Couch Surfing at 70

I really have nothing to say this Thursday morning. Beyond, “There’s a lot to it.” If the creek don’t rise, and there ain’t no meltdown, I’ll be back with a few more words tomorrow.

And then Wednesday came around and my mind was like a spider spinning her web and slowly scurrying around in a shaded corner of the big room. That’s ‘The Big Room.’ Reading and writing, and – honest to goodness – even some ‘rithmetic. What’s 12 times 15? What’s 180 into a thousand? Really, really grateful…

I was thinking a while ago about the post here today being a listing of the predicted temperatures today for all the places I’ve lived so far. Which I’m not going to do, though it wouldn’t surprise me if San Diego’s the coldest of the bunch. Which wouldn’t be a comment about anything, just a…

There are three doors. Just three. Right now I can show you two. Door number One is I actually retire for good, quit working. That means moving out of San Diego. Not working equals moving from San Diego. The expense. Door number Two is not retiring, not doing what both my body and soul are…

Came across this (like a bridge) in the morning yesterday and it held hands, like lovers strolling around a pond, with the morning that had already happened. And with the last few months. From John Tarrant’s “bring me the rhinoceros”: “The point is that, in an impasse, life becomes more real and more interesting, so…

I don’t really have a single thing to talk about this morning, other than I was thinking about seagulls earlier. I appreciate seagulls. They have a Mad Hatter keep-on-keepin’-on quality – it’s a food thing – and I have always been delighted by the call of a seagull slipping over a beach, on the roof…

A Zen Koan: “Tree withers. Leaves fall. Like That. Golden wind manifests.” Pretty much the story of my yesterday.

There is a rule. It is ‘Rule 62.’ It says, “Don’t take yourself too damn serious.” There is a particular verse in Dongshan’s “Five Ranks.” It says, “Conceal your practice, function in secret, seem for all the world like a fool or an idiot…” My first year at Salem State College, which got going as…

“And what costume shall a poor boy wear, to all tomorrow’s parties?” – Velvet Underground (slightly amended) I listened to this song in the Camry Saturday morning on the way to drink a coffee by myself in the Mission Hills Starbucks. I listened to it a couple of times. There was something of a sub-sonic…

I woke up at 1am today, couldn’t fall back asleep. It’s been that way all week. They say, “No one ever died from a lack of sleep.” I haven’t heard it said, “Doesn’t mean you can’t pass for psychotic pretty darn easily, kid.” This morning I pulled myself out of bed at 1:45 and began…

I feel hesitant to write here in the Blog today because my mind is all filled up with interconnecting thoughts and ideas which only I can begin to make sense of – possibly – the hopping and skipping from one thing to something wildly other – just like that. The Velvet Underground tune from which…

Like, um, couch surfing at 75. That amazement, like standing on a corner in Mission Hills, San Diego, California at 4:30 on a Tuesday afternoon at age 75 in hopes of selling a guitar I ordered two years before from Germany to a guy I don’t know from Point Loma. Where I’m having coffee with…

You know, I’ve been trying to sell my Harley Benton electric guitar. The story of how I actually came into possession of that guitar is crazy, some of it involves an illegal cadre of electric criminals within the staffing of a massive UPS warehouse in Tennessee. I don’t remember exactly which city. The guitar traveling,…

Feeling like old man river. Trying to sell books, trying to sell paintings, trying to sell guitars — just keep rolling along.

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…