Two Spoken word pieces by an unhomed man.

Freedom Fight

Two spirits that are free,
and spread truth as free
souls should.

All that is good is covered up,
and you shall be the savior
of good.

Even though the road is rough,
you two, in your freedom,
cast spells with creation.

She, a creation, in herself,
and he, the master of
spirits wealth.

So keep up the fight, by
being you.  The freedom
fight is won, in truth.

___________________________________________________

The Lie

On this wicked plain I seek
only in what I believe.  A lie
does me no good, and only
understood is the wickedness
of the world.  Reality is my
enemy now, and the real world
succumbs to all I am.  I am
only what chance brings.
What I must change into
when oppression beckons this
soul to rise.  I have risen
many times.  I have risen
many times.  I never knew
a vain disguise that was
so powerful.  A world wide
lie.


both written works by Kenneth Towler, Downtown LA.  He does this for tips.  He hand selected poems to give to me and a friend--I received "The Lie."
Freedom Fight he wrote right in front of us. 

Just thought I'd share some bits of loveliness going on in DTLA.  

Habit energies & fear, yippee!

Fantasizing about a rectangle when looking at 5 free floating squares of different sizes again, are we?

I have a habit of gathering unrelated phenomena into some form and drawing conclusions--a very common mental process, actually.  Useful, and required for some (not all) forms of logical thought...
The issue is when labels are introduced from thousands upon tragillions of vantage points. Mixed, and are mingling in (practically) different languages in the public sphere.

*Labels = preliminary judgments from a single vantage point.

Excerpts from Voices of Freedom by H.W. Dresser (+ added ideas & discussion):

"Consider for a moment the habits of life into which we are born.  There are certain social conventions or customs . . . a theological bias, a general view of the world [universe].  There are [rigid] ideas in regard to our early training, our education, marriage, and occupation in life."
How we learn to label things, ideas, and ourselves--automatic judgments that constrict our views.


Now for a grounding exercise, playing with vantage points...  Empathize, see through eyes of a stranger.  The specific sights, smells, winds, physical sensations, mind-states, and pressures felt by the person.  Lay out your immediate visual environment as if you were that driver in the car who nearly ran you down in the crosswalk.
^^^ An experiment with empathy ^^^

The (not-entirely-necessary) stories we hold onto about our lives (present and past, any way we try to conceive of it) commonly contain a huge list of anticipations: growing old, losing faculties, diseases, and the chocolate on the grasshopper: DEATH.  Fear of death, that is. 

 "A list of fears dreads, worriments, anxieties, anticipations, expectations, pessimisms, morbidities, and the whole ghostly train of fateful shapes which our fellow men especially physicians are ready to help us conjured up."

This immense pile of Fear is swelled by an unpredictable, foreign nature of the external world.  The sense of I , me, myself  VS. everyonefuckingelse.

But here's the thing:  we are all part of this environment.  I'm no more real than you, no?  Need I quote Tyler Durden's steaming pile of shit motivational speech....  I won't. (If you haven't seen Fight Club, well, I can't help you, Netflix, or I suppose Blockbuster, can).

This leads us to....the nameless dreads...
Henry Wood (Varieties of Religious Experience) describes a person suffering from The Nameless Dreads:     "The Man has fear stamped on him; he is reared in fear . . . all his life is passed in bondage to fear of disease and death . . . his whole mentality becomes cramped, limited and depressed, and his body follows its shrunken pattern and specification."

Fear in the brain puts the body in a state of chronic alarm.  The muscles take their shapes accordingly: shoulders tense and high, spine hunched, neck protruding forward (or something like that).  The body grows accustomed to this state, and begins exhibiting more reactive (vs. active, general) behaviors in response to external stimuli. 

The thoughts and ideas that go on in our heads prompt our bodies to twist and morph.  Fear-bearers, habitually pulsing with fear and quick on the defense, are more prone to seek out these familiar, cozy states of alarm, consciously and unconsciously (recreating trauma from the past in order to move past it).  The more practice the brain and body get at this energy, the easier it is for the nameless dreads to quietly lay roots.

Rick Perry: notice the hunched shoulders, forward neck--alarm pose.  This is an unrelated jab--I disagree with Rick Perry's political values.

"How can an idea, an ephemeral nothing, gnaw at my stomach and constrict my chest?"
"Polarizing and magnetizing us at they do--we turn towards them and from them, we seek them, hold them, hate them, bless them, etc.."  All action verbs.  (All require a do-er--who/what is this entity and is it necessary or limiting to our understanding and perception of the world?)

The real issue is the attachment and subsequent reaction to the crack-monkey brain.  By responding to such intrusive, messy, all-over-the-place, borderline schitzophrenic dialogue in ourselves, we play the game of anxieties, fears--by removing from the present moment.  Not the ideas you hold about the present moment, but _______________. This.  Hello.   

4 Pacmen and algebra alligator mouths, going for the larger sum.

Semi-copy/pasted and inspired by: Time, Space, and the Mind by Irving Oyle

On Seattle, train songs, and wordnature porn.

Seattle, seattle, what a lovely effing place.

People are noticeably passive, I will say.  But there' s authenticity to it.

