Tai Chi Mind Stretch
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 onto and over the old stone wall, crumbled now in places, little easy jumping spots for beasts of the forest at play or either after or getting away, and it says here that fairies watch, sometimes they sit on tree branches and giggle and share small bottles of sweet colas (even sweet codas) or something like the Orange Crush we used to guzzle back there out in the yard or at a friend’s house in their basement playroom – which could have happened on Halloween as well, oh, where have all the flowers gone, still we have Bob Dylan composin’ and singing and helping us to keep on keeping on, which is something to never let go of, and I am reading up on hypergraphia which is all about what might be called the disease of needing to write, a wicked compulsion to sit down and write on and on – write on – because what else matters so much, Bro?, I mean, really,
and there was the time I went out on a vacay to the East Bay and took an afternoon to go over to San Francisco, via BART from El Cerrito, my intention to meet up with my college friend David P (formerly of Braintree, MA) and I would eventually take buses all the way over on Divisadero (‘Divis’) to Geary and switch there and out to I think 30th and the Presidio Middle School where he was teaching, which I did and we walked and went for pizza and talked and he showed me his classroom of many, many years, and before all that I left the BART station on Market Street and walked south down to Townsend and just walked on in to the admin building of state-wide programming org Walden House and managed an impromptu “interview” of sorts with the ED and head shrink which ultimately from way back in Massachusetts months later got me a job offer and another big life change – oh, to dream of a life in Cali and look, see, wow, I live in Oakland and drive over the Bay Bridge nearly daily and work in San Francisco – fucking San Francisco man – and ain’t that grand – in fact some of my drive was on Grand Ave, which there was a way to come flying down off the bridge after work, late afternoons say and take the Grand Ave exit which avoided all sorts of freeway jams (Jeff Back tune/lp?) and I got to know it well and boy those were some good days.
Do these memories stretch my mind, I’d like to think so, I would like to think that this act of sitting at the keyboard for 30:30 and typing on oh you two-fingered wizard, all of it the entrails and guts of letting it all hang out that this in and of itself breaks down the walls of, you might say, the edict to color within the lines which I sometimes refer to as a white bread world (hey Billy Joel) and living by the book which ask yourself who wrote the book and hmmm, I think I’ll say fuck the book and live by that rule and that rule alone, see how I see myself well into the future – virus or no – is right down here (since the wife seems intent on staying and not fulfilling my life’s dream of living on the California coast, though on a walk yesterday she did agree with me to move to New Zealand, though they ain’t letting honkies or other loser Americans in just now so that might be for another lifetime, and hey, maybe I can try to channel my re-incarnated selves that there could be one big, wide stretch of the old Brainiac boundaries, and to be clear this is way beyond getting outside myself which is more relevant to not being self-centered which that feels like a seven out of 10 for me so far on the life scale, no, getting beyond the fences of where my mind daily travels, hopping the fence breaking in, trespassing, yes, that is a sweet image, trespassing where no Buddy has gone before, out there in Philip K Dick land, and excursing with friends past and present, cats all way smarter (smahta) than me and so I was pretty smart, thinking about it, hanging with them so much and even more in the future the ones still alive and around and therefore available, though getting back to the mind-stretch how about an astral projection journey, well, some way séance-like to hook up with old buddies and in particular have Billy Mac and Bob Z and Dr. Doug Grant mostly in mind, but how about Forrie Nelson talk about a blast from my past and so very sorry we lost connection the final years of his time here so that is a ‘stretch’ possibility, lie on the bed with no one around or on the living room rug say 3am with a pillow (as neck aches easily with 71 years plus accumulated to date) and ask for all imaginable help, and help even beyond my current imagination to help me find those guys again, which may imply belief in life after death on my part which this week I am more in that camp and speaking of the afterlife, reading completely the “Exegesis” has brought up a number of journey-istic possibilities in my mind and one fun one is to write a fictional story about a guy or a couple of guys or a few guys (and guys could include girls though likely not) and they are not so much struggling with as puzzling over religion and do they have any and are they open-minded in that field even a smidge or has something happened some life incident or maybe it has been an alien intervention of even sitting in Bay Bridge traffic one afternoon beyond the breaking point, something, a meditative sittin’ on that ledge overlooking the big stretching away field on a sidebar path on Mount Monadnock back near Jaffrey, NH and I sit there day after day in the summer heat and one time, it only takes one time, a light bulb pops on and there is an old friend and he doesn’t need to be bringing any message or vital information or faith even, just to shoot the shit a while would be so much more than enough
and it is possible, like I intimated way back there near the beginning, that to stretch my mind it may be enough to participate in just this, I sit here my ass nearly glued to the chair I bought at a church yard sale when I first came to Portland and I stare down at this keyboard I am staring down at and the first digit on my left hand and the first digit on my right hand both slap down on one key after another and rarely I look up and see a host of typos and I could be on that Mount Monadnock ledge or in my Taurus on the Bay Bridge or driving out to Astoria later this summer when most of the virus has drifted elsewhere and doing research on a follow-up to ‘Strange’ and a host of angels arrives and sings a little tune for me and these are quite like the fairies watching me hop the wall in my friend’s backyard forest and it is possible one or two of these ideas will lead elsewhere later, hopefully way way out beyond my usual haunts.
Love that picture