They seek him here, they seek him there.
they dont actually seek me anywhere, but
I am over here now - http://whatsthewordon.wordpress.com/
not sure why. maybe the new town, maybe the new life. maybe I just needed a change.
again.
Monday, 27 May 2013
Thursday, 3 May 2012
Monday, 23 April 2012
Looking for God - Part III - Conviction
As a reminder....I am on the search for God. This was triggered by a talk from the Machine Gun Preacher held at a Christian church I recently attended, which made me realise how the missing key to my life at this stage is conviction. It is something I lack, and observing Christians and the MGP in action , much as I can't agree with their basis for it, they sure have a lot of conviction and it drives them on. I need it. My problem? I aint never going to be a Christian. There was one line that really started this avalanche within me. It was when Sam was asked how it began for him and he said,
'God spoke to me and said , Sam, you got to go to Africa' .
He went on to explain how it really was God speaking to him. That, right there, was not only the moment I realised I needed that kind of conviction in my life if I was to succeed in the endeavors I felt my life was destined for, but it was also the moment I had a serious problem with the whole thing; God does not talk to people. Only crazy people. Yet Sam, from my brief assessment, was far from crazy, he's a bloody successful businessman, living out his destiny, and all because of God, or more accurately IMO, his conviction.
with me? good.
So, lets continue Looking for God.
What is conviction ?
Apart from getting sentenced to imprisonment, according to the Oxford English Dictionary it is,
- a firmly held belief or opinion
In my use of it here I would go further and say conviction is an unshakeable belief. When faced with the opposite opinions of your fellow man, or even outside influences, you remain unshakeable and convinced. That is conviction. In short, nothing will ever be able to sway you from your belief. Your belief is right, all opposing beliefs are wrong.
Now that is a pretty serious stance to take. You have to have looked at your position, seen all the other possibilities, and know without any doubt at all, that you are 100% right. For real.
Unfortunately, all my lessons in life have taught me that not only is that a very dangerous position to hold, but being inflexible is also virtually impossible because things change and evolve. Though I have to say for men it is a classic issue. We seem to have an in-built need for things to stay the same and can fall to pieces when they dont. In that light alone, I can see why Christianity came about, created by males, for males to feel safe in a universe of chaotic change. It is also the root of most war. But what is a truth today can be revealed to be irrelevant tomorrow. Sometimes it is important that it is. Evolution itself is an example of how permanence actually changes. So right there is a first stumbling block, and one of the reasons I moved away from my Christian upbringing and eventually settled more in a Buddhist approach. What is the Buddhist equivalent here?
Anicca (pronounced anichar ) - the law of impermanence. It is a fundamental cornerstone of Buddhism and relates to the need for us to come to terms with the fact that everything is in flux, everything changes, and nothing ever stays the same. Nothing is permanent. This is a meditation and after many years of meditating on this, I have to admit it would appear to be pretty accurate. Nothing is permanent. Feel free to try to refute this idea.
At first the idea of impermanence is scary and leaves one no ground to stand on, unconscious fears immediately arise, and if you are in meditation you start to fidget and feel all sorts of reactive sensations like itching, or pain, or boredom. But as you move through this, you start to realise impermanence is also your 'get-out-of-jail-free' card, because whatever shit may befall you in this life or another, it wont last forever. That is a bit simplistic, and really what the whole thing is about is uncovering a 'truth' and facing up to our fear of it, but again I digress. We are talking today about conviction, not impermanence. Though they may be related, for now I want to stick with conviction to really try to understand what it means for us to have it, or not.
So Sam Childers has it, the elixir of conviction, the magic, empowering force behind his every waking action, his decision making, and as a result, his progress through life. Frankly I am jealous. But I started to consider the reasons why I dont have it. I am a strong-willed, fairly able individual who has succeeded in achieving phenomenal deeds and, without wishing to sound egotistical, quite simply put, I know I have done many things in life that others look at and wonder how the hell I had the balls to do it, let alone get away with it. So, I have a driven nature. I am self-centred, bloody-minded, and something of a megalomaniac. I know this. And for me to say I am lacking conviction would certainly set a few people I know rolling about in fits of incredulous laughter. Why do I say I lack conviction? Well the difference is I am a chancer. I get moments, bursts of self-driven obsessiveness, and they generally die out after a while, and quite often I am left with the mess of the aftermath, no real explanation for why I did it, and sometimes even a sense of guilt at what I have done. This is a common cycle for me. My partner says I run 'hot and cold'. But getting back to conviction and why it applies for me, is because if I had a sense of conviction, if I could genuinely say the honest equivalent of 'God told me to do it' and really say it with conviction, and not be a dangerous mental person, then the things I could achieve would be epic. Do I want that? I want to feel epic, sure, but more importantly I want to feel correct. For me, I have the gusto and gumption to do shit, my problem is I actually have to reign it in to stop myself doing shit. All because I dont have a 'God told me to do it' clause. Not one that I can put any conviction in anyway.
There are a billion reasons why I can't join the Christians and start believing in their version of 'God'. Hardly anything about the Christian version of it sits right with me, and that is due to study, not just reaction. I dont deny others the right to it as their source of conviction but for me it wont wash. So my only alternative is to find my alternative.
I am repeating myself a bit now, but I think we have got some clarity on conviction and just what it means and why we might need it. So the next question is why do I takes this particular direction, why have I titled this search - Looking for God.
'God spoke to me and said , Sam, you got to go to Africa' .
He went on to explain how it really was God speaking to him. That, right there, was not only the moment I realised I needed that kind of conviction in my life if I was to succeed in the endeavors I felt my life was destined for, but it was also the moment I had a serious problem with the whole thing; God does not talk to people. Only crazy people. Yet Sam, from my brief assessment, was far from crazy, he's a bloody successful businessman, living out his destiny, and all because of God, or more accurately IMO, his conviction.
with me? good.
So, lets continue Looking for God.
What is conviction ?
Apart from getting sentenced to imprisonment, according to the Oxford English Dictionary it is,
- a firmly held belief or opinion
In my use of it here I would go further and say conviction is an unshakeable belief. When faced with the opposite opinions of your fellow man, or even outside influences, you remain unshakeable and convinced. That is conviction. In short, nothing will ever be able to sway you from your belief. Your belief is right, all opposing beliefs are wrong.
Now that is a pretty serious stance to take. You have to have looked at your position, seen all the other possibilities, and know without any doubt at all, that you are 100% right. For real.
Unfortunately, all my lessons in life have taught me that not only is that a very dangerous position to hold, but being inflexible is also virtually impossible because things change and evolve. Though I have to say for men it is a classic issue. We seem to have an in-built need for things to stay the same and can fall to pieces when they dont. In that light alone, I can see why Christianity came about, created by males, for males to feel safe in a universe of chaotic change. It is also the root of most war. But what is a truth today can be revealed to be irrelevant tomorrow. Sometimes it is important that it is. Evolution itself is an example of how permanence actually changes. So right there is a first stumbling block, and one of the reasons I moved away from my Christian upbringing and eventually settled more in a Buddhist approach. What is the Buddhist equivalent here?
Anicca (pronounced anichar ) - the law of impermanence. It is a fundamental cornerstone of Buddhism and relates to the need for us to come to terms with the fact that everything is in flux, everything changes, and nothing ever stays the same. Nothing is permanent. This is a meditation and after many years of meditating on this, I have to admit it would appear to be pretty accurate. Nothing is permanent. Feel free to try to refute this idea.
At first the idea of impermanence is scary and leaves one no ground to stand on, unconscious fears immediately arise, and if you are in meditation you start to fidget and feel all sorts of reactive sensations like itching, or pain, or boredom. But as you move through this, you start to realise impermanence is also your 'get-out-of-jail-free' card, because whatever shit may befall you in this life or another, it wont last forever. That is a bit simplistic, and really what the whole thing is about is uncovering a 'truth' and facing up to our fear of it, but again I digress. We are talking today about conviction, not impermanence. Though they may be related, for now I want to stick with conviction to really try to understand what it means for us to have it, or not.
So Sam Childers has it, the elixir of conviction, the magic, empowering force behind his every waking action, his decision making, and as a result, his progress through life. Frankly I am jealous. But I started to consider the reasons why I dont have it. I am a strong-willed, fairly able individual who has succeeded in achieving phenomenal deeds and, without wishing to sound egotistical, quite simply put, I know I have done many things in life that others look at and wonder how the hell I had the balls to do it, let alone get away with it. So, I have a driven nature. I am self-centred, bloody-minded, and something of a megalomaniac. I know this. And for me to say I am lacking conviction would certainly set a few people I know rolling about in fits of incredulous laughter. Why do I say I lack conviction? Well the difference is I am a chancer. I get moments, bursts of self-driven obsessiveness, and they generally die out after a while, and quite often I am left with the mess of the aftermath, no real explanation for why I did it, and sometimes even a sense of guilt at what I have done. This is a common cycle for me. My partner says I run 'hot and cold'. But getting back to conviction and why it applies for me, is because if I had a sense of conviction, if I could genuinely say the honest equivalent of 'God told me to do it' and really say it with conviction, and not be a dangerous mental person, then the things I could achieve would be epic. Do I want that? I want to feel epic, sure, but more importantly I want to feel correct. For me, I have the gusto and gumption to do shit, my problem is I actually have to reign it in to stop myself doing shit. All because I dont have a 'God told me to do it' clause. Not one that I can put any conviction in anyway.
There are a billion reasons why I can't join the Christians and start believing in their version of 'God'. Hardly anything about the Christian version of it sits right with me, and that is due to study, not just reaction. I dont deny others the right to it as their source of conviction but for me it wont wash. So my only alternative is to find my alternative.
I am repeating myself a bit now, but I think we have got some clarity on conviction and just what it means and why we might need it. So the next question is why do I takes this particular direction, why have I titled this search - Looking for God.
Sunday, 22 April 2012
Looking for God - Part II - Budanimism
...So I began my search for God.
Where to begin?
If you read my last post you will know that this was triggered by a visit to a Christian church to hear a talk from Sam Childers, aka the Machine Gun Preacher. During which I came to the realization that my life was missing something. Some may mistakenly call this a revelation, or maybe even use it as the excuse to say 'Mark, God spoke to you maaan, you got to go to church and repent your shit'.
It wasnt like that, it was simply that I saw something reflected in Sam, in me. As a result I could respect what he had to say. Maybe it's the killer instinct, or the bad past. I dont know, but what I saw in his belief, I knew was distinctly lacking in me.
It was his conviction
Sam really did believe God had spoken to him directly and told him to go to Africa. This conviction alone enabled him to attain his goals against all odds. He wasnt doing it for himself, his wife or anyone else, he was doing it all for God. And that shit was clearly working for him. I wasnt convinced of the God hot-line, but it set off a chain of thought in me that I could not deny. I just dont have that kind of conviction in my life, and it is exactly what I needed to find.
As I sat there listening to Sam and observing the intensity of belief exuding from the Christian audience, it conjured up all the other times I had come across religious zeal. And love it or hate, you had to admit the bastards really had some fire-in-the-furnace when it came to doing their shit based on their belief. Delusional or not, they had conviction.
God damn Christians, but lets face it, they got nothing on the Islamic militants, those mofo's even blow themselves up for their religious beliefs ! They blow Christians up too for that matter, or anyone deemed an 'infidel' i.e. not an Islamic militant, but we all know this, I digress.
Now, for the last 4 years, and in many ways a lot longer, I have been finding my personal truths aligning more and more to another system , maybe religious, arguably more scientific and experiential than simply faith-based like the Christian and Muslim God clubs. For me Buddhism has a much more agreeable truth.
But it isnt the whole story, there is one other spiritual system that I oft find myself in agreement with, Animism. I've got 3 definitions from the free on-line dictionary;
It's in there somewhere, I am not sold on multiple gods with volition and care for humans, but there is something in the system that I have found rings true and more specifically where you find Animism you usually find a lot of direct, and divine, connection with Nature. Indigenous systems the world over are Animist. Arugably the oldest belief systems in the world and they have striking similarities the world over. Outdating the Muslims and the Christians by many thousands of years sometimes hundreds of thousands of, and as much as both those One-God based religious systems have gone out of their way to annihilate any remaining trace of Animism, pockets have remained (South America, Africa from my experience) Even up until the Romans, belief systems allowed for multiple Gods and also threw in Goddesses to the equation. It's all just so much better balanced and on an experiential level, for me, it provided access to aspects of my life that a One-God upbringing had just never been able to hit. Animism was my entrance back into that world, for reasons I will explain later, while Buddhism provided me a path and way of living, education might be a better word, but it didn't mess with my innate sense of existing belief in the way the One-God systems did. I hasten to add that it didnt make me a Buddhist either, I just observed and found I could agree with their stuff. And in following the Vajrayhana a little way, I also got an education into life. A perfect example being meditation, inner silence and deconstructing the essence of existence. Buddhist are not only a scientific bunch but they offer practical lessons to follow if you wish to check it out for yourself. Again, more on that later.
So, finally and in my usual long-winded manner, I get to the reason for the title of this post. In starting my search for God I have to begin in the place I am at today. As I sat listening to Sam go on about God talking to him and telling him to do this, and that, I started to feel somewhat confused, maybe like a cat in a dog house. I have gone into the details of that in the previous post but suffice to say it made me observe myself, and I saw that it is a long, and well-earned path that brings me to my own stance on it all here today. A lot of battles, and a lot of stories, and many questions on the bigger picture. I have burnt the midnight oil looking for those answers, this isn't just a whimsy dislike of Christians & Muslims, this is a life-long study of humankind we are talking about here. I have been to some dark places looking for those answers, and in surviving many of them, I have brought some booty back with me. Its really just a co-incidence that I had this realisation in the midst of a bunch of Christians. But as I said at the beginning of this post it hi-lighted to me something: I had certainty, I had knowledge, I had experience, and I had covered a lot of ground looking for answers, but what I really never had found, what I was still lacking, and what was needed next , was the power of conviction
And then the label just popped up, because it was all I could think of to fit who I am, in this moment, right here, from a spiritual belief perspective I have to admit I am probably part Buddhist, part Animist, and thus I, rather self-righteously, decided to invent a new system and I loosely called it Budanimism.
