Couch Surfing at 70

In the company of rattlesnakes and scorpions, roadrunners and morning doves, I fell out of last night’s dream and went chasing after my dad, so we could have one of the 10,000 talks we missed. “There’s something warm about the rain.” — The Jesus and Mary Chain, ‘About You.’

Back when my mother was living in a lovely little cottage, senior housing in the town of Harwichport, Massachusetts on Cape Cod, she told me once that there were months when she had to choose between heat and food. A life on Social Security. I should have slammed my whole being’s brakes on then and…

It is said, upon waking for the day the Buddha would sit in his morning meditation practice. He would then take his bowl and walk into town and beg for food. Most often rice. So sustained, he would spend all the rest of the day teaching. I am most fond of that image. It resonates…

This morning I felt the feeling I was reading the specific, exact pages which have been waiting for me to read them this very day for 75 plus years. The feeling was clear. Here’s a quote from what I read, though this particular passage didn’t, of itself, bring me to that wonder of something like,…

“Being dazzled signifies a state of wonder and admiration, where one is captivated by the brilliance or beauty of something remarkable, leading to a heightened sense of appreciation and awe.” I fell into this definition of the word “dazzled” sometime late Sunday morning, having experienced feelings and a psychic state earlier, in which the only…

Ann and I drove into Joshua Tree National Park at 4:30 in the morning last Monday. Our hope was to swoon under a symphony of milky way inspired stars, and sit quietly for what could be a moving and spectacular and colorfully gracious sunrise. Such a strange travel suggestion. As it happened, the earliest of…

Continuing the ongoing riff this week in the Blog about living “an entirely different life,” I read this in a book while drinking coffee this morning: “Trapped within currents of change, we are compelled to attempt more and more with ever lessening time.” – ‘Dongshan’s Five Ranks, Keys to Enlightenment.’ There’s some of that in…

Yesterday in the Blog I wrote about spending time in Joshua Tree wondering about being and becoming entirely different. Esoteric? A specific is this: How to never prepare what I am going to say. Never, under any circumstance — What I’m going to say at a meeting Saturday; what I’m going to say at the…

I spent nearly four days in Joshua Tree, CA, with Ann and the kids, and ventured (was transported by others) four times into its National Park. They got a lot of cool rocks there. There is something ‘other’ about the milieu of that space – in and out of the park. I spent a fair…

“Oh do you have time to linger for just a little while out of your busy and very important day for the goldfinches that have gathered in a field of thistles…” — Mary Oliver ” I hear faintly the cawing of a crow far, far away, echoing from some unseen woodside….What a delicious sound! It…

I am being carried away to a place without access tomorrow. My goofy words and notions here at couchsurfingat70 will return Tuesday.

It wouldn’t be accurate to say I’ve begun my next book. Like “It’s Like This”, the next one – either a single story or two, both mysteries – has been hanging out in the corners of my mind a long time. I’ve come home to visit these past few days. Backpacking the stretched-out wonder and…

I remember a summer day, it was either late in the afternoon or early in the evening, and it would have surely been 1968. I walked the very short walk up to Butchie Davidson’s house. He took me into his bedroom, and on whatever turntable thing he had set up, placed an album over the…

I did not go to work at the library yesterday, Briana called out sick. I lost that money. I did have a book sale on Amazon, for which I will receive $4.45 sometime a month or so from now. I went out to coffee with Ann, and we had a nice walk from the coffee…

The Beach Boys have a wonderful song by that name, and it’s filled with a soul the Beach Boys probably never get credited with. It’s also how I’ve been, reflecting deep within, since 25 copies of “It’s Like This” showed up in a box outside the apartment door just over a week ago. If you…

“I can blast it to you.” – Mistaken lyric from the Beatles “Birthday.” (“Happy birthday to you.”) Wondering, how to blast it while tip-toeing? And how to tip-toe while blasting it? “Huh?”

