady eye resolved and content to peer forward into my beginning and not backward into my end.



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This is Not My Beautiful Life

I don't think I like this place I'm at. In life I mean. Post-marriage number two, nearing fifty, kids at the age where they just ain't around much, 

Whadda they call it? Incrementalsim? Like the frog boiling in the pot. Like gaining weight. it happens so slowly that from day to day it's not noticeable. And then i shake my head, clear it, and here I am thirty year later, striding through middle age, struggling with addictions to substances, food, love. And burned. Recently burned. Like when your best friend of many years turns out to be a liar. And a cheat of uncanny proportions. 

How does one regain this lost ground? How does one climb back into the sunlight and the air? Fat. Gray haired. Squeaking in the wrists and ankles. Desperately seeking and probing for the right path back into the proverbial garden. Some manner of entrance, some road leading not to perdition but instead to a contented and fullfilled life.

How does one 'process' the dark matter? There isn't really any place to do that. Not any place that matters. Sure there are friends, but they don't want the gory details. Who can blame them? But it's those details that yearn to be spilled over, to be spoken aloud with a pair of compassionate eyes looking back. There are paid friends to spill to. Counselors. The hundred dollar an hour answer. They who will hear and listen actively to each and every infraction committed against my personage but who, ultimately, don't much matter. I mean let's be real here, I can shout my troubles to a granite wall as well. And save some thousands in the process.

It is late now and time for rest. From my bed I see the light of her bedroom window. Friends ask if this is not too close for any proper sort of separation and I can not help but to shake my head and respond, 'No.' And yet it is. And so I do my best to look away all the while recoiling from the cold shower of it all. So sudden and yet so, so long in the coming. The scheduled train on time yet one waits and listens and maybe hears. On time and at long last at the same time. I saw it coming all along and where the hell did all of THAT come from?

It keeps churning. Life that is. Churning, grinding away, hustling down the little highway of it's own creation. That thing most hallowed, the sacred and untouchable, the fibers of the three sisters, la vida, the whole enchilada. We stand before the runaway locamotive of our lives like straw people before a hurricane. Grass to be cut down. 

How then is it that we somehow muster onward? What lines of genetic code have evolved within us that propel us forward, swimmers dashing upstream, valiently and so too futilely moving, despite our strongest efforts, backwards? 

Humanists we must be. Yes, humanists. People who operate from the ingrained understanding that we are all really the same. We are all, in the words of Wavy Gravy, 'going around shaking hands with ourselves.' Through this humanist lens we have pity on, we sympathize with, we feel for, we reach out to, befriend, connect to, mate with, merge. It is then in the moving forward in spite of, and in the battling against all odds that we display our innate drives-those which allow us to swallow our tribulations and to align our faces against the inclement winds and to set our feet and to tighten our belts and to speak loudly against the misfortunes and the abuses and to move forward towards the fullfillment of our goals and hopes and our dreams.

Perhaps then that is the spot at which I need to place my feet. Turn towards the elements and, shouting my 'fuck yous,' saddle up and get ready to rumble with a gleam in my eye and a smirk on my lips. 

'Fuck you, world.' Striding confidently forward into that black night, a claw hammer gripped purposefully in my right hand, 'Here I come!' 




