Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

it ain't easy growing up at sixty eight
facing fears
about death
All the "Ho Wood" movies playing in my head about warriors and good deaths, I expect an ordinary death.



For these past couple of weeks been watching a scenario based on my Aunt's death in a hospital intensive care unit.

"Watched over by machines of loving grace" Brautigan knew irony too.

For just once
i would like to sit here and type something without thinking of anyone in particular.

No reader in mind.

Not even thinking about what I am going to write.

As I sit and wait for inspiration.

In the almost silence

emerging consciousness

I don't know myself anymore

I am just a bundle or repetitions

I repeat actions over and over

I eat, I breathe, I smoke,

I type

I return to my own vomit

We are made to be immortal, and yet we die. It's horrible, it can't be taken seriously. Eugène Ionesco

I would imagine death. In Hollywood movies I stared in.

I have heard that one can not imagine his own death.

I would play silly games with god. Make deals with God. Pray to god for a good death. Under the sky

my chindi released to disperse in the wind.

The old woman on the bed in the sterile white room "watched over by machines of loving grace"

I suppose I should be grateful I am not a traditional Navajo

How many Chindi in that white room.

Her family knew she was close to death, her siblings old and feeble could not come to say good bye.

I was chosen to go. A request from my maternal uncle I could not refuse.

So I sat there in that cold white room among the loving grace and said the lord's prayer.
and she died.

"deliver us from evil" a tremor passed through her body and I think she tried to say something.

It scared me. How can I not laugh at myself.

That was the uncle who called me the night of Alamo Rose's funeral and brought me to tears.

I cried like a baby while I tried to defend myself against him giving me hell about wasting my life. My gosh, that was twenty five years ago.

I must be falling off a cliff, my life is flashing before my life in slo mo.

Man oh man

Gravity is getting me down

I am out of here at thirty two feet per second per second

I used to find physics so boring

Now it gives me the willies.

Maybe I should just go ahead and panic
Got dam Darvon
I am not that smart when I am straight

How can I try to write like this


"Pain defines me" artguy

It is not the physics of the pain that scares me
It is the psychic cost. The fear that drives it.
Self inflicted.
Got dam poetry
"in a dark time the eye begins to see"

A friend told me that I don't know the dark side.

I wondered how he could know what I did not know about myself.

What drives this line of text is a quest

Worthy of Don Quixote

The search for the holy grail of existence Joe Campbell called it

To live a live of one's own.

When is that going to happen?

Where was Dr Benjamin Spock when I needed him?
I won first prize in a healthy baby contest in 1941
Now look at me.

copy paste read

If you can smash through a single thought,
Then all deluded thinking will suddenly be stripped off.
You will feel
Like a flower in the sky that casts no shadows,
Like a bright sun emitting boundless light,
Like a limpid pond, transparent and clear.
After experiencing this,
There will be immeasurable feelings of light and ease,
And a sense of liberation.
There is nothing marvelous or extraordinary about it.
Do not rejoice and wallow in this ravishing experience.
If you do, then the Mara of Joy will possess you.

- Han Shan Te'-Ch'ing, 1600
Essentials of Practice and Enlightenment for Beginners
Translated by Guo-gu Shi

http://www.gardendigest.com/zen/hsind.htm#Quotations

my life as a jerk
How many times have I smashed through that thought and got caught up again?

every day for the past thirty five years.

How many times have I smashed through that thought and got caught up again?

How many times do you count your toes or fingers?

There is nothing marvelous or extraordinary about it.

Acceptance is most natural... and easy.

nothing marvelous or extraordinary about life
just a crap shot

I have counted many things, jobs I lost count twenty nine years ago when the count was around two hundred.

How many homes have I had, how many times have I thought my roots were planted and I had made a stand on the promised land? About twenty when I lost count of them about twenty nine years ago.

How many women have I laid down beside. Eight. I stopped counting women in 1980.


For most of my early childhood I used to think I had a eleven toes.


Lots and lots of changes coming and I got to get off these Darvon's they are clouding my thoughts.

I am switched my pain med to Naprosyn (RX strength ALeve). Not as psychoactive as Darvon. just an analgesic with out the stoned quality. I am stoned plenty already on the bitter herbs {I smoke out of season too), don't need to get no stonder.(sick-er)

Thanks for taking the time to read and reply, thanks also for your pithy comment .

No strain Cecil, I am cool on my stool. I got my own little Buddha Lamp to light my way, and Jesus Christ to call on when it hurts like hell. My brother is a physician, a psychiatrist even. Told me the story about a drunk in the emergency room who kept using the Lord's name in vain. It was a Catholic hospital, the nuns sent him to another hospital.

take care, truck... be easy. no time for complications. nosirree.

I know Cecil.
I had to stop the weed for a while too.


speaking of counting I found this bit from Han Shan I like.

You find a flower half-buried in leaves,
And in your eye its very fate resides.
Loving beauty, you caress the bloom;
Soon enough, you'll sweep petals from the floor.

Terrible to love the lovely so,
To count your own years, to say "I'm old,"
To see a flower half-buried in leaves
And come face to face with what you are.

- Han Shan, 750
Translated by Peter Stambler

strange old man in the mirror

What more can a man wish for than have a woman cry over his bones.

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