A letter to my former self,

It sounds cliche because it is.
Sometimes these annoying little word packets of profundity hang around generation after generation for a reasonable reason.
Because these adages, often addressed to All of Us, contain some truth inside.
Hindsight and all,
If I only knew then...
The egg comes before the chicken,
it's Murphy's Law.
Which gets amended, riders added as the years pass, but in principle safeguards the same, the blame game, or a random act of unkindness, mindless appropriation by Murphy, who could have easily been John Galt.
There's that business about wisdom coming with age, like accrued interest, growing as quietly as grey hairs and as invisible as social security. There is no security, or forwarding address.
Nobody gets wise checks they can cash in the mail.
Sometimes lucky people acquire wisdom by gratuitous donation only, so it's deductible (since you are often in a not-for-profit status).
Donate your time, it's a secure investment
 in You.
Art is everywhere, never stop seeking it.
Circles will drive you nuts but you'll need the spiral-graph, starting and ending with infinite.
Synchronicity and serendipity, partners of a lifetime, will always know where to find you.
I wouldn't change a thread in those woven fibers of your being, the new me needs every single sinewy string, the patchwork of experience, worn soles, renewed souls...
Fear, love, anxiety, doubt, that feel like butterflies are the indicators of a chrysalis of change about to occur. Butterflies are better than worms.
It's okay to be scared.
You will always prefer being alone, so be a better friend to yourself.
You will get a higher education, you'll never stop nourishing your brain, many people that cannot understand you will claim you're insane, but they mean it nicely (I think).
You will read EVERY BOOK-
that you possibly can, and remember why you are here in the first place, like walking into a room to forget your purpose, you must retrace and try again.
You will have greater adventures in your non-fiction life.
You'll save these like squashed penny tokens from the boardwalk for a rainy day,
which always reminds you of home,
under any sky donning a grey coat.
Under starry skies before sunrise you'll telescopically find what you were looking for
is not up there, not out there, not outside of you.
You did not mis-step, there are no mis-takes, the picture is perfectly to your liking.
Errata will tempt you astray, but the road you're on doesn't go away, erosion control,
your foundations are solid. A sparkly glint, a yellow brick paved road will remind you of your own straightforward path.
Ever-ever land awaits.
Sometimes you will feel apprehension when you can't see around the corner, it's fine to fear
what lies ahead.
Problems with patience will persist, but practice perfects. You will exercise that muscle of Will, it will become the strongest part of you, you'll need it like a shield, you will persevere.
Survive and thrive. But I will be torturing you, as a practice, in the future,
I must in order to make it through the darkest parts. And worse, you will be my sacrifice, my token of forfeiture, giving is better than receiving, you get more. I will keep the pyre you started lit,
like a Virgil.
It's the journey that makes the warrior strong.
Stop tripping and keep going, one foot after another.
Don't worry so much about money, it isn't worth your time.
Letting go is the difference between flying and falling.
But you won't let go easily,
and realize all of what I have said is true for you, in a flash moment at nel mezzo del camin when you're about to die,
you realize you are right,
Write where you should be, as a shadow of self, a pale portrait, the nurse of nostalgia administers sweet injections of TLC,
for an impatient, fond but distant memory, of the old me,
curious about who I'll decide to be.



Image of wall of Senor Grubby's in Carlsbad, mural by Morley in conjunction with Synder Art Design.

It's not an Emergency, just a Suggestion

Sitting in the waiting room on Saturday morning at almost six, with my son whose is seventeen, and is writhing with stomach pains,
we waited-
as a patient would.
While we waited,
I noticed a Suggestion Box.
It sat in an unlit corner implying,
this private lascivious anonymous exhibition was a private, confidential, secure, receptacle,
after all it had a sturdy lock.
I had to conjecture that it was, in fact, it stood for something, a representation of something else.

(Whose job would it be at the ER to check this?
Never mind, I don't need any suggestions.)