I wont be needing an army of militants to spread the word just yet.
Where to begin?
If you read my last post you will know that this was triggered by a visit to a Christian church to hear a talk from Sam Childers, aka the Machine Gun Preacher. During which I came to the realization that my life was missing something. Some may mistakenly call this a revelation, or maybe even use it as the excuse to say 'Mark, God spoke to you maaan, you got to go to church and repent your shit'.
It wasnt like that, it was simply that I saw something reflected in Sam, in me. As a result I could respect what he had to say. Maybe it's the killer instinct, or the bad past. I dont know, but what I saw in his belief, I knew was distinctly lacking in me.
It was his conviction
Sam really did believe God had spoken to him directly and told him to go to Africa. This conviction alone enabled him to attain his goals against all odds. He wasnt doing it for himself, his wife or anyone else, he was doing it all for God. And that shit was clearly working for him. I wasnt convinced of the God hot-line, but it set off a chain of thought in me that I could not deny. I just dont have that kind of conviction in my life, and it is exactly what I needed to find.
As I sat there listening to Sam and observing the intensity of belief exuding from the Christian audience, it conjured up all the other times I had come across religious zeal. And love it or hate, you had to admit the bastards really had some fire-in-the-furnace when it came to doing their shit based on their belief. Delusional or not, they had conviction.
God damn Christians, but lets face it, they got nothing on the Islamic militants, those mofo's even blow themselves up for their religious beliefs ! They blow Christians up too for that matter, or anyone deemed an 'infidel' i.e. not an Islamic militant, but we all know this, I digress.
Now, for the last 4 years, and in many ways a lot longer, I have been finding my personal truths aligning more and more to another system , maybe religious, arguably more scientific and experiential than simply faith-based like the Christian and Muslim God clubs. For me Buddhism has a much more agreeable truth.
But it isnt the whole story, there is one other spiritual system that I oft find myself in agreement with, Animism. I've got 3 definitions from the free on-line dictionary;
1. The belief in the existence of individual spirits that inhabit natural objects and phenomena.
2. The belief in the existence of spiritual beings that are separable or separate from bodies.
3. The hypothesis holding that an immaterial force animates the universe.
It's in there somewhere, I am not sold on multiple gods with volition and care for humans, but there is something in the system that I have found rings true and more specifically where you find Animism you usually find a lot of direct, and divine, connection with Nature. Indigenous systems the world over are Animist. Arugably the oldest belief systems in the world and they have striking similarities the world over. Outdating the Muslims and the Christians by many thousands of years sometimes hundreds of thousands of, and as much as both those One-God based religious systems have gone out of their way to annihilate any remaining trace of Animism, pockets have remained (South America, Africa from my experience) Even up until the Romans, belief systems allowed for multiple Gods and also threw in Goddesses to the equation. It's all just so much better balanced and on an experiential level, for me, it provided access to aspects of my life that a One-God upbringing had just never been able to hit. Animism was my entrance back into that world, for reasons I will explain later, while Buddhism provided me a path and way of living, education might be a better word, but it didn't mess with my innate sense of existing belief in the way the One-God systems did. I hasten to add that it didnt make me a Buddhist either, I just observed and found I could agree with their stuff. And in following the Vajrayhana a little way, I also got an education into life. A perfect example being meditation, inner silence and deconstructing the essence of existence. Buddhist are not only a scientific bunch but they offer practical lessons to follow if you wish to check it out for yourself. Again, more on that later.
So, finally and in my usual long-winded manner, I get to the reason for the title of this post. In starting my search for God I have to begin in the place I am at today. As I sat listening to Sam go on about God talking to him and telling him to do this, and that, I started to feel somewhat confused, maybe like a cat in a dog house. I have gone into the details of that in the previous post but suffice to say it made me observe myself, and I saw that it is a long, and well-earned path that brings me to my own stance on it all here today. A lot of battles, and a lot of stories, and many questions on the bigger picture. I have burnt the midnight oil looking for those answers, this isn't just a whimsy dislike of Christians & Muslims, this is a life-long study of humankind we are talking about here. I have been to some dark places looking for those answers, and in surviving many of them, I have brought some booty back with me. Its really just a co-incidence that I had this realisation in the midst of a bunch of Christians. But as I said at the beginning of this post it hi-lighted to me something: I had certainty, I had knowledge, I had experience, and I had covered a lot of ground looking for answers, but what I really never had found, what I was still lacking, and what was needed next , was the power of conviction
And then the label just popped up, because it was all I could think of to fit who I am, in this moment, right here, from a spiritual belief perspective I have to admit I am probably part Buddhist, part Animist, and thus I, rather self-righteously, decided to invent a new system and I loosely called it Budanimism.
I wont be needing an army of militants to spread the word just yet.
Saturday, 21 April 2012
Gone Fishing ? Gone Looking For God
I sat in the midst of them, right in the heart of the nest.
Christians.
Probably about 300 of them tonight all packed into the church. Well, they call it a church but actually its more like a modern day concert hall. Australia doesnt really possess many buildings over a few decades old. I prefer it. The sombre cold unfriendliness of churches in England was enough to put any kid off God for life. Most especially since they were generally built on lies, and a lot of a blood. Bad history hung in an English church like a decaying last fart in a coffin.
There was an insanity here tonight though.
I had come to see the Machine Gun Preacher do his thing, the real live-in-the-flesh one, not the movie or the actor. For some reason I hadnt really considered that I was walking into the habitat of the Christian. Why? I guess I was overly excited at finding the flyer advertising his imminent arrival at a small church in Nowra just 30 minutes drive away. I had come across the flyer at a rummage sale. I'd wandered off into the kitchen of what appeared to be a site of religious service when not a rummage sale. There I saw the small pile of leaflets, picked one up, and was surprised, having just seen the film last week, that it was so quietly advertised. Even so, I just had to go, the missus, Miss P, was equally as excited.
So we went. Of course it wasnt advertised much because Christians dont need to advertise outside, they have their own network. God looks after his own. But fate had clearly intervened and put his message in my path. Sure, I am a spiritual sort, 'no atheists in a foxhole' right? but if truth be told, I consider my evolution to have passed through Christianity on the way to a more likely and experiential truth. I left Christianity behind aged about 13.
We met him at the door. The Preacher, not God. He was signing books and chatting. Again, the preacher, not God.
There weren't too many people, but what people there were, were those kind of people that seem somewhat intense, and have about them an air of self-righteous, falsity and cut-throatedness. Or maybe it was me. But they are out for themselves, you can smell it. I guess everyone is really, but not everyone uses the same methods as Christians to hide that fact. They feign 'the love of god' use it like a weapon to coerce others unto their will. They dont see it like that though. Due to an extended upbringing in a religious school, and subsequent personal realizations about the various 'truths' in the bible, and concern about just how easy it is to interpret anywhichway you like, I tend to get royally fucking annoyed by Biblically based God-botherers quite quickly.
I held my tongue.
Besides, the MG Preacher interested me.
'Can I get photo with you two' I asked and promptly iPhone snapped Miss P with Mr Sam Childers, aka the Machine Gun Preacher.
'Don't you want one?' she asked, after we had done.
'Nah' I replied.
'You are shy' she laughed. But I wasnt sure it was totally that, I just didnt need me to be in the whole super-star phenomena. I wanted to talk to the man. I wanted to measure his soul.
It took about 1 minute. He was a good bloke. Obviously tough, though I would say more in his convictions and general good-bloke-edness than as a fist flying, gun-slinging, Rambo, but then you could never be sure with people. He just looked like another chequer-shirted, dirty jeans, rather nicely tanned, Harley riding hill-billy of a yank with handlebar moustache akin to Yo-sammity-sam.
I didnt get time to ask him much, other than his take on the Kony affair. I had my suspicions about it all and he confirmed them; Kony was 7 year old news. Kony was never the real problem, the problem today was President Bashir in Sudan with planes, bombs and oil. and the US had just dropped 10,000 'peace-keeping' troops into the country.
no shit.
So my suspicions that 90 percent of the problem actually came from the demand in the West for slaves/diamonds/oil, was confirmed.
'...My friend in Uganda says...' I was burst in upon, and the conversation hi-jacked by some red-head behind me. She was clearly taking over and muscled in without any kind of acknowledgment to my existence. I stepped back. At the same time, a tall young man in hat and glo-jacket, suggesting he worked at the church, muscled in from the other direction.
'I just have to say, you are crazy man, but total respect to you' he said to MGP.
I stepped back further, it was like being mobbed by pecking seagulls going in on my bag of chips I had just let drop. I had that sudden sense of indignation at being usurped, but put it bed quite quickly. It was the Christian thing to do.
We stepped into the main hall, and walked down the front to take up a good seat. And it was within ten minutes that I realised we had taken up roost right in the midst of the heart of them. In fact I think we had taken someones reserved chairs as a couple of people came by and shook my hand, pausing for a moment as if wanting me to say something. I just smiled, lazily and ignored them. Then the pastor came to sit on one side of us with his wife, and a little after MGP turned up, and sat in the seats next to him, and then two more , very vocal, inner-circle, 'personal friends of god', sat beside us on the other side and took to shouting things like 'Praise be the lord' and 'hallelujah' or 'Jesus, yes Jesus hears you Lord' really loudly any time anything happened that remotely gave them the excuse to make an exhibition of themselves, I realised my error in seating choice.
Every few seconds it went off, right in my ear. 'Praise Jesus' 'God loves you' . I had a mind to tell them to shut the fuck up, I knew Christians wouldnt have the balls to throw me out, but I was in their nest, and it was their safari. Even so, it seemed annoying and false to be shouting at God all the time. It was so Evan-fucking-gelical. And was a twenty second reminder of what horse-shit people are willing to believe if you can get them to do it en-masse.
After the Christian band finished, during which time everyone stood up and sang except me and Miss P, I could always count on her for some satanic rebeliousness, the Pastor cut a few jokes about him becoming the 'shotgun preacher' and then played the trailer for MGP - the film, afterwhich he gave the stage to the man himself.
Finally.
'God be praised!' I muttered.
He said a few things about his current situation, his businesses including restaurants in Ethiopia, a motorcycle work-shop in US, a clothing line in US, a security firm in Uganda...this guy was like Richard Branson on the quiet.....and how all of them were doing so well it was enough to be able to fund all these other charities as a result and all of this was....because of his relationship with God.
'This all began' he said, 'When God spoke to me and he said - Sam, you have got to go to Africa'
hmmm.
He said it in a way that couldnt be misinterpreted and he repeated it and made sure we all knew it really was God that spoke to him.
And it was at that moment that I realised just why I had come, really.
I found myself in a quandry right then.
It was the way he said it. With absolute conviction in his eyes that God actually spoke to him and told him to go to Africa. I had measured this guy, and I generally had some good radar like that. I liked him, I felt I could have a normal conversation with him, I felt he was on the same mental level. I felt you couldn't pull the shit over his eyes, and sell him some crap. He had been in fights, got down and dirty in life, done the druggery, the thuggery, who knows maybe even the buggery too but when he found God he hadnt turned into some total nut job. He was clearly still a normal person you could tell from talking to him. Until that sentence came out of his mouth.
It carried so much with it. Think about it.
'When God spoke to me and he said - Sam, you got to go to Africa'
So God actually leaned down from his cloud and spoke, God being a white man and dressed in a white tunic with a long beard and chummy disposition if you are one of his sheep of course, and spoke directly into your ear? Are you having a fucking laugh mate !
I was in the midst of a turmoil.
On the one hand I had read this guy and he didnt seem to me to be a bullshit artist, and yet here he was telling us all that God actually spoke to him.
God actually spoke to the Yorkshire Ripper too, and most of the other serial killers and told them to do what they did.
Saying God told me to do it, was a fucking psycho statement not to be taken seriously and generally hinted at Uber-meglomania.
But my usually rather excellent radar was not triggering with this guy, he was straight up genuine enough to mean what he said.
I was spinning, this did not compute, what was going on.
'God be praised' came up from one of the zealots behind me.
'I hear you Lord, oh yes I feel you there, hallelujah!' came up from another
MGP ramped it up a gear on the stage. Pacing now, preaching it up. Hill billy styleee. The crowd was going with him. Lapping it up.
I turned to look back , nods of approval. people shaking their heads in alignment to his words. hands in the air here and there. Some standing, swaying in his miracle glow. Those looks in the eyes that I never now how to adequately describe, but somehow suggested a total self-delusion on an egotistical scale way beyond anything the mind can self-detect, and supported, endorsed by a multitude of other fakes, all with their own agendas.
These are NOT my people. I was thinking, and turned back around.
Something was happening inside me. It felt like the fuckers were hypnotising me. It was that need to belong, that feeling you wanted to be part of your fellow man's community, not left out alone in the cold of the universe, and you would do anything to make them welcome you in. I felt it tug at me. I felt alone, I felt inexplicable fear churn up from within, I felt alone there in the midst of all of it. preying on my sense of abandomment. I suddenly was really alone, and small, in the big, cruel universe and needed a hug. shit! It was getting to me. This is how the church got them all. Believing in the fear. Fuck this. I shut my eyes. Went to the place I knew, the place I had learnt to go to survive the tough.
Meditation,
Inner Peace,
Inner Quiet.
Less bullshit,
not more bullshit.
Aaaah, that was better.
It was all ok really. I didnt have to believe in their Goddy agenda and shit, just because they all did. They werent going to attack me. Besides none of them really knew that I was not one of them. So long as I shut the fuck up, it was all going to be ok.
