RIP Daisy

may daisy be happy wherever she is now.

pain

i've had a long and wonderful summer working outdoors with my body, the first time i've worked so hard physically in a decade. i realized a couple days ago that i haven't taken more than a couple days off in five months. my body has grown stronger, i look fit, muscled, which strokes my ego, but i'm also feeling the drain of so many days without restoration. i'm glad to know that i can go five months without much of a break, but i'm also noticing how much my will to persist obscured messages from my body, especially my arms. they're pretty much yelling at me today, saying something like, "dude, are you crazy? we're beat. stop!" and so i've listened and am listening more as they sing an achey dissonant chorus of muscular overtones that don't seem to emanate from any particular place, kind of like the subsonic hisses and rumblings produced by a dead dog lying on the pedals of a cathedral organ. if i listen closely, i can almost hear reverberation.

music

one of the joys of working in community this summer has been more or less nightly jams with whomever was at the faerie camp. i brought my guitar up and with a bevy of african drums we found our way into lots of interesting rhythms, jams and songs. my chops got better, i got used to singing in front of people and i let myself explore publically more than i've ever.

over the winter i'm looking forward to recording with my friend jade and other faeries. i had a fabulous dream a few weeks ago, a recurring dream for me (many of my recurring dreams have come true) in which i'm on stage, and i'm in my 60s, jamming away to an adoring audience. in this case the dream included a bunch of radical faeries along with me, and it felt just peachy bein' up there on stage. my astrological bent is to be an entertainer. i share my birthday with tom jones and prince and there are lots of other famous entertainers around my birthday, including some of my musical heroes like laurie anderson.

construction

here's the interior of the timber frame and straw bale structure i'm working on in vermont. with the roof on, the walls up and the windows soon to be installed, it's taking shape and it feels great! i've helped instruct about a hundred volunteers over the summer in varioius techniques from timber framing to packing mud plaster onto straw. i've come to think of teaching as learning and find that i learn as much as anyone while teaching. the act of packaging my knowledge into simple instructions somehow opens my mind. with all the physical work over summer i'm in good shape and that feels great, too.

swirling electric energy

i've become accustomed lately to "asking the universe" for help when i get stuck, and i've been surprised by how often it responds, and how quickly. it is as if the mere formation of a question in the mind establishes the space for the installation of an answer. i've noticed that when i become grumpy or irritated i'll often make proclamations: this sucks, they suck, i suck, whatever. it's not until after i finally give up damning that clarity presents itself. it would seem that a critical aspect of happy consciousness is an inquisitive demeanor. so i remind myself to ask, if not aloud to someone else, then to the universe.

i recently asked the universe for help on some sticky personal issues that have haunted me for quite a while. a day later i met some friends, a couple, who related to me a story about their relationship that shocked me in its similarity to the issues i've been coping with. this led me to find out that what i've been experiencing is first of all not uncommon and secondly is well studied and somewhat understood, so there is some literature about it. i'm being vague here to protect the innocent, but it turns out that somewhere from 1 to 2 percent of the nation suffers from borderline personality disorder in varying degrees with varying levels of functionality.

people with bpd, as it is known in short, are often charismatic, intense and sensitive but have trouble maintaining intimate relationships and typically are extremely sensitive to real or projected abandonment. the relationships they do engage in can start idyllically but then veer into stress and pain for both parties, ranging in a short time from intense connection with idealization to abrupt rejection and devaluing. there are a bevy of symptoms, some of which i don't quite understand, that qualify a person as bpd and i'm certainly not qualified to make a judgement, but just being introduced to the symptoms and patterns of bpd have helped me take a new look back at a stressful and painful relationship in my life which has, despite the fact it happened years ago, confused and affected me to the present.

i picked up this book which i've found helpful: Stop Walking on Eggshells: Taking Your Life Back When Someone You Care about Has Borderline Personality Disorder.

