WEEKLY WTF
01-22-24 Edition
Cooking Shit~ Fermented Red Onion
Your farts are going to be Ah-mazing
The Tangle
I love this photo, this tangled fucking mess. You can hardly tell that there’s a river on the right and barely discern the trail on the left adorned in green which, if scrutinized, may lead the eye into a mysterious and shaded hollow inspiring both a primordial fear and a childlike excitement. Visions of both lounging Mountain Lion and ethereal Fae folk swirl about in the imagination. Or perhaps within the shade squats a homeless dude taking a shit, who knows. I love this photo because I love this place. I’ve been walking this exact route for 20 years. When my Son was born I’d put him in a front pack and walk him here on the daily. When my Daughter was born I would shift the boy to a backpack and the girl to the front pack and we’d all walk down here like some kind of 3 headed lumpy Quasimodo looking mother fucker.
So many memories and eventful occurrences were born down here. Once while staring at a rock, about 18 years ago, the rock became a kind of catalyst and somehow the awareness of being aware of that small stone caused me to inexplicably realized the all encompassing nature of awareness itself. My first experience of melting into reality as I did not discern myself as separate from the rock or river, hills or trees and later as I walked through Safeway with my wife it endured and I merged even with the bottles of aspirin and boxes of tampons. I was the fuzzy peach and bruised banana, the deli chicken and the pork buns, a singularity of awareness through which waves of nearly meaningless definitions coursed. And no I was not high at the time. Another time I pulled a neighbors Son out of these muddy waters seconds before he drowned. He had disappeared in the murk and in my periphery I saw two finger tips just break the surface with a quiet “blip” sound, one final desperate reach as if trying to grasp the sky before the river swallowed him forever. That opened a floodgate in me that I didn’t even know I had and for years after this rescue all of the drownings and dead bodies and death I had sequestered from my time in the Coast Guard suddenly became very real and I understood that horrific drowning shit might one day happen to my own river rat kids and I forevermore would spend my time on the the beach with friends and their kids just counting heads over and over and over while kids frolicked and friends drank. Ok I drank with them but I never swayed from my manic counting. My kids used to sit in diapers eating burritos in this river, I like to think it fortified their immune systems. I’ve canoed and paddle boarded this river and swam it endlessly. It has risen and run through my house, above my knees at about 10 knots. It’s weird to sometimes lay in bed and think about the fact that the river once flowed in one door and out the other. But mostly it’s this secret route, the lonely and introspective walk that has been the most enduring in my regard.
I wouldn’t normally post a photo like this. It’s hard to make out what’s going on. There are no sunbeams or reflections, no majestic vistas or towering trees. It’s just a tangle, like life is a tangle. This trail itself used to be about 10 feet to the right but every year the Russian River swells and then shrinks back in the springtime thus changing the path every year. At some point this exact spot will be 20 feet under water. The path is always different but the route is always the same, again, kinda like life.
There is a secret entry point near my house known only to the neighborhood that I’m able to walk to from my house, we call it “The Loop”. It goes through a mixed Redwood forest full of Redwood fairy rings that are the result of clear cutting all the Coastal Redwoods in the 1800s. If I climb high it’s dominated by oak, down low is the California Laurel. There are Mountain Lions, Bobcats, a shit ton of deer, raccoons, blue Heron, Raven, Osprey and a loud smelly creature with a hairy face and big feet, that’s me. Here by the rivers edge is a cornucopia of growth of just about anything you can imagine due to yearly flooding. Sonoma County Ca. being wine country that rivals Napa county we have grapevines that sprout near small trees and years of tandem growth result in vines as thick as my forearm trailing up massive bay trees to fruit high up in the canopy visible only to the sky and the birds who no doubt eat the shit out of them.
I love a good photo, or more accurately I should say I love taking a good photo. I don’t actually own a camera but who needs a fucking camera anymore? iPhones do a great job but they never quite convey the scene as I remember it. The fun part for me is the edit, elevating an image up from a smartphone pic to a thing that reflects how I felt in that moment, that’s what I chase. The challenge is to not go too far such that it starts to look fake. But this tangled and convoluted image of swaths of light and shadow and textured flora is the best I can do to squash what, at the time, was an idyllic and appealing scene. At a glance there doesn’t seem to be anything to focus on but if you dive into it, there are layers upon layers that tell the tale of a magical moment. That’s where the magic is after all, it’s in this moment.
