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Dharma Beatdown: August 2008

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

Things were starting to look pretty bleak.

I discovered something strange about myself. I've had hints about it over the years, but it came very clearly into focus the other day. The world holds me to a higher moral and ethical standard than it holds other people.

Ouch.

So yes, that is in part because of the fact that I hold myself to a higher standard. Yes, Tim, I realize because I am a philosophy-minded sort who ascribes to a virtue ethics-based creed that there may be some element of confirmation bias. I'm factoring that in. Beyond that, though...

I'll give a specific example. Due to unfair vicissitudes of divorce that I won't get into here, I am only allowed to see my kids at a supervised visitation facility. During intake at this facility, my ex was asked to fill out a form rating my capacity for violence. This form has been discredited by pretty much every government agency, including the judge in our case, who happens to be on the board of the visitation facility. The form had questions like these:

Has the other party threatened you with a weapon?
Were they implicated in the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand?
Have they or have they not stopped clubbing cute little baby seals?

My intake form, on the other hand, only had a space for my name, with "Adolf Manson Satan" already filled in.

NOTE TO OFFICIALS GOOGLING ME: THE PREVIOUS STATEMENTS HAVE BEEN HYPERBOLIZED FOR HUMOROUS EFFECT

Regardless, the point is that the form was taken full advantage of, I was falsely portrayed as dangerous, and the supervisors should have expected me to be a complete raving lunatic. Now, instead I have been my usual self. Polite, cautious, honorable, articulate, and helpful even when being intolerably crapped on. I'm surrounded by methheads and worse who actually belong in this place, and who seem to be given every break imaginable when it comes to bending rules and such, but I am afraid to fart in this facility for fear of getting tasered. Still, I am treated more restrictively than the rules seem to imply, and not seemingly out of punishment. Maybe because I'm not struggling, the shackles just have a way of slipping tighter... figuratively speaking.

It's not just in that arena. It's at work, at play, with family in friends. People expect me not to act like a dick, even when it's okay to be one. Or to perform when there's no reason for me to. I realize there's no reason for me to get worked up about this, or feel singled out, and I'm not, but I have to be intellectually honest. It's something I'm noticing. Sometime's it's seemingly arbitrary, and while I have a definite knowledge that the phenomenon is there, I don't know the full scope of it.

These were the things I was thinking about recently, and honestly, the biggest feeling I was getting was that of being lonely. I felt really cut off from everyone, even the people who are most supportive of me all the time, until yesterday, when I realized...

So fucking what? Maybe I am unfairly held apart. Big deal. Life continues. So will I, just doing my thing, walking my Middle Way and trying to not be huge asshole and yet remain somewhat entertaining. So for this I would like to thank not only my homeboys Tim and Tim for direct and indirect consultation, but also my Mommy, my good friends online, and of course the evah-wonderful and savage Kayla, love of my life. Also:

"Do good. Don't do bad. Keep trying to figure out which is which." -Daolin

Damn. Do we really need a thousand millennia of fucking Buddhas to help us out with this?

Sunday, August 17, 2008

Gym questions: What's a boobzout, and Am I evil?

Saturday morning I was at the gym, and apparently the forces of interdependence decided it would be blog fodder.

Part one- public nudity. Everyone at the gym, if you've never been, is running around in scanty little outfits that leave very little to the imagination, which is nice to look at in some cases, horrid in some cases, and sweaty and straining in all cases. This is a given. Despite the reputation of my particular gym's location as being a meat market and gyms in general as being some sort of Roman orgy, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of wanton naked flesh running around.

Until yesterday. The elliptical machines I prefer to warm up on are near the corridor that leads to the locker rooms. I was on one, and next to me was a guy who checked in at the same time I did. He's a regular, and we said hi and he seemed a friendly sort. Next to him was his friend.

Suddenly, amid the occasional people going in and out of the ladies' locker room, a ghastly old woman comes out wearing only a towel on her bottom half. She's only half-heartedly attempting to cover one scary boob with her arm, then she gives up and they're both just flopping in the wind. I don't know if she had soap in her eye from the shower and didn't know she was in front of the entire cardio room or what, but it was not pretty. She was walking around in that corridor for a minute or two. The guy next to me was pointing her out to his buddy and they were laughing. Then I got a chance to use some FARK terminology in real life other than 'asshat.'

