The Walker

Friday Mood: Stoned

"Oh, can't you feel it?
Stoned love
I tell you I ain't got no other, ooh-ooh
Stoned love, oh, yeah

If the war 'tween our nations passed, oh, yeah
Will the love 'tween our brothers and sisters last?
On, and on, and on, and on, and"

- “Stoned Love” written by Kenny Thomas and Frank Wilson. Performed by the Supremes. (1970)

 

 

Imagine all the people. I imagined a couple.

Terrified, frozen in fear, remembering early parts of the night, one of the best nights of life.

Your love was with you. One trusted. One true. One with tender eyes and a warm heart.  Yours. Equal; gave as good as got; moonshot.

She loved rave parties and techno; dancing all night, sounds bouncing from desert to sky.

A birthday present. She's the one. Propose. Tonight.  

They raved. They drank. They took an assortment of good drugs and lived in clouds of heavenly peace; love enhanced by drugs; life free.

Senses and emotions heightened; night perfect.   Together, with other ravers, experiencing techno in the desert, with goals of reaching nirvana, strings of life come together to form a perfect, unbreakable bond.  Burning Man without burning.

The stoned-in-crowd let thoughts drift: extraordinary taste of a chocolate chip cookies melting in mouths, relished more than before. This chocolate has feelings; sensation extraordinaire;  chocolate telling you stories of bliss.

The stoned-in-crowd lets music take extended tones and lingers. Remarkable what the brain says, slightly delayed in understanding the beat, but taking it in, slow. What music does to normal ears, becomes cacophony as plot; the meaning of the world revealed.

Drugs are key when escape warrants, used in hospitals to numb pain. Morphine as method to deaden “knives” stabbing the stomach; gut pain gone with miracle morphine. When done right, and in right situations, everything feels good; drug brain switches pain to objects to be ignored.

There is dislocation with reality when you enjoy psychoactive drugs.  Experience and normal stimuli changes. Things become weird, by design, by intent. “Did you really feel that, or was it the drug?”   or “Maybe that really didn’t happen. Did it?” 

The brain tries to explain, before the brain “gives way”; the drug now in control, the brain functions off, temporarily. Sex becomes something different, more pleasurable. Maybe that’s why drugs are so sought after: “Bring me a higher love.” said Mr. Winwood.

“Did you hear that noise downstairs?”   “No, I didn’t.”  “Wait, there’s that noise again! What could it be?”  Paranoia! The part of psychoactive drugs producing ungodly, unfortunate side effects of panic.

The brain struggling, knowing there is no disturbance, no “intruder at the door”; the drug mind floats the idea and lets the flow continue, “there is someone at the door, someone here to hurt you, someone who will do you harm.”  

The brain intervenes. “There is nothing there!  You are only *thinking* someone is there. Stop.”  

The drug speaks “How do you know?  Sure, nothing ever happens on this street, but what if it did. Tonight!  There’s always the possibility!”

A subtle battle, followed by other strange side effects:  “shakes” and “chills.” Paranoia slowly fades…

The lovers now in a tantalizing state of bliss. Warm October breeze, pulsing beat of music; feel-good-all-time-feel-good and you are in the groove. The sun comes up on the horizon, a glorious morning.

Then screams and fingers pointing to the sky; the brain conjures images that cannot be real. “What is this?”  or “This can’t be happening, not now.”  Paranoia meets reality, much worse than paranoia visions.

My colleague, in Israel, mentioned a video circulating, of the Hamas terror attack.  “I’d like to see it,” I said, nonchalantly.

“No you don’t. James, this is not stuff you can unsee.” 

“C’mon, I’m adult, I can handle it.”

“O.K., please do not share this with anyone; especially not children.”

He sent me the video.  

After watching it, I could only hear Mozart’s requiem in my brain; my instinct to scream at the top of my lungs, eyes bulging. I didn’t scream.  I sat in stunned silence for a long time.  

More than I could handle, cruelty beyond; barbarism defined. Hardened journalists and experienced police officers cry at images defying basic codes of anything.  My head keeps shaking.