Sure, I love a fucking waterfall and mountain top. I’m a fan of giant trees and alpine lakes and all the things we drive really fucking far to see and pay the fee to stand shoulder to shoulder with other people who have driven really fucking far and have paid the fee, hungry cameras in hand snapping and biting at the beauty they behold. But give me a fucking tangle down by the river. One that I have to chop my way through. One that, if I’m not careful, will landslide me into the cold muddy ribbon that winds down the valley, my lazy meandering companion who would greedily gobble me up should my attention to the slick and treacherous path wane. Give me a forest that’s been chopped down and forgotten so that I can wander it alone and see how tenacious nature and life responds to man’s inflicted trauma. All the strange and wonderful, and sometimes terrible, cornucopia of plants that grow along a river that floods every year carrying plants from yards and gardens and vineyards and orchards growing in the fertile Redwood loam. If their timing was good they got a foothold in the ground that was once shaded by giants and became prolific before the Redwood stumps sent up their babies which are now adolescent rings of giants in their own right and who have reclaimed the canopy. I have seen many a strange item high in the trees after the flood water recedes. Tangled leafless Halloween trees covered in mud fruiting underwear and old tires, tarps and propane tanks. Let me climb up out of the flood zone towards clean air which is visibly marked by the ever larger pollution hating tufts of old man’s beard hanging aloft in the oaks. Give me a place that’s been broken and is healing because I relate far more to it than I do gift shops and crowds and waiting in fucking lines.
I didn’t know what this little writing was going to be about. Maybe I’m still not sure, perhaps I’m just as curious as you are as to what the ending will be. I don’t really write with an idea of what I’m writing. Ideally I also don’t really hike with an idea of what I’m up to or where I’m going whilst hiking. I don’t specifically go mushroom hunting because if I do that all I see are mushrooms. The term “forest bathing” keeps my eyes open and mind clean. I don’t aim for a destination because it pulls me out of the present moment. I don’t do it for exercise that happens all on its own. I suppose I write like I walk. One step and one word at a time. It’s ridiculous that I write such long soliloquies here. Social media is the kingdom of short attention spans. A place people go to escape because they don’t have to think the same thought for more than a few moments. Anything unpleasant is instantly banished by a thumb jerk. I suppose it’s a place people go to in order to not have to think at all. But not you dear reader, you who despite the undefined drab photo and sooo many fucking words, and perpetual tantalizing pull of “yeah but what’s next?” are still here. But as ridiculous as it is to write here, I don’t actually give a shit. One step and one word at a time. I suppose I do what I do for myself but if I’m honest I think I do it for us, both you and me. A collaboration of thought, a view from behind my Rusty Eyeballs.
I often find myself observing some random person, always an ordinary one, perhaps a downtrodden one and I wonder what it’s like behind their eyes. What is it like to be consciousness sequestered behind another’s face. Existence driving a different meat tractor, plowing the field of their own mysterious life. The raw electricity of life shunted through a different wrinkly pink meat computer than my own. An ineffable cosmic Wi-Fi signal of cognizance traveling though another network of neural pathways built of an entirely foreign series of experiences I’ll never know. And I’ll never know what it’s like to be other than what I am but I feel an inexplicable fondness for that other experience. I feel a yearning for that intimate experience of just existing within that random person. Then I remember that I already have that access but it’s been muddied by my own damn thoughts and obscured by the tangle of familiarity, just like the tangle in this photo obscures the layers of landscape. And just like when looking deeply and carefully into this tangled photo a scene comes to life. We too can walk along the muddy flow of thought rather than swim in its brown brine and if we look past the tangle of familiarity that we’ve labeled as a sort of an unimportant mundanity there we will find something extraordinary. An intimate experience of existence. Existence just existing. Awareness suddenly aware of itself. Give me a tangle because within it I find myself.