A suggestion by definition must be made public.
It must be told, conjectured, proposed, I suppose.
And this suggestion box implied that there is an appropriate time and a place for suggestions.
It could just be a trap that nobody ever opens to see if it caught something.
Just dead flies in a booby trap, likely full of nasty feedback,
and static, no good-nik, anti-constructive, ranting, lamenting, venting. Warning; hot steam can scald, if your sensitive to the heat.
Despite the Suggestion Box being an ill-placed allusion of helpfulness, subversively hidden in plain sight, like the chairs, it was indeed there for those in need.
A suggestion qualifies as anything-
to represent another thing indirectly, figuratively and sometimes obscurely by evoking a thought, image or conception of it.
Then there's poetry. A poetic license, that is often suggestive, rather than assertive.
Robert Frost was icy to the double meaning, a poetic metaphoric bridge that reader is expected to cross without knowing how secure the span, or hopes to
fall through the cracks, in wide open gaps, down a slit just wide enough
for a suggestion to fit through.
My son didn't know the ER was not a first come first serve type of establishment. We shyly watched an old man with white hair, sweats, a flannel shirt, wearing crocs and small spectacles arrive in the ER with his wife trailing a car length behind- who had taken time to "put her face on" first, as my grandmother would have observed.
The old man seemed okay initially, his color and manner rather calm and muted. Then I noticed he seemed a little confused after continuously rubbing his brow.
He was shortly taken by a doctor to get an EKG, his heart was about to attack him.
My son realized the priority system.

“Mom,”he asked me with his unusually tousled chestnut hair,

deep sunken drab eyes

and his salty olive complexion turned to the green kind of olive,

his baby lips that look the same to me are the pimentos, he ignored the customary fond look in my eyes, “Can I say something that I guess sounds totally racist?”

“Um, sure.  Go ahead,” I responded off guard and was not sure if he was going to be offensive or funny, neither are really his strong suit.

“I would trust a black doctor the most.”

“Really?” I asked as a knee-jerk response, not really needing confirmation of his preference. Of course this was so. And perhaps racist, it still made me proud.

Things can change.

Our offspring are our Silent Spring, whose waters run crystal clear despite the source.

He's a sensitive human.
And then a gesture, or adjustment in his seat, the collar of his t-shirt drooped,
tiny tufts of hair curled from the collar,
and in that brief moment the way I saw him forever changed,
he's becoming a man.
He used the restroom, which is traumatic enough for him at a public facility, the trauma team needed on standby.
And when he sat back down, he beelllccched.
We exchanged a wordless glance. Then we went home tired.
I suggested he pay more attention to his diet.
Garbage in, garbage out, as my grandma used to say,
kind  of like that suggestion box,
brimming with gassy garbage.
We are all full of hot air-
but sometimes it can become your enemy instead of your reassurance,
the mothers mirror check for her sleeping baby's fog,
the relief that you are still alive and made grateful all anew, humbled by the gift of life,
or it could be both.
Either way suggestions can be difficult to digest.
A little lesson learned from the hospital room suggestion box.


Image credit: By Unknown or not provided (U.S. National Archives and Records Administration) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Putting puzzles together