 I wonder what happened to my imagined (but possibly very real) couple. Did they escape, or were they slaughtered like beasts clubbed in cave man times?  Did those drugs triggering harmonic, happy thoughts, turn to amplify atrocities; methodical massacre meets nerve sensitivity as never before; tantric titillation pivots to total terror instantly: white heat whiplash into hell. Good God!

Incredible, this irony of progressive people, dancing in the desert, coming to commune with a chorus of peace and love, attacked by a hideous overwhelming army of Hate.

New words are needed to describe this intense cruelty; cruelty so severe existing words simply don’t. They just don’t, nope, nope.  

This picture I took in 2017, the Elvis American Diner in Neve Ilan, Israel: In a small town outside Jerusalem, a roadside diner devoted to all things Elvis Presley. It was as improbable to me as thoughts of peace in this region.

Are we entering an era where extreme carnage causes reconciliation to become obsolete? 

Stoned love a chimera, a mirage; a trance-dance blown away by the wind, across the desert.   

Friday Mood: Quiet

Friday Mood: Quiet

Back in University Days, a college professor told my class “No matter what you do, take time - every morning - to look at the headlines, so you know what the hell is going on in the world!”

This week has been difficult to keep that ritual.  

Erida, goddess of Hate in the “Iliad” has been having an exceptional month. I ponder “has there always been this much hate?”  Of course, yes. I truly want to believe otherwise. Today, smartphones provide access to Hate’s Highway; never-ending video streams of haunting horrors; offramps to further frights 24/7.

In conversations with friends this week:

My Jewish friend in Paris: “I took off my Star of David necklace. I don’t wear it anymore. It is too dangerous for me. Every time I hear Arabic I look around, terrified.”

My Jewish friend in Santa Clara: “My God!  The level of hatred toward Jews. You see how much they hate us!  Even ‘progressive people’ didn’t even give us time to grieve our dead before they started to blame us for our own people’s murders. I am very afraid for the future.”

I PAUSED my daily headline viewing - for a few days - before jumping back.

Back into the mix, next up, deer in the headlights in Maine: a madman shot many people in a bowling alley.  Why? Who cares. Mental patients shouldn’t have access to auto-load, auto-death, AR-15 weapons of war. Mental hospitals shouldn’t have shooting ranges. Just saying. It really shouldn’t be this hard.

To clear my head, I took a long bike ride; refreshing to get out and see the neighborhood.

I came upon this small house with these cool figures. My thoughts: “These people have the best Halloween stuff in their front yard!” I stopped to get the photo. 

A small man in a cowboy hat came out of his house approaching me.  I explained why I was stopped. I told him his Halloween yard décor was awesome.

He laughed the most wonderful laugh, then spoke in the halting, verb-mixing way people from non-English mother tongues often do.  We chatted for a bit. He told me he arranged the Halloween stuff for his three small children (I could see them in the window, waving at me and smiling).

He had to go to work, so he said goodbye and left.  Another man (brother of cowboy hat man, I learned) approached, from the house with a baby in his arms; he was smiling.  We talked for a bit. His broken English, my broken Spanish. We managed.

He recently arrived from Venezuela, a place he called “broken land.”    

“It better here. Here quiet. Very good.” 

I knew what he meant; the way he spoke reminded me of all the workers recently remodeling my roof: Mexicans and Guatemalans; painters from Honduras and Ecuador; gutter-guard installers El Salvadoreans.  All incredibly hard-working; focused on the job at hand; very gentle to talk to, even though conversation was limited, darn sentence structures and nouns that escape brains.   

Most immigrants want to work, save money, and raise families without fear. They come from places oozing corrosive corruption, jacked on gangland warfare, eviscerated by economic devastation.  Where they come from, there is no quiet of the mind, or in the streets.

They are struggling, these people. They need help. They are getting some, and I see some large charity food trucks catering to them in certain parts of the city, small children gathering around the trucks.

Waves of immigrants have always faced violent opposition; people of “color” often wildly targeted for demonization. Sadness washed over me knowing many people obnoxiously oppose immigrants; would they look differently upon this man from Venezuela and his family?

