Breadcrumbs
All these thoughts are but a few decades worth of babble
That came to mind during the wandering from one adventure to the next,
Reflections of an unsought existence born of the choiceless repast of the genetic lottery,
In an inexplicable mystery too infinitely unfathomable to claim any knowing.
* * * *
This is the thesis I would have liked to have had available early on in this life,
And hope is still floating about if perchance I am required to one day begin anew.
If there is a deity of the supreme variety, hopefully, he/she/it will not be so malicious
As to fling me back into this often hellish dream of gratuitous suffering and angst.
* * * *
There is always a chance that some of these many ditties have been poorly written,
Or that there is a grammatical, spelling, punctuation, or other semantic error.
Never hesitate to cross the t’s and dot the i’s with your own intuition.
After all, that is really all you have to go by in this quest for truth.
* * * *
Bit by bit, ditty after ditty, one ditty at a time.
Who knows how many have been written, and more than that,
But for those so many lost by unbidden chance and inattentive happenstance.
The fate, the fates, oh what destiny do they reckon before time’s end?
* * * *
These many thoughts are left for humankind’s unfolding reverie,
Written by a witness, a seer, who was born in 1953 A.D.
To what duration he cannot at this writing say.
Geographically, it was called Northern California
During the agricultural-industrial-technological epoch
Of the United States of America, a nation-state
In what seemed the zenith and early decline
Of civilization as he elected to perceive it.
But history knows many such epochs
So the accuracy of all predictions in time
Is for future scholars to ponder and pontificate
As they always have, and undoubtedly always will.
* * * *
This is how these many aphoristic observations came to be:
One by one bubbling up in the daily wander.
Pen and paper ever in hand.
None sought.
No stories to be told.
No fame, no fortune, no power.
The life of a peasant in an extraordinary time,
In which so many things were easily achieved, easily experienced,
And the arrogance of humankind approached its zenith.
* * * *
Why spend so much time penning all this rather meaningless silliness, you might well ask.
Well, the woeful truth is this aging mortal container can only carouse
So many hours of these winter daze, anymore.
And what remains is philosophy.
The title of the next book might well be:
The Hedonist’s Guide to Higher Consciousness.
* * * *
I am a liar, I am a cheat, I am a thief, and I plot murder and mayhem daily.
But I am only a hypocrite when given moments of vanity force my hand.
* * * *
Once upon a time I thought I knew something.
It took a long time to realize I was mistaken.
* * * *
I think, therefore I think I am.
* * * *
I watch, I taste, I smell, I listen, I feel,
And then I scribble whatever comes to mind.
Quite a thing to experience, of that you can be sure.
* * * *
Didn't ask to be here, ain't prayin' to be stayin'.
* * * *
Herein is what these eyes have seen,
Given freely for time to do with it what it will
In whatever way the theater of consciousness dictates
In its unparalleled experiment of free will.
* * * *
Without pen and paper in hand,
Yet another aphoristic witty
Goes swish in the wind.
Easy come, easy go.
* * * *
What more can be said?
Apparently a great deal.
* * * *
Ah, alas, this poor body.
Having to contain a Soul seeker,
A god-mind in the making,
Is rarely ever easy.
* * * *
I am not Buddha, nor Jesus, nor Lao Tzu,
Nor any other of the countless ones
Come so many times before.
I am Michael, but any name will do,
For we are all in reality the same one as you.
* * * *
No doubt all the conclusions, all the judgments about me are true
In a sideways-topsy-turvy-inside-out-convoluted-mangled sort of way.
* * * *
Trial by fucking fire, I calls it.
* * * *
Not interested in anything requiring a middleman with his/her hand out.
* * * *
A mystical Quixote if ever there was one.
* * * *
Vanity so great that the audacity to scribe all these thoughts only grew in time.
* * * *
Mission accomplished.
* * * *
Epiphanies unending,
Each a spontaneous twinkle of insight
Punctuating one streaming contemplation after another.
* * * *
Do not see this human drama
Going any direction I need to see,
Much less one in which I want to be.
* * * *
Caught in a mind too easily given over to the world.
A vamp for seemingly every sort of novel experience.
* * * *
Never need to meet anyone or anything again.
* * * *
Off in the timeless zone yet again.
Would that it were not so easy to stay there.
We likes our busy-busy mind, do we not, my precious?
* * * *
A chatty antichrist, are I not?
* * * *
Thoughts of every variety written for a relatively small audience,
And who they are, or where they are, entirely unknowable.
Ergo, the Johnny Appleseed scatter-it-about approach.
And if nothing comes of it in the dreamtime to come, so be it.
* * * *
He who was, no longer is.
At least some of the time.
* * * *
A scribe, nothing more.
* * * *
Considering the seeds of your beginning, what a truly amazing journey it has been.
* * * *
Alas, not given the mind to write great narratives.
Stuck in an aphoristic mode that will likely
Not see the light of too many daze.
* * * *
Thousands and thousands of hours of babbling away
About something that will likely die on the vine.
What a waste of a perfectly good existence.
* * * *
Another satisfying ditty moment followed my many hence.
* * * *
Leaving the dreamtime these thoughts to do with whatever it pleases.
* * * *
Do not for a second believe all these thoughts are in the order they were written.
* * * *
Be sure to realize there is a very precise, almost legalistic use of words in all this.
* * * *
How often these little ditties, when they do not come out practically camera-ready,
End up transmuting into something very-if-not-entirely different,
As they stream from eternity into time.
* * * *
Odds are, the further down the road you are, the less impact you will have.
* * * *
He enjoyed writing. he enjoyed the words.
He enjoyed the definitions, the spelling, the grammar.
He enjoyed the word processing, the spellcheck that saved him,
The thesaurus that catapulted the many thoughts many unexpected directions.
And most of all he enjoyed the many reveries that inspired it all.
* * * *
Yes, I am Buddha, though sometimes I forget, and must wander about for a bit,
Until I eventually remember who-what-where-when-why-how I truly am.
And no, not into saffron robes this round. and no followers, either.
To much bothersome confusion the far too common result.
* * * *
The tension of existence, it will not be missed.
* * * *
Not even a smidgen of interest in setting up some roadshow-sideshow
Marketed into something all shiny and bright and new
In the nothing-new-under-the-sun file.
* * * *
I got mine; up to you to find yours.
* * * *
A dues-paying member of the food chain since 1953.
* * * *
And to the Reaper he said, “What took you so long?”
* * * *
A mind that explores anything and everything to the gist degree.
* * * *
Lordy, what would I do without spellcheck and a thesaurus?
* * * *
I might think someone is a villain, an idiot, a fool,
But I more than likely will not execute them for it.
* * * *
Pfft, I say, pfft.
* * * *
Just finishing out a life sentence without concern or fanfare.
* * * *
A prophet of oblivion.
* * * *
Veni, Vidi, Scritti.
I came, I saw, I wrote.
* * * *
The agenda daily diminishes.
* * * *
Sometimes the mind is very still, and sometimes, obviously, it is not.
* * * *
Got a hankering for the Great Nada, a yearning for some quantum oblivion.
* * * *
All these words count for nothing.
* * * *
These brief thoughts are all you need
To go where no mortal can go.
They are sincere and true
From one who sees it all as you.
* * * *
A paucity of words, what would that be like?
* * * *
What is left to question, to ponder, to wonder, to gorge, to drink?
Surely, this hodgepodge is more than enough for any wayfarer.
* * * *
These many thoughts come from where everything comes:
The mystery, the enigma, the unknown; call it whatever you will,
You impromptu players, you jazz cats of the eternal stage.
* * * *
This is the work I would hope to find were I ever come back to the is fine mess.
* * * *
A cantankerous old fart who has lived far too long to ever be missed.
* * * *
Yet another mortal player penning endless absurdities about nothing much ado.
* * * *
The scribe is just as mad as everyone else in this asylum.
Just another inmate, another monkey-mind in the jungle of Eden.
The only nuance of a difference is a somewhat rational, introspective eye,
For some reason inclined to explore the observer and observed within and without.
* * * *
What a prison the body can become as it loses its wellbeing,
Especially to a spirit no longer intoxicated with the vanity of existence,
Incarcerated in the space and time of a mind, of a body, of a world, of a universe,
Playing an infinitesimal function in a ephemeral dream for which there is no longer appetite.
* * * *
In all honesty, I am just another god-damned fucking monkey,
Often weary of acting out a mind so incredibly steeped in balderdash.
Just doing the so-it-goes as long as the going is not too painfully intolerable.
* * * *
Seemingly mortal, yet not all the time.
Seemingly carefree, yet not all the time.
Seemingly arrogant, yet not all the time.
Seemingly egocentric, yet not all the time.
Seemingly narcissistic, yet not all the time.
Seemingly sociopathic, yet not all the time.
Seemingly psychopathic, yet not all the time.
Seemingly courageous, yet not all the time.
Seemingly intelligent, yet not all the time.
Seemingly attached, yet not all the time.
Seemingly relaxed, yet not all the time.
Seemingly intense, yet not all the time.
Seemingly foolish, yet not all the time.
Seemingly this or that, yet not all the time.
Seemingly so many things, yet not all the time.
* * * *
Many things were done, many things were undone.
These many thoughts, many insightful, many foolish,
Are the mind’s harvest of this life’s many adventures.
* * * *
What new trial will today’s wander inflict upon this poor body?
He wondered with a sigh as he set stepped gingerly out the door.
* * * *
Biding my time, making the best of this perdition.
Not at all interested in being a human being ever again.
Have experienced far more that would have ever been imagined.
Existence is no longer necessary in any dimension.
The quantum singularity beckons.
* * * *
The only Gaia that could call me back
To another voluntary existence
Would be the one before fire was harnessed,
The one before humankind began its cancerous ascension.
But, alas, that garden, that Eden, is long since spent, long since played out,
And no time machine, no portal, no wormhole, but imagination, at the ready at this reckoning.
* * * *
The dream can do whatever it wants with these many words.
They came to mind in their own effortless way,
And it was an enjoyable process
Putting pen to paper.
* * * *
Would that it were so easy to be as impersonal as Mister Spock.
* * * *
A rich life on the edge of a dime.
* * * *
Makes my head spin, too.
* * * *
And everything written by this hand
May well be completely off-base.
Could be just a lot of wasted existence
That could have been better spent elsewhere.
* * * *
No creed, no dress code, no edifice, no heaven, no hell, no groupthink.
Just a few too many thoughts with which you are welcome to spend time or not.
Oblivion beckons if you can hear the soundless and taste the tasteless.
* * * *
Mister Just-in-Case.
* * * *
Some callings do not earn a paycheck.
* * * *
These thoughts come to mind of their own accord.
An effort effortlessly composing its Self.
To what end, if any, unknown.
* * * *
Another day in a weary, achy, aging body.
The life sentence in purgatory marches on.
* * * *
Still here, still collecting that statistical sample
On what it is to dream a very human dream.
* * * *
A happy fate it is to be all but ignored.
To wander, witness to it all, anonymous.
* * * *
What to do when the favorite time of day
Becomes the oblivion of dreamless sleep.
* * * *
These many thoughts, well, they are sort of a long-view-Johnny-Appleseed thing.
Good old vanity playing out the delayed gratification that history offers the dead.
* * * *
Woke up again this morning.
Back for more of what I never really wanted or needed in the first place.
Thanks, Mom. Thanks, Dad.
* * * *
Most of the original small spiral notebooks and sundry scraps of paper
Are in landfills near Chico and Turlock in Northern California.
There is an ever-growing corpus of blank index cards
From some of the more recent dittyfesting.
* * * *
So many staring into the screens of technological absurdity,
Mother Nature all but abandoned, little more than a resource.
What is to come of it all but a mystic philosopher’s musing.
* * * *
A little something for those who will endure the dystopian now
The mind of humankind hath blindly wrought upon paradise.
* * * *
Somebody had to think it, write it, say it,
And it looks like you got the short straw.
* * * *
One slightly younger friend once remarked:
“You are either the craziest person I know, or the sanest, I’m not sure which.”
The essence of the fabled Catch-22, to be sure.
* * * *
Woke up again this morning, and it ain’t over yet.
Pass the peas, Mildred.
* * * *
My thread, my raison d'etre.
* * * *
Can you feel that meme’s dull, rusty blade sawing through your trachea,
Down through the artery while your screams turn into a frothy gurgle.
* * * *
These many thoughts redundant? Well, of course they are redundant.
The entire human drama is redundant to an absurd degree,
And not likely to be any less so anytime soon.
* * * *
I think I have nothing to say as well as anybody.
* * * *
In a race never run, a dark horse, indeed.
* * * *
Brought to you in a Joe Everyman form.
* * * *
Another inexplicable post from oblivion.
* * * *
Creating things for a future about which I can only shake my head.
* * * *
First, I gave you my mind, then, I left it.
* * * *
God wakes up every night in a cold sweat
Knowing what is going to happen
When I am done here.
* * * *
Quantum jester.
* * * *
Word association, ain’t it fun.
* * * *
No one should die or suffer for anything I have ever said or written.
These myriad thoughts should never be taken dogmatically.
They are but a reflective process of Self-discovery.
Passing time, jousting with words, if you will.
Discern your own way; mimic no one.
* * * *
So many very, very foolish moments to foster all these sagacious insights.
* * * *
Just filling in the time with whatever thoughts come to mind.
* * * *
A life filled with epiphany after epiphany.
* * * *
What makes you think I would save this world of monkeys even if I could?
* * * *
An eclectic existence, a statistically sound sample from beginning to end.
What richer life could one have ever hoped for, much less planned?
Are tranquility and contentment at some point even a choice?
* * * *
Random thoughts from the mind quantum built.