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The Classical Mess

Life is weird. I feel like I'm stuck in some crazy repeating cycle. Groundhog Day. Return of Groundhog Day. Son of. Grounghog Day vs. Memento. That's it. That's entirely it. So I'm driving myself and my mother from Milwaukee to Ellensburg. Six day and five nights. Black Hills. Pine Ridge. Rosebud. Crazy Horse Memorial. Mount Rushmore. The Bighorn Mountains. The Museum of the West. Yellowstone. Sun Valley. And that's all terrifically good. But, as it always is, there's so much more than at first meets the eye. My mom has been, I suppose, the love of my life. My number one fan. The kind of unconditional love and enthusiastic support that no other woman in my life could probably, in my mind, live up to. But perhaps I digress. My hope in taking this trip was somewhat, er, um, okay, very much rooted in idyllic, Maxwell Parish glowing clouds, over the top juvenile/infantile Freudian fantasy. You know, son and mom taking an adventure road trip together, uberbonding and all. I told my mom, 'It'll be like Thelma and Louise.' We both grinned. 'I mean, without probably the picking up the guy at the cowboy bar.' Another grin, giggle. 'Or the cops and the going off the cliff thing.' We laughed. So thumbs up, right! Uh, well, honestly, at this point I'd say that on a scale of one to ten we're looking at a six and a half for overall bucket list meet unrealistically large expectations score. See, my ma has rapidly developed a fairly pronounced lack of ability to recall things with a generalized anxiety disorder. It's tricky. And frustrating. And scary. And it's suddenly exceptionally high maintenance. My mother has begun to spout really fantastical statements, utterances which contain wildly spontaneous spatters of a magical surrealism rivalled only by some of Latin America's finer literary talents, think Gabriel Garcia Marauez. Many of the towns that we drive through, most of the ones over ten thousand people, are accompanied by stories of how she always enjoyed coming here on the way to visiting us when my two older brothers and I lived with our father as youths. How she knew people who lived here or there. Yet best I can recall my ma never once visited us there. And what's worse is hearing her go on about how she had to come see us because she couldn't possibly go for long without seeing us. Um, yeah. Dreams die hard. The death of hope? Some addage or other. When all the laughter died in sorrow. Her generalized anxiety disorder, unfortunately, colors the endlessly repetive verbalizations with a grating distress that appears to be genuinely based in fear and disorientation and is therfore this disturbing panic-think stripped down fight or flight. The look is positively feral. The statements that come at this time are things like, 'where am I.?' or, 'where is Chacon?' (her husband)----okay, folks, double triple bonus alert interuption to say that in REAL TIME as I JUST finished writing the earlier part of THIS semtence, my mother called out from the inside of our two bedroom condo here in Sun Valley to say, truly, 'Peb, where's Chacon?' I shit you not! We are now returning this broadcast to your regularly scheduled program). I'm trippin cuz there's so very many different things about the way my ma behaves, how she thinks, how we interact, who I am today, that I am not able to reconcile the today shit with the shit from forty years ago. When I was seven. I mean there now exist such large ass gaps between what I thought was going on then (and maybe it was?!) what, best I can tell, is going on now. Like what, as a child, you think your ma is doin when she goes out one or two nights a week to Mr. P's, a south side night club and dance venue. And the amount of thought that a person should put into the selection of a babysitter for their 7-10 year old boys-one would imagine that another would take this type of care with the due diligence that it deserved. But no, things didn't it seems go quite that way. I am not intending to be alarming. No hyperbolic, worst case, babysitter sexually abused anyone. Not that I know of. Point is that my two older brothers, Marco and Leone, and I didn't get protection in these areas like any person would give to something that they felt a strong need to protect. I mean, would they? Say some human somewhere has a prize worth, oh, let's say twenty seven million dollars. A swiss bank account user name and access code. Would that person, all things being equal, life in a vaccuum and all, NOT choose the caretaker of said prize for the evening really carefully? Hmmm? Uh, no. They would do everything in their power to have their time away AND to safeguard their prize as well. So where does that leave us three little guys back in the day when we lived on Sherman Ave. in Madison, WI, when my mom goes out and leaves some schmucky nineteen-ish aged never met before gal in charge of us and things turn into biker party toilet overflowing with shit/vomit/piss and people passing out and vague things that I can't remember distinctly but which end up forming a strange soup of viewed from a distance bewilderment and perhaps alienation. Here's (with a large 'perhaps' here. Just my take at this moment) where it leaves us. With fairly pronounced issues that revolve around our perception of our mother's committment to parenting us. Were we not her biggest prize? Sitting here on a pebbly surfaced, brown leather couch in the living room area of the two bedroom timeshare that we're staying at in Sun Valley. Just had a good red curry shrimp stir fry on jasmine rice with two pints of Sun Valle Brewing Company brew. Had the UberCranky IPA and the seasonal Scotch Ale. Both really good ales, especially the latter-like what I imagine an old world Scotch Ale should taste like. But alas, back to the story here, the story of my mom's deteriorating state of mind. Decompensation. I believe that's the word. Throw that in along with depersonalization and derealization. And then compound that with the effects of a similar nature that it has on those around you who try to help buffer tbe edge between the more solid world and the less solid one. My mom has lost alot of life's rhythms, how they operate, why. But she knows and has an easy, familiar relationship with the TV. Blisses right over, through commercials and all. Huxley's soma right here in our laps. Can tell when a show is nearing conclusion. No interruption of experience or memory or perception there. Watching her watch the tube is sort of like seeing the box within the box thing, or the life imitating art/art imitating life circle swallowing it's tail spiral down to hell phenomenon. I am reminded of the quote, supposedly from the tombstone of Bruce Lee, 'A once fluid man, crammed and distorted by the classical mess.' My mom, checking the locks on the windows incessantly, operating from fear, everything an unknown, a threat, unsure, afraid. The smell of the afraid, of living amongst them, it's neutering me, it's my allergy. I run from it. I run from it. So here is my mother, my one ALWAYS fan; the one most loving and supportive person in my life. I mean I'm puzzled and somewhat stunned and a bit afraid of what appears to be transpiring in the life of my mother and hence in the lives of myself and those integrally in her life, my two brothers, our families. But all in all and een including six days now spent driving across North America with her--interruption alert, my mom is wLking around looking for some fictitious tray with her medicatikns ad I write this-and I got her to sit down and watch Joni Mitchell sing 'Coyote' on the flatscreen in Martin Scorcese's classic rockumentary The Last Waltz. A film I first viewed in Iowa City in 1987 on acid wit a group of people that I knew for a fairly brief time. The kinds of things, perhaps like this one or like jail stories or drug stories that no one really shows interest in ever engaging me in. Can't blame 'em, guess I'm sort of a dweller on the threshold. So here I sit, caretaking my ma. The cycle completing itself. She like the character in Memento, in need  of writing every important thing down so that sbe can keep it in her mind; yet like the character in that tale, if she doesn't tattoo it on her skin she won't find the piece of paper again-my mom has no tattoos. And every day like the last, lost in a busy, over stimulating, synesthetic blur, a kaliedescope of memories, of smiling childhood friends, of first jobs and loves and breakdowns and of tired small trails leading back to the tired small you trying to stoke the fires of life and love and of the earth and its unending completeness. It seems to me that the world around my mother is akin to a Rorshach Test, you know, the inkblots shown to people who then say whatever comes to mind while looking at it. So that if my mom happens to see, oh, say a black boy riding a bike down the side of the street, she may say, 'many more blacks live here now then before wben I lived here. And, you know, they are very decent and they've done a really good job of cleaning up the whole area. It's much nicer now, very clean.' All of this about a place she had neer been to before and the whole while she wouldn't even be able to tell you what state we're in. Like a wide eyed child she looks around her and wherever her synapses are stimulated she makes some connection and out comes some interesting facet of her as it relates or pertains to whatever is being viewed or experienced.

