Edie at the Peak

As America stands on the brink of its inevitable devolution into a Third World country, those of us old enough to remember the peak of our culture-- when, to paraphrase Hunter, the tide rolled in, crested, and rolled back -- should periodically be excused for the nostalgia indulged to do so. And when we do, it's hard not to envision that one lonely waif of a girl who was the first of so many things, but who was truly unique, the victim of everyone who is in many ways the icon and the emblem of whatever it was we became in the 'sixties, Edie Sedgwick.

Edie died in 1971 at the age of 28, a year later and a year younger than Jim Morrison, and right on the heels of the deaths of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin in 1970, whose deaths were themselves the sad cultural echoes of the shooting of Robert Kennedy two years earlier. Edie, like Jim, Jimi, and Janis, died of drugs, except in her case she did so as much at the hands of the society which simultaneously tried to save, enclose, enwrap and suffocate her. I first became aware of Edie in about 1979, through Edie: American Girl, an oral biography by Jean Stein. Although I lived through the sixties, I was a child and was in my early twenties still scrambling to retain my culture; I don't think I had any acquaintance with Andy Warhol's Factory before this other than the wisps of mention on the evening news and in the mainstream press. So I hadn't heard of Edie although I was 13 at the time of her death. But something about her powerful presence reached out to me through the words of the interviews in the book and the grainy photos.

I'd almost forgotten about Edie until Factory Girl, starring Sienna Miller as Edie, came out a couple of years ago. I recommend the movie for the myth, if not the truth, but in this case the former points to the latter. Sienna Miller is a beautiful woman, but she looks nothing like Edie Sedgwick, who was waif-like yet dancer-strong and powerful in a frail way that no one else has ever equalled, not for the lack of trying. Edie was the offspring of a wealthy and degenerate West Coast family; she was a multiple incest victim from within that nuclear family, her only anchor being her gay brother, who was shamed by the father into killing himself when Edie was a teen. The family's reaction to Edie's trauma was not to punish the offenders, but to put Edie into treatment; she was in the modern version of the asylum as recently as the year before she shot to stardom.

In 1965, Edie, recently arrived in New York City, became the first and really only Warhol girl to become a superstar; she was the It girl for two years, dominating the covers and contents of fashion magazines and society pages. In the Factory, or thereabouts, she met with the drugs that led to her destruction, if not the ones that killed her. If you think meth kills now, think what it did then to an innocent generation. The entire Factory was overrun and overpowered by the stuff; dispensed by the infamous Dr. Robert from the Beatles song in the form of powerful injections in combination with some vitamins, and then of course supplemented by the "patients" with their own syringes, Speed ran rampant through the above-ground underground of the Factory. With no cultural awareness of what the stuff really was or what it could do, brains were blasted and lives were lost, much as today, when the populace has less excuse. But in that era, meth started at the top of the cultural food chain.

Edie was indeed a shooting star. By the spring of 1967, her brain had begun to fry, her immaculate balance to fail. By Memorial Day she was toast. Warhol's people washed their hands of her, and the once-rich trust fund heiress struggled, borrowed and stole to get by in the Chelsea Hotel. At about the end of that year, she disappeared, to reappear later in the grasp of her family in California, where she underwent shock treatment and drug therapy which was itself abusive; she died of her tortures in 1971, in her bed one night.

But like Warhol's art, Edie's life became enwrapped in and indistinguishable from a film which began as just another Warhol pic and became her biography and her eulogy. To understand Edie, it is essential to watch Ciao! Manhattan. When you do, make sure you watch the interviews included on the DVD. Ciao! was originally written for another Warhol starlet, one of the many with whom he tried to fill Edie's shoes when she had become lost. The actress' name was Susan, but she became unavailable as the crew went to filming, and the filmmakers John Palmer went to the Chelsea scavenging, to bring in Edie.

The early part of the film, in black and white, made no sense at all; it was produced in an amphetamine haze that left it plotless and clueless. But it does feature invaluable and irreplacable footage of Edie at or near her peak. Such elegance in a human being has never been captured on film. The film was abandoned in the cans, but then Edie was rediscovered in California and was found to be charming and heroic even in the face of the abuses she was enduring in the name of treatment, and she was adamant that the film go on. And so it did, although almost all of its original cast was dead, missing, or in jail. It became a five-year project which in turn became Edie's life. Her life became the film, and her life ended a couple of weeks after the film wrapped. Warhol couldn't have hoped for a more perfect ending.

I saw Ciao! year ago and only saw it as the mess that the film, as a film, is. But I watched it again as the artifact of a culture which has disappeared. Today's illiterate, jaded and moronic audience will never be able to appreciate what happened in the 'sixties, when literacy met fantasy, destiny and death and entwined in the stranglehold embrace which has choked our culture to death. It is impossible for anyone who remembers, to see this movie without longing for the spirit and the spark which will never come again.

Edie, I never knew you, but I miss you. I miss all that you and we could and should have become. As we die up to our necks in Lindsay and Paris and the flotsam and jetsam of a directionless and mindless lack of culture, I will always know there was you, and that in some way, you make it all worthwhile.

A Moment of Silence

Re: the comments section on the last entry. When I'm getting advice from the Practice Director of the ASZC on where to get chili dogs, I must be doing something right....

The last blog entry was written in a period of intermission, of sorts. Prior to my last sesshin, I'd been hating my job for quite some time. A situation which had been profitable and enjoyable the year before had done to shit when the firm lost its major client; for the last few months I'd been forcing myself in to work every day, even though the money was inadequate and I was leaching off my savings, and the environment had been intolerable, with rampant in-fighting and office politics, not to mention an inadequate workload, bizarre client behavior, etc. So after sesshin, I went back to work on Monday, then never made it on Tuesday nor ever again. So.

And with the national and worldwide economies lurching on the brink, sorry guys, I don't feel like jumping right back into the chase. Froggy in a blender is not for me, at least until I can breathe for a while. Following my abandonment of the job from hell, I went into a period of funk and illness from which I have just not emerged; the last entry, as I say, was in the transition. I did my first yoga class of September last night, which started out as agony as a thousand putrid toxins fled my muscles and pores, and ended in satisfaction and a return to self, as I'd hoped. But of course the self I returned to is not the one I left (thank you, Heraclitus), and this one needs a moment of silence.

And I'm sorry, for those who can't understand. I'm not one of those people who could do the same thing every day for thirty years. I'm glad for those people that they can find completion in this, but if I can't reinvent myself every day, if even in my own head, there's no reason to get up. Who I am, for better or worse, is the product of more than half a century's hard work, not at accomplishing or trying to accomplish anything other than the moment to moment grasp, of What is this? Who and where am I? And if you've never felt the need to do this; well then, that's you.

Today I have no need to validate my existence by seeking a false consensual reality with those with whom I have nothing more than bare existence in common.

So I can sit here alone today, and watch the towers fall, over and over; not the Twin Towers but the metaphorical ones in Babylon.

Then there's the damned Nashville Buddhist Festival meeting tonight, brought to you by people who think that if it's worth doing once, it's worth doing over and over until you've beaten the living spirit out of it. Rest assured, it's my last. If you want to go delude yourselves, go for it; I'm tired to promoting those who would promote themselves. The Dharma is in your pocket.

Updates

I know, I've been pretty slack lately. I'm going through another period of transition, and although I still don't have a whole blog post in my head, I just have to post something to get that picture of Sarah Palin off the top of the blog.

Also, in retrospect I think I played into the whole Sarah Palin thing. I mean, the incredible choice of her took the national political debate off any serious issue for what, two weeks? And only the recent inevitable meltdown of the financial industry (which is about all Americans do anymore) brought back any attention to a serious issue.