Once I had calmed a bit, I opened my eyes again, and started to listen once more.
'And God said to me, Sam, you got to go and build this restaurant in Ethiopia....'
Oh, for fucks sake !
But I was stabilising in the midst of the nonsense. And it brought it up for me again; the real reason I was there.
I am not against the idea of God. I just have issues with 99 percent of the people who spout about religion. Sometimes I come across someone I think is genuine, following a belief like MGP, into their convictions. They are generally leaders of people, ploughing fearlessly into the unknown and following their destiny. These people interest me. Malidome Some, Martin Pretchtel are examples, and now Sam Childers. Sometimes they are God botherers. I dont hold that against them as such, but I want to know what gives them that conviction. That was why I was there. I needed to find my conviction, my drive. I lacked it in life. And I had noticed that when someone believed in God, they had that conviction.
I was there because I could relate to MGP in lifestyle, then he had had a change that led him to an unflinching conviction. unshakeable. He thought it was God. maybe it was. I wanted to know.
I needed to find that conviction which I lacked. I knew this was a fact because there was a bunch of stuff I wanted to do in my life , that I just couldnt do, simply because I could not find the conviction to sustain them in the way they needed. Music was a perfect example. I didnt do it much because I lacked conviction in it. I had lost it along the way.
But it was in hearing the conviction from Sam that it was 'God talking to him', that I hit a massive inner conflict. Such statements were untenable to me. It was nonsense. God didnt talk to people. But when people, like Sam, said they did, it gave them access to that unflinching conviction. It was the drive to do what they had to do.
It helped if they were part of a community, like that of the Christians, that then supported it. This was all kind of smacking of delusion on a grand scale, to enable you to believe in yourself. It wasnt good enough for me. I couldnt kid myself with that. But it seemed like Sam could. Yet. the contradication came in the fact that I sensed this guy would not lie to himself on that level.
So what was going on ? I wasnt totally sure, but it was clearly time for me to go in search of some answers. Fate had made it so, brought me here tonight to witness this conundrum.
It was time for me to go looking for God.
Christians.
Probably about 300 of them tonight all packed into the church. Well, they call it a church but actually its more like a modern day concert hall. Australia doesnt really possess many buildings over a few decades old. I prefer it. The sombre cold unfriendliness of churches in England was enough to put any kid off God for life. Most especially since they were generally built on lies, and a lot of a blood. Bad history hung in an English church like a decaying last fart in a coffin.
There was an insanity here tonight though.
I had come to see the Machine Gun Preacher do his thing, the real live-in-the-flesh one, not the movie or the actor. For some reason I hadnt really considered that I was walking into the habitat of the Christian. Why? I guess I was overly excited at finding the flyer advertising his imminent arrival at a small church in Nowra just 30 minutes drive away. I had come across the flyer at a rummage sale. I'd wandered off into the kitchen of what appeared to be a site of religious service when not a rummage sale. There I saw the small pile of leaflets, picked one up, and was surprised, having just seen the film last week, that it was so quietly advertised. Even so, I just had to go, the missus, Miss P, was equally as excited.
So we went. Of course it wasnt advertised much because Christians dont need to advertise outside, they have their own network. God looks after his own. But fate had clearly intervened and put his message in my path. Sure, I am a spiritual sort, 'no atheists in a foxhole' right? but if truth be told, I consider my evolution to have passed through Christianity on the way to a more likely and experiential truth. I left Christianity behind aged about 13.
We met him at the door. The Preacher, not God. He was signing books and chatting. Again, the preacher, not God.
There weren't too many people, but what people there were, were those kind of people that seem somewhat intense, and have about them an air of self-righteous, falsity and cut-throatedness. Or maybe it was me. But they are out for themselves, you can smell it. I guess everyone is really, but not everyone uses the same methods as Christians to hide that fact. They feign 'the love of god' use it like a weapon to coerce others unto their will. They dont see it like that though. Due to an extended upbringing in a religious school, and subsequent personal realizations about the various 'truths' in the bible, and concern about just how easy it is to interpret anywhichway you like, I tend to get royally fucking annoyed by Biblically based God-botherers quite quickly.
I held my tongue.
Besides, the MG Preacher interested me.
'Can I get photo with you two' I asked and promptly iPhone snapped Miss P with Mr Sam Childers, aka the Machine Gun Preacher.
'Don't you want one?' she asked, after we had done.
'Nah' I replied.
'You are shy' she laughed. But I wasnt sure it was totally that, I just didnt need me to be in the whole super-star phenomena. I wanted to talk to the man. I wanted to measure his soul.
It took about 1 minute. He was a good bloke. Obviously tough, though I would say more in his convictions and general good-bloke-edness than as a fist flying, gun-slinging, Rambo, but then you could never be sure with people. He just looked like another chequer-shirted, dirty jeans, rather nicely tanned, Harley riding hill-billy of a yank with handlebar moustache akin to Yo-sammity-sam.
I didnt get time to ask him much, other than his take on the Kony affair. I had my suspicions about it all and he confirmed them; Kony was 7 year old news. Kony was never the real problem, the problem today was President Bashir in Sudan with planes, bombs and oil. and the US had just dropped 10,000 'peace-keeping' troops into the country.
no shit.
So my suspicions that 90 percent of the problem actually came from the demand in the West for slaves/diamonds/oil, was confirmed.
'...My friend in Uganda says...' I was burst in upon, and the conversation hi-jacked by some red-head behind me. She was clearly taking over and muscled in without any kind of acknowledgment to my existence. I stepped back. At the same time, a tall young man in hat and glo-jacket, suggesting he worked at the church, muscled in from the other direction.
'I just have to say, you are crazy man, but total respect to you' he said to MGP.
I stepped back further, it was like being mobbed by pecking seagulls going in on my bag of chips I had just let drop. I had that sudden sense of indignation at being usurped, but put it bed quite quickly. It was the Christian thing to do.
We stepped into the main hall, and walked down the front to take up a good seat. And it was within ten minutes that I realised we had taken up roost right in the midst of the heart of them. In fact I think we had taken someones reserved chairs as a couple of people came by and shook my hand, pausing for a moment as if wanting me to say something. I just smiled, lazily and ignored them. Then the pastor came to sit on one side of us with his wife, and a little after MGP turned up, and sat in the seats next to him, and then two more , very vocal, inner-circle, 'personal friends of god', sat beside us on the other side and took to shouting things like 'Praise be the lord' and 'hallelujah' or 'Jesus, yes Jesus hears you Lord' really loudly any time anything happened that remotely gave them the excuse to make an exhibition of themselves, I realised my error in seating choice.
Every few seconds it went off, right in my ear. 'Praise Jesus' 'God loves you' . I had a mind to tell them to shut the fuck up, I knew Christians wouldnt have the balls to throw me out, but I was in their nest, and it was their safari. Even so, it seemed annoying and false to be shouting at God all the time. It was so Evan-fucking-gelical. And was a twenty second reminder of what horse-shit people are willing to believe if you can get them to do it en-masse.
After the Christian band finished, during which time everyone stood up and sang except me and Miss P, I could always count on her for some satanic rebeliousness, the Pastor cut a few jokes about him becoming the 'shotgun preacher' and then played the trailer for MGP - the film, afterwhich he gave the stage to the man himself.
Finally.
'God be praised!' I muttered.
He said a few things about his current situation, his businesses including restaurants in Ethiopia, a motorcycle work-shop in US, a clothing line in US, a security firm in Uganda...this guy was like Richard Branson on the quiet.....and how all of them were doing so well it was enough to be able to fund all these other charities as a result and all of this was....because of his relationship with God.
'This all began' he said, 'When God spoke to me and he said - Sam, you have got to go to Africa'
hmmm.
He said it in a way that couldnt be misinterpreted and he repeated it and made sure we all knew it really was God that spoke to him.
And it was at that moment that I realised just why I had come, really.
I found myself in a quandry right then.
It was the way he said it. With absolute conviction in his eyes that God actually spoke to him and told him to go to Africa. I had measured this guy, and I generally had some good radar like that. I liked him, I felt I could have a normal conversation with him, I felt he was on the same mental level. I felt you couldn't pull the shit over his eyes, and sell him some crap. He had been in fights, got down and dirty in life, done the druggery, the thuggery, who knows maybe even the buggery too but when he found God he hadnt turned into some total nut job. He was clearly still a normal person you could tell from talking to him. Until that sentence came out of his mouth.
It carried so much with it. Think about it.
'When God spoke to me and he said - Sam, you got to go to Africa'
So God actually leaned down from his cloud and spoke, God being a white man and dressed in a white tunic with a long beard and chummy disposition if you are one of his sheep of course, and spoke directly into your ear? Are you having a fucking laugh mate !
I was in the midst of a turmoil.
On the one hand I had read this guy and he didnt seem to me to be a bullshit artist, and yet here he was telling us all that God actually spoke to him.
God actually spoke to the Yorkshire Ripper too, and most of the other serial killers and told them to do what they did.
Saying God told me to do it, was a fucking psycho statement not to be taken seriously and generally hinted at Uber-meglomania.
But my usually rather excellent radar was not triggering with this guy, he was straight up genuine enough to mean what he said.
I was spinning, this did not compute, what was going on.
'God be praised' came up from one of the zealots behind me.
'I hear you Lord, oh yes I feel you there, hallelujah!' came up from another
MGP ramped it up a gear on the stage. Pacing now, preaching it up. Hill billy styleee. The crowd was going with him. Lapping it up.
I turned to look back , nods of approval. people shaking their heads in alignment to his words. hands in the air here and there. Some standing, swaying in his miracle glow. Those looks in the eyes that I never now how to adequately describe, but somehow suggested a total self-delusion on an egotistical scale way beyond anything the mind can self-detect, and supported, endorsed by a multitude of other fakes, all with their own agendas.
These are NOT my people. I was thinking, and turned back around.
Something was happening inside me. It felt like the fuckers were hypnotising me. It was that need to belong, that feeling you wanted to be part of your fellow man's community, not left out alone in the cold of the universe, and you would do anything to make them welcome you in. I felt it tug at me. I felt alone, I felt inexplicable fear churn up from within, I felt alone there in the midst of all of it. preying on my sense of abandomment. I suddenly was really alone, and small, in the big, cruel universe and needed a hug. shit! It was getting to me. This is how the church got them all. Believing in the fear. Fuck this. I shut my eyes. Went to the place I knew, the place I had learnt to go to survive the tough.
Meditation,
Inner Peace,
Inner Quiet.
Less bullshit,
not more bullshit.
Aaaah, that was better.
It was all ok really. I didnt have to believe in their Goddy agenda and shit, just because they all did. They werent going to attack me. Besides none of them really knew that I was not one of them. So long as I shut the fuck up, it was all going to be ok.
Once I had calmed a bit, I opened my eyes again, and started to listen once more.
'And God said to me, Sam, you got to go and build this restaurant in Ethiopia....'
Oh, for fucks sake !
But I was stabilising in the midst of the nonsense. And it brought it up for me again; the real reason I was there.
I am not against the idea of God. I just have issues with 99 percent of the people who spout about religion. Sometimes I come across someone I think is genuine, following a belief like MGP, into their convictions. They are generally leaders of people, ploughing fearlessly into the unknown and following their destiny. These people interest me. Malidome Some, Martin Pretchtel are examples, and now Sam Childers. Sometimes they are God botherers. I dont hold that against them as such, but I want to know what gives them that conviction. That was why I was there. I needed to find my conviction, my drive. I lacked it in life. And I had noticed that when someone believed in God, they had that conviction.
I was there because I could relate to MGP in lifestyle, then he had had a change that led him to an unflinching conviction. unshakeable. He thought it was God. maybe it was. I wanted to know.
I needed to find that conviction which I lacked. I knew this was a fact because there was a bunch of stuff I wanted to do in my life , that I just couldnt do, simply because I could not find the conviction to sustain them in the way they needed. Music was a perfect example. I didnt do it much because I lacked conviction in it. I had lost it along the way.
But it was in hearing the conviction from Sam that it was 'God talking to him', that I hit a massive inner conflict. Such statements were untenable to me. It was nonsense. God didnt talk to people. But when people, like Sam, said they did, it gave them access to that unflinching conviction. It was the drive to do what they had to do.
It helped if they were part of a community, like that of the Christians, that then supported it. This was all kind of smacking of delusion on a grand scale, to enable you to believe in yourself. It wasnt good enough for me. I couldnt kid myself with that. But it seemed like Sam could. Yet. the contradication came in the fact that I sensed this guy would not lie to himself on that level.
So what was going on ? I wasnt totally sure, but it was clearly time for me to go in search of some answers. Fate had made it so, brought me here tonight to witness this conundrum.
It was time for me to go looking for God.
Wednesday, 7 December 2011
Another day, another death
It was the same time last year, maybe even to the day. 7th December that A W took his life by jumping from an 8th floor window in Bondi , days after we fired him from our three piece music act. It was the first time I watched a plain wooden coffin get put into the ground. Dust blew about the hot earth and the roughly painted, and sadly cheap nature of the container told me it wasn’t wholly unexpected. I didn’t know him all that well, it devastated my last surviving partner in musical crime though, they had been friends since childhood. I knew the good days couldn’t last , and they had only just bloody arrived too. I took it as a warning. I was sinking into the bad things associated with my love of music again; Drink, drugs, trying to fuck everything. It was time to stop. I finished off gigs for Christmas and then left Bondi. It had been 3 years and I have to admit, I thought I could have stayed there for life quite happily. That is the nature of death when we look beyond the pain, get over the horizon of its texture on our hearts. Leave the day behind. Suicide is the most cruel of deaths, for the living. But death, when all is said and done, is emotionless , inevitable, and just a transformation from one form to another.