fake bliss trumpet

okay, i faked this smile. can you tell? i was walking down the road at faerie camp and decided to try to take a happy looking picture. this was about the fifth try. i think it still lacks sincerity but overall i like the picture. it reminds me of pharmaceutical ads promising vitality of some sort. i do this kind of self-observation of fake states probably more than most people. when i was doing lots of radio i used to record myself a lot, edit, re-record, until i'd get something so overproduced and slick that it had almost no personality, i suppose rococo in a way, overproduced, over-ornate, intricate but soulless. maybe it's my love of the banal that drives this.

about half a year ago i bought a trumpet. i started to try playing it a couple days ago. i never realized how much a trumpeter can influence pitch with the lips. even though i played trumpet four years in elementary and junior high school, i don't think anyone ever mentioned intonation. in fact, no one ever mentioned a thing about theory or what exactly we were doing playing all those notes.

so, tying all this together, perhaps this is my first trumpet album cover.

giving

i've just returned from a long weekend of work and companionship at the camp i'm working at for the summer. i'm volunteering a lot of hours to complete a new building there, teaching people construction and timber framing. it's a lot of hard work but i'm slowly discovering the deep power of giving, and more specifically selfless giving, a practice that's mentioned a lot in yoga and buddhism, as well as western religion.

selfless giving isn't something that comes naturally to me. my behavior twenty years ago was decidedly selfish and self centered. i wouldn't call myself bad, but i was doing for myself and no one else. i worked really hard to prove myself to others, not in order to give to them. my self esteem, self image and self worth were intimately linked to how well i conquered tasks and people, and not to how well i felt or how honest i was being or how others felt. i even voted for ronald reagan the first time riding high on his "greed is okay" platform, which seemed just the ticket back then, and seems to have permeated the baby boomer generation of which i am on the trailing cusp.

but over the years, through my various projects, i've discovered that i feel most joyous when my personal gain is small to nil. i feel best when engaged in helping others with their lives and projects. i'm now seeing my role as a builder and architect as a healing role, in which i am a part of a dream, often a communal dream or someone else's dream. my interest is in eliminating my interest in favor of a greater interest. figuring out what that greater interest is is fascinating to me. the reward for approaching things this way has been that all of the energy i put into a project comes back to me in various interesting ways and usually multiplied. so, it's more profitable, in a sense, than pursuing selfish goals.

rafters up

another week gone by, another four days at faerie camp destiny, the radical faerie sanctuary in southern vermont. last weekend we lifted more very heavy rafters up onto the frame. it's very physical work, exhausting at times, but very fulfilling and the camaraderie that's developed while working on this project makes all the hard labor worth it. after a long day, we all settle down for a meal and afterwords hang around one of the fire circles on the land or huddle in the yurt if it's raining. i'm loving my time in the woods, a place where i don't own anything, and despite my responsibilities at the camp, i do not feel overwhelmed. the few times i've felt irritated have been when i've picked up power tools. their sound, vibration, threat and energy all irritate. it seems to be price of speed.

faerie camp

i've been very busy working at the radical faerie camp in southern vermont, more or less orchestrating the construction of a timber frame kitchen, bathroom and shower building. the frame is mostly up, just a few more pieces to go. the frame has been carved entirely by volunteers who, over the course of about 12 weekends, have learned from scratch how to carve mortises, tenons, peg holes, and how to plane.

like

i just like this picture.

slowga

i've been doing yoga for about eight years now. i practice more or less every day for between an hour and an hour and a half, usually in the early morning, sometimes in a class, sometimes with gabriel, sometimes with lots of others, mostly alone. a few years ago i trained to teach yoga at the kripalu center for yoga in lenox, massachussetts. at the time i really had little interest in teaching. in fact my decision to do a 200-hour yoga teacher training program was somewhat frivolous. i told myself i was deeply serious about yoga and needed to go deeper, but really i was looking for escape, something completely different, a hyperwarp to a distant galaxy with focus, clarity, physicality and good food!