Well, well look at that. Just like my beloved loop trail, we’ve come full circle here too. One word and one step at a time. Funny how that works when you don’t have a destination in mind, you end up right where you’re at. Right now and right here, just me and you. Toodaloo.
Cosmic Mycelium
Thoughts and ideas, they’re kinda like shrooms, are they not? A mushroom is just a fruiting body that pops up out of a vast network of mycelium which is like an underground spiderweb, like some peoples hair in the morning, like varicose veins of the forest, you get the idea. Have you ever watched a thought pop up out of the vast network of neural pathways that similarly branch out within your wrinkly pink meat computer? It’s entirely possible that you have not, much in the same way that it’s possible that hitherto you’ve always looked at a mushroom as though it’s a thing independently growing. A singular, possibly dick shaped, organism pushing itself up out of a blanket of loam or a shaft of wood as if it’s trying to fuck the sky of its own volition. A musty, horny little forest pene doing what penes love doing: thrusting and impregnating. For the forest pene it’s spreading spores. For the human one eyed meat mushroom, it’s spewing its bleachy little tadpoles. Well shit, that got weird fast.
The point is that we are accustomed to identifying things as independent from other things. In fact the very purpose of the human ego is to prove to itself that it exists separate from all that shit “out there” by creating unique ratios of attraction, aversion and neutralities. Everything gets labeled: I like it, I hate it or I don’t give a shit about it. For example I might say “I am a motherfucker who likes nature, I hate when a brownie has walnuts in it and I don’t give a shit about politics.” And so my ego creates an apparent relationship to sensory objects. By saying that I am attracted to nature, I have just made nature a thing by defining a relationship to it and so “I” get to be a thing that’s “other than” nature because there is now a relationship between “me”
and “nature” and thus I feel like I exist independently. I hate walnuts in brownies, but actually- why do people ruin perfectly good fucking brownies like that anyway? But same difference, by creating an aversive relationship to the unfortunate walnut/brownie situation I establish a “me” and an “it”. Same with a neutral relationship, it’s still a relationship. I make the shitshow that is called politics a thing by defining a relationship between “me” and “ it” called “Meh” and by establishing separation through the relationship called “meh” I must certainly exist by virtue of the vectoring of the 3 reference points of attraction, aversion and meh. We have to establish our independent existence within a unified field through this method. Like a meat ship navigating by pinging buoys and landmarks with its nautical sense organs whilst underway upon a great lucid sea in order to get a fix on its own apparent position. With all this seemingly obvious and compelling relative data the ego urges our inherent and raw awareness to identify with it, so that the universe can pretend it’s a thing by forgetting itself in the form of you for a damn minute.
Perhaps we could make a less naughty comparison than forest dicks and liken mycelium to a certain trait that the universe seems to have. Mycelium is unseen, it hides and invisibly permeates the forest floor, or wood depending on the species. But we can see its fruit, we see what it sends up out of its vast fluffy bosom in order to spread spores and perpetuate itself. I mean mushrooms often do resemble dicks but… hey now, stay on track people! We can’t see the mycelium but we see its fruit. There’s something that also invisibly permeates reality that we cannot see but we can clearly observe its fruits.
Try this on for size: you are a sentient mushroom made of meat which has sprung forth from an unseen vast and incomprehensible network of…. well, there’s is no appropriate word that I am inclined to use for it. A mushroom comes from mycelium but the very thing it fruits from- it cannot comprehend. If a shroom could actually become sentient and talk and learn this fact it could say (in a high pitched warbly voice) “err yeah I come from mycelium, duh”. But never having seen its own source the word itself doesn’t mean shit. The word just represents whatever ideas it’s formed or has been told about what mycelium is. The mushroom cannot know mycelium but it can know of mycelium’s existence by its fruit because hellooo, IT is the fucking fruit. To know the mycelium the shroom must come to know itself, its very existence is the proof that this mysterious and elusive mycelium exists.
