post removed

folks,
i decided to remove the kit post from the other day. thank you for all the comments!
-p

She Wears The Pants

[This tale of post-apocalyptic Romance is quickly becoming our own "Summer Babe", i.e. the most-oft requested tune in our ouvre. And by oft-requested, I mean one time.]

[VERSE 1]
She... she wears the pants
And I've got the books
She's my escort on a long and dangerous trip across the land

And she... she's got a spear
And I've got some poems
She defends the finest things she doesn't even understand

[CHORUS]
And she don't know a thing I say to her
But she feels my horizon inside
Cuz its the fate... of a new world.

[VERSE 2]
So we... came to a creek
Defended by trolls
Willingly illiterate, and dripping in the finest of gold

So she... she summoned the wind
And put me in a hole
Tore down a tree, and beat them limb from limb

[CHORUS]

[VERSE 3]
So we... came to a town
Burned to the ground
By international celebrity trolls and circuit clowns

But she... she baked us some bread
And I fashioned a guitar
Out of planks and thread, and we sang to the moon until we bled

[CHORUS]

THIS is New Age Design

Egads. And hey, if you want cutting-edge, check out the masters.

The Temptation of Narcissism

From Narcissists in Positions of Authority:

Being in a position of authority secures the uninterrupted flow of Narcissistic Supply. Fed by the awe, fear, subordination, admiration, adoration and obedience of his underlings, parish, students, or patients -- the narcissist thrives in such circumstances. The narcissist aspires to acquire authority by any means available to him. He may achieve this by making use of some outstanding traits or skills such as his intelligence, or through an asymmetry built into a relationship.

One has to sympathisize with the call of narcissism. My personal perspective is certainly the most convenient and efficient one I own. It is forever tempting to reduce the world to the definitions I give to it, to the straightjackets I fit upon it, to the narratives I discern within its chaotic maw. We all aspire to narcissistic power, however subtle that call may be (yes, I say that narcisstically-- since I aspire to the call, then all people must), to have an entire social system revolve around the Sun Me, to have asteroids crashing into each other and comets migrating across vast distances and climax forests growing up to process and eat my rays -- such is the temptation of every sentient being, to find Ultimate Safety and Ultimate Security and Ultimate Satisfication in a realm with boundless love for me.

Or at least my blog.

Technorati Tags: narcissism

That's So Postmodern!

She took a photo of me sitting at her desk by her computer,
Then uploaded the photo to her computer
Then took a photo of the photo displayed on her computer
Then emailed the photo to me -- now sitting
at my own desk at my own computer --
to view the photo of the photo of me
at her desk at her computer at my own
desk and my own computer,

which I posted here for you to view on
your computer
at your desk
or living room sofa
or beachside kiosk.

Addenda: On The Mysticism of Coffee

This article, on the Sufi uses of coffee as mystical rite, might prove to be interesting. Two things strike me immediately, however:

1) The sleep-defying character of the coffee addict seems to pierce the veil separating days. If you maintain constant consciousness long enough to bridge the previous day's sunset with the next day's sunrise, the night/day dichotomy appears all the more arbitrary, and the distinction bewteen days losing meaning. In a sense, one steps off the wheel of time (or human at least), replacing the cyclical sunrise/sunset view with the gradualistic perspective of constantcy.

2) Coffee's ability to keep the exhausted wide awake proves its role as zombie-catalyst: those would otherwise be "dead" asleep are kept artificially vivified to accomplish who-knows-what dark work. Yet it doesn't just ground them in typical waking consciousness, for its metabolic-jolt seems to reach beyond the person, in its quest to accomplish, see, and pierce through more than is typically possible.

A Brief and Personal History of the Coffee Bean

"Coffee should be black as hell, strong as death, and sweet as love." --Turkish Proverbs

For someone who claims to be kicking his coffee addiction, I sure do write about it a lot. This morning I penned my 3rd or 4th bean-centered diatribe (to be posted soon), another one of the usual "coffee has occult powers and is using you for non-human ends" screeds. Given that I know very little of the scientific properties of the US's most beloved (un)controlled substance, nor its rich cultural history, I am left with a barbarian "beginner's mind" in my direct confrontation with the potent liquid at inconvenient times. Why this obession? What end might it serve?