So I'm posting a few pics from the last sesshin at the ASZC, about two weeks ago. It was another physically hard one; at one point I snuck out for a chili cheese dog (that weird fake stuff that comes from a machine) from the local convenience store, and then later that night for some ice cream. It got easier after that. I probably shouldn't post that, because it'll probably get seen by the cook, who is one of my favorite people in the Buddhist world. And the food at these things is truly excellent. But there's a tradition of the food at these things being all vegetarian and healthy, and almost none of the Zen people I know are vegetarians (as opposed to the Theravadans). And zazen is very physically stressful; I did something to my legs this time that I still haven't recovered from, though it does give me an excuse to seek out a massage therapist. And either having your diet shift in that stressful situation, even if for the better (I could easily be vegetarian if there weren't any seafood in the world, which will happen soon) always leave me with a lack of energy; or I just got a psychological bump from sneaking out and violating the diet. So the chili cheese dog helped. Sorry, Terry.

Anyway, enough of that. These are just a few of the pics from the retreat; Richard of the ASZC put them all up on his Flickr site, and you can see them here.

Oh, and if you want absolute positive proof that the Bush family was behind the bombing of the World Trade Center , plus some naked pictures of Sarah Palin as a teenager, click here. I hope to post something more coherent soon.

What, Any Woman?

I've already told you how I feel about politics in the Year of Our Lord 2008, so you can guess how I feel about the Conventions; I've been doing my best to ignore them. Lest you forget, I was a strong supporter of Hillary Clinton, thinking that was the only way to bring back any effective rational behavior on the part of "our" government, and I feel that Obama is probably well-meaning, but is also a self-important blowhard whose followers are naive idealists. But I'm gonna vote for him because he's better than four more years of McSame; the Republicans need to go down, even if it's just for the show value.

Nevertheless, I was relieved at Obama's choice of Joe Biden as Veep; Biden is an experienced fighter with good connections back into the solid base that Obama will need to get anything done if elected, and I have to admire a fighter (and someone who'll speak his mind occasionally). Of course I was mildly curious about McShit's choice, though I didn't expect much. But I was titillated, excited and like most Democrats dancing in the aisles yesterday when I heard who he'd chosen.

It's often said that the choice of the Veep candidate is the Presidential candidate's first real choice as Executive, and these two choices were, uh, revelatory. While Obama's was very sound, I think that John McCain, with the choice of Sarah Palin, has shown that he is indeed a fucking idiot.

Surely this will be the end of the challenge to Obama's experience! Palin has spent about 18 months as governor of Alaska. Prior to that, her only other office was mayor of Wasilla, a town of about 9,000. Just who I want a heartbeat from the Presidency with her little soccer-mom hand on the nuke button. If you were undecided, here's your best reason to vote Obama: the spectre of Sarah Palin as President.

It strikes me that the nomination of Palin is a real insult to women. Next to this bitch, Geraldine Ferraro was a gem. I won't go on about her; you'll be hearing it all from better authenticated sources 'til November. There will be revelations of petty corruption, and I can't wait to see her advocating the rape of her home State by the oil boys. And any woman who's anti-Choice has a real problem with Stockholm Syndrome.

So, was this an attempt to win the potential crossover Hillary vote, with a woman? Did he think just any woman would do? Does McCain seriously think that anyone who'd support a vetted, intelligent woman like Clinton could vote for this twit? Does he think that just any woman would do, and after all this one's not even bad-looking....

So I was thinking I'd help him out. Lately, I've been fascinated with the work of a performance artist named Boyd Rice, to whom I was turned on by a co-worker. Rice as an early Industrial performer,and was included in that famous RE:/Search Vol. #6/7 Industrial Issue back in the late '70's. In the '80's and '90's he became associated with some really edgy groups, like the Church of Satan (apparently he was dating Anton LaVey's daughter at one point!) and was featured in some White Supremacist media, probably because he'd taken to wearing and featuring Nazi regalia in his performances. Whatever. But he was originally a DJ and apparently still does some work, and he just released an EP with Go-Go Giddle Partridge.

Giddle Partridge was associated with the Partridge Family Temple, a religious organization devoted to the worship of deities who incarnated as member of the Partridge Family. She has had some movie roles, particulary as a character named as the Blonde Floozie In Year of the Dog. She is now working on an album with Boyd, and she lives in LA, working as a dancer and designer. It appears to me that based on these qualifications, she would be an excellent choice for Vice President. Check her out!

In My Absence - Jackie Fox and Brad Warner

Thanks for allowing me my rest from blogging for a while; I'm still not over it. In the meantime, I wanted to introduce those of you who are not already familiar with two of my favorite bloggers, to some great stuff that's come out just in the last few days.

First, meet Jackie Fox, original bassist for the Runaways. After she left the band, Jackie went to Harvard Law School, where she was in Barack Obama's class; '91? Anyway, I don't know anyone else who could write an insightful comparison of Obama and Joan Jett. It first appeared here in her MySpace blog, and was picked up for the Huffington Post. I'm reprinting it below. Check out her other blog entries; she is an intelligent, insightful and charming writer. If more than one in a million attorneys were anything like Jackie, I might have stayed in.

And Brad Warner has been on a roll. He has been reprinting his posts from his Hardcore Zen blog site to MySpace, and then there's his work on Suicide Girls. Check 'em all out. Whenever I get bogged down by the wait of all the delusional deadheads in Zen, Brad is the antidote. The following is a YouTube video of his appearance on CNN last Sunday morning. His comments (as well as the same video) appear here.




I won't be silent much longer. See you soon.

Why Barack Obama Reminds Me of Joan Jett

Yes, you read that right – Barack Obama reminds me of Joan Jett. They are the only two people I've ever known who have affirmatively chosen to give themselves a larger-than-life persona and then grown to fill it. I saw this a little better with Joan, given that she was a younger age when I knew her than Barack was when I knew him. Joan in late 1975 was a perfectly ordinary Valley girl. You would never have looked at her and thought you were seeing a future rock star. If you'd even noticed her at all you probably would have thought she was a bit of a mouse. She had brown hair cut in a competent, if unremarkable, shag and she had that slouched-over bad posture that seems to be the working uniform of the shy. In the early days of the band Kim Fowley was always yelling at her to stand up straight. When I saw the Runaways play as a three-piece band at the Whiskey, I thought they weren't terribly interesting. Both Joan and Sue Thomas (the future Michael Steele of the Bangles) were ordinary and unassuming. The only member of the band that really stood out was Sandy, and she was stuck behind her drum kit. The response to the band was a bit lackluster and it's no surprise to me that Kim decided that the band needed more of a visual standout up front. By the time I auditioned for the band they had added Cherie and Lita, both of whom grabbed your attention immediately. Joan kind of faded into the mix, and I doubt that the addition of a fifth band member, especially one who was tall, smiled and wore skirts, helped on that front. Cherie was blonde and beautiful in a sulky, fragile way, and Lita had enough personality for ten girls, not to mention lots and lots of curves. Plus they were the lead singer and lead guitarist, respectively, the two instruments that soloed on every song. Who was going to notice a shy, brown-haired rhythm guitarist with bad posture?

