dressed like a con artist carney magic man with rainbow suspenders and jangling bangles, packing up possessions to relocate and filter from scene to scene, promising a story, a promising narrative, a binding role play with inclusive notions of living together and caring for one another. when we were on the road we split our take evenly and shared the bagel with avocado in the morning, no matter what we had, we all made use of it, kept each other alive for another day to return to the spring market fair, settling in to the sidewalk with suitcases stuffed full of art, the women displaying decorative bits of handcrafted jewelry and modified pieces of clothing, romantic nomad charms hanging from strings. the artist with his mixed media photographic prints on found reclaimed wood, burned copies of experimental films, a visionary discipline negotiated over chatter of influences and the long explanation of how we got from here to there. the poet standing at the corner banging public sculptures to rattle the metal frame and reverberate big drum percussive pulse while shouting out lyrical cries of inner child hungering, on edge on the hinge of turning a corner and disappearing, etherial, ephemeral, ghostly, like a figment of imagination spied out of the peripheral corners of eyes.

stop to listen and take in the characters, slumming it with real street artists, real life modern day beatnik hobos living this mode of performance that represents authentic counter-culture still alive and timeless, good to eat longer than most worst artificially preserved industrial slop and grime everlasting. people hunger for spiritual sustenance thru creativity and magic wonder defying reasonable description. illusionists and theatrical players take note: accentuate the positive, leave some mystery to the imagination, don’t explain the trick.

walk by the smell of jasmine in the berkeley dusk time. so many pleasant neighborhoods to contrast with the dingy street life of half-crazed homeless persons and weird crust punk hippie run-away kids and that whole seedy underbelly, or the all night strange times of the underculture of San Francisco, sitting at a bus stop eating ice-cream with a young woman telling me about the sexual politics of couch surfing, how it’s completely reversed for a woman rather than a man. a man is looking for a girl to take pity on him, want to shack up with him. a woman has to protect herself from what these lecherous boys may want of her. what would be appealing to me would be potentially threatening to her. the contrasts of our comparative experience, the differences stark but the sensibilities of life lessons learned surfing the slack and living on the road are of a common thread.

big dreams and big plans, trying to stay focused on the most manageable tasks. gonna take some ongoing amount of time to get your personal religious movement off the ground, to occupy the new church and start your own gatherings where artistry is the act of worship and we are the spiritual leaders we’ve been waiting for. even as I grapple with questions of cultural appropriation and syncretism, wondering where the appropriate line is, even as those questions swirl in my mind as people tell me that it really is a sign of respect for one people to emulate another, even if it is a misguided sense of respect. of course I don’t want to deny any serious earnest seeker of wisdom the opportunity to explore a tradition foreign to themselves, indeed, I take my own ideals piece meal from where I can source them. but there is an offensive point it can be taken to, I’m sure that sensitive people would understand that and if they were aware of the history and struggle that underlies the cultural interactions that proceeded the day we find ourselves in, they could appreciate why someone would be protective of their own birthright that may itself remain elusive to them. yet I know that nationalism is a failed approach, that the identity politics left to us from the previous century are too limited in scope to bring together the human family. I am sure that isolationism and xenophobia are dead ends. the new mythology is global, the new story is one of a world with no horizons, no people just over the mountain range to punish. only us, our brothers and sisters and the hardest thing to do in the world, to care for one another and love and dream and dare to reduce all the old boundaries to dust, and bootstrap a hip growing worldwide sensibility to the new world empire’s long shadow casting over land and sea.

may 10 2011

they told me there would be free wifi on this bus! foiled again, speeding away from the old town where I used to live, headed back to the city after scraping up nickels in the old house I used to live in, hanging out with my old roommates. it’s a great scene and it’s great to get a hero’s welcome everywhere you go. the men respect me and their girlfriends tell me I have to come to their weddings and I’m their biggest supporter. for days of just babbling on incessantly entertaining everyone, walking backwards, affecting a nervous manner and so forth, and finally even when I just shut up and do nothing, people are still enthused and happy and surprised to see my act, “look, he’s being quiet! he’s not doing anything! amazing!”

the master mime! mimicry of your surroundings is a survival technique. the permanent houseguest should follow some kind of code of ethics, although, in my more slothful slack surfing moments of foolish pride in idle behavior, I have subsisted on a bare minimum of effort. people fed me, took care of me, occasionally I swept or helped do the dishes. I said get rid of half your dishes.