When I was little my father's parents lived two hours away and would visit often. I knew the Saturdays when they would hold court in our family's tiny dining room: they were the mornings when I was woken up by the stuttered animation of the percolator brewing up a pot Sanka. With the fevered metallic breathing of a baby Darth Vader, the little pot was a mainstay on days when "Grandpa Coffee Pot" came to visit, and I can only wonder if it was the shake-fuel itself which gave the aging man and his aging wife (my late grandmother) the metabolic focus he needed to entertain four maniacal boys.

In high school breakfast conversations, I soon learned of my father's heartbreaking addition to the nasty sludge, which had given him everything from acid reflux disease to bad gas, and was only partially kept at bay by an ill-fated switch to decaf (hopefully he's trying again). Yet this was nothing I could understand nor empathisize with: my addictions as a peach fuzz mustache-wearing teen remained untapped, and coffee seemed like another silly liquid adults had been duped into selling themselves.

In college I interned at a multimedia company which produced language learning software. My first task? Design a logo for a fictional coffee shop called "Cool Bean", which ended up a beige mug with wavy hair and shades buffetted by green outlines. My superiors thought this an apt homage to their favorite pick-me-up, but again, I failed to understand.

And then came Starbucks.

It began as something of a metropolitan rumor: the corporation whose carpet-bombing campaigns were unlikely to find their way out to the semi-rural communities I commuted through on my way to my first job in a small town in a small-minded county. Kitty-corner coffee shops hawking exotic bean-wares seemed like so many fantastical beasts residing in the massive cityscapes I had yet to visit. Coffee would remain in quiet cans on the back shelves of super markets, and make no more of a fuss than the occasional innuendo-ridden Folgers spot, and then what is it. Starbucks was a fad, and trad at that.

But then something happened to the windows of a certain Seattle storefront in 1999 which changed everything. For Black Bloc anarchists (or their agent provacateur dopplegangers) to risk life and black-clad limb in taking out a few green/white facades hinted at larger issues circling Coffee the Innocent like so many aircraft carriers circumnavigating the Midway Islands. Starbucks, and the super-strong coffee it purveyed, became a lightning rod for 90s-style, Clinton-approved "dumb growth", the unrelenting march of consumer development which would wash past my suburb and a thousand like it, a wave ripping through split-level sand castles at low tide, leaving a thick film of parking lots in its wake.

Soon enough, the inevitable would happen: my hometown would get a Starbucks, pseudo-European cafe-jargon would become the lingua franca of countless mall-grubbing provincials (the very same who would come to pronounce "espresso" as "EXpresso"), and human metabolism would never be the same again.

Think about this: besides soda pop, what access had we tweens, teens, and twenty-somethings to caffiene back in the 1990s? Coffee was a drink for old people, came in fussy pots, and tasted like black death squeezed through the mop-wringer of a midget janitor with syphillis. Yet soon, it became almost commonplace for ten-year-olds to order a grande latte, for 16-year-olds to stop at the local supermarket's coffee stand for a five-dollar frappucino every afternoon, and for whole offices to go up in arms at the prospect of losing their access to the neighborhood pop-n-slop. A whole generation given over to disease-riddled corporate addiction, with which I would have no part.

Until I became a writer.

It started with a Red Eye at an Elmwood Strip hipster hangout, a dark shot of espresso dropped into an even darker mug of house blend. My focus became more accute, my decisions more sure, my kinetics more frenetic. The Laundry Day Poetry Marathon became a common accurance, as I had my T-shirts tumble-drying down the street for two hours as I assaulted a tall pile of yellow legal pads with every memetic lightning bolt I could wrest from the towers of the Caffiene Buzz.

Yet even these sessions were few and far between, until I joined a newspaper founded by a pair of speed freaks. I wouldn't touch meth, but my coffee consumption reached reckless levels as I brought new meaning to the concept of 24-hour Production Day. Yes, like good caff-heads, we waited 'til the last minute to output each issue, trusting in The Bean (and plenty of beer) to open the floodgates of Gonzoid genius with a surging flood of fresh libel for our hungry homegrown readers. 'twas a devious pact indeed.

