Chill Out Angry People – Be in the Moment
Fiddle with a yo-yo on an abbreviated string over an illusionary pot. I’m panning for gold in an altered state. Spin it musically off the chi between my knees. Spin dips, and scatters what spilled. A cloud of golden missiles sprinkles the counter. Putting in time? Imagination meditations are laughably easy.
Explore the mysteries of mental illness by poking at the fringes. With a final windy spin to challenge gravity, the middle finger holds the yo-yo up in a lubricated state of impermanent stasis. It’s its form of restitution, and it’s rehabilitation from rudeness.
Meditation isn’t a literal translation of reality. Hum into the thickened air. Add rhythms to the undertones. The dirt below the carpets disappears. If a chanted mantra can recreate an old illusion, a fresh one can revise a genetic belief in an ill fated illustration. I’m uneasy doing this in public. It never works.
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Rays wash across furniture. Sunshine lands on a pot of yesterday’s freshly stewed coffee, atop a cold hotplate. The beam illuminates bits of bland goat cheese I bought to support the local goats.
Gaze about. What’s owned is basic and functional, with more than anyone should need. It’s okay to own stuff if it’s just stuff. Nor should a spiritual path necessitate giving away possession. Avoid dead ends stained by regrets. As such, what I wear is worn until it wears out.
With space to move about, let things be. Besides, this isn’t as messy as my imperfect kids’ bedrooms, with green furry clones stuffed in stashed lunch bags.
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Books are as sacred as the words between the pages. Furniture holds them off the floor. Once I absorb the heart of a page, what knowledge or pleasure to be gained is gleaned. Then it’s just a possession. I recycle the books at the free story library. The brittle diaries stick around, as I never know when to add sweet calories.
A shopping list sits in an obvious space. Short-term memory fades with age. I forget something, until it becomes long. Sometimes it’s too long. That said, I’m not yet at that age where the aged think only of a past they’re growing away from, as they shrink with age. If at all. If they can.
The wood stove, with loose tempered glass, guarantees ash. In spring and fall yellow pollen bothers my eyes. Moving in, I scraped off the dusty carpets, and threw down throw rugs. That made them happy. Then I juggled various shapes of furniture into a pretence of anarchistic companionship.
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The mementos from travel symbolize my reciprocity with life. The meaning of a few eludes me. But all of them provide comfort. Feng Shui responds to the negative aspects of clutter. But old fashion clutter is a familiar sculpture. It makes a home into a person.
Close my eyes and open my ears. A table of contents is covered in miscellaneous stuff. Otherwise, there’s a bent brass reading light by the affable madras chair, a dicey computer on a slivered slab, hanging candles and partial chimes, a webbed dream-catcher with glistening bugs, a thriving pregnant mother spider plant, and a Somali camel hair fly whisk hanging off a yellow buckshot shot roadside sign displaying a severely peppered six-point buck.
There’s also an altar on a concrete brick, with the blank Buddha Chess board on top. The pieces come from the Buddha market in Bangkok. They go where they want. In Zen chess, with meanings in the confusion, it’s up to me to encourage reconciliations out of the accidental inter-dimensional shifts.
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Open eyes. The scrabble board holds the last game in limbo. I lost to a woman with a longer vocabulary. The goddess knows more seven letter words. In rural life the fix was in for Yin to win. Alphabet magic, courtesy of the goddess. Didn’t lose by much. Would have won if I put stupid and idiot into words. But I dropped them from my vocabulary.
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Stroke a housewarming gift from a spirit realm. Got it at an i Ching revival gala in a Romany eatery. It’s David’s mighty Biblical slingshot! Authentic, it reeks to high Heaven. The deck is pieced together with bilge beams from Noah’s miniature model Ark collection. The hull is made of dark bark off a bonsai tree, and magic mushroom mill ends
It guards the companion seed trays on the pallets. Prior to our truce, the trays nestled under the futon. Courtesy of the cat’s affections, the sides are scarred. Trespassing crows can’t ruin what sprouts indoors. Otherwise, Old Moron nails the buggers in crab apple cross fires. But if one of the scheduled apocalypses prematurely arrives, I’d starve. Give me a bow, and I’d bag a bag worth of branches.
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As a back to the land grower, I’ve a blistered green thumb for the garden, pyromania for the wood stove, foul language for the plumbing. The world springs forward/falls back in season. But I’ve no interest in clockworks. Time here stands still. And no locks. Possessions, like a life, are transitory.
Eyes rove with my itinerant body. Follow the patterns on the Star Wars bedspread hung on hooks, with a patchy Chewbacca duelling with a pigmy Godzilla, armed with wet mops and toreador capes.
Lace curtains cover a rubber doll’s cot, with quadriplegic Barbie in a tracksuit. Thalidomide Ken, in mean biker gear, dangles upside down in the rafters on a slinky, in a wheelchair. There’s the aerated DT (Donald T.) voodoo pincushion, bent bashed nails in pallets, orphaned appliances rescued from a pyramid of sidewalk junk, counter top results of a spilled mustard topping, and scrap remains of an experimental Tandoori penguin.
The crystal glass skull is gone. Blown smoke circulated in swirls. It was always thinking. Typical stoner. Hollow head. Neurotic, or car sick, depending on the vortex. Gifted it to an ego who loved it more.
Wealth only offers prettier things to be kept under plastic, synthetics to shut out noise, and for the ostentatious, servants to ignore. I’ve a similar resistance to cascading commercials. It helps that the local options are repetitive whinny redneck country blather, with the singer suffocating on the song, bland trendy whiny Indy crotch music for junior high virgins, creep out electrical Jazz that sounds like falling glass furniture, Blues in a bathroom, and techno in the filling of a flushed toilet bowl.
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Outdoors, crows dance disco, while the ravens dance a sky ballet in the sky.
Indoors, the orange radio raised audible anarchy, before it broke. The imperfect green radio is stuck on the good news station. “No news is good news.” The red shell, turned on, has a nasal C&W rift from the Logjam Band: “Ah could smile. Had a joke on the tip o’ mah tongue that stretched fur a mile.” With a twang. Followed by the one about the gal who done him wrong. Cowpoke dials up the wrong number, and she’s never there.
Move the dial. Same guy. His AA nickname prison name puts him first on every list but love. Next station: “The Extenuated Thirty-Second Rap,” replete with page after page of disassociated thoughts. Followed by the singer who sings the blues about how to make a good friend into a rotten friend out of stale coffee. Glance up at the hot plate. Some songs sound better after the radio shuts up.