My mum seemed overly eager to get the news to me. I am not sure why. I found myself wondering if she is taking medication over there in the city of Lost Angels. I hoped not. She had thus far avoided making herself into a duck faced plastic caricature, as is the way in Hell A, so maybe there was hope.
Honey, F has had a death in the family, S's older sister committed suicide, thought I should let you know
It stopped my morning rush. I was bound for work, the one day a week I work in the city , a 2.5 hour train ride, mad dash for 5 hours without stopping, followed by the same train ride in reverse. Its worth it for the free time I get most of the rest of the week. I don't quite know how the hell I got my life into this great position, but long may it last. So I stared at the message. It had positively ruined my breakfast. I didn't care much for suicides. There had been too many, in fact it was the most common form of death in my life by far. It irked me. When so many things were out to get us, that we should get ourselves.
S was the guy who ended up with the girl I should have ended up with, but blew it. I blew it consciously and decidedly, but was always quite baffled by the speed with which she picked up someone new, the fact that it was the bass player in my recently defunct band, and a work colleague of hers, just added to the sensation that maybe it hadn't been totally my doing. This was a common one, I noticed, where ending of relationships had been concerned. I had pretty much always ended them, or rather, I thought I had. But women clearly have ways.
The discovery to me was also one that was a little disconcerting more because it didnt seem to bother me all that much. After 7 years of what was, in the main part, a pretty good relationship. I left her. Less than 2 weeks later, while letting myself into the house we owned still, to collect the last of my things, I discovered a used condom draped over the bin in the bedroom. This was the woman who had had sex with less people than you could count on one hand.
It was an echo of a similar feeling I felt this morning, staring out of the window as I was now, feeling a gnawing discomfort in the belly thanks to death, to change, to the end of something, and yet recognizing that really I should be thankful for the things I do have right here, right now. And I was, I truly was, but death sucked, most especially suicide. I clicked on Facebook and saw a ton of messages and condolences, I wasn't sure quite how my mum thought I would miss such an event. She wasnt turning into one of those feeders on dark news, was she? I shuddered and let the thought go. I wrote a short, plain, not very interesting message privately to F, and then left the house for the train.
F had spent the larger part of last year harassing me for the failed relationship that ended over 6 years ago now, as well as any other shortcomings she could think of at the time. I had 'wasted the best years of her life'. Etc..etc.. I felt like the subject of a Pogues Christmas song. I also, at first, felt a hint of guilt but it was for a short period of time and then I just started to feel pissed off with the harassment. So I ignored further emails. She had a point, sure, but it was 6 fucking years ago. In fairness to her, when her next baby popped out she seemed to calm down. Hormones. Who'd a thought it. It was born the day before my birthday, the 3rd in my family, or close to family, to do so. Was life trying to make a memorial of me, or was I being slowly pushed out? Either way, she calmed down a bit and the emails trailed off as motherhood took hold for the second time. And then this.
So they changed the new-borns name to N in memory of S's older sister and I had a quick peek on the facebook site under her name because I just couldnt help it. I was a rubbernecker like the rest of them, but I wanted to know. Suicide mystified me. The whys and wherefores. And A's terminal exit last year had been messy, flopping around on the ledge of a balcony for a good couple of minutes before passing as I got to hear all about at the funeral, from the landlady who had found him 'Like a fish gasping' were the words that really stuck in my mind. He had taken a running dive at a landing window on a Friday evening hours after spending quality time at his young niece's birthday party. It must have turned him inwards far enough to explode outwards in a random moment as he climbed the stairs, no doubt drunk and/or having a severe polar moment. Enough to make you run at a closed window? Why not just run at the closed window of life, it seems easier somehow.
N had a picture of herself smiling, possibly a little on the zany side, with a large black teddy bear. It didnt seem particularly odd except that this woman had just committed suicide. Her facebook was private, so there was nothing more to see here. But on her wall was a status message saying she had just befriended three people recently and was married. Shit. That sucked. Mr N was going to be having a breakdown for sure. I wondered if the word 'married' was something to do with the whole saga. I also noted she lived in Sydney. S was from Oz. He had a few issues himself lurking in there, you don't play bass in my band without me figuring out your dark side at least a little bit. The boy was...haunted, might be a word. I guess it was in part why I felt more happy for him than angry the day I found his man spit in my waste bin. He seemed like he needed a good woman. And I realized, that weird morning, that rather than annoyed, I actually felt like I was off the hook. It was a sense of relief, like I had permission to get on with my life and stop beating myself up over it. As a result, of course, she seemed to think I was a cold-hearted bastard who couldn't care less about anyone or anything. She had no idea that it had taken me years to achieve such a state of grace. And a lot of pain it had taken too. But not enough to make me jump out an 8th floor window, get married, or hang myself, nor find God. Not yet anyway.
Though Remember, Jesus is the reason for the season.
Right on.
See you in hell, then.
happy fucking christmas
Over and out
Monday, 7 November 2011
The Grotesque (Part II)
' Are you really considering getting on that insane merri-go-round one more time?'
So I started downloading and watching music documentaries. I was feeding something inside me. I needed to understand something about the path I had chosen through life so long ago, the one that led to The Crossroads, yea, that crossroad. I had been there. I'd met him, seriously I did, in a field one night in about '87 in Oxfordshire someplace, and I had refused him at the time, or so I thought, but I wasnt so sure now.
With the benefit of hindsight, it was clear to me that I had , since that date, lived the rock and roll lifestyle without doing too much of the rock and roll. I'd had the power gifted to me, and instead of using it to actually 'make it', I had just got lots of sex, and high all the time, with the occasional bit of music thrown in if I had to do it. I mean, if you are getting laid and getting high already, why bother doing the gigs?
But there was, I also realised, a certain freedom in coming out the end of that. Without the cash, success, or full-time gigging lifestyle, I'd survived, for one thing. And I hadn't yet been stuck into a pigeon-hole musically. Only by the few people who knew me, at least, but in that regards, I was still kind of a blank canvas publicly. The down side was that now I wanted to be a musician again, I was actually just an ex-druggie , too old to be interested in notching up one-night stands, and musically; a never-has-been. And when you are coming back to music as an unknown in your 40's, who the hell is going to buy your music, let alone be around to start a band with? Everyone has retired to working and family life. In fact the very idea of it suggests the need for some serious therapy.
There was another thing, the teachers at AIM music college, where I had enlisted as much to learn production skills as to find a way to give up music, had pointed it out to me,
'You are better off than us, we have to work in music to make a living and we never have time to focus on our own stuff, we have families and work all day. You on the other hand work in I.T., so you have some spare change, you have no family, so you have more time and energy, and you dont use up all your musical energy on other peoples music. You really are in a good position.'
They had a point.
So here I was with some free time, and with it I was hungrily lapping up documentaries about bands and artists I loved or was interested in, and while I did it, I tried to observe what it was inside me that was seeking to be fed. Then while watching The Doors – Classic Albums documentary, Perry Farrell from Jane's Addiction said something about musicians having this strangeness inside themselves, and they pull it out, and offer it up, and it is strange but they kind of like it too. And it was in that explanation that I somehow grasped, for the first time, the elusive thing in me that wanted feeding, that hungered to be recognised, that longed for the stage, and the lights, and the drugs, and the women, the fame, and the glory, and to write the best song in the world, and of course, to be adored. And it was 'strange', it was almost hiding in there. It wasn't sensitive so much, because it was bloody stubborn and defined already by its own nature as much as being driven by it. But it existed uncomfortably within me, it wouldn't just die and go away, but it couldnt seem to find a way to happily come out and express itself either. And a word popped up in my head, and it described it quite perfectly, and that name was 'The Grotesque'
I give some wiki definitions here:
The word grotesque comes from the same Latin root as "Grotto", meaning a small cave or hollow....
...grotesque has come to be used as a general adjective for the strange, fantastic, ugly, incongruous, unpleasant, or disgusting, and thus is often used to describe weird shapes and distorted forms such as Halloween masks.
In art, performance, and literature, grotesque, however, may also refer to something that simultaneously invokes in an audience a feeling of uncomfortable bizarreness as well as empathic pity
It was a perfect description to me. There is something painful and piteous about the expression of music, it seeks approval for itself to exist out in the world happily, it needs it, and that need is what makes it something that hides, almost lurks, in the soul like a timid child, an innocent, yet somehow an oddity. For me at least. It carries with it a sense of the predicted future, of change, and that creates reaction, and that reaction isnt always good, but it is a reaction. A reaction by the listener to the Grotesque. It's a freak show.
Making music for me is, and I hate to admit this, slightly Gollum-ish. It brings the feeling of being a freak to the fore, and I then find myself needing to seek approval for my existence, if someone knocks it, I scurry back into my cave and stroke 'my precious', as it were, until I feel better. I love the power it gives me, and I hate it's power over me.
So, as I observed myself watching these documentaries, I noticed I was doing a couple of things. I was seeking inspiration, or more precisely, trying to find support and confidence from others who appeared to have 'made it' , that had 'the grotesque' within in them, it troubled them, and yet they seemed confident enough in their music to have gone for it anyway.
Listening to Bono, in 'From the Sky Down', describe how he took on pieces of past musicians or elements in the world, and with them he built a mask to wear in order to protect himself. I understood that. And they all came out in his performance, or his clothing, or his show, or his mannerisms on stage. It was a shield. To protect that thing, as much as to protect himself from that thing . To enable it to come out into the light, and do its thing, and not change him, or damage him.
I had also to consider that there had been an element of self-sabotage along the way for me, something Anthony Robbins had put me onto was that if we have conflicting needs then we are unable to progress, as one need pulls us one way, and the other goes in the opposite direction. We have to resolve these inner conflicts, but first we have to recognise them. It wasnt until 2007 that I recognised one of those; much as I longed for fame, the stage, the recognition. I feared giving myself away or getting it wrong, or being labelled, or losing my privacy, or dying in a champagne supernova. The conflict was that, as much as I wanted to make it, I really didnt want to either. The reasons made up a long list; I feared not being strong enough to handle fame. I didnt really actually like the look of fame. I didnt want to lose my freedom. I was a bit lazy too. I didnt like the idea of touring. I didnt want to rise up to have to fall down, and I was well aware that if you didnt fall down, the press sure liked to shoot you down. I didnt much like the industry, nor the game. But at the same time, just sitting at home making music wasnt enough, learning the art of music was not enough, nor was playing gigs to a small loyal crowd going to be enough. I was in a state of permanent conflict and inner turmoil with music. Hungering to make it, yet struggling to avoid it too, fearful of it.
In fact when I considered it , I wasnt really sure what I wanted. And that was probably why I hadnt really gone for it properly either. That, and then there was the obvious lack of self-confidence in my own singing ability which drove me forward and then backwards in equally erratic force, so that essentially I went nowhere, but thought about doing stuff a lot, planned a lot, but ultimately, didnt do a lot.
Watching the Jim Morrison doco called 'When you are Strange' surprised me to hear that he doubted his singing ability too, even at his peak. I would kill for his voice. And as the story unfolded it was clear that the rest of the band were much more skilled musicians in their own right than he was, he didnt know an A major from a B Minor, which probably pushed him further into a sense of low self-worth, which he made up for by becoming more and more of a spectacle, and a drunk. To some extent their abilities held them up through the insanity.
Something else I could relate to when I considered the last few gigs I did in England, Cornbury festival acoustic tent where I was so drunk I couldnt tune my guitar, and asked the audience to help me out. No one did. They wanted someone sober who could play to come on instead. 4 hours earlier I had played one of the best renditions of Sympathy for the Devil I had ever done with a band. I'd been drunk then too and the response had been uplifting enough to make me play the acoustic tent later. I couldnt even see the strings. I found solace in more drugs, and sex with some random.
The footage of Jim Morrison working on the last album shows him with twitches and ticks and drunk all the time, so much of a mess that Paul Rothchild, the producer, walks out and does not return. Though in the end it probably helped make the album, it didnt help Jim avoid his ultimate fate, which was clearly sealed by then regardless. His girlfriend-inspired attempt to pull up involved him giving up music, and moving to Paris to try to be the 'poet' , which is where he had come to music from, and where he felt more at home. As the poet, the shaman. That is more what he was, he ended up a musician by accident really, and then as a result, in the '27 club'; dead famous. But then didnt Jesus get it at 32 and he did everything right, allegedly.
The poet and shaman
I wondered about this. I related to Mr Mojo more on these terms, even though I could play a few instruments with confidence, though I couldnt sing with confidence, much to my chagrin I wanted to, I needed to for some reason. I needed a voice. But now, I wasnt sure it was really the music that was the essence of what it was all about for me. I loved making music, but at the risk of being sacrilegious, I couldnt give a rats ass for the music itself. I didnt collect music or learn all about every musician. I just had particular things I liked, or related to, and that was it. The poetry, and the shamanism of it, I liked more. In particular, the shamanism of it. That is more where I felt my 'Grotesque' became defined.
So, I was trying to define my Grotesque. I was also trying to learn from my mistakes, learn from those who walked before me, and also, it is fair to say, figure out a way to do it one last time and do it right, maybe even big. I felt I deserved big. It was the ego maniac in me, or was it the truth, I didnt know yet. My Grotesque was a freak amongst the world of the grotesque, I felt it deserved recognition as such ...or rather, it had been in its day.
I was in now my 40's ! Wtf was I thinking. Once again I had to ask myself, is this really how I want to be spending my time?
I watched a doco on Lemmy. That made me laugh. I used to see him in the St Moritz propping up the bar, a part of the furniture always there. It was a good doco. He is a good example of how to survive the industry and still be yourself. Handled it better than Jim, but then was he really a shaman type? Silently, I felt yes, maybe in his own way he was. He came from Anglesey after all, the last bastion of defense in pagan Albion by the druids before the Romans slaughtered them. Besides, only a looney shaman could wear shorts like that and get away with it. Heavy Metal was never my kind of music but I liked the documentary, and then all the shots of him on his own on the tour bus watching crap TV traveling alone to shows. How did he live like that? God knows. I wasnt sure I could do it. I needed more input to my life. Maybe he was an accidental superstar.
