Please Allow me

Please bear with me as I, like Walt Whitman, sing my body electric. I’m 71, I turned the dial to begin my 72nd year on this planetary journey while visiting my son Cameron and his wife and kids in Florida. I traveled and adventured with my wife, a dazzling respite from the wet Portland cold, and now we are back – older – and yes, possibly wiser, and as, at least so far, you are bearing with me, I would like to rave on about this, that, and all sorts of creatively and potentially psychotically, but always surely psychedelically exponations of just what I’m thinking at any given moment – you could say moment I’m being given – and, as Allen Ginsberg so well said, celebrate the “Honor” of writing.

While I’ve been away WordPress changed the layout of my Blog space and, I guess, creative as per written word and how it becomes visually presented, the look of this site, this hosting place for the Blogs I write and post here, at ‘Couch Surfing’. Speaking of which, while I cannot truly count among my couch surfing adventures the last week spent with my wife in a third-floor, ocean-front, hotel room paid for entirely by my son and daughter-in-law, as couch surfing, there is a true-to-life episode approaching quickly, when I fly down to one of my favorite places on the planet – Oakland, California – and partake of the couch hospitality (actually his bed) of my friend, intellectual mentor, and all things 80’s music guru Gavin in a little under two weeks from now. Quick, que up the Ricky Nelson classic “Traveling Man” and pound that mother out of highly-energized woofers and tweeters. Which, when you think about it, is way more satisfying and good for the soul than simply “tweeting”, something I am more often than not convinced is a waste of time and leads to a swollen ego – and they say, in secret, ego stands for “Easing God out”, though I wouldn’t know.

But all of which got me going here in the first place – and you would not believe the number of typos showing up after being away from the keyboard only seven days – that being to sing my body electric – like old Walt did – and rave on about how the world presents itself to me these days, and vice versa, and what with me being a warrior for peace and justice (not exactly the same as “no justice no peace”). And let me add right here this new WordPress formatting truly sucks, at least for technical-lilliputian me it does, and among a host of “improved” negativities it’s depriving me of ‘word count’ information, and that matters as I lean these days toward the scenario in which most Americans (I cannot speak for Belgiums or the Scotch or Laotians obviously) , the scenario in which most Americans, those of us here in the USA, have the ongoing attention span of gnats (sorry gnats) and read anything beyond their phones about as often as they trek up the side of Mount Fuji. Meaning since I have held your attention this long I don’t want to push it.

Well, just a bit longer. I finished on the plane home yesterday Philip K. Dick’s “Valis”, which almost literally knocked me out of my socks – I’ve become in this last month a full-on devotee of PKD – and there was much to say about spirituality and mental illness, with both of which I have familiarity, and also the idea of writing. Flat-out balls-to-the-wall pounding these very keyboard keys, stream-of-conscious letting it all in a words-way hang out. And while on the same 35,000 feet high ride home continued reading a “Paris Reviews” selection of “Beat Interviews”, and read the interview with Allen Ginsberg in which he stated that writing was “An honor”.

So I’m honored to be here doing just that.