And He Emerges, Blinking and Startled, To Find That Time Has Passed

As in, nearly a year of time since my religious dialogue with my Maker.  At this point, the only readership I have is comprised of the person typing this entry.

I'll start small to celebrate the occasion of my return: here's a cat picture I made my very own self. It's been a week of suffering and hardship, and I find that smiling helps me bear it.

Also, this song by the Fabulous Thunderbirds.

I used to listen to this record for the lead-off track, "Twist of the Knife" because it reminded me of my ex.  Then, driving to work one day, "Sweet Thang" came up and this is about how my thought process went:

1st listen - "Dear Jesus, what is that? It KICKS."

2nd through 10th listens - I become convinced that the riff Duke Robillard (Jimmie Vaughan's replacement on this record) is working out of the low strings on his Strat is pure sex and suggests a world of fun to be had on certain Saturday nights, and I begin diddy-bopping around and daydreaming about singing it live.  I remember years ago seeing a young woman crossing a street with a certain step whose stride and overall bounciness matched the perfection of the backbeat of drum and bass precisely.  "Hallelujah!" I say to myself, and hit repeat on the car's CD player.  Life begins to feel much, much better.  I start learning the lyrics in the hopes of singing it live one day.

11th listen - my critical, socially aware self starts paying attention and begins taking the lyrics one verse at a time:

"Don't know how to cook or sew
Can't even play the radio
my baby ain't good at much
But I'm just wild about her lovin' touch" 

Socially Conscious Me: Does Kim Wilson mean to call his girl dumb?  I mean, you have to be pretty far gone to not be able to work a radio. You know?

Me: But..I don't think he means that....

SCM: Is he saying that he's okay with a woman who's not all there upstairs but who's good in the sack?

Me:....Were you listening earlier?  Back when we decided Duke Robillard's Strat was AMAZING? Do you remember? The girl?

And after a long conversation like that, I reluctantly decide to keep my faith in Duke's guitar lick intact but it's not an unreserved faith.  This is more the kind of faith that lets me listen to exactly two Bo Diddley songs before the inherent misogyny in some lyrics stops me in my tracks.

Some year it was.  Get your groove on - Duke Robillard, Kim Wilson and the T-Birds still get it done.  If Bushido Cat moves you to smile, then smile.

Catch you later (but sooner than a year, I hope)

A Religious Dialogue

The following dialogue occurs between myself and my Maker on a fairly regular basis on my awaking first thing in the morning at the beginning of the working week.

ME: Jesus.

JESUS: Yes?

ME: Jesus.  It's Monday.

JESUS: I know.

ME: You know what? 

JESUS: I know that it's Monday.  I have known it was Monday since the foundation of the world.

ME: And you couldn't have warned me?!?

Thus endeth the lesson.

Walking to Jerusalem

Given our cultural obsession with fitness, I think it important to note that this is not a conversation that one will read in the New Testament:

"And the Lord and his disciples did set off from Bethlehem at a gentle pace until they felt they had warmed up.  Then Jesus did say unto his disciples, 'We shall now increase our pace until we have all reached our Target Heart Rate', and, so saying, He did set off at such a rate that the Twelve were hard pressed to maintain it, all except John, whom Jesus loved and would go running with early in the mornings.

Peter especially felt sore pressed, and did cry out unto the Lord, saying 'Lord, the Greeks have invented a wonderful system of movement which is called Pilates.  We should go forth and try it.' Jesus replied unto him, saying, 'Verily, core strength is a good and necessary thing, but without cardio training, mankind will never rid himself of his excesses.' Judas Iscariot, who was later to betray him, pointed out to Jesus that they were all wearing robes that were pretty much one-size-fits-all, so perhaps a little excess was not all that bad.  

Jesus did not reply, but an angel of the Lord smote Judas on the back of his knee for this saying, bringing unto him shin splints, and athlete's foot for good measure."