I watched more documentaries, ones that I would not normally be drawn to, yet interestingly I found a commonality in each that related to me somewhere, to my path, my dreams and ambitions as a musician.
Metallica – Some kind of Monster. Music I really did not like, and yet how much had my bands been just like that, albeit without very many fans at all, and certainly no record deals. But the story was the same; the struggle, the dream, the longing to feel worthy, feel recognised as what you feel you are, a musician, if that it be. I found it interesting that the people we would look at and consider as having made it, they were also still looking to their heroes trying to feel like they had made it. Weird. Did anyone ever really make it?
Anvil – the real, live Spinal Tap. A classic story. A pair of 50 year olds playing metal that only a bunch of people have ever heard of, and even less really liked, unable to give up, finally 'making it' as a result of the documentation of their inability to do anything other than fail dismally at 'making it.' The exquisite irony.
It all lead to the same basic questions – What qualifies as 'making it?' , what is it really, what would satisfy that, if satisfying it was really what was needed, and why am I still hungering for it at all.
Answering these questions would , I hoped, lead me to know what to do about it.
The Grotesque (Part I)
This isnt exactly a blog post, so much as a journal, or an observation, or an attempt to try to dig out my soul. I havent written for a while, I have been in a place of peace: inner peace, I guess. After all what is there to write about when you are happy?
I now live in a beautiful, spacious, flat overlooking the ocean in Kiama, Australia. I work only two days a week in my own business, and it is enough to survive and pay the rent. I have a beautiful girlfriend who I am in love with, and will marry. She gives me just enough space to feel comfortable, just enough love to feel I don't own her. She has two kids, a boy 8 and a girl 4, who I seem to have adopted with ease thus quelling any fears I was passing the age of having a family and going to die alone. And she is independent enough to be non-plussed by my controlling side when it tries to come out.
You could say life is perfect, and it has been this way since earlier this year. And best of all, BEST OF ALL...I am making music again, and it is prolific. I have a back room converted into the beginnings of a healthy home studio. This is great news to me, as just having passed my 45th birthday, I have spent the last, nearly, decade thinking music was pretty much over for me, and trying to figure out how to replace it.
So, I guess this post is about music, about what music is for me. And though at 45 years old you would imagine that I should understand that very well, I have discovered that the truth is, I really actually don't know what it means to me at all, nor what it is really for, nor how to approach it to feel a sense of true satisfaction in it's execution. It's changed, I've changed, the world has changed, the industry has changed, the availability of music has changed, the money in music has changed, the style has changed, the reason for making it has changed, the future has changed. Everything has changed. And with an awareness that I was clearly preparing to dive back into it, with possibly even more gusto than I had felt in my youth, I realized it was important that I knew what the fuck I was diving into it for this time.
I needed a reason, a purpose, a strategy. She'd hurt me before, or maybe I should say that I had hurt myself along the way; singing to her from beneath the light of the streetlamp under her window, I had gotten in spots of trouble here and there. But I couldn't afford to make the same mistakes again, and I didn't want to feel that sense of weakness, anxiety, frustration, directionlessness, or meaninglessness, again. I didnt want to feel lost when trying to woo her. If I didnt stop to consider my actions, you could be sure that I would get lost again. But despite the sense of fear, of insanity too; insanity at the idea of being 45 years old and trying to make music. And that sense of uncommon un-certainty of direction, which would descend so often that I never quite understood, and which would make me tail off from any idea , and ultimately give it up. But there was an undeniable certainty of purpose and fatefulness about it all this time, something inside me was calling me to duty, and that excited me. I always KNEW I was born to make music even if it was just for a while, even if ultimately I might very well give it all up, and try my hand at writing, or something else instead.
I have spent the last 5 years seeking a way to give up something I had invested most all of my life into. It took a lot of work but I had almost achieved an acquiescence to the sense of failure that came to me whenever I thought about music. That was the hardest thing, the cruelest thing; I felt she had lured me, all along, to be suckling from her bosom only to end up shoving a dried-up teat into my mouth and laughing at me. I couldn't understand why, all my life, I had held onto the steadfast belief, and internal drive, the certainty that I was going to 'make it' despite everything everyone said to me, only to discover in the end they were right; it had been a dream, a delusion, nay, a lie. I had not only to accept that music was over for me, and that I had failed, but worse that my intuition and self-confidence could not be trusted either.
That was a confusing and hard thing, the hardest part was to accept it all without falling apart.
So I turned the corner, and finally started to let go, accept that music was over for me, but that my life had to carry on.
Then what happens?
A collaboration from a few years ago with some random friend in Sydney gets signed up by a label in the UK and cut to vinyl. It ends up reaching over 50,000 hits on Youtube and getting airplay in the very clubs I used to frequent. It's like fucking making it without trying, and in a genre I wasn't even really working in !
The irony of it all wasn’t lost on me, but it did something else for me. Two things in fact. Firstly, it gave me the feeling that, at last, after nearly 30 years going nowhere in the music business, I had finally made it, I had put my name on the god damn wall, somewhere down the bottom, but that wasn't the point, I was up there. I didn't make any money out of it at all, I made probably about 100 english pounds in total, but that is the ridiculous state of the music industry today, and a whole other story which is a part of why I write this now. But what else it did for me, and probably most importantly, is it gave me back my confidence. Enough to consider whether really, honestly, truthfully, had I given music up ?
She'd got me. Like a true woman, played me to the very limits and then when I finally stopped chasing her, she flipped the script. My god, in a funny way I actually thought it was beautiful. I fell in love with her all over again. And at the same time my life changed for the better, as I said in the first part of this post.
And that brings me to the here and now.
I now live in a beautiful, spacious, flat overlooking the ocean in Kiama, Australia. I work only two days a week in my own business, and it is enough to survive and pay the rent. I have a beautiful girlfriend who I am in love with, and will marry. She gives me just enough space to feel comfortable, just enough love to feel I don't own her. She has two kids, a boy 8 and a girl 4, who I seem to have adopted with ease thus quelling any fears I was passing the age of having a family and going to die alone. And she is independent enough to be non-plussed by my controlling side when it tries to come out.
You could say life is perfect, and it has been this way since earlier this year. And best of all, BEST OF ALL...I am making music again, and it is prolific. I have a back room converted into the beginnings of a healthy home studio. This is great news to me, as just having passed my 45th birthday, I have spent the last, nearly, decade thinking music was pretty much over for me, and trying to figure out how to replace it.
So, I guess this post is about music, about what music is for me. And though at 45 years old you would imagine that I should understand that very well, I have discovered that the truth is, I really actually don't know what it means to me at all, nor what it is really for, nor how to approach it to feel a sense of true satisfaction in it's execution. It's changed, I've changed, the world has changed, the industry has changed, the availability of music has changed, the money in music has changed, the style has changed, the reason for making it has changed, the future has changed. Everything has changed. And with an awareness that I was clearly preparing to dive back into it, with possibly even more gusto than I had felt in my youth, I realized it was important that I knew what the fuck I was diving into it for this time.
I needed a reason, a purpose, a strategy. She'd hurt me before, or maybe I should say that I had hurt myself along the way; singing to her from beneath the light of the streetlamp under her window, I had gotten in spots of trouble here and there. But I couldn't afford to make the same mistakes again, and I didn't want to feel that sense of weakness, anxiety, frustration, directionlessness, or meaninglessness, again. I didnt want to feel lost when trying to woo her. If I didnt stop to consider my actions, you could be sure that I would get lost again. But despite the sense of fear, of insanity too; insanity at the idea of being 45 years old and trying to make music. And that sense of uncommon un-certainty of direction, which would descend so often that I never quite understood, and which would make me tail off from any idea , and ultimately give it up. But there was an undeniable certainty of purpose and fatefulness about it all this time, something inside me was calling me to duty, and that excited me. I always KNEW I was born to make music even if it was just for a while, even if ultimately I might very well give it all up, and try my hand at writing, or something else instead.
I have spent the last 5 years seeking a way to give up something I had invested most all of my life into. It took a lot of work but I had almost achieved an acquiescence to the sense of failure that came to me whenever I thought about music. That was the hardest thing, the cruelest thing; I felt she had lured me, all along, to be suckling from her bosom only to end up shoving a dried-up teat into my mouth and laughing at me. I couldn't understand why, all my life, I had held onto the steadfast belief, and internal drive, the certainty that I was going to 'make it' despite everything everyone said to me, only to discover in the end they were right; it had been a dream, a delusion, nay, a lie. I had not only to accept that music was over for me, and that I had failed, but worse that my intuition and self-confidence could not be trusted either.
That was a confusing and hard thing, the hardest part was to accept it all without falling apart.
So I turned the corner, and finally started to let go, accept that music was over for me, but that my life had to carry on.
Then what happens?
A collaboration from a few years ago with some random friend in Sydney gets signed up by a label in the UK and cut to vinyl. It ends up reaching over 50,000 hits on Youtube and getting airplay in the very clubs I used to frequent. It's like fucking making it without trying, and in a genre I wasn't even really working in !
The irony of it all wasn’t lost on me, but it did something else for me. Two things in fact. Firstly, it gave me the feeling that, at last, after nearly 30 years going nowhere in the music business, I had finally made it, I had put my name on the god damn wall, somewhere down the bottom, but that wasn't the point, I was up there. I didn't make any money out of it at all, I made probably about 100 english pounds in total, but that is the ridiculous state of the music industry today, and a whole other story which is a part of why I write this now. But what else it did for me, and probably most importantly, is it gave me back my confidence. Enough to consider whether really, honestly, truthfully, had I given music up ?
She'd got me. Like a true woman, played me to the very limits and then when I finally stopped chasing her, she flipped the script. My god, in a funny way I actually thought it was beautiful. I fell in love with her all over again. And at the same time my life changed for the better, as I said in the first part of this post.
And that brings me to the here and now.
Friday, 15 April 2011
Sunday, 10 April 2011
Excerpt from 'Sperm Wars' by Robin Baker
It is late on a Saturday night and a man and woman in their late twenties are getting ready for bed. As they drift around their rooms, attending to the minutiae of life, they are naked. For them, this is usual and of no sexual importance. They are no longer excited by simply being naked in each other's presence. In fact, they now scarcely notice each other's bodies. As it is Saturday night, they know they will have sex before they go to sleep. Yet, as they vacantly pursue their separate routines, there is no hint of foreplay, even when on occasion their paths cause their bodies to brush past each other.
It is a week since they had sex — last Saturday, in fact. Four years ago, when they first met, they had sex at least once a day (except during her menstrual periods, when neither of them was particularly keen). In those early days they would have ridiculed the possibility of intercourse only once in a whole Week. Now, once a week had become more and more common, even though their usual routine was still to have sex twice a week. Until, that is, two months ago when they had given up using contraception.
Not that they were in any rush to have children. They hadn't yet contemplated the earnest nightly conception campaigns that some of their thirty-something friends had delighted in describing to them. Rather, they preferred to leave it to fate (and so far fate had decreed 'no conception'). They had both found mild sexual excitement in the possibility of conception and for a while their rate had returned to three or four times a week. This week, however, had been different. A couple of separate nights out and, if they were honest, an unexplained coolness between them had conspired against their ever quite getting round to sex. The usual warmth of their relationship had not fully returned until this Saturday morning as they drove on a pre-arranged visit to her sister. Even now, as they eventually got into bed, they could both still feel the legacy of the week's coolness. It was with some tentativeness that the man made his first faltering contacts with his partner's bare body. Once started, however, they quickly slipped into their usual routine.
He begins by gently kissing her face and stroking her breasts. Then they kiss deeply. He strokes her legs to her knees. After a while, he moves down and sucks her nipples. All this time, she cursorily strokes his back and buttocks. Tonight, as is often the case, she cannot concentrate and her mind keeps slipping back to conversations with her sister earlier in the day. She is jolted back to the present when he places his hand between her legs, moves her longest pubic hairs, opens her lips and inserts a finger to check if she is wet. He thinks she is ready. She knows she is not and winces at the prospect of unlubricated penetration. She moves her hand, finds his penis and gently squeezes, in part to see how ready he is but primarily to delay his moving into position. Briefly, her ploy works. He pauses to savour the sensation and responds with half-hearted massage of her genitals. Even though his massage misses her clitoris by a centimetre, he detects (or imagines) an increase in wetness on his finger inside her vagina. He moves his hand and begins to shift his body into the missionary position. She keeps her hand on his penis, and when the moment comes helps to guide its swollen tip into position. She leaves her hand between them for a few seconds to stop him pushing too hard, too soon (she is still nowhere near moist enough). Then, she has no alternative But to abandon the act to him. It takes a while before his gentle working backwards and forwards makes her lubricants really start to flow and his penis is able to enter fully.
Until she was lubricated, the woman had focused her mind on his and her genitals and the mechanics of penetration. But once she is lubricated and he begins the routine of thrusting, her mind drifts back to her sister. Her attention returns to the present only when he makes an uncomfortable movement. Despite her abstractedness, years of practice allow her to time the quiet noises in her throat to the man's thrusts. Then, suddenly, her mind jumps back to Wednesday night and the man who had flirted with her when she was out with a group of her female friends. Now, in her mind, it is him on top of her. Her heart speeds up, her breathing quickens, and her noises get louder. But just as her fantasy begins to take shape and she feels she might even come, her partner makes a particularly awkward thrust. Her fantasy disappears. The moment has gone, and the next second she realises he is ejaculating. She makes a sound for each of his contractions, then relaxes with him as his penis shrinks inside her. Impatient for him to remove his now dead weight, she coughs, gently. His limp appendage is ejected, he moves off her and they slip into their usual post-coital embrace. Both feel guilty at not having made more effort for their partner's sake and both feel depressed. Briefly, they exchange untruths over how pleasurable everything had been before eventually drifting into post-coital sleep.