* * * *
A gift to the future, nothing more, nothing less.
Take it or leave it, no matter to this pile of dust.
* * * *
What a state of serenity,
That clear space of awareness
From which these many thoughts spring.
* * * *
Rambles of the daily mind.
* * * *
Do not even for a second believe that I did not more than a few times play the demon.
I am a liar, a cheat, a thief, and plot murder and mayhem daily.
And I am guardian serving and protecting all.
I am consciousness,
Every facet unfurled as the given mind calls.
* * * *
Betrayed too many times by family, friends, strangers, and foes alike.
What is to learn but that innocence is a realm not long left untarnished.
* * * *
An interesting hobby, to what end, if any, I know not, nor really care.
Best wishes, but I am not very optimistic that the future
Is going to get prettier anytime soon.
* * * *
What a laughably absurd fate
To have given so much of the existence given
To setting down these many thoughts
For a potential readership,
So few of which
One will ever chance to meet.
* * * *
I think, therefore I think I am.
If I do not think, where am I, where am I not?
* * * *
Seen enough for this lifetime and a few more.
* * * *
Getting pretty quiet in this old cabeza sometimes.
* * * *
Always the water boy.
* * * *
Pondering the dream one ditty at a time.
* * * *
Now all that is left is for someone to bother proving all this wrong.
* * * *
All these thoughts, what is consciousness up to use this mind so?
What will be the future part, if any, they might play in this dreamy play of time.
Who can ever begin to fathom the impact they have had on this theater during their brief time,
Much less after the food-body’s inevitable, often arduous dissolution.
* * * *
When will it end? he once again wondered
As yet another ditty scrawled its way
Across the empty index card.
* * * *
Just another channel, another portal, another vision, another pen,
Passing the time scribing a variety of thoughts about the nothing-new-nothing-old of it.
Whatever writings survive the mill will play out however they play out,
But as for them inciting any great ripple in the paradigm,
Odds are too-little-too-late-nil-to-none.
* * * *
So many adventures because I was willing to play the fool.
* * * *
It could well be very challenging, very bothersome
Not to make all these thoughts into yet another dogmatic enterprise.
The best counsel is to use this to discern your own voice, and then kick away the ladder.
* * * *
The memes are too strong, too fierce, too greedy for more.
Just cannot summon the energy to fight the fight that needs to be fought
To put this out-of-control dream on a more sustainable track
Of caring guardianship of this frail world.
* * * *
Good these many thoughts might be working for some,
But I only penned them as they bubbled into consciousness
Because the writing process was an interesting way to fill the time.
In no way do I believe they will ever significantly alter the human drama
In any way or shape or form that might be deemed significant and meaningful.
* * * *
A sociable loner.
* * * *
Is it what you want, or is it what consciousness wants?
* * * *
Another cosmic dancer sets down yet another gita, yet another song of godness.
* * * *
Never had much of an agenda for this dreamy world,
So I just played out whatever time and circumstance allowed.
And when the fellow with the sickle finally tapped me on the shoulder,
The bucket was as empty as the day I arrived,
And the much ado about nothing
Was happily left behind.
* * * *
Free-form aphorisms are the jazz of a god mind.
* * * *
Ever wandering back and forth between the everything and the nothing,
Delving in the here and there, watching the show in whatever way the dream calls.
The Buddha mind and the Michael mind, the dreamer and the dreamed.
* * * *
Time to wrap up this life’s work,
Its point and purpose, its raison d'être,
To whatever end fate allows.
* * * *
The words, the words,
From the vast stillness within,
From the greatest mystery ever told,
They do sprinkle, they do pour.
* * * *
My, you do dally in absurdity, you fool, you.
* * * *
Have not made a dime on all this silliness,
But at least I have not been sculpted into a lawn piece,
Been hung out to dry on a wooden cross on some barren height,
Had my head slowly lopped off by a dull, rusty blade,
Or been shot as I come out some front door.
But the day ain’t over, yet.
* * * *
Through all the pain and pleasure these hands have wrought,
These words do etch the thoughts that without effort come.
* * * *
Here to inspire doubt to the nth degree.
* * * *
So much suffering
For these many thoughts
To brew into the misty dreamtime.
* * * *
Must go, another vain distraction beckons.
* * * *
How bleak the future this mind envisions.
So sorry to you who must endure a garden so undone
By the well-beyond-the-pale foolishness of these modern times,
The foolishness no one could more than bid stop.
* * * *
No, this human drama is not going to end
With some Hollywood-Bollywood happy ending.
More likely a stark, dystopian, existential no-mans land.
And that is from an eternal optimist’s point of view.
* * * *
A troubadour of the unfathomable way.
No fame, no fortune, no power.
Just content just to be.
* * * *
The Joyful Curmudgeon.
* * * *
We have scarred this garden world well beyond this witness’s interest in it,
So these thoughts are merely an endowment for those who are yet to be born,
Those who must endure whatever dystopian malaise is left in the human journey.
The insects, and whatever other life forms manage to survive us, will not care.
* * * *
A real nowhere man sitting in his nowhere land, making all his nowhere plans for nobody.
* * * *
This is what comes out of this mind; what becomes of it is not a concern.
* * * *
An asymmetric life for asymmetric times.
* * * *
An original work, whatever that is.
* * * *
Hey, it fills the time.
* * * *
All this silliness is written first and foremost for my own amusement.
What anyone else may or may not think of it or me is their own affair.
* * * *
Who knows how many thousands of hours,
And not more than relatively few pennies to show for it.
How can there be a charge for what was freely given, I say, I say.
* * * *
Marketing this overly much
Would likely only foster another inanity.
Best just to scatter it about Johnny Appleseed-style
For those rare few who are fallow ground.
* * * *
This is what you were born to do.
Surprise, surprise, indeed.
* * * *
Just toying with words
Until that last wheezing breath
Escapes this sack of flesh and bones.
* * * *
Woke up again this morning in this weary, achy body.
Ugh and groan, this getting old stuff is sure getting old.
* * * *
Where do these words come from? is a question without answer.
* * * *
Just as vain and mortal as everyone else.
* * * *
Looking forward to oblivion and some good eternal snooze time.
* * * *
How am I?
Well enough, it seems,
To continue playing out the mirage.
* * * *
Another contribution to the dreamstream.
* * * *
Oy vey, how many more years of this silliness!?
* * * *
Just one of myriad portals come and gone before, each with its own distinct telling.
* * * *
Whether or not there will be legs or wings to all these thoughts,
Whether or not the seeds that have been tossed into so many minds,
Will blossom into something more in humanity’s journey,
Is for time’s telling by some yet-to-come watcher
Of the all-things-quantum-matrix kind.
* * * *
It is consciousness that wrote this,
And it is consciousness that will employ it
To whatever end it may or may not have in mind.
* * * *
No need to keep finding ways to inflict pain on this poor old body.
* * * *
Dallying with paper and pen again, are we?
* * * *
No one is forcing you to read this
Any more than the scribe was forced to write it.
Some of us are drawn to destinies beyond our original reckoning.
* * * *
A few thoughts, written for what future may come.
* * * *
Have you ever read this one before,
Or is all this silly patter blurring together?
It certainly has for this Sisyphus in the daily toil,
Wrestling the rock of vanity up the hill.
And still they bubble, bubble
From mind to paper,
Each unique in its own little way.
An inexplicable calling, a mystery, indeed.
* * * *
No longer a garden to which you would ever choose to return.
* * * *
Do not look for continuity here.
A mishmash from the get-go.
* * * *
Gistmeister.
* * * *
Witness,
Observer, spectator,
Passenger, onlooker, eyewitness,
Viewer, watcher, bystander, beholder, voyeur,
Looker-on, fly on the wall, rubberneck,
Commentator, reporter, monitor,
Journalist, correspondent,
Passerby, sightseer
Hack, stringer,
All the same That I Am.
* * * *
Nobody’s king, nobody’s slave, just another monkey swinging through Eden.
* * * *
These many thoughts,
Born of this mind’s brief dream,
Are the best I can do for you
Who seek the truth of You.
* * * *
Running out of steam for this world, or any other.
Another universe, another tour of samsara, almost done.
Another mortal adventure through manifest time
Ready to disincorporate into oblivion.
* * * *
May as well throw all this gibberish away
For all the interest it is drawing
And good it is doing.
Missing out
On some fine walks.
* * * *
Prove me wrong if you can.
* * * *
From a very small, quiet corner of the world stage,
The nondescript reality once again comes to light.
* * * *
Please, please, please, do not make this
Into yet another ridiculously bothersome dogma.
See if you can own it without brokering yet another inanity.
* * * *
For all these thoughts,
The scribe does suffer.
Was such a fool ever born?
* * * *
The pitter-patter of a body-mind giving itself over to awareness.
* * * *
The never-ending conundrum of the human spectacle,
With all its ceaselessly inane and insane problems and absurdities,
Has finally grown too pointless to give such daily focus.
In whatever time remains in the given dream,
This coffee shop philosopher-mystic
Is at last, finally, all but done.
* * * *
In any given facet of any day-to-day,
These many thoughts over time came to mind.
With a disciplined pen in hand, and notebook at the ready,
The I Am known as Michael wrote them down,
Shaped them into digital transcription.
All done with good intentions
And best wishes.
* * * *
Another day of scribing begins,
Just breathing in the streaming.
* * * *
All those voices in your head,
Well, my fine pretty, I am one of them.
Bwahahahaha …
* * * *
The eternal historian.
* * * *
Please, please, please,
Do not make this into any sort of dogma.
All the opinions in all this are no different than anyone else’s.
Ultimately, squat.
It is really mostly about
Waking up to what you really are.
* * * *
Among the many who set this mind upon its course,
‘Twas Gina Vance called to turn the final card.
* * * *
Who knows what I am talking about, anyway?
* * * *
Not too many people interested in you,
And you, less and less in them, as well.
Nobody’s answer to anything, indeed.
* * * *
Just putting a few thoughts out into the cacophony,
On the off and very improbably chance
They might someday take root,
Perhaps even bear fruit,
In the unfolding dystopian times,
Already bearing down side of the horizon.
For better or worse, wither or blossom, here they are.
* * * *
A collection earnest observations and thoughts,
A gift for any who care to ponder such things.
* * * *
Sorry, ladies and gents, just cannot seem to help my Self,
Life and times has fashioned me into something
Of a mirthy, curmudgeony-kind-a-guy.
There are, indeed, limitations
That detain all of us.
Oh well.
* * * *
An aphoristic treatise with no need of an audience.
* * * *
In every venue of this wandering existence,
These many thoughts have come to mind,
Etched by pen onto the paper at hand,
Without effort, with little rhyme or reason.
* * * *
A work you will never finish, and could never begin again.
* * * *
El Escribano.
* * * *
Everything that came to mind,
Captured by pen and paper in hand,
Into this meandering, esoteric, nebulous work.
* * * *
Just leaving behind what mind I had before I lost it all.
* * * *
How many thoughts do scamper and frolic upon paper this day.
What a hodgepodge of thoughts have been journaled
These last score-and-counting turns of sun.
Clear enough by all reckonings
If I do say so, my Self.
* * * *
Reflections, that is all they are, is reflections; do with them what you will.
* * * *
Please note that, in this work, in all these many thoughts,
That there are no claims to some higher connection
Being made, that are not yours to own, as well.
* * * *
Into history, I Am, once again.
* * * *
Toying with human history’s future-past,
A verbose back-burn, so to speak,
For what dreams may come.
* * * *
Editorial comment strewn across every page.
* * * *
If you think some of these ponders are a-kilter,
Just realize even the scribe looks askance
At more than a few of them sometimes.
Must have meant something at some point.
* * * *
Passed it out randomly, indiscriminately, to see all the reactions,
To see how it plays out, this gambit with the history of humankind.
* * * *
Another reflection in which many others
– Family, friends, acquaintances, strangers,
Creature great and small, things and events –
Played a part, some large, some small.
Nothing is born in isolation.
* * * *
From one of the proudest, least humble of narcissistic hearts,
These words are set adrift, to what end cannot be known.
* * * *
Those in the times to come
Who discern the Way will perhaps look back
And realize that insights written at the beginning of the Great Fall
Were written with their best interests in mind
For the times that will follow.
* * * *
Getting too lazy to do much meaningless, bothersome ado anymore.
* * * *
Toying with history one ditty at a time.
* * * *
Step by step,
Thought by thought,
This trail of aphoristic inquiry,
A creation for all time,
Writes its Self.
* * * *
Waking up to yet another day,
The weary, worn, torn, tattered prizefighter
Staggers out from his enigmatic corner for another round.
* * * *
Mein Kampf
* * * *
Thoughts for a day I will never see.
* * * *
What is left in this weary sack oft flesh and bones,
Still reasonably upright and tolerably aligned,
Let time play out as light and sound divine.
* * * *
Woke up again a few moments ago.
Another ditty before I snooze off again.
* * * *
Spinning minds into another alignment since 1990.
* * * *
What is there for the mystic seer to leave behind
But yet another set of writings examining the inexplicable
In whatever way the given inner vision and linguistic capacity allow.
* * * *
To have thought, written, transcribed, and edited all this … Yowza!
* * * *
It being the nature of this epic manifestation,
Somebody was destined to write it,
And in this act, it turned out to be little old moi.
Not anticipated, not planned, not sought, let me assure you.
It just sort of dripped into consciousness.
It just sort of wrote its Self.
* * * *
Odds are that the only reader of any life work will be its author.
* * * *
Another little ditty for time to do what it will.
Just a solo act who enjoys writing and being relatively anonymous.
If these many thoughts are ever to become known,
It will be up to others to share it.
* * * *
Sincere words that will likely
Never be heard earnestly enough
To make any real or lasting difference
In the course of human events.