I love to see the strong proud men in the right, the beauty of women confident in their power, the dream of a rising collective solidarity in communal living amongst the sights and smells of a group of people, breathing in the same air, conspiring, breaking bread, sharing water, coming together experiencing the tastes and feeling a whole sensorium at once in each other’s company. I love the beautiful couples (i’m their number one fan) and I love the single friends plotting harmony, scheming desire and wishing to justify passion with tolerance for weakness in resistance to temptation, grateful to have been selected as the patron to tempt. I advocate for the miserable wretch on the street corner holding on to his last dime and write songs celebrating calmness at the center of insanity.

I want tattoos for the first time in my life, I want symbols and reminders, I want to trick myself into doing creative things, and leave life open to interpretation and grow with signs that remain mysterious even as you learn more and more.

proof of life! (Taken with instagram)

old haunts (Taken with Instagram at G&G Market)

Rupert Sheldrake (Taken with instagram)

Vince Collins bicentennial animation (Taken with instagram)

in the trenches of reality, the whole totality of life is beyond the morality of good and evil, it’s easy to characterize whole groups of people or make strawmen out of hypothetical pitiable creatures of society, but all in all each person is in their own phase, mode of being, adding layers and stages to their existence. there is no linear path toward freedom or happiness or wisdom or spirit or being, yet we mesh with others and take their explorations into account when we are developing our own frameworks.

all the elusive mysteries telling me that this moment is alive, the world is intelligent. the universe is made of consciousness. the ultimate ground of existence is this kind of energy that turns into self awareness in a sufficiently complex nervous system. we learn self reflexivity from ideal thoughtless void, channeling and rambling our exultation to much excitement. you never learn the perfect truth in taxonomical terms but working within agreed upon relative frameworks we can metaphorically describe our experiential observations and compare the terrain we’ve encountered. cartographers sharing unique maps of the common phenomenon of the solitary depth and interiority of the human condition.

life is an open ended experimental process. I saw a guy on telegraph avenue scooping up free boxes of books left out for perusal. he said he lists them on amazon and makes hundreds of dollars a month driving around scooping up these random books. I guess it’s worth his time, that’s a job you could do. infinite approaches to things and it isn’t always necessary to have a plan or follow the conventional path. so we lazy intellectuals tell ourselves to justify our periods of inactivity. my only obligation is to produce, I tell myself, as I scowl about some unfinished project lingering in the back of my mind.

it’s good to go where you’re wanted and needed, but you can’t be everywhere at once. stroke of luck that you showed up when you did, the weather finally started to turn nice, and of course you found out who was still around and got to spend some quality time, rambling about the inconsistencies of some conspiracy or other. probing questions and long nights of consideration, half baked thoughts, ideals, vivid dreams. wild speculation. provocative declarations.

I don’t know where any of this is going or how to make ends meet, I fold space and curve one-dimensional manifolds over onto themselves and stretch myself so thin I become transparent. an infinite coming of age story in he effort to become a classic character in life, an archetype for the ages! what more is there to aspire to? D-I-Y spirituality, anarchy, choose your own fate and write the script as you go along, just in time.

berkeley/sf update

goin on two weeks, process and progress in the bay. land in San Francisco off a hostel charter bus and get picked up by an old friend. end up in Berkeley eager for an adventure itching to call around and find all the friends. lots of different ones I ain’t had seen in so long. mania rules departures and arrivals.