It is a week since they had sex — last Saturday, in fact. Four years ago, when they first met, they had sex at least once a day (except during her menstrual periods, when neither of them was particularly keen). In those early days they would have ridiculed the possibility of intercourse only once in a whole Week. Now, once a week had become more and more common, even though their usual routine was still to have sex twice a week. Until, that is, two months ago when they had given up using contraception.
Not that they were in any rush to have children. They hadn't yet contemplated the earnest nightly conception campaigns that some of their thirty-something friends had delighted in describing to them. Rather, they preferred to leave it to fate (and so far fate had decreed 'no conception'). They had both found mild sexual excitement in the possibility of conception and for a while their rate had returned to three or four times a week. This week, however, had been different. A couple of separate nights out and, if they were honest, an unexplained coolness between them had conspired against their ever quite getting round to sex. The usual warmth of their relationship had not fully returned until this Saturday morning as they drove on a pre-arranged visit to her sister. Even now, as they eventually got into bed, they could both still feel the legacy of the week's coolness. It was with some tentativeness that the man made his first faltering contacts with his partner's bare body. Once started, however, they quickly slipped into their usual routine.
He begins by gently kissing her face and stroking her breasts. Then they kiss deeply. He strokes her legs to her knees. After a while, he moves down and sucks her nipples. All this time, she cursorily strokes his back and buttocks. Tonight, as is often the case, she cannot concentrate and her mind keeps slipping back to conversations with her sister earlier in the day. She is jolted back to the present when he places his hand between her legs, moves her longest pubic hairs, opens her lips and inserts a finger to check if she is wet. He thinks she is ready. She knows she is not and winces at the prospect of unlubricated penetration. She moves her hand, finds his penis and gently squeezes, in part to see how ready he is but primarily to delay his moving into position. Briefly, her ploy works. He pauses to savour the sensation and responds with half-hearted massage of her genitals. Even though his massage misses her clitoris by a centimetre, he detects (or imagines) an increase in wetness on his finger inside her vagina. He moves his hand and begins to shift his body into the missionary position. She keeps her hand on his penis, and when the moment comes helps to guide its swollen tip into position. She leaves her hand between them for a few seconds to stop him pushing too hard, too soon (she is still nowhere near moist enough). Then, she has no alternative But to abandon the act to him. It takes a while before his gentle working backwards and forwards makes her lubricants really start to flow and his penis is able to enter fully.
Until she was lubricated, the woman had focused her mind on his and her genitals and the mechanics of penetration. But once she is lubricated and he begins the routine of thrusting, her mind drifts back to her sister. Her attention returns to the present only when he makes an uncomfortable movement. Despite her abstractedness, years of practice allow her to time the quiet noises in her throat to the man's thrusts. Then, suddenly, her mind jumps back to Wednesday night and the man who had flirted with her when she was out with a group of her female friends. Now, in her mind, it is him on top of her. Her heart speeds up, her breathing quickens, and her noises get louder. But just as her fantasy begins to take shape and she feels she might even come, her partner makes a particularly awkward thrust. Her fantasy disappears. The moment has gone, and the next second she realises he is ejaculating. She makes a sound for each of his contractions, then relaxes with him as his penis shrinks inside her. Impatient for him to remove his now dead weight, she coughs, gently. His limp appendage is ejected, he moves off her and they slip into their usual post-coital embrace. Both feel guilty at not having made more effort for their partner's sake and both feel depressed. Briefly, they exchange untruths over how pleasurable everything had been before eventually drifting into post-coital sleep.
Thursday, 7 April 2011
So what of 2011 and the coming days?
Well apart from us being 4 months into it already, I just have a feeling we are on the edge of an era of big things
You could say this is inspired by the 2012 phenomena, and before you start, no I dont buy into the doom story, it's just another year as far as I can tell, but, maybe it is an opportunity for people with a consciousness, to raise it a bit.
What does that mean?
Basically, tune out of the shit stuff and into the good
If life is just a perception
then let's choose what we perceive
.
My meditation work, which has been a 4 year journey so far, bumped up a gear this last year. Right now I am working on Osho's 112 meditations based on the Vigyan Bhairav Tantra
wtf? you may ask
and well you may ask it
The first meditation is the one Buddha, and he was quite possibly a real chap, found enlightenment through. Just the one. Called Anapana, focusing on his breathe going in and out the nostrils and he thereby achieved enlightenment, stopped the world, stopped the monkey brain from reacting
I was having a dig around with these funky meditation techniques and then happened upon 48 to 50, and was pleasantly surprised to find them relating to sex and how to go about it
Meditation was, after all, supposedly invented as a way to achieve a state of bliss otherwise only achieved during sex
not the humpy bumpy scratchy shimmy bang bang bang uh uh sex, the other sort, involving being quite still and highly aware of everything until the body starts shaking, and it does, I can attest to this phenomena
Though personally I actually quite like it feral, but that's just me
So meditation is what I am working hard at, whenever I can, which is quite a lot, and it is doing me good, I would never say it is a cure, like I am still punchy as fuck and prone to sleeping with the wrong kinds of women....but then I dont actually see these as problems anyway, but I digress
So what of 2011 and the coming days?
Well my suggestion to us would be this,
Get ourselves a nice place in the sun it doesnt have to be expensive,
Make our lives about lifestyle choices, fuck trying to get rich, we'll never get there
Make it about the moment, bugger later, later we are all dead and that's a fact
Learn tantra and meditation - trust me you need them both in your life
the secret to both is simple, stop trying to do something.
Manifestation is the way forward - dont work your ass off for it, intend it towards you
Do a vision board - 3 days it took me and blew my mind it worked so well
and that's enough from me for today, now I need.... to stop trying to do something
Actually I may knock out a quick jizz-free wank first , and then that
coz that's the kind of guy I am
Here is a piccie of the place I love to be, things seem all ok when I am there....
Gods Bless you all, Goddesses too, here's to a bright fuckin future coz we all deserve it
: )
You could say this is inspired by the 2012 phenomena, and before you start, no I dont buy into the doom story, it's just another year as far as I can tell, but, maybe it is an opportunity for people with a consciousness, to raise it a bit.
What does that mean?
Basically, tune out of the shit stuff and into the good
If life is just a perception
then let's choose what we perceive
.
My meditation work, which has been a 4 year journey so far, bumped up a gear this last year. Right now I am working on Osho's 112 meditations based on the Vigyan Bhairav Tantra
wtf? you may ask
and well you may ask it
The first meditation is the one Buddha, and he was quite possibly a real chap, found enlightenment through. Just the one. Called Anapana, focusing on his breathe going in and out the nostrils and he thereby achieved enlightenment, stopped the world, stopped the monkey brain from reacting
I was having a dig around with these funky meditation techniques and then happened upon 48 to 50, and was pleasantly surprised to find them relating to sex and how to go about it
Meditation was, after all, supposedly invented as a way to achieve a state of bliss otherwise only achieved during sex
not the humpy bumpy scratchy shimmy bang bang bang uh uh sex, the other sort, involving being quite still and highly aware of everything until the body starts shaking, and it does, I can attest to this phenomena
Though personally I actually quite like it feral, but that's just me
So meditation is what I am working hard at, whenever I can, which is quite a lot, and it is doing me good, I would never say it is a cure, like I am still punchy as fuck and prone to sleeping with the wrong kinds of women....but then I dont actually see these as problems anyway, but I digress
So what of 2011 and the coming days?
Well my suggestion to us would be this,
Get ourselves a nice place in the sun it doesnt have to be expensive,
Make our lives about lifestyle choices, fuck trying to get rich, we'll never get there
Make it about the moment, bugger later, later we are all dead and that's a fact
Learn tantra and meditation - trust me you need them both in your life
the secret to both is simple, stop trying to do something.
Manifestation is the way forward - dont work your ass off for it, intend it towards you
Do a vision board - 3 days it took me and blew my mind it worked so well
and that's enough from me for today, now I need.... to stop trying to do something
Actually I may knock out a quick jizz-free wank first , and then that
coz that's the kind of guy I am
Here is a piccie of the place I love to be, things seem all ok when I am there....
Gods Bless you all, Goddesses too, here's to a bright fuckin future coz we all deserve it
: )
2010 was the year that...
I got fired
I sold everything I owned, again
I gave up smoking
I meditated every day, most of the day, for 3 months and went wherever the road took me
I completed my circuit of Australia, started on a bicycle in Katherine in 2007 and finished on foot in Cooktown 2010
I sat in front of a tree in Cooktown for 3 days, until I experienced what Buddhists mean by 'the true nature of existence is emptiness'
I returned to Sydney broke but in exactly the right head space
I started a business in I.T.
I had free time and money
I let go of some bad things that had followed me for too long, and defined me for too long
I had to let go of a relationship with a girl I thought could be 'the one'
I started drumming congas, and getting paid for it
I said goodbye to a suicide friend and watched him go into the earth in a black wooden box
I rented two places at once, one in Sydney, one on a cliff-top ocean view setting in Kiama
I finally let go of the dream of being a musician, then within months, I was released on a CD published by a record label in the UK. In 30 years of trying to make it in the music industry, this had never happened before
I made my first vision board
I said goodbye to Bondi
I sold everything I owned, again
I gave up smoking
I meditated every day, most of the day, for 3 months and went wherever the road took me
I completed my circuit of Australia, started on a bicycle in Katherine in 2007 and finished on foot in Cooktown 2010
I sat in front of a tree in Cooktown for 3 days, until I experienced what Buddhists mean by 'the true nature of existence is emptiness'
I returned to Sydney broke but in exactly the right head space
I started a business in I.T.
I had free time and money
I let go of some bad things that had followed me for too long, and defined me for too long
I had to let go of a relationship with a girl I thought could be 'the one'
I started drumming congas, and getting paid for it
I said goodbye to a suicide friend and watched him go into the earth in a black wooden box
I rented two places at once, one in Sydney, one on a cliff-top ocean view setting in Kiama
I finally let go of the dream of being a musician, then within months, I was released on a CD published by a record label in the UK. In 30 years of trying to make it in the music industry, this had never happened before
I made my first vision board
I said goodbye to Bondi
I am back
Wordpress didnt really work out for me. I feel in need of some skull-bloggery again and I may have some time here and there to do a bit, so , dusting good ol blogspot dot off....
And may I suggest following my other blog too, Daily Blog, if only because it has a photo of one of my favourite nipples on it -
http://thesmilingbean.blogspot.com/
And may I suggest following my other blog too, Daily Blog, if only because it has a photo of one of my favourite nipples on it -
http://thesmilingbean.blogspot.com/
Monday, 20 September 2010
Illiteracy in bigger chunks
found a website to publish my scrawls so probably wont be back here so much
havent used wordpress at all either for that matter...no time at the moment
if you come by here and want to read more from me, visit this site and seek out my various publications all for free.....
http://www.wattpad.com/user/mdkberry
:)
havent used wordpress at all either for that matter...no time at the moment
if you come by here and want to read more from me, visit this site and seek out my various publications all for free.....
http://www.wattpad.com/user/mdkberry
:)
Tuesday, 9 February 2010
Wednesday, 27 January 2010
grief and the real Pandora
I went to Confest, never been, the lift seemed to fall into place, the timing, well a relative died two days before and I needed space to grieve.
work wasnt working out.
I needed out of the city. it fell together. it felt right.
I had just finished making a divining tool. started it in 2006 in Wales on a retreat with an African shaman (...yawn) yea I know, we pseudo-hippies just cant stop looking for answers under these god awful banners but, you've got to keep looking everywhere without judgement when you know the hounds are chasing ever on, fueled by those consuming flames, and getting closer each day.
So, I threw the bones...looked and saw....ritual, things needed, to be addressed, for my Nan and my Aunt. Both now dead, but grief is a strange thing. I didnt do it right until I did it right. Let go to the pain, not for a few hours silently alone together in some cold church, but for a few days in the heart of the natural world. I had learnt from Malidome Some, of the Dagara tribe, a process. So I figured I would follow it.....them bones....d'em bones...thrown down and like a compass they seemed to show me the way. How did I know this stuff? I wasnt sure at all, but I did.
I knew I needed water, to heal, I knew my gran had some stuff there needed addressing, I didnt know what, my aunty too, so it seemed. I knew Nature was to be the arena, it was all in there, clear as clear could be. Then me. l'il ol me. I was in there too. my gifts. my magic. a little deeper. I was about to go a little deeper.
that is what d'em bones were saying.
I felt kind of like Bambi that first day trying to walk up the creek barefoot slipping over rocks, until I got to a quiet water-hole that caught my attention. I saw a small cave and knew it was the place to set a shrine to the beings that lived around there, to ask for welcome and acceptance and to ask forgiveness for my intrusion, just simple respect really. Then another spot seemed to flicker in the corner of my eye and made me look. it was by the water and I knew was just right for setting as a shrine to my dead, my relatives, my Nan, my Aunty and in some ways my entire lineage going right back to the beginning. Dont you wonder sometimes what we might find there if you could touch them again, speak to them again, like some Avatar world.
and people go to the movies for it. Why not go into nature, since its there. doh! too obvious maybe. and scary. Easier to buy a ticket and some popcorn then to dribble listlessly, unblinking for three hours, feeling fluffy yet strangely sad when it stops, and like you might be in heaven if you dreamed or wished it hard enough, but instead get in your metal car and drive through concrete streets, to walk into your box-like fabricated house and get into nylon sheets, and cry yourself to sleep because how can it possibly really exist? Yet for a moment the child in you was brave enough to want it more than anything in this life, or the next?
so I do my stuff, set the shrines up. speak out loud, feel stupid, like a city slicker in the wild, just totally out of place, stumbling loudly, crunching sticks and generally making a noisy nuisance of myself in the garden of the gods. but I dont really care for my own stupidity and embarrasment because today I am fuelled by death, my wrath at its theft, the sense of loss, the sense of needing to do something to help this pain , this gnawing in my guts , to make it move along, to know it, to go into it. to deal with it. and fucking well deal with it the right way. so I feel stupid? so what. listen, or kill me. I dont really mind which.