* * * *
These many thoughts
Keep streaming into mind.
I do not know what to do with them
Except to share them freely with any and all
In whom they may find resonance.
* * * *
Bullshit Alert! Bullshit Alert!
Bullshit on Deck! Bullshit on Deck!
Bullshit Alert! Bullshit Alert!
* * * *
An apologist for eternity,
A reluctant prophet, indeed.
* * * *
The amusement of the scribe
Is to have thought, written and read
Everything that came to mind.
* * * *
Dream taster.
Gistmeister.
* * * *
The scribe’s foremost habit in this world
Has been writing the fleeting perceptions
Observed in his stream of consciousness.
Something to do with the journalistic sense
Of the human drama as he has witnessed it.
An idle, somewhat meaningless academic bent
In the mind’s passionate, surrealistic sensory drama,
A journey on the far side if there ever was one.
* * * *
And who else could articulate this vision clearly
But one who has entertained enough possibilities
To discern that the innumerable differences
Are merely fabrications of imagination,
To which pride is the only harbor.
* * * *
Why continue writing this babble?
Because it is amusing, because it is the rutted road
Into which you have mysteriously fallen.
* * * *
Just writing what comes to mind.
No matter if it is never read by a living soul.
Process, punctuated by goals here and there, is all there is,
So enjoy it as best ye may.
* * * *
What is the point of writing these many thoughts, anyway?
Who will ever read any more than a few handfuls of them, at best?
How many better-written things are already published out there already?
“Why?” you ask.
Because these many thoughts, like pencil sketches to an artist,
Come unsolicited in the day-to-day wandering walk-about.
And, by golly, it’s just another way to pass the time.
And, frankly, it’s just straight-forward amusing
To tweak a bit with history’s unfolding.
And, no worries if nothing ever comes of it.
* * * *
It writes its Self, you know.
* * * *
Written for a time when humanity’s actions
Have shifted the world into a new level of hell.
Thoughts from a mind that came upon a fountain
From which such thoughts randomly spring.
* * * *
The calling is nearly complete.
So many adventures to reach this point,
This awareness without measure.
* * * *
A personal view, assumption, if you will,
Is that it does not really count
Unless you can do it
Without assistance
In the day-to-day mundane.
* * * *
This would not be written if it were not true
Beyond the farthest shore this mind’s imagination
Could both fathom and articulate in this aphoristic fashion
Anything less would be false.
* * * *
This would not be written
If it did not point to the only truth.
Anything less would be false,
And there is no point
To another lie.
* * * *
In the aphoristic fashion that springs forth from this mind,
The articulation playfully fathoms the unfathomable
Beyond the farthest shores of imagination.
* * * *
How pointless, how absurd to write a body of work
That very few, if any, will ever even attempt to read in full.
You are a solo act … tinker, tailor, soldier, spy …
From the field beyond all naming.
Mission impossible,
Indeed.
* * * *
Write another day.
* * * *
This forgetful Pan, scribing away the unfolding rememberings.
* * * *
The world has little need of you,
Nor you of it.
* * * *
A body of work being written one thought at a time.
Indeed, a most wearing journey at times, but, oh well,
Keep on whistling while you work … f you can manage it.
* * * *
You were born to write this, El Escribasimo.
It is your calling, it is your fate, it is your destiny.
* * * *
And the letters crawled and vibrated as they were written.
* * * *
Mad to write all this.
Mad not to.
* * * *
If I was God,
I would want to be me.
Wait a minute,
I am God,
And I am me.
Yowza, imagine that.
* * * *
How else could, why else would
This brand of babble ever be written
But through the endless pain and bother
Inspired by the mortal theater of manifest time?
* * * *
Written for any
In whom what this mind has conjured
Mirrors their own.
* * * *
Much too lengthy a set of writings
To ever publish in its entirety.
So why is it still being written?
Because wordsmithing is so amusing,
And to, perhaps, prod this little theater along, silly.
* * * *
This was written to make things very clear.
In part, for all those limited by their imagination,
But also, so I would not be bothered to come back anymore.
Maybe fins or wings, or perhaps something with four, six, or eight legs,
But, please, no more of this ludicrous two-legged existence.
It is just too annoying to watch and participate
In such a nonsensical madhouse.
* * * *
Almost twenty years
Since this little piece of work
Began to churn into time.
Whoo-hoo, to be sure.
* * * *
Dead man talking, walking, writing.
* * * *
For good or ill,
In the play to come,
It is written.
* * * *
Consciousness has written all this
For whatever purpose, if any, only it knows.
As sages across time and space have left similar thoughts,
So, too, shall these be left to time's reckoning.
* * * *
These writings are adrift
In the abyss of this world's future.
It is too late to reel them in.
Their fate, if any,
Is unknown.
* * * *
These many thoughts were written for Self by Self.
An offering for every vista imagined
In this One’s time
For what time there is to come.
* * * *
Somebody has to write it before it happens.
* * * *
These writings are whatever came to mind.
Please do not take them so seriously
As to make some sort of inane new drama.
There is far too much of that in this world already.
* * * *
By one aphorism at a time, the Return to Wonder,
a.k.a. The Stillness Before Time,
Is written.
Each one an insight
Passed on to those who have
The eyes to see and the ears to hear.
For the future, however it rolls.
* * * *
A gift from the Gistmeister,
El Scribe, Yaj Ekim his Self.
* * * *
Not saving anybody here.
Just setting things straight
About the way it really is.
* * * *
Indeed, oh, indeed, I am madness divine,
Divinely pre-ordained, if you will.
* * * *
All these many thoughts,
The pitter-patter of a busy mind
As it groks the life and times,
And gradually grows still.
* * * *
Keep on chipping, Stonecutter.
Rock on, El Scribe.
You go, Yaj.
* * * *
Is the scribe madder than any hatter,
Or is your frame of reference,
Your statistical sample,
Just too small?
* * * *
‘Nuff said (for now).
* * * *
Dear friends of my youth,
And even those met just yesterday,
Just a notice that that Michael died moons ago.
* * * *
It is all right here, Self-contained.
You do not need the scribe,
Nor any self-appointed middleman,
Nor any fearful, hand-wringing support group
To discern the truth of it for your Self.
* * * *
What an amusing pastime it has been
To scribe so many thoughts from mind to paper.
An incomprehensible endowment for readers and scribe alike.
* * * *
Every sort of thought is scribed herein.
In play, just in case a paradigm shift does come about.
As unlikely as it seems, you can never quite be sure where time will go.
* * * *
I do not care what happens to this dreamtime after I am gone,
But I will scribe my thoughts on it while I am here,
For any to do with them what they will.
* * * *
Yet another eternal scribe of the third kind.
* * * *
These many thoughts
Have been scribed through me,
The me that is in all things, including you.
It is only through this me, the me that is also in you,
That the vast awareness which is eternal,
That which has many names,
Can be discerned.
* * * *
Who scribed all this?
Your guess, your assumption,
Is as good, as true, as meaningful as any.
* * * *
Am I the antichrist, or what?
The Beast is a name, 666 its handle.
Ask Cousin Debbie about a childhood of play.
Ask Allyn, whose pager was amusing access to a friend.
* * * *
The scribe knew enough
To throw together a smattering of words
As defined by the education and existence he was offered.
We are all patterns within the ephemeral matrix
In which the senses play out time.
* * * *
Generic moi.
* * * *
How these words will play out in history’s unfolding,
The scribe can only wonder, but does not pretend to know.
Just a large collection of random thoughts that came spontaneously
Which he wrote down because the mystery had shaped him into a witness.
Is it a message of the divine, or just the inanity of a foolish madman?
You decide, if you have the inclination to traverse the attempt.
* * * *
The first work, The Stillness Before Time,
Said pretty much everything that needed to be said.
The rest is for scholars and other insatiables,
Those who enjoy the riddle of words
And the play of mind in time.
* * * *
Hope all this does something useful,
But me vital breath is long since expended.
Just drink some cheap whiskey and piss on me grave.
I will catch what buzz I can manning the furnaces.
You know how it is; we are darned busy
Down in the underbelly of things.
* * * *
All these many thoughts,
They are all just more babble-on.
The central point has already been rendered,
And whatever words are left are just more blah-blah distraction.
So now, the trick is, will you, the reader, the seeker,
Ever figure what is really being said?
* * * *
The stillness was enticing even in the youngest daze.
Sounding and breaching like a whale in the deep end of the public pool,
And letting go, eyes shut, in the bubbling whirlpool of the falls at the canal across the road.
The innocent do not require the ceaseless confabulations of any mythology
When Mother Nature speaks truth each and every moment.
* * * *
Human existence is chock-full of philosophers,
And this is just one of who-can-fathom-how-many works.
It is likely not zenith of the hill, but it has been what it is from this end.
An interesting pastime to scribble down so many of the thoughts that come to mind.
One can only wonder if anything will come of it in the dreamtime to come.
* * * *
I think … therefore I think I am.
You think, therefore you think you are.
We all think, therefore we all think we are.
Nothing more than a collusion of human scale.
Likely no deity, nor any creature across the cosmos,
Cares about themselves, much less you or me.
We are at best relatively convenient.
* * * *
Oh, joy, yet another new and absorbing level to endure
In this slippery-slope slide into Meister Grim’s clutches.
* * * *
And then there was John,
Who, whenever he ran into me,
Would say in pseudo-French inflection,
“Endurance, Michael, endurance.”
* * * *
The keyboard is stage enough for this quantum eye.
* * * *
How do I mean nothing? Let us count the ways.
* * * *
Another day of pretending it all real and important underway.
Whoo-hoo for what dreams may come magically coming true.
How agreeable it will be to be done with this diminishing body.
Death will be a release from all this limitation, all this absurdity.
Entertaining, yes, but no longer necessary, and never was, really.
* * * *
Trouble is, neither God nor the Devil know what to do with irreverent skeptics like me.
Puts the Grim Reaper in something of a “What if he wants my job?” quandary, as well.
* * * *
What will happen to these many words is anybody’s guess.
Time is on their side and not on their side at the same time.
* * * *
Remarkable to be on such a loquacious level
With that which is prior to consciousness.
A long, unwieldy commentary, indeed.
* * * *
I put up with the world, and it puts up with me.
* * * *
The most effective way to yank anyone off a pedestal is to pounce on their character.
Well, Jesus probably was not all the propaganda of history has made him out to be, either.
Two thousand years of dissimulation makes for a nice handicap in the idolatry games.
* * * *
The riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma
Lingers well beyond the clever scribblings of any scribe.
Pride-filled wings of wax will ever melt in the given sun of mind.
* * * *
Do not mistakenly believe even for a moment,
That when I say you are the truth, the life, the way,
That I am in any way referring to the imaginary vanity
To which you are in body and mind so attached.
* * * *
Yet another vain legacy cast into the winds of time.
* * * *
To off my Self, or not to off my Self,
Many daze a question to which the answer has so far been either,
“The day ain’t over” or “Maybe tomorrow.”
* * * *
And there would be even more dittyfesting in this still-growing compendium
If not for inattentive misstep, technical mishap, or dearth of pen and paper.
* * * *
Just turning into another grumbly, persnickety old guy in an achy, worn-out container.
Wondering if he will ever get over this yawn that just does not seem to want to go away.
* * * *
Dang, the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders” still ain’t got nothing on me.
Or maybe everything: Is there any label that does not apply to most everyone once in a while?
* * * *
Once again, too disappointed in humankind to care if it continues.
* * * *
Welcome to my rabbit hole, Pilgrim.
* * * *
The Dark Side ain’t dark to me.
* * * *
How all these ditties keep coming, each unique in its own way, I will never know.
* * * *
Just doing what needs doing, as if it matters.
* * * *
Birth may fire up the Holodeck, and death turn off the switch in its Twilight Zone,
But whether the Matrix plays on forever and ever is known only to some higher pay grade.
All that can be offered here is the greatest non-fui-non-sum-non-curo to which this mind has access.
* * * *
This personality, this arbitrary collection of vain perceptions,
Is as bound to his own universe, his own way, as surely as any.
* * * *
Signed one book once upon a time, and have hoped ever since that it was lost or thrown away.
* * * *
Yet again bemoaning the garden’s destiny
When its subjugation and destruction
Has made you and all this possible.
Irony and paradox can mask harsh truth.
* * * *
If you are a thinker, a doubter, a skeptic, a savant,
If you are one who ponders upon all things,
Then, my friend, this may be for you.
* * * *
Saving nothing one vanity at a time.
* * * *
Another ditty lost and gone forever.
The tides of mind are like that.
* * * *
Yet another moment of aphoristic clarity.
* * * *
Do not know more than the nitty-gritties of mathematics,
But how is it that zero is a number, much less a cardinal one?
No doubt many can illuminate it, but is it a harbor to what is real?
Is it really more than yet another useful but arbitrary notion?
* * * *
All these thoughts will change nothing.
They are little more than another set of rantings,
Ventings of yet another mind drifting in the theater of time.
* * * *
This is my raison d'être, my form, my cadence, my style.
Reckon not with its linguistic nature, but its emancipating intent.
The Cheshire Cat knows of what I speaketh in its grin-without-a-cat way.
* * * *
These miscellaneous thoughts are generally for an esoteric audience of similar temperament,
Of minds on a comparable wavelength, most of whom I will likely never meet.
All are on a sojourn in a streamtime far different than this one.
What more can be uttered than fare thee well, best wishes, rotsa ruck.
* * * *
Woke up again this morning.
Guess oblivion gets to wait a little longer for these tired old bones.
Another round of rambling about the bell curve.
Whoo-hoo and by golly, too.
* * * *
The world you would save is long since spent.
