WEEKLY WTF
10-28-24 Edition
Pills
Take a fucking pill
you’ll feel much better.
Oops there’s a side effect
the bed just got way wetter.
Take a second pill
to cancel that first one.
Some pills make you shit
some pills are quite fun.
Take all the damn pills
take them til you pop.
Take some now & later
some you just can’t stop.
Take the newest pill
you won’t be such a bitch.
Take those pills day & night
you’re making someone rich.
Take a pill my Man
then you will not feel.
You’ll rot in dead emotions
you will not know what’s real.
Take this pill right now
this pill can save your life.
Don’t try to marry it
a pill is not your wife.
Pills can work their wonders
but avoid them if you can.
A pill is not your spouse
a pill is not your man.
Take this pill go up
then take this one go down.
Take all these fucking pills
And really go to town.
A pill for when you hurt
your body will say “yay!”.
Though the pain recedes
the pill will want to stay.
There’s a pill for everything
except for common sense.
Attempt to be more natural
health is your defense.
Pills can save our lives
please don’t get me wrong.
Used for medical conditions
not just for your schlong.
Here’s a pill for happy
anal leakage may ensue.
There’s not a pill for healthy
Thats mostly up to you.
I am all for pills
who improve quality of life.
But some are an easy out
We all must process strife.
Take this pill and then-
you will not want to eat.
Your body will consume itself
and starve- ain’t that neat?
Go take this supplement
instead of eating food.
Did you fall for a fad?
Take a pill for attitude!
Here’s another pill
so your brain will squirt.
Here go take another
so you never have to hurt.
Pills saved my Daughter
other pills- they kill.
I love them and I hate them
my girl must take them still.
They can save your life
then you get the bill.
Is there a point to this poem?
Nah- I’m just being a pill.
Peeling Onions
The onion is peeling
and I am reeling,
there’s something under
the shock.
I thought time would heal
but shits getting real
the awful ticking
of a clock.
Immediately after someone suffers a spinal cord injury, the affected area swells and inflammation occurs. As a result the ensuing lack of sensation and motor function is at its very worst. Eventually the swelling and inflammation decreases and it’s then that a person might regain whatever remaining communication there is between brain and body- if the spinal cord damage is not total and complete.
I am not here to say that miraculous healings do not occur, I’ve seen that shit happen myself more than once- but I definitely am saying that normal biology is sometimes confused as a miraculous healing. I think it’s important to understand the distinction lest we become like rubes to the convincing carny who hawks from our hopeful hearts.
I think a similar inflammatory process is happening within my very own fucking head.
When people, up to this point, have asked me how I was doing- I genuinely didn’t know how to respond. Because in truth, I really didn’t know. When your paradigm of what you though life would be or “should be” gets suddenly snapped, that paradigm swells and emotional inflammation occurs.
Naturally, you think that things will get better after a while, once a sort of mental homeostasis occurs. Once the mind swelling goes down. Once you acclimate to a new normal. Once you somehow wrap your tiny head around this immense tragedy.
Perhaps that is the case but for the sake of documentation I can say that, at this particular stage, things actually seem to get worse. Hitherto your paradigm became swollen and in that enlargement there is still a good deal of surface area of hope because that landscape is as of yet unsettled. You can’t get a bearing on things while in such an extreme and violent state of expansion. There’s this part of you that truly can’t accept a new reality until your old paradigm balloon expands to the point of popping.
Then actually pops.
The emotional inflammatory response provides you a comforting numbness. It’s not that you don’t feel, it just keeps you from feeling EVERYTHING all at once. When it finally subsides you then begin feeling all of the things that were too big and too painful to have previously been allowed to heap upon the mountain of suffering you thought you had already summited.
You planted your acceptance flag on this terrible peak only to have it covered in the snow of a blizzard that just keeps coming. So you pull yourself, and your flag, out from under the frozen crust and plant it again upon the new slightly taller summit as if you are finally done, as if you’ve peaked. But all you end up doing is clawing yourself out of the terrible ice and planting your flag again, and then un- burying. Planting again and then un-burying. Ad nauseum. Meanwhile the mountain of suffering keeps gaining elevation and you begin wearing the fuck out trying to keep from being buried under the never ending ice.
It seems that all of the desperate broadcasts that your anguished soul forcefully shockwaved throughout the astral realms have gone unnoticed. All of the oily pleading and greasy cussing directed into the infinite stardust machine of infinite night have been ignored. The demands made towards cruel fate- scoffed at. The pre-gratitude protocol you implemented unto every possible idea or iteration of God you’ve ever read or dreamt up- goes unheard. Every manifestation lever that you have thrown and every quantum button you have fucking pushed- are ineffective, your beloved still cannot control her own body. Your beloved is in a kind of hell and you can’t throw her a lifeline because you’re down here with her. You’re in hell because you refuse to leave her side, willing to burn to ash if it provides her even a momentary lee.
