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Calling all mind-stretching exercises. Tommy – can you hear me? I cannot say I have never been ingenious, there have been here and there ventures into interesting-ness and even vivid story-telling – that being the forever and always goal, tell me a good story, Brah, I need it. Yes, he said and pulled himself up…

I finished the “Exegesis” this morning. (Philip K Dick). It left with the idea of ‘Contemplation’, the forever way to enter the ‘Mysteries’ is through contemplation. Yesterday the word was ‘Compassion’. The week before, ‘Play’. How long did it take me to read the book, I couldn’t say what day I began, though I feel…

You may have heard this expression before – “There but for the grace of God go I.” It feels worth talking about a bit today. Do what you will as far as the “God” thing. It barely matters, I think, how that is envisioned, you could say ‘dolled up’. For me it just as well…

4/11 I woke dizzy this morning – quite dizzy. Trouble walking in a straight line, the listing-like travel of a rowboat on choppy water. Back, forth. Of course I am hoping this is not Covid related. That would suck. While I do not remember reading dizziness as one of the initial indicators of the virus,…

4/9 104,505 – Let me speak here, later on in the day and after ingesting a sleeping pill, of my hopes and wishes for the immediate future. Primary among them is the re-charge for ongoing moment-to-moment positive thinking and here I extend to the clarity of positive expectations. And beyond, the clarity of allowing the…

I find myself waking up in the middle of the night and going to the bathroom to wash my hands. Then washing them. There has been no activity other than sleep since the last hand washing. Perhaps this is a sign of the new world order. A new world order. Out on a walk yesterday…

I had the crystal clear idea, up in the recliner, that to truly live today – experience a life in all its fullness and richness and joyishness and warmth and acknowledgement and, for sure, tenderness, I have to do my very best and pull back and see under the cover of the day. The what…

My wife has sat two teddy bears in the living room window. They are low, on the top of the couch – sisters, brother and sister, brothers? – and not that we get much foot traffic passing by on our residential street, them being low and not so obviously seen. No – it is the…

I have already been in contact with folks from California, New Jersey, and Massachusetts today, and it is only 9:30 in the morning. My friend and spiritual advisor in California has prophesied a “new world order” coming out of all of this, all this time of virus, some type of higher plane of compassion and,…

Just re-read my Spenser Subway story from a couple of days ago, people have mentioned it has a good flow and a good mix of humor and serious dread. That makes me happy. I feel like I “got it”, and I also remember it was written within a 22:59 timed writing exercise, so as in…

I was on the phone with my boy Gavin this morning, me in self-imposed isolation up here in Portland, OR, him down there in Oakland, CA, pretty much under government commandment via Alameda County to stay at home, fool. Actually the seven California counties ordering folks in did not add the “fool” part, even if…

Book One Once upon a time a man named Nevin Ruins sat behind a nice, wood desk and spoke while the cameras were rolling. He said things like “This is a great time to go out with friends.” And “This is a great time to go to your favorite restaurant.” He said “great” a lot.…

You couldn’t have asked for a better day. I’d been crashing at my friend Gabe Zimmerman’s apartment in Noe Valley in San Francisco, looking for work and possibly a new life out west here, and Gabe said he had a friend in Santa Cruz and let’s tool down there for the weekend, I will for…

I flashed this morning on a scene from sometime in the late fall of 1963. It must have been raining, we were wet and cold, and now we were all back in the steamy hot locker room. The freshman football team. Last game, last practice – I don’t remember. The coach, I’ll hold on his…

Say it’s late June in 1962. School is out for the summer and Donnie Sisson and I have pushed through the cat n’ nine tails behind and beside the A&P, hauled ourselves up over the berm supporting the railroad tracks and walked down through a few more reeds and on soggy, oily muck to the…

(From the Writing Group) My baseball season will be different this year. Quite a different experience I suspect. Back before the 2019 season I got the idea to try and pay good attention to the fortunes of five teams. These teams – Boston Red Sox, Oakland Athletics, San Diego Padres, Los Angeles Angels, and Philadelphia…

And in the spring of 1975 I found myself one of the final workers closing up a short-term funded runaway house on the north shore of Massachusetts. I’d been there since Rasta House opened some 15 months previously, but there was only so much money in a federal grant divided among a number of municipalities…

My first cross-country bus ride did not travel all the way across the country. Just most of it – Phoenix, Arizona to Boston. Good old Greyhound, I’ll tell you I must have earned an honorary golden ticket or my face on a plaque at corporation headquarters, for all the miles I logged with that sleek…

I think when it gets to Wednesday I’m going to start living louder. Living bigger. Get out more and see more – big, wide attention. With all the time I have left. It’s still later in February, the 24th, stretched out this week the rare leap year, and the streets of Portland are decorated in…

“‘The Idiot’ and ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ were our favorite books then, because those books dealt with heroes who were constantly rushing up to each other and looking in each other’s eyes and asking about each other’s souls and getting into big conspiracies or crimes or emotional climaxes together.” – Allen Ginsberg, “The Best Minds of…

I feel like I need to cram everything in these days. To say I’m suggestable to new experience is a big ole’ understatement. I’m 71. My mind still works. There are brain cells not yet atrophied. I don’t say I’m “still open” for new information. It is a thirsting, a hunger for teach me what…

And this fell out: I had two houses in the spring and summer of 1965. I had two lives. My daughter Jessie, she’s 12, her thing is ice cream. Yes, of course, there are snakes and lizards and scavenging down boysenberry from the low bushes at the edge of the Everett woods, and peanut butter…