Thnks

It's been so long and so many thinks since I've updated this blog that I have no earthly idea what I might write or say.

I'm too tired to be profound - I've been helping a co-worker paint her condo, and then just now getting home.  The picture below is how I spent my summer vacation - refinishing my first bass, a Peavey Foundation.  It was a black lacquer finish with a lot of wear.  Now it's a warm wood and has a gorgeous, bright tone.

I'll have more thinks later on.  Right now, I need dinner.

Resvolutions and Socks

It's January, the first month in an entirely new year, and while perusing the Facebook feeds of several of my family and friends, I've noticed that they've begun using the more upbeat-sounding "revolutions" in place of "resolutions" to describe their goals for 2014. The two words are basically meant to say the same thing: "I'm going to be doing it differently this year", so I decided to make one word out of them: resvolutions, as in: "I resolve to revolutionize my behavior for the upcoming year."  

I understand the importance of having resvolutions- I stayed home from a New Year's Eve party because the conversation about what was I going to do with this empty slate of 365 days was a necessary one to have with myself.  I even took the week off from work so I could have the uncluttered free time to do that.  I did get some writing done, and I have an idea of what I'm looking for in 2014, and I've also put off the making of resvolutions so that I could clean the apartment, do laundry, tidy up papers, play my bass, wander aimlessly about the internet, and do some post-Christmas shopping.

Of course, a resvolution involving gratitude is near the top of my list, as it is everyone's.  So - I'm grateful for a certain amount of serendipity in 2014.  Twice now, I have gone to the laundromat near where I live only to discover after I've gotten home that I've left clothes in the dryers.  I don't realize this immediately - this awareness comes on me slowly, over the course of a few days.  It will leave gentle hints in my mind while I'm working, or arranging things in my dresser: "Didn't you have more socks than this?"

One day, I was doing laundry at the same laundromat and I passed right by the dryer where I'd left those self-same socks, and my brain tried to get my attention: "Those socks.  Do they look familiar to you?  At all? Hmm?"  I walked off, muttering a bit, and then started doing some other things.  At work a few days later, my brain finally gave up, stopped hinting, and just came right out and said it: "Hey. YOU..."  and then I began mourning and trying to budget for replacement clothes while wondering if I should be enrolling in my employer's Long Term Care Coverage for the Aspiring Senior.

As soon as I reasonably could, I went scuttling back to the laundromat and was thrilled to discover on both occasions that I'd chosen the one laundromat in Seattle that was almost completely unwatched, because my stuff was exactly where I'd left it.  Unwatched is a good thing - this laundromat is owned by someone that I've rarely ever seen.  He shows up in the morning to open the doors, turn on the lights and collect the money, and then he leaves.  Beyond that, he's only a disembodied voice on a cell phone that you call if you need the code to the restroom door, or if you have a problem with a piece of equipment.  If the owner were any more attentive, my lost clothes would have been sucked up into the huge bags of left clothing threatening to take over his office, never to be seen again.  The clientele range from hipster to homeless but they all seem to share a hands-off attitude about laundry, which is how I've managed to reclaim my socks and shirts.

Now that I think about it, both of the loads that I left, I left in the same dryer.  That's eerie.  It's like discovering that I've got a blind spot in my peripheral vision that I didn't know about before.  The only other time I've been that discomfited by laundry machines was one day last year, when I put the soap and coins in the empty washer next to mine because I was thinking about a kiss that I'd received from a good looking woman on the evening before and I was therefore not of a clear mind.

Now that I have all of the socks and shirts that I had before the New Year, the only other resvolution that seems to matter now is finding a way to live the life that I wanted before I got married.  Today is the 20th anniversary of the day that I first kissed the woman who I eventually married, and I went to the place where it happened yesterday to say my last goodbyes to the marriage, to the problems that it had, to the joys that it promised but couldn't fulfill, and to put it all to rest because 20 years seemed like a serendipitous number, a good round number, and it felt like the right thing to do.