the training was excellent. my two primary teachers, naresh and yoganand, were longtime yogis who had lived at kripalu when it was an ashram. they both practiced and taught yoga with unmistakable authority. however, my experience of yoga itself during the course was shallow. i did not experience epiphany, release or much of anything other than lots of sore muscles and a vague embarrassment that i seemed to be one of the only students not surfing deep emotional swells. i wasn't unhappy that i was losing weight, gaining muscle, growing limber and learning a lot of new-age vocabulary. all that was fabulous and i enjoyed checking out my new body in the full length mirror down in the basement men's locker room where it seemed many came to admire their own bodies and those of others (at least that was my fantasy, unyogilike as it was).

back at home, life returned to normal, meaning all the stresses and unresolved things that had complicated my life prior to hyperwarp into yogaland asserted themselves again. my life was remarkably the same, unchanged. i resolved to try teaching yoga and found a position at a local gym where i taught for about nine months, ironically in the same space that i had first taken a yoga class. i developed a loyal following of several students who told me they enjoyed and benefited from the classes. but, i found myself simply repeating what i'd been taught at kripalu and that grew stale very quickly. not much later, my own practice dwindled to a day or two a week, if that and it felt like a chore. i found myself not really caring at all about yoga, thinking about other things during practice, begrudgingly doing postures. the more i parroted what i'd learned in teacher training during my classes the more i realized how little i understood about yoga and how deeply shallow my experience of it was. i walked into a local clothing shop owned by a friend. she sported a tight-fitting "fuck yoga" t-shirt. i kind of gasped at first, but then i thought, yeah, fuck yoga. i stopped teaching partly because of conflicts but also because i felt fraudulent teaching it.

since then, slowly, i've dropped a lot of what i considered yogic discipline: i started eating meat (killing); i started having wine with dinner now and then (and recently even some martinis) (impurity); i started drinking coffee, even getting into a dunkin donuts coffee-in-the-morning habit complete with eco-unfriendly piles of styrofoam cups in the back of my car (more impurity!); and there's more. but, what's fascinating to me about this turn of events is that re-engaging my old habits (and dropping the superficial yogic ones) has brought me face-to-face with yoga.

how? well, in saying "fuck it all, i'm going to just be who i am, not try to be perfect" the yoga postures became real to me. i began to feel my limitations, muscles that were held tight by stress, fear, anger. postures seemed to intensify and filter my experience--if i allowed them to--providing feedback about myself. this has helped me realize that almost all yoga classes i've experienced move much to quickly for me. it takes me a long time to sense what's happening and without awareness yoga is meaningless to me. this new sense of yoga has more than once made me think about teaching again--i'd love to bring this slow yoga to others. but, i want to remain, for the time being, in research mode. i'm very much enjoying yoga as an experiment, as a kind of self-science that uses the body to enter the soul. after i've banged about with this strategy, and maybe cleaned up my act, perhaps then i'll teach again.

oh boy

hey, i'm not even taking pictures any more. but, i am organizing my life. i've discovered some online organizing tools that i'm really enjoying. though it feels a bit remedial in that i like to think of myself as an organized person (though my physical environment would suggest otherwise) it's been an excellent exercise to parse my life into projects and tasks and see just how much i've got on my plate. as with so many revelations in my life, i am the last person to see what others can see perfectly clearly. in this case: i have too much to do myself. applicants for jobs at the new aloofdork corporation should contact me directly. i have many positions available.

the hardest part of delagating for me is letting go, acknowledging that there are limits to human endeavor. it feels a bit to me like giving away something very valuable. there is a pain to it but also a fabulous sense of lightness when the cherished task is given away. i cling to very little materially, but i do cling to tasks. "that's my job!" part of this control-freakish behavior is yankee frugality (though i'm not a yankee, at least not directly). i dread spending money. the other part is losing control, having to trust, having to communicate a need to someone else, admitting that i have a need. i somehow have programmed deep inside me the delusion that i should be self-sufficient. it's a ridiculous concept given the way i live, with so many inputs from others, including energy, money, food, transportation, entertainment. very few of us, even the most remote, live in isolation. i need to admit my enmeshedness, my interconnectedness and reliance, that while i'm a strong person, i'm deeply indebted to my family, friends, society and the planet. seeing this clearly is a first and crucial step in genuinely organizing myself.

