Couch Surfing at 70

In his book “Cat’s Cradle” Kurt Vonnegut Jr. has a line which says this: “Strange travel suggestions may be dancing lessons from God.” I read that book in college, along with most everyone else, maybe late 60’s, early 70’s. That line pulled me in from the get-go: “Strange travel suggestions.” “Dancing lessons from God.” I…

I just got back from a pre-surgery nasal swab Covid test. It, the swabbing, kind of tickled. Tickled is good. On the way to the medical center I was listening to The Byrds. On the way back it was the Beach Boys. Last night looking at a Padres/Brewers baseball game the announcers got talking about…

I had a mentor of sorts I’d found back in the early 80’s – this cool gay guy who was helping me out with the whole don’t drink and drug thing. He was forever telling me that there was “a plan” for me, that my Higher Power – whatever that was – surely had a…

Some of the Monday through Friday posts here the coming week will reflect internal ‘weather’ I experienced last week. I will try my best to remain true to the day in which I am posting.

Not really, good old Bell Telephone, but it’s a phrase I remember and pretty much the only company you got in the ear-to-ear, handing on the wall, 20-foot curly cord so as to be able to walk around the kitchen and prep dinner or prep the dishes or scramble some eggs and drop the toast…

I am usually ‘Mr. counting my blessings every 10 minutes’. Paying my best attention – as the Buddhists say, noticing, noticing, noticing – and taking note of how gorgeous the day and planet can be, is in fact when that is where as a species we all go. A guy I knew long ago, Eddie…

A few people I knew long ago use to say that if you walked into a room full of people and everyone had thrown their troubles in a pile on the floor, you’d be lucky if you grabbed your own when you left. What do ya think? Wednesday.

Six days from now – exactly 38 years ago – I met a guy named Frenchie. He was a longshoreman from Charlestown, MA, retired, a bad back, and he traveled all about the greater Somerville vicinity with a couple of cats named Eddie G. and Jack. By chance having stumbled into this trio, and in…

Purples, pink, pale oranges – sunrise paints. My Morning Pages written, perhaps a smidge more somber than other mornings. Still – just waking up is a victory. And I laugh out loud with my reading and coffee, following 22 minutes in the meditation chair. I may be a Buddha (Buddya) but I sit with my…

Friday night empty.

This photo, Thursday, taken just after 8am, in my car. See the three – it’s show and tell. Left to right – That baseball, familiar baseball stitching, that baseball has traveled with me out and about, hither and thither, a big hunk of my life. Found in the infield of the track at the old…

I jerked up and out of a coma-like sleep in this afternoon’s recliner, I’d been reading “The Letters of William Burroughs”, wide awake and meanwhile as well to the accompaniment of two cups of Allen’s Corvallis coffee, four bags arriving in a box in the mail today and one freshly opened and perked and heavenly,…

Beach Boys, “So Young” alternative take, post dinner dishes, Allen Ginsberg piling up in on-line book carts, it’s all about the war Baby. Like the song says, “…Then Mama’s baby will have seen the last of me. I’m about the transcribing, Holmes, the story telling, documenting the moments, we share in ways and we change…

I’ve come to be slightly more gentle with myself, over time, and an example is my plan for this Monday afternoon which is drive over to the Cleveland High School track and walk around it either 12 or 14 times, depending on stamina in the  moment, track milieu including weather temps, wind velocities, and sunshine-iness,…

Twenty-one minute silent meditation, 5 a.m. Two daylight walkings out in the sweet, friendly air. Blessed. No-sugar chocolate. So good. This Friday. Let it shine.

Dust bunnies rolling around my head later here Thursday night. Did some good stuff, worthwhile, support the family, try to stay healthy, a bit quieter today. Daydreamed, on morning walk, about an extended stretch of silence, like four or five days without any talk. Be hard, the wife, the kid, but it’s a thought. These…

Wednesday, 7:15 pm. Today is today. Mostly was today, now creeping along toward a new one. Today is not yesterday. Entirely different, a unique thing. Today is/was unique. Today is today. I liked today. I hurt my back and both wrists and created general aches and creaks working out in our vast vegetable gardens (Punster)…

On a long walk late this morning I saw multiple birds, heard waves of bird songs, aerial lyrics, the winged span of an eagle passing away up-creek beyond my tardy glance. Robins and doves come to linger, jays in squacky conference, I could not say if there’s is play or debate or a brand of…

11 a.m. — There is a sliver of blue sky broken out and down through the seemingly endless Northwest clouds. Over to the north. Rain devils, why not travel 1200 miles south to Los Angeles where you are needed. They reside here, though, these clouds, so the blue cutting through is a gift. I’m grateful.…

My wife Susan is working on her memoir. The particular memoir she’s working on today. That one. Memoirs are funny, like a pinata, sort of, take a whack and see what falls out, whatever awakes in memoir-ville – any old time and place. So, for example, were I to try and write my memoir it…

Chest-pain day. I see mirrors, everywhere I look. And I look.

