My Life, and Loss, perfectly reflected in a week......

As you can tell, it has been about a week since I did my last post, even though I PROMISED I would do this every day. And this is the story of my life, to go head on and hopeful into a project, only to get derailed.

I got sick last week with a very bad cold and got busy with work. I did not have the energy to get to this. And I mourned the loss of another friend a week ago. A beloved friend passed away suddenly while I was away in California, I literally got the news via a voice mail while waiting at the gate. I could not come out for the funeral nor Shiva, but was able to attend the thirty day memorial. There I saw the widow and two daughters. When I embraced the youngest, the one I am closest to, she wrapped her arms around me and began to sob, burying her face in my chest. I cried as well, holding her head in one hand and wrapping my other around her, holding on as we dove into the abyss of sorrow.

What a gift that was, to have someone love me enough to open their soul to what was around them. She did the same for me, as I had fire-walled this loss as best I could since I got the news. I tried to visit his grave but the snow prevented me from finding it. So I kept pushing it aside until Love, and let's just call it what it IS, Love, broke open the gates and allowed the hurt to come out.

Last week, at my mother's birthday, I found out someone else I knew died. He was a priest whom I knew as a child and would run into every now and again. He had accidentally called me on New year's Eve and we talked about the new pope. He was wonderful and we hoped to meet up soon after. We never did.

My friend who passed away..... his widow said something. She said, "He was all full of hope before he died so suddenly. Nobody saw this coming. He was planning on teaching friends and writing a book and enjoying his retirement." Those words hit me like a stone in the face. 

The words of obvious time ahead negated by Fate.

Tea and Sympathy

I awoke really late this morning listening to the sounds of the Morton Feldman piano and string Quartet piece done by the Kronos Quartet and Aki Takahashi. This piece always reminds me of my late friend Sharon Spitalney who died at the age of 22 back in 1992 from basically her body shutting down after a bone arrow transplant to fight an undiagnosed advanced case of aplastic anemia. The day I got a photograph of her from her parents (after telling them I dedicated a song and album to her),I fell amazingly ill with a stomach virus. I had just gotten the Kronos quartet CD and listened to it the entire afternoon and night while in bed. To this day, there are moments when my bones ache I miss her so much. She was the kindest and strongest artistic soul I have ever seen. She was a poet who spoke without anger, she had the most beautiful hands and we danced once backstage at cabaret we both performed at. There are some people whose presence is so great that when they leave it is still there and you are forced out of respect, love and duty to walk in it, regardless of how much it reminds you of them.

I am drinking a huge bowl-cup of tea right now and doing my best to try to go without solid food today. Tons of water and tea should do it. Food is a distraction so much of the time. Coffee as well. Don't get me wrong, I love them both, but I am the kind of person that needs distance from things that I love to appreciate them. I take things and people for granted. We all do. But there is a line between being orgasmically grateful for every little thing and apathy. Maybe that is why we are to say grace before meals, thanking god for the food, never taking it as a given. The Our Father has that in it as well. We do need to be reminded. The more one has the more one takes things for granted. It is human nature stretching back to the Garden of Eden. Everything..... but the fruit of one tree. And I am sure the fruit tasted amazing, the best fruit ever consumed, but it came with a price as does all experience.

With the hammer about to fall with work and bills and what will happen next, I really wish I could just talk to someone. Do not get me wrong, I have amazing friends, but we are all busy. Tonight I am hopefully going to meet up with my friend Scott and we can talk. That is rather amazing. But I suppose all of us desire to really be able to have someone who knows exactly what we are going through and who can guide us, tell us the future. I totally understand the desire for psychics.  Who the hell does NOT want to talk to their deceased loved ones or know what their future will be. But that is a dangerous game that can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

Sometimes all we need is some sympathy, someone who will listen and let us figure out the solution to our problems by exposing them to the light. Then again this is Peace Prayer of St. Francis, so nothing is ever really new, is it?

End of day, out to sea....

This is being done at the very end of the day and I feel like at the end of a drainage ditch.

My mood has turned sour after a day full of disappointments. Any hope I had for a better Autumn of work was destroyed and things are just making me ill at ease. This is a season to let go of everything that holds us back, to accept change. But at times change sucks.

We are supposed to trust that God will take care of everything, the whole "are not the birds of the sky taken care of by God" thing. Yeah, true. But birds die, get hit by trucks, run into planes, and freeze to death. Bad things happen to birds. Bad things also happen to innocent people.

I am hoping  that this whole job situation works itself out, but I have never been in this place before. All my life I have been teaching guitar and doing landscaping (or crafts). I cannot figure out what to do next. I am an adult now and have responsibilities. Should there be a huge change? Can I walk away and start over?

