Take only what you need

I am staring blankly at the ceiling. I have no idea how long I have been doing this. Did my eyes just open? Where is J? I feel the covers beside me. The familiar swell on the other side of the bed reassures me. It is morning.

“Have you considered Sol Lewitt?”

I can feel my muscles resist as I climb out of bed.

“There is a dead mouse outside the door daddy.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Tiger-Lilly must have caught it last night.”

My hand, wrapped in a plastic grocery bad swoops down to pick it up. Suddenly I am caught up in a moment of indecision. Where do you put a dead mouse? Dig a hole? Toss it in the alley? I glance over at the fence that marks the boundary between my house and the neighbors. She died last summer, and the house is still vacant. The back yard covered in overgrowth. Glancing one last time at the alleyway I arc my arm over my head and toss the mouse over the fence.

Morning ritual. I remove the reusable filter from the coffee maker and lift the lid of the trashcan. The fetid odor rises to greet my senses. My eye water slightly as I bend over and knock the contents of the filter into the chasm below then turn quickly for a breath of air.

“Help me get my socks on Daddy”

The coffee percolates in my stomach and I keep wiping the same grain of sleep out of the corner of my eye.

Time to go. I stuff the familiar tokens in my pocket. Wallet. Phone. Keys. Each one a statement about what I am doing and what I cannot go without.

When I left for college I had a suitcase and a guitar in the back seat of my car, and I had everything in the world I needed. When I moved from S.F. eight years later the car had turned into a u-haul, but the editing process had been the same. Take only what you need. Take only what you need. It becomes my mantra. The morning air is cool as I step outside the door. The coffee is doing the trick. The fresh air on my face is cathartic. Take only what you need.

I step outside and close the door.

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Divining the Clockwork

I am really sorely tempted to write yet another blog entry on the inane voices in my head. I think what has been keeping me back is the fear that people will think I am some kind of crazy. I was talking to a friend the other day telling him just this and he said “Are you kidding? I am pretty sure everyone has these voices.”

“Really?” I said.

“Oh yes.” He continued, “Just the other day I found myself thinking about the father of this girl I had been dating, he is a co-worker of mine, and I knew that he probably disapproved of that fact that I had stopped calling her. Before you knew it I found myself imagining the huge argument, the restraining order, and the so many hurt feelings that were going to follow if I ever had to face this guy directly. At the same time, I knew, since I worked with him, that a run in with him was inevitable. And while it is frightening how violent these images can become, the really scary thing is finding yourself imagining a bit of ultra-violence against somebody and waking up in the middle of the checkout line at Wal-Mart, and realizing that everyone else around you is doing the exact same thing and praying that they are able to show the same amount of self restraint that you have in acting against these impulses.”

This conversation, as unsettling as it was, helped me a bit and I began to calm down. A few days later, at my men’s meeting, I was thinking about this conversation again, particularly about the aspect of violence associated with these voices. I realized that the violence is the manifestation of anger in my psyche, and that all of this fantasy was merely a way of anesthetizing the fear that was somehow building up inside.

Anger trumps fear. While physiologically similar, anger has the benefit of allowing the individual to physically respond to the emotions that are welling within by confronting them, while fear makes me want to ball up and hide. The strange thing is, as powerful as this anger makes me feel, as powerful as the imagery of violence can seem, it is totally imaginary. Fear makes me feel powerless and anger confronts that feeling head on. The problem is that the anger is born of fantasy and eventually dissolves while the fear can be very real and may linger for days at a time. Anger, my droogie brother, is a placebo.

(The more I read it the more I am sure that I sound crazy!)