The evitable collapse of that unsustainable endeavor left me begging Starbucks for a job, and soon enough I too was pulling espresso shots for the hopelessly addicted.
Here the Starbucks Mystery both gained and diminished in power. The suicidal aura of Four Shots to Start the Mornin' became irrestible, yet the sheer banality of preparing once-exotic concoctions for the frivolous middle-class morlocks of Colorado made me question my newfound love for The Bean. If such potent power could be distributed to any and all, why did society continue digging its boring grooves into the plateaus of Dead Time? Where were the manic minions of Sumatra-shivering powerscribes making use of this Pact for the elucidation of hyperbolic pro-Darkness antimatter words cannons? Why did so many seas of coffee bean extract wash ashore of the Mainstream with very little cognitive effect other than a slight increase in Rush Hour agitation and early-morning productivity?


Coffee as Sacrament: A Proposal

The reason caffienated genius fails to materialize is due to the sheer glut of coffee in the first place. When every Tom, Dick, and Harold can purchase a 20-oz throat-burner of Ethiopia-grown arabica excess, the Shaking State becomes something to take for granted, much the way life itself is taken for granted. The cherished augmentation which may have kick-started the Enlightenment has become the average mode of consciousness of modern life, yet it could do with a little of the same temperence which has done wonders for sex, booze, weed, shrooms, and every other Holy Experience which overproduction has rendered beyond the pale of thoughtful consideration, and treated like the Western entheogen it truly is.

Now if it would only let me sleep.

Technorati Tags: coffee writing Starbucks

October in Boulder

On a steel-gray street,
dead leaves crinkle dead
beneath Prius wheels

The stubble of hilltops
basks in a frigid halo;
dogs lick small brown ants

Retiring aspen play
in football team colors,
Coach Fall calls the plays

The "new shoe smell" fades
from scholastic feet walking
on a rhomboid campus

People with budgets are
monitoring the price of gas,
as a bus runs south.

Technorati Tags: poetry haiku Boulder

When Bloggers Become the New Working Class

A few years from now, when weather-weapons become the mundane talk of basic cable talking heads and people in old age homes are getting misty-eyed at the thought of another Patton Oswalt Christmas special, being a blogger will carry all of the cultural currency and nose-to-the-grindstone workaday blandness that janitorial work and data entry bear today. For-profit bloggers will become a stable, taken-for-granted section of the working class, like dock workers or brick layers or school nurses, working an unglamorous, indispensible job so that more fortunate people may focus on the exciting, exotic, and cutting-edge.

"Huh?" you ask.

It's pretty simple: bloggers, in their daily labors, are creating an infrastructure -- albeit very subtle -- of conceptual associations, worn paths between ideas, fragile tendrils between memes, filaments of consciousness tying disparate themes together. Every day brings new connections, and slowly this associative network grows stronger, until one day it becomes a platform for something even bigger to stand on. Just as the atoms composing our floorboards have no idea what creatures they are keeping afloat high above via the power of the static electricity bding them together, we will barely be able to conceive what Beings will live, feed off of, and walk around the conceptual networks we've laid down. Ideas are atoms, blogs and wikis and forums are the molecules, and at some point soon, cells will emerge.

So consider that the next time you sneer at your bland iron-worker Dad before firing up your blogger account: what seems sexy-hip-cool to you today will become the staid beige blah-work future generations will rebel against with the increasingly invisible, arcane technologies awaiting our bodyminds further down the cyberpike.

Technorati Tags: blogging blogs internet

Tunnels in The System of the Self

There's a manic confluence of cultural forces bearing down on me at present which precludes the stating of any coherent viewpoint beyond... wow. I've gone from the Neil Stephenson's Baroque Cycle to Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos to Rise of Nations to the new Animal Collective album to New York City and back again, struggling to find a thread, trying to find a thread...

But, as Will Oldham once sang,

If I could fuck a mountain
Lord, I would fuck a mountain

Indeed, the interconnected immensity of life is something sexual, which Oldham has recognized, a sentiment echoed in NIN's "I Do Not Want This":

I want to know everything
I want to be everywhere
I want to fuck everyone in the world
I want to do something that matters

It's only to take a slightly further step to recognize that the very world as-it-is is our Lover, we are its Lover, we are here to serve and bring it pleasure, to take ours when able... and so much of it comes to us today through media, as though our engagement with the disembodied Sign is the means by which we may touch the growing social body we're evolving up and through. Though we honor our physical bodies, communion with higher truths takes place further within the reaches of the mind, in the capacity to recreate the interior visions of the authors we love within our own domes....