I don't remember which came first, the persona or the black hair, but they pretty much went hand-in-hand. One day Joan just decided to become a bad-ass rock star. She dyed her hair black, bought a leather jacket, and started scowling. She turned her slouch from that of a shy person to that of a rocker who wears her guitar slung just a bit too low. She started standing at the front of the stage and doing the most talking in interviews. It was a noticeable and calculated transformation and if it seemed a bit silly and over-the-top at first, it has served her well over time. Act like a rock star long enough, do it unfailingly and well enough, and you become one. The few times I have spoken to Joan in the years since I left the Runaways, I've found it hard to recognize the Joan I met in 1975. She wears her rock star persona like a second skin. I sometimes wonder if she is even capable of taking it off. Who knows – maybe she goes home at night and coos baby-talk to her cats. I'd like to think so. I admire her for sticking to her guns and believing in herself, or at least for having the guts to "fake it 'til you make it." Most people give up in the face of adversity. Joan never did. I do have to wonder sometimes if that's the Joan that was always there hiding under the shyness and brown hair, like the butterfly hidden inside the caterpillar, or whether she had to give up a significant part of Joan Larkin in order to become Joan Jett. And if so, was it worth it or does transforming yourself like that make it impossible for a question like that even to make sense?

When I met Barack Obama, in our first year of law school, he had already put on his big-time politician act. He just didn't quite have it polished, and he hadn't figured out that he needed charm and humor to round out the confidence and intelligence. One of our classmates once famously noted that you could judge just how pretentious someone's remarks in class were by how high they ranked on the "Obamanometer," a term that lasted far longer than our time at law school. Obama didn't just share in class – he pontificated. He knew better than everyone else in the room, including the teachers. Or maybe even he knew he didn't know, but knew that the leader of the free world had to be able to convince others that he did. Looking back now I can see that he had already decided that he was a future president, and he was working hard at filling that suit. I wonder – was there a moment in his life when he did the presidential equivalent of dying his hair black and putting on a leather jacket? I'm betting there was, but he'd already done it by the time I met him. I'm sure Barack as a child was perfectly ordinary, just like Joan was. Until the moment he decided that he was a star. The Barack with whom I went to school wasn't the Barack that debuted on the national stage at the 2000 Democratic National Convention, but the president suit was already on, even if it was still too big for him. In law school the only thing I would have voted for Obama to do would have been to shut up. When he made that speech almost exactly eight years ago, I wanted to vote for him. For something, for anything. Now, as his vision of himself becomes a real possibility, though, I find that he may have filled out that suit all too well. It's hard to see the humanity underneath. Even the humor feels calculated now. And again, just like with Joan, I have to wonder – is he so focused on the goal that he has to live that persona every moment of every day? Or is he the kind of guy who can go home at night and change diapers while making poopy jokes? And if he gets elected, in eight years will he even think to wonder if it was worth it? He'll spend the rest of his life followed around by the Secret Service. How will he ever be able to take off that presidential persona without feeling entirely naked? Most of us look at the before and after pictures of U.S. president and wonder how anything that ages you that much in eight years could possibly be desirable. And yet, they seem to miss it when it's gone.

I once told someone that I felt like I wasn't special and nothing I did seemed to make a difference. He told me to stop trying to be special and, instead, to decide that I already was special and not do anything inconsistent with that. It was an effective strategy. The hard part was not to overshoot the mark and go from special to entitled. Barack and Joan seem to have adopted a similar strategy, but on a really grand scale. I just hope that they haven't overshot the mark, either. Because I really liked the Joan I knew in 1975. And Barack may just be our next president.

Vacation in Azeroth

In response to those of you who've wondered where I've been, and for those who have asked, I got tired of words for a bit and decided to go live in a place where actions speak louder. Actually, I went for the ten-day free trial of World of Warcraft® and instantly became addicted, so I've spent my off-time for the last ten days or so developing a Dark Elf Warrior named Kwanyin in the Realm of Onyxia to a level 13 (gamers may laugh, but I'm doing it the slow, hard way as a solo act). She's about to take the Ferry to Darkshore, and I'm very excited.

Seriously, words do get old. I have to live in them all day at work, which is expected, but they have been getting in the way, otherwise. I've begun to concentrate on my workouts again; I can get more "spiritual awareness" from one good Yoga class or even a Step class than any dozen Buddhist Festival Board meetings, or listening to any more canned words after a session of zazen. Why is it that we feel the urge to talk, talk, talk after we sit? Wouldn't this be the best time for some silent physical activity? Will I ever get the time and resources to put together the Zen/Yoga workshop I've been thinking about for a month or two, to counter the talky talky crap from every other Buddhist activity I'm involved in? Stay tuned.

So if you must read about Zen, instead of just cutting to the chase and doing it (which is the only path that's ever going to get you anywhere/nowhere), at least read something real; I can heartily recommend Gudo Nishijima's To Meet the Real Dragon. No pansied crap there; if you see a giant pink lotus anywhere, run, run, run.

And if you want to watch something, the Witchblade TV series is out on DVD, finally.

Or come and join me in Azeroth. Very little talk (if you ignore the chat feed), lots of action. No screaming babies. Seriously, a few hours of this stuff makes me feel like I've had a real vacation. Make sure you hang in there through the map stuff at the beginning, to see how the characters look and move. So although millions of people are already doing this, I'm going to give you their trailer to watch. Maybe this'll hook you.

And don't worry, I'll find something to yak about again soon, I'm sure. I'm just as addicted to words as you are.

Doomsday

Let's combine a serious prediction with some fun, OK?

It should be pretty clear by now that modern civilization as we know it is near the end. Mankind's excess of success as a species -- and Man's adamant refusal to rationally manage his environment in such a way as not to suffer the otherwise inevitable consequences of that success, i.e., destruction of his environment (via annihilation of the earth's client and the extinction of its natural resource, petroleum, which fueled his existence binge in the first place, 150 years ago or less) -- is about to lead to the end of the Industrial Age. There are many possible means of that end, which can either lead to the extinction of Man as a species, or simply his reversion to a primordial, uncivilized state. All of them can and probably will occur to some degree, and we are already seeing them, much more so that than when I first started throwing this in your face. Nuclear war is still a threat, and war in some form is inevitable. Starvation is there already, it just waits to become universal.

You know, the Powers that Be have to be aware of all this. Dick Cheney, as we've pointed out before, has been talking about Peak Oil for fifteen years. These are evil men, but not ignorant. More and more, it strikes me that they have a solution in mind for overpopulation, and for the preservation of earth's scant remaining resources for the chosen few alone, and the most efficient means to reduce the population drastically would be the controlled release of a pandemic.

Surely today's extensive research in bio-warfare has by now given them a virus that could do the job. Then all you have to do is make sure you have enough antivirus to inoculate a small segment of selected survivors, and bingo! A few more generations of livability on Planet Earth for the chosen few and their progeny. The viral weapon could be waiting, cocked and loaded at CDC in Atlanta, or in any of a thousand places.

Of course, this theme is not new; I have merely made a Robert Frost choice in this case, although mine is guided less by poetry than by rationality. And the whole idea does lead to a certain Poe-ish scenario, does it not? But it's also been done and overdone in recent fiction, as if it's become an unconscious artifact of popular consciousness, while the bodies associated with the minds in denial continue to spit out little genomes as if this were the Dawn of Eternity. Look at the whole Resident Evil series, and probably hundreds of others.

But if you're gonna dance til you drop, you should at least have fun doing it, and Doomsday, a movie released on DVD last Tuesday, set in a world where a natural(?) plague starts in Scotland, of all places (guaranteeing great dialect in the dialogue), is much more fun than most. When I started watching this movie at the theater, I was afraid I was walking into another underfunded British sci-fi knockoff, but once the protagonist, played by Rhona Mitra, is captured by punks weilding chainsaws (25 years of isolation and they have gasoline?), and then it is revealed that the punks are in contention with a medieval heraldry headed by Malcolm McDowell for control of Glasgow -- well, this one is so far over the top that you don't even look for the logical howlers any more and are free to enjoy this delightful hodgepodge of free-flowing Dystopian fantasy. Watch the preview below, then go rent it or buy it now! Then continue on with your spewing out babies and guzzling up petrol, or whatever it was you were doing.

