Okay, okay, I finally get it. What family and friends have been saying all along. Here it is:
A. Being yourself is more about "allowing yourself to be" than actually becoming someone you think you are. Just GET OUT OF THE WAY is the answer. Try less to do more.
B. Now that you've gotten out of your way, do the things that come naturally. Yes, DO them. It's easy. Rather, it's simple. . .but not easy. Do it. And do it. And do it. Then do it some more. Just do it and do it and do it and do it and do it and do it and do it and do it and do it and do it and do it and do it and do it and do it and do it and do it and do it. . . You get the point. Now I need to get the point.
B. (corollary) Everything else: bills, work, cars, lovers, even family will settle in around that thing you do. That's it. So do your thing and let everything else be as it will.
And that is the whole of the LAW.
Now I'm going to do it.
G'night, M.
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Monday, October 22, 2007
October 17, on a plane, mostly for Gabe
I’m on a twin-engine, propeller plane from Seattle to Calgary. Everyone who wants one has a row all to themselves. It’s the most indulgent flight, in terms of personal space, that I’ve been on since my flights to Hawai’I following 9/11. Nice.
I’m munching on some grapes that D. thought to send me off with. Eating them in transit reminded me of the grapes I bought in Japan in 2002 while visiting during the transition to Hitachi from IBM. Those were huge, plum-sized fruits five pounds of which cost US$100, over 10,000 Yen. Five pounds was the smallest amount they had available and I figured I would share them with people on the train back to Tokyo. Nobody wanted any at any time during the 2 hour train ride from Odawara. I ended up eating most of the grapes myself and putting myself off of grapes altogether for a couple of years.
The grapes today are large, for grapes, but nowhere near the Chernobyl-sized Japanese grapes. Every time I look over I think of them as purple pearls plucked for the eating. They’ve got seeds and it makes me bite them once to get the seeds out and then again to eat the de-seeded flesh. Two bites per grape.
A little iTunes is playing in the background, ‘90’s techno-dance music: “I Just Want to Be a Drummer”. I like rocking out to the music and writing.
Bruce, my therapist/counselor, has been suggesting that I take 10 minutes a day to simply stop and do nothing. Do nothing. Do. Nothing. For ten minutes. Seems simple.
So for the last month or so I think about taking those ten minutes and doing nothing. Just sitting there, or lying there, stretched out, relaxed and not doing anything. But I haven’t done it until yesterday. Yesterday I came home after work and while Denise was cooking braised beef short-ribs, Gorgonzola polenta and chard with onions and celery, I lay down on the living room couch and did nothing. . .for ten minutes. It ended up being more like 20 minutes because at some point I dozed and had funky dreams, but there it was. Ten minutes (almost 20) of not doing anything. It was strange. A very conscious thing to do and very subconscious as well. I could tell that a subconscious message was being delivered though I couldn’t (and still can’t tell) what it was. I did feel much more relaxed and happy later that night. And here I am writing today.
There’s something about airplanes for me. No internet, no phone calls, no drop-ins, no email. At some point during my flight I pull out my computer and write, or go through email at break-neck speed. It’s a two-part process: first the relaxation and just doing whatever I want like reading, crossword puzzles, just letting my mind go; then at some moment I get action-oriented and start to do whatever is top of consciousness for me. Today that’s writing.
Not deep thoughts, not the snags of my emotional river that whirlpool and become stagnate and self-referential. Just observations and top-of-mind thoughts that keep coming and keep my fingers moving on the keyboard. Nice and easy, easy and nice. When I’m on the ground I’ll post them to the latest blog exercise, a little NaNoWriMo exercise.
Gabe sent me an exercise a couple of weeks ago to get the writing juices flowing and the muscles working. The “assignment” was to write for half an hour about high school or college recollections. I kept thinking of what to write about, but besides depression and disappointment what comes to mind is: girls. The hook-ups, the desires, the hot, the cute, and the kinky.
What comes to mind first is my unlikely and somewhat absurd fascination with Beth from 3rd to 11th grade. Hard to fathom in retrospect but at the time it really drove me and had me enthralled. What is it about cut and pretty (though not beautiful) girls that gets me so enthralled? There was also Jeanine – she was quite the kinky girl. If I had known what the hell I was doing and how freaky I was I think she and I would have slept together and maybe even gone out for a while. But as with other girls I just pushed until I got some play and lost interest. Weird.