The first law of thermodynamics tells us that the amount of energy in the universe is constant and can neither be destroyed nor created. Other than Hydrogen all of the atoms in our meat tractors were created billions of years ago within the forges of dying stars. The carbon in our wrinkly pink meat computers, the iron in our vein ketchup, the calcium in our boners, sorry I meant bones, are all stardust that congealed into mushrooms and meat and me and you and all the fucking things. It’s all been here all along, energy dancing with itself ever changing its forms. But what is the congealing factor? What compels a complex organic molecule to bind or a cell to divide? In order for hydrogen and oxygen to get together to form water there must be some factor in which one is drawn to the other, be it a chemical or electrical signal it’s a form of communication in my mind. WTF is it that wakes matter up to proclaim “I am” and “it is”? What is the cosmic mycelium that I’m alluding to? My preference is to just say “figure it the fuck out” and move on. Not because I’m trying to be an asshole about it but because it is a thing that one must uncover within ones own experiential awareness. But let’s try anyway because fuck it.
We might ponder “what is the most amazing thing about existence?” I mean sure, mycelium, which just looks like a white fuzz, somehow produces a complex mushroom. It’s kind of astounding if you really contemplate it, like “How do it know!?”. Wait, I just had an epiphany, mushrooms are mycelium’s junk, woah. Ok, moving on… the clumping of stardust into planets is a pretty cool phenomenon. The spherical contained nuclear hell of a star is bad ass. The fact that our salty mudball fruited people is bizarre if we can pull our head out of the ass of familiarity for a minute and achieve a different perspective. If you like math then you could go balls deep into equations and discover the statistical unlikelihood of a universe of matter forming at all. I think a lot about the fact that stardust congealed in the primordial ooze and rose up as meat, WTF right!? It’s crazy town! But the most astounding thing of all is that the meat fucking WOKE UP. That’s you I’m talking about by the way. We are unlikely miraculous fucking things that are oblivious because instead we worry about what’s next and lament about what was and what’s for dinner and that fucker cut me off today and oh that motherfucker said that thing about me but did you hear what a douche so and so is and oooh I’m gonna buy that thing and oh I hope for such and such to happen because surely the next moment is superior to this moment……..
Science knows a lot of shit but one thing it doesn’t know is what consciousness is. It calls consciousness “the hard problem” (insert dick joke) of science. We’re like the shroom that cannot actually see its own mycelial origins of which it sprang from and is tethered to. If you see a shroom then henceforth you now have the opportunity to alter your perception and consideration in order to see direct evidence of the unseen mycelial network just under the surface simply by observing the fruit of that hidden soil superhighway.
Earlier I asked if you’ve ever watched a thought “pop up” (insert another dick joke) and suggested that perhaps you have not. I hope you have though because to observe a thought rising and then dissipating back from whence it came means that there has to be something other than it in order to observe it. I’m not talking about generating thoughts to examine other thoughts then those examinations become scrutinized by more thoughts, that’s a fucked up rabbit hole you probably are best off avoiding. I’m trying to point at something. I don’t want to name it because a word cannot accurately describe or contain it. I don’t want to see you talking out of your ass to yourself like the mushroom who just knows a experientially meaningless word that sounds like my-cel-ium but doesn’t take the time to know itself. There is an ineffable wakeful mycelium that is just under the surface of reality and it fruits matter and meat in order to perpetuate every possible iteration of its potentiality. How do we know that? We know that because that’s what’s fucking happening, look around! The same ethereal mycelium is just under the surface of your mental events and your thoughts are its fruit. To call it anything at all is an obscuring folly. But we sure do like to try to name shit; God, consciousness, Tao, the Great Spirit, the quantum field, Amaterasu-Ōmikami, Hecate, Shiva, Yahweh, Bramah, Jehovah, Shangdi, Odin, Anu, Zuess, Baiame, Perun, Quetzalcoatl, etfuckingcetera it’s a never ending catalog of pegs upon which to hang our hats of belief. You can fall into a web of words if it pleases you to do so but perhaps it may occur to you to simply fall into yourself instead and experientially realize what the all these labels cannot contain and what the fuck I’m attempting and constantly failing to point directly at.
