October

 

 

 

Baggage

 


There is an old adage shared to me by an old, jaded, worldly truck driver that picked me up hitchhiking on some lonely road long ago. He picked me up saying he was lonely on the road and would trade a ride for hearing my story. So, I told him but what he really wanted was to tell his story. So, he told me his story. Both tales were sad. Both tales were about women and the baggage they brought with them into our lives.
We figured we could be rich if we could discover a ointment that could get emotional baggage to shed.

 


When he dropped me off in the emptiness of a nowhere highway near dusk, he gave me this advice:

 

'Remember son; never play poker with a man called Doc, never eat at a café named Mom's, and never but never tangle up with someone whose troubles are worse than your own.'

 

Sage advice I seldom followed.


I remember those tangles, those girls, sometimes. I remember their baggage and mine.


I remember K. that big breasted, big hipped, short little thing that so matched my rabid lust. I thank her for all of the exploring she let me do and for the disease she gave me that got me out of the draft for a year and a half. She was older, often divorced, and wanted my youth because hers was gone.


I remember J. that handsome little Dutch girl that was not so little. She was first to go down on her knees before me. Gulp. The things she taught! Back in the 70's J. wandered down from New York State to hide in our small Texas town from something she never admitted to. I thank her for 'gushing' her gratitude when we made love. She was a rebound girl that finally got tired of how sad I was over losing my first wife. She had my baggage to carry. It was too much.


I remember Margie a scrawny orphan girl who thought feeling up was hugging. She took out her bio mom's abandonment on her foster parents with wildly inappropriate behavior. I thank her for her wide-eyed searches into my soul. We met in a bookstore where I worked. Books and lust we shared. She wanted me to steal her from her home. She needed that more than needing me. I steal no daughters.
Way too many other girls with baggage haunt my tattered soul. Maybe we need new baggage to carry.
However, Margie got on my mind when I wrote this poem.

 

 

Margie's Baggage

 

We hear that a rolling stone gathers no moss;
Not so for people rolling through the days of their lives.
I don't know about you but I am one mossy son of a mother.
And, all we gather and bear is so very with us
As we face each of those days.

 

Alone we enter this world, wide-eyed and fearful.
Alone we leave this world, wide-eyed and fearful.

 

On day first, yet unburdened in the lightness of being,
We begin to gather all things sensory, sensual, and sentient.
We hold, grasping and avaricious, all these things,
The pleasurable and the painful, as if they were treasure.
Dragging them unto the last of our days.

 

Alone we enter this world, wide-eyed and fearful.
Alone we leave this world, wide-eyed and fearful.

 

This gathered moss drags us down into weariness,
That guardedness, showing in our eyes and our mouths
As we greet those we meet and those we want to join.
The home not so safe. The family not so warm.
The disenchantment in the hard knock world.

 

Alone we enter this world, wide-eyed and fearful.
Alone we leave this world, wide-eyed and fearful.

 

The embarrassment at the excess of youth.
The stories of love and lovers lost and gone.
Of truth, and hope, and want, and need
All vanished, all stolen, all neglected, amid
The tumult, the tangle, the tarnishing of reality.

 

Alone we enter this world, wide-eyed and fearful.
Alone we leave this world, wide-eyed and fearful.

 

And, like dragon Fafnir in his cave, this moss,
This burden, this cursed treasure we keep
Grows scales on the leather of our skin and
Droops our guarded eyelids and snarls our lips.
This burden, this cursed treasure we keep.

 

Alone we enter this world, wide-eyed and fearful.
Alone we leave this world, wide-eyed and fearful.

 

This burden making misery of our days.
Tempers our work and our efforts, and
In the end, guides all of our choices.
It deepens our cave and our loneliness.
This burden, this cursed treasure we keep.

 

Alone we enter this world, wide-eyed and fearful.
Alone we leave this world, wide-eyed and fearful.

 

We hear that a rolling stone gathers no moss;
Not so for people rolling through the days of their lives.
I don't know about you but I am one mossy son of a mother.
And, all we gather and bear is so very with us
As we face each of those days.