I speak my thoughts out loud, let that place know my intention for being there, for setting up the shrine, for wanting to find healing, not just for me, but for my family, my Nan and my Aunty , the things they never got to do , the things they never got to fix, the things that hurt them, broke them, suffered them, the things they loved, the things they did and didnt dare do, the places and people in this beautiful world that they never got to say goodbye to, or say sorry to, or say thankyou for, or to forgive, or to love, or even maybe to hate.. I am here, right now to address all this, for them. for me. for them. for the living, for the dead. maybe even for you.
then ...once it is said, out there, put out there, said, done...I stop.
look around, sit down
and more importantly...
shut the fuck up.
silence.
silence.
the minutes pass....
my mind calms....the cogs of the machine slowly calm ...a little.
I was considering ways to dig it out with a kitchen knife once, I am glad I didnt. Now, I just sit still until it calms to a lull, a dull thud that seems so loud when you enter the utter silence of nature. then something else starts to grow, a sound. I think at first it is inside, then I realise it is crickets.
it grows.
louder
until it is so loud it almost hurts my ears.
little legs, hundreds of little legs scratching making that amazing sound that actually hits me like soft bullets. I can feel them making out my shape with their sound, assessing me, reading me.
undoing me.
what is this?
I sit in it.
bathed in the sound.
and something else occurs to me.
that sound just shut the machine whir in my head off completely.
I sink into it. happy because despite the fire ant that just chomped into my foot and the mosquitos that are right now drilling my back for blood, and the ...JESUS H CHRIST !... those are leeches I can see wiggling between my toes....yuk....despite all this taxation by nature on my body, those god damn crickets are cleansing me of something far more intrusive, demanding, deadly and quite possibly evil.
I sink into natures' bossom. home again, she devours me. quite literally. it hurts, physically, and it hurts like fuck emotionally, but spiritually I know just where I am at, and with that I enter what some might now call Pandora, and the roller coaster ride of turmoil we have come to call grieving begins.
work wasnt working out.
I needed out of the city. it fell together. it felt right.
I had just finished making a divining tool. started it in 2006 in Wales on a retreat with an African shaman (...yawn) yea I know, we pseudo-hippies just cant stop looking for answers under these god awful banners but, you've got to keep looking everywhere without judgement when you know the hounds are chasing ever on, fueled by those consuming flames, and getting closer each day.
So, I threw the bones...looked and saw....ritual, things needed, to be addressed, for my Nan and my Aunt. Both now dead, but grief is a strange thing. I didnt do it right until I did it right. Let go to the pain, not for a few hours silently alone together in some cold church, but for a few days in the heart of the natural world. I had learnt from Malidome Some, of the Dagara tribe, a process. So I figured I would follow it.....them bones....d'em bones...thrown down and like a compass they seemed to show me the way. How did I know this stuff? I wasnt sure at all, but I did.
I knew I needed water, to heal, I knew my gran had some stuff there needed addressing, I didnt know what, my aunty too, so it seemed. I knew Nature was to be the arena, it was all in there, clear as clear could be. Then me. l'il ol me. I was in there too. my gifts. my magic. a little deeper. I was about to go a little deeper.
that is what d'em bones were saying.
I felt kind of like Bambi that first day trying to walk up the creek barefoot slipping over rocks, until I got to a quiet water-hole that caught my attention. I saw a small cave and knew it was the place to set a shrine to the beings that lived around there, to ask for welcome and acceptance and to ask forgiveness for my intrusion, just simple respect really. Then another spot seemed to flicker in the corner of my eye and made me look. it was by the water and I knew was just right for setting as a shrine to my dead, my relatives, my Nan, my Aunty and in some ways my entire lineage going right back to the beginning. Dont you wonder sometimes what we might find there if you could touch them again, speak to them again, like some Avatar world.
and people go to the movies for it. Why not go into nature, since its there. doh! too obvious maybe. and scary. Easier to buy a ticket and some popcorn then to dribble listlessly, unblinking for three hours, feeling fluffy yet strangely sad when it stops, and like you might be in heaven if you dreamed or wished it hard enough, but instead get in your metal car and drive through concrete streets, to walk into your box-like fabricated house and get into nylon sheets, and cry yourself to sleep because how can it possibly really exist? Yet for a moment the child in you was brave enough to want it more than anything in this life, or the next?
so I do my stuff, set the shrines up. speak out loud, feel stupid, like a city slicker in the wild, just totally out of place, stumbling loudly, crunching sticks and generally making a noisy nuisance of myself in the garden of the gods. but I dont really care for my own stupidity and embarrasment because today I am fuelled by death, my wrath at its theft, the sense of loss, the sense of needing to do something to help this pain , this gnawing in my guts , to make it move along, to know it, to go into it. to deal with it. and fucking well deal with it the right way. so I feel stupid? so what. listen, or kill me. I dont really mind which.
I speak my thoughts out loud, let that place know my intention for being there, for setting up the shrine, for wanting to find healing, not just for me, but for my family, my Nan and my Aunty , the things they never got to do , the things they never got to fix, the things that hurt them, broke them, suffered them, the things they loved, the things they did and didnt dare do, the places and people in this beautiful world that they never got to say goodbye to, or say sorry to, or say thankyou for, or to forgive, or to love, or even maybe to hate.. I am here, right now to address all this, for them. for me. for them. for the living, for the dead. maybe even for you.
then ...once it is said, out there, put out there, said, done...I stop.
look around, sit down
and more importantly...
shut the fuck up.
silence.
silence.
the minutes pass....
my mind calms....the cogs of the machine slowly calm ...a little.
I was considering ways to dig it out with a kitchen knife once, I am glad I didnt. Now, I just sit still until it calms to a lull, a dull thud that seems so loud when you enter the utter silence of nature. then something else starts to grow, a sound. I think at first it is inside, then I realise it is crickets.
it grows.
louder
until it is so loud it almost hurts my ears.
little legs, hundreds of little legs scratching making that amazing sound that actually hits me like soft bullets. I can feel them making out my shape with their sound, assessing me, reading me.
undoing me.
what is this?
I sit in it.
bathed in the sound.
and something else occurs to me.
that sound just shut the machine whir in my head off completely.
I sink into it. happy because despite the fire ant that just chomped into my foot and the mosquitos that are right now drilling my back for blood, and the ...JESUS H CHRIST !... those are leeches I can see wiggling between my toes....yuk....despite all this taxation by nature on my body, those god damn crickets are cleansing me of something far more intrusive, demanding, deadly and quite possibly evil.
I sink into natures' bossom. home again, she devours me. quite literally. it hurts, physically, and it hurts like fuck emotionally, but spiritually I know just where I am at, and with that I enter what some might now call Pandora, and the roller coaster ride of turmoil we have come to call grieving begins.
Monday, 28 December 2009
I don’t know what becomes of us crazies in the end.
I dreamed last night of an old demi-god who frolicked with a lover and died when he should have been with his true woman. He was born again, but into regret of his mistake. That rebirth was me. Then I was someplace else and I saw the ‘one’ for me. She was stood by a wall. I knew her but couldn’t place her name, and then I woke
to another Friday.
To force myself up out of bed, to work, then to drink, then to a Casino, to lose, to drink some more and then go home.
What becomes of us?
I sit and watch the fan blowing the hot air around.
Thinking about it.
Dark clouds loom and drop rain on the summer. I am here. Writing.
About a life I lived. Maybe more than once. I just don’t know.
I have seen so very much of the truths that are the same for all of us, yet I know so very little.
What exactly we do seems to matter very little. Who we are, or what we try to be; Winners, Losers, Richmen or poor, Hunters, Achievers, Seekers or bums sat watching the slow failure of the human race. What we are, matters very little.
What matters more is that whatever it is we do we strive to remain awake, aware, watching, observing ourselves, become conscious, become present in the moment. All these things seem to me to be more important than what we are actually doing. And yet in the end, they really are not that important at all.
Then I got to thinking; what becomes of us crazies if there is no end?
I dreamed last night of an old demi-god who frolicked with a lover and died when he should have been with his true woman. He was born again, but into regret of his mistake. That rebirth was me. Then I was someplace else and I saw the ‘one’ for me. She was stood by a wall. I knew her but couldn’t place her name, and then I woke
to another Friday.
To force myself up out of bed, to work, then to drink, then to a Casino, to lose, to drink some more and then go home.
What becomes of us?
I sit and watch the fan blowing the hot air around.
Thinking about it.
Dark clouds loom and drop rain on the summer. I am here. Writing.
About a life I lived. Maybe more than once. I just don’t know.
I have seen so very much of the truths that are the same for all of us, yet I know so very little.
What exactly we do seems to matter very little. Who we are, or what we try to be; Winners, Losers, Richmen or poor, Hunters, Achievers, Seekers or bums sat watching the slow failure of the human race. What we are, matters very little.
What matters more is that whatever it is we do we strive to remain awake, aware, watching, observing ourselves, become conscious, become present in the moment. All these things seem to me to be more important than what we are actually doing. And yet in the end, they really are not that important at all.
Then I got to thinking; what becomes of us crazies if there is no end?
How To Survive In Paradise. Part 1.
‘They liked your song called ‘African Son Rise’ but they laughed when I played them ‘Been Down’’
‘What dya mean they laughed at it?’ I said.
I felt a momentary twinge. Felt weak, stupid, naive. Music did that to me. I righted myself quickly, but a mild tang remained. My mum was staying with a family in Africa, currently Rwanda, where she was helping victims of atrocities. I was living on a beach in Sydney. I guess just trying to help myself. There was a relative life-equation involved here; could a middle-class white boy from England have had it tough? It was exactly this kind of thing that gave me the urge to try to justify myself. This…This…guilt maybe. It is what had finally brought England to its knees. Lost its white identity. The guts gnawed at from the inside out. No, I hadn’t been gang raped, and I hadn’t had to take a machete to my sister. Hell, at least one of those was true.
What was a guy to do to get some respect, I wondered.
Though it was true I was in green pastures today, at least for now. It didn’t stop the fear though, nor the madness. Funny thing that. The stealth killers of Westerners. The mind had a way of torturing the soul when not occupied with matters of survival. 2000 years of civilsation proved it; if man was ever to really find a state of peace, all hell would break loose. He couldn’t handle it. He’d get bored and end up going insane or murdering his neighbour. Vice , pressure, hardships, poverty, suffering. These things we struggled daily to escape seemed, at the same time, to be the very things we needed in order to be qualified to live. If things got too good, too easy, there was some universal law that would address the balance by throwing in a curveball. Look at Aids, Cancer, obesity, peacetime murder and suicide rates, depression, drug addiction, even in some inverted way terrorism too. I read someplace that more people died in England in 2006 from suicide than from the Iraq war. How many miserable looking people lived in the West, how many people disatisfied with their life? You just had to look at the mounting massive public debt as people tried to satisfy the hole left by curing the daily struggle to survive. 100,000 units for a mortage? You were basically paying 100,000 units just for a feeling. Surely that defined insanity. And the closer you got to curing all ills, the meaner those stealth killers became. People just started to kill themselves. Maybe it had to be that way. All things must find balance. The universe demanded it. But, god damn it, ‘Been down’ was a good song.
‘Well, glad someone enjoyed it’ I relented, finding my sense of balance again. At least someone had listened to it, I figured.
There was a pause during which I realized how much I loved my mum. I could never live up to her amazing selflessness and ability to give. It just wasn’t in me the same.
‘When are you heading back, mum?’
‘I’ll be back around Xmas time, back home to L.A. I have Nairobi first then South Africa for a while to visit friends.’
‘Look after yourself out there, wont you’
I knew she would be ok. They still had respect for the Matriarch in Africa. As mean and cruel a continent as it was, I always felt she had a better chance surviving there than on the streets of L.A.
‘What dya mean they laughed at it?’ I said.
I felt a momentary twinge. Felt weak, stupid, naive. Music did that to me. I righted myself quickly, but a mild tang remained. My mum was staying with a family in Africa, currently Rwanda, where she was helping victims of atrocities. I was living on a beach in Sydney. I guess just trying to help myself. There was a relative life-equation involved here; could a middle-class white boy from England have had it tough? It was exactly this kind of thing that gave me the urge to try to justify myself. This…This…guilt maybe. It is what had finally brought England to its knees. Lost its white identity. The guts gnawed at from the inside out. No, I hadn’t been gang raped, and I hadn’t had to take a machete to my sister. Hell, at least one of those was true.
What was a guy to do to get some respect, I wondered.
Though it was true I was in green pastures today, at least for now. It didn’t stop the fear though, nor the madness. Funny thing that. The stealth killers of Westerners. The mind had a way of torturing the soul when not occupied with matters of survival. 2000 years of civilsation proved it; if man was ever to really find a state of peace, all hell would break loose. He couldn’t handle it. He’d get bored and end up going insane or murdering his neighbour. Vice , pressure, hardships, poverty, suffering. These things we struggled daily to escape seemed, at the same time, to be the very things we needed in order to be qualified to live. If things got too good, too easy, there was some universal law that would address the balance by throwing in a curveball. Look at Aids, Cancer, obesity, peacetime murder and suicide rates, depression, drug addiction, even in some inverted way terrorism too. I read someplace that more people died in England in 2006 from suicide than from the Iraq war. How many miserable looking people lived in the West, how many people disatisfied with their life? You just had to look at the mounting massive public debt as people tried to satisfy the hole left by curing the daily struggle to survive. 100,000 units for a mortage? You were basically paying 100,000 units just for a feeling. Surely that defined insanity. And the closer you got to curing all ills, the meaner those stealth killers became. People just started to kill themselves. Maybe it had to be that way. All things must find balance. The universe demanded it. But, god damn it, ‘Been down’ was a good song.