I found myself reading the beginning of the stories in “It’s Like This” earlier, when I would normally be reading something more directly falling within the realm of Zen material. It was a sudden urge, how do these get going, and I read through 13 of the 15, the final pair unread taking into consideration…

In deference to my finances, I must give everything to the marketing and sale of my new book, “It’s Like This”, and to every piece of my art. The greatness of this good news is that in the giving of everything to the book and the art, I move closer to the work I am…

I think it was while writing my Morning Pages the movie “What We Do in Shadows” slipped through my head. I was writing about the new book, and promoting the new book and marketing the new book and hustling the new book, but there is nary a single vampire to be found in the new…

Most often when walking home from the Spruce Street suspension bridge I notice a hummingbird on one of the electric company wires above me to my left, canyon-side of Front Street. When I told Sarah Roshi I felt any hummingbird was there to fill me with joy, she said perhaps I was there to delight…

Twenty-five copies of my new book – “It’s Like This” – arrived in San Diego yesterday. I took a picture of one on my phone and texted it to Gavin in Oakland. He almost immediately sent back a wildly joyous response, which included the title of this post – “All the punks are crying now.”…

I don’t know if I’d call it reflecting – I’ve been strolling through these past 75 years maybe more than usual lately. Sometime with reason, sometime just because. Often back to the town I grew up in, “growing up” both beginning to learn some stuff and the pages of a calendar flipping again, and again.…

When I swung my legs off the bed and touched my feet to the floor this morning, there I was with 41 years since my last drink of alcohol and the last use of any of those drugs. Writing my Morning Pages, all kinds of stops along the way – even before April 15, 1983,…

Isn’t it kinder to just talk about yellow flowers blooming in San Diego? In “Yellow Submarine” it was a “Sea of Green.” In green San Diego (all the rain) it’s a sea of yellow. Whether I’m alone or with people, there’s still the yellow. Here in the Blog through this week I’ve been wondering out…

When I was a kid I used to fish in Mill Pond in my hometown of Wareham, Massachusetts. The little side of the pond, as Route 28 sliced one part from another. The big side of the pond, north, went on maybe miles, and I fished there a lot, catching a few bigger fish, and…

I’m thinking of going online, seeking out and scoring a large vat of Brylcreem, and starting to get serious. “I was talking when I should have been listening.” Husker Du – “What’s Going On (Inside My Head)?” The idea of listening and not speaking is tangled up with the things I noted yesterday – How…

I had an interesting conversation last night. It was with myself, and took place on the drive home from Ocean Beach to the street which divides Banker’s Hill and Hillcrest – the street where we live. Some particular things had occurred a little earlier, which got me talking with me, a more spacious than these…

It’s like offering a tour of Jack London Square, and when a crowd gathers, laughing, and saying, “That’s the tour.”

The first drops of Friday rain sparkle through my head, left ear, vast listening, coffee-ending, having recently read, “Things are not as they seem, nor are they otherwise.” For the first time in nine months (living here) I can feel a stirring of air, breeze cousin, me in the lop-sided recliner, the most gentle air…

There’s a story behind The Righteous Brothers song “Little Latin Lupe Lu”. Let’s just take a peak – Little Latin Lupe Lu (“Lupe”) was written by 19-year-old Bill Medley when he and Bobby Hatfield were in a five-piece band called The Paramours. It’s about a girl he dated at Santa Ana High School in California…

The first line in my now published newest book is this – “You think you know how it goes.” My eleventh book – “It’s Like This” – is a collection of short stories, many among the favorites of words I’ve hung together through this life. Me with a strong sense for years and years now…

Walking under a big, big sky.

It’s Sunday night, 7:43 PST, and this is a jump on the Monday post. The one you’re reading when and where it belongs – Monday. I’m looking at the open windows at the top of the monitor screen. Left to right: Buddy Cushman – Art for Sale, fineartamerica; Buddy Cushman – Creating writings and drawings…

This is one of those mornings.

I feel like pretty much everything I can think of saying here this morning, hopefully worthy of your attention, I’ve already said recently. Age stuff and struggling artist stuff and book/writing stuff and life in this big city. A few facts are – I’m missing two of the next three days of work – a…

This morning, rather spontaneously, I changed the name of my soon-to-be-published book. My new and newest book. A “possible” book – the way Pink Floyd sings about “Your possible pasts” – which has hung out and lingered, rushed from the shadows and slipped back in, a long, long time. Yet now, with the possible help…

In about three and a half hours I’ll be off to Ocean Beach and the People’s Food Coop, where I’ll work a bit under four hours supporting a young woman and her ongoing employment there. Usually, before I leave, I buy three Cara Cara oranges for Ann. She likes them. I gave up oranges about…

“People got the idea that ultimately what mattered was the quality of what you were doing and how much importance you gave to it, regardless of how widespread it became or how many records it sold. ” Lee Ranaldo, Sonic Youth There’s much music I sort of twirled around, and missed, growing up. For instance,…

Borrowed words for the last post of this week. These from a long-ago guy named Ta-Lung Chih-hung: “The breeze brings the voice of the water close to my pillow; the moon carries the shadow of the mountain near to my couch.” Maybe it’s a poet thing.