After some thinking about intuition,
                                  (albeit a counter-intuitive process)
reading, researching, writing, putting things together,
like a jigsaw puzzle I realized intuition wasn't even the missing piece I was looking for.
It was only part of the puzzle.
I read this book called "Imagine", I imagine it is what I happened to be looking for, it was about stimulating the imagination and the professional side of creativity. All literature takes imagination. It was a creative moderately priced somewhat controversial book...
Then I started to put it together-
Those that can't do are supposed to teach what they can't do.
By imagining a place where creativity lives in the brain, like an address, so I can visit as often as I want,  feasting until sated on as much intuition and hospitality as I want, it is really the same as reading a book about being creative, or writing about a book that someone wrote about creating creativity.
Writing about writing.
The poet's obsession with the poem.
While I'm no teacher-this is good since I have nothing to tell-as you can tell-I can tell that
actions speak louder than any vocabulary at any volume.
Don't listen to me. Learn from my mistakes that I never knew I made-until I stumbled intuitively into some opportunity I had been planning all along. These weren't mis-takes they were mis-give(ings).
If we could get our creativity to work on cue maybe we'd find ourselves in another Renaissance period.
That's romantic isn't it, romanticism and chivalry revived. Not really, realistically.
Perhaps this period is just part of a sentence whose point has yet to be made.
If we once intuitively accepted that the world is not flat, are able to comprehend that there are rings around planets and perceive that intuition is a sixth sense that we have yet to fully develop, maybe we could finally map the ocean and our brains or even better, unearth the secret to earthquakes. Maybe we were told and forgot, or maybe we were the forgetful mistake, I don't remember.
The earthquakes in Nepal this year reminded us we are just ants crawling on Mother Nature's back. We are the Doozers from Fraggle Rock, despite what we build, make and erect, she can reject without regret, most often as soon as we forget about things like gravity and earthquakes.
We walk around with regret. One kilogram of regret has the same 10 neutron force of gravity. Such is the weight of the world on our backs.
When I was 12 I lived through a major natural disaster, so it is called. This natural phenomenon goes by many other more specific names, like cancer does. The one I was afflicted with was called
“earth-quake”.
I did not get hurt. No lives of my loved ones were lost-any more than they were before the earth began shaking.
They call it a disaster and not an occurrence because we have no control over it. Like all trauma, disaster takes charge, acts, reacts, and lasts like aftershocks that slowly lose magnitude over time only to be forgotten generations later.
It was violent, but I was more horrific than it.
My own children, now almost adults themselves, have not ever been confronted by these random acts of mortality. Not one natural disaster has come knocking at the door in their life and I'm afraid they've started to believe they are standing on terra firma.
That is a slippery slope of quicksand. Don't trust the ice-practice walking on hot coals first.
I was told a man named Jesus advises this too, but it could be a rumor.
I saw the promotion of a cinematic scare tactic, another apocalyptic action movie due to infiltrate the big screen called 'San Andreas' starring The Rock, how i-rock-nic.
The quake I lived through, the Bay Bridge fell through, the Rock should be warned, Alcatraz is not safe either.
Escape the fallen debris of a bad movie while you can! The aftermath will still be there.
Mother Nature doesn't care about putting the pieces back together.
She is still setting the table, putting the plates where she wants.
Someday there will be a big buffet. No invitations will be sent, no black tie event.
It will be first come, first serve.
Variety is the spice of life, not everyone has the same tastes. Better is a personal flavor.
What is universal? Is there anything we can all agree upon? What about perfect? What about symmetry, the Higgs Boson, doesn't it all always fit together, even meteorites being pulled under pressure seek the path of least resistance...and we have two eyes, but our feet don't match...
We are all abnormal choosing holding up under pressure, hoping for better.
Some days I wake up with a suspicion, an intuition that something special is about to happen, something wonderful is definitely waiting for me today, or likewise, something important, catalyst in my life, and then-nothing.

Herman Hesse wrote of the same feeling, “And sometimes it seemed that something never seen yet long desired was about to happen, that a veil would drop from it all;but then it passed, nothing happened, the riddle remained unsolved, the secret spell unbroken, and in the end one grew old..."

This is not a tragedy, or a disaster, it is a sentence that is not done, that will never meet its period so it is doomed to keep repeating them-
until I understood that finding the missing piece of the puzzle meant including myself, the puzzle will never become solved.
As the final and complete image becomes clear, when the puzzle is almost solved, when I am the last piece, realizing I have been creating something I don't want to finish, an earthquake will occur, spreading pieces of me everywhere, hoping someone will pick me up and start this puzzle all over again.
Until then I will keep seeking imagination while secretly waiting for intuition to show up.



Image By Jason7825 (Own work), 3-D Jigsaw puzzle [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

I got lost in a poetry workshop

In a poetry workshop that I was not in, the instructor found a poem, in a rather serendipitous way.

It had been abandoned, like a muted dummy, behind glass windows with the occasional blaring lights and still nobody noticed it, nothing needed repeating so it hid without an echo in the Xerox, a sterile x-ray cloning machine, like perverted a fly on the wall, imagine all the things it has seen-purely x-ray-ted poemography.