Mmmmm. . .Lisa Dumser: cute and blond, sexy and muscled legs, firm ass and a tomboy who could write the occasional engaging short story. One of my original ice-queen crushes. We were so clearly mismatched for each other sexually, outlook-wise, background, but I thought that physical attraction and our mutual hotness could conquer all. I guess that’s the benefit and curse of youth: ignorance and obliviousness.
Jenny Lin, first girlfriend, first lover, smart, slim, sexy and just crazy enough to be irresistible. I see pictures of her now and I’m glad we didn’t stay together. Besides there was a lot of pain I went through being with her.
Then college: Linda, Jessie, Michelle, Rebecca, Lauren, Jessica, as well as assorted infatuations and hot hook-ups. Michelle was the best lover, hottest body for me and definitely the freakiest. The story with her also fucked me up the most, but it was a hell of a ride. If nothing else it should have taught me to avoid introducing my fuck-partner to my family, but unfortunately not enough. I wish I had had the ability to not develop feelings for women I slept with in college. That would have saved me a lot of heartache and insanity. But it took Barbara and the “sex with no strings” experiment to get there.
Other than the girls and my misadventures with them I do have fond memories of writing the self-published magazines in high school and college. “Exodus” was the high school magazine I did with James with Sarah drawing our covers and his mom running off copies for us in her church’s basement on a mimeograph machine. Then at Brown it was the “Miskatonic Cinematic Acknowledgement”, an alternative to the Film Bulletin, that I did with Gabe. It brings me back to Friday nights at The Rock doing research on the upcoming movies and plagiarizing descriptions for the Miskatonic along with pieces like the Stone Wheel of Pain, Voodoo Vartan (though we wrote that for the Film Bulletin), and “Castles in the Sand”. That last one was a fake movie we put into the Miskatonic as a goof on the pretentious French crap that was showing that week and the Film Society got super-torqued at us because people were showing up during “Star Wars” demanding to see this made-up movie. The Brown people are possibly the most gullible idiots out there (remember John Stuart Mill University?).
I’m munching on some grapes that D. thought to send me off with. Eating them in transit reminded me of the grapes I bought in Japan in 2002 while visiting during the transition to Hitachi from IBM. Those were huge, plum-sized fruits five pounds of which cost US$100, over 10,000 Yen. Five pounds was the smallest amount they had available and I figured I would share them with people on the train back to Tokyo. Nobody wanted any at any time during the 2 hour train ride from Odawara. I ended up eating most of the grapes myself and putting myself off of grapes altogether for a couple of years.
The grapes today are large, for grapes, but nowhere near the Chernobyl-sized Japanese grapes. Every time I look over I think of them as purple pearls plucked for the eating. They’ve got seeds and it makes me bite them once to get the seeds out and then again to eat the de-seeded flesh. Two bites per grape.
A little iTunes is playing in the background, ‘90’s techno-dance music: “I Just Want to Be a Drummer”. I like rocking out to the music and writing.
Bruce, my therapist/counselor, has been suggesting that I take 10 minutes a day to simply stop and do nothing. Do nothing. Do. Nothing. For ten minutes. Seems simple.
So for the last month or so I think about taking those ten minutes and doing nothing. Just sitting there, or lying there, stretched out, relaxed and not doing anything. But I haven’t done it until yesterday. Yesterday I came home after work and while Denise was cooking braised beef short-ribs, Gorgonzola polenta and chard with onions and celery, I lay down on the living room couch and did nothing. . .for ten minutes. It ended up being more like 20 minutes because at some point I dozed and had funky dreams, but there it was. Ten minutes (almost 20) of not doing anything. It was strange. A very conscious thing to do and very subconscious as well. I could tell that a subconscious message was being delivered though I couldn’t (and still can’t tell) what it was. I did feel much more relaxed and happy later that night. And here I am writing today.
There’s something about airplanes for me. No internet, no phone calls, no drop-ins, no email. At some point during my flight I pull out my computer and write, or go through email at break-neck speed. It’s a two-part process: first the relaxation and just doing whatever I want like reading, crossword puzzles, just letting my mind go; then at some moment I get action-oriented and start to do whatever is top of consciousness for me. Today that’s writing.