In Hyperion there is an ancient mystery known as the Labyrinths, a network of massive and perfect tunnels existing like a mysterious ancient webwork in nine planets throughout the Hegemony of Man's 100+ inhabited worlds, a system which may or may not have been established by the mysterious TechnoCore, the God-like Artificial Intelligence machines -- spawned by humans -- which are busy throughout the series constructing the Ultimate Intelligence, a meta-being which dines on quasars and treats the billions of human minds throughout the Hegemony as so many neurons, unwitting tools to allow Him/It think His/Its thoughts, process energy, etc.


I'm wondering, now, if these "labyrinths" exist on our human scale as well, manifesting as mysterious "tunnels" within our own bodies, which beguile and flabberghast our constituent cells like so many mice struggling to apprehend the presence of pyramids. Though "tunnels" connotes something negative (literally) in its use of emptiness, this need not be so, in that perhaps it is our network of tunnels which binds us to other humans, in the form of potential causeways for use at some future date to the benefit of our highest potentials. I have empty, useless, huge pathways inside of me, mere ghosts of actual infrastructure, put here by God-knows-who, and in exploring the mystery Me, and seeing equivalent structures in my peers, it as though I wish to turn my body to "align" my tunnels with those of another, and in our coordination of swiss-cheese tunnel currents, a stronger wind may blow through us both/all, gaining in momentum and direction as we seek to stand stock still, cross-conduits of terrible lightspeed gales that we are.

Perhaps it is the aforementioned media which is intuitively produced and sent rushing in to fill these gaps, whistling through us into each other like Pacifico winds through crude cliff-\side eyelets and red rock arches, which leads me to ask two questions: 1) do our bodies contain mysterious structures for the facilitation of future media forms (artworks of another planet), and 2) what would happen if we refused to channel our cultural products? If we stopped writing, reading, consuming, listening, playing... would the gaps in our internal labyrinths be filled by something else? Or is the feeling of cold air rushing through dead spaces, pointless holes and meaningless tributaries, the actual intended condition?

I don't know.

Technorati Tags: Will Oldham NIN Hyperion

Andrew Cohen's Students Launch a Blog!

Along with a completely redesigned website for the controversial guru, the What is Enlightenment? people have launched a blog by Cohen's own students. Check out Notes from the Revolution. Will it serve as an authentic rebuttal to the anti-Cohen blog What Enlightenment??!, or just another slick, very well-designed PR vehicle? ;) We'll see... [Special thanks to Tom H. for the tip].

Technorati Tags: Andrew Cohen spirituality blogging

The Warrior and The Rock Star

As The Warrior you are sensate and brutal-- whole galaxies/eons of violence at your fingertips should you need them, spine suppled and poised, skin warm and firm, gaze alert, heart explosive yet open. Self-denial is your key virtue; you slice through desires like a laser scalpel through liquid aminos, lipids scatter and lazy habits vaporize in the concentrated force-beam of your Higher Desire. You walk slow, you wait... wait... wait... wait... then at last you act. The action is swift, fierce, and sure: the slimmest of margins are negotiated as you apply the perfect pressure to the most vulnerable juncture, your social acupuncture opens the world, global meridians ejaculate with the new energies of liberation which your slightest finger-fall has set in motion with the whisper-flick of an impossibly occluded switch. How you dodge all obstacles, like a ninja bike through the beaches of Normandy, will become the object of legend in the space of millenia, and how you know precisely which targets to hit, and precisely how hard, will fall as fodder into the A.I. minds of the conspiratorial faithful. People have heard of Action-at-a-Distance, but never did they suspect your Analog Telekinesis, the impossible Samurai Blade of your empiricist transcendental materialism. You believe in only the possible and mundane, yet perform the impossible and breathtaking.

As The Rock Star, yours is a Holy Hedonism, a warrior's desperate plunge into the thick of an asteroid battle, taking pleasure as you bounce from rocks, stringing a cascade of weightless booze-laced blood behind you for the groupie-shuttles to lap up with the titanium tongues of their nosecone lips. You are hounded as a celebrity the way moths harass porch lights on jet black campground evenings, and your opinions are given undue weight, as though your attachment to Surface Flash was much-coveted passport to the secret knowledge of the World beneath the World. Yet plunge you do beneath the surfaces with each and every performance, losing yourself in chord changes and elastic harmonic structures, swinging ceremonial weapons of wood-and-wire across the rainbow-lit altars of throng-choked artillary bunkers given the names of beer commercials and commerce. Riffs ratchet social rejects into the heavens of heavy-chugging bassline drumcore feedback, the imagination balloons like a pig-stuffed viper in the rib cage containment column as it rises to join the rhythym clusters swinging like birds from the rafters, harbingers of the Sonic Suction of a galaxy collapsing in on itself and the ringing ears of a solar system which smoked its first joint and received its first blowjob in the nethers of a sweat-heaving crowd of Fans of the Universe.