Politics

One of Hunter Thompson's most celebrated bits of genius writing came in the midst of the book many consider to be his masterpiece, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He wrote circa 1971 of living in California in the '60's:

You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning...And that, I think, was the handle – that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply PREVAIL. There was no point in fighting – on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave...So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark – that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

Out of the ashes of the failed Hippie and the Peace Movement, my culturally immediate progenitors, came some of the biggest greedheads and failed bastards of all time, the people who have made America and the world what they are today; a wasteland of the dead and dying, the rich sucking off a petroleum pipe full of opium, while the populace lies starving in the desert. But for most of us without Thompson's vision, the true turning point came at the end of the year 2000.

Who would have guessed that the Doomsday Millennialists were right? All those deranged fantasists who told us that the end of the world would come in that seminal year. I did, I felt it as a sleazy, slick, sickening feeling when the U.S. Supreme Court, the American people, and yes even Al Gore himself were complicit in allowing the Bush Cabal to steal the Presidential election.

One has to ask, would it have gone down the same way, had any of us, including the Clintons, known the true horrors of what would happen in eight years of lawless tyranny? Did even Bill Clinton, who surely knew more than anyone at this point, know how America would tolerate the evisceration of its Constitution and its heart, by the soulless bastards who seized control in 2001? What would have happened at the end in November and December, 2000, if Clinton's Executive branch had seen how Congress would roll over and play dead when the present current Executive blatantly refused to follow the Constitution and the mandates of the powerless Legislature and Judiciary, and taunted it as young George must have taunted the flies whose wings he pulled off as a child?

In 2000, the Clinton administration still had control of the Executive branch, and Bill Clinton was Commander-in-Chief of the military, who I think would have been at least partially loyal to him. What if Clinton and Gore had beat the Cabal to the punch and refused to acknowledge the manipulated Supreme Court affirmation of the Bush coronation? Well, it would have been the end of our Constitutional government, for sure. It would have happened a few years earlier; how different would the results have been?

And more intriguingly, while maundering in rancid waters of useless speculation, what would Clinton and Gore have done had they known how truly heinous the Cabal would prove to be? The planes did fall out of the sky, not at midnight at the beginning of 2000, but twenty-one months later (and remember, most of the Millennialists were Christian and uneducated; the Third Millennium actually began on January 1, 2001, not a year earlier). Would Gore have rolled over and played dead, as he did, had he known, how Bush's puppetmasters would manipulate the hunger and desperation of the Middle Easterners, for their own vile ends? How the Cabal would manipulate the incipient desperation of the American public, using pseudo-patriotic hokum which would have embarrassed P.T. Barnum to lure the gullible youth of this declining empire into the jaws of death, to secure the last few remaining petrodollars for the grim old men and their sharp-tooted prodigy who now roam the corridors of power?

Would Clinton and Gore have fought back, had they known the ruthless means by which the real Evil Ones would seize the reign of power to steer the Hummer down the fatal slope into oblivion? Or what's worse, more frightening: Did they? And were they just too afraid to fight on?

I think it was all over in 2001, when Bush was inaugurated the first time. The theatre of the War on Terror which his masters created and performed nauseates me now as it did then; I refuse to revisit it further, here.

But for most of us whose hearts still beat, the final nail in the coffin came this year, when a still-gullible American public allowed Rove (or whoever is really behind him) and his instruments manipulated the sad, gullible Democrats into nominating Barak Obama, thus abandoning the last hope we had of having anyone with any pragmatic sense of responsibility, and moreover capability, anywhere near the power switch. A Hillary Clinton administration could've done, with the aid of the people and the apparatus who gave us the last successful administration in the last real American Presidency, whatever could have been done to minimize the bloodletting. The bus is already headed down the slope at breakneck speed, and nothing can be done to avert that, but it would've been nice to have a pilot who gave a shit to avoid a few trees and rocks on the way down, and would've been experienced enough to drive the thing.

Now we have an election between Tweedledum and Tweedledoofus, who will do nothing. It will be a one-term administration that begins the Plague Years. And yes, I said Plague. I'll vote for Obama, though I don't like him. But I have no hope; he's been set up to fall big before November, which is why he was hand-picked by the Cabal in the first place. But even if he wins, in some twist of manipulation that is too far away from the hand for the eye to see, he's been so compromised that he's be nothing but a scapegoat.

Tanya asked me why I don't write more about politics; this is why. I can try to show you the big picture, plain as the smirk on Bush's face or the heaps of our predecessors dying in Africa; or I can urge you to focus on developing yourself now, for what is happening, now. But the middle ground? Politics is dead. Get ready to starve and join it.

Hearing the Voices of the Land

This is a picture of the Black Mesas outside of San Ildefonso Pueblo, New Mexico. I didn't take it, and I don't know who did; I had pictures from that time, but they are gone. The New Mexico period of my life was a strange time, a fog in retrospect, just one more image in a sea of images. I lived there for ten years.

At the end of the summer after my first year of law school in California, which summer spent in Nashville in 1981 concreted my resolve that I would never again return here to live, I decided to drive slowly across the country, on and off I-40, back toward Palo Alto. I spent my second night in Amarillo, Texas, and happened to check into a Quality Inn with a bar that got very lively at night, and after an evening of drinking, pool playing, and if my memory serves me correctly (which is not likely), some other chemical explorations I woke up with a blazing hangover and drove over the state border into Tucumcari, New Mexico.

The border between New Mexico and Texas at I-40 is a strange place, one of those odd junctures of the land where the scenery changes instantly -- different vegetation, different rocks, and the land comes alive. Or maybe, not alive, but brimming with ghosts. Because the Texas panhandle scarcity ends to be replaced with something very different. I stumbled into Tucumcari, a town of nothing but endless cheap motels and seedy Mexican bars, and rented a cheap room from people who spoke no English. A storm was brewing, and tumbleweeds flew down the darkened, deserted streets. I thought about braving one of the local bars but was too whipped, and settled down in the motel with a bottle of something or other. I had two phone calls to make - one to my parents in Tennessee, one to my fiancee in California, but the phones wouldn't give me a long distance line. I was enveloped in New Mexico.

The next day I had what had to be the most mystical drive of my life; with a six-pack in my lap, I drove the long, windy alternate route from Tucumcari up to Santa Fe, a highway of high desert, fields of whipping August grasses that sometime overshadowed and nearly covered the roads; occasional isolated littel towns usually consisting of nothing more than a bar and a gas station, where I refreshed my beverages, used the bathrooms and moved on. I have never had a more moving day on the road. At the end of that third day, I checked into a motel outside Santa Fe, and still tired, instead of sampling any of the good restaurants in one of the country's best restaurant cities, I drove to a Wendy's to pick up a cheeseburger. When they asked me if I wanted green chile with it, I knew that I was home.

I split my second-year clerkship between a law firm in Albuquerque and one in Los Angeles, and after graduation came back to Albuquerque. The job there didn't last; a law firm is a law firm and I was no more cut out for corporate law then, than I am now. Nevertheless, I stayed in New Mexico for ten years, times getting stranger and stranger, until ultimately I was forced back to Tennessee, where I never have felt, and never will feel that I belong.