when it was time to decide what to do the first day, seeing as how I woke up in berkland borderlands between Oakland and Berkeley and I was in such close proximity to the poetry-slam-world-famous Starry Plough Pub I thought I’d find an open mic to perform at, hoping to sell some CDs to cover my already so basic costs. luckily for me there was an open mic that very night, and even a poetry slam event the next evening at the same venue.

when I did my poem about all the things I want to be when I grow up - tongue in cheek absurd freeverse memory feat performance, sort of a intersectionality of identity study - I stepped off stage to genuine applause, and immediately after a gypster girl with feather in her fedora asked me if I needed a place to stay that night. she responded to my claims of living life on the road with kindred enthusiasm - she told me she had been traveling for about 12 years, easily putting my 7 years or so to shame. she showed me leather pieces and hemp jewelry that she made to sell to people to make ends meet. we talked of the commercial art street hustle, and she told stories of living in her van. I slept next to her and her dog, and in the morning her folks bought us breakfast since they were visiting the area, neurological effect on the out of town.

we parted at people’s park in Berkeley, and I called around to get ahold of anyone else I knew in town ended up at a household of students, all vegans making vegan baked goods, because I happened to know one them from living in the north bay a couple years ago. they let me shower and said I could come back after the poetry slam at the starry plough.

the poetry slam in Berkeley is home to some of the most respected poetry slam performers in the poetry slam scene. I was eager to share my work with a group of enthusiasts. they had a great house band that played between poets, and when I went up I sang a song I wrote, and when I was done the band started playing the melody to my song as I walked off stage. this was basically the coolest thing that has ever happened to me, to hear a band playing music that I composed, essentially. with this high water mark complete, I marched back to my perch in the night.

having connected with characters in Berkeley to let them know I was in town, I moved on to San Francisco. I spent a couple of days in the mission district, catching up with a guy who researches all manner of mysticism and the limits of accepted science models surrounded by a fortress of books on every esoteric subject you can imagine. he had a steady stream of interesting guests come thru mostly just to converse, a salon in the old sense of people sitting around discussing things. I was happy and lucky to be one of his interesting guests and I get introduced as “my friend the traveling poet” or just “my poet friend” and often if the person I’m visiting is a good old friend there other friends have already been told about me before. and then I’m happy i’m on the road.

we debate about materialism vs. metaphysical cosmologies, empiricism vs. magical thinking, conspiracies, extraterrestrials, and the viability of mankind in the long term. some of the smartest people I know make an argument very thoroughly, and proceed to point out all the problems with it to illustrate some limitation to conventional thinking on the matter. does magic exist? of course it cannot, even though magic would be a better explanation for strange phenomena than some of the ludicrous doubling over backwards that the logical person will do to explain something that doesn’t fit their worldview.

of course we need critical thinking and to challenge our own biases and to get out of our cultural frame. the society that I have been born into has sculpted the environmental conditions present to encourage alienation, compartmentalization, individuation, atomization, and so many ismims that nobody knows what they are doing or what is worth arguing for or if any ideology is truly sound in the epic debAte of us versus them and I could pity every person that was never inspired with the vision to imagine a life less conventional, imagine a utopia, a convalescence of happy accidents, a coincidental controller free gestural suggestion before linguistic progress ever impeded thoughtless objectification or enabled critical discourse _ of course _ you never knew the consequences of your actions before you internalized the morality of your collective. OF COURSE humans live in small collectives and societies based on mutual trust and reciprocal gift giving / slash nobody knows what’s good for them / slash communication is key in all relationships / slash we need feedback from others or it’s garbage in garbage out; the self consulting about the self with no novel stimulus,

this is the reason I venture out into the world.

warm days and people talking about being teased by the sun and then it gets chilly again, windy and miserable in the shadows and grateful for shelter. managed to have connected with a few different friends and meet some new people to get me thru living in the first week, and did some open mics to positive reception, and sold a couple CDs in my new mode of being sponsored by my friends and the greater open mic going public.