In the Penal Colony

Life is a cabaret. Er, hell, maybe it's a cabernet. Here I sit on Lakeshore Drive sipping a Goose Island 312 ale. Okay, so life is a cold, fresh ale on a hot and sunny day.  For most of you the fact that my favorite number is in fact 312 will be new information, but trust me, it's my one. Ig nod to superstition. It's sunny and eighty some degrees but the wind off of Lake Michigan is just exquisite, moist, revitalizing. So here I am, my favorite beverage combined with my favorite number on this terribly perfect July afternoon.

My brother and his gal left this am about 8:45 to do a half day of work and after showering and coffee I headed for the Pink Line, boarded the L and headed for the Loop. Disembarking at Clark and Lake, I walked past the House of Blues and found the Howl at the Moon piano bar and the Rockit Bar as well, stepped inside, soaked it up, turned and left. I walked in a zig zag to where I now sit, directly across Lake Shore Drive from the Oak Street Beach.

Bliss, the bar where I am sitting outside now, is on the south end of the Gold Coast, the waterfront properties of the wealthy. Oprah lives here.

There's a peculiar sychronicity spinning itself out here. This city is full of not so fun memories for me. These can be filed collectively under the heading, 'Marital Difficulties.' I'm really doing my best to be able to purge and release so very many ugly things without using this forum as a tool for bashing my ex over the head in a public manner. So let's just say that my walking this route, my trip here to Chicago at all, my sitting here and writing this down, it's all part of my reclaiming this  city for me and for my ability to enjoy it in the future.