face it

gabriel and i are putting in a shower at home. we've had a bathtub for about a decade. it sits in the upstairs hallway and came from the original main street musuem on south main street. the tub ended up there because the bathroom i designed turned into a bedroom and the hall was simply the only place left it could go. after a few friends expressed shyness about bathing in the hallway (it's not really very public, actually, because it's upstairs, above most of the apartment, but, yes, you can be seen if you go upstairs) we started a tradition of taking pictures of people in the bathtub and posting them on the wall as a way of saying, look, all these people did it!

despite the new shower, the tub will remain, and hopefully more folks will grace the wall. we haven't come up with any shower traditions. but, already it has expressed some personality. the shower walls are backed with a cement fiberboard and while cutting it to face the shower walls we created the one pictured. a mistake forms a nose, the mouth is the cutout for a sprinkler pipe and the eye is the shower head hole. it's still visible but will soon be covered with tile.

biceps and boobs

i'm way behind in my blogging. i'm down to about a post every ten days. i enjoy writing and lament that drafting seems to be edging out writing for the time being. but, i keep snapping pictures, which doesn't take any time at all really, other than remembering to bring a camera. here's a shot from the recent revolution fashion show. this is not actually the fashion show but kim and brandon hamming it up in the hallway. brandon has the biggest biceps in white river junction. i enjoyed photographing them as much as he seems to like showing them off. i'm not really sure if they were comparing things here, but kim is also certainly big in all kinds of ways, though she's petite (a plus as you'll find out later). she not only brings us this glamorous fashion show twice a year, but champions her clothing store, revolution, which has just risen from the ashes (well, the ashes are actually across the street where the strip club used to be) and now features not only cool used clothing but prominently presents a half-dozen independent (and some local) designers who make beautiful collaged clothing from recycled garments, cloth and other found things like old billboards and computer parts. kim gets to wear all the cool clothes that someone like me at 6'4" never gives two serious thoughts about, though i must admit i do give them one thought most of the time until i remind myself that one, i'm male (which isn't that big an obstacle these days) and two, i'm a giant (which is the show stopper). i've fantasized for quite a while having some custom clothes made that really fit me. but, most of the time, for what i do, i wouldn't want nice clothes. i never know when i'm going to have to climb up on the roof and fix an air conditioning unit. truth be known, i am pretty vain. so, when i become rich and famous and no longer have to pull the hatches off rooftop air handlers and unclog toilets and change dusty old lightbulbs, i promise i'll hire a tailor.

pema serendipidy

yesterday, i drove down to the radical faerie camp in grafton, vermont. on the way there and back i listened to a talk by pema chodron, the buddhist teacher from gampo abbey, nova scotia. i hadn't listened to her for quite a while and it was refreshing to listen again.

today, on my way into white river junction, i stopped at the local coop. there was a car in the lot with a woman standing next to it, door ajar. the rear door was also ajar and a person in maroon robes was leaning into the car. i see buddhist monks and nuns around where i live frequently, so i wasn't surprised, but then i caught a glimpse of the person's face, and it sure looked like pema chodron. i went inside feeling giddy and somewhat silly because of my childish excitement at the possibility that someone famous (at least in buddhist circles) was in my town.

i bought a burrito--though i'd lost my appetite--and then circled into the pasta lane. there she was and i couldn't think of anything to say. what do you say to someone whom you know from books and talks and who knows nothing of you? so, i said, "are you pema chodron?" and she looked up, a bit puzzled perhaps, and paused. for a second, i thought, oh, i made a mistake. but then she said, "yes, i am." and i told her i'd just listened to a talk of hers the day before and thanked her. she asked me where the vitamins were, specifically echinacea. i showed her to the other end of the store and she found what she was looking for, said she was coming down with a cold.