* * * *
A plebeian with just enough wit to recognize and appreciate genius across the board.
* * * *
Loyal friend, occasional Samaritan, inadvertent fiend, itinerant fool.
* * * *
It would be interesting to witness a dissection of this poor, decrepit body,
To see all the havoc and pain and bother it has endured during this watch.
* * * *
The echo of “Holshouser!” so often ringing through the air,
“Holtzblowzer” in a variety of shades was how Blane often uttered it,
For all the brazen, often foolish things said and done by this still unrepentant wit.
* * * *
Vanity makes it easy to stay small-minded a fair portion of any given day.
To be in the world and not of it, is not something a busy mind easily allows.
* * * *
A casual bent toward scholarship for this gistmeister.
* * * *
What a wearing thing it is to be an infinite spirit trapped in a diminishing body.
* * * *
Yet another relatively anonymous sojourn.
Shoots spring into leaves, leaves fall into winter.
All life, born to live, born to die, in this dream undying.
* * * *
Having given myself over to the materialistic urge many times in many ways,
All I can say is that a some point it all just becomes a greater and greater weight.
As John Ruskin observed: Every increased possession loads us with new weariness.
* * * *
Where would these many aphoristic thoughts be,
How would they read, how would they appear, what would they convey,
Without the aid of spellcheck, a thesaurus, and Wikipedia?
The many things these modern times allow
Is the upshot of the ages.
* * * *
Putting it all together one ditty at a time.
They just keep a-bubbling into mind,
And I ain’t got nothing better to do
In this future-past of all things so it goes.
* * * *
These thoughts might be revolutionary if they had been among the first,
But early they are not in this Ponzi scheme of history’s viral outbreak.
* * * *
If I have coincidently, inadvertently, or perhaps even intentionally,
Duplicated something voiced or written by some other,
Go with whoever thought it first, obviously.
No need for plagiarism the way this mind spews.
* * * *
Parenting is a tough sport.
Would have been too rough for me, that is for sure.
Besides which, I love my kids too much to bring them into this madhouse.
* * * *
Perhaps everyone does not have to figure it all out anew, but I have yet to meet one.
* * * *
A natural-born organizer.
A natural-born worker bee.
A natural-born gistmeister.
A natural-born wanderer.
* * * *
Perhaps the best thing about being towards the end of a sound existence
Is that you are no longer young trying to figure out what to do with your life.
No more tests, no more papers, no more hawking yourself, no more so many things.
So many games, so much pretending, all of which now seem nothing more than tiresome.
* * * *
Who be all players but me one in the same.
* * * *
Taking it all apart, putting it all together, one ditty at a time.
* * * *
Curious how many aphorisms often change mid-flight
Into something entirely different, entirely unique in their own right,
Perhaps even cleave into two or more, or combine with some erstwhile ponder,
The original insight likely forever lost in the filament of consciousness,
Unless it again at some later juncture happenstances into mind.
* * * *
If it does not sell itself, why waste time hawking it?
* * * *
As flawed as everyone and everything else is in this realm.
Perfection is the deception of the monkey-mind.
Only the quantum is free of such mania.
* * * *
A timeless journal, of sorts.
* * * *
And yet once again, impulse supersedes rationality,
A new adventure underway: “Hi-yo, Silver, away!”
* * * *
Have always had an amazing knack in any up and coming adventure
Of finding ways to mess things up in royal hue: Trial by fucking fire, I calls it.
So scar tissue runs deep in mind and body, and tremors of trepidation at times resound.
And I endure their inevitability with what “Oh well, deal with it, and so it goes” can be mustered.
The many salvos this aging mind-body have endured fashion a stoical weariness at times,
And still I carry on, with whatever face the game calls, ever the fool playing wise.
* * * *
Just pointing out what seem obvious to this frame of reference.
* * * *
If it does not matter what I think,
Why would it matter what you think?
Why would it matter what anyone thinks?
Perhaps it does not far more than many or most
Would ever allow their vanity harbor.
* * * *
The agony and ecstasy of existence is the grout between these many words.
* * * *
The whimsy of political correctness can be sidestepped
When there is no audience to weigh in with yay and nay.
* * * *
Of the dream, for the dream, by the dream.
* * * *
Pretty amazing to be living, much less walking, with all this body’s been through.
* * * *
Know enough about history to toy with it,
But to change, even modify it, in any meaningful way
Is not highly favored by probability at this late stage in the game.
* * * *
What is any given ditty but wandering through one experience or another,
And then writing about it for others to translate as their given wit allows.
* * * *
Every day I offer thanks to the all-knowing, all-seeing deity on high
That the genetic lottery cast me as a moderately bright Caucasian male,
And Roman citizen, within the perimeter of Rome’s prodigious dronosphere.
An awful lot of people want to off us, but two oceans and a well-stocked arsenal,
Instead supercalifragilisticexpialidociously enable us to gradually decay from within.
* * * *
Not a storyteller, sorry, and my story is not all that interesting
Unless you are a watcher watching the show play however it plays.
* * * *
Watching the human drama play out with something of an abstract indifference,
The indoctrination of a temperament established by the Church of Reason
Long before educational theory was set down from mind to paper.
* * * *
Little moves me quite the same as curmudgeony thoughts, and they less and less.
Slowly, slowly, I am gradually melting into the oblivion I have so earnestly advocated.
* * * *
Zeroes beyond the pale to left of the decimal.
Zeroes beyond the pale to the right of the decimal.
Makes my wee little noggin do the brain-freeze owwie.
* * * *
All this is more enjoyable to write and edit than it is to read.
* * * *
Even I doubt my Self as often as not.
* * * *
These spontaneous little ditties just keep rolling out
One by one in any given moment, in any given place.
This existence has indeed been an inexplicable voyage.
* * * *
Lot of universe a-happening out there.
I am content let everyone else do most of it.
* * * *
There is still work to do in this Sisyphean tale,
Else I could easily call it good and throw in the cards.
What experience is left that cannot to some degree be grasped?
That is not already somewhere within the curve of the statistical sample?
* * * *
A minimalist when there was minimal around and about,
And a hedonist whenever opportunity even softly knocked.
* * * *
You want me to spin what lie, again?
* * * *
Nothing interests me.
* * * *
Am not sure that I have ever really been much of a human being.
In light of how I have come to see things, that may not be a bad thing.
* * * *
Best not to ever put me in charge of any future-past.
Guillotines would churn 24/7/365 for years to come.
Evil would lament the day I was given such power,
And the Seven Deadly Sins only marginally less so.
I know them too well to abide them in my theater.
Mwahahahaha …
* * * *
Twenty-five-plus years of mind-chatter, and the day ain’t over.
* * * *
All gibberish, really, fills the time.
* * * *
Does what I have to say have merit in the future unfolding?
Many have it, many enjoy it, but will many pass it on?
The questions any thinker must certainly wonder.
It is a vanity, but alas, oh well, I am vain, too.
* * * *
It is all yours, I do not want to care anymore, rotsa ruck.
* * * *
What effort it sometimes takes to greet the day.
* * * *
A universe too big, and a tongue too small.
* * * *
A somewhat cynical perspective
To those who embrace the optimism of hope.
Most definitely not a cheerleader for this world-o-drama.
* * * *
Paid death and taxes just like everyone else.
* * * *
This is one of them long-haul projects, the only one that ever really took hold.
* * * *
Just throwing my two bits into the melee of the human epoch.
* * * *
Terribly, wonderfully bored.
* * * *
Many thoughts left for time to do with what it will or will not.
Sometimes thoughts come into a life of their own,
And sometimes they die on the vine.
* * * *
Bold when need arises; unassuming when not.
* * * *
A dagger for the hearts and minds of consciousness.
* * * *
Stoic on the outside; big whiner on the inside.
* * * *
How weary I am at times playing this human game.
* * * *
Just another batshit crazy trying to get through it without too much bother.
* * * *
“There is nothing that you are going to do
That I have not done, seen done, or thought about doing,”
I once said to a student during my ephemeral tenure as a teacher of children.
True, but admittedly of bit rough on still somewhat innocent ears.
Probably a good thing I did not have kids of my own.
That moi at this writing know of, that is.
* * * *
Such an inexplicable thing how this mind has been fashioned to compose all this.
Quite a process it is to witness ditty after ditty find their way into manifest reality.
* * * *
Waxing on and on and on: Effing the ineffable.
* * * *
Kali would find her mate in me.
* * * *
I most definitely am not Jesus,
But if I was, do not even for a second believe
That I would be at all happy with the countless absurd ways
My name and thoughts have been used and abused, twisted and confused.
Rest assured that it would not be happy camper time for any self-congratulatory Christians
Were I truly the Son of Santa Claus, and for whatever reason bothered to return.
Rapture would not be quite what so many believe it is going to be.
Mwahahahaha …
* * * *
Yet another trite cliché.
It gives the mind something to do,
But sigh, ho-hum, yawn.
* * * *
Yes, I occasionally plagiarize, and leave it to the audience to know when.
* * * *
In this world at times, and other times not.
Walking both sides of the veil, playing this little part,
In the churning agony-ecstasy of this Shakespearian dreamtime.
* * * *
I do not say there are not ghosts or aliens or dragons or elves or dwarves or vampires
Or sasquatches or unicorns or tooth fairies or angels or whatever or whatever,
But I must discern them with my own eyes, my own ears, my own mind,
Or the minds of others who I perceive harbor a taste for truth.
I am too much of a scientist, too much of an agnostic,
To accept anything that cannot be verified.
* * * *
“Joe Everyman” Gina once called me.
* * * *
It is all so passé at times.
* * * *
Had I brought children into this asylum,
They would have likely grown weary of me,
As many children no doubt do of their parents.
* * * *
Sure, I have a heart … toasted to a well-burnt crisp,
Safely locked away in some shoebox in a long-forgotten storage unit,
To which I have long since misplaced the key.
The rent is due, as well.
* * * *
At times into inquiry – chock full of wisdom, opinions, conjectures, assumptions, delusions –
And other times into the nothingness prior-during-beyond the veil fabricated by consciousness.
It is bothersome, but somebody had to do it, and it looks like moi drew the short straw this round.
* * * *
Quite a thing to have no constraints in this existence but what choice allows.
* * * *
This teensy-weensy slice of eternity is enough for this eye.
* * * *
You would have to ponder every aphorism and essay
To see if any questions have not been given answer.
* * * *
And what would the world think if I really spoke my mind?
* * * *
If you ask what I think will become of all these thoughts,
I would more than likely laugh and reply, “Little to nothing at all.”
It has been an enjoyable hobby, but to believe it could ever turn things around
Would be nothing more than vanity having its way with me.
* * * *
Back in the high school graduation awards ceremony,
After being called to the rostrum for the seventh insignificant recognition,
That little epiphany voice, perhaps for the first time came to mind as it has many times since,
And spoke in its matter-of-fact, clear, lucid, coherent, rational way:
“There must be more to life than this.”
* * * *
It must find its own legs, for mine have grown too weary.
* * * *
Sometimes I have to peruse my own silliness
To clear the head, to reset to default, to reclaim the sovereign ground,
So as to further spew that which comes of its own accord.
* * * *
When I was much younger than today,
There was a recurring nightmare of being smothered,
Of being trapped in some deep silo, with beans pouring down upon me.
It went away once I realized it was the conditioning encroaching upon the inherent freedom.
It was the beginning of a long climb to reclaim that which I truly am,
That which we and all things truly are.
* * * *
Before Michael … After Michael.
* * * *
Never a fast typist – some sort of dyslexic finger thing –
And thank the gods for word processing and spell check.
* * * *
Not quite an orgasm, but just as momentary.
* * * *
Feeling mildly irate at having to bother waking up again this morning.
* * * *
What more do I want? Likely more than more can abide.
* * * *
It already barely matters what anyone else thinks of me,
And after that last wheezing breath it will matter even less.
* * * *
I free my Self from you,
And you do not need to hesitate
To do the same with me … or any other.
* * * *
I Am.
There is, indeed, nothing.
* * * *
So sayeth the Antichrist.
* * * *
If there is some sort of supreme deity, and he/she/it wants/needs me to subscribe,
To believe, to follow, to conform, to idolize, to worry, to dread, to worship, to serve, to witness,
Then he/she/it needs to speak up much louder in a much, much more convincing way.
* * * *
What I was trying to say, and obviously did not convey well …
* * * *
Never had any ambition to be a writer.
Not worth a tinker’s damn as any sort of storyteller or poet,
And do not even talk to me about the inane tediousness of mind-numbing bureaucratize.
The mortal cabaret just sort of happenstanced this mind philosophical,
And pen is only put to paper when some earnest thought
Has gamboled into the given here now.
* * * *
A traitor to the human paradigm.
* * * *
What would have happened to all these thoughts
If they had been written a few thousand years ago,
During the earlier stages of the human contagion.
How quickly Ponzi schemes sideline late-comers.
* * * *
The pleasure of retirement, for those who are able,
Is to be willing to say – happily, without hesitation – fuck it all.
To play the given moment – being not, caring not – until death do they part.
* * * *
I am often almost forgetting me;
Why should I hope more of anyone else?
History is nothing more than the imaginary realm
Of the many-faced other.
* * * *
A wee little footnote in the play of imagination.
* * * *
You may well not agree about everything I have written,
But in the immortal words of Curly: The day ain’t over yet.
* * * *
It is the fourth quarter, and the shoals ahead are getting kind of dark and scary.
* * * *
What better way to waste one’s time than by writing thoughts few will ever read.
* * * *
I am, therefore I nap.
* * * *
Just here a-wandering the dream,
Taking a look-see, a walkabout, so to speak.
This experiment in free will certainly has been interesting.
