A Ravenous Peace.

And a babbling problem.
Breaking the fogs of procrastination.
Slapped by Joy and Seared by Song.
​

 
"oh the candle light unravels all the knots I have woven and fettered, all my thought cloven and severed, and the gold dust on the darkness, like a hand on my brow loosens my grasp full of straws and how do you do it? asked the wind of the water, holding those creatures inside and outer your salty space while you dance with the sea grass and sand? i do nothing said the water, but open my hand and hold it out to be filled and hold it open to help and raise it high to welcome and put it low on the ground to honor what is missin'."

Wrote that in Hermes last night 'round 2:45 a.m. when I fell asleep computer in lap for a moment, then set in to the side. It took me a while, as usual, to find a place to park last which I didn't think would immediately enrage someone when finding me parked in their morning view. After getting off the freeway on a quest for diesel, I realized it was time to sleep anyway.


I'm currently at a Whole Foods dotted somewhere in the sprawling new-adobe cookie-cutter gated communities between Laguna Hilla and Laguna Niguel. I tried to find a non-chain coffee shop this morn--no dice. Eventually I asked Siri to take me to the nearest Whole Foods because they are often large enough I can find a cafeteria seat with an outlet to charge my devices and crowded enough no one bothers noticing the food I eat didn't come from the hot-food bar. This time the cafeteria is just a modest strip of couches, sprinkled with five women wearing tight grey and black and pink leggings and tops. They are all gorgeous--thick hair, glowing skin, thin, lounging lithely, some on their phones, sipping different post-jog libations. They are not together. But they all belong to the same tribe, that which I never want to belong. They live in a place where literally every neighborhood is a monotonous repeating pattern of wealth, and their shopping centers are all chains--I wove in and out of them late last night and this morning--semi-shocked and impressed at the monotony and vastness of the winding land of faux-clay and repeating grids of palm trees, felt like I was going in circles, getting closer to the center of hell--aka the most boring place on earth, where they would most likely pay someone to pay someone to pay someone to kill a gypsy like me for the crime of my brazen existence as a person who loudly gives zero fucks about earning money; driving a yellow box in which I obviously, oh my fucking god, live.


More of my thoughts later on the tip of the classism-iceburg which has pricked me more sharply than ever of late (since living in Hermes).


I'm sitting in the nigh dark though it be 10:01 a.m. I asked the young folks at customer service where I might find a place to work on my computer for a moment--meaning another local, a coffee shop, or somewhere very outlet/writer friendly that is not Whole Foods--but the young man kindly steered me to the closed Rock-It Bar, where the chairs where up on the tables and the blinds drawn, and he proudly revealed the one outlet hiding near a comfortable looking bar stool with a back--I like stools, and I like chairs, but stools with backs are the best--I'd raise this blind, but it's electric. I got 16 ounces coffee here for refill price cuz I gots my own cup. I indulged in half a slice of french toast from the hot bar, soggy with something heavenly and topped with hot berries. I don't like that I'm not at a small business or co-op, and I am disturbed by the wealthy suburbia suffocating me buried deep within it's sterile labyrinth, but the young folks at this Whole Foods are quite nice. I think of the awesome salad in the cooler in Hermes, greater than the sum of it's comprised-of-leftover-food parts, laden with lemon juice, ginger, garlic, rice, quinoa, kale, zucchini, turmeric, pepper, apple cider vinegar, and sardines on the side. Gosh I love food. I have so much catching up to do with this blog, dammit. I still weep for the first entry from this trip, an extraordinary piece of writing spat out in a dash directly onto the website whilst at the Whole Foods in Eugene, and was directly eaten up by black holes in the internet. And though I feel like losing that entry was a sign of continued derailment to come--I fight this notion. I yet do better as time passes with resisting procrastination--just starting the thing, whatever the thing may be--without indulging in the notion I know what will come, and resisting the temptation that I must first produce the correct and comfortable environment in which for me to start the thing--and that is why I sit in the dark at Whole Foods in the midst of spooky rich Laguna territory--because I have lived too much life where I'm seeking the environment in which my blossoming and flowing will be easy and natural--trying to invoke emotions on myself like a spell woven from the correct light sources and aesthetic suggesting whatever it is I am lacking--spending time preparing to begin until I the day is over and I still never really began what it was I for which I was planning and preparing. That vague madness I suspect taunts us all from time to time--but I feel keenly it's stealthy seduction of my focus, a fog I try to keep at bay on the daily--the clouds of procrastination that can suck my thoughts inverted into a moment like a black hole condenses matter, until I believe time-travel and astral-travel must be a valid experiences reachable only by fully losing your mind as you sit still--your mind imagining other futures and times and places and conversations with other people and gods, as your body moves slower and slower, turning the fool to a touchstone on a hill, or a blob on a couch--one's mind moving faster and freer and deeper into it's self-made dimensions--until it no-longer deciphers between make-believe/fantasy/ideas and reality--until your mind betrays your corporeal goals, leaving action and interaction with other humans behind, birthing a new life lived only in the mind--vibrating on the band of spectrum ranging from the distractable undisciplined mind, graduating to either paranoia or delusions, and leveling up to either schizophrenia or astral-travel.