2/10 – Life is interesting. Questions we get to ask ourselves. Okay, I know, it never makes sense to talk about “we” when what I know is “me”. Own my own, and talk what I know about, and anyway, no one really likes it when they hear someone else speaking for them. So, forgot how…

I would like to begin writing letters again. Because it’s right. It’s proper. It’s a perfect use of physical and emotional energy. And spiritual energy as well, for sure. Not letters to everyone, or, for that matter, many at all. Writing letters to the very few who matter most to me. For me. Yes. I…

1/3/20 – Sitting here in the basement, surfing the net, wasted time. I must wake tomorrow with a great purpose to move forward as a writer/author. Weigh-in today 152, down two pounds from last week, better, not as much as I thought as I have done well to live with a close-to-Keto diet the last…

I was outside, a little while earlier, whizzing. There was a small space of clearing over and down in the southeast sky, and I found myself – standing out there in the pre-dawn dark – praying for more time, time in which to act with greater enthusiasm and all the devotion I can muster on…

From this morning’s ‘Morning Pages’: Isn’t it interesting, okay, I’m over there at the computer messing around, seemingly delaying coming over here – this side of the Cushman table – to get going on these ‘Pages’. Like it is some kind of task, a burdon, versus what it always is, everyday, nearly nine years now,…

There’s the notebook I had in Texas, obviously, with the “Long’s Fish Camp” sticker on the cover. I’ve written the word “Stories” on the back cover. I saw it sitting open on a pile of ‘Morning Pages’ notebooks, I don’t know why I went over to look at it, and I saw it was different…

  I do not usually use this space – it might just be sacred space – for hawking my own wares. That’s not what Couch Surfing at 70 is about. But today I’m gonna. I was shipped this morning the first, fresh copies of my just-published book – “Get in the Car”. It is a…

I’m showing up here, this first day of the New Year – this New Decade – to out myself as to intention. My intention going forward, call it primary, numero uno, coming after gushing love for my wife, my kids and family, and the unending wish to stick it to the man and in so…

From “Timed Practice Writings” These are Red Sox truths – Well, I’ll get to the Sox as I embark here on another 17:45 minutes of screed under the auspices of “Timed Writing”, an exercise I have created for myself with the phone clock rolling back from just under eighteen, some days with a topic in…

It is Wednesday, a week before Christmas – here in the States – and I have not finished shopping nor completely entered into the Christmas spirit. And time flies. It is early down here in the basement this morning, the basement home to my parents’ kitchen table upon which I write, home to my computer,…

I’d like to say I’ve been hard at work this last week, excusing my absence from this page. But ‘hard at work” and “Buddy Cushman” in the same sentence are pretty much a – what do you call it? – oh yeah, oxymoron. At least these days. Suffice it to say I have been periodically…

You have to look between the rain. Between the rain? Right. Look at those places between the rain. That’s where you celebrate. Celebrate? Right, in those places between the rain you celebrate – maybe you dance, maybe you bow nine times, maybe you write a letter to the editor of whatever it is you read…

“I now write from an old mind and an old body, long beyond the time when most men would ever think of continuing such a thing, but since I started so late I owe it to myself to continue, and when the words begin to falter and I must be helped up stairways and I…

  Mostly what I buy these days are books and Trader Joe’s salted Almond Butter. I’m capitalizing because it’s a real thing. The books I buy come unexpected. It works like this. I’ll be reading a book or an on-line magazine article or essay by someone I like and another book will be mentioned and…

Sometimes, out of the clear blue, one or the other of my knees will scream out in pain. It’s only for a moment. Then that knee goes back to doing what knees do. Knee-ing, I guess. Almost every morning, when I bow nine times to the cushion on which I have sat in meditation, my…

There is a guy — very tall, thick and big — who showed up yesterday. Here at Breitenbush. I think we first saw him at lunch. He was wearing an incredibly loud bathrobe, a whitish and black geometric-design thing, nearly floor length, made with a very light, thin material. Now, there are always people in…

Writing way uphill here, from a low chair up to the table in the dining hall at Breitenbush. We, my wife Susan and I, are the only ones in the hall save for some guy who keeps walking in and out. We sat in a naturally heated hot spring pool first, in the pitch dark,…

Well, we’ve arrived, deep in the Oregon woods, a spiritual retreat as advertised — my wife’s favorite place. It’s pouring down rain out there. I had to remove my shoes before entering the silent library in the main lodge, so you already know what I think. I’m at a place where they tell you to…

  There’s too much dawn, I realize when I walked out into the backyard to capture in my eye the familiar constellations I had witnessed an hour earlier when I was back there praying. Before meditation, before cough syrup, before coffee. Way before the writing books. I’m hung up on this idea of “Need”. I…

  From September 20: It is looking like suddenly through fumbling around entirely haphazardly over and through the net I have found a blank ‘Word” doc I can actually use on this laptop which I am only borrowing. Whether I can save it someplace to which I will have access later, well, that’s a donkey…

Note: This piece was written one week ago, at Tierra Del Mar on the Oregon coast, in a cottage shared with my son Spenser. Someone asked me what it’s like to be 70. Is that a question? Is this a multiple choice test? In seventh grade a few of my more devilish classmates stuffed me…

I graduated from Cape Cod Community College in the spring of 1969 and transferred up to Salem State. My high school classmate Ricky Fleming was in the same circumstance, and we found an apartment together in Marblehead. I hitchhiked back and forth to and from the college. Maybe a couple of months after I’d started…