But what drew me to New Mexico and kept me there until after all my options had run out, was the voice of the land. I could feel it so strongly in those Black Mesas pictured above, or in the bosque are where I lived in my adobe apartment in Albuquerque's North Valley. I am one-sixteenth Cherokee, but I have no real contacts with Indians (or Native Americans if you prefer, but I don't) these days, or before New Mexico. But I was drawn to the lands where they lived; there was and I'm sure still a power in those lands, a presence, a huge warm and hauntity entity that I perceived on that first day driving into Santa Fe. Some people feel it, and some don't. Living in Albuquerque was a lot like living in any other city, but I could get on my Yamaha Virago 920 and out into the land from my townhouse in ten minutes, and hear those voices again and feel the connection with the land. It was a hauting and eternal time.

After the first law firm job expired, I worked for a time in a two-man firm whose founder had fled the Department of the Interior when Reagan came in, and took up Indian law by contract. Most of our clients were Indian school Boards, particularly Navajo. During one period that lasted a few months, I was assigned to work with the Governor of Acoma Pueblo, about sixty miles out of Albuquerque, codifying legislation for the Tribe. That was a strange time. The tribal offices were mostly deserted; there was only one nearby restaurant. Like other Pueblos, Acoma had a counsel or legislature and a Governor, to satisfy the BIA and whoever else holds the leash on their funding, but the real governing is done by traditional tribal forces, structure unseen as the ghosts in the mesa, but very real -- often the real ruler of the tribe was a brujo, and old man with a broom you might see around at night when you get ready to leave the office. Shadows of reality under the veneer of a falsely imposed and plastic structure. The feeling of all those days and weeks spent in that place will never leave me, like the experience of flying out into the parched crack land where we saw fit in our greed and power to put the Navajo, towns with no employer but the schools.

I never really developed any good personal relationships with any of the Indians. Their lives were depressing to me. They lived in the shattered remnants of their own culture, which our society had largely destroyed and replaced with the worst and lowest features of our own -- the worst food, the worst entertainment, a culture stripped of value. It seemed to me that there were two extremes of person. Most of them were living only the most shallow and ignorant existence, and yet there were people of extreme depth, whose roots in their largely past-tense culture remained deep, and whose education was due to their own efforts and innate drive and wisdom, not the affect of a culture where all pretend to be educated. These truly impressive and self-made people, embodying the wisdom of their own traditions and their own will, must have been like the people who made this country for our culture, a type gone from everywhere now that the madness has taken over all.

Several times in the last couple of years, I've heard music in my bedroom from a source I couldn't locate. Several times it took the form of a very, very long soft murmur that seemed to consist of human voices, in the rhythm of a tribal chant. On sleepless nights, I would hear this music for seeming hours on end. At first I thought it came through the wall (of a different room) from the other half of the duplex I live in, but when I went to that room, there was no sound. Obviously, it came from outside. But on at least two occasions, sleepless and curious, I went outside and walked all around the house; nothing -- no sound. Until I went back to the bedroom where the chanting continued unabated. It was always gone by morning.

The neighborhood where I live is a livable ghetto, a mostly White underclass area called "the Nations." I've never known, or even thought about the source of the name, until a few weeks ago, my friend Ezra mentioned that the reason for the name was that the area hosted, a long time ago, and population of Indians, and then Indian graveyards. It took weeks for this to come together for me. But now I think I know something about the source of the chanting.

I don't believe in souls, or in ghosts, as those terms are passed on to us; those are stories which grasp at but can't enclose a deeper reality, which is ineffable but which at any rate I feel no pressure to define. What I am learning, as my life enters this latest phase, is that experience is what it is. Who were are and what 'it' is are questions which, if asked to often, obscure the reality of the world. And part of that world, for me, is hearing these voices of the land.

Incidentally, a few months ago the kid who lived in the duplex behind me was diagnosed with schizophrenia. He is gone now, hospitalized somewhere I guess. But he was hearing voices through the wall, which he thought were me, mocking and taunting him. I understand this is common for paranoid schizophrenics, and it sounds like hell. The voices he heard weren't me, but who am I to say they were unreal? Me with my Indian chanting, and that huge feeling of Presence in certain land.

As I pursue my Zen practice, I have been taught and encouraged by my teachers to trust my own experience and to accept what I perceive clearly, even when I can't define it. And one benefit of continued practice is an enlargement of the sense of self (which is also paradoxically, the absence of self) that allows a perspective on the self as if from the outside; and I see that quite justifiably in the minds of those who are enmeshed in the normal grid of social consciousness, I may be quite mad in some ways. I have no desire for most of the things people spend their lives chasing -- wealth, family, and attachments. Some of my best friends aren't even real in any "objective" sense of the world.

But when I see where your mass consciousness has taken you, and me and all of us, to the brink of extinction or purifications, depending, I don't mind. I'm quite happy with a life that some of you may see as insane; and I wouldn't give up the live I've lived, the perceptions and the feelings I've had, for any of the world that you've been building in your heads all your lives.

Have a nice day, and try to experience it as it really is.







This is me in about 1985. Already teetering on the edge of civilization.

Finally, Some Truth About Hunter S. Thompson

I knew this movie was coming out, but I had no idea it would be in Nashville this fast; as it was, I was on my way out of town on Saturday afternoon before I learned, and I knew since it was playing at the local non-profit theatre, I only had a few days. I couldn't find anyone to go with me. People will sell out a theatre to see another Batman movie, but I went to see Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson alone. Not that there weren't people there, mind you, but I wondered how many were there for the right reason.

I'd been really disappointed in the HST movies to date. I'm a big fan of both Bill Murray and to a lesser extent, Johnny Depp, but both Where Buffalo Roam and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas were for the most part pointless exploitations of Thompson's Gonzo image, Raoul Duke come to the big screen. They missed out on the important side of Thompson, the crystal-clear visionary who saw everything, including what comes next for this country and this world, and ultimately decided he'd had enough.

Those ignoramuses who know Thompson only for the darkly comedic side of his work, though not anyone who read Anita Thompson's The Gonzo Way or Thompson's oeuvre, may be surprised by the depth and width of the celebrities who considered themselves his friends. From George McGovern to Nixon speechwriter Pat Bucahanan, from Jimmy Carter to Thompson friend and benefactor George Stranahan (currently of Flying Dog Brewery) who laments that Thompson "never paid the rent, broke up my marriage, and started both my kids smoking dope," the testimonials are many, but mostly on point. And the insights into Thompson's childhood and life, although limited, are invaluable.

Of course, as Jimmy Buffett says, we miss Hunter because we need him now. Its' hard to imagine Hunter Thompson as one of today's cringing, pandering, colaborationist "journalists." We needed Dan Rather, and we need Hunter Thompson. In what may have been Thompson's last published piece, or maybe just one of the last important ones, he laments at the fall of the Twin Towers that all hope for world peace has been lost. Of course, he was right, and I think his vision was clear enough that he knew he'd done all he could do. How can we expect someone who burned so brightly, to burn forever?

I'm not going to urge you to read Thompson any more; if you haven't yet, and you're old enough to remember the sixties and seventies, there's something wrong with you. For those of you who were alive and who cared about your world, I urge you to see this movie and remember. Many of Thompson's pivotal pieces are quoted, particulary his observation that from San Francisco in the late '60's, you could see the great wave that would have changed the world, crest and roll back. Sometime there can be events in one's life that make everything after, just the anticlimax. Especially one who lives in times that he can see getting darker and darker.

Maybe it's just that I see so much of what I'd like to be in Thompson; not only his brilliance, but his absolute courage. And of course, his success. I pretend not to be envious. But there 's no doubt that his example changed my life forever. Of course he was nut, in a way, but so am I, and in lots of the same ways. I just haven't made a living at it yet.