I tapped the guy next to me on the shoulder, and he immediately got a serious expression on his face- he probably assumed that I was going to chastise him for making fun of a confused old woman. What I said was:

"Pardon me, do you have any eye bleach?"

He almost fell of the elliptical machine laughing.


Part two- Metallica's Garage Inc. Disc Two. Let me repeat that. DISC TWO. I WAS LISTENING TO DISC TWO, NOT DISC ONE. Which if you don't know, is composed of their excellent NWOBHM covers from their Garage Days eps, some b-sides, Lemmy's birthday party, etc. One of the songs popped up, and I was reminded of a simpler time in life, and a mystery that I have been unable to solve to this day...

In high school, I had a long distance romance with a beautiful, intelligent, cool girl from a farm, and I somehow managed to creepily bumble through it before she justifiably dumped my ass and moved on. No hard feelings, E, hope you know that!

My dad had gotten me into Los Lobos around this time, and I had shared that with her, and before the schism we had gotten concert tickets. Uh-oh... has anyone heard this one before? We were 15 and from Oregon so of course very cosmopolitan, so we would attend the concert together like civilized people and that would be it. I'm sure the gentlemanly thing would have been for me to give her the extra ticket, but none of her friends liked the boys from east L.A. She could have given her ticket to me, as my best friend liked them, but that must have smelled like defeat. So we were deadlocked and went ahead with. I think in a way I was also hoping that the summer magic, the sounds of Los Lobos' "Kiko", the spicy Zydeco opening band or some other bullshit would set me up for reconciliation. Honestly, I don't think I've every been Alpha male enough to count that kind of coup.

To bring this story to its point, the concert was wonderful musically and awkward personally. They came out for an astonishing 2 encores, and played a bunch of cool blues and soul covers. I've seen Los Lobos twice since then, and they are known for doing Cream, Marvin Gaye, stuff like that. There's even a guy, website now defunct, who kept a list of all their covers, and it was mindboggling. He had never even heard of what I will bring before you.

There's a question I'm sure you're asking. "Where's 'La Bamba'?" Well, it's right here, in just a second.

They came out for a third encore. Which, while not unheard of, was notable. I mean, this was Los Lobos in 1994 in Oregon, not the fucking Beatles. The guitarists launch into a brief distorted fanfare and then a crunchy riffing that would be recognizable to any young metalhead, especially one such as myself who had been obsessed with Metallica as a much younger metalhead. "Am I Evil", originally recorded by Diamond Head, the intro based in part on themes from two of Holst's "Planets" suites.

I am completely blown away. This isn't some song that sounds like "Am I Evil," it's it, note for note, full on distortion. The arrangement is very distinctive, it's on one of my favorite albums... Emily asks me what's wrong. "They're playing a fucking Metallica song, nothing's wrong." She shrugs. The song intro riffs for a while, crescendo; then goes into a brief solo, same as on the album, tapping, harmonics and all. When it reaches the tritone that signals the beginning of the song proper, right before the other instruments come in and Hetfield/Harris sing 'My mother was a witch/she was burned alive...'

THEY LAUNCH IN TO MOTHERFUCKING LA BAMBA.

The crowd is on their feet. It's probably the most recognizable song for them, sure, but I don't think it had the same impact for them that it had on me, the sound guy and a couple roadies.

I've used a light touch for this mystery ever since, in part because of my tender feelings toward the times in which they occur. Also because it brings up an interesting dilemma. Either I am completely insane or Los Lobos really really is the coolest band in the world and no one will ever know or care. I actually saw them on a magazine cover back in the 90's that proclaimed them the coolest band in the universe, but I think that was hyperbole. Los Lobos are an awesome band. Really world class versatile musicians, passionate the whole run. Commercially they are in a sense a one-hit wonder, and that one hit was a spanish-language song from a musician biopic starring Lou Diamond Phillips. You tend to associate a sort of shallowness with musical groups in that category, and I for one am glad that Los Lobos have completely transcended that.