Not deep thoughts, not the snags of my emotional river that whirlpool and become stagnate and self-referential. Just observations and top-of-mind thoughts that keep coming and keep my fingers moving on the keyboard. Nice and easy, easy and nice. When I’m on the ground I’ll post them to the latest blog exercise, a little NaNoWriMo exercise.
Gabe sent me an exercise a couple of weeks ago to get the writing juices flowing and the muscles working. The “assignment” was to write for half an hour about high school or college recollections. I kept thinking of what to write about, but besides depression and disappointment what comes to mind is: girls. The hook-ups, the desires, the hot, the cute, and the kinky.
What comes to mind first is my unlikely and somewhat absurd fascination with Beth from 3rd to 11th grade. Hard to fathom in retrospect but at the time it really drove me and had me enthralled. What is it about cut and pretty (though not beautiful) girls that gets me so enthralled? There was also Jeanine – she was quite the kinky girl. If I had known what the hell I was doing and how freaky I was I think she and I would have slept together and maybe even gone out for a while. But as with other girls I just pushed until I got some play and lost interest. Weird.
Mmmmm. . .Lisa Dumser: cute and blond, sexy and muscled legs, firm ass and a tomboy who could write the occasional engaging short story. One of my original ice-queen crushes. We were so clearly mismatched for each other sexually, outlook-wise, background, but I thought that physical attraction and our mutual hotness could conquer all. I guess that’s the benefit and curse of youth: ignorance and obliviousness.
Jenny Lin, first girlfriend, first lover, smart, slim, sexy and just crazy enough to be irresistible. I see pictures of her now and I’m glad we didn’t stay together. Besides there was a lot of pain I went through being with her.
Then college: Linda, Jessie, Michelle, Rebecca, Lauren, Jessica, as well as assorted infatuations and hot hook-ups. Michelle was the best lover, hottest body for me and definitely the freakiest. The story with her also fucked me up the most, but it was a hell of a ride. If nothing else it should have taught me to avoid introducing my fuck-partner to my family, but unfortunately not enough. I wish I had had the ability to not develop feelings for women I slept with in college. That would have saved me a lot of heartache and insanity. But it took Barbara and the “sex with no strings” experiment to get there.
Other than the girls and my misadventures with them I do have fond memories of writing the self-published magazines in high school and college. “Exodus” was the high school magazine I did with James with Sarah drawing our covers and his mom running off copies for us in her church’s basement on a mimeograph machine. Then at Brown it was the “Miskatonic Cinematic Acknowledgement”, an alternative to the Film Bulletin, that I did with Gabe. It brings me back to Friday nights at The Rock doing research on the upcoming movies and plagiarizing descriptions for the Miskatonic along with pieces like the Stone Wheel of Pain, Voodoo Vartan (though we wrote that for the Film Bulletin), and “Castles in the Sand”. That last one was a fake movie we put into the Miskatonic as a goof on the pretentious French crap that was showing that week and the Film Society got super-torqued at us because people were showing up during “Star Wars” demanding to see this made-up movie. The Brown people are possibly the most gullible idiots out there (remember John Stuart Mill University?).
Saturday, September 22, 2007
The right addictions
Some people believe that no addiction is healthy. Drugs are bad, too much eating is bad, too much exercise is bad, too much sleep is bad. . . They fall back on the ancient Greek proscription: "Nothing in excess."
But is that realistic? We are all just collections of our habits. We brush our teeth in the morning, we go to bed later than we want, we avoid doing the things that are new and uncomfortable. We are a Voltron monster made up of habit-lions.
What are habits? Aren't they simply small addictions. Just like addictions are BIG habits. Even addictions like smoking, drugs, and anorexia can be cured. That is, new patterns of thought can be laid down and practiced over time to create new habits. Essentially -- new addictions.
What's my point? That not having addictions is not an option, we are our habits, our expected behaviors. What I need are new addictions. Writing as an addiction, sleeping enough as an addiction, being fit and healthy as an addiction. Those will do for now I think. Once I've got those addictions in place I can think about new ones. :-)
Monday, July 9, 2007
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)