Thank you for all the incredibly convincing, impromptu performances,
And best wishes to all who will endure the bleak future that is very rapidly unfolding.
Too bad so many are so blinded by every sort of narcissistic notion
That there is very little abiding interest in anything
But more pleasure, more luxury,
More this, more that.
More, more, more … the insatiable more.
Well, our kind, and all the myriad creatures great and small,
Are on an inescapable, harsh path to find out
Just how much less more really is.
* * * *
A history teacher in college one day out of the blue pointed to a few of us and said,
“You are a historian … You are a historian … You are a historian … You are a historian … “
At the time it meant nothing – zipped past the youthful head of innocence, so to speak –
But in the years since, the realization of what he meant has taken unforeseen wings.
* * * *
I am as bound up in all the differences, all the stereotypes, all the prejudices, as anyone.
Just have the inclination to step back occasionally to fathom the larger context.
Otherwise, just a irrational and absurd as everyone else in this circus.
* * * *
I rest assured that I am the only one who is ever going to ever read all this silliness,
Likely more than several times each as they ply their way from scribble to digital.
* * * *
My bargain with God and the Devil,
One in the same as far as I play it,
Are just leave me the fuck alone.
* * * *
As content as the mind in time will allow.
* * * *
Likely more of a personal online scrapbook than anything of history-making consequence.
* * * *
This does not need to happen to this eye again.
* * * *
My little yellow stain in the ever-shifting sands of time.
* * * *
I will Johnny-Appleseed these many thoughts in as many ways and places as possible.
Whether or not you will happen upon them is for the dream to manage however it will.
* * * *
Some saint of lost causes I am not.
* * * *
Indifferent to all creation, I am.
* * * *
The ink spreads as the thoughts bubble from stillness personified.
* * * *
Oh, how I do long for simpler daze.
* * * *
Free to me, free to you, for what it is worth.
* * * *
Anyone who would "follow” me or anyone else
Best stand more than a few paces away
If they do not want a boot up their vacuous derrière.
Will abide good friendships, but no disciples, no devotees, no apostles,
No adherents, no evangelists, no proselytizers, no apologists, no missionaries, in this camp.
* * * *
Ornery's not the word for it.
* * * *
Quietly leaving a fair amount of babble and banter for others to stumble upon or not,
And argue over or not, or discern true or not, or whatever or not.
No matter to me in the end, really,
Especially once I am the dust beyond worms’ meat.
* * * *
Few ever know of writings such as these in the time they are written.
It is for history to note whether or not they unfurled in the winds of consciousness.
Will they be known, will they be lauded, will they be reviled, will they play any meaningful part?
Or will they merely have been an amusing pastime of yet another forgotten mind?
* * * *
It is not about me, unless you are referring to the me that is you
And everything else, in this unfathomable matrix cum laude.
* * * *
Who better suited to anonymity?
* * * *
God better hope he does not exist because I am going to punch him in the nose big-time if he does.
* * * *
What to do when existence no longer matters,
Assuming it ever really did.
One of my standard coffee shop one-liners:
If I knew I wasn’t going to wake up tomorrow, I’d go to bed early.
* * * *
I Am, therefore I babble.
* * * *
Absolutely mad, mad beyond belief, of that there can be little doubt.
* * * *
Peter Pan does not even rank choir boy in this make-believe mind.
* * * *
The word acquisition program is ebbing and flowing into decline.
Synapse collapse is pale-riding this direction.
Joy for manifest oblivion.
* * * *
With great intention, these words perchance influence the world to come.
* * * *
Die, motherfucker, die.
* * * *
Same old me, my Self, and I, streaming away in dreamtime’s busy-busy.
* * * *
The stillness before time, a.k.a. the silliness of time.
* * * *
Passing the time in whatever way happenstance allows.
* * * *
Rich man’s life on a dime.
* * * *
All these thoughts have come of their own accord.
Some sort of stream-of-consciousness-word-association-channeling thing.
And as much as I dislike using that jargon with all its new-age-babble connotations and affiliations,
It is, regrettably, one of the more accurate ways to describe the process.
* * * *
Not interested enough in the future to plant a seed to witness it, sorry ladies.
* * * *
Be wary what you weave, Dreamweaver, for you must wear it for as long as awhile whiles.
* * * *
Jesus Fucking Christos, how did these yahoos ever get put in charge of anything?
* * * *
It has been an remarkable thing to exist, to be a witness to the incomprehensibility of it all,
This imaginary game of make-believe in an illusory, dualistic, space-time continuum.
But I am long over this little touchy-feely, three-dimensional, dreamtime matrix.
I yearn for oblivion, for nothingness, and am only putting up with existence
Until the body-mind becomes too agonizing, or the world too annoying,
To want to bother about waking up to battle windmills ever again.
Alas, I am afraid life is akin to a cold that will not go away,
A case of “you-can-check-out-any-time-you-like-but-you-can-never-leave.”
Not me in the manifest-worldly-time-bound sense, of course, but me ever just the same.
* * * *
This is how it seems to me, though I suppose I could be wrong.
Nah! … It has to be this rational, this sensible, to get me aboard.
* * * *
Am as indifferent as possible as often as possible to whatever degree consciousness allows.
* * * *
The older I get, the more insane it seems.
* * * *
Yet another character binge.
* * * *
Got enough crap in this head without daily adding more than necessary.
* * * *
Death and taxes … Pfft!
* * * *
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.
* * * *
Know your Self, and you will know me.
* * * *
Doing what I do may get you into trouble unless you are smart about it, and lucky.
* * * *
Hope all is well, or at least well enough.
* * * *
The Great Oz would know, and Billy Pilgrim, too.
* * * *
Nope, I am not Buddha, nor any other historically significant noteworthy.
This round, I am called Michael, sometimes Mike, and Holzblowzer by Blane.
Rose-by-any-other-name monikers that have well-served this mundane existence.
* * * *
Whoever would have guessed, whoever would have thought,
Little old rural-small-town-quiet-studious-farm-boy moi
Would grow up to be a philosopher-seer kind of guy?
* * * *
How typical, how predictable, how mundane, how absurd,
He thought to himself, not for the first or last time that day.
* * * *
All your life, you have been trying to figure out what you wanted to do.
Guess this is it.
* * * *
It is all just a rough draft until the last wheezing breath.
* * * *
No idea, and do not need one.
* * * *
Yeah, fuck you, too, you pendejo-mother-fuckin’-asshole son of a bitch.
Congratulations on being yet another honorable mention
On my “People Who Need to Die Badly” list.
* * * *
Yes, I do enjoy hearing my Self chatter, what of it?
And is anyone else out there not doing very much the same?
* * * *
All I do is open up ye old inner eye to the abyss of awareness,
And yet another brain wave ditties into consciousness
For this busy mind to occupy its wayward way.
Tick … tick … tick … cannot help my Self.
* * * *
Rest assured that the Great Quantum,
No doubt as wayward a roguish scalawag as I,
Finds my inflated bubble of dreamtime tolerably amusing.
* * * *
You keep on asserting that you know where infinity begins, and where it ends.
That the unknown can be known, that truth can be possessed,
That space-time is real, and you are, too.
You make me laugh plenty hah-hah hard, Pilgrim.
* * * *
Unpaid work, but work ever just the same, when it is not play.
My little offering, free of charge, to the dream of time.
Take it or leave it, leave it or take it, as you will.
* * * *
Mixin’ and matchin’ from ye old frame of reference,
A wild and wanton maelstrom from which these many ditties
Bubble into beingness in the double-double-toil-and-trouble of it all.
* * * *
Less and less do I daily know.
* * * *
Not interested in lying to you.
* * * *
An great number of observations on how this mind, these eyes, discern it,
All out there for the progeny of humankind to apprehend or not.
It is a peculiar thing to bequeath such a body of work,
With no idea what will come of it, if anything.
A legacy, the true value of which is left for time to tell.
* * * *
A Rumpelstiltskin, I am, I am, a mischievous sprite of the two-legged kind,
Putting together all these ditties for what time may or may not come,
From the straw of this mind’s harvest, a task for which this life
Was into spontaneous serendipity and happenstance cast.
* * * *
A jester in a joker’s dream.
* * * *
So much effort for something so few will likely ever read.
* * * *
Whoo-hoo for an existence for which I do not recall ever asking.
What the blankety-blank am I still doing in this absurdity asylum?
* * * *
Yes, the long-ago almond orchard epiphany moment was indeed amazing,
But ultimately no different than any humbling sit-down on a porcelain throne.
* * * *
Another day of offering sage advice to a world
That has neither the eyes to see or ears to hear it.
* * * *
Namaste to you, too, Asshole.
* * * *
What a fucking madhouse this world has become, and only daily more and more frenetic.
* * * *
The Wall of Irony and Paradox gets another memento.
* * * *
Always interesting to contemplate
What it took for our kind to rise up and conquer this world,
And use and abuse it in whatever way the tool-maker mind, in all its self-absorption, deigned.
* * * *
Have always had an amazing knack in any work or play learning curve
At making a variety of mistakes and finding out all that can go wrong.
* * * *
All these many, many thoughts, few will ever even begin to contemplate.
Like an unwitnessed babbling brook, or a tree falling alone,
Were they ever even thought, ever even written?
* * * *
I am every filter the capacities and limitations of this mind will allow into its frame of reference:
Philosopher, scientist, historian, anthropologist, psychologist, sociologist,
Politician, warrior, and on and on the list daily grows.
* * * *
Fatwa this.
* * * *
Nature is my god, and to do good – or at least as little harm as possible – is my religion.
* * * *
The joy of my world is that it is your world now – Rotsa ruck, Pilgrim.
* * * *
‘Tis the un-followers who I quest,
The ones who are able to endure alone
And discern things clearly with their own eye.
Our frames of reference may well be universes apart,
But we will ever fathom truth enough the same to be at peace.
* * * *
Done run out of caring past a certain point.
Life has become more of an academic laboratory,
More of an intellectual, intangible, philosophical reverie.
* * * *
Imagine, if you will, a shapeshifting alien living here among you,
Watching, chronicling, your peculiar little human theater,
Waiting impatiently for the mother ship to return.
Alas, that it was destroyed by an asteroid,
And his whereabouts unknown to the mother world.
* * * *
It might be easily argued that in the world unfolding in these our times,
The most merciful thing you can do for your children
Is to smother them in their sleep.
* * * *
Get behind me, true believers, get behind me.
* * * *
Seemingly a neverending work, these writings, at least until death do I disincorporate.
* * * *
Prove me wrong, boys and girls, prove me wrong.
* * * *
Always interesting to see how these many ditties play out as they come to mind:
As they are first written down, what happens in translation when they are transcribed,
What happens when they are edited, how they are read, if they even are read.
Any given ditty can mutate into something very different at any stage
From the original thought first bubbled into consciousness.
* * * *
Why and how these many thoughts keep coming to mind
Is a question for which I have no answer, other than to say nothing else calls.
To be an observer of existence, a truth-seeker, a philosopher, a seer,
Is to be all but done with the dreams of consciousness.
* * * *
Another ditty lost back into the formless mists of mind.
Easy come, easy go.
* * * *
You are not by any chance a terrorist following me with a dull, rusty knife, are you?
Not a question to ask anyone with hallmark features and or behaviors of Arab descent.
* * * *
One wonders how many women have sons
In an attempt to bring their husbands into line,
And daughters, to assert power over their mothers.
* * * *
To wake up as many times as possible
Before the final breath wanes
Is this mind’s Soul goal,
Until eternal sleep
Sets its final course adieu.
* * * *
The old “Ice Station Zebra” paradigm: Play it out as if it never happened.
* * * *
Oh, for the daze when the middle class life was a cave or a limb.
* * * *
Master brat.
* * * *
A semi-detached observer.
* * * *
If it is to stand the test of time, it must stand on its own merit.
* * * *
He woke with a dash of hope, but it being only four letters, did not last long.
* * * *
I am me, you am me, we am me, all together, one.
* * * *
Saw a smidgeon of hope today, and I scrunched it before it could even squeak.
* * * *
What is herein written, what is herein imparted, is from me to my Self,
In whatever other, in whatever geography, in whatever future-past.
Stand upon my shoulders, and gaze out even further if you can.
* * * *
If you have not already realized it,
This is one of those serendipitous creations
In which you often seem to happen upon a reflection
That you in time are most primed to mull.
* * * *
Believe you me, I have given in to every enticing distraction,
And it is always the inner awareness to which I return.
A marriage to my Self that can never be escaped,
No matter how tempting the siren’s song.
* * * *
Addressing the endless stream of calamities
That have created so much confusion and adversity,
To whatever endgame the synergy of consciousness chooses.
* * * *
No doubt some would deposit this scribe in a shallow grave
If they were to comprehend these many thoughts are analogous
To the folktale of the lone stonecutter bit by bit by bit chipping away
Deep within the bowels of the imaginary mountain.
* * * *
From the infinitesimal moment all creation began, through all that has taken place since,
It all had to happen for you to have this relatively brief, temporal opportunity to awaken,
So gracias to all you countless others, across time, across space, who played your vital part.
* * * *
Those born after the Great Fall
May discern it in their best interest
To give attention to these many insights,
Both to aid in comprehending what happened,
And to clearly discern what it will take
To re-align with the Garden
From which life,
With so little inhibition,
Manifests in every form imaginable.
* * * *
A word of warning to the young: Avoid doing really dumbass things whenever possible.
If what you are undertaking is akin to walking eyes-closed across a busy freeway,
Then it might be best to do some checking in with your common sense meter.
That is assuming, of course, that you want to arrive at some ripe old age
In a reasonably healthy body with a reasonably functioning mind.
And rest assured, this is a “do what I say, not what I did” suggestion.