[God damn I've been reading too much Hyperion.]

Technorati Tags: Dan Simmons Hyperion rock

Peep my Del.icio.us links!

New to this blog: publically-shared bookmarks. Anticipate my blog posts before I write them as I bookmark/blaze my way through cyberspace.

Underneath the Paving Stones... The Blog!

The Situationists employed an army of cute non-sequitors in their near-overthrow of the French government in May of 1968. One of the more memorable of these -- "Under the paving stones, the beach!" -- was a nod to the almighty power of the imagination for transforming every day life (the Society of the Spectacle, as they called it) into something more passionate, liberating, and, well, downright sexy. Given that many of the Situs were writers themselves, one wonders what fun they'd use the blogosphere for today. Combine that with their profound sense of place, exemplified by the process of psychogeography (their own spontaneous form of walking meditation, as it were), and today's practice of metroblogging, and you have... something.

Now, with Yahoo! on the verge of granting bloggers equal status with journalists, the practice of blogging itself is beginning to fall to the reality principle which dominates much of the mainstream media (save The Onion and a few other oddball print rags), and blogs are becoming, well, boring, meaning just as institutionalized, conventional, and fact-oriented as your average AP story on Chinese rocket launches. Blogs, in an official sense at least, have become mere reflectors (albeit skewed) of reality, rather than authors of it.

Yet, with the dream of free municipal wireless nearing actualization every day, it will not be long before the textures of Internet and meatspace begin to intersect in ways we never thought possible a decade ago. The Internet will become an author of the everyday, physical world, as powerful as city streets and lighting fixtures, and bloggers, long the holders of cyber-emancipation, are in position to hold a major influence over this envelopement.

Therefore, we propose a new form of metroblog, a regionally-focused organ of creation, where everyday realities are not only reflected and reported on to those sitting smack dab in the middle of them (i.e. the average laptop owner sipping a coffee in the local commons during his lunch break), but synthesized, remixed, mutated, and conjured in an orgy of postconventional perspectives, the Globe-Amoeba's view of its dynamic innards. Drop me a line if you're interested (a handful of you have already expressed interest), and stay tuned....

Technorati Tags: blogging Yahoo! internet Situationists

Towards a Geographic Big Mind

Zen master Genpo Roshi's Big Mind process has become something of a sensation amongst the integral scene here in Boulder, for good reason. Unlike the traditional "narrow" paths of certain meditation schools, which focus on a bull-headed, laser-pointed pursuit of satori, Big Mind is devoted to exploring all of the minds, personalities, forms of consciousness, etc. which are part of one's 10,000 minds (and if you don't think you have 10,000, try staring at a blank wall for 10 minutes without thinking).

Using a voice dialog process, Big Mind facilitators engage groups in sessions lasting 2+ hours, having them look at the many facets of their minds. The Controller figures big, as it is a voice which allows the facilitator access to all of the other voices. If the facilitator wishes to speak to, say, my Desire voice, the Controller must be honored and petitioned first. What's interesting is that, each time a new voice is brought on stage, participants are asked to shift in their seating position. We actors might take it a step further: shifting in voice, mannerism, accent, etc.

During a session yesterday, we spoke as several voices: The Controller, Apathy, Anger, and Desire. All of these, besides the Controller, have "enlightened" versions of themselves as well: Apathy becomes Equanimity, Anger becomes Warriorship, Desire becomes The Lover, and so on. In flipping the egocentric versions into their more trans-egoic counterparts, we engage in a process of transmutation, using the energy of what appear to be very selfish emotions to inhabit far more useful mindsets (to a sufferring world in need of them at least). The Selfish Sentient Being becomes a Hero, just by examining the capacities of his own mind. [Note: most powerful for me was the switch from Anger to Warriorship, both of which share an intense motivation for action.]