The Oh Sees, local Seattle band.  I find their sound pretty fun.  (photo: http://sexbeatlondon.com/2010/04/15/sxsw/)

Here's a Seattle experience so far (hopefully more to come):

At Citizen coffee in Lower Queen Anne, real people that work in there--honest.  The cook in the back was pissed because it was so hot and didn't want to be in the kitchen--and she expressed that authentically--something I wouldn't see in an LA cafe where smiles = tips and a chance at a toothpaste commercial or voice-over in the very least (right).  Especially for an attractive woman, (at least I found her rather attractive).

Every restaurant and place of vending I went to, there seemed to be no outward physical obligation to feel a certain way in order to send some message to customers.  That's REAL service.  Acting as a present, authentic human being is necessary in order to treat people as such****

(* this assumes the majority of people in big cities give two shits about treating people like human beings)

That message is unnecessary--and would have been irrelevant to the moment.  At least to how she was authentically feeling--so why is that so masked so often?  Of course, it is possible that the passivity acts as another mask--merely a different expression of the same intention as the robot smile, which of course is influenced by environment/context.

Only tunneled into Kurt Cobain, 90s grunge, or _____ (whatever) instead of the T-mobile chick or happily rich n' malnourished poster-girl or ______ (insert other images, public identities assumed for the day/week/year/present moment). 

There's no use in complaining about people being too passive or too happy or too ____ (fake happy, outgoing, etc) but there is use in examining it.  Moods and flavors of communication happen to be contagious sometimes, and it helps to reign in the ol' Brainerangs (mental pests) every once in a while, right?

Side note: I love how friendly people are in Southern California--happy people, seemingly, but that's different for everyone so who the hell am I to say?! 

Kurt Cobain fetishes?  Absolutely, me included.  Grunge 90s, rain, coffee, trucks with "fweedom" signs on it, dreads, rolling green hills -- count me in.

Although I have a feeling if I spent a lot of time there the environment would affect me just as it has the people that live there.  While there's nothing wrong with keeping to oneself and being emotionally present and passionate (we all go in waves, anyway, a natural phenomena called being alive), that's not entirely comfortable for me in a sense.  I like to reach out to people and strangers, it's just part of my curious cat syndrome, my search for external approval, and depending on how seclusive I'm being from the world around me.

We have the right to crawl into our caves, definitely--and I will, it comes to that sometimes if I don't stop and reconsider my breath on a regular basis.

The little escapes that are so necessary sometimes seek to remind us of our insignificance--our littleness--and the transitory state of everything.

Every city has as song.  And my dear friend that lives in Seattle remarked the song of the trains in the valley that his back porch overlooks.  (The porch overlooks a neighboring hillside of houses with haunted teeny diamond windows and the like and the bay, industrial ports, Tacoma, San Juan islands--fuck, maybe even pieces of Canada).

The train songs, I heard them the morning I crashed on Paul's* (is it okay to say your name if you read this? , lemme know) couch.  A whistle with leaves and ships' horns and water.  Seldom cars on windy roads and the overbearing leaf-drums in trees from the wind.

The postcard unfolded itself like a damn hologram--and I thought of a conversation I had with another dear friend* on a balcony in downtown Los Angeles (same name question above, if you ever read this).  The extreme sensory pleasure I received from all these elements unknown to me in colors so fresh it seemed fucking edited (by ___ jeebus m christ myself?  Allah? Yahweh? FSM? Our own software? V-chips brought to you by Time Warner Cable and Coca Cola? ) gave me the spark that holy shit, THIS is IT.  This is the ultimate fucking lump of art, source of joy, source of connectedness... _____ .

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Insert anything that brings out ultimate joy in you, whatever joy that may be, hell, maybe it's eating babies--not that that is encouraged, but still, be curious and aware about whatever brings you ultimate joy, right?

The exquisite weavings of how the elements all manage to get by--earth, water, air, fire (and any others, I mention 4 for brevity).

The train song accompanies the horns of the ships, the wind leaf drums, and the crows perched on white triangles with square windows, and the evergreens, the pink sunset reflection, and the sunlight sparks on the surface of the water.  All of it.  Can teach us how to get by.  How to live just doing what we do.

The sunlight on the water doesn't move with the waves; rather, the light is a mere spark, barely a firework, more like a teeny strobe.

Nature's hypnosis for people who like to stare at things and go into trance.  :)  A joyous one, at that. 

From which I receive the same high as I do from reading Kurt Cobain's journal and letters between him and Courtney Love.  :)



Indulgently reposted:

"Courtney,

When I say I love you, I am not ashamed, nor will anyone ever ever come close to intimidating, persuading, etc me into thinking otherwise.


I wear you on my sleeve. I spread out wide open with the wing span of a peacock, yet all too often with the attention span of a bullet to the head.

I think its pathetic that the entire world looks upon a person with patience and a calm demeanor as the desired model citizen, yet there’s something to be said about the ability to explain ones self with a toned down, tune deaf tone.

And I will say it: I am what they call the boy who is slow. How I metamorphosised from hyperactive to cement is for the lack of a better knife to the throat hu, annoying, aggrevating, confusing as dense as cement.

Cement holds no other mineral. You can’t even find fools gold in it. Its strictly man made and youve taught me it’s ok to be a man and in the classic mans world

I parade you around proudly like the ring on my finger which also holds no mineral.

Love Kurt"

(copy and pasted from http://heatherfink.blogspot.com/2009/12/love-letter-from-kurt-cobain-to.html)