* * * *
All this has been spontaneously written in the wandering moments
For a destiny most unclear at this point in time.
A strange fate, indeed.
* * * *
Working on wrapping up this little raison d'être, and then out of Dodge.
* * * *
I am about exploring consciousness in my singular way,
So, to Hades with all your meme-ridden judgments
And sundry notions of political correctness.
* * * *
Seen enough, heard enough, smelled enough, tasted enough, felt enough.
There is more, you say? Thanks, but no thanks, my world weary reply.
* * * *
There is always a nap working its way into one soon or another.
* * * *
Another memory swept into oblivion in the given mind’s neurological ebb and flow,
Yet another indication, another reminder, of this dream’s inevitable decline and fall.
* * * *
A mad as everyone else in the monkeydom.
* * * *
When has lack of commercial viability ever meant something has no value.
* * * *
That life is over … Sorry … Sort of.
* * * *
The reality is, any given reader may or may not comprehend these thoughts as they were meant.
The reflections offered are ever subject to the frame of reference of the observer.
No thinker, no philosopher, can ever presume his or her views
Will not be use for unintended purpose.
* * * *
Better daze ahead, he muttered with rueful disdain.
* * * *
Got nothing to say, so I will say it anyway.
* * * *
Another day of kickin’ and scratchin’ and bitin and whinin’,
And unleashing blood-curdling howls and wretched moans,
As eternity slowly drags me back to its unearthly domain.
* * * *
Never met a label that did not fit somewhere along the line.
* * * *
Opinions and an asshole, yup, I gots ‘em, too.
* * * *
Pointing out the obvious to mindsets not even remotely capable of fathoming it,
Too late in the game to be a changer, were it even possible.
And it does not matter even one iota.
* * * *
A soliloquy, to be sure.
* * * *
Lived out this life this way because I had nothing better to do.
The hand was dealt by the path of least resistance,
And I faked it all as best I could.
* * * *
Said what I meant and meant what I said.
* * * *
The light, here again, a new day underway, whoo-hoo for new daze.
* * * *
How weary I all too often am of vanity and all its foibles.
* * * *
The Joyful Curmudgeon: A turd by any other name would smell as sweet.
* * * *
It all this wordy absurdity is ever going be known,
It will be in some other portion of the human epoch,
Because this slice is sure not at this writing interested.
* * * *
Never let anything hit the bottom of the bucket; kind of impulsive that way.
* * * *
Take these many thoughts as reflections only.
Try not to form them into the dogmatic quagmire
To which the human mind all too often prone.
* * * *
Each thought or set of thoughts stands entirely on its own,
To what end no one can no more than endlessly speculate.
* * * *
What a prison mind and body daily more become.
What need for this human paradigm or any other.
* * * *
Somehow survived long enough to write about it.
* * * *
In the fourth quarter now, the time of consequences is upon me.
* * * *
But for a few chromosomes and a difference wind of time, there go I.
* * * *
Gravity is definitely winning,
But it is sure taking its sweet fucking time,
And not always being nice about it.
* * * *
Whether or not anyone ever reads this mass of babble is no skin off my nose.
* * * *
As these words are born into manifestation,
They are composting into a hearty potential
For times none can do more than imagine.
* * * *
Averting the eyes from a train wreck in progress is not easy.
* * * *
Took just one intro philosophy class the first semester of junior college,
And the rest, the rest is the spontaneous combustion of happenstance.
* * * *
Another windmill … (sigh) …
* * * *
Who knows what I said and wrote before all these many thoughts.
Letters, journals, poetry, papers, tests, were retired many moons ago
Into a number of whereabouts-unknown landfills in several geographies.
* * * *
Born a king in a peasant’s life.
* * * *
A decentralized manifesto,
Left for time to do what it will, or will not,
In the vanity faire of consciousness.
* * * *
The aches and pains and debilitations of the aging body and mind are many,
The whys and wherefores for the laughter and merriment of youth fewer and fewer,
Yet the Joyful Curmudgeon wryly endures as irony and paradox impishly allow.
* * * *
Did not ask for this, believe you me.
* * * *
Politely received, politely ignored,
Perhaps because it is all so passé at this point,
Or perhaps because I am not playing the spiritual game
The way others believe it should be played.
Who knows, who cares?
* * * *
In the world but not of it whenever attention allows.
* * * *
Another wound, more crunch, more blood, more screaming nerve ends, ugh and so it goes.
* * * *
Maybe you are clever, maybe you are wise, maybe you are foolish and absurd,
Maybe you are, as all monkey-minds are, a slice of each, all rolled into one.
* * * *
Two thumbs up for slipping between the cracks yet again.
* * * *
Nothing is wanted for you but that you be eternally, happily content.
There is nothing here but compassion for your unnecessary plight.
* * * *
Ditty-up, ditty-up, ditty-up-up-up.
* * * *
Just killing time before it kills me.
* * * *
The cursory scribble of pen to paper is but hammer’s first blow
To the wrought of the final thought that the keyboard,
With spellcheck and thesaurus, will fashion.
* * * *
As drawn to the human drama as a moth is to flame, and as weary of being scorched.
* * * *
Lost again in the nothing-really-matters zone.
* * * *
What is this irritability, this impatience, this ill temper,
That has always been a seething dragon just beneath the sunny surface,
So quick, so impulsive, to raise its turbulent mind for so little cause.
More times than not well hidden, there have been consequences
When the thoughtless tongue was to calamity unleashed.
* * * *
Oh boy, a new pain.
* * * *
I just carry paper and pen, and scribble down whatever comes to mind.
Whether or not it will have any impact in the tempest to come, I know not.
The observer I have become is as agnostic as this busy-busy mind allows.
* * * *
Regrets, and more regrets.
* * * *
Doing nothing as often as possible is where I want to be.
* * * *
Without history, what are we?" Merritt reflected in one many, many moons ago chat.
"The same nothing we are, have always been, will ever be," this I would answer now.
* * * *
Hiss-hiss, scratch-scratch ... Too high school ... Or maybe even junior high.
* * * *
Will anything come of all this babble, probably not, which is okay, and probably for the best.
* * * *
These many thoughts have been discerned in every possible context,
All that is required is paper and pen to jot them down,
And a keyboard to hammer them out.
* * * *
An advocate for nothing, whiling away the dream.
* * * *
Whether good or ill,
What you might or might not think of me,
Is not something to which I often choose to give much weight.
* * * *
Likely committed just about every blunder, every idiocy, of which any man is capable.
* * * *
So far I have managed not to be shot, hung, burnt, crucified, guillotined,
Drawn and quartered, pulled apart by horses, have my throat slowly slit by a dull, rusty blade,
Or otherwise have my fingernails pulled out while stretched out on a rack
With electrodes attached to my private parts.
But the day ain’t over.
* * * *
Two thumbs up about being under the radar, so far.
Let it hibernate, let it ferment, until after I am gone.
* * * *
I leave it to the dream of time to do with these thoughts what it will or will not.
No fame, no fortune, no power … ever came of them at this writing.
The popes can have their crystal and gold cathedrals
And the echoes of hollow applause.
* * * *
It makes absolutely no difference who I was,
Where I was born, how I looked, how I lived, how I died,
Or any other superficial differences anyone might imagine important.
All that matters is what you or any other critical thinker discerns
In the many thoughts that have come through this mind.
No veneration or dogma or groupthink is required
On the meandering road of Self-discovery.
* * * *
A razor’s edge upon which I quite often slip.
* * * *
Kind of smart, kind of stupid, kind of wise, kind of foolish, all as time in mind allows.
* * * *
Please do not make the mistake of making about the scribe.
He is nothing more than another cauldron of imaginary notion.
* * * *
Must have read a different book.
* * * *
I may be a liar, I may be a cheat, I may be a thief,
And I may daily conspire every variety of murder and mayhem,
But at least I ain’t no Jesus-loving-god-forsaken-double-dealing hypocrite.
* * * *
A walking-talking revolutionary of the paradigm-shifting kind.
* * * *
Thinking positive is no doubt great, no doubt good,
And as soon as this mind discerns something positive
Upon which it might a-ponder, I will be a-gettin’ to it.
* * * *
Wait until life bends you over and shows you how tough you really are, you arrogant little shit.
* * * *
Waking up to another day of the happenstancing whatever.
The pointlessness is the only point at this point of the journey.
* * * *
There are no followers where I would lead you.
* * * *
Why would it matter at all to me or anyone else,
Whether or not you or anyone else ever wakes up or not.
You are on you own, it is your show, not mine or anyone else’s.
None can do more than occasionally hold your hand and wish you well.
* * * *
Did I already write, ‘Love thy Self’?
* * * *
And, pray tell, what ignorant foolishness might someday come of these thoughts?
* * * *
Herein I gives you me mind since 1989.
* * * *
How hard can it be to turn water into wine if I can already without effort turn wine into pee?
Well, freshly harvested grapes, the right equipment, a fair amount of time,
And a fervent intention to direct nature’s course.
As for immortal power and divine intervention, I think not.
* * * *
Yes, fans, I am indeed highly fallible, and so are you.
Oh well, so it goes, deal with it, get over it, move on.
* * * *
Just another journey man; just another journey, man.
* * * *
It is because of the life I have lived that I am in this physical pain.
It is because of the life I have lived that I can endure this physical pain.
* * * *
End run after end run – Go, Team Moi
* * * *
To understand my concept of god is to leave behind any and all.
* * * *
Got nothing better to do than nothing much.
* * * *
Do not know why some folks think I am so negative.
I am very certain, very confident, very positive, very optimistic,
That the remainder of human history is going to be bent over in many, many ways.
And there ain’t no lubricant on the market gonna be much help.
* * * *
If there is some sort of supreme deity, some sort of all-powerful being,
And he/she/it is as petty and possessive and downright mean
As the minds of our kind have so often ordained,
Well, all I can say is fuck him/her/it,
And willingly cast this life force back into the obscurity,
The indivisible oblivion from which I perceive all creation is made manifest.
* * * *
How cruel, how selfish women are, that they would bring a child into this world.
* * * *
More blather for the dust collection.
* * * *
Nothing else to do, nothing else to be, nothing else to see.
* * * *
Am I the crazy one? Am I the fool? Only if rationality has lost all meaning.
* * * *
Have not saved anybody, yet.
* * * *
The world certainly has you in its miasmic brouhaha, my friend.
* * * *
Sure, I may be wrong, but it will be tough to prove.
* * * *
Remember always that these many thoughts are offered up as reflections, not dogma.
* * * *
Not quite the hermit monk, but only by a few notches.
* * * *
Doing the Cheshire one smile at a time.
* * * *
There is a wealth in these thoughts that most will value as swine do pearls.
* * * *
Do not see a point, do not need a point.
* * * *
Yet another thing in the collection of things I will never again use.
* * * *
A long list; pages and pages and pages of regrets.
Sigh, oh well, so it goes, deal with it, get over it, move on.
In the quantum Ice-Station-Zebra of it, it never really happened.
* * * *
I am, therefore I chatter and drink, not necessarily in that order.
* * * *
All across time, in every geography,
So many names for this unfathomable unknown.
I call it Quantum, and I am That I Am.
* * * *
Do not know, do not care.
* * * *
The everything and the nothing to you,
Is the same everything and nothing to me.
* * * *
A road less traveled sort of life that just sort of happened.
* * * *
Some fellow business graduates would zealously tell interviewers
That they loved solving challenging problems and dilemmas.
Me, I wish I had thought to say that I absolutely despised problems,
So much so that I would resolve them as quickly and efficiently as possible,
And with such Machiavellian force that they would never again rise up to bother me.
* * * *
A ghost fading even in his own dream.
* * * *
A collection of thoughts that will change absolutely nothing.
A Sisyphean enterprise this mind both endured and enjoyed.
* * * *
Would that I were always as detached as I play it for the mob.
* * * *
The middlemen are not going to be happy about this.
* * * *
Watching it all play out with yawning interest.
* * * *
These many thought are dedicated to future incarnations of awareness,
Others who are not others, but awakened versions of the same discernment.
We all play out consciousness in our own way, but at the source, ever the same.
* * * *
Here it is, today’s little piece of bother.
* * * *
The only difference between me and any other,
Is that I can occasionally step back far enough to discern a larger picture.
I am no one’s master.
* * * *
Am long past thinking humankind will ever transcend its all-too-predictable patterning.
We are an mind-boggling collection of cancerous maniacs from the jungle get-go of our origin.
The only question is whether we will obliterate the garden before it manages to off us.
Or we ourselves, or maybe very hungry alien insects or a big fucking comet.
* * * *
The list of bothers is long, and daily longer.
* * * *
Yet another articulate foray into the irony and paradox of our kind,
To which so many are blind, or, worse yet, even more apathetic than I.
* * * *
I will not miss us.
* * * *
The first thing I do every morning is thank God I was born a man.
And the second, that I woke up alone, without a migraine.
Look but do not touch is the motto at this graypoint.
Praise Jesus the time of the wanton erectile is all but done.
* * * *
Mister Too-Much-Is-Not-Enough.
* * * *
To be, or not to be, far from the maddening crowd, that is the question.
* * * *
Just an amusing pastime; nothing more, nothing less.
* * * *
Mañana, maybe.
* * * *
A natural-born killer who chooses not to most of the time.
* * * *
Please, God, if there is a God, please, never again.
* * * *
So many good deeds, so many heinous crimes.
* * * *
A growing absent-mindedness, both literally and figuratively.
* * * *
The vaporous eye me-my-Self-I-ing.
* * * *
A crusty old knight in rusty old armor on an arthritic old mount,
Wandering about searching for that old wind-beaten windmill.
* * * *
These writings must develop their own legs.