I cannot find happiness in this situation though there are a few moments when I feel decent, but now Max is even dead. The Man is gone, the Boston Terrier who was my brother. My mother and sister made that poor dog suffer till his dying night. He deserved better. I should have but him to sleep when he was barking in pain and confusion from his eye problems. He was so goddamned miserable. He was better than that. He was beautiful and made Neitzsche look like a brain dead toad.

I feel like hell and cannot smile. Giving up all alcohol was a mistake. Then again, it is easier than last year, where I drank but had the scene of my friends cancer in my sight every second of the day. In thirty four days I will have all this stuff again. I won't see Max and I won't hold my friend at the end of it.

Like I said, all things will pass, but not necessarily the way that will make you smile.

On Photographs and Ink Stains

I just got out of bed and saw a new photograph of a friend who passed away. It was on the front page of my Facebook feed. So early in the morning and without the buffer expectation, it kinda smacked me down. Ther was that beautiful smile and those bright eyes that I miss.

Is the concept of death changing in the 21st century? It used to be that one had the space of silence and non-reminders to mourn the loss of someone, to somehow figure out what the hell you ere supposed to do without them here. Now you can find pictures of people who are gone all over the place.

Okay, let me back step here a bit, I am  not saying it is a BAD thing to have access to pictures and videos we love on the internet. It is actually amazing. However, it in within that first year, the place where all mentions and reminders that they are not here reallllllllllllly hurt the hardest.

I have texts of my friend on my phone. Even now it is hard for me to look at them. But the strange thing is that they are so sterile looking. She and I exchanged many letters in our life. Alas, in an act of pure evil, all her letter were thrown out on purpose. So now I have no way of reading her wonderful writings again. At present, it would be crushing, but in time, it would be amazing. I have writings of some of my friends who have passed. There is something sacred about the written word, the handwritten word, that really connects people.

Van Gogh's letters to his brother Theo are an amazingly intimate look into the soul of an artist. They are still read today and for good reason. They are rich in emotion and passion and wonderfully written. What will be left behind of us? Texts? Twitter feeds? Emails? The new generation does not write emails, so make that texts, Twitter, or instagram.

We are all dust, we are all to return to the Earth. What will we leave behind? Selfish personal experience that only satisfies ourselves leaves little behind to help other things grow. We must do our best to give to others so that when we are gone, things can grow and be better. This is not a new concept, I understand that, but it will most likely always need to be repeated.

Acts of kindness and selflessness are those seeds that we plant. We must do our best to be a positive part of the continuum. And, no, that is not easy, but being a farmer never is....

There are no little earth quakes.....

Unable to go back to sleep this morning. The stress of Chris most likely losing her job in ten days making rest impossible. I feel like a Yahtzee dice tumbler being shaken by a thousand hands and then slammed onto a concrete table.

If I had any real nads, I would be able to have some hope in this situation and believe it would all urn out okay. Things are not dire, but the creative life I have lived has not panned out the way I have hoped. I supposed I have always lied to myself and said that I could walk away from it and get a real job if need be. I have done my best, produced an uncompromising catalog of work of high quality that did not sell. So, why is my stomach not full enough to move away from the table?

Creativity is an epistemic horizon that you can always see but never reach. You just keep going. Maybe there are some people who are able to stop. But I am willing to guess that they think about it fondly, remembering the best times like they would a former lover who enchanted them.

What am I worried about here? That we will have to sell the house and move? That I will have to sell my gear and we will have to start over?

Vanity upon vanity. All is vanity.

Isn't this the line I was talking about when Lent started? All this fades. If I ave to sell some guitars and some clothes and strip down to where I was years ago, or maybe even further, so what? The most free I ever felt was in Music school in Minneapolis when I had nothing. The problem is, your Honor, that the road ahead of me was full of a certain hope that things would get so much better, that I would be put in the place I had always dreamed of and worked so hard for. This is not the case.

While I am grateful to be alive and distanced from the deep depression that had dogged me for years, all this possibility of change is difficult for me.

I visited a Benedictine monastery on my birthday. The Rule of St Benedict dates that one must have nothing and give everything away to be able to get closer to God. This, I see now is very true. Possessions due block one from getting closer to God. But seeing the problem and acting on it are two radically different things.

My big fear is that we become uninsured and someone gets sick and we lose everything. But, set against death, what does "lose everything" really mean?

We hoarders collect things because they represent possibility.I am the worst because I am both a musician and a collage maker. Things just pile up because you are so goddamned sure you will use them someday. But that is such a lie, isn't it? My dear friend died recently wanting to write a book in his retirement. How much more of a reminder do I need that I need to be in the infinite moment? That there really is only the present?

However, I have seen enough tragedy to know that sometimes things do not work out in this life. Suffering is not something I embrace as enough of it arrives by the truckload into my life and lives in my backyard.

What can be done?

Perhaps Beckett put it best in "Waiting for Godot" : "I can't go on. I'll go on...