Thompson is not the only writer whose shadow got so big it became hard to live under. Look at Jack Kerouac, who had nowhere near Thompson's talent nor intelligence. Hell, look at Hemingway, or Fitzgerald, the latter whose style Thompson so admired that he typed and re-typed The Great Gatsby just to get the rhythm of the prose.

Sometimes, when I get a little perspective, I see that maybe I'm not really all that sane or normal. But then I look around and see where we are in history, what a disaster human civilization has become, and I realize it's the sane ones, the normal ones, the ones who can live with hypocrisy, the ones who refuse to yell and thrash shoot and point at the imposters, that have put us where we are -- the Good Germans who would allow the whole world to become a mass grave of their unspoken and spineless good intentions. And I'm proud not to be among them, and I'm glad there was a Hunter Thompson, to help me do what I'll have to do, to do what has to be done. And to realize that, warts and all, to be truly human is not to be a peaceful coward, but to be truly alive.

Naked Mole Rap

Deuce made me post this.

A little over four years ago, the descendants of Rufus the Naked Mole Rat entered my life. Now they control everything.

Deuce also wanted me to give you this link to his blog, though he doesn't write often...

"Post-Oil", Jim Lydecker Guest Blog

I've been posting Jim Lydecker's stuff here for since May, 2007; check out the archives for the older posts . I came to realize a long way back that everything he says here is undeniably true, except for those lost in a delusional haze, or those who have a vested interest in fostering that haze in others. I got this one Thursday night and it ruined my whole evening, because this whole thing is staring us right in the face, much closer than we expected, and even the average citizen is starting to get it.

I don't necessarily agree with Jim's "solution" at the end; it would be temporary at best. No, the drain's wide open. There is no solution. Also, I don't know about the sequence of the Iraq pullout and censure in the World Court, though it's not that unlikely The OPEC cut-off is quite likely to occur as stated, as are the consequences

Thanks to Jim for keeping up on the research; I have neither the heart nor the inclination. This imminent future is why I do what I do, and why I think it's so important that it be done right. But before I take it from there, here's a dose of reality.




Greetings-

As most of you know, for the past 10 years I have been writing regularly in the Napa Valley Register. In the beginning it was mostly about national/international politics and economics.

I would probably have stuck to those themes had it not been for a hot summer day in 2004. On that day a woman I was dating and I decided to go to the Sebastiani Theatre in Sonoma where The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream was playing. The filmmakers were in attendance and were to have a question and answer period after its showing.

I knew next to nothing of Peak Oil before the screening. However, from the credits on I absorbed every fact and quote put forth. By the end of the film it was as if a brick hit us. We were both so depressed we did not stay to meet with the filmmakers but instead went back to our apartment in silence.

I recommend this film to everyone. It started me on my path in trying to understand as much as I can about Peak Oil, resource depletion and the consequences our industrial civilization faces due to our decision to turn blindly away from the biggest crisis man will ever face.

On the Internet I found that Peak Oil was nothing new, but something the government and various institutions have been studying since the late 60s. Several of the sites that blew me away were Life After The Oil Crash (www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/), Wolf At The Door (www.wolf.readinglitho.co.uk/) and Die Off (www.dieoff.org/). The latter is a site that has links to several hundred government studies that provide evidence to what we are to expect to get through Peak Oil unless the overall population of the world is not reduced by 90-95%.

Looking into our future was fascinating, frightening and depressing.

On January 7, 2005, the Register published The End of the Road? To this day it remains, I believe, my most powerful essay. (It can be found at www.peakoil.com/printout3276.html.)

Three and a half years later, it is more powerful and current than ever.

However, it was just the beginning of many. Since then I have written a flurry from the Register and have had others published by the New York Times, TruthOut, the Press Democrat and various scientific and ecological/environmental journals.

Most in the beginning, such as Of Peak Oil, global warming and the economy (www.napavalleyregister.com/articles/2005/03/11/opinion/export2597.txt) and Overpopulation: Partying as the iceberg looms (www.napavalleyregister.com/articles/2005/11/11/opinion/commentary/iq_3161168.txt), were considered very negative in nature at the time. Later brought such essays such as Grim worldview from the deck of the Titanic
(www.napavalleyregister.com/articles/2007/07/01/opinion/commentary/iq_4015564.txt) and Overpopulation and Peak Oil: The perfect storm (www.napavalleyregister.com/articles/2008/01/18/opinion/commentary/doc479033ed52bb4948686565.txt) which were considered even more so.

Each essay over the years made even more dire predictions. And each prediction came true before I thought.

Examples are:

-I thought world Peak Oil production took place in November, 2005 when 2003 is now considered the accurate date.

-I originally felt Middle East would peak in 2012. We are now finding out that the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia , went over the peak in 2005.

It is not as if we were not warned. No less than such experts as Mathew Simmons, head of the world’s largest energy investment bank, have been screaming the loudest about Peak Oil since the mid-90s. Simmons is also the personal oil advisor to the Bush and Cheney families.

And hate him as most of us do, Cheney gave speeches from 1994 on warning about the soon-to-collapse supply of oil.

While I don’t consider myself an expert on oil, I am the most knowledgeable person I deal with daily on the subject.

These things I know:

-The original estimates of the world supply of crude at 2 trillion barrels were accurate. And we know we have used nearly 1.3 trillion barrels since 1851 giving us a tad less than 800 billion barrels left.

-What is left is going to be exponentially more expensive and difficult to extract.

-The world’s thirst for the stuff is about 86 million barrels a day, and increasing. (Do the math… 30 years from now and we’ll be asking, What happened?)

-The problem is not 'running out,' but when the world's demands can no longer be met.

-The only reason oil production is not increasing to keep demand from outstripping supply is that all producer’s fields, from Russia to the Middle East, are collapsing quicker than imagined.

-Every new field to be exploited is nothing more than the proverbial drop in the bucket. For example, if you could magically move all the oil left in Alaska (ANWAR included) to be used in America exclusively, we would run through it in less than 6 months.

-The decline of world oil production will affect people in more ways than any other event in human history.

As I wrote in The End of the Road:

No substance has been more interwoven into life as oil. Without it civilization will unravel. While 20-30 percent of oil is refined for gasoline, the majority is used for drugs and pharmaceuticals, fertilizers, electricity generation and everything plastic.Oil made it possible for humans to exploit resources basic to civilization in volumes never before seen. We've already depleted the Earth of its surface found, high grade resources. Those that remain need oil and high technology to be mined.

I then added:

No economy is more at risk to oil depletion than ours. Without growth we no longer can make due on the interest on our national debt.Oil depletion means economic anarchy is on the way.

Are our leaders aware of this?

In another Register essay I asked this question and wondered:

-Are our leaders blissfully totally clueless?
-Are they aware but just hoping we can get through this crisis “fingers crossed?”
-Or are they aware of the problem but know there is nothing we can do, so why disturb the masses?

My answer was all of the above though the latter now makes more sense. Last week on Face the Nation, people no less than George Will, David Broder and Jim Cramer were discussing why the price of crude is entering stratospheric levels. They said the problem has nothing to do with speculation but simply that demand outstrips supply. That, and a large unmanageable population.

All admitted they felt there is no way out.

I agree.

On every format, from the Internet to live speaking engagements to one-on-one debates, I have spoken about whether something is coming down the pike to rescue us from the demise of oil. This is not the place to dialogue this, but I am telling you, there is not.