As I walked to the spot where it happened, I was wondering what kind of a speech should I make, or if a speech was even necessary, and the only thing I could say was, "This is the last time I will come here for this purpose."  I may go back to that park, either for a picnic, or a celebration, or a concert - I don't know.  I only know that I will no longer carry the baggage of a ruined marriage with me.  That's by choice as well as a function of circumstance.  My resvolution this year: to get back to myself and then to get on with it.

Garfield Is My Spirit Guide

My spirit animal revealed itself to me earlier this month.  I was not on a vision quest per se, and I wasn't fasting or meditating.  I went walking in a park in the Ravenna neighborhood in Seattle one Thursday night and decided to climb a nearby tree because tree. After some initial hesitation about how to go up and best routes and so forth, I managed to ascend to some of the lower branches where I could meditate and where I could look around and recite what I could remember of Erroll Flynn's dialogue from "The Adventures of Robin Hood".

I'll say here that my spirit animal did not reveal themselves to me on the way up the tree, and it did not turn out to be the Wolf or any of the really cool and highly sought-after ones.  

It was only after I began to think "I ought to get down now - I have places I must go", that I became aware that I was, spiritually, a cat. I could not think of a single workable plan for how to get down from a tree.  Jumping?  I was low enough to make that work but it would aggravate hell out of the tendonitis in my right knee. Not good. Climbing?  All of the hand and foot holds I'd used to get up the tree had rearranged themselves so that I could no longer find them. Plus, it seemed several hundred feet farther to the ground every time I looked down.  

A very kind, older lady offered to wait until I actually managed to get down before going on her way and, I think, she would have called a fireman if I'd needed one.

A Religious Thought

In church today, the responsive reading/sung response involved God asking the musical question, "Whom shall I send?"

I had a lot of fun pointing at random people in the congregation and saying, "Them, God. You should send them.  The guy with the finger up his nose, or that lady in the upper right.  They're the ones.  I'll stay home and read an edifying book."

I obviously demonstrate a keen sense of religious duty.  Of course, for all I know even some of the saints may have felt the same way.  St. Francis at prayer may have sounded like Bill Cosby's "Noah" routine.

Random Sunday Thinks

My turgid brain has been surging with thinks this entire week but, of course, when I begin to set them down I get the mental equivalent of the Blue Screen of Death.  Here are some thinks that I've had recently:

• I was looking at a picture of my late brother Patrick before church today and it felt as though our life together was a dream that I'd had a long time ago.  He strongly resembles my mother facially and I know that I had a brother and that he did certain things and thought certain things but it feels like I've always been alone although it's only been 23 years since he died.  
• I've been extremely grateful for my study of the martial arts and for my brothers and sisters in martial art.  That I've lived to experience the therapeutic benefits of martial art is beautiful to me. 
• Chocolate donuts are no one's friend.  Not three at a time, anyway. 
•  Growing up is really not so scary once you seriously begin doing it.  Peter Pan missed out.  
• If juror B-37 refused to convict George Zimmerman of manslaughter because she "knew what was in his heart", then she had no business being on a jury.  A juror needs to weigh the facts, not their supposed knowledge of the suspect's intentions or motivations prior to committing a criminal act.  
• I refuse to dread things now.  I'm grateful instead.  Grateful for every minute, good, bad or indifferent, of life that got me to this point.  

Random Think(s)

Literally, these are the things that are kicking around my surging and turgid brain at the moment:

- Just how fast is "Godspeed"?
- I like being blond because the gray hairs resulting from my advancing age are - for the moment - limited to my sideburns, a wicked long ear hair, my chest hair and my eyebrows.
- It's okay to believe in love at first sight, but what happens if you've got bad eyesight?
- Will Rogers once said that the art and legacy of Charles M. Russell would last "Maybe as long as the Republican Party is under suspicion."  Talk about a guarantee of immortality.