Healthy it is to take a media break, avoiding headline news.   It is even healthier to stop watching Murdoch’s Hate Machine Fox News: the network humping hate, amplifying anti-immigrant rhetoric,  damning all immigrants as destructive demons.

Immigrants deserve welcome, not scorn. They want security more than anything.

A quiet life.

 

 

Friday Mood: Mad

 

“And I find it kinda funny
I find it kinda sad
The dreams in which I'm dying
Are the best I've ever had
I find it hard to tell you
I find it hard to take
When people run in circles
It's a very, very mad world, mad world.”

“Mad World”  – Tears for Fears, written by Roland Orzabal (1982)

A disturbance in the force; millions call out; my Friday mood hollowed out by world events.

When everywhere seems cavalier chaos and carnage, pivot to quiet places.

Peace, quiet: cozy cottages in the Cotswolds; wind-swept shores of northern Denmark; green gardens in abandoned monasteries in Spain; Thai beaches to yourself.

A dusty room in the back of my 3^rd grade class. My teacher collected old magazines, often stacking them in the corner.  A lover of words and picture magazines, I sat in the room, mesmerized. It was recess, escaping playground bullies a super bonus.  

I remember dust dazzling in streaming sunlight after each magazine I picked up.  Dust.

TIME magazine cover: Yasir Arafat; me wondering why the dishcloth on his head; words “Arab Commandos” and where in the world was the “Middle East?’  (“Is that close to the Midwest?”)

Opening the magazine, I found “Middle East” a problem my 3^rd grade brain couldn’t process.

Over time, unbearable complexity of “Middle East” entered consciousness; rubrics cube inside an enigma; trapped in a genie bottle; wrath of a warped Sphinx: no key; no magic wand; no alternative. No hope.

Show-and-tell time relayed stories of tragedy times ten: small children raised with horrible, hardened hate. Catatonic cluster f*ck, this. Somnambulist rage: names of terrorist organizations sound like board games (let’s play Hezbollah) or appetizers (pass the Hamas, please.). One can’t joke about this. Humor is lost in the land of a thousand harrowing close calls, and a million missing limbs.

If this is the “Holy Land” the per capita rate of unholiness is off the charts. Funny how religion causes friction more than fraternity.

But I remember beauty; positive energy; life in the “Middle East.”

Israel, the enigmatic land I’ve visited three times. Superlatives come close, contradictions abound, special from my following visions:

Vison #1: “I’m a Barbie Girl:” Barely clothed Barbie surfer girls coming wet from the beach, depositing boogie boards at the base of a Tel Aviv café at 10:00am one summer morning; coffee ordered, in hand, disappearing via a side door; music coming from below. I asked the barista “where are they going?” and she told me “to dance.”  Curious, I asked if anyone could go down there “Of course!”  I moseyed down the staircase and entered a magical miasma: balloons and drag queens and some of the most beautiful people I’d ever seen. Barbie surfer girls sitting at a big booth, sipping lattes and cappuccinos.  When Michael Jackson’s “Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough” started up, so did the girls. Coffee down, they’d come to play and dance away, shaking their bottoms. “Lovely is the feeling now. Fever, temperatures rising now.” Get your grove on ‘cause these girls are present. Surreal. I exited the club back to the coffee shop at 11:30am, the party still going strong below. The sun extremely bright on the café tables out front.  Whoa.

Vision #2: Our outrageous openly gay tour guide/comedian who called himself Joan Rivers of Jesusland, “just a Jew from Jaffa who likes quality cock. (nervous laughter) My chickens, I mean. I raise them!  You dirty minded people!”  We went on a bus trip to Northern Israel, skirting alongside the walled off border of the West Bank where Palestinians live. Sealed off, “we can’t go there.” Our guide sighed and was sad about it.  He had much to say and was very unhappy about the whole separation thing.  “It’s like the Berlin Wall, without cool pornographic graffiti.”