some people live in vehicles and that gives them a measure of independence from others, a house cat like me lives in the lives of others, trading housework favors and camaraderie for a guest room or space on the couch, and coffee in the mornings and walks to cafes and spending idle time in dogparks and helping people moving. I’ve heard living in a vehicle can be addicting. I understand the need for movement for it’s own sake, so uprooted and always feeling like you can just move on to another place, hopping between these concurrent worlds available for you to sample. whatever methods you employ in your approach to life - whether bunkering down in one place or spread out all over, still on a run toward the horizon and what may come, trying to stay open to new experiences and any new simulation of freedom to taste and develop preference for.

escape velocity

endless farm landscapes along the way up the 5. space invaders on stilts carrying powerlines. the bus stops for a break halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, parked at a burger king for twenty minutes before they take off again and drive by the cow slaughtering facility that looks like some kind of concentration camp for cattle. that’s where your burger comes from, Timmy!

the stay in LA was good, I slept in seven different houses over four weeks, and visited with old friends and fellow travelers who happened to be in town around the same time. I googoo gaga’d at the new babies, latest addition to the family of friends as everyone I know begins approaching the ages of responsibility and adulthood. someday all our friends will have kids. me and the out of town medic listening to the screaming baby - “other people’s kids are great, but this sets back my biological clock about twenty years” and “mine’s completely smashed” she says. I cannot argue with anyone. some have the itch to move, and being anywhere too long eats away at them like a madness they can’t ignore - others want homes and families of their own, real domestic like, and we require each other, each sort of person - the homemakers provide a place for the travelers to visit and the travelers bring in some fresh input to the situation.

so while baby sleeps we practice juggling or throwing knives in the backyard, novelty is good for the brain, perhaps working on your sideshow act will stave off degenerative brain diseases and complete atrophy or collapse of neural pathways. we scramble and unscramble strange patterns into a rubic’s cube to confound one another and teach our neighbors any geeky talent we have to share. skill share bonanza

listen to police scanner app, hear broadcasts of troublesome street characters - they’ve got their eye on you, ya know. swinging by a few times to make sure you’re not going to flip out, go insane and attack someone. other such shady goings on at Venice beach - the seedy underbelly rolled over on display in broad daylight, safe for families and tourists. trivial notions of poverty, addiction, mental instability - parodied as worlds greatest wino waiting for you to pay him to take a picture, as grungy crust hippies all scraggly like junky wizards fishing for marijuana with hobo signs on display. every other barker on the boardwalk you pass hawking medical marijuana prescriptions for any reason in California for a small fee - the new cottage industry, the new gold rush, the new 49ers, the new wild west in a legal limbo. all this in the bright of day so you can buy a Marilyn Monroe t-shirt photoshopped with gangsta tattoos and bandana (but the proportions are all wrong). or a tacky stupid tasteless postcard. I can never find a decent postcard to send to my family. and all the bummy territorial artists shopping their wares on the strip- the ghetto van gogh with his stencils, the palm readers, fortune tellers who should already know I am uninterested, the novelty acts, your name on a grain of rice for a dollar. all of this I try to explain to new comers (though it is not strictly my place to introduce, but I am an admirer) and the charm and something to appreciate about this nexus of counter culture, this strange street life brimming underground, a dirty underworld that sits exposed all day and waits for night to fall to pull out needles and camping gear. I slept under a pier around here for 6 days when I first came to venice some seven and a half years ago, and I’m happy to say I don’t need to do that anymore. I’ve made love on this beach, I’ve contemplated how death will return my body’s share of water to a mother ocean, walking along its moonlit shore. I’ve shed tears of frustration here alone, and I’ve been inspired and felt celebratory joy in this place with the kinds of friends that became family. here in the daytime when the kids play in the swings and families ride bikes together oblivious to what happens late at night.