The instructor said she tried diligently to find its composer. It didn't have an ID tag. It was an unregistered homeless poem uncounted. Like a stray cat, as independent as a poem or cat may be, it positioned itself to be heard, and cats don't meow just for themselves. And birds like their own songs.

The instructor did not use a paper poster with her phone number notched in strips fringed at the bottom of the page, she asked around, looking for its negligent owner.

Nobody called the unknown number, nobody claimed the paper.

Nobody at the workshop recognized the dummy because its features were so vague, it could be any of us, like the lucid moment(s) of writing a poem and the details arrive, it's right there, our likeness.

This abandoned poem could easily have hid in the trash instead, accompanied by overflowing evidence of wasted resources, spent but not gone.

The instructor credits old Anonymous, and recites it for the thousands in, but not at this poetry workshop.  All ears, just a washing machine of words and ideas whirled in from the wobbly weird world of poetry, have you seen some of those people? I don't look, but I'm all ears.

And amid the chaos and anonymity this voice, its thoughts, noticing, go on and on and on, and when you are not listening you are hearing, you are there, seeing it, you are in it. It was not her voice, her reading, it was the weight of the words on the page.

It may have not been special, but it was a wonderful wonder how it all worked. Simply, eloquently and delicately weaving into ones reality, a choice, of another voice, that sees the same thing.

Causeless, waiting to be found, it's speech not wanting to interrupt, polite and ready to multiply, resonate, refract, project, distribute, share its dislocated effect at any time. It stopped me. Grabbed, arrested and invested in me so humbly.

Which made me realize, or recognize really, that the most powerful poetry, the best poetry, has oft been abandoned, rejected, neglected-abused by is creator-who must let it go- literally must let it go-in every way…

Because there is no poet, there is only poetry-waiting to be heard. Yes, by other poets in a poetry workshop that were never even there, but who also cherished every poetic word, louder than it could have ever hoped to have been heard, as an anonymous dummy quietly hiding in the copy machine.

Image by William Blake [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons, A Little Girl Lost Plate 44.

What a book nook took

A book will help.
It usually does. I don't even need to read it.
Just buying some will help. It's not just about the smell. If inhalants smelled like books,
I could understand the addiction.
I'm not talking about shopping therapy, too many Americans have tried that DIY.
I have a public secret spot, really, at the local library.
These are lonely books. Some are from dead people,
I know.
I can't smell it, but I can read between the lines. It is rather poetic actually, some great writers jammed next to local authors that slide in their own books. Some of those books suck. Some lie-there. And will.
But I have found diamonds-no, I don't like diamonds-I have found flowing streams of crystal consciousness, that can be icy, crisp, like pins and needles-stimulating,
invigorating. I have read classics like stepping into
a working time capsule, tactile, mouthwatering, delectable,
delicious. I can't help that. Saying yum yum about a great book.
Mothers do this to their babies too and it's not meant to be
cannibalistic.
My cat does this to me.

I take what cash I have on me when I go to the secret spot.
People don't carry much cash these days, someone should tell panhandlers this.
Is there a secret union? I don't like conspiracies, they're like cults. There is a secret language for panhandlers, or I mean hobos. Did you know that? It's in symbols to mark things.
Primitive.
Anyway, I usually have less than $5 and maybe some change.
Do you carry pocket change, or is it in the car?
For $3.50 I have come home with a half dozen exotic strangers.
Some are friends of mine already. Some I may be interested in, like a date.
No harm. All goes into the Trust Box. The money, that is.
Payphones are jealous of Trust Boxes.

I've already broken all my rules.
I'm deep in the abyss of my silent treatment.
Sulking, kind of.
Sometimes I annoy the crap out of myself.
This abyss has alternating warm and cold currents,
kind of like that stream of consciousness I am hoping to dive into.
I think you are a book person too.
People write books as a form of therapy.
Re-living the past. Freezing it. Like a deer in headlights.
Do you look at old pictures of yourself? (I've looked like a deer) Are you embarrassed or envious?
I'm the first one.
Public pain=Best seller.
I know some warm flowing blood is in every published book.