It feels like the ultimate let down.
It’s a game of endurance I suppose. Hurry up and wait it out.
Blessed are they that can find some sort of comfort by adopting a narrative that makes sense of such things. But for me that requires a subjugation of my own experience for that of another’s, and I am no longer someone who can find comfort in belief systems born just because someone says so, or even if a billion someone’s just say so. Be they words spoken one minute ago or words written upon hidden scrolls or words carved in stone a thousand years in the past.
It’s a singular experiential truth, or none. That’s just how I roll, there’s no real choosing anymore. Actual experience over thoughts every time.
I am not unfamiliar with faith though. The greater, and little known, part of my life was spent in this endeavor. To Explore and practice faith like a maniac. To attempt to realize the truth through the mechanism of faith by adopting and implementing every belief system which, at the time, made sense to me then- dumping that system when something more resonant came along. That process in itself is like a hammer upon the rock of faith, it breaks. A difficult but very necessary step if you are aiming higher than you can see at a target that no living person you know can adequately identify.
Other than the beneficial faith breaking effect, seeking absolute truth in the relative is mostly fruitless and exhausting. Not an easy task- this existential catch and release. Accepting a comfortable paradigm is much easier than shit canning one. I caught some pretty big fish back in the day but threw all but one back and grasping tightly unto that last fish of self regard I fell overboard and drowned, like a drop returning to the sea. But that was many years ago and a tale for another time.
Ultimately I only learned one thing worth knowing- it’s not about acquiring beliefs or knowledge, accolades or traditions, rules or moralities.
It’s simply about letting go.
That’s the path that all paths lead to- letting go.
A lifetime ago I gave up everything- in exchange for one thing that’s true. A thing that cannot even be spoken, because it’s not really a thing.
That’s not to say that one can kill his own ego anymore than a mouth can eat itself. But if you gnash enough then grace just might swallow the rest, eager teeth and all.
We cruise along sparkly black cosmic waters on a weird existential fishing trip leaving behind the foamy wake of our individual existence upon an eternal and ineffable sea of awareness- therein, within that frothy trail, lies our record of mind and memory. We greedily overfill our boats with desires blocking the emotional scuppers and live bogged down lives- barely able to putt along in a cloud of our own frustrated exhaust. Gear adrift sinks ships. Freedom is fishing from within an empty boat. We can catch and keep our fish to nourish the ego or catch and release simply because- it’s fun.
It’s as though a great nothingness ejaculated itself into countless amnesiatic squirmy little bits so that it could experience somethingness- impregnating its own void. A birthing of the unmanifest into the manifest that it may experience every iteration of what it’s not, which of course is what it actually is. This is a paradigm that allows for all things, all religions all beliefs or lack thereof. It’s a gale that takes the wind out of all lesser sails and is a force too great and vast to be managed by individuated meat boats.
But no that’s not quite it- not really, not exactly. Ultimately it’s all a bit of bullshit but it’s also all a bit of truth. Let’s not be so bold and foolish to pretend a string of words can possible contain what’s actually going on. A shot glass can’t contain an amber ocean of whiskey. You can take shot after shot and try- but you’ll just puke it up and piss the bed.
Some of us inexplicably feel that deep tug, the proclivity to want to escape embodied life and expand into the ethereal regions and experience the ultimate transcendent “whatever the fuck”. It’s like being homesick for a home you can’t quite remember. But, should you find yourself destroyed, and by virtue of your destruction you expand into the absolute in the same way that the air once sequestered within a popped bubble becomes the entire undifferentiated atmosphere you find- that you miss being that damn bubble.
I don’t mean that the soapy film misses itself in some kind of a quantum invagination or inside out fractal desire fold. That would perhaps be the realm of ghosts and phantoms, a realm of uneasy disembodied dreaming where there is no mortal avenue of escape, where there is no “awake”. I mean that the eternal ineffable horizon misses being a mere mote. Or a breeze or a bit of smoke or fog or even a fart for fucks sake.
Perhaps it comes down to that, we are all cosmic farts of infinite aromas.
When you’re everything- you’re also kinda nothing.
The unmanifest can only view itself through manifest eyes. I’m talking about you in case you didn’t catch that.
But here I am, like: wtf,
like:
WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK.