People speak often of Kafkaesque situations, nightmares of faceless, patriarchal, institutional machinations and persecutions, of dehumanization and alienation. My buddy, Bill, gave me his copy of Collected Kafka Stories to bring on this trip, and I've been reading them. The Judgement. The Metamorphosis. In the Penal Colony. It is this latter tale that I am reading now, this morning, on the L, here at this table. The central character is called the Explorer, and he is being shown a bizzarre 'apparatus' designed for a painful and prolonged execution of persons who are not aware of why they are being killed, who have no ability to defend themselves in any legal manner. The Explorer is discomforted by all this and witnesses a terrible misapplication of the device's capabilities, all metaphoric allusions to the workings of administrative, bueracratic applications of state and societal power applied indiscriminatly and often somewhat randomly to the common man.

So, here I am in my own Penal Colony, the torture device created from my own spare parts, lodged immovably in my cerebral cortex executing and torturing with an immutable and passionless disregard for any adherence to principle or justice or morality. Yes as in the tale, my own device is unfathomable, unfeeling, relentless.

I've walked a fair piece now. To Navy Pier, another spot I need to smell, to piss on, to reclaim. Done. Called my bro, we shall meet under the Clark and Lake L stop in about a half hour. So I'm drinking a Half Acre Daisy Cutter at O'Leary's Public House. Saw folks outside enjoying a beer AND a smoke at the ashtray enabled metal mesh tables.  Count me in. The dwindling number of establishments that allow you to drink and smoke AT THE SAME TIME need to be explored, enjoyed, and marked on the mental GPS. Watching the people stroll by I am again struck by the fitness and uprightness of the Tuetonic appearing women that fill this city. A good time of year to behold.

No, I'm in no way ready for one or more of these gals, my heartworks clogged like some emotional-cholesterol from hell that had shellacked the insides of my arteries to the point of vaso-constictive failure. But that too shall pass. Hell, the nicotine and the Daisy Cutter are already working that magic.

The last time I underwent the divorce procedure I didn't date for over five years. I take my love seriously. Probably far too much so. And therein perhaps lies the true crux of the problem. My execution machine, this Penal Colony that I carry with me, hasn't an understanding of the passage of time, of the fact that it is not dishonorable to find another, that it does not mean that my pledges and all of my love for her was not real. Yet the machine tells me that. Tells me that when I focus my attentions on a new love that my integrity to the one before is outed as being disingenuous and insincere.

My brother and I shall take the Blue Line to Damen and go to an establishment in Wicker Park called Piece. Their insignia is a peace sign with only two triangular legs-like a slice of pizza, which they do well, and they also sell, you guessed it folks  (a blue ribbon prize for the kid with glasses in the front row), beer, which they also make there.

This process of dredging through my brain and through my broken emotional center by writing is going to, fingers crossed, dismantle that soulless machine. Thank you, then for your part in this, dear reader, for giving me that most neccessary of components for this dismantling-an ear to bend, an internet shoulder to virtually cry on.

So my bro and I met downtown and went to Piece and had really good pizza and really good beer. Lots of beer. I'm thinking about fifty to sixty dollars of good beer. This place won the 2006 World Cup Best Small Brew Pub and has some mighty tasty brews, Dysfunctionale being my fav. A citrusy, clean, sparkly IPA to wash down the really good and really reasonably priced pizza-large pizza, which fills a large cookie sheet, maybe 16" X 22", for under $18.00.

Leone and I sat at a tall table from about 3:00 to maybe 8:30. Saw the end of the lunch crowd leave and the Saturday eve crowd start to pour in. We hit on some meaty topics: lack of approval from our parents; my need to move beyond those issues and to take control of my self-pity; where are we in relation to our family members today; what we really think of how our parents raised us.