So, the dilemma. Since I have found no record of them ever doing this type of shenanigans, I am forced to conclude that:

a. there is some instrumental song by... I don't know, Peter Green-era Fleetwood Mac or something that sounds note-for-note identical to "Am I Evil", which is incredibly unlikely.

b. I hallucinated it all.

c. They stepped out their bounds and did an obscure cover of an obscure band which contains an obscure shoutout to one of the most brutal,metal symphonies ever.

I'm throwing a. out right now. It's not impossible, but come on. I really, really don't like option b. either. I've hallucinated before and I'd like to think that the elaborate cognitive processes involved in me thinking about the song and what it meant and listening the parts, etc. were not all part of a waking dream. That just sucks. Option c.... I love it. "Am I Evil" was included on some copies of Metallica's "Kill Em All" but not most of them. A lot of my friends out here on the west coast had never heard it. Diamond Head's "Lightning to the Nations" was hard to find... there was a cassette version, but it was in short supply, to my chagrin, and I know the vinyl was a collector's item. So the person who would dig this cover would be a Metallica fan, and the Metallica-Los Lobos overlap was pretty tiny. This was the early nineties, and musical eclecticism was not de rigeur, kids!

So for now, until I have the wisdom to unlock all secrets, I'll let the secrets of Los Lobos' collective mind be hidden, and I'll hope that all the saggy boobs remain covered.

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Tuesday, August 12, 2008

What would the Buddha say?

So, I was over at my mom's house after helping her jump-start her car. My 13-year-old brother Cullen is in the background playing DS, not paying any attention as we have a conversation.

I'm ranting about how someone at my work steals the Friday A&E section of the paper, the only part of the paper apart from the comics that is worth a crap, and how I am totally fed up with it. Our company pays good money for multiple copies of The Oregonian for people to read and some douchebag prevents the rest of us from enjoying it. I'm describing my cunning and vicious plan to show my disapproval... I'm going to get the A&E first thing in the morning and take some spray adhesive and glue every fucking page together and leave it in the break room.

My mom says that my anger is misdirected, that I'm channeling it away from somewhere I should be and into these little things, then asks, "What would the Buddha say?"

"DO IT!" Cullen says.

There's a moment of silence.

"I love you," I say. "You are quite possibly one of the coolest people I've ever met, Cullen."

It's good to have a family that cares.

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Monday, August 11, 2008

It's done

Brief post, and then some radio silence. My novel "Antipaladin Blues" was completed this afternoon, gloriously. I'm feeling awesome. Sent it off to my publisher and now comes the fun and potentially nightmarish process of editing and illustrations. Whew.

Monday, August 4, 2008

Why I need to read "Gulag Archipelago" again

The song I've been working on and mentioned in my last post, was called "The Captivity." This is important and either a wonderful coincidence or evidence of synchronicity. As sinister as the song is, it is elegaic... much like for as much of a death sentence as it was, "Closer" could have been "Closure."

So why coincidence or synchronicity? Well, on the same day I hit "Save Live project as...", Nobel Prize winner Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn died at the age of 89. Now, I've been noncommital about it before, and I will be again:

When circumstances begins coming together in a meaningful pattern without any obvious reason why, right? C'mon now, it's as plain as noses on faces that that happens, right? Right?
I'll agree to that. It's easy to notice that things come together like that, and if you're a believer in a higher power, it's even easier to fit things together with that meme working on the ol' melon. So be careful.
But what about the other side? I once stated that "Synchronicity is just apophenia," and while I do reserve the right to keep the file open, it's the stronger of the philosophical positions. It's easier, and simpler, according to the Principle of Parsimony (also known as Occam's Razor, if you really didn't know) that the entire phenomenon is just selecting hits over misses. Besides, and I quote a brilliant philosopher from Peacetrain, who said that "human cognition, honed by millions of years of evolution, is one bad-assed pattern recognition engine." Hard to argue with.
Yet... there's something there.
A mystery. Why does the idea carry so much weight? Are we just fooling ourselves, with ideas about destiny, masking untestable artifacts of consciousness with more romantic, emotional artifacts of consciousness?
All I know, is that for an acausal connective principle, it's some strong stuff- and you have to admire anyone who is willing to wrestle with it. I mean that.