 

Alone we enter this world, wide-eyed and fearful.
Alone we leave this world, wide-eyed and fearful.

 

Instead of the baggage we all seem to carry around with us as if it were treasure, the baggage that tempers the way we welcome people or tempers the way we hold people at arm's length, might it be other baggage we could carry.

 

We could carry the baggage of our first smile, or first blush, or first love. You know, that first love before we managed to let it get away.

 

We could carry the first magic we witnessed, or the first belly laugh we laughed, or the first fantasy we imagined. You know the first fantasy we imagined before our innocence was lost.

 

We could carry the first tentative first kiss, or the first thrill of our first caress, or the first explosion of our first orgasm. You know the first exploding orgasm we wish we could have again.

 

Let us shrug off our old baggage. Let us pick up new baggage – the baggage of all things good in our life.

 

 

 

 

 

Monkey Mind 10/16/13

 


Monkey mind. Monkey, monkey, monkey, monkey mind. Nothing on my mind but monkey mind.
I have monkey mind this day, this week. I have it real bad.


And, as all of you that know what 'monkey mind' is, to have monkey mind means that everything, but everything, is on your mind. Everything, all your thoughts, all hopes and worries and memories, all the time.


Monkey mind came to me from Eastern meditation texts I collected at the beginning of my trek toward 'theVoid' and 'the Middle Way'. I hate to use western terms to tag these things for they mislead, but 'void' and 'middle way' are goals to reach with some practices.


Monkey mind refers to that constant internal dialogue our brains carry on as they sift through all the stimuli they collect as they function to keep us alive day by day. It refers to those agitated times when this dialogue forces itself to the forefront of our consciousness when we have better things we need to be doing.


What chores have I not done today? That woman's ghost, that woman from my past, haunts me again. My deadline nears. Damn Congress! How's my son's job-hunting today? Why isn't this paragraph working? Am I having 'social media' withdrawals? Where's that mouse? I can't believe my wife said that. Hey, M*A*S*H reruns are on. Shut up, cat. I'll feed you in a minute. It's chilly. Now, it's too warm. Is that rain I hear? I need to go for a walk. Malone, you are a lousy son-of-bitch. Get to work. Hey, a football game. Change the channel...

 

"I am burdened with what the Buddhists call the monkey mind. The thoughts that swing from limb to limb, stopping only to scratch themselves, spit and howl. My mind swings wildly through time, touching on dozens of ideas a minute, unharnessed and undisciplined. You are, after all, what you think. Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions."
- Elizabeth Gilbert

 

You know, monkey mind. You get it, too. And, right now, monkey mind is ruining my whole week.
A number of 'cures' exist. I can dump what I need to be doing, surrender to my monkey mind, do something to fix all those stupid problems, then watch that TV. I can 'watch my breath' meditating – as if 'making' myself meditate achieves a quieting at all. I can find the magic elixir of 'letting go' – of letting or making all this mental noise finally drift off back into the shadows of my mind where it belongs. Or, I can write a blog post...


Well, here it is!


Now: What chores have I not done today? That woman's ghost, that woman from my past, haunts me again. My deadline nears. Damn Congress! Damn...

 

"The earth is black in front of the cliff, and no orchids grow.
Creepers crawl in the brown mud by the path.
Where did the birds of yesterday fly?
To what other mountain did the animals go?
Leopards and pythons dislike this ruined spot;
Cranes and snakes avoid the desolation.
My criminal thoughts of those days past
Brought on the disaster of today."
― Wu Cheng'en, Monkey: The Journey to the West

 

 


 

 

 

Summer's End - Samhain 10/31/13

 


This has been a bleak autumn for me. I can't really pin down a particular reason. All the usual ones I suspect and none of them – worms in the soul eating around the edges of consciousness. Ghosts of all my past sins that waft from their graves to haunt me I guess.


The needling of these specters brought home this All Soul's Day eve. Maybe it is then a day to remember, honor, or placate the dead in my life.