With all of the feelings of loss that I carry with me like some artist with their masterpiece-see, look at what I made, look at how unfair life is to me-I think my life has maybe been a series of attempts, through relationships and jobs, to validate these negative feelings by continuing to recreate situations in which it becomes so obvious to others that I'm this really good guy who just keeps getting pooped on. What a long waste of perfectly good life energy it has been. Who can say, maybe this time I can reach the summit of that icy crag, check it off my list, and move on to some new challenge. Or maybe I'll pitch sideways off of the side of that impossibly tall peak and slide all the way to the bottom again where I can wallow and put up in large neon letters, 'Don't you people get it, it's harder for me than it is for you because...blah blah fucking blah.

In Kafka's work are a multitude of themes that are too salient, too pertinent to my life at this point. Neurosis, anxiety, a disgust with the unfulfilled and essentially sinful and guilt filled existence. A sentence here from the introduction, 'it is in the nature of man to achieve only limited ends. He cannot comprehend the Whole; his vision is discontinuous, his security always incomplete; his aims he can realize only in fragmentary fashion." In the end it is merely the human condition.

This morning as I was making coffee before the others had yet arisen, I read a quote on my brother's fridge. It somewhat stopped me in my tracks and it helped me to center my current understanding of things.

"Know, you are where you are not by accident but by the design of your creator for your own development or for the development of those around you."
           Abdul Baha (founder of the B'hai faith)

Chasing the Dragon

Tonight I'm in Chicago. Tonight I am terribly sad. Tonight I feel the weight and the cold loneliness of the universe pressing down on me. Tonight I feel a difficulty in breathing and I have not the understanding that I need to keep me from crying. Tonight, as Neruda says, I can write the saddest lines.

For the last seven years I have felt like I have been on a runaway train. Yes it's dangerous. Yes it's important to get off. Yet at the speed it's traveling, how does one get off? Out of control. Desperately scared and out of control and hoping that by cowering down and tightening up I can survive the inescapable crash. Hoping that we'll run out of fuel before we fly off the tracks or experience the effects of extreme decceleration trauma. And yet perhaps either of those last two options would have been preferable to what happened in the end-the slow tearing apart of two souls craving each other but unable to make the next step, unable to find their love amongst the ruins. Sickened ultimately by each others' flailing, each others' clawing to reach the air of the surface, drowning we each supposed, because of the cloying and suffocating needs of the other.

Tonight I'm just mad as hell. Tonight I don't know where she is and I know that if I allowed myself I would call her and I would cry and I would tell her that it could work, that we can work through it all. I would tell her that I love her and that it's all okay, just a little bump in the road.

Then it all hits me again. Only one of us kept our vows. Only one of us nurtured and adored and kept safe the other. I remember suddenly the emotional violence of dishonesty and purposeful deceit. Duped for what, for momentary hits of validation and physical pleasures. A love that had eternity written across it ditched for that? My towering love, the poems, the declarations, the nights spent in the sage under the Nevada stars, the nights of protecting each other and of holding back the world so that in our small, small place of knowing we could exist maybe just a little while longer. Even just one more month. Just another night to lay next to her and to listen to her breathing, smell her shoulder as she rested, touched her slumbering cheek.

But it was not my offerings that in the end she wanted. And I, full of pride and filled with the ebullience of new found love, certain of the healing power of love, the transformative power of listening and of wanting and of demonstrating how much pain I can stand in order to show the fullness and the realness of my intentions and of my safeness. Yet I could never overcome the influence of those who came before me. This I never really understood until the bond came undone in Mazatlan this December past. Same story. Her with men. Me upset at my own impotence and lesser than-ness. And before she leaves we make love for the very last time. Me trying to be tender, she crying throughout. And that the last night I ever will spend sleeping next to her perfect form. An angel that never really had a chance to fly.

Here I lay on a mattress on the floor in Chicago, the city most haunted by the excesses and unkindnesses of my former love. Broken. That's how I feel tonight. And my cure, the salve that I have come to depend on, I can not call, can not reach for. Oh to taste her breath, to feel her hair on my face, to hear the timbre of her voice. Just once more. Just one more time.

The sorrowful and emotionally barren place I am tonight is a place wherein I hope to quickly leave. Going to her for help is no different than putting that spike back into your arm to ease the sickness of quitting the drug-chasing the dragon an ex-user friend used to say.