2024 – In the yesterday library stacks, “straightening”, an art book the kind I’d never really look at speaks to me. I take it home. I’m buying a cheap, used copy a couple of hours later. Perhaps exactly like: 1971 – “Hey. There’s a new Social Welfare major. You should try it.” Salem (State College).…

I staked out my place on the outskirts of town in the Oakland Koan group last night, and woke this morning thinking remaining silent would have been better. At least, way less wordy. In a section of a Dongshan poem I have written down are the lines, “Conceal your practice, function in secret, seem for…

Monday was a day speckled with wonders and generosities, nature, sparkly clean windows, graces and graces and graces. And a breathtaking after-the-meditation sunset over the Pacific, caught sideways searching for parking, and flat-out bedazzling seen through the rear-view climbing the hill of the 8 away from the beach. Even then, the sense of having missed…

‘It’s a beautiful morning. I think I’ll go outside for a while – and just smile.’

I’m feeling rather ancient this morning. Once I could climb Mount Monadnock with ease. Once I could run nine miles Friday afternoons. Once my body worked the way bodies work in fairy tales and the movies. Once I would wake at 3am, desparate for another life. Once I had a dog and we ran through…

It’s Ann’s birthday. I have presents. Shopping for presents is pretty great. The folk singer Melanie had a line in one of her songs, “Why can’t it be Christmas the whole year through?” For me, giving it all over to what will make someone else happy is just that invitation. I remember, and it was…

I have adopted the persona of struggling artist. I think I’ve rescued it. Like how kind souls rescue dogs and cats from a shelter. I’ve shown up to point – “That one.” – and brought it home. Like Van Gogh, giving all of himself to this calling and you sell two paintings in 30 years.…

I recently watched a three-part documentary of The Jefferson Airplane on YouTube. When I was much younger I took white masking tape and tore and stuck the words “Jefferson Airplane Loves You” on the wall of my bedroom, opposite the bed. “Jefferson Airplane Loves You” was a thing back then, the mid-sixties. A slogan. An…

I went to bed last night and woke this morning entirely discombobulated. Which feels like a rather gentle way to say it. I’m closer to a place with Laura Nyro, who sang, “Last call for the poverty train.” And further, this line from a Zen Koan – “I have a way to bless this poverty.”…

I woke this day troubled. This Friday, March 2024. I was born in January 1949. It’s a long way to troubled. The 10,000th dance to get going. Every time I danced, closer. James Brown – “Get up offa that thing and dance ’til you feel better.” The Church of the Good Shepherd basement dance lessons.…

I’m feeling a bit dismayed with the ‘struggling artist’ thing, and also wildly encouraged. Both those feelings – it feels right – resting comfortably together. ‘Struggling artist’ offers such a wide array of personal views. Trust me. Struggling to paint, struggling to doodle, struggling to market and sell, struggling to easy does it, to be…

I’m drinking two large cups of rich coffee in the (yesterday) afternoon. I know I need to call a friend in Massachusetts – Steve T. I’ve arranged as art on the counter three large cara cara oranges I bought for Ann at the People’s Co-op. My first post-work book invitation is “Nine-Headed Dragon River” by…

I found myself talking about my divorce last night in the meditation meeting. In response to the leader’s story of a recent break-up. Shortly after hearing the word ‘divorce’ a morning almost three years ago, I wandered out into that day’s sunshine on Portland streets, my walking aimlessly view streaked with tears, and after a…

I spent a bunch of time the past two days revitalizing and energizing an online artist website I had joined for free in 2013. Maybe you know, maybe you don’t, I’ve begun painting again after a substantial lay-off related for the most part to my April ’21 divorce in Portland and the subsequent lack of…

Sometimes in the earlyness, sitting in the lop-sided recliner drinking coffee and reading Zen materials, I hear someone on the kitchen floor, practicing yoga, singing along to tiny headphones in the joyous voice of a little kid. It sounds like praying.

Through and within what I’ll refer to as “my practice”, I have been spending a fair amount of time these last few weeks, six or seven, thinking about my life – self and soul, inclinations and fact-of-the-matter history, hows and whens and whys of the way I am. This process, this path taken, has been…