Now then, let's take this a step further. First, let's assume that folks like Howard Bloom and Andrew P. Smith are correct in suspecting that at some point in the near future, the entire planet itself will become a sentient being, utilizing its oceans, ecosystems, civilizations, and infrastructures much the way an amoeba makes use of its organelles. Second, let us pretend for a moment, as I once did, that it is cities which serve as the loci of energy and focus within this global superorganism.

Could these cities also be viewed as "minds" in the Big Mind process? Could one identify with the global superorganism, and then inhabit and speak as its many minds? Could a skilled facilitator draw from you the Voice of New York City? The Voice of New Orleans? The Voice of Boulder? The Voice of Timbuktu? The Voice of Iran? The Voice of China? And would each of these bring its own capacities, intelligences, and ultimately, enlightened counterparts?

Can you feel the part of you that is America? Australia? Swaziland? Nova Scotia? Great Britain? The Moon?

Technorati Tags: Big Mind integral New York City New Orleans

New Orleans' Own Rodney King?

I'm curious to see how this one develops, if it does... imagine returning to your 'cane-ravaged neighborhood, only to get beaten down by three officers for no discernible reason whatsoever. Maybe clusters of white cops are hurricanes, who grow fearsome in the Southern heat and attack for no reason.

Technorati Tags: New Orleans Robert Davis

The "Integral Salons" Blog Meme Continues

Pashmina continues where Dan and I left off. She takes particular issue with my preference for one-time gatherings, which she responds to here:

If all we had were these one-time events, I feel that we would lack the intimacy of challenging each other. Every encounter between us would be a flurry of greetings and kisses in the air, with beautiful states of creativity and a smattering of small jabs here and there. There's got to be a deeper commitment to each other, a stretch for each of us, and an endeavor to sustain the connections between us. We grow to learn who we are chiefly through contact with others.

Anyone else want to take this one up as well? Coolmel? Matthew? TG? Had a good/great/horrible salon experience? Got some hard-won advice, some well-travelled injunctions? Share!

Technorati Tags: integral salons Ken Wilber

A Day Amongst the Infrastructure

Tomorrow is a travel day for this blogger, and I am looking forward to my entrance into the vast organelles of our Earth-amoeba. Dodging vacuoles, marvelling at cholorplasts, I plan to jet through the cytoplasm of the U.S. via microtubules, landing in a few hours time at the center of the cogni-nucleus, Mr. New York City (that's right, a return!). Shuttle buses, highways, airports, the atmosphere, more airports, more shuttles and highways and trams and trollies and sidewalks and etcetera: was any of this here 100 years ago? I think not.

Whorecull wrote a rave-tastic post the other day about the pioneering efforts we bloggers are making in the exploration of new realities, at least until the crypto-corpies and pentagonal control droids spoil the fun. Cull:

Every spare moment we're at it, positing alternative realities and visions of a better future by night while working as wage slaves in the day. This inquiry is directed mostly at the webmasters and the bloggers, but it is relevant to where they connect with those who make art or play and perform music, or promote these and other artforms, in their own micro scenes, content to cultivate not accumulate.

Cultivate, not accumulate. What if every city adopted this as their motto, what if every citizen deemed themselves a blogger working in the mediums of poured cement, carpool lanes, and monorails? What if building one's own private infrastructure, part of a web criss-crossing the planet of everyone else's infrastructure, was as cheap as owning a cell phone or calling collect? What if, what if.

And so I travel, joining the jet set within the empire of signs, returning to the city from which one never leaves (as I've speculated before, fractally-speaking, NYC is bigger than the rest of the United States combined, and to flip the old adage: there are a million naked cities in this one big story.) And the links and URLs and tags I've linked and accumulated and grown and farmed travel with me, yet ever they stay the same, a permanent habit in the Earth amoeba's cortex. And here I am, a mighty blood cell in need of too much coffee, young in years and dressed in jeans, surveying the surface of the (inter)national brainscape from the comfort of my free winged Blogger account, capsizing the old ways of thinking linearly with my jumbled to/fro Rise of Nations adage-spazz across the interior continent, never to be more blissed out again in quite the same way, yet spinning off para-galaxies and rugged cogni-lifeforms like a Cambrian Chain-Reactor whips out new strains of Jurassic coral.