Why is this song title connective? When I have a chance to sing the praises on the passing of a great man, such as I have with Thompson or Wray, I refuse to trivialize them by listing their accomplishments as other people will who are more qualified. Instead I share something of myself. I stumbled on Solzhenitszyn's great work "The Gulag Archipelago" in high school and was fascinated by him. There was something about the idea of the mild-mannered physics professor not only going off to command an artillery company on the front in WWII, but also having the huge sack to make fun of Stalin's mustache. AND SURVIVE. I was also in love with the idea of the writer enduring through adversity, and somehow I thought my adolescent/teenage struggles (while pretty horrible) were cognates with imprisonment, cancer, and exile.

I read it again after I was married, and this time was fascinated with the satanic machinery of the prison system, Prosecutor Krylenko and all his dark brethren. Pretty obvious stuff here- I was imprisoned cruelly for my own ill-thought words ("I do..") and abused arbitrarily at the hands of an illogical captor. Ugh.

Somewhere in that mess, I had a dream that Solzhenitsyn's ghost came to me and told me to get off my ass and that I knew what I needed to do. I thought at the time he meant to write... I know in retrospect he meant to get the hell out of the Dacha. He wasn't dead at the time either, so I wrote him a letter once I found that out. Don't know if Farrar, Straus, and Giroux ever passed it on, but I can hope.

So now Soli, as his friends called him, has passed. According to some Farkers who knew him in Vermont, he was a cool dude to drink and play chess with. According to Wikipedia, he was a dick who thought atheists and rock music were to blame for the downfall of the west. Regardless, he can be named as an inseperable part of the modern world's concience, and I think that it's time for me- as a man- to reexamine what that means.

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Friday, August 1, 2008

Quoth the Raven "..."

So, a literary post, then, instead of a musical post.

I am finishing up my novel. This is one of the biggest priorities in my life right now, and I really am not far from being done... a couple thousand words of sheer brutal assbeating with a little setup for the second book in the trilogy, some alchemical explosions, sexual tension, and as much filthy language as a book with no denoument can stand. Easy, right?

I had stalled out a bit, until I got a handle on how I wanted the action to play out. No sweat. Then, a couple of weeks ago, my migraines/cluster headaches returned in earnest. Now, I come from a long line of tough-skinned people who bury their pain no matter how acute, and just deal. Thanks, mom. That's been a bit difficult to reconcile with Buddhist mindfulness, but there you go. So, since cringing in a darkened bedroom is not conducive to a number of activities I do- work, play, etc., I went to the doctor the other day.

That was great- I reunited with my old doctor, who actually moved to a smaller practice closer to me. He was very supportive and understanding of the crap I've been through with the divorce, and helped me move forward with treating my migraines. The preventative treatment he put me is apparently a very successful one- with the wildly awesome side effect of weight loss, which I can more than handle, and another that maybe I can't...

On forums dedicated to migraine sufferers (migraineurs, if you want to be fancy about it) they have a name for this side effect, chosen by people who already seem to have it: "The Stupids." Or for you laymen, 'cognitive deficit.' It can include memory loss, aphasia, confusion... wow.

My first dose made me feel like Dementors had come to return me to fucking Azkaban. Not dopey, just zero energy. I tried to write and failed, then figured I could probably make a little music. I opened up a song I've been working on, kind of a scary "Security"-era Peter Gabriel type track. I cued up a part, then... sat there. For like five minutes. Not nudging tempos, not changing warp points... nothing.

So I called a mulligan and went to bed. Okay, Kayla made me go to bed because I had fallen zombie-fashion on the couch. Next morning, I woke up feeling like someone in the house had gone into bullet time. This was not encouraging. If this was how it was going to be, I'll take the fucking migraines.

The good news, again. After my second dose the effects are not as strong. I was able to sit through "So You Think You Can Dance" last night before going to bed in a relatively civilized manner. I suppose they titrate you on this medicine for a reason.

Well, I feel good and able to knock out some wordage tonight. That's great, and hopefully it means a future of not wanting to tear the livid flesh from my own skull. Wish me luck, kids.

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