On the tour we stopped in awesome Acre (aka Akko/Akka) in the far north of Israel. I snuck behind the wedding photographer and took this pictures of the wedding couple. They were really nice people, wanting to see the picture I took.  I didn’t know if they were Israeli Jews or Israeli Arabs or Palestinians or whatever. I didn’t care. What does a Jew look like? What does an Arab look like?  Ridiculous questions. They are beautiful. Human.

Vision #3: My Italian colleague wanted to visit the tomb of Jesus in Jerusalem. She was obsessed. The city is a jumble; one the most unfriendly; unwelcoming places, taut with tension of three world religions, each thinking they’re superior. Ah, the power of the love of God.

Orthodox disdain for the common man, tourists tarnishing “their” city. You feel angry eyes of darkly clothed women walking around with many children, eyeing your summer shorts as if you came to defile. Super tacky is an easy way to describe the over-touristed memorial to the place Jesus was supposedly placed after he was crucified. Over the years, many famous, rich, royal fools have left mementos to the man of God in the form of diamonds and tacky gold picture frames of themselves. The Czar and Czarina’s pictures placed inside the tomb. You must wait in line whilst some big burly bodyguard takes your ticket to enter into the shrine of kooky knick-knacks. It’s a clown show, not a religious shrine.

Funny to watch women faint and men self-flagellate outside the tomb and cry at the place they supposedly washed Jesus’ body.  My Italian colleague held on to me as we walked through the “crypt.” She was crying. I couldn’t tell is she was crying over the jewel encrusted frame of Wilhelm II, or the golden stuffed parrot left by some emperor from somewhere. I simply shook my head.  As we exited the church of the tomb, there was commotion at the entrance, some strange turf battle between Easter Orthodox priests and the local Catholics.  They almost came to blows. Brotherly love.

And now the region is on fire. Again.  All about history. Read it and you will cry.  One side wants protection; the other side wants escape from the largest open-air prison in the world. They both want the same land and both sides claim the moral high ground. Eyes for eyes.

 LOVE and HATE; equal power brokers.

I’m on Team LOVE; rooting for it; hoping for it; praying for it.  

I know you are not supposed to take the Lord’s name in vain, but Goddamnit, in the holiest place on earth, where God “spoke to the people” my team is losing.

LOVE is losing.

And I am mad.

Friday Mood: Stable

“Somewhere
We'll find a new way of living
We'll find a way of forgiving
Somewhere”

“Somewhere” by Barbara Streisand (1985)

A common greeting when my partner returns from flying trips: “Guess what happened while you were away?”  A shrug and then, “Let me guess, absolutely nothing.” My smile. “Yes.”

Our way of conveying stability and calm: nobody moved the cheese; glassware exactly where it was before; lights still work.  

Stability as luxury, finding something in the dark, by touch and feeling alone. “There it is. Right where I thought it would be!”

My solid bike enabled me to roll across the city, on this fine autumn day. I rolled through the middle of the city, not a care in the world, sun on my clothes, perfect. 

By coincidence, I encountered a march. Chanting and drums; hives of people up ahead, more coming to gather. A protest? A demonstration? Many people wearing the keffiyeh, traditional headdress of Arab Middle Eastern men.  

I dismounted and walked along the edge of the crowd, curious; people looked at me with a wink and a nod, as if I were part of their movement, part of their brotherhood, feeling I was on “their side” simply by being there.

What did they believe?

“Viva, Viva, Palestina! Again, and repeat, on loop. Or “Free Palestine!”

Many held signs showing clearly defined goals or wishes.  Israel this, Palestine that.

Some signs I agreed with (“Peace on Earth”), some I disagreed with (“Israeli’s are all terrorists”), and some so appalling they made me sick (“Israelis deserve to die!”).

I rolled on, the beating drum giving me a headache.

A sad, sad situation, this Middle East thing. Ignorance abounds, tolerance tanks, misinformation meltdown.   My Jewish friends say one thing; my Muslim friends say the opposite.

I can only ask questions in a human way:

“How would you feel if your relatives were at a rave party, celebrating ‘Peace and Love’ then find themselves in a shelter with fellow ravers, discovered by terrorists and shot point blank, a grenade to finish them off?”  Kaboom, you would be filled with rage and thoughts of revenge.