So tonight I am mad as hell. Did I misspeak? Did I not offer you everything you said you wanted? Coffee in bed. Dinner every night. Protection from your demons. Understanding and forgiveness ad infinitum. Did we not understand one another? Did you not understand or was it always some crazy game that only one of us knew the rules to? Did I not accept you every time after every new man?

Even here tonight on this mattress in Chicago I am unable to comprehend the finer points of this collapse. True love or sex? Safety and acceptance or danger and exploitation? A home and a friend to grow old in or a hotel room and men who jam on their clothes and leave within two minutes?

All I can think of right this moment of now is, 'Are you kidding me? I lost you and large amounts of my ability to trust and my willingness to love for THAT?'

Now that the end has come I sit alone asking why and looking for my new path forward. I heard a story from a friend about a near fatal scuba diving adventure. He found a small cave openning fort or fifty feet down and decided he had enough air to give it a little look see. Yeah it's dangerous, his scuba buddy was not with him, did not know where he had gone. After going in this not so big tunnel he comes to the end and turns back.

Now his air is getting low. Suddenly he comes to a junction that he never realized be had past on the way in. Air low and he knows that at this point he is essentially lost and may have only the opportunity to try one and hope it is the right one. Panic sets in. Heart rate doubles and he stays right there hovering, nuetraly bouyant, trying to form a plan.

Then he realizes that there isn't only the two options; he cracks the whole game open at this point, changes the rules, saves himself. He turns off his light and, in the blackness, allows his eyes to adjust and then slowly as he peers into each tunnel he makes out the faintest of light. Turns his light back on, swims through the correct one and on up to the surface.

In the end I think that my role in her life has been really more that of a father than that of a true love. An emotional refuge from the dragons that fight for supremacy inside the shattered realms of her experiences. Ultimately our togetherness, the home we made together, the refuge of our bed, all of it was a place from which she continued her interactions with the world outside as though there was no man that she had made any promise to at all. The hard part here is to work at not taking it all personally, of understanding that more or less the entire affair hadn't much to do with me at all. A placeholder to mark a certain passage of time, the way we call the era of the dinosaurs the Jurassic Period. In her life it all continues regardless of any commitments or proximity to any man, and these last sevev years simply have my name hung on them as a title, as a way of marking time.

In the face of all of that it seems, when I step back a few lenses and remove the hurt, that my intent to hang in there and show my safeness and to wait for her to change is no different than sitting under the giant maple tree in my front yard and waiting for it to change into an oak.

The Places In Between

Got dropped off at the Amtrak in near downtown Milwaukee, bought my ticket for the Hiawatha Express, the commuter train to Chicago. Doesn't board for forty five minutes. Just enough time to cruise the eight or so blocks to the Milwaukee Ale House. Here I am, ten minutes to enjoy the golden elixer that is Pull Chain Pale Ale. Grapfruity notes hit you upfront, instantly miigated and brought down a few bars into an incredibly quaffable malty, clean finish. I love this place and have returned to it over and over during my visits spread out over the last ten years.


The brewhouse motto is, Ale's What Cures Ya. Gotta love it. Partied here with family, girls I met here, my ex-wife, a local Central Washington coffee magnate, my favorite uncle Lloyd. The people rotate through my adventures here as do the seasonal varieties of the fermented hop beverage that I so adore.


Off to the Second City to hang with my brother, Leone Jose. Back to the train station standing on the speckled terrazzo floor with some odd hundreds of others waiting for the iron horse to speed us off to the windy city (for my hometowners- NOT, I repeat, NOT Ellensburg, but rather the more famous and less windy city of Chicago!).


Talk about a place of transition, i'm standing here with all of these people who are all, like me, standing around in half formed queues looking around with that semi-vacant aire; how long shall I be here? Will we leave on time? Will my _______ be there to meet me when I arrive? A place of transition. Yep, right-o, a place of transition indeed.


Between things or places, or maybe people, or maybe all three combined. Left your known and heading for the unknown. There is an addage printed on a dog-eared piece of paper on the refrigerator in my mom's home. 'One can not discover new places without losing sight of land for a long time,' it says. A long time. Out with the old in with the new. 'Doesn't it hurt?' 'Of course it hurts.' 'The trick,' as Lawrence (of Arabia fame) says, 'Is not to mind that it hurts.'