As Matthew Simmons says:

Economists and politicians love to say once the price reaches a certain level, we will invent our way out of this. For the first time, scientists and physicists are asking, Like how?

As government studies predict, we are looking at societal and civilization breakdown around the corner. We are talking mass migrations, starvation, disease and a die-off of biblical proportions. Peak Oil will cause a sheer magnitude of problems unlike any before.

This is happening as I predicted. However, like the filmmakers of The End of Suburbia, I was dead wrong about how fast it is barreling down on us. It is literally right around the corner.

An interesting fact of interest: Back in 1997, two independent studies, one by the CIA and the other by Osama bin Laden, asked the question, At what price per barrel will the US economy be shattered?

Both arrived within two cents of each other: $176.00.

We are currently at $144 and the price seems to jump daily. Goldman Sachs, which has been incredibly accurate since the 1990s, predicts $200 before the end of the year.

$200 a barrel means over $10 a gallon of gasoline. This is only the tip of the iceberg since the price of every product we purchase is directly influenced by the price of crude.

The most oil intensive industries? Agriculture and pharmaceuticals, and they are just the beginning.

In a book I am writing, I ask what will happen if we pull out of Iraq ? My answer is that chaos will be the rule of the area with Iran taking over southern Iraq while the north will be controlled by the Turks.

We can then expect to be dragged into the World Court for war reparations, which now are estimated to be in excess of $9 trillion.

Think this is far fetched? The Bush Administration has said we are no longer compelled to answer any decision issued by the World Court . They knew this was coming.

The next step will cripple us: OPEC will cut us off and no longer accept dollars for oil. The latter will bankrupt us overnight.

Society breakdown will reign in America . Think about all the people in places like Southern California where they grow no food, have no natural resources (i.e., water) or energy. Southern California will make Somalia during the 90s look like a walk in the park.

How do we survive?

There is only one place in America to turn to and it is the place all the original titans of Peak Oil have relocated to: Oregon and Washington State .

The Pacific Northwest generates more hydroelectric power than the rest of the country combined. The Columbia River also provides enough irrigation to allow the eastern half of the states to grow enough food for themselves, and then some.

They are relatively isolated which is important to survival in a post-oil crisis. Every study on survival after Peak Oil maintains that you need to be as far away as possible from the masses.

They have small, manageable populations. (They are also educated.)

There are deep water ports offering access to the Pacific.

The two states have most natural resources necessary to allow an economy, though contractive, to exist without serious disruption to the standards of living.

The one resource they do not have? Oil.

The simple answer to this is: Strike a deal with Alaska . Oregon and Washington would provide Alaska with food Alaska can not grow in exchange for oil they do not have.

How would you defend the Pacific Northwest from the rest of the nation where societal collapse will ensue? You bring back the troops from the Middle East and have them defend their borders.

Is this outlandish? Absolutely.

But just a decade ago no one thought about the collapse of the world’s supply of crude oil. As we head into the era without oil, the only rule that will be followed is chaos.

Friends of mine ask if speculation in oil futures is worth considering and my answer is yes, you will make money.

But if you want to invest in your future, my answer is, Go Northwest.

Do you, your family and loved ones a favor and buy some land near Portland or Seattle .

Jim Lydecker
Napa, California
July 3, 2008

Nashville Zen Center Jukkai Ceremony

I monitor the hits on this site through a free tool called Google Analytics, and I notice that a lot of people have been looking at my last post. It's quite possible that a lot of those hits are from people who are associated with the Nashville Buddhist Festival, and they quite probably consider themselves slammed by that post. That's unfortunate, because those are all really well-meaning people, and you certainly could do worse that to practice with any of the groups associated with the NBF. Perhaps I need to learn the lesson implied by the name my teacher Taiun Michael Elliston gave to my friend Ana at her initiation Saturday, Annin, which means something like "patient forbearance."

But you know, when something is important, it deserves to be done right. Which is what we did Saturday. I do indeed feel that the Nashville Zen Center was reborn Saturday, and was reincarnated in the way that it needed to go. If you missed the previous post, go read it; what I said we'd do, we did.

There were lots of great things about our half-day sit, followed by our Jukkai ceremony. Probably the best thing was the way I feel about this group of people. We were supported by some of our other members who either haven't chosen to go the initiation route, or had been initiated otherwise; and best of all, by some of the "old" Nashville Zen Center members whom I hadn't seen since schisms hit us right after I started there. Lisa and Patsy, from One Dharma, a group that splintered from the old NZC in 2005, and now has dwarfed us in size; Bill, the founder of the NZC, from 1982! And Jeff was there, and a host of others; a picture below includes a lot of these people, without whom we would not be who we are now. We are immensely grateful for their support.

And thanks to our families and friends. From my point of view, thanks to Stephanie, and to Ana's mother and sister, and all the other friends and relatives who really didn't know what was happening but knew there was a good thing there.

This blog entry has no rhetorical point. I just wanted to share with you my good feeling, and the conviction that something right has happened. And my thanks to everyone involved. And to invite you to join us. Because words can't describe the benefits of what I'm talking about. And I'm failing miserably at trying, so I'll just let you look at these great pics from Nat's wife Kathy. You can see them all here, by the way. More later.

Buddhism®

Tonight, I was exhausted. Maybe it was that really good Yoga class I did last night, or maybe it was the fact that my job has become so stupefying I can barely make it through the days. And then on top of it all, my Buddhist practice, which is my point of reference when everything else become intolerable, is so infested with bullshit these days that I'm tempted to clear it all out and start over.

But I was exhausted, and whereas when I'm in that frame of mind, in the old days I would have probably got drunk, passed out and woke up about this time (1 a.m.) with a hangover, last night I had a salad and a barbequed chicken breast, read as much really good sci-fi as I could stand, and went to sleep about 7 p.m. Go figure.

When I did wake up, I found Brad Warner's latest Suicide Girls article. Go on, read it, it's free, especially if you're Buddhist. If I had stayed in California where I started sitting zazen about twenty-seven years ago, I might feel like he does about institutional Buddhism.

Bonnaroo, ten days ago (sob!) did for me what I hoped it'd do; it cleared some of the bullshit out of my head and let me reconnect with a part of my "self" that I was missing, the one that liked to stand in a field in Manchester, TN, and scream "Bullshit!" at the world, all done of course with a beer in my hand and some really good music. On the other hand, it made me want to call a spade a spade, and that makes it really hard to go to work and pretend to be someone I'm not (or more accurately, to refuse to admit who I really am), and on top of all that to deal with Buddhism®.

You've heard all this before, but for some reason, at the two times in my life I've really felt drawn back toward Buddhism, I've had trouble finding it. The first time was in Albuquerque, where now there is a big Albuquerque Zen Center apparently (Rinzai), but when I was there I had trouble finding anything authentic and instead wound up with Nichiren Shoshu for a few years. The second time was in Nashville in 2004, when I did find the Nashville Zen Center. When I discovered the NZC, I had hoped it was a source for connecting with real Zen. I was motivated to come back to Zen by Brad's first book, Hardcore Zen. I think the preface of that book -- Brad's basic "philosophical" questions, the "What is This?" which is the basis for all real philosophical, existential inquiry, was the same as mine. I just needed to find people of a like mind.

My frustrations with the Nashville Zen Center have been well-documented, and I won't reiterate them here. In the spring of 2006 I went to Atlanta to the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and found what I'd been looking for. I found a teacher who insisted on staying with what I feel to be the true essence of Zen, and of existence; the essential staring down the void which is the self. And he/they was/were still able to do that essential thing within the context of a semi-formal, mostly dignified Zen practice. I made that connection and it's the best thing I've done since my life changed when my mother died in 2003. I will not refute it.