Within the Voice, the invisible Home

I saw a friend post last night on Facebook about how she longed to hear the voice of her longtime boyfriend who died from lung cancer a few weeks ago. I met him twice but cannot remember his voice. To her however, it was home.

I lost my friend Steve who sang in my band years ago. He recorded songs of mine that became highlights of the shows. I was unable to listen to the songs he sang on for some time after his death. That piece of archeology was too painful to dig up. When I did, I remember crying. What hurt the most was that it was an exact reminder of what I had lost, what the world had lost by his beautiful voice. His voice was him, just as much as his smile and his kindness.

I still cannot listen back to the voice of my father. I have done it a few times but could not do it for long. Then again, there was not a great deal for him to say on the cassette tapes I found. Just letters to friends who were horrible at writing him back.

Years ago, I saw an interview and a clip from a movie about the prophet Abraham who was played by bad boy actor Richard Harris.  He sad that he did not want the voice of God to be huge, like in the Ten Commandments. He said that after he had been rather naughty and sinned (he was known for being a huge drinker and liked cocaine), he would go off to a monastery and pray. He said that the voice of God was was comes to all of us in silence, in prayer. And that voice is the one inside our heads, quiet and direct. No bombast. The voice of God, silent but available. So in the movie, the voice of God that speaks to Abraham is his own voice, slightly hushed, but in his head via a voiceover). Abraham looks like an insane man talking to himself.

From the moment of conception, we all hear our mother's heartbeat and her voice. That Music, that sense of pulse, is always with us. My mom's voice changed severely after a brain bleed stroke and I can say I do miss her old voice, light and airy. I have it recorded somewhere but cannot get the courage to listen to it. It is so hard to look back on what we cared about, what brought us joy, as gone.

I sent my friend a link to the book "A Year of Magical Thinking" by Joan Didion. In it, she tries to confront the sudden death of her husband without any religion. The upside is that she confronts the physical issues that come with deep mourning, something I always felt but could never get any real proof of. She does her best to make sense of it all, but never really does. Gone is gone. One can never make sense of Death even though it is a constant of the Universe.

In this digital recording age, we will have more archived footage of the past than any time in history. I do not believe that it will make death easier for people, but only harder. Because when we want their voice, we remember their embrace, and when we remember their embrace we remember their smell. And ,in the end, we want them back again in full. And that is not how this life works.

And, as always, we almost always find that out the hard way, after the fact....

Looking into the rooms nobody wants to because...

The first year after someone dies is the absolute worst. I am not sure why this is, but it is most likely because the last reference point we have of the same day, they were there and/or it is the first time we get memories of that person and they are not here anymore. And, even though it gets better over time, it sucks.

A year ago, the downward spiral of my dear friend Theresa started via her diagnosis with cancer. Due to my experience in seeing people with this, I knew from the moment I got the text where she told me that cancer was in her bile, combined with the fact that they did a lung biopsy on her for reasons she did not know at the time, that this was going to be a hellish and fast run to the finish line.

In Lent we are supposed to confront the fact that we will all die, a recant of Ecclesiastes "Vanities of Vanities, oh Lord. All is vanity." etc. But, how does one try to help someone who is literally looking down the barrel of their own mortality and they are avoiding it at all costs? The only answer is to treat them with love, kindness and compassion.

I remember driving around with her just two weeks before her diagnosis. We were at a light in Manhattan Beach and she said, "Yeah, I just want to get through the next 12 years then retire, ya' know?" Without knowing a damn thing else, I remember looking over at her and thinking, "Sweetie, those are the most dangerous words I could ever hear you say. Why are you putting off living till THEN? Please be in the moment! You are an amazing woman, so why are you waiting to see that?!?!"

It is at times like this that one realizes that nobody can force anyone to do anything. Not even Jesus did it when He was around here. Free will is an amazing invention. We all try and struggle with that, to have people love us who don't, to have people stop drinking or doing drugs or having affairs or wasting their God given greatness on video games, sports, and/or porn. But we cannot forget that people can drown if they wish, or to be more precise, are permitted by the Universe to make those bad decisions.

But for those of us that remain here on this Earth, the questions that sit inside the mystery of loss, like birds forever circling in clouds across the highway, never allow us to be still. We have to keep going, keep walking, keep struggling every step of the way to hopefully make sense of all this when the fog of sorrow breaks and we can see colors again, taste food again, not cry in the middle of department stores or on trains and busses when we miss the other person so much we believe we will shatter from the inside out like a Faberge egg dropped from a skyscraper, when we will awake one day and not have to confront that pain of knowing that a silence was there that never was before, that finally, one day, we will lay our head down at night and not just black out from exhaustion, but find that sense of peace that was there before all this happened.

If Jesus cried at the death of His friend, then all of us have to realize that the loss of someone we love is able to make the creator of the Universe shake. Love is that strong....