Today Bird feeder swaying. Wren flits, green branch bends – Cool breeze. (Kerouac offered less than 17 syllables. Said it was more “ours”. I think a haiku is how I feel it, letters spilling out from these friendly keys. I chase Wednesday magic.) In 2018 I published my second book of poetry – “Dictation from…

“Hast thou attuned thy being to humanity’s great pain, O Candidate for Light?” — (Tibetan) Book of Golden Precepts, ed. H.P. Blavatsky Yeah, I generally think about that quote two, three times a day. Pretty much. I came upon it early this morning over coffee, reading Peter Matthiessen’s “The Snow Leopard”. Which I’ve been meaning…

Traveling in my mind, today – Monday – I wonder. Do humans flit? As an active verb? Can I? I am flitting, so’s you know, amidst various geographies my precious springtime March, out there in this daylight Provincetown down the way end of Cape Cod, Oakland of course, and a journey of the mind into…

It’s 7:35 Friday night. I worked for a youth organization once named 735. Back in Melrose, Massachusetts. Lot of my changes there, the North Shore, all those kid outfits, all the roles I took, all the way up to Director level over and over again. We got good work done a lot of the time,…

Oh, to be a better bird. That’s how I flew out from the bed this morning. And why. Rushing, gushing these ancient joints lubed with a joy of still can do, here I go, these wings, out beyond the rapacious reaper’s ruin. Ha! Dumb thing, no match for the avaians. Inbound dream, outbound skeedaddle, and…

I heard the hoo-ing of a dove while I was sitting in zazen this afternoon. It was my second sitting of the day, the first at my usual 4:54 am awake alone in the sleeping house, straight back chair with attached cushion in the dark living room. The second this afternoon, in the studio, blessed…

My wife transferred me $1400 from our joint account to my personal ‘Shares’ account today, free government money, earned being a good citizen. There’s a dark grey rabbit hanging out in our yard pretty much all the time these days. My son in Missouri Paypaled me a bunch of money I’d lent him back in…

Back in ’06 and ’07 I worked for an outfit called Walden House. This was in San Francisco, most of my time running the adolescent boys’ residence in The Lower Haight – ‘214’ – and some of it at the girls’ residence in South San Francisco – ‘PSK’. Walden House was a California state-wide organization…

It’s August 1958 and I’m nine years old. Ginsberg is back from Europe, living lower east side New York, and Ferlinghetti is plunked down in the forests of Big Sur. My dick is getting hard, for the first time ever, once in a while and I dig that. It has dawned on me that, at…

I feel I have been trending in the right direction for some time now, on a psychic cellular level, good orderly direction, intertwined among body, soul, and the individual me of me. Something like a to thine own self be true. And digging it. Body, 72-plus years on the odometer, and mind (all those minutes…

I have this incredible group of friends, their number growing weekly, who converse with me regularly and are all dead. Se la vie. My ongoing corporeal walking around peeps, not so much. I don’t hear from them and it ain’t me (Babe). I make calls, leave messages send texts send emails greeting cards, words of friendship support…

There were small knotholes in some of the old boards, the holes oblong shape, and slivers of sunlight would stream through onto the barn’s dirt floor. I was staring trance-like at one of those lit up areas right when I had my first ever true sexual experience, with a girl named Cindy Mawaka. She was…

(Monday weather) Rushed to get a letter in mailbox early this morning before regular Monday spiritual retreat. Banged the letter out yesterday (Sunday) afternoon. I have received only one letter (Keith, LA) in the last year. Oh, sadness. What happened to letters? That is a koan, my koan – What happened to letters? I will…

Banger oh Banger. This is me (this me), I’m sure Walt Whitman approves, my exuberant self, especially with these vows of silence and heavy noticing. My pal Milky Dent has a belief and always believes it’s about compassion, which he and his posse of energy minstrels chase hourly. It’s the compassion, Brah (they always say).…

Well here we go Thursday, my mind electric and I’m thinking evermore in the place and space of ‘just this’. “This.” My complete sentence. Yeah, I’m reading another book about Zen, an occasionally interesting memoir, but the spectacular nuggets, didn’t the early forty-niners note just a tiny gleam of gold under flowing waters – and…

I stand tall within myself – Outside too. Viewable but effervescent. Isn’t there always a peanut gallery Or two Worth Ignoring?