and that was that. i've always wanted to thank her for her books and teachings. and without much fanfare, i got to do it in person, in a grocery store.

sole train

gabriel, david and i drove down to brattleboro last weekend to catch the reverend billy and the stop shopping choir. our friend donald sings with them. they put on a gospel program complete with sermon about the evils of consumer addiction ("we're all SINNERS!") and how to stop shopping, "push back!" they performed in a beautiful old church turned community center. the exaltations to halt the plague of consumerism seems to have backfired with me and gabriel, because, while we're normally happy co-op shoppers, organic farm and local economy supporters, we suddenly had the urge afterward to get mocha coffee slushees at dunkin donuts. spring fever?

listmaking

i made a list of words about myself this morning. i recommend doing this. at first, only a half-dozen or so words came out. i thought, that's it? so, i sat for a bit thinking of more words. i realized i was editing out a lot of words subconsciously, things that i might not really want people to know about. but i wrote them down anyway. and then the flood came. it was interesting that locking out embarassing or undesirable adjectives about myself also blocked the good things. when the list was done, i scrambled the order of words. while the first incarnation sounded a bit like a hallmark card, the randier later version, all mixed up, was a lot more interesting and human.

phineas

the newest denizen of white river junction (as far as i know) arrived this morning in lebanon, new hampshire, at 5:08am. apparently he screamed. but, he's calm now with his moms, michelle and michelle, who are recovering from the surprise of his three-week early arrival. gabriel sprinted to the hospital at 4am this morning to be with the michelles and phineas announced himself shortly thereafter. they had some back up names in case he didn't look like a phineas, but i think everyone's agreed that he's a phineas. phin will be a cool nickname. because his full name is phineas henry roy-ollie his acronym will be "phro". that's pretty cool too, especially if he ends up with curly hair. i got to hold him a bit this afternoon. i have to say, there's nothing like holding a newborn.

buyer beware

gabriel and i recently visited ikea to look at kitchen furniture. we didn't buy any of that, but we bought a small cabinet for a bathroom.

the cabinet's swell, but i've always wondered, how do they make them so inexpensively? the morning paper held a partial answer: cheap materials. according to an article in the washington post by peter goodman and peter finn, china is ikea's largest supplier of wood furniture and russia is ikea's largest supplier of wood. ikea claims it audits its wood supplies, but they have only two foresters in china and three in russia. the problem is that great swaths of forest are being harvested illegally, shipped with falsified documents to china for production and the result is that the western diet for wood products will, if continued at the same pace as it's running today, exhaust the forest of some countries in just a decade. much of the wood harvested is protected, but apparently chinese import officials rarely verify documents and the production chain takes advantage of this oversight which spurs timber industries where there should not be any. so, the problem with ikea (or home depot, or kmart, or lowes, or any multinational) is that it's too easy for retailers to claim clean hands. the system which is supposed to protect forest resources in the places where most of the wood for our cheap products comes from is corrupt. i think probably the only gauge we have, as consumers, is to ask whether the price seems too good to be true (aka sustainable). this means we, as consumers, have to check our desires and purchase power with a vague and incomplete matrix of social and ecological concerns as we lust after product that is clear, immediate and available.

vaccum

i wandered into our local sears store a few days ago. all the well-worn salespeople with combovers and bad suits that i've long associate with sears have been replaced by an entirely different staff. at first it seemed there was no staff--i simply didn't see them. but, after a minute or so, i realized the uniformly dark-blue-clad youths strolling the aisles with engraved plastic tags just below their peach-fuzzed chins (the boys anyway) were the staff. is this a byproduct of a merge/restructure?

although the kids are definitely more attractive than their predecessors and brighten the place up with their lightness and slang ("that drill is so gay") it's just not the same place. the new staff lacks authority. the cast may have changed, but the script hasn't. there are some things only a pot-bellied 55-year-old can deliver convincingly. but the kids sure know how to make a great display. check out the way they arrange the vacuum cleaners!