Self-help is a relatively new genre, arriving just before Reality TV and just after the music left MTV.
Are they used like recipe books? For foodies of drama.
We are all foodies by necessity, searching for the perfectly ripe fruitful endeavor.
We need nourishment, I need brain nourishment.
No two dishes followed to the exact specifications of a recipe ever turn out the same.
Fast food is not made, it is a mold.
There are books like fast food too.
Romances.
All books are self-help really. It's up to you to help yourself.
Not steal books, but listen, swallow, savour, jump in. Get some old good traditional couch therapy.
And the cat.
But as I check my wallet, I realize I'm broke.
Not even change.
I will need to ask for help.



Image of painting by Louis Comfort Tiffany [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Optimism Injections

It was recently reported in the US that most chicken farmers will stop injecting their chickens,
our food supply,
with hormones, isn't that nice?
I thought so too,
before I corrected myself with some sanity-how long have they been doing this?
How much hormones and from where and whose or from what and why?
I remember hearing something about milk a few years ago,
which didn't concern me too much at the time being allergic to milk myself as a child
I never liked the liquid chalk,
but it was said that the hormones they inject into the cows was trickling down into our milk supply-another brilliant discovery! Not mad cow disease they said but have you ever come across a Bessie that had raging hormones? Sounds like a mad cow to me.
Furthermore,
that this additive process was resulting in girls crossing the threshold of puberty earlier, great.
My daughter is, or was, a milk monger as a baby and at 14 she is the only one of her friends not at the period party yet, or rather hasn't joined the menstrual martyr's club. So much for that false alarm.
Still, there is cause for concern when the general public,
who has become freely and wildly organically unlinked from their food chain
and can only follow the breadcrumbs to the local whole foods grocery store,
will eat anything in a convenient pretty packaging and believe,
with the ultimate confidence in our FDA,
knowing with ultimate trust in our government safety regulators that all ingredients are included,
as stated on the newly required label.
It's not lying if you neglect to mention, right? Errors and omissions are pardonable.
Then there are these super-bugs going around which are not like killer bees, or like bugs with capes, Super-Bug-that is the viral epidemic word choice for unknown germs resistant to our own human 'super powers' and must be demolished!
Except we actually created them.
And continue to grow them;
every time a child is given antibiotics when it's not necessary,
every doctor that is visited for a cough or headache,
every Prilosec and Viagra commercial-
we give birth to a new bug. Congratulations!
Let us not forget that the boy who cried wolf was a great storyteller who also liked attention more than the truth, he ended up dead and alone, if that was the moral of the story, why do we have so many medicines?
Are we not the fittest of the species anymore?
Athletes get cortisone shots if they have had injuries, it takes the pain away, now they also use cock's comb too, which is all natural right? Birdbrain.
My step-dad used to offer his assistance when I got hurt to ease my pain,
informing me that he'd make that pain go away-
implying by hurting something else worse, he could eradicate it and multiply it, not knowing where it all started so we just keep hurting each other,
to ease the pain.
We should reconsider this approach as not so primitive, perhaps
you need your Ambien because you can't sleep, it's too loud outside-
but you don't live in a war zone-wake-up!
Who cares if anyone has frown lines anymore, don't worry, don't be happy, who cares.
It's sometimes hard to tell the difference between the flesh and bone type of humans
to their mannequin, plastic counterparts,
after a dip in the fountain of youth there's a certain tight shine, oh yes, it's Botox,
forget checking the Rolex, time just ran backward, past the liver spots over those thin crepe paper gloves.
Aging isn't the enemy,
pain isn't the enemy,
getting sick isn't a terrorist assault,
a rainy day is not an excuse for suicide,
getting lost should not be scary,
taking a walk on the wild side should be required exercise,
and if we could all take Optimism shots,
or Immunize for Hypochondria
and prescribe pink glasses for Myopia
we will likely live a lot longer-or see past our own nose
then again,
death doesn't seem like the worst outcome after all...
if you can't tell, I already had my injection.




Image by By Creator:Mary Young Hunter, c. 1901 [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.