“How would you feel if you’ve spent all your savings on a nice little house in Gaza, your pride and joy, and it is taken away. Because some fools decided to launch a terror attack in the neighboring country, you get the blame, and you have six hours to leave your home, possibly never seeing it again. You know when you come back, it will be gone, blown to bits; nice summer flowers pulverized.  Boom, you would be filled with rage and thoughts of revenge.

The hate-filled hamster running the wheel at high speed: hate begets even more hate.

Terrified people of Israel and Gaza feel stability is gone (if they ever had it).

Not one to quote scripture – always seems preachy and overtly evangelical and weird – I remember something from my Sundays with my parents in our Catholic Church, when people would turn to each other, in greeting, and shake each other’s hands (usually) with a statement:

“Peace, I leave with you; my peace I give you.”  John 14:27 – some just say “Peace be with you.”

It is easy for me to say, cozy, in my stable world.

Tonight, somewhere in Gaza, a child cries out in the dark, digging desperately for mother, buried under rubble; the child’s cries heard by an Israeli hostage, beaten, bleeding, and blindfolded, just down the block.  Both feeling with their hands, nothing familiar, searching.

Unmoored, unstable; lonely and lost.

My peace I give you.

Friday Mood: Rich

 

“Consider the little of life that we know
We bring nothing, take nothing, pass through & go
We're all of us poor when it comes to the night
In need of the darkness, in need of the light
If we learned to want less & love more
There's be enough for the poor
'Cause there's more than enough for us all.”

“More Than Enough” by Robb Johnson (1993)

There exists a bike trail, from lake to river, winding like a loose rope, linking one part of the city to another. This trail ends at a wonderful waterfall next to the river, and a beer hall with outdoor seating.  

I took the path, my bike wet from an earlier rain, enjoying the greenery; the smell of the nearby creek, interrupted only when I diverted into a “sketchy” part of town to buy a lottery ticket at a gas station.

Yes, yes, I know, rich people don’t buy lottery tickets. But the threshold!  After a certain level is reached (i.e. $1 Billion) the outrageous odds cause a riotous ridiculousness in me. Oh, all the things I could do, if I had a little slice of that $1 Billion (Money!!!)

Waiting in line at the gas station mini-mart, I witnessed patterns of the poor: people paying too much for false food; people paying cash, obligatory output of a possible “drug deal” based on the classic thug look (RIP Tupac’s style is so ’96).  A purple tattoo climbed up the side of a woman’s neck “Hail Mary” and some religious figures, bleeding Jesuses and assorted angels dancing. Another woman, clothing ragged, obviously drunk, shouted orders at a small dirty child. Posters on the wall – people pictured in crime scenes: ski masks covering faces: “WANTED” in big letters, likely for petty crimes like stealing beef jerky or big bags of junk food, or maybe previously pistol whipping “Patty” the cashier on duty. The place smelled of weed and body odor and hot dogs left too long on that rolling heat thing.  

A man rushed in, shouting in Spanish, then squeezed to the front of the line, around me, placing random identification papers, from his home country (Ecuador, on the paper), in front of cashier Patty, to prove he was “of age” to buy cigarettes. I guess he’d been in line earlier and had to “come back.”  The cashier looked defeated and handed him Marlboros; took his cash, never looking to see if the picture on the ID matched his face.

Felt like a crime scene, the only “crime” people shared was crushing poverty.

I moved on, back to the path. Glorious arrival as the falls, then frantic search for a table. It was packed, not many seating options.  I’d asked an older gentleman if I could sit at his table (he was alone at a very large table). “Well, there’s going to be more coming, but you can join. I don’t know how long they’ll be!”

Oh, Chatty Charlie, he.  I found out he lived in one of the wealthiest Zip Codes in the country. He talked about his house and his dogs and his boat, and on.   “Where is your boat?” His city didn’t have a lake.  “Oh, my boat is at our other house up North.”   “Oh,” I said. “Your other house.”

