Couch Surfing at 70

WBCN FM radio got it starts in Boston in 1968. I remember listening in my bedroom in my parents house in Wareham, home for the summer between and before I began wildly dropping out of college. One of the initial disc jockeys was named Charles Laquidara, and something he said, everyday, was, if memory still…

I came upon the word “capacious” while reading earlier this morning. It was here, in this sentence – “Unless you achieve that capacious sort of mind, your practice cannot be said to be successful.” I looked up the definition: “Having a lot of space inside; roomy.” I got to go to a play yesterday. People…

My brother-in-law DeeDee Snowden would often say this – “There’s a lot to it.” Whenever he said it, his meaning in that particular moment felt crystal clear. This morning, while I was sitting, an image appeared in my mind – “Warehouse of treasures.” Something about this day, this Friday, offering up a warehouse of treasures.…

One of the things about zazen, about sitting in meditation, is the everyday chance to see the way my mind works. Every day. To see where thoughts come from, out of the nothingness of a moment before. The way they sometimes play tag, hopping and skipping from here to here, now here, now here. Sometimes…

My mind has felt blown open all morning, the way a meadow on a high plain might host passing gale winds – blowing along, say, a trillion milkweed parachutes. I remember those so well from childhood, the sticky, sappy whitish milk clinging to fingers while opening a ready-to-go pod and freeing its children into whatever…

I have a ticket for a Sunday presentation of “The Untitled Unauthorized Hunter S. Thompson Musical” this Sunday at the La Jolla Playhouse on the campus of the University of California at San Diego. Ann has a ticket too, as do her sweet friends Katie and Al. We’ll drive up to La Jolla from San…

I have a long-ago friend, Steve T. I think he lives in Malden, Massachusetts. It could be Stoneham. One time I watched him spin out, quite righteously, howling and yowling, angry and frutrated, flustered and feeling abused – loud, loud, quite vocal. When he ran out of gas I walked over to him and asked,…

The three-word title of this post came to me when I was out in the dark between cups of brewing coffee, able to see a partial moon through the flimsy marine layer, and a couple of morning stars. Orion’s Belt there, and not there. I’ve felt closer to my Zen practice this week, which I…

In a piece I read earlier, that was something about how we – as humans – move through the day, I came upon this sentence, which winked up at me and suggested, “Check this out.” This sentence – “It’s a radical deconstruction of what you’re sure of — your hard won assumptions about life, habits…

I wildly overslept last night. I believe it was the result of wildly under-sleeping the night before. I was something like running on empty yesterday, and in fact, I’ve been feeling the running on empty thing since back to the beginning of July. Never catching up with “right” sleep. Still, long ago I often heard…

Little kid foxes are called kits. If I knew that I forgot I knew it, but on an early walk with Ann, she said she hoped she’d see a fox, which she always says when we walk over the Spruce and Quince Streets bridges. We didn’t see one – and she hasn’t in San Diego…

Yesterday, Sunday, I felt as if the planet has tilted off its axis, that the end was nearer than near. This morning, Labor Day, I feel different. Yesterday, in the midst of a gathering of folks, there was a crazy man – seriously, really crazy – largely responsible for my sensation of the Earth tilting.…

A line in a Steely Dan song says, “I was on the other side of no tomorrow.” I fell sound asleep in the big chair yesterday after work, a newly checked out library book in my lap, the remaining two-thirds cup of coffee in my right hand. Then I was immediately awake, warm and wet…

A number of my dead friends came to visit in this morning’s meditations. When I was thinking – during the medition – it was mostly a brand new problem with my car, so I couldn’t say why this particular morning men named Bob and Doug and Billy and Kevin and Bill and I’m thinking even…

I live with a redhead in Hillcrest in San Diego, and drive a Camry, and eat mostly organic. A bit more than 40 and a half years ago, in Somerville, Massachusetts, there were people looking at me, saying, “Keep it simple stupid.” See.