Spitting in the oceans, drinking liquid fuel as it runs off the gangplanks of the whorl-D, webbing like a New Tide diving into the cess pools of the tired minds writhing for the stimulating tongue of the divine transit-wind, I creak my neck back to take in the vast skyscrapers which exist within and in me, my liver and my heart and my lung and my bones joyfully nailing themselves to the cross of the world as it sinks and I float...

See you soon.

Technorati Tags: New York City travel

Rednecks Are About to Get Redder

Introducing "Star Wars" NASCAR, the next level of motorsports, wherein logo-festooned rocket planes will tear through the atmosphere to the delight of millions of levitating rocket-fans. And we all know what happens in the upper atmosphere, where the ozone layer gets thinner: skin burns quicker, and farmer tans become even worse. And no longer may NASCAR fans claim "country" status. Imagine that: space is conquered not by the urban and tech-savvy, but by tractor drivers and moonshiners. God help us.

Andrew Cohen: The Mustache That Roared

Despite the presence of the What Enlightenment? blog, not to mention David Deida's hilarious send-up of the controversial guru, I couldn't help liking Andrew Cohen after a public discussion he had with Ken Wilber in Denver the other day. True, his message may be simplistic, his speaking style lacking in some much-needed humor, and he may play drums in a jam band, but he's one post-New Age guru we'd do well to acknowledge, and I'm not just saying this because he employs some of the best graphic designers in the integral/spiritual marketplace, not counting this dude.

Contra all the New Age spin of "being here now" and "seeking bliss" and "wanting to feel good" and all the rest, Cohen champions a more heroic version of spirituality: that of the man or woman placed in a precarious situation who does what they must, i.e. rescuers on a sinking ship, or the 9/11 firemen. Over and over during the talk, he kept repeating the fact that "we don't have time to 'be here now'", that the self-indulgent whinging of countless affluent Western "seekers" was a luxury one should no indulge in a world with far too many poor and underpriveleged, and that, rather than the physical posture of meditation, it's the meditative intent and attitude which really counts, the "stance of non-relativity" to the world, as he put it.

Though he seems often short on practical, day-to-day advice and actual injunctions (one hopes he pricey seminars bear those out), Andew Cohen is a powerful voice for the emerging "evolutionary spirituality" movement, which both honors a "being with" the past as most mystical paths do, but places even more stress on being open to one's role as an agent of the future. To Cohen, what we call "God" is no longer a Man in the Sky, or a Personal Friend, but the creative principle of the universe as it acts through our every action. It is therefore imperative that we examine our every impulse, to take the meditative stance to every urge that arises, and ask: is this serving the Universe?

Which reminds me, it's a about time I ask myself that question re: this blog....

Technorati Tags: Andrew Cohen enlightenment meditation evolution

Autumn Has Come to Boulder

... with the typical Colorado whimper. Gone are the shocking chlorophyll death-explosions of my Upstate New York youth: the golds, reds, violets -- all of it shimmering and violent as it falls like firework ash to the fetid mass grave composts of Adirondack's forest floor. Here we have a two week window of leaves going slightly yellow, like kale left in the fridge a week too long, before acquiescing to winter's gravity with all the drama of a junior Democrat senator letting another GOP-penned energy bill slip through his milktoast gaze. You would think a state with such dramatic mountain vistas would do something about this sad state of fall foliage, but thus far, the Forest Service has kept its Autumnal Enhancement Sprayment in storage, refusing to improve our arboreal aesthetics.

Every leaf should be like a miniature Dylan Thomas, raging against the dying of the sunlight which once lit the green donuts limning its cellular walls, shooting arrows and running blockades and tripping up galiant Knights and slaughtering horses -- enough of this weak kneeling and polite branch-departing! Leaves are not meant to accrue in the softened corners of a languid creek, nor feather like snowflakes on a flat Denver roofline: leaves are meant for piling up in huge pyres of death and weird beetles, for lighting afire with lawnmower gas and Aim-n-Flames, for stuffing massive horror-manniquns with. To children, leaves are weapons, architectural materials, and objects of semi-symmetrical glory, crumbling and exposing ribs and letting themselves be traced in jagged shapes, or pressed flat between wax paper and hung around peer pressurized 6th-grade classrooms like the African animal heads in Roosevelt's war room.

And don't even get me started on the CO's pathetic snowfall.

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Grassroots Katrina Relief!

Don't trust the Red Cross? Mayfirst.org offers a list of organizations to lend assistance to. (I'll keep this posted on top for a few weeks).

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