Month: June 2013

Cages, Walls and Prisons

18 Track 18  Soundtrack to blog.

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A good friend of mine recently went to prison.  I hate to say it, but this news came as no huge surprise.  You see, he had always lived his life behind one wall or another—–a wall of alcohol and drugs (until he got help and quit) a wall of pretension and success (until he lost his business and money) a wall of arrogance and deceit (until his fraud was exposed) a wall of emotional insulation (until he was filleted and spiritually gutted).  In jail there are no walls between you and yourself, the only walls there are the ones keeping the rest of the world out. The prisoner and his keeper are forced to coexist—-hope—like pardons, float just out of reach.

Sometimes when I consider this life, I see each of its participants living out their existence where “they need to be”—-please don’t misinterpret this as meaning “where they may want themselves to be”.  Perhaps its arrogant of me to say such a thing, who am I to know what another may or may not want or need?  I am arrogant.  Arrogance comes with the territory of being a writer.  A writer is the last unwitting peddler of authenticity for all crumbling cultures.  To be a good writer, you need to have something to offer, something new and interesting to say, a revelation to shine a light upon.   As for me and my writings, I intend to confound the smart asses, frustrate the conventionalist and piss off the righteous. Cause, if I mix the colors just right, I might create a picture that becomes a window for another to peer through.  I always wonder the same thing about others, “Tell me what you see—what you feel?”

I loved a girl once.  And maybe she loved me back, these things are illusive and subjective—or more than likely, I’m just plain hard to love.  Love melts in your mouth not your hands, and it’s very difficult to see whats going on inside another’s mouth, let alone within their heart.  M&Ms lie, they all look different, but they all taste the same.  She took me to her home, a place where she kept her clothes, slept, stocked her cupboards and fridge, where she dreamt her dreams, hid her tears, bathed, put on her make up and stored her smiles.  I tried once to live with her, but my stuff cluttered up her neat organizational scheme of things.  I left before the walls she was constructing became to high for me to scale.

There’s a place in the High Sierra’s known as Desolation Wilderness, what a mystic and daunting land. A place of stark granite walls, gnarled pines and hidden alpine lakes, a place where one can either lose themselves or become re-aquatinted with what was meant to be.  It is here that I sort out my devils from my angels and decide who is the lion and whom is the lion tamer.   The lion cage is where I go to discover what comprises the alchemy of my soul.  And I will tell you this, it takes a lot of courage to put my head inside that lions mouth.

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Casting Spells

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Lets share a cigarette baby, there is something sexy about having you partake in my bad habits, why?  I don’t know, does it matter?  Lets drink a couple bottles of wine and we can say things that we make up along the way, just little thoughts about this or that, it doesn’t really matter.  We can stumble down some dark small town streets or take our clothes off and stand in the sun on some vacant summer beach, like the one that runs across from the railroad tracks out highway one north between SF and Santa Cruz.  But maybe you got better things to do these day, I sure as hell don’t.  Do you got any new tunes on your iPod that you can turn me on to?   We always like the same artists, the odd ones no one else has ever heard of.  Pass me that cigarette again baby—-where’s that cork screw? I don’t want to feel like shit tomorrow, but fuck it, tomorrow is another fabled world away, put your coat on and I’ll tie these unruly shoes of mine and we’ll go outside and walk around, stumble about and I’ll tackle you and bring you down to the earth next to me.   And we’ll laugh at this life with its promised death and we’ll pretend today is our last day, maybe it is, who knows, who cares, cause sweetness, right now it don’t matter.  Why do people die, they get taken away from us, I don’t like that, I hate that.  But you’re alive today with me.  Lets go get high and then eat cinnamon graham crackers with sweet Nutella chocolate spread all over them.  And then, I’ll make you-up stories as we lay in one another’s arms staring up at the ceiling and we’ll see all these undreamed-of-things tumbling from my mind, hanging right there within the emptiness above us, as if they were real, as if they belonged only to you and me—–cause imagination and fantasy is the spell that once cast, holds love together.  Come on darlin, come on along with me and we’ll just keep goin on like this.  That wouldn’t be so bad now, would it?