Just don't mind. Feel it, absorb it, mull it, let it go. Sit with it. Every moment just another moment in which we are born, we exist, and we die. With each and every breath we are born, we exist, we die. In this way we are new at all points, just being with every breath, and in the moment of our last breath we are born, we exist, and we die.


As he lay bleeding out in the garden, mortally shot by an assassin's bullet, Mohandas Ghandi says the name of God over and over, 'Ram, Ram, Ram.' He is born, he exists, and then he dies, the name of his beloved painted in ruby colors across his lips.


Transitions. Like, say being on this train here going from Milwaukee to Chicago. Between places. Between things. Between people. Metaphor. Not metaphor. The places in between.


Or maybe that's all there is. I mean sure maybe the hoky poky is what it's all about. But I don't think so. I think it's all about the places in between. This mortal coil, this life we feel certain we are living, this fling with consciousness, ego, and personality (this time of adhering to the construct that we are all separate from one another) is just another place in between.


Think it over, write me a comment, tell me if you disagree. What job have you ever had that was not a place in between? What domecile? What relatuonship? What friend, what meal, what book, what car, what pet, what goal or dream or fear was not a place between?


Yeah, right. I hear you, I just don't agree. No, people, the places in between does not refer only to those that are now past. No. All of your current ones are temporary as well. We are but watchers here, bystanders really, borrowing this place, these jobs, friends, meals, for what in the end is a remarkably short time. And then we too shall speculate, as we near our appointed time, Will I leave on time? Who will greet me when I arrive?


The mentality of permanence is delusion. Even within the accepted parameters of what most folks think of as permanence we all know better. True love forever. Built to last. Diamonds are forever. Attempts to quiet that special place of fierce anxiety that we all do our bestest to ignore are the root, in my probably not so humble opinion, of this compensatory ideation common to most. We build pyramids, monuments, companies, works of art. Unless one defines eternity as a matter of some few centuries or even some few millinia, things do not have permanence. It, they, we all are temporary items on the shelf and shall be rotated out.


Looking out the window the sunlight paints golden drops and broadstrokes across the foliage, the buildings, the cars outside. And them flying by like so many pages of a book on lost civilizations. Kaliedescopic images, frozen faces, colors briefly beheld, two men on lawn chairs behind a chain link fence watching me watch them and then gone. Holograms. Ideas of people or things. Not the people or the things themselves.


Maybe the closest things that we have to achieving permanence is in the propagation of ideas. Extra-genetic information storage and the passing of it to the next generations may come closest to making the cut. Books beig a good example of a vehicle for the storage and subsequent passing on of extra-genetic, or outside of the body, information.


DNA is the code we have utilized, albeit almost entirely unbeknownst to humankind, to pass information. Before language humans relied on this. Baby ducks cower if the shadow overhead is that of a predator, not so if the shadow is friendly. This happens even the very first time a shadow crosses over, hence impirtant genetic coding passes along helpful information to the offspring. But it is limited in scope. The basic tool kit is embedded. But you gotta decide for yourself if you wanna go to Florida for vacation, and for that you'll tap into that growing body of extra-genetic information (google it, hit up the world mind for your info).


Moving now into the Chicago Land area I am reaquainted with the brick industrial Midwestern landscape. The tired buildings full of weary working class folks hoping that their AC continues to keep the hundred plus degree intruder from their homes. Train yards. Power lines. Junk yards. EZ Storage. Manufacturing plants. And just now up ahead I see the Sears Roebuck Building, once again, temporarily now, the tallest building on the continent. Multi-tiered, obelisk in form, black, towering above it's paler, smaller compatriots. And into the Loop we go now, diving into the city's ripe and pungeant underbelly, passing through its bowels and sewers and pipes and girders.


As we move away from the paradigm of individuals forming a group to the paradigm of holons, or units, or cells, forming an organism called human, we will become more comfortable understanding that like cells we come and go but homo collectivus is ongoing.


In the same way that each of us is composed of about 110 trillion cells but only ten trillion of them are what we think of as us, have our genetic code, we all together form homo collectivus, individually we are merely a place in between.