Tuesday: Antwon Alazar is sitting alone in his barber shop. The sign out front says “Antwon’s Hair Cutting”. Old school. Antwon is a white dude, just so you know in case you were surmising otherwise. Which explains the fact of his favorite meal being scrambled eggs. Antwon’s a “keep it simple” guy and creating a…

It is said the Buddha’s final words were, “Be a lamp unto this world.” Which is, conceivably, alike the spiritual suggestion, “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.” Who knows. Myself, I lean toward the Velvet Underground’s, “I’ll be your mirror, reflect who you are.” And did you know I share a…

I personally cannot wait to get to the ocean again. Portland sucks. One hundred miles away. I cannot wait for the fresh, cool snappy ocean air, right there, right there, fill my lungs with that oh so much wonder. How much wonder do we note, accrue in our minds and who knows your answer, your’s…

Rat traps, rat traps – I don’t believe there will ever be enough rat traps. So the mind tumbles down the basement stairs, no surprises, no promises, just another day, which should go without saying “Thank you God” though otherwise no promise that any of it will get any better. Not all better – even…

(Last week’s weather.) On the third day without electric, without heat, Wednesday, with all those taken-for-granted slices-of-life missing, my wife’s handyman called, early in the morning, and asked if we needed firewood. In fact my wife had decided the night before – the house growing colder each day – to light an early fire and…

(Last week’s weather.) A Poem The wife sometimes frets, suffers, fleeing from joy. I take coleman-stove coffee, surely of the wife’s skill, none of mine, to the reading recliner, ancient appearance, bought well-used upon entry to these Northwests (now lit here only by day) – I feel wild with joy, oh, dear sweet coffee and…

(Last week’s weather.) During the recent power outage we piled seven blankets and comforters on the bed. I crawled under that warming weight at 6:36 the first night, so very early against the cold, but my wife came and rescued me from my hiding. I returned to the living and made charcoal drawings by battery-lamp…

Nearly the first thing I do every morning is look at the rat traps. I like it when they’re empty. Who wants to see death first off? Not me. Then that’s over and the rest of the day proceeds. On its own sweet time, and that ‘time’ thing is a bit nebulous since of course…

(A vision) I pictured myself, earlier, wandering through a desert scene, Nevada likely, a quarter mile off the 15, talking out loud to no one there, trying, really trying, to have a dialogue with some God. Pretty much any God would do. Something wise and just, ancient, or maybe freshly brand new today, mother father…

There is a contest today here on the Couch Surfing at 70 Blog, an oldie kind of “Name That Tune” contest. You ready? Following is one line from a popular song back there in the past, perhaps as recent as 2018, possibly earlier. You will win this contest by correctly identifying the name of the…

In the 60’s and in the 70’s you’d often hear someone say to someone else, or hear someone say to you, or hear yourself saying to someone this: Keep the Faith. Keep the Faith. They are an interesting trio of words. Suggestion? Command? Prayer? Encouragement? Blessing? Hope? Soul connection? Some? All? I can hear those…

I drove my wife Susan and I to the Portland Airport last night where we received our second Moderna vaccine injections. The deal, they say, is it’ll take another four weeks for the vaccine to kick into its highest gear and provide me (us) with the promise of 95% protection from becoming sick with the…

From the Beach Boys song by that title: “Late at night I think about the love of this whole world.” It’s how I’m choosing to leave this day I was blessed with.

It’s funny that here just after 8pm I just said to myself, “Well, I didn’t do a thing today”, and yet the facts would bear out that I was busy doing “stuff” and some of it real “important stuff” from the time I pulled myself up from the meditation chair just after 5am until maybe…

“The monkey may be off my back, but the circus is still in town.” I like that saying/description/self-evaluation and most days it fits just right in here. You know……..in here. I woke this morning feeling as if aliens had transported into the bedroom the middle of last night and sucked the brains from my head.…

Let me set the scene. It’s the summer of 1987, around then, on the central east coast of Florida – specifically the town of Edgewater, about 20 miles north of Cape Canaveral. Most Monday through Friday afternoons would find me sitting in a small clubhouse on a side street off US 1, there with a…

It is so interesting to wonder, for me anyway, where ideas come from. Not their source, their place and time and terrain of origination. Assume they exist and all those categories can be explained, can be mined for their facts. No, I’m talking about the “out of the blue” quality of ideas showing up. I’m…

5 a.m. Meditation 7 a.m. Morning Pages 9 a.m. – Zoom meeting 10 a.m. – Finished one book, began another 11 a.m. – Long walk through the Hood Noon – Mailed “Milky Dent” and Greeting Card to San Fran 1 p.m. – Coffee and heavy reading 2 p.m. – Electric trim beard, hair….shower 3 p.m.…