He talked about his second home in detail (when they bought it, the square footage, the dock on the lake, etc. how it is getting too big to manage now the kids are grown and flown). A Range Rover pulled up to park. “There they are!”    His entourage came over the table, his wife cozying up like Coco in her Chanel, masked by sunglasses. We sat, gamey Stammtisch-style in the big park under the tall trees. After a few questions from me in jest (“he’s been waiting here with me for a long time, where have you been?”), I sipped my beer and listened. If the Robb Report could talk, this would have been the output. His wife, an interior designer, talked about the latest luxury house she’d designed; an exquisite sauna they’d ordered for some house on Lake Minnetonka.   

Her face of privilege wasn’t real, but plastic gives off its own glowing sheen. She kindly bought me two more beers as time progressed;  she told me I was simply “charming!”

I’ve learned, late in life, if you want people to think you are interesting, get deeply interested in them; enter “listen mode.” Ask them to “tell me more” and follow up with questions about what they just described.  The more you ask, they’re more convinced you’re the most charming person on earth, even though you’ve hardly said anything about yourself.

As the sunset’s last gleaming, my heavier-than-thought bicycle somehow rode underneath my seat and happily drunk me biked blindly home along a very dark path (“why are there no path lights? Why are my little bike lights so weak?”). Many near misses with posts and trees and benches along the side of the path.  

My drunken mind stuck in a loop, comparing gas station poverty purple people to Burberry bench tavern table people.  Both groups, living side by side, breathing the same air, occupying the same city. To say “the gap between rich and poor is becoming wider” is so passé. The gap now a chasm, societal tension so tight, a rope stretched to the breaking point. Maybe someday we’ll hear a snap, like a clap of thunder over the Bastille.   

Picture: In awe in Menton (Commune in Alpes-Maritimes) Cote d’Azur, France. October 2009.  We stopped at a hilltop cemetery with multitudes of beautiful statues. Here the dead are buried on top of each other, stacked; rich and poor, separated no more. I don’t think they mind.

Friday Mood: Calm

 

My neighbor, down the street, recently died. He was nearly 90. He checked out, leaving his 80+year-old wife behind. When I see her, in her doorway, which is rare, she says hello to me, as if for the first time.  I simply smile “Nice to meet you, too.” Then, under my breath, “again.”

I live on a one-way street facing a forest. At times it is very quiet. Some rain swept evenings, I sit in my room, on the top floor, looking down this lonely street with its sole street light, thinking about the future. Sometimes I like to imagine otherworldly creatures walking down the street, or characters in some Stephen King novel. Pennywise, playing, coming closer.

Never happens. The street stays empty, lone car headlights interrupt nothingness.

My mother-in-law thinks she saw a ghost recently: a thousand-particle figure of gray matter floating across the hallway.  It’s not new to her, happening about once a decade; each time it freaks her out. The same apparition; the same feeling. Chills down her spine.

Ghosts.

Older people think of even older people, projecting on elders; there’s always someone “ahead of them” in line for the next wave, the next world.  “Not me! Them!”  Those sitting in rough rocking chairs in not-so-nice nursing homes or ailing assisted living centers, waiting for their time to come: waiting for the little figure, floating closer, coming for them, tapping them on the shoulder.  Time.

When anxiety creeps in, and oh how it does as you get older, there’s one sure way I keep calm. I think of a small figure, approaching down my street (I can see it!), coming through my front door, up the stairs, then standing in my room with an open hand, all but saying “It is time. Come with me.”  

You cannot refuse the Reaper. There is no option but to obey.

The picture appeared in my feed today: I remember Topkapı Palace, or the “Seraglio,” in Istanbul, 2011.  Istanbul, the beguiling city. Go, once in your life. The palace was completed in 1465.   All the people who built it and all the people who lived in it are long gone; harvested by the Reaper.

There must be a calm at the end, knowing all worldly worries are literally at an end: nothing left to fear; nothing left to fend off or fight; nothing left to patiently plan.

Open your hand, slip it into the figure’s hand and go. Easy.

The thought brings me peace…and calm.