Yesterday – Monday – the word “Dozing” found its way into my life twice. Once very early, writing my Morning Pages, and here comes a vision of Alice (the Wonderland young lady) reading a book on a summer day, maybe she has company – her sister, her cat? – and she dozes off leaning against…

I don’t really want to talk about this publicly, though I’m inclined to talk about it, so I’ll just dangle around the edges. It turns out, before the Buddha would preach to 5000 followers, he would take his bowl and go into the town and beg for food. Noting this for you falls within an…

One of my favorite lines in the movie “The Guardians of the Galaxy” is when Rocket responds to being told he’s something like a raccoon, to which he says, “Ain’t no thing like me except me.” Then there is the famous quote from Shakespeare – “This above all: to thine own self be true.” Friends…

The title of this post arrived in my Morning Pages. Some of the flock of neighborhood wild parrots just arrived in the very tall decidous tree across the street. A beautiful photo of two elegant giraffes at the Roger Williams Zoo in Rhode island arrived on my Facebook home page earlier, enjoyed by Ann and…

I believe I’ve mentioned a few times the past four or so years incidents in which my brain stopped working – periods of 15 to 30 minutes when I simply could not talk, in one case could not write. Maybe I noted my doctor referring “my case” to the Kaiser nuerology department, which got back…

I think it was five years ago I received a text or email from my friend Keith, a most interesting cat I met in my Provincetown days running Foley House for the Aids Support Group of Cape Cod. It said this – “Don’t make a case against yourself.” That quote showed up in a Facebook…

Back there in ’84 and ’85 I was working for a place called The Drug and Alcohol Resource Program in Stoneham, Massachusetts. A good chunk of my weekly time was spent in a gifted space in the guidance offices at North Reading High School, about 10 miles north. I’d show up two or three times…

I wouldn’t say it’s (so much) welcoming a hurricane as accepting an invitation to hunker down. Weather doing for me what I (seemingly) cannot do for myself. Likely also the opportunity to overdose on coffee. Which is what they made reading glasses for. Wisdom gates. It’s a cool image. Passing through wisdom gates before me,…

Once I was lost in the woods with my friend Donnie. We may have been crying, feeling so lost. My dog Taffy, along for the adventure, just did dog, scooting around, playing, poking her nose through the blocking underbrush into a clearing and the path home. Last night I got all wrapped up in my…

I went back to work the last few years, after 10 years or so of mostly not working, and every position has been in the service of folks who have what’s called a ‘developmental disability’. Working in their homes – including with my son Spenser – working out in the community, and most recently, working…

It’s nice when people check in on me, which my friend Gavin in Oakland did yesterday – “How you doin’, Bro?” Check-ins. Like Ann’s friend Cory did Sunday morning, “How’s your post-MRI persona, kid?” Ann’s son too, checking in. All the formal psychiatric testing placing me way down the end of the extrovert to introvert…

Our friend Cory stopped by Sunday morning to see how I had fared in my procedure. I was slightly under the influence of legally prescribed drugs. The three-way kitchen conversation eventually swung around to people, and how different people want different things and are inspired and motivated by different things, and since we – the…

Yesterday was a day of big emotions – sorrow and hope; the fathomless wonder of what happens next. Today is Friday.

Out last night with a couple of people, in a rather crazy setting, I left at the end of the gig with a distinct sense of being “other”. Distinctly, crystal clealry, profoundly other. Other than them. Other than you. There’s been some shimmering rememberance of this all along, say since five or six years old.…

This looks like me on my boogie board yesterday.

I’m about 20 minutes from walking out the apartment door, locking up, getting in the Camry and rolling my way over to the closest parking spot on Long Branch to Tower 4 and the beach beyond, my plan to take three or four deep, possibly delaying breaths and then run into the chilly Pacific for…

Earlier, writing my Morning Pages, it came to me that I have been saying, both to others and to myself, how exhausted I have been, and am. Like 25 times a day. Physical exhaustion; mental exhaustion; psychic exhaustion – you name it and I’ve been claiming it. And following that recognition was the remembering that…

Earlier, during my second session of meditation on the zafu cushion, these two words floated into and through my mind – Dancing Spirit. I can’t say they were capitalized when they showed up, but quickly it was clear that the day – the world – had offered me another name – something, someone else to…

There’s a discombobulation thing going on with me. Sometimes I remember to remember, then I forget and I have something like awareness of being strung out, without a clue why. It’s okay. Big life changes and an accumulation of a lot of physical and psychic expenditure way beyond the kid’s regular routines. The it’s, oh…

Early, Ann asked me to come and look at the full moon, shining moonlight behind and through the moving clouds, out the kitchen window. I did. Highlights of the day. They start early, and carry on. And every single moment is brand new.