If you want to employ thought then it’s pretty obvious through simple observation that reality fruits objects. But if we dig a little deeper we will discern that reality fruits consciousness within said objects with which to be able to view said objects by distinguishing itself as an object other than all those other fucking objects that have also fruited. I’m an apple, it’s an orange, oh, nice pear Ma’am. What if the first law of thermodynamics doesn’t just apply to energy not being created or destroyed? What if it applies to this un-namable quality of existence that happens to fruit consciousness in all sorts of strange and interesting forms? If consciousness cannot be created or destroyed then it too would be ever existent, changing its fruity forms, dancing with itself in the underwear of matter. Consider that there is something that is… I don’t want to say “awake” because awake implies something was first asleep so let’s say there’s a sort of hidden mycelium of “wakefullness” that permeates existence. I don’t want to call it awareness because awareness always implies an “of”. I am aware “of” the world and aware “of” myself. Let’s call it awareness without the “of”. Do you see the pickle I am in trying to explain this shit with the limitations not only of language but of thought itself? Thought cannot think of itself, only the thinker who transcends thought can think of thought and it’s just not possible to define that which transcends thought with mere thoughts. But fortunately, we can know it. Well, not exactly because the known must be known by a knower but strangely there is a state in which the knower can know itself independent of the known. Holy shit this is getting deep. Fuck it, forget all that it’s a tangled web you don’t want to get lost in. I’ll try a more reasonable approach.
Imagine if you will a movie theatre. There is a blank screen (existence) which allows images (phenomena) to dance upon its surface. Up in the back of the theatre is a metal box (your skull) within which is a constantly moving strip of film (thoughts) behind which is the thing that makes it all work, a light bulb (the true nature of mind) the lights only job is to shine (be conscious) and it doesn’t need the film (thoughts) or the movie playing on the screen (the persistent illusion of reality) to do its thing. It also doesn’t give a shit what film (thought narrative) you flash in front of it. Load a shitty old movie (depressing thoughts of the past) or a nerve wracking psychological thriller (anxious thoughts about the future) or perhaps something feel good or heartwarming (thoughts of positivity, compassion, gratitude). You can play whatever the fuck you want. It’s your choice, you load the movie (thought narrative) which will project (your life) onto the equally ambiguous screen of existence. Is that any better?
I honestly don’t know if it’s a good idea to paint all these elaborate pictures in this way. None of it is true or accurate. I’m just pointing at something and there is a danger of becoming fixated upon the finger itself that points. Try not to let me finger fuck your mind, M’Kay? I find that it can be incrementally un-conducive for myself as well to be constantly attempting to contain an entire ocean in a cup fashioned out of thoughts and analogies. I recently took a little fucking breaky-poo from trying to turn my experiential awareness into a narrative for the sake of this social media thing I’m doing all the time. I’m finding that doing it so often starts to obscure it. But saying “fuck it” for a minute and letting it go in order to remember to simply exist in the moment, aware of awareness, is fucking amazing. To experience the most extraordinary experiential aspect of existence simply requires allowing oneself to let go and relax into what one already is and become absorbed in the moment. You see, the secret is not a secret- the extraordinary hides amongst the mundane just as awareness hides behind thought. Are you looking at the screen, the film or have you noticed that light bulb yet? Anything you’ve ever heard from me or anyone else- of anything ever written or spoken or chanted or sung is ultimately all bullshit that we are compelled to wade through. But, if we eventually let it all go, and I do mean all of it, then what’s left is one single true thing and that one true thing only exists within the experiential awareness in your middle and is non transferable in word or deed, miming or interpretive fucking dance. It’s what’s left when everything else is dissolved. Once it’s exposed all you can do is laugh because you finally see that it has always fucking been there! While we’re so busy getting emotionally effected by the movie of our life playing out or whilst fixating on the strip of film we don’t notice the most fundamental thing of all, the one thing all other components rely upon, the lucid, wakeful, cognizance of that light that shines through.