‘Well, glad someone enjoyed it’ I relented, finding my sense of balance again. At least someone had listened to it, I figured.
There was a pause during which I realized how much I loved my mum. I could never live up to her amazing selflessness and ability to give. It just wasn’t in me the same.
‘When are you heading back, mum?’
‘I’ll be back around Xmas time, back home to L.A. I have Nairobi first then South Africa for a while to visit friends.’
‘Look after yourself out there, wont you’
I knew she would be ok. They still had respect for the Matriarch in Africa. As mean and cruel a continent as it was, I always felt she had a better chance surviving there than on the streets of L.A.
Tuesday, 15 December 2009
Living in a Paradise Postcode
Of all the people qualified to make it to paradise, I was actually quite high in the rankings. I had balls. I knew this. It wasn’t out of choice, just that through life I had gotten forced into corners from which I had learned to force my way out. I wasn’t actually very good at it, but once convinced with purpose I could find my way into most things. This had been my ace card during the years I lived in London. Having said that, one of my blind spots was knowing when I should be getting out. I tended to hang about too long in bad business. The problem was I didn’t imagine a better life existed anywhere, so dealing with shit day after day just seemed the norm. If I left this job it would be to another equally meaningless one. If I left this shitty town it will be to an equally shitty one. I knew the world was a lie and I knew wherever I went, whatever I did, I would still be the same person I always had been. So I saw nothing better anywhere. I didn’t really know what better meant. That was how my mind worked. But every now and then something stirred in me, something deep and when it did, in the blink of an eye I would be gone. I moved to London this way from Oxford and I moved to Sydney from London the same. I rarely looked back. Just dropped everything, everyone, and left town. Gone. Never to be heard from again.
Maybe one day I would become like some kind of shadowy legend figure. I liked the idea of it. The mystery. Let people imagine that in the end I finally got away. That would do. And so it was I now mosied the weekends away in what was one Paradise on Earth; Bondi Beach. Where I lived the dream. So they thought. Those I had left behind. I didn’t want to shake their illusion. It was like the film Cool Hand Luke only not quite so cool. People needed dreams, needed heroes and people they could look up to. We all did, even the ones that said they didn’t. Creatures of influence the lot of us. I had seen a lot of hate in mens eyes in my time for it, and a lot of deluded adoration from the ladies too. What the men didn’t know was that I was just as bitter and pained as them, if not more so, and what the women didn’t know, was that I was a useless self-centred shit underneath any stardust veneer, just like all the others. Though a couple had found that out the hard way. I didn’t like preying on peoples foolishness though, it wasn’t my style which was a pity really because I could have done pretty well for myself if I had the nature of a confidence trickster, but I didn’t. I had the opposite; A quite annoying desire to be habitually honest. Though if you scratched deep enough, that too was a lie.
So I finally made it out of the dirty, grey city of London where I had discovered dreams don’t last and the roads weren’t paved with gold but were rather paved in pure, cheap white snow-like disco dust. It wasn’t a bad time. 18 years of it. I had some good times and some tough ones but in the end I had just run out of the energy needed to make the most of a city like London. Truth was, she had been good to me. I didn’t think so in the last couple of years but looking back I know she was my town. My prime was lived on her streets. We had a love affair I wont ever forget. And then, just like I had always predicted, one day I got in one of those planes that I used to watch taking off from Heathrow while sat up on the Hill in Harrow often time feeling a bit whistful, and off I went and never looked back. That was it. 18 years getting to know a whole life, a whole bunch of friends, a city like the back of my hand. 18 years. Done. Walked off. Left it behind. It was like dying. In fact I thought I was going to. I went off into some lonely distant outback and waited for it to come. But to my surprise it didn’t come. So two months later I headed back to Sydney, got a job. Got a place by the ocean right on the front in Bondi Beach, and sat about waiting for life to start over again.
I’d made it to paradise. It was true. I would step out my door each morning heading for a job that wasn’t so bad as some I’d had. I would stand on the top step rising up and down on my toes letting off some pops of morning wind. A little excited because I was looking right at the turquoise blue ocean and white sands of one of the most famous beaches in the world. I would smile like a Cheshire cat and say to myself,
‘Marky boy, you fucking genius! You made it, my son, you absolutely fucking made it!’
And off I would trott to earn the money to stay in paradise, which is pretty much what my money went on. To live in paradise you need two things; Money for expensive rent, and something to do. I was just about getting away with the former and did fine with the latter for the first year and a half. It took about that long before I started to really wonder where I was at. The trouble with staring at paradise every day was that pretty soon you took it for granted. It was hard not to, maybe even impossible. People would hate you for such a comment, but it was true. Paradise only remained Paradise if it could be able to remain a dream. One of the cruel ,twisted truths in the movie we call life, is that the deepest and truest love you will ever feel is the unrequited kind. The dream must remain out of reach to remain a dream. It is the nature of things. We can never really have what it is we seek. That is the law. And once you get that law, once you figure it out. And many do. You start to wonder why you are seeking it in the first place. And there is no real answer to that. You realize that Paradise is an illusion just like everything else. Some tougher days it’s enough to make a man walk off into that beautiful blue ocean until breathing stops, and some have. Again, not really my style. But even so it was god damn beautiful and a place to come home of an evening and imagine I was being healed in some way. I think maybe I even was.
So I had finally done something a little better for myself but , like I said, there were still issues. It was endlessly this. I wasn’t even sure it could be figured out. You fixed one thing only to discover the sense of crisis in life had shifted to another. Now it was my loneliness and my age I was struggling with. Paradise was beautiful but I didn’t feel quite the same on the inside. I tried to. In fact some days I felt positively sinful for not feeling better about the fact that I was living the dream. I did a good job of it but there were farts in the ointment or whatever it is they say. I got pretty healthy for a time and happy too but it would be a lie to say it was perfect. It sure looked perfect and had a perfectness about it, pretty good post code too. 2026. But once you have made your environment idyllic it becomes glaringly obvious that the fault does not lie anywhere around you, but within you. Yes, my friends, you , YOU are to blame for everything you have a problem with. The ego, the I, the curse of mankind. That was what I came to see of myself. But I could not allow myself to fall there. I just couldn’t.
So I sat back, pulled on my board shorts and slipped a pair of soft-soled thongs onto my feet and stepped out into the balmy hot sunny day of yet another Sunday afternoon and strolled the beach looking at tanned blondes, rolling waves and swaythes of the finest golden summer sand this side of Christendom. I had made it. Here I was. Here, I finally was. In a paradise postcode. Sure I was still alone, sometimes lost, sometimes pretty confused and uncertain. Most of all about when the dream was going to end, and when would I be priced out of paradise. But while it was here. While I was right in the middle of it. Staring right down the barrel of the blue. For fucks sake, this was it. This was it! I’d god damn make sure I was going to appreciate every minute of it. Sip the gold and blue nectar of every last drop. Somehow Satan had made it back into Heaven and so far it seemed, no one had noticed.
Qualified.
Maybe one day I would become like some kind of shadowy legend figure. I liked the idea of it. The mystery. Let people imagine that in the end I finally got away. That would do. And so it was I now mosied the weekends away in what was one Paradise on Earth; Bondi Beach. Where I lived the dream. So they thought. Those I had left behind. I didn’t want to shake their illusion. It was like the film Cool Hand Luke only not quite so cool. People needed dreams, needed heroes and people they could look up to. We all did, even the ones that said they didn’t. Creatures of influence the lot of us. I had seen a lot of hate in mens eyes in my time for it, and a lot of deluded adoration from the ladies too. What the men didn’t know was that I was just as bitter and pained as them, if not more so, and what the women didn’t know, was that I was a useless self-centred shit underneath any stardust veneer, just like all the others. Though a couple had found that out the hard way. I didn’t like preying on peoples foolishness though, it wasn’t my style which was a pity really because I could have done pretty well for myself if I had the nature of a confidence trickster, but I didn’t. I had the opposite; A quite annoying desire to be habitually honest. Though if you scratched deep enough, that too was a lie.
So I finally made it out of the dirty, grey city of London where I had discovered dreams don’t last and the roads weren’t paved with gold but were rather paved in pure, cheap white snow-like disco dust. It wasn’t a bad time. 18 years of it. I had some good times and some tough ones but in the end I had just run out of the energy needed to make the most of a city like London. Truth was, she had been good to me. I didn’t think so in the last couple of years but looking back I know she was my town. My prime was lived on her streets. We had a love affair I wont ever forget. And then, just like I had always predicted, one day I got in one of those planes that I used to watch taking off from Heathrow while sat up on the Hill in Harrow often time feeling a bit whistful, and off I went and never looked back. That was it. 18 years getting to know a whole life, a whole bunch of friends, a city like the back of my hand. 18 years. Done. Walked off. Left it behind. It was like dying. In fact I thought I was going to. I went off into some lonely distant outback and waited for it to come. But to my surprise it didn’t come. So two months later I headed back to Sydney, got a job. Got a place by the ocean right on the front in Bondi Beach, and sat about waiting for life to start over again.
I’d made it to paradise. It was true. I would step out my door each morning heading for a job that wasn’t so bad as some I’d had. I would stand on the top step rising up and down on my toes letting off some pops of morning wind. A little excited because I was looking right at the turquoise blue ocean and white sands of one of the most famous beaches in the world. I would smile like a Cheshire cat and say to myself,
‘Marky boy, you fucking genius! You made it, my son, you absolutely fucking made it!’
And off I would trott to earn the money to stay in paradise, which is pretty much what my money went on. To live in paradise you need two things; Money for expensive rent, and something to do. I was just about getting away with the former and did fine with the latter for the first year and a half. It took about that long before I started to really wonder where I was at. The trouble with staring at paradise every day was that pretty soon you took it for granted. It was hard not to, maybe even impossible. People would hate you for such a comment, but it was true. Paradise only remained Paradise if it could be able to remain a dream. One of the cruel ,twisted truths in the movie we call life, is that the deepest and truest love you will ever feel is the unrequited kind. The dream must remain out of reach to remain a dream. It is the nature of things. We can never really have what it is we seek. That is the law. And once you get that law, once you figure it out. And many do. You start to wonder why you are seeking it in the first place. And there is no real answer to that. You realize that Paradise is an illusion just like everything else. Some tougher days it’s enough to make a man walk off into that beautiful blue ocean until breathing stops, and some have. Again, not really my style. But even so it was god damn beautiful and a place to come home of an evening and imagine I was being healed in some way. I think maybe I even was.
So I had finally done something a little better for myself but , like I said, there were still issues. It was endlessly this. I wasn’t even sure it could be figured out. You fixed one thing only to discover the sense of crisis in life had shifted to another. Now it was my loneliness and my age I was struggling with. Paradise was beautiful but I didn’t feel quite the same on the inside. I tried to. In fact some days I felt positively sinful for not feeling better about the fact that I was living the dream. I did a good job of it but there were farts in the ointment or whatever it is they say. I got pretty healthy for a time and happy too but it would be a lie to say it was perfect. It sure looked perfect and had a perfectness about it, pretty good post code too. 2026. But once you have made your environment idyllic it becomes glaringly obvious that the fault does not lie anywhere around you, but within you. Yes, my friends, you , YOU are to blame for everything you have a problem with. The ego, the I, the curse of mankind. That was what I came to see of myself. But I could not allow myself to fall there. I just couldn’t.
So I sat back, pulled on my board shorts and slipped a pair of soft-soled thongs onto my feet and stepped out into the balmy hot sunny day of yet another Sunday afternoon and strolled the beach looking at tanned blondes, rolling waves and swaythes of the finest golden summer sand this side of Christendom. I had made it. Here I was. Here, I finally was. In a paradise postcode. Sure I was still alone, sometimes lost, sometimes pretty confused and uncertain. Most of all about when the dream was going to end, and when would I be priced out of paradise. But while it was here. While I was right in the middle of it. Staring right down the barrel of the blue. For fucks sake, this was it. This was it! I’d god damn make sure I was going to appreciate every minute of it. Sip the gold and blue nectar of every last drop. Somehow Satan had made it back into Heaven and so far it seemed, no one had noticed.
Qualified.
Saturday, 12 December 2009
2009 This was the year that….
I went drug free (excepting a slight altercation with some Methadrone and a bottle of vodka. And some reprobates I befriended one night in the Beach Road Hotel who insisted I join them)
I discovered I am prone to social leprocy and Facebook turettes.
I got my first genuine proposal of marriage. And she wasn’t joking.
I got my first genuine stalker. And she wasn’t joking.
I had more lovers in one fortnight than I had in the last 4 years
I accidently dated a hooker, it lasted a month
I completed my first book
I learnt some more about rejection
I felt I might not survive the year, mentally or physically but spiritually ...somehow I always felt ok.
I discovered being challenged is what makes you get up and get through it.
I grew up a little bit.
...but not too much.
I released another solo album that immediately sailed majestically into plummeting obscurity.
I rediscovered the reasons to see life as an amazing experience to be lived
I bought a drum
All in all it was a pretty good year
I discovered I am prone to social leprocy and Facebook turettes.
I got my first genuine proposal of marriage. And she wasn’t joking.
I got my first genuine stalker. And she wasn’t joking.
I had more lovers in one fortnight than I had in the last 4 years
I accidently dated a hooker, it lasted a month
I completed my first book
I learnt some more about rejection
I felt I might not survive the year, mentally or physically but spiritually ...somehow I always felt ok.
I discovered being challenged is what makes you get up and get through it.
I grew up a little bit.
...but not too much.
I released another solo album that immediately sailed majestically into plummeting obscurity.
I rediscovered the reasons to see life as an amazing experience to be lived
I bought a drum
All in all it was a pretty good year
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