This coming Saturday, Michael Elliston, Abbott of the ASZC, is coming to Nashville to conduct a Discipleship ceremony for my friend and NZC president Nat, and to initiate some really great people into formal Buddhism. These people are people I'm thrilled to share the experience with, people who were drawn to Zen of their own accord. Paul and Ana, you are two of my favorite people (you too, Michelle and Walter). The ceremony will take place after a half-day sit at the new 12South Dharma Center, which is a cooperative effort among several Nashville Buddhist groups and a kind of dream space (with problems, of course). So why am I not happy?

In my efforts to bring what I find to be real, essential Buddhist practice to Nashville, I have of necessity found myself among the purveyors of Buddhism®. To do what I had to do, I myself had to become visible and prominent in the Buddhist® community, which is something I never wanted to do, and now I'm paying for it.

See, I would never want to be a visible leader of any Buddhist group I'm a part of. I've got too much baggage, for one thing. For another, I have, of my own design, very little tolerance for bullshit, and that's not what you want in the occupant of a position which becomes, in some sense, political. I just want to sit on the sideline and throw these japes in. Unfortunately, in this case I had to help create the thing that was there to throw the japes at. Hence the dilemma.

Last year, I and representatives from four other Buddhist groups conducted the very successful Fourth Nashville Buddhist Festival. You've read all about it. It went well, and it made me a lot of friends, and I was happy with it. Unfortunately, this year I'm still on the Board of that, and I don't like it any more. Can't stand it, in fact. I got them incorporated, but I'm done with it. They want to do the same thing as last year, and I never do see the point in that. Introducing the Buddhist-curious in Nashville to some options. For some of the groups, it's a recruiting tool.

Yes, people can be recruited to Buddhism, just like any other religion, or any other -ism, for that matter. Because, see, people want that. That's what religion is all about, isn't it? The desire to find people of like-minded belief. To gain a purpose larger that oneself. To mutually reassure one another that, yes, despite, the vicissitudes of this life, Life has a bigger meaning, and everything will be OK in the end. God or the Buddha will take care of you. I'm OK, you're OK. Horseshit.

Because my Zen practice has nothing to do with that. Zen is about confronting reality. Michael Elliston and 90% of the ASZC members I've practiced with (of course, I only tend to meet the serious ones, at the retreats) understand that. Brad Warner certainly understand that. And I choose these people to be my teachers. Don't think I'm in any way refuting my authentic Zen practice here. I have found, in my sitting on my cushion, a lifetime practice. Something that always comes back to the real. Something I won't give up. And the only sincere Zen practitioners I've ever met came to Zen on their own. Wandered in off the street, as it were. You can't recruit people to the real question; they must have it, to start.

I've been told by my teachers and by people who've been sitting zazen for a long time, that once you've done it for a while, everything you do is Practice. It took me until now to understand that. Because now, not sitting zazen is also Zen practice. Bonnaroo was practice, definitely. Writing another vitriolic blog entry with a Red Bull® at 2 a.m. is also practice. Knowing I have another mind-numbing work day to follow, followed by a refreshing NZC meeting tonight, is also practice.

And sitting in a room with a bunch of delusional religiosos who happen to call themselves Buddhists instead of Christians is also practice. I'm talking about the Board of Directors of the Nashville Buddhist Festival, not the NZC (the latter being, in its present incarnation, made up of quite sincere people). And there are some NBF Board members whose practices I admire, and in fact consider teachers. But in a group setting, it all makes me puke. Because at this point I may as well be on the Board of the Southern Baptist Convention.

And now of course there's the informal committee set up for running the Dharma Center, which is made up mostly of the same people. Good people, good intentions, more bureaucracy. I'm not made for Bureaucracy. I'm made for sitting in a field at dawn with a beer in my hand. That's existential realization. That's Practice, too.

So for now I have to stay with the Bureaucracy for a little while longer. Pretty soon I'm gonna get off all these committees. Maybe someone else will take my place, now, maybe not. But for now it's the place in which I've put myself and I have to deal with it. I should be typing the minutes of the last Nashville Buddhist Festival Board meeting right now, instead of bitching about it. Hopefully I'll get that done, sometime.

Photo courtesy of Paul Felton, Shambhala Nashville®.

Bonnaroo and Beyond

Now that I've survived it, enjoyed it, and was in fact revived and transformed by it, I'll admit that I was approaching it with genuine trepidation. The version of myself that had evolved to deal with my "current" reality just wasn't geared up for it. My friend wanted to camp, and I didn't; I was thinking I wouldn't sleep for three nights, be tired, comatose and cranky. I was thinking that I'd need a Port-o-Potty every thirty minutes and have to stand in long lines for them. In short I was afraid that I was gonna have a really shitty time. But I'd committed, so I bought or borrowed all the necessary supplies, girded my loins, and charged in.

The other factor that was making me hesitate was that the thing is, after all, supposedly mostly a musical event, and my interest in music in these latter days waxes and wanes, and lately has been kind of at a lower point, so that seeing Metallica and Pearl Jam sounded OK, but the idea of listening to a lot of new bands, particularly the noodling jam kind, didn't appeal to me.

And actually that worked in my favor. Because my friend and I winded up having fairly different experiences. He threw himself into the music, watched it all day and into the night, and hated the camping. I, on the other hand, threw myself into the social experience (including the contents of our coolers and the beer booths in Centeroo) and missed a lot of the music. But in the process, I think I made a reconnection with a part of myself that's been either missing or scorned lately, and it's a big step forward for me, in terms of self-realization, if that term has any meaning, and also in terms of my practice of Zen.

Because I sure as hell violated a lot of precepts those four days, and I'm a better man for it. Neither the career world nor the zendo values a beer at dawn, but I can tell you it's one of the more mystical, meaningful and beautiful experiences I've had in a long time. I don't know if it's modern society or just a component of the general social makeup of mankind that I lack, but I find most people to be effete pussyfooters. They seem afraid to do much more than prance or cower, for fear of the judgments of others, or worse, of their own Freudian superegos. And I agree that you can't live too well in the modern world they way I lived those four days, and I'm back to playing my old roles with a bit more awareness of their arbitrariness, and intrinsic falsehood. But I've had a catharsis.

It's been a hard lesson for me as I've had to deal with the social aspects of helping establish genuine Zen practice in Nashville, that most Buddhists aren't really any better than most moderate, reasonable Christians (forgetting the more rabid species of the latter for the moment). They want to wring their hands and nod sagely at platitudes and ring little bells, assuring themselves that they've become more enlightened thereby (and also thereby conquering their basic, animal selves, and becoming better than their fellow humans who are non-Buddhists). I'm sure they have no comprehension of why Hunter S. Thompson will always be one of my foremost idols. And if I have to sit in any more meetings after this year of watching these people plan puppet shows to en-trance more people to be like them, I'll barf.

I don't particularly want or expect anyone to be like me. My mission is to become more fully myself, and now I can throw myself into my zazen with more dedication and more knowledge. I wouldn't want to live every day like I did at Bonnaroo, not anymore, but that experience will help me live each day more truly as myself, and that is indeed "a blessing."

Incidentally, I do want to commend the great people who attended, especially the kids in the hard-core camping all around me, and the people who kept order at the Festival without becoming cops. This is the social experiment that proves that the Bush Cabal are wrong; people are not ignorant savages to be kept in check by the Forces of Order (for Profit). They are just like me (and you); noble savages in greater or lesser degrees of denial. And joining the Order of the Spotted Palm or whatever won't change that.