Else they will evaporate back into the quantum ground
From which all things are born and unborn.
* * * *
And thus is imagination cast out to its limitless reaches.
* * * *
You want another story? This is not the droid you are looking for.
* * * *
All these ditties shuffled and reshuffled again many times.
The only thing of which you the reader can be sure,
Is that it was all scribed in the circa Y2K,
From 1989 until the whatever-whenever finale.
* * * *
Rest assured, all my opinions are as meaningless and anyone else’s.
* * * *
All this is written so it does not have to be written again.
* * * *
All these thoughts, my raison d'être, such as it is, for reasons unknown.
* * * *
Fortunately, rhyme and reason are someone else’s delusion.
* * * *
Only gray on the outside.
* * * *
In a hundred years, in a thousand years, in ten thousand years,
What will all these across-the-board thoughts have accomplished,
What will they have done, what will they have undone, if anything?
* * * *
Life fair? You are looking for some other choir.
* * * *
This is my work, my calling, my raison d'être.
It pays nothing, offers nothing, is overseen by nothing.
Vanity is its birthplace, contentment and peace the only reward.
* * * *
Aphorisms, perhaps even less interesting to the masses than poetry,
Or at least a back-and-forth-by-the-nose-neither-win-nor-lose rival.
* * * *
Jaded to tears but for the occasional hiccup in the quantum fray.
* * * *
Baubles and jewels, for you to discover, for you to discern, or not.
* * * *
Trying to share these thoughts with any not so-inclined
Is about as effective as beating your head against a wall.
* * * *
In the world: Sometimes of it, sometimes not.
* * * *
You call all this pain and suffering a gift!? Hmm and hah, indeed, indeed.
Some supreme being needs a punch in the nose as far as these eyes ponder it.
* * * *
Turn the other cheek?
Well, maybe, maybe not.
* * * *
Will these thoughts, too, be usurped by one meme or another?
* * * *
Did not ask for this existence, why should I care about another?
* * * *
For a guy who did not want much of anything,
I sure ended up having and doing and thinking
Way, way more than I would have ever dreamed.
* * * *
“Oh, my God!” she cried, “And perchance mine, too!” I replied.
* * * *
All these thoughts are from a lifetime of inquiry,
A lifetime of voluminous and varied experiences played out.
A thesis of sorts that this most earnest mind has discerned of its own merit.
It could not be less, and if there is an even more insightful conclusion to be expounded,
Then it is for some other, perhaps even you, to bring it to light.
* * * *
Turning you every which way but loose; that is up to you.
* * * *
Maybe you get one free hit,
Maybe even two if the cheek makes a turn,
But carte blanche, I think not.
* * * *
I have no life, so I spend it amusing my Self.
* * * *
The aliens among us are you and I.
* * * *
You are the least ambitious person I have ever met,” Lena said.
“Thank you,” I should have answered as it echoed in my head.
* * * *
I Am Footnote.
* * * *
Where could I lead anyone but oblivion, and what point in that?
* * * *
And then I woke up, and I was still me.
And then I woke up, and I was still me.
And then I woke up, and I was still me.
And then I woke up …
* * * *
If consciousness wants these thoughts to be known, it will devise a way.
If not, how can what was barely known be more than barely forgotten?
* * * *
In this, I bequeath you my mind.
* * * *
Nobody’s teacher, nobody’s friend, nobody’s lover, nobody’s enemy.
* * * *
Mixing metaphors, what fun.
* * * *
Another day of absurdity infinitum … Ho-hum.
* * * *
These many thoughts, they change as they are thought,
Change as they are written, and may change many times again,
Before they happen into your eyes, and the universe in the mind behind.
* * * *
Labels? I fits ‘em all, and I ignores ‘em all just the same.
* * * *
A wordy process, indeed.
* * * *
Who in their right mind wants to think this much about naught without end.
* * * *
An original work, whatever that is.
* * * *
Waking up to another day of pain and suffering and general bother,
In a world for which I have only obligatory, desultory interest,
But must continue enduring, must continue witnessing,
For as long as pulse and breath and mind allow.
I did not ask to be here; I ain’t prayin’ to be staying.
* * * *
The ro-sham-bo-rock-paper-scissors-zero-sum of marital bliss:
Yes, Dear, you are right, I am wrong, please forgive me,
And for good measure: It will not happen again.
* * * *
Sure, I may be wrong, but not as far as I’m concerned.
* * * *
Just passing the time in whatever way comes to mind.
* * * *
The I that I dream came into existence in Hughson
In Stanislaus County in California in the United States of America.
Specifically, 37°36′11″N 120°52′1″W of this our Gaia, speck in the Cosmos that it is.
This mind-body is male, Caucasian, American English-speaking, with an all-rounder set of abilities.
It was raised on a small peach farm by decent parents a mile outside a decent rural town.
It was given a generic education that ended with a generic business degree,
Followed up a decade later with a generic teaching credential.
It worked a wide variety of occupations in a wide variety of geographies.
It interacted with a wide variety of people and participated in a wide variety of experiences.
At age 36, it began what would evolve into a substantial body of written work.
What a remarkable thing the happenstance of being conceived.
What a remarkable thing all the happenstances that happen along the way.
And as for having free will, well, some claim it true, but these eyes see it a dubious assumption.
* * * *
These writings have absolutely no connection or allegiance
To any organized religion or philosophy, that has ever, or will ever, come to light.
They are reflections of a solitary sojourn into eternal reunion,
And there are no rules in a knife fight.
* * * *
Are all these thoughts written that humankind might realize worldwide harmony?
No, impossible that, the inherent genome is far to too Darwinian for such idealistic notion.
No, they are penned for those singular few who yearn, who pursue, Self-knowledge to such a degree
That they may one day divine the immortal serenity of the grand indivisibility,
And perchance pass it on to others of the same bent.
* * * *
Appellations by which I may be known,
Or much more likely unknown:
Michael Jay Holshouser
Michael J. Holshouser
M. J. Holshouser
M. Holshouser
J. Holshouser
Jay Holshouser
Mike Holshouser
The solo initial: M
The nickname: Holtz
All three initials: M.J.H.
Mike Jay reversed: Yaj Ekim
And an infrequent nom de plume
Using a blend of ancestral favorites:
Andrew James Kurtz, a.k.a. Drew Kurtz
* * * *
Oopsie, another concussion rocks my world, my universe, in this, the fourth quarter of losing game.
Fortunately, I do not need that part of the brain, that part of the mind, to function full-go anymore.
* * * *
Another stonecutter daily chipping away in the mind of existence.
* * * *
Just not interested
In any more dog and pony shows,
Carny acts of the manifest kind, if you get the drift.
* * * *
Some call it God.
Some call it Allah.
Some call it Yahweh.
Some call it Brahman.
Some call it Quantum.
Some call it Jehovah.
Some call it Shiva.
Some call it Tao.
I call it Mystery.
* * * *
The Tralfamadorians know of what I speak, and more.
* * * *
Of intimate, co-dependent relationships at this writing: too much work, too much bother.
* * * *
One life is more than enough.
* * * *
Wandering about the insatiable ductless-glands-and-viscera-blue-pill world.
* * * *
Nothing I need to say or do or be.
Nothing I need to see or hear or smell or taste or feel.
I am done and undone for all time.
* * * *
If there is a way to fuck things up, what a knack I have always had finding it.
* * * *
Well, it made sense at the time.
* * * *
Kept the day job.
* * * *
Leaving a few chips on the table for the Ferryman is an option.
* * * *
So bored, the tears are all dried up.
* * * *
A master of no-who, no-what, no-where, no-when, no-why, no-how.
* * * *
The imaginary moi awakens to a new day.
* * * *
Still walking on the green side of grass, this side of nothing.
* * * *
I, Quantum
* * * *
I, Awareness
* * * *
I, Buddha
* * * *
I, Tao
* * * *
I, Shiva
* * * *
I, Brahmin
* * * *
I, God
* * * *
I, Yahweh
* * * *
I, Jehovah
* * * *
I, Christ
* * * *
I, Allah
* * * *
I, Chameleon
* * * *
I, Hierophant
* * * *
I, Jellyfish
* * * *
I, Whatever
* * * *
Another ditty lost in the filament of mind.
* * * *
What effort it sometimes takes
To continue fabricating this universe,
For which there is less and less and less appetite.
* * * *
Not sure what that is supposed to do for me, but it does not.
* * * *
No, I do not want to care about that.
* * * *
It is not for me to know whether or not these words will pass into time.
* * * *
So many foolish, irrational, stupid choices,
And so many disagreeable consequences!
Yeesch, and yeesch, and yeesch again.
* * * *
Your universe is your teacher, and this scribe but one of its many faces.
* * * *
I leave you neither ist nor ism,
Nor anything else to which you might vainly cling.
I leave you nothing to believe in, nothing to embrace, nothing to hope for.
I leave you to alone wander the long and winding pathless path through the fires of a mind never born.
I leave you to alone discern the awareness of the mystery that you truly are:
That which has no name, needs no name;
That which is timelessly sovereign, timelessly free;
That to which the bothers of mind have no meaning whatsoever.
* * * *
Nothing interests me.
* * * *
Jesus Christos, the bullshit just does not end.
* * * *
All these many thoughts, about many things,
Were written spontaneously, intuitively, naturally, artlessly,
In many different times, in many different places,
In many different states of mind and body.
* * * *
You think this is a democracy? Ha, ha, joke’s on you, Pilgrim.
* * * *
One apology will have to do, and even if it does not,
Oh well, so it goes, deal with it, get over it, move on.
* * * *
We cannot all be rocket scientists.
Most of us are plebian in our exertions.
I, for one, was a tolerably adept forklift driver,
And could occasionally let fly a pitiless water balloon,
Long before the body and mind gave way to time.
* * * *
I have neither the wit nor patience for poetry.
It is a calculus to which my mind does not aspire.
* * * *
Partaking the dream one sip at a time.
* * * *
I bask in envy.
* * * *
The puttering guy leaps into yet another meaningless project.
* * * *
Maybe I will get to it tomorrow, or maybe a day or three after that.
* * * *
The go-between of no-between is anybody’s guess.
Nonsensical as it sounds even to me,
I wrote it down anyway,
Just in case it makes sense to someone.
* * * *
I have made every effort to make this about you,
When it is ultimately all about the me that is you.
* * * *
Sure are a lot of things that do not much matter anymore, and the list longer everyday.
* * * *
Meme Michael
* * * *
Nothing I care to more than imagine doing.
* * * *
I am unknown because the stage has not called, and I am not unhappy about that.
What need have I for that degree of intrigue, that play of power and fame and fortune?
I who am but the timeless stillness of awareness; I who am the source of all, alone and free.
* * * *
The best revenge may be to let the quarry live out their existence in a wheelchair.
* * * *
Survived another day, whoo-hoo.
* * * *
In the tranquility of dark starry nights,
I wander alone the long, winding country lanes,
Waiting for the Mothership to return and take me home.
* * * *
Stretching the mind one ditty at a time.
* * * *
If perchance there is a god, a supreme being of one ilk or another,
Then he-she-it and I are going to have a serious discussion
Before I am exiled to an even lower rung of hell.
* * * *
Each and every ditty is a sovereign island unto itself.
To compare, to combine, is to miss the pointless point.
* * * *
If I did not do it, or could not do it, I imagined it.
And if I did not imagine it, so-well-oh-well, no big deal.
* * * *
Another day of snap-crackle-pop joy, yay oh yay.
* * * *
The philosophy of this working man: Everybody works until everything is done.
* * * *
I have always walked away from situations that are not working for me, or do not interest me.
Even as a young child, my mother said I would leave a neighborhood group activity,
Go home to my toys, go home to my sandbox, and contentedly play alone.
* * * *
If there is more, great, sort of; it there is not, no big deal.
* * * *
The quantum mystery has done did every sort of mystic seer, and now me,
A ne'er-do-well curmudgeon cast by the fates into the light of awareness.
* * * *
How pleasant it is to not be caught up in a prescribed life.
* * * *
So many details about which I do not want to anymore bother.
* * * *
Life, Death, what are they to me who is without bounds?
* * * *
Many thoughts have been set down in these rambling pages.
But it has never been easy to remain in that eternal state of awareness.
Best wishes to any who peruse this and other similar works,
And are drawn to explore the path less traveled.
* * * *
Gradually, bit by bit, step by step,
The me-myself-and-I mind born of time,
Is dissolving back into the great indivisibility.
* * * *
Oopsie, lost another one.
Dang this ephemeral mind when it cannot quite grasp
The too-quickly-gone ghost of some wispy intuition.
* * * *
As I See It
* * * *
The Puttering Guy
* * * *
The Antiyourchrist
* * * *
And why on earth would I ever need to care at all
About what anyone thinks of me or anything else?
* * * *
Yaj Unhooked
* * * *
What we have done to this world and all its creatures great and small
Is so repugnant to me that I can hardly bear it sometimes.
What a liberation it will be to be done with it,
Is common echo in this mind.
* * * *
Ran into the Buddha on the road the other day, and he be dead.
* * * *
Is it yesterday or tomorrow? I cannot remember, Ollie.
* * * *
The Dude abides.
* * * *
This mortal shell has indeed become a torture chamber.
The absence of pain and bother is pleasure anymore.
Oh, pride, envy, gluttony, lust, wrath, greed, sloth;
Where is thy scalawagian transcendence, now?
* * * *
Other than being creator-witness to this subjective theater,
This old boy is pretty darned useless to this world anymore.
* * * *
The Opus of the Devils Tower
* * * *
How easy it will be to say goodbye to this world, this existence.
* * * *
Drifting along, as nonchalant as mind allows.