Emotions then are places in between that so briefly inhabit our consciousness. In other words, places in between inside of places in between and like a hall of mirrors or an endless set of Russian dolls, the scale of this phenomenon is too grand to hold onto. Flitting impulses inhabiting flitting egos in flitting minds encased in flitting bodies of flitting cultures that exist in brief eras strewn across geologic time in this changig parsec of an endless universe that is, we now understand, only temporary in form and substance. Another place in between.

For Who Does the Bell Toll?

Homonculus. The now outdated notion that there is a miniature man inside of each of us that runs the show. Think the little man behind the Wizard of Oz. Well in recent time, the last months, maybe the last five years, mine has begun to take on both the appearance and the qualities of Quasimodo. Do allow me to explain.

Cloistered. Pitied. The punchline of others' jokes. Deformed. Alone. Poorly adjusted. Somewhat insane from lack of human love and respect. Hopelessly downtrodden and controlled. Reaching up to grab the rope that dissapears up into the blackness of the bell tower above. Yanking it down again and again, a selfless act causing deafness, sensory overload, and eventual madness.

The state of my mental, emotional, and finally spiritual health has suffered quite precipitously in the past few years. My partner has never relented in her assurances that my mental health and the subsequent paranoid fantasies have been the problem and not the events that I have battled to discover and to in any way comprehend. Misshappen. Either because I've been programmed to believe it or because I've allowed it all to continue. Leaving my property to work, to get food, for any reason at all, has become more and more difficult. Mentally I have developed patterns of obsessive thinking centered on particularly sordid and dark unhappinesses. Hence cloistered.

My ability to string cogent, well formed thoughts has become lessened. Cloudiness and a lack of the capacity to hold a keen focus have become the norm. My feelings of self doubt and self distrust plague me. Am I mad? Have I somehow erred cataclysmically in my quixotic quest to save another and to forge my own true love (that's correct the author IS fourteen) and therefore insure my own lasting happiness?

Distorted I am. The brothers give me no mirror with which to behold my own ugliness. It is only by spilling the pitcher of water that is raised to me each day onto the uneven stone blocks of the floor that, with the right sunlight, at the correct time of day, I can in an manner glimpse the melted visage of my the face within which my immature self is embodied. Misshapen. Misanthropic. Not a man.

But I ring that bell, I obey my instructions. Well, I have obeyed my instructions up to now anyway. All that isolation, the sentences designed to curb my urges for self improvement, the mantras of not change, of not growth. The dischordance of the bell inside the echoing confines of that clammy tower, the clanging, the pain in my head-it all needent be.

Outside the prism of metaphor and analogy there are pressing concerns. On the purely quotidian plane I need to form new understandings of what to do and when. Example. My spiritual teacher, he whose truth I trust, has said that one of the worse things we as humans can do is to feed another with anger in our hearts. That anger directed at another and embued into their bodies is damaging. To damage another being is the ultimate bad thing. So then, reader, I ask you do I feed this other or don't I? To release that anger, to meditate upon it long enough that, like an ocean wave, it moves away and, as you watch it, it recedes and finally melts into the body from whence it came.

When my recent mate and I came together I spoke to her of my neccessaire if we were to become one. Again my teacher had laid out before me a powerful truth: relationship is the hardest form of yoga-yoga being an activity which brings one closer to god. To pursue this trudge towards enlightenment both halves must commit to an adherence to honesty and truth and to listening to the feedback and observations of the other as we aide one another in our attempts at growth.

This life is the only one that I KNOW that I will have. I value this place. I adore my interactions with others, with sharing this giant consciousness of ours, with my own obsession with seeing as much of it and learning as much as I can about it all as I can. In other words I want to do it well.

Growth. Personal growth. Knocking off my corners. Gaining ANY movement towards enlightenment is a major victory. Don't get me wrong, I've no idea, none, that I'm almost there. How does one know what one does not know? No, folks, but even if, to be fully enlightened, one needs to score a, I dunno, a ten, I may be hovering between a .00000000001 and a .00000000011, I'm STILL aiming to get to .000000000012. That's just how I see it. That, dear readers, is my truth.

So therefore, as it were, do not seek to ask for whom the bell tolls, rather ask who is ringing that bell and why.