I’ve been sort of waiting to see what would happen next with this weird shit I’m doing in front of over a million fucking people. I almost got a bit lost you see, I almost forgot what it is I’m actually doing, like with this life I mean. I’m not trying to be some motherfucker jerking himself off all over your feed. I’m not trying to be a “creator” or really anything at all. My content started as a fun translation of my life and what I’m up to for the purpose of making someone feel something, that’s it. But slowly, nefariously, I began to get lost in the quagmire. I got addicted to the serotonin squirt acquired by so much positive interaction, it’s definitely a thing. That’s not to say it shouldn’t be enjoyed, I definitely do enjoyed it, but when you realize that you miss it or crave it when it’s not present that’s when it’s time to re-evaluate and yank the fucking reactive reins back a bit. I also started to forget what it is to create from emptiness. When you start trying, and try you must to crank out as much shit as I have, it requires that you mine the mountainous memory that lies within the thought plane and you smelt that ore and hammer the shit out of it into a crude shape to make a vessel to hold a thing that cannot be held. It’s an inferior product to that which comes from wakefull emptiness. To create from emptiness does not require trying, it’s the opposite of trying and it can get tricky when trying not to try. But if I get out of my own way then something happens. It’s as though the event horizon which lies at the border between the wakefull emptiness and the thought plane opens slightly, like ass cheeks parting and then “Poot” a silent ethereal fart comes forth from the mysterious lucid void in my middle. It is a colorless and odorless fart but it has a current and as it moves through the thought plane it creates eddies and those eddies gather thoughts within them, spinning and coalescing and if I don’t try and I just start writing then sometimes, magic happens. It might only be magic to me but I’m the only critic I feel compelled to mollify.
Holy shit this is getting long but you know what? Fuck it. I am enjoying this dance of emptiness and form, of awareness and thought. Thanks for coming this far dear reader, I still think it’s too much for social media though. I believe I’ll do a podcast, what do you think? Would you rather read this shit or hear me say it? Maybe this very long winded mushroom lesson that doesn’t really have anything to do with mushrooms could be episode 1. I feel like it’s the next right thing to do. I’ll always make videos of course, whether in my kitchen, or talking about fucking your Mom, or wandering the woods or desert or pacing my shop whilst sharing both deep and shallow thoughts, it’s too much fun not to and provides me the opportunity to be sure that I don’t take myself or this life situation too seriously. Nature constantly wants to unfold and thus I shall comply. I’m not going anywhere, I’m just glad I did not get trapped by this phenomenon of digital connectivity and all the stickiness of it. I’m sliding easily back into the moment, which is to say I’m just going to get out of my own fucking way and let the resplendent farts of the primordial wakefull emptiness adorn my mind that I may waft it your way in whatever format I’m inclined to deploy it in. Thoughts hammered out from the thought plane are an inferior product indeed, we all deserve better.
Well that’s all I have to say about that big red mushroom I guess. Yeah I know I didn’t specifically say anything about the damn thing. Truth be told my memory doesn’t work in a way that would be conducive for me to become a mycologist or anything even near it. Maybe I’ll stick with being a mindcologist. Thats like a gynecologist but instead of gazing deeply into vajayjays I peer into my own wrinkly pink meat and poke around with aspiring fingers lubed with the slippery goo of self awareness. I suppose these social media platforms are kind of like the stirrups in which I place my humbled feet and split my mind wide open unashamed for all to see and whilst splayed spread eagle and exposed I fart directly into your mind. It’s a shame I’m not, in this moment, a female because then I could say “queef into your mind” which I much prefer the sound of. But whether fart or queef I do not aim it in your general direction in the hopes of teaching you shit or building new paradigms but with the intention of breaking the old ones long enough for you to be able to smell your own fart of awareness or queef of existence. We’ll see what farts out next, it shall be a surprise, for us both. And it will be especially surprising if it’s a fucking queef on accounta, you know, I only have a butt to work with, so, yeah. Way to end it on a fucking weird note! Remember, don’t take shit too seriously, or do I’m not the boss of you. Toodaloo.
Alrighty, well… have the week you want not the week you’re given. It’s up to you. You’re the one livin’.
Toodaloo