After a brief trip home to work on shit to help along Maisie’s eventual return to Guerneville I find myself driving back to the hospital absolutely balling my fucking eyes out. I thought I had cried hard before but here I am not just uncontrollably sobbing but also bug eyed, forehead veins popping, red faced guttural voice screaming: NO NO NO NO NO NO NO… and FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK… until my throat turns into shredded pink hamburger.
And yet on some level I’m observing this outrageous thing that’s happening. I’m assessing it, trying to determine if this is actual madness? Did I finally snap? Will I ever stop screaming? How am I even fucking driving right now? How does this terrible expulsion also feel so good? Am I this shattered mess or the witness thereof? All the while fascinated at the fact that I can finally cry and wondering what that looks like. Wondering so much that I took this fucking selfie of myself in the aftermath of freaking out. That part seems so weird to me. How I can be so incredibly emotionally destroyed and yet curious enough to take a stupid selfie afterwards. Quite weird is life.
So yeah- what a pickle. Because great suffering is clearly part of this gig. Sure, you could stick your thumb in your mouth and blow really hard and inflate your balloon head and make some room in there for narratives that best fit your comfort zone. You can make a belief sieve through which you can force suffering so that the really rough and pulpy parts need not be dealt with and out comes a smooth cream to fill your existential pie. Make it convincing enough and you can get yourself some sympathetic lost souls to help you make a religion out of it… or cult… or both.
An age old tale.
Or you could potentially meditate your ass into the great grey fade and dissipate beyond this embodied mess… very, very tempting. But- you don’t go into that stillness…
Because you understand the fucking assignment, you get the point of it all.
This assignment is not one you look down upon in an aloof detachment nor is it one you let yourself drown in with a frantic survivalistic splashing about.
It’s one you live.
You live it both in awareness and in ignorance, like peanut butter and chocolate, like sweet & salty, like sand & sea, like bumping uglies- you experience duality and you live it as best you can. You fuck up, you adjust, you carry on. That’s the game, the one you came here to play on level 10 because you’re tired of fucking around with delusion. But eventually, you have to fight a boss.
I’m fighting a boss right now and he’s a real fucker. He seems impervious to arrows of philosophy or special combo logic weapons. “Fuck it all” flamethrowers don’t even scorch his ass. I’m frantically mashing all the buttons at this point. I’ll find the chink in his hideous armour though.
Watch me.
Playing this game you gleen that evolution is not merely a thing sequestered to individual material existence. If you break off a tiny park of a hologram and look through it, you’ll see the whole hologram in entirety.
Think on that.
You just live it, this game we’re calling life. You live it fully as the avatar in a video game that is made entirely of itself. Like the reference point you call “me” in a dream. Like a soup sandwich. Like the air in a bubble that is ignorantly attached to its soapy sheen- until…
*POP* goes the Wee Soul.
Movies aren’t as fun if you’re thinking about how your ass is sore or that the popcorn doesn’t have enough butter on it or if you’re pissed off about that motherfucker two rows up whose cell phone is beeping and booping and ugh, really!? Who the hell farted in here!? Watching a movie is not as engaging if you think about the special effects or the skill, or lack thereof, of the actors. It’s only truly enjoyable if you are present and thereby you forget you’re watching a fucking movie and you experience it as it was intended- and in order to do so we must suspend disbelief and get lost in the action or drama or joy or horror or comedy or heartache or... you get the idea.
I sat down here tonight in this tiny dark trailer illuminated by a single LED candle. A tiny aluminum box situated within this dismal industrial region of Santa Clara to simply touch my thumbs to glass to vent how honestly shitty and alone and hopeless I currently feel. To give voice to what I am experiencing now that the mind swelling is subsiding. To say “wow” and “holy shit” and “wtf” and to say I finally know how I feel- I feel fucking terrible. I sat down here to peel my own onion in open vulnerability to explore what’s under those squirting tear inducing layers because it’s the healthiest response I currently have.
And whoopsy fucking daisy, I accidentally reminded myself of something I forgot to forget.
And though there is an almost irresistible temptation to dive into this comforting knowing that hides behind knowledge- I refuse. Not because I’m a masochist or someone who relishes in woe.
It’s because I have remembered once again- to forget in order to truly feel.
To forget- in order to live.
Suffering is part of this exquisite spectrum.
There is a terrible richness to it- this misery. Yes- even suffering seems delicious to the hungering eternal soul. The stretching soapy film floating within the atmosphere is perfectly and delicately balanced. The air inside the bubble pushes out just enough and the entirety of the atmosphere has just stable enough of a hug that it keeps the bubble skin from expanding ad infinitum. Thus we float through existence for a minute, a conscious bit of sequestered atmosphere who notices only its soapy sheen.