Who knows, maybe between the point where I am now and the point of complete madness is hell, but the end point is secretly divine--but I don't care to find out--so I'm headed the other direction--trying hard to not procrastinate. Trying not to second guess. Trying to observe. Trying to act. Trying to observe as I act. Trying to resist the cloying temptations to create increasing levels of comfort. Trying to not guess the future. Knowing I don't know what will happen. Ever. Never. I will let myself hope. I will encourage myself to hold the moment easily as a holy joy that also holds me--this sunshine, this coffee--seeing this man across the wood-paneled floor--he wears a red polo shirt--he looks like a weathered rosehip, his brown skin glows softly in the light of the windows where he stands, holding glass jars at an angle-just-so. I don't know with what he fills them, but I like how steady his gaze is and his movements slow like a wave of wind across a field of wheat.


I woke up with an ailment in my right eye this morn--an evolution of some stress-induced resperitory/sinus infection--and the eye continues to ache, swollen and leaking green puss. It kina hurts. It's not pink-eye. And the air outside smells sweet and green like it only does in early spring. Or maybe it smells that fresh every day in Laguna land. The sea is calling me still. I am heading to San Diego, thought the route east from there may be tedious with border shit, for I am not sated by salt water its sand on which to lay while wearing as little amount of clothes as I can muster.


I think for a moment on of saying goodbye to my dear friend Sarah late last night--she barefoot at her gate in Koreatown--I don't know if I've hugged anyone so much who wasn't a lover--we cried we love each other so much. I don't see her often, but her countenance is almost a shock at the release I feel around her--the release of childhood bliss unfurled--and the blooming of all the best of me that has formed over the years. She is true love to me. If we both liked having sex with women, we would definitely get married. A trite comparative for the connection we feel--but a true soul sister she is--completely affirmed by each other every moment, letting me slip immediately into another realm of ease and confidence I know with few others, and--the best part of all--the kind of friendship that is mostly all kinds of laughter.


I am so very glad I am a person blessed by many, many friends--of many different lifestyles, personalities, experiences, classes, vibes, colors, and tribes. I value solitude so that I may hear my own self, but damn, I would be nothing without constantly being affirmed by other humans--whether it's an exchange at a gas station, or with a stranger who pauses for a moment while I sing on the street, or a new friend I dance with at a house show, or an old friend like Sarah who has known me for a decade and seen me go evolve through many extreme changes since we first met when I was still a child at twenty-one years old. As I get older, I am getting better at true empathy and feeling connected to others--respecting them and recognizing them as actual pieces of myself. This is so likewise, and perhaps because of, my increased self-knowledge--knowing what my health and happiness and sanity needs. I know I need my alone time--but it has naught to do with feeling disconnected from others--like I used to feel. It has to do with seeking a break from being overwhelmed by being influenced by the awesome energies of others. If I am to be an effective human, I believe I must still seek out solitude on the daily so the voices calling me to do only that which I can do might be heard. I need that balance--strict solitude and silence and white noise--and intense connection with all kinds of other energies.

​I have been a little too alone lately. It leaves my confidence wobbly and my emotions easily tipped. But these things I observe and try to temper accordingly. Though I crave and need community to root me in a context greater than me and yet supportive of patterns I may form within it as satisfactory self-expression. . . I yet reject a community where I am physically rooted for more than six-months time. . . I try to have my cake and eat it too--as much as possible--but I now know which one my happiness must sacrifice when I must make the choice--and I give-up the having--more consciously this year than ever before--I have learned a new level of understanding that traveling makes me more happy than staying put. The next time I stay put somewhere it will be with the knowledge that the staying-put is a thing I do sometimes only to sustain my fleeing and flying. Someday I will slow down a little bit. And I have already tried to slow down--for it seems like a good idea in so many endless obvious ways--but my voices, though I push them away, still call me on. My happiness will not give up on me. And my happiness requires wandering and touring and traveling--gathering information--seeing what is out there with my own eyes. Everywhere I go I ask someone what is the meaning of their life. Everywhere I go I hear a new song. Sometimes it comes from an experience with a person, but oft it comes from the land, and it comes from the movement of the people living on the land--their movement shaped by the land--no matter how polluted and tamed a land is, no matter how wild--the land is still what gives birth to language and song--its rhythms are at once deep and buried, the foundation of the movement of creation all around, but as the base it is also the most obvious thing, waiting, large and quiet, to be seen as the source of all.

The Laguna Hills are chill and hypnotic and they lay down their bodies, limbs languid to the sea--a seductive, easy rhythm, chill and quiet--paradise--the wealthy claim it now and cover it with cement and tweak the peace into more rigid order, but those hills still infuse something into whatever is going on here. But I'm not gonna stay to find out. My phone is fully charged. And though it's been swell, I gotta get to the beach again--where the surf somehow roots me--strips away most anything except my sense that I am a fucking gorgeous animal belonging right where ever I am, the ocean is my god, the land is my mother, and all else on this planet my kindred. The ocean stops my mind imagining things. The ocean obliterates all my fucks. Just five minutes by ocean and I am woke, standing taller, seeing farther, moving easier, breathing deeper. Why am I still typing? Bye. I love you.