I think the irony of the voices is that they conceal the very feeling that offers the solution to fear. Acceptance and mindfulness. Acceptance for me comes from realizing powerlessness in a situation and letting go of the possible outcomes. Not an easy thing to do, especially when one is caught in the grasp of unreasonable fears and illusions of control that border a scene from A Clockwork Orange, but then that is why I am working so hard on these voices right now, practicing to recognize behaviors as they form and dispelling them before that take control of my thoughts. Right mindfulness involves bringing one's awareness back from past or future events or outcomes and places the attention squarely in the present moment. As I gradually get better at recognizing when the voices are taking over, I see that the mind is continually chattering with fear and judgment. Noticing that the mind is continually making commentary, I try to observe those thoughts, seeing them for what they are. I get the feeling the root of these fears are old and probably go way back for me. Fear is ugly. It resists inventory. But if I am patient I can begin to divine their origins and begin to take back my thoughts. (Oh and now I probably have to start working on a blog about patience because that is another one of these “shortcomings” that stands in the way of spiritual acceptance.

Recharging the Batteries

Well, another week come to an end. Yesterday was “University Day” at school. Graduate students in the Art department were asked to come out and help with “Art Day,” a series of workshops designed to showcase the art program and introduce the faculty to prospective students. So I show up at 7:45 and listen to the office workers complaining about how there has been no advertising of Art Day so we are going to get about twenty students and what a monumental waste of time this is. On top of that, they said, the faculty are embittered by the low turn out and don’t even want to be there. “It should be turned over to the graduate students,” is the sentiment. “They don’t do enough around here anyways.”

Listening to people complaining is the best part of waking up, especially after having spent a week juggling a full time job, and school and family and then waking up early on your Saturday to drive for an hour to donate your time to a University that thinks you are nothing but a slacker. Needless to say I spent the better part of the morning bitching to anyone who would give an ear before sneaking off to my studio before lunchtime.

I came back at lunch and chatted with another office worker about the purgatory that is Graduate school. She recalled a conversation between two professor who were joking about one particular graduate student that wanted to move through the program quickly and how these professors were going to make an example out of him. My lunch sat in my stomach like a cold stone as I could only imagine that this story was about me somehow.

Afterward, I went back to my studio, thinking about every conversation I had ever had with a faculty member. Art School is largely a subjective enterprise, and one can easily make oneself crazy trying to divine a course though the quagmire of personalities. I know that my own expectations were, in large part, making me crazy. After all, why not try to make some kind of plan for graduation? Still, in trying to plan a life for myself outside of school, I have tried to figure out every conceivable way of shortening my stay at the University. Not so much looking for shortcuts, as trying to be expeditious about my use of time. I ask you, what is wrong with that?

In retrospect, working yourself into a depressive frenzy and then going off and sitting in an isolation chamber for 5 hours was probably a bad idea. They turned off the power to the building in the afternoon. Probably working on the electricity at the construction site next door. I cleaned myself up and jumped in the car for the hour drive home. The depression fairies were working overtime.

I got home J. had had the same long week I had, only hers was punctuated with a newborn, small children, shuttling our daughters to school and swim meets and grocery stores. Hers is the definition of grace under fire. After dinner she graciously offered to put the kids to bed. As I curled into bed, I vowed to sleep until noon the next day and recharge my batteries. (No T.V. and No beer make homer something something.) Does recharging your batteries mean you have to be wholesale selfish about your needs? I think I thought so going to bed, but work up in the morning with the two toddlers and got them breakfast and entertained them for a while before I realized that a little family time and a little, just taking it slow is really all I need.

Gods and Men

Sometime I feel like telling God that h/his little "life lessons" aren't so friendly.

Wouldn't it be strange if s/he played by the same rules as Men? What kind of and S.O.B. would s/he be then?

(and why won't the voices in my head just shut up when I ask them to?

This Just in

Joe Biden Cracks up:




and Sarah Palin is "palling around" with secessionists:



It is getting scary out there folks!

Mr. Anderson

The way my Mom tell the story, one sunny Sunday morning in the late 1940's at a church in Freeman Minnesota, the pastor climbed into the pulpit and began his sermon.

"Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, Idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envying, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God

Now, today I am going to be talking about the sin of demon liquor, like Elza Anderson (pointing to my grandfather) sitting there in the third pew willingly distributes."

Accounts vary on what happened next, Whether my grandfather stood up and escorted my mother and grandfather from the church that instant, or whether he waited patiently till the end of the service. Either way, the record is clear, we were done being Methodists from that day on.