I crawled into bed at 8pm last night, woke at midnight, never fell back to sleep, and got up at 1am. Thus – the sky is blue; birds fly; fish swim; I’m loopy. I’m off work today, but need go into the office for a while for paperwork and documentation, time sheets for which I…

The Zen Roshi Joan Sutherland says that some of the times the gate we have to walk through to move forward on our (the) Way is behind us. I’ve felt some of that lately. I felt it profoundly in a Zoom group with some folks in Colorado Springs yesterday afternoon. Talking about Precepts. In order…

In exactly a couple of hours I’ll head out, catch a moment of the 163 before turning east into the 8 for the fast and southern California drive out to the city of El Cajon. Exit the fast lane and meander my way into the parking lot of the small center which is home to…

A spring flower in an autumn breeze. That’s how old I am today.

I’m kind of stunned sitting here at the keyboard this morning. It’s very early, telling you the big hand and the little hand might be scary. There’s another’s alarm now, this way cool sharesy-thing, and not bothering the traffic, so rising and shining. And a grandfather would gong out five times – right here now…

I watched a documentary a couple of weeks ago – “Food, Inc.” – which I had seen before, but apparently not with these eyes. The degree of cruelty to animals crawled up inside my heart, the way the Buddhist nun Pema Chodron says “bodhichitta” will, and within a couple of hours I pretty much made…

Early Friday, nearly five days living in my new home. With Ann. It’s a co-habitation thing – for which I am wildly grateful. The physicality of the move not quite yet passed – but winding down. And this room, where I drink coffee and read Zen stuff and come here to the Blog, and to…

So – Here I am, back in El Cajon, leaning on a metal-top counter in a bustling thrift shop offering (almost exclusively) women’s clothing. It’s a work thing. I described it to a friend in a text as, “The ambiance be way weird”, and sent a photo. She replied, “The ambiance be awesome.” She’s a…

About four o’clock yesterday I arrived at a complete state of exhaustion. I guess it dawned on me that that was what was up. Physical and mental, emotional as well. Too tired to even ponder for a moment how tired I was, what I wasn’t capable of thinking of. Whipped. Strung out. Really, really –…

It’s Tuesday morning and I’m sleep deprived in El Cajon. Me and Lester Bangs, right? Just 23 minutes tooling east on the 8. I’ve got a rendevous with a womens’s clothing thrift shop at 9:30, here in El Cajon, and if The Talking Heads asked, “Well, how did I get here?”, the best I’ve got…

I’m typing this at the confluence of the Hillcrest and Banker’s Hill neighborhoods in San Diego, CA, here on Monday, July 17. From a new home. The unpacking and moving and arranging and straightening and the this and that’s of leaving one place and arriving at another are not yet done. Think back-ache and making…

It’s 11 days beyond two years ago when I first rolled into Encinitas around four in the afternoon on a Saturday and became a permanent resident of California. I remember the day well, up on the bluff above Moonlight Beach before getting in the car again and crusing up the Boulevard to find the room…

Sincere kindness. Sweet blindness. “Is it possible he can be that clueless?” Sometimes I speak with the voice of Coyote. And yet, after the tricking, the packing. Like Sarah said, it’s just a different packy run.

“There’s one more thing, I got the pink slip, Daddy.”

Slants of sunshine are beginning to slip through the marine layer gray of the morning, gray nearly all the mornings the last few months. I see the day brightening out my window. There’s one window in this room I rent here in Golden Hill, a pretty big one, and the bottom half of the window…

I’m going to begin eating healthier food. I don’t know, typing this the first Friday in July, what my food choices will look like. Not here today, not exactly. But, I know I’ll begin eating differently. The next 10 days or so will be moving days, kind of big life changes. Slow dancing. Normal and…

This will take way too many words to say what I’ve been thinking about all morning. So, perhaps this becomes the first attempt at my original shorthand: Get a witness. Marvin Gaye. Grand Funk. Temps and Stones and Stevie and Supremes, and who knew? The first great vow – wake (all) the beings of the…

I began a new job last week, at the San Diego chapter of United Cerebral Palsy – UCP. There’s something awake and alive within the adjoining realms of karma/irony/right where you’re supposed to be in this newest life journey. My son Spenser has received services and case management from the Oregon UCP in Portland for…

This is the fourth of July. I have pink eye. I’m sorta patriotic and, still, viral germs have also taken residence in my throat and lungs. Perhaps it’s covid. Maybe my eighteenth summer cold. Maybe this ancient engine, running down in an increasingly filled-up world. I was thinking last night I miss the Blog. This…

Tuesday afternoon I was walking on a sidewalk in Sherman Heights and stopped by a small patch of flowers growing through a fence to play a while with a monarch buttterfly. It would look at me – maybe warily, maybe gratefully – and fly away over the fence, and come right back. Flying close by…