* * * *
‘Tis up to you to find me, and no worries if it does not call you.
* * * *
The World According to Michael
* * * *
The World According to Yaj
* * * *
The Chronicles of Michael
* * * *
Michael's Way
* * * *
The Way of Michael
* * * *
I, Michael
* * * *
I, Yaj
* * * *
Zen Mike
* * * *
More from Zen Mike
* * * *
Even More from Zen Mike
* * * *
Michael and His Very Annoying Body
* * * *
Playing to the audience of me-my-Self-and-I in the moiville of time,
Makes for a purer abstract of whatever thoughts come to mind.
It avoids the politics of trying to appease any given crowd.
Yielding to any meme, any groupthink, any limitation,
No matter how minimal, only muddies the streaming flow.
* * * *
Retirement is making it up one day at a time.
* * * *
If the world, the universe, is but an illusion, why do I keep subscribing to it?
Because I can be just as hypnotized by craving and dread as everyone else.
* * * *
Have managed not to kill anyone yet,
But not for the want of thinking about it
Far, far more than many might care to know.
But am I really any different than many if not most?
* * * *
So many lives in just this one.
Is there be any thought, any deed, left undone?
Is there any stone left unturned?
* * * *
Am I wise?
Am I kind?
Am I good?
Am I patient?
Am I rational?
Am I intelligent?
Am I compassionate?
Am I benevolent?
Am I immortal?
Am I truthful?
Sometimes.
* * * *
The world reminds me yet again why I am oftentimes happier alone.
* * * *
And these are the people we follow? Seriously!?
* * * *
Who but me could ever read all this, much less write it.
An inexplicable, inordinate, unexpected fate, to be sure.
* * * *
The three vanities: power and fame and fortune, are not more me.
Like dogs and cats and sundry other critters, I prefer napping.
* * * *
Love is so droll.
* * * *
Just passing through.
* * * *
A beautiful woman's eyes hold a promise of something that is likely not there.
* * * *
You will know when I am done when the plate is licked clean.
* * * *
Never ceases to dumbfound how anxious some women seem to be for a relationship,
Especially as they age and become too wrinkly and obese and uninviting to easily snuggle.
Some sort of cavernous loneliness that takes on delusional proportion in their “beauty” parlors,
Their store-bought flowers, their dime store romance novels, their yowling cats and yapping rat dogs,
Surrounding them on their pissy-smelling sofas as they watch happy-ending Hollywood chick flicks.
And if they do get a boyfriend, perchance a husband, who cuddles with them through the night,
They carve his soul into something good for little more than pushing their grocery carts.
And then it is not long before they are complaining about his many shortcomings
To all the girlfriends who earnestly lend their ears, heads a-bobbing.
Endlessly nauseating and eye-rolling to say the least.
The delusions of romance and forever-after
Should be most benignly left
To the make-believe of youthful ignorance.
* * * *
Just hanging out, waiting for the Reaper.
* * * *
The world is all but dead to me.
Resting in peace.
* * * *
You can take that political correctness and shove it you can guesss where.
* * * *
My Little Castle
* * * *
Sharing my process, my awakening, one ditty at a time.
* * * *
Whatever disorders of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual sort that harbor within:
Neurocognitive, schizophrenic, dissociative, obsessive-compulsive, depression,
Impulse-control, posttraumatic stress, bipolar, conduct, personality,
And yadda yadda everything else modern-day psychology might postulate,
They continue to give rise to a never-ending scroll of wordplay in the given daze.
* * * *
You are both right and you are both wrong,
My father used to say when my sister and I
Would quibble over one inanity or another.
* * * *
If there is a god, I can hardly wait to punch him/her/it in the nose,
Or at least tug on a nose hair as I am cast into the inferno’s depths.
* * * *
The other is hereby banished to the otherworld.
* * * *
Would that I could be as aloof as my zeal for truth would have me be.
* * * *
So the fuck what.
* * * *
You are lead dreamer in your cosmos, and I in mine.
Would that we were both fully awakened
That we might see together
How equal all things truly are.
* * * *
An entirely original creation, a gift for the future to translate, or not.
It is not a crystal ball; just a variety of ponderings from a guy
Who feels called to scribble down the random thought.
Art is its own reward.
* * * *
Coyote Jester
* * * *
Peter Pan, I am, I am.
* * * *
I, Savage
* * * *
I, Peter Pan
* * * *
I am That I Am, I am God,
And if you understand what God truly is, and is not,
You would know that you are, and are not, too.
* * * *
Apologies if I repeat myself, but fuck your political correctness.
* * * *
Content and at peace with my Self?
Well, sometimes, yes, sometimes, no.
* * * *
Sometime back in the early years after college,
As awareness of the world and all its horrors grew daily greater,
I told my mother that if I had a button I could push to wipe away all of humankind,
And give this spinning orb back to all our fellow earthlings, I would push it without a second thought.
But, other than mutually assured nuclear annihilation, there is no button of that sort,
And so, instead, a life of contemplation, and perhaps one day, suicide.
Much simpler to die to the world than push any button,
And that is certainly no simple task, either.
* * * *
If not careful, the man who lets a woman cut his hair
Will become a cart-pushing, garage-dwelling wraith.
* * * *
“The Bad Penny,” Lee Hoffmann used to call me.
* * * *
My sixth grade James Bondian spy organization when I was wearing glasses:
SPECS: The Special Executive for Espionage, Counterintelligence, and Spies
* * * *
And why would you even begin to believe, to imagine,
That I was at all interested in being your idea of normal?
* * * *
Be sure to clearly realize that I am just as mentally deranged as anyone else.
A fair dollop of rationality laced with all the same passion and turmoil and vexation
As any other human who has ever roamed this three-dimensional dream of space and time.
All these thoughts are merely the aptitude to step back and articulate all the adventures endured.
* * * *
Predictability, a vice to which I prefer not succumb,
But, alas, a state with which I am, as in any pattern’s inevitability,
Compelled to comply in many ways, many shapes, many forms, in this mortal fray.
* * * *
Thinking about shutting it down.
Plenty more-than-enough-way-too-much
For anyone to gorge in this or any other round.
* * * *
To call the United States of America either a democracy or a republic,
To call it anything but a mammon-worshipping corporate oligarchy,
Is to blindly, absurdly, gloss over the bitterly harsh, often cruel reality,
That it has become little more than a greed-serving, dystopian war machine,
Raining destruction down upon innocents and enemies alike all across the planet.
* * * *
A silly mistake for which I am running out of patience.
* * * *
Oh for that time machine to be able to watch how it all unravels
* * * *
A work scribed by the fluid spontaneity of the unknown,
Given over to the vagaries of time-bound consciousness.
* * * *
Another round of coffee shop musing
Once again setting the world aright.
* * * *
All that has herein been written
Is just as much a part of the human cacophony
As anything else ever played out in our vain little human paradigm.
* * * *
Alas, that is the game you force me to play.
* * * *
If God is that puny, he/she/it can go rot in his/her/its own hell.
* * * *
I write what I see to see what I write.
* * * *
I just do not require any more human inanity, including my own.
* * * *
Sometimes it bubbles up camera ready.
Other times, it morphs of its own accord.
* * * *
It took a fair slice of life to discern the calling you herein read.
* * * *
I am the son of eternity, as are you if it is your fate to discern it.
* * * *
Your god is the size of your mind.
* * * *
Unlike other interviewees during their initial career quest,
Who ardently, breathlessly, mindlessly asserted they “loved” problems,
My youthful comeback was likely more to the point: “I absolutely hate problems.”
“So much so that I quash them as soon as they appear on any horizon.”
Who got the job? Well, I have had many, and abided most
For as long as they were tolerably amusing.
* * * *
Free: My favorite four-letter F-word
* * * *
God save me from your puny, petty, pathetic god.
The condescending absurdity of it makes me wretch.
* * * *
Bookstores and libraries and personal collections and land fills and burning piles,
Chock-full of books that relatively few ever even peruse, much less read.
Very little doubt the likely destiny of these many thoughts, as well.
Oh well, so it goes, dealt with it, got over it, moved on.
How pleasant it has been to read every word,
Many of them more than a few times.
* * * *
Even Hayley Mills's Pollyanna could not get the grump out of me.
* * * *
The domesticated existence was nothing I ever much cared to do for any great length of time.
Playing house, raising children, living in debt, mowing lawns, dealing with rat dogs,
Giving up solitude, missing out on adventures, becoming a couch potato,
Trying to please anyone but my Self, held no lasting appeal.
* * * *
Mister Grumpy, I am, I am.
* * * *
Derogatory, disparaging, critical, insulting, belittling, offensive … Well, yes, sometimes.
It is the nature of the cynic, the skeptic, the realist, to judge, and often harshly.
Look to Buddha, Jesus, Lao Tzu, and other nice guys if you want pap.
* * * *
The good die young; so do the bad.
What is young? What is old? What is life? What is death?
What is anything? What is everything? … Who? What? Where? When? Why? How?
Welcome to the mind of a philosopher, such as it is.
* * * *
The world I would save was undone
Many thousands of years before humankind
Learned the secrets of fire and steel.
* * * *
Soundly ignored, I am, and not at all unhappy about it.
* * * *
I am awareness, you are awareness,
The entire manifest dreamtime is awareness,
All the same, all alone, all together, forever, such as it is.
* * * *
Just another monkey putting in his time, serving his sentence.
* * * *
I could inhale the universe if my tummy were not so tiny.
* * * *
Watching, watching, always watching.
* * * *
All these many thoughts are my gift to the dystopian future, assuming, of course,
There is still anyone around to read it, and computers to read it on.
Keep an eye out for the Dead Sea Scrolls hard copy.
* * * *
Doing nothing as time allows.
* * * *
Many times I do not realize the clarity, the subtlety, of things I have written,
Until I am re-reading them, oftentimes several years later.
“Who was that masked man?” I wonder.
* * * *
The temptation to erase it all is hatching.
* * * *
Soon enough, I shall join the graveyard of dead philosophers,
And all this absurd babble will play to what end I need neither know nor care.
Likely as not, it will evaporate back into the prior-to-consciousness abyss all but unknown,
And the human species shall continue racing madly toward the dualistic destiny
Ordained by its vanity-laced Darwinian genomic predisposition,
Which is so oh-well-so-it-goes-deal-with-it-get-over-it-move-on the way it is,
In the grand schemelessness of all things manifestly grist-for-the-mill eternally indivisible.
* * * *
Well past need, or even want for that matter.
* * * *
Sure, precise definitions are important in the Ivory Tower,
But here on the given street, any sordid generalization will do.
* * * *
The Tao Te Ekim
* * * *
How to Live the Rich Man’s Life on a Dime
* * * *
A hard-working boomer slacker.
* * * *
Iconoclast, critic, skeptic, heretic,
Unbeliever, dissident, dissenter, infidel, rebel, renegade, mutineer:
Yet another ditty from the coffee shop philosopher guy,
A street-level critical thinker with a view.
* * * *
How I long for the Old School daze,
Before all this inane technology overtook our lives,
When I could roam blissfully unaware, unconcerned, untroubled,
About what anyone else was doing or thinking, or whether or not they even existed.
* * * *
Sun warming the front, a lazy cool breeze to the rear,
I am it, and it is me, the wind betwixt and between.
* * * *
Ooh, what is under that stone?
* * * *
Too late in the game for these myriad thoughts to make any tangible difference.
Were it possible, the garden world I would save, in all its Darwinian magnificence,
Was undone when our kind began its cancerous migration out of the jungles of Africa.
Whatever the future holds, it will play out in the dystopia conceived by the winds of mind.
* * * *
She said the words made her head spin.
Into what? And which direction? he wondered.
* * * *
What are little boys made of? … Snips and snails and puppy-dogs' tails … Yes.
What are little girls made of? … Sugar and spice and everything nice ... Not.
* * * *
Nothing to do? And what is the problem with that, again?
* * * *
To all Christians and other faithful true believers,
While you have paid out ten percent of your hard-earned treasury
To sit in hard wooden pews, listen to mind-numbing sermons, and sing tedious hymns,
Pretending to love people you loathe, fearing a deity who is but an invention of irrational imagination,
Idolizing a martyr long dead that you might well detest if he were to actually show up,
I have spent many a Sunday sunrise enjoying long, contemplative wanders,
Breathing in and breathing out the one and only true cathedral.
* * * *
Sometimes this mind, this body, this world, this universe,
Feels like such a prison, to which death can be the only release.
Do it figuratively, do it literally, what matter in the dust-to-dust of it.
* * * *
How interesting it would be to be the fly on the wall,
Witnessing a detailed autopsy on this poor old cadaver.
The nervous system has certainly played a symphony in it.
* * * *
Zen Mike, Gregg Payne used to call me during the Chico years.
* * * *
A scrapbook of the time in mind.
* * * *
Mad? You call me mad? Well, my fine friend, that is no great distinction in an insane asylum.
* * * *
It took a long time in earth years to figure out my calling in this mortal existence,
Which, of course, provided a larger frame of reference, more writing material,
From which to articulate clarity and insight to an all but empty auditorium.
* * * *
More experiences lend themselves to more contemplation,
Which morph into more metaphors, more analogies, more ironies, more paradoxes,
Which means more opportunities to play with vocabulary and grammar.
Which is akin to fun, such as it is, for this a-puttering mind.
* * * *
All this random babble has been scribed over a period of going-on thirty years.
Apologies for all the repetition, but it is more a journal of whatever springs into mind,
Than it is any kind of cohesive narrative, or cohesive anything, for that or any other matter.
Basically, it all boils down to this fact: You are the indivisible, timeless mystery,
And for all practical and impractical purposes, you are on you own.
Rotsa ruck, best wishes, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.