Some cling to the soapy sheen, some want to pop. Whatever floats your boat me buck-o.
The ineffable witness, who presents as awareness, sits in the audience of the cosmos eating popcorn. Eternally watching from behind all eyes as we make our movies about- and also for it.
Or so I tell myself with my forbidden memories and console myself with my ethereal conjectures.
Never has there been a time in this life that has tempted me more to again pick a paradigm. A religion or belief or anything really, just a single hook upon which to hang my tired crumpled and dusty hat. But I won’t do it because this tragedy has also stripped me just about as bare as a man can get. It’s a hard place to get to on purpose. It has made reality raw. It has eliminated so many unnecessary things that I hitherto clutched as necessary. It has eroded the very fabric of existence thin enough for me to sense the strange energetic leviathans behind that veil. I’m not going to waste this opportunity on something so flimsy and fleeting as comfort. I just cannot take the easy out offered by belief.
It’s not that I have anything against those paradigms. It’s not that I turn away from adopted narratives due to aversion or simple stubbornness, I just know the ways in which reality attempts to bind. How nature is designed to trap. How soapy existence encapsulates.
But of course that seems to be the point. And so here’s the rub, the ultimate challenge- to keep your awareness unveiled so as to remember just enough to remember to forget and live this fucking life thing hard and fast and full.
To remember energetic immortality just enough to quench the survival instinct but forget enough to ride its currents and have a bit of fun whilst doing so. Like existential white water rafting or some shit.
Do you see how tricky the setup is? Even in ignoring narratives and refusing paradigms I inadvertently create more narratives and paradigms. Words are the problem, words are the ultimate reduction of what is. It’s all about letting go.
Fuck it though, words are fun. Words are my arrows.
I have never been able to aim my interest towards anything but ultimate truth and so I loose my arrows in that direction, but it’s quite difficult and awkward shooting yourself smack dab in your own fucking self, in the awareness that radiates behind the mind. I won’t let my weaknesses or aversions fuck this up, I will persevere. And if I go cray cray? Well, I think one must go a bit crazy to transcend the crazy ass thought plane until awareness is stripped of its “of”. If you go crazy enough you’ll transcend crazy and will become the only thing sane and perpetually stable in a suddenly mad and temporary world. But for fucks sake don’t ever admit that to anyone, history has shown that it rarely goes well for those who try.
Life- it’s not about zigging into one thing or zagging into the other. It’s not about breezily escaping into the unmanifest or rooting ignorantly into matter.
It’s about integration.
It’s about letting go.
It’s about living.
Actual living.
But sometimes living is fucking hard. So fucking hard.
But there’s no such thing as an up without a down.
Know what I mean?
Alrighty well, existential venting is hereby concluded.
I feel a little less shitty than I did when I first sat down. I hope you do too.
Toodaloo
Chili Cookoff for Maisie Mae
A very young toe-headed Maisie Mae grew up dancing her ass off here, at the Rio Nido Roadhouse. A place that thousands of others have also danced their proverbial asses off, since the 1930’s when Count Basie played and later on when The Beach Boys, Grateful Dead & countless others also got down in this rustic bar/ restaurant/ music venue nestled alongside the Russian River under the feathery green umbrellas of ancient Redwood trees. So many brain cells have been happily destroyed here, a few of mine are amongst the lost
I can still see her gleefull chubby cheeked smile as I bobbed her little body around on the old outdoor dance floor in wild dips and swung her in sweeping circles- tiny feet orbiting rapidly in that way that Dads & Daughters dance. Later on, as a teenager, Maisie had her first job here and worked multiple summers. And now, all these years later in her time of need, with true Sonoma County- Guerneville- river style the Rio Nido Roadhouse is making their annual Chili cookoff and auction a benefit for Maisie Mae, our little bird, to help mend her broken wings to fly.
We Bolands all plan to be there and Maisie is hoping to be one of the Chili judges. So- if you want to come make or eat chile, donate auction items or buy some bad ass shit, or just dance your own ass off and meet Maisie then come on out. Details in the flyer.
If you would like to mail something for the auction here is my mailing address:
Rusty Eyeball
14580 Canyon Seven Rd.
PMB# 237
Guerneville, Ca. 95446
Alrighty well, thank you Roadhouse and thank you to all our friends for managing this wonderful madness! Hope to see you there, or not, I’m not the fucking boss of you. Toodaloo.
Dedicated to Miracle Maisie Mae
Toodaloo