As one of my age begins to notice, the dead have become legion. Or, it seems so. This evening, so believed the Celts, these dead are released from the cold grave of the Earth to walk amongst us. Many rituals grew around this event. Some of these rites are a purging. They are ways of allowing the ghosts to be remembered and to complete their business with the living.


Allow me to remember some of my ghosts.


The first of the dead that I remember are those of my parents and grandparents. Great aunts and great uncles that I barely knew treated almost as if they still lived in the room of the funeral home by my Southern Baptist parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles. I tried to puzzle it out.


Were their souls still here attending their own funeral? Were they sleeping within those bodies beneath all the spackle and rouge awaiting the Judgment Day? Were they wafted straight to heaven to sing in the Holy Choir leaving so much cold meat in those caskets?


Whatever lay there creeping me out in that box was not that person. Not any longer.


The second of the dead that I remember are those classmates and cousins that went off to the Vietnam wars. My first cousin, so tender and coveted by my aunt and uncle, that could not take the memories and came back to commit suicide while in a barbiturate induced haze. Seven people died in the other car. The quarterback of my high school who did the patriotic thing. He volunteered for the army instead of going to college. He got both legs blown off. It took him several wasting months to die. What a dirty war that was.


The third dead that I remember are all those beautiful broken souls that died in the drug wars. The cute little seventeen-year-old junkie my friend went with whose parents found her stash. She snatched it, locked herself in the bathroom, and shot it all up as her parents pounded on the door. She had too much heroin in that stash. That idiot vacuum cleaner sales man that I introduced to methamphetamines that jumped in front of the train because the drug culture did not make him popular. My posse member that worked so hard to belong. His mother tried to protect him from us by moving away. He tried to take our lifestyle to small town Texas. The local cops shot him down trying to rob a drugstore.


The forth dead that I remember are the lovely ladies I tried to make better while a psychiatric technician in private mental hospitals. Suicides all. In my vanity I used to take pride in the fact that none died in my hospital when I was on duty. Don't let them loose though. The one that stands out is one of the few multiple-personality patients I saw. I knew eight of her personalities. The doctors said there were more. When she was the sixteen-year-old bulimic, even the wrinkles left the creases of her eyes and mouth. When she was the forty-three-year-old businessman, I swear that even her Adam's apple extended into prominence. Once, when she'd worked hard to be good and take her meds, the doctor gave her back her phone privileges. She called 911 and told them she'd been kidnapped. Try telling a squad of uniformed cops they could not come into the PICU, psychiatric intensive care unit. One of her doctors gave her a weekend pass one time. She drove directly to the nearest Walmart, bought a pistol and ammunition, and put a bullet through the roof of her mouth. Right there in the parking lot.


The fifth dead that I remember die more peacefully. I am of that age now where parents, iconic media stars, and even friends are passing for their ages. My mom. Rock stars. Movie stars. Husbands of old girl friends. Online friends. These people just wear out. The heart fails. Organs fail. I sometimes read where these may be 'good deaths'. I don't believe that. Death is not pretty. Death is not good.


They say we should invite these risen dead to eat with us. We should leave a place for them at out tables. If they can't make it, leave some food out on the stoop for them to enjoy at their leisure. There will be an extra TV tray set before my television tonight. I have an apple to slice and leave on the deck outside.


They say we should put on costumes tonight so that the unhappy spirits will not recognize us. If they don't know us, they will look elsewhere to finish unfinished business. I will wear my Tai Chi suit and samurai sword to greet the trick-or-treaters tonight.


They say we should build bonfires tonight to sacrifice food to share the bounty of the year's work with the gods. I will have a fire. Some of those apple slices will be burned there. Despite the legions of dead, despite my present mood, it's been a good enough year. I can share.


Samhain, or Summer's End, is meant to be a festival of cleansing – of a new start. One remembers those that have gone. One remembers with gratitude the bounty of the year. One reflects on all that will be new in the coming months. I can do that.