turning off the 5 to head up San Jose way, rolling green hills a welcome sight compared to the flatness and hot arid farms of the central valley. hoping for similar luck in San Francisco. I hadn’t spent much time in LA for years, so people missed me and that’s like a built up credit you can have with people. back years ago I would come and stay for weeks on end, head up to SF after a while and walk around the rain with all my gear, getting rides bouncing back and forth periodically between these two great cities on a long california run. it worked out great back then, and I’m still visiting these same characters I met in those times plus new ones I’ve added and whomever has moved around and shuffled into my path. rolling green hills of california

things I’m interested in: combination of technology and counter culture. the future. artistic expression. good conversation. a net enabled life to encourage serendipity and making online friendships real. San Francisco, the mecca of all these things and more, awaiting my arrival in a few short hours as I type this merrily on the bus trip up, with my thumbs doing roughly 30 words per minute on a mobile touch screen device.

some idyllic landscape out the window but no compulsion to capture a video stream, they told me there would be outlets and wifi on this bus! I was had. I must wait. tonight we drink tea with old friends new friends, tomorrow we decide if shamanism can be divorced from it’s culture context, wednesday we start planning our next adventure a month out, thursday we’ll read poetry and Friday the federal government will shut down.

back in LA, around venice they have a saying called AWOL - it means “always west of lincoln” and it means you never go further east than this little quadrant of land between the beach and Lincoln avenue. I can jive with that sentiment because it’s my favorite part of the metro, it’s like Austin as to the rest of texas. but I ventured out a little more, for dinner parties in Korea town, for all night media discussions and coding sessions in downtown warehouses, for commiserating with film industry hopefuls and critiquing the unoriginality of Hollywood in apartments near it’s culver city studios. I saw a famous scientist give a talk about the future at Cal-Tech in pasedina. I sipped coffee and assembled my demo cd cases in the trendiest parts of silverlake and ate a decent New York style slice of pizza in echo park. its not that I don’t like these places, its just that I’ve got more connections to Venice and it’s still home base when I’m in town even if (or maybe even moreso now because) people are having babies. I’ll be back in May, I tell them.

cattle grazing on rolling california hills

here I come, San Francisco. I never really spend as much time in the city up there as long as I would like, it’s expensive to live and I never really knew enough people to pull it off. when I was younger and more bold I did street performing and made new associations that way, people took me in off the street sometimes without even knowing me. I would usually retreat to the north bay now and then to make it work. but this time I think I may have enough friends to stay a few weeks and really get to explore and check out cool events I hear about and i’m excited to visit people in San Francisco and Oakland and Berkeley and even up north of the golden gate bridge in the north bay towns. friends in tiny studios, and big warehouses and everywhere in-between, all the while I’m supposed to be pushing my CD and doing poetry and open mics and stuff, the most incidental part of my touring journey because the main thing I am interested in is just getting to talk to you and hear your stories and tell you mine, and get to share over our experiences and perspectives and try to encourage one another to be brave and hopeful in an uncertain time and counteract the fear and paranoia and hysteria of apocalyptic fears lingering. this is our home (even if I don’t really live here) and we should stick around to defend it.

hopefully I’ll get to see everyone. hopefully the crowds will dig on what I have to offer. hope they love me and hope to progress steadily every year with the new line - and I hope I can pare down my possessions yet more still, living out of a suitcase, a messenger bag, and a duffle-bag with even more containers rolled up and unused waiting to explode all over your floor and take up more surface area than you thought possible when you saw me stroll up carrying all my things. trim down possessions a little every leg of the trip if you can, resist the urge to acquire things unless they replace multiple things you already have. everything should be a multitool.

that’s the very definition of utilitarianism.

San Jose approaching. SF not too far out. outlet malls and in-n-out burger joints along side the roads. pass cupertino and mountain view. hello apple, hello google. get out your confirmation numbers, we will be arriving at our destination shortly. and I will see you again soon.

your robot, lance