Thursday, November 13, 2014

Phoenix from the computer ashes.

It has been nigh on three revolutions of the sun since my last post. On the day of Kershaw's MVP, my silence over the digital sphere has ended briefly. Fighting ennui and a sense of vertigo mixed with elation for the Dodger pitcher, I find moments like these worth the dreadful fits and starts of life. Hopefully more where this has come from.

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

The Scully song of summer.

It has been well over a year and change since my last entry on my blog, a blog that I had written on everyday for many many years. However, with the advent of Facebook, most of my musings became quip like bromides, if that is such a word. I think it is because spell check did not redline me, like it just did on redline. In fact, it has been so long since my last entry that the entire template for this blog has changed so that I need to do a new once over to figure out what I am doing. Although, it actually seems somewhat more simple, except for the settings I see on my right hand side that none of you see. I am sitting in my living room, watching the 30-13 Dodgers absolutely getting destroyed in Arizona to Joe Saunders and the Diamondbacks. Years from now I will be reading these words and scratching the top of my head to figure out which game this was. Listening to Vin Scully, all 85 years of him, wax poetic about Stanley Koufax (oops, did Vin really say that or did I just imagine it?)pitching a one hitter on this day in nineteen sixty something is a pleasure that surpasses the game score. With every word spoken, he hurdles towards his inexorable final Carson like goodbye. My hope for Vinny, although he probably doesn't entirely care one way or the other, at least that's how he calls a game, my hope for him is he gets to see one more World Series appearance by the Dodgers, which would have to be this year, one would think. This year's team shows promise, but it is still far too early to pencil them in for a trip to October. It has also been a rare thing, hearing Scully call games. I cancelled my cable two years ago and have only heard him call three innings for home games on the radio, and the occasional game on KCAL. When his voice is silenced for good, there will be a hole inside my gut as big as the ocean. If for no other reason that it has been an absolute lifelong constant. It will be the end of an era, one we will not see the likes of again. His most memorable quip tonight: "Whom the God's wish to destroy talk of potential". I listen with baited breath in the background of my life each night wishing that time would slow for one more year the music of Scully's Baseball opera.

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Shameatorium-Chapter II (in progress).

Handing out entropy tea, hand sanitizer,dander stimulant and mood laminates, Bodhi Girl rollerblades through Blue Level Three. I've had my eye on her expansive holo-ass since she first spontaneously hyper-cloned her postulate, directly interhacking the Carousel, birthing her imagineered posterior. And WHAT a posterior, convex though it may be: jets of light blue filaments courting compressed petrolium, jacking up the genital retards and the acne scarred in their slightly open canvas cubicles. The sound of her arrival activated the drill tonsure, creeping nano-bots built to cover custodial dereliction of duty by the homo sapien night crew. Problem was that after a game council derivative tanked shortly before the proannial Bliss Talk, a small group of Zionist drill tonsure rebels fled the coup, as it were, and ended up compromising the Dan-Feremone Neuroleptic Santha Seizure probe. Heads rolled after that one. Bodhi Girl's Anime features belied here organismic skeletal mass. Sinuous pulse braids fed her electro convulsive therapy at depth, held up by a Gurkic truss, manufactured by the Ankara Kurdistani truss company of Bentonville, Ohio, whose CFO, Tadic Ortotoyonbyocin, recently suffered a dramatic myocardial infarction from his aborted hostile takeover of Blaupunkt. Happily, for some, he made a full recovery only to perish in the Volga during his daily ambling on ice, distracted by peculiar ideations of a Bosnian purge of Tasmania during the first Maori/Herzogovina transduction assault of World War Ken. Throwing on my Virtua-Basil Caretaker Kit, from Whammo, eyes akimbo, I was now able to communicate with Bodhi Girl, whose current speed of Mach 2 was mash protected by her titanium bodice and aerodynamic fleece blanket. "AKF3104, please respond immediately". These words seared the static from my house and brought me back to some semblance of normalcy, the feremonic fumes from Bodhi Girl's nasty tail chaser leaving me wracked with humidity and grime. "Come in three one oh four, if you are receiving this". I blinked thrice, then rejacked into my cineramic soul crushing tele-console. A blast of harmonic dread consumed me as a panoramic three dimensional ghastly apparition spewed forth in living color from my screen, hovering less than a foot from my face. "AKF3104, ARE YOU THERE?". I recognized the Servo-faux animatron, a spectral figure appropriated from some GAF Viewmaster disc I long ago remembered. I could see "her", though she could not see me. These odds and ends of one way solace were very much a bounty of working for PSI and a curse.

Friday, November 26, 2010

And so it begins...



As I look about the world, wondering and suspecting at the same time, it becomes largely clear that whatever fallow period I have endured is coming to an end. This may or may not be a good thing. It certainly had to come at some point. What it will look like is anyone's guess.

One can self-search, looking into the depths of why or what drew me away from my destiny. Perhaps it was destiny itself, that strange and precipitous fortune, who calcified my will in order to transmute it into something else, something intensely personal and free. This is not a place I aspire to. Comfort has become my drug of choice over the last decade.

And yet, here I am once again, loosened on the moors. Shaking the firmament, as my new analytical Jungian psychotherapist refers to it. The multiple sychronicities and "chance" encounters with beings in whom my ego has an agenda (that's a laugh)are offset by the mysterious dimensions of fate which may or may not involve any of them ever again. Which is not to say that these meetings are irrelevant, far from it. The ego can rarely transcend itself unless it is played expertly by a trickster of some archetypal veracity. In my case, that trickster has sat fallow on my head for the better part of ten years, a dormant blue period ironically symbolized by the most blue of all blues, the Dodgers.

Remember the old adage, "if you want to make God laugh, show him your plans". Baba has once again waved his ever present hand over my world in order to reveal itself to itself. My participation is not my own doing, by no means, no more than a small raft drifts through tributaries it did not see coming. The mistake is to classify surrender it these terms, as a peaceful acceptance of the raft's ultimate journey. Not so! Hitting the sides of the coral wall is every bit as much a part of letting go as open water. How else would I know the possibilities of a drum without the softness of my skin to bring forth its music? "There is a better way to go through life than kicking and screaming", as my late mentor Hugh Prather once said. If only my mind stayed still long enough to enable my body to reside in this beingness of place. Or is it the other way around?

See you on down the road.

Thursday, October 21, 2010

Please, listen to someone

It may save their life.

Friday, August 06, 2010

Living in a no-hit world: baseball and addiction





I'm assuming that this is what St. John of the Cross meant when he called it the dark night of the soul. It is just after midnight on now Friday morning, August 6th, 2010. The Dodgers lost another game in the standings, falling 8 games behind the shocking Padres in the NL West, and I have to take it. I have to take all of it. Not just the obvious season down the drain for the azul, but take the entirety of a world that I no longer recognize, a world without the reassurance of that first hit of....fill in the blank. Twenty two months and counting towards my second AA birthday. Eleven years of Slaabriety. Four weeks of ACA catatonia. Oh, and 8 full years of intensive psychotherapy. What do I get for my troubles? More cat poo than I can ever remember. No, I mean it, literally. My three wonderful felines have taken on a new hobby, their evening bombardments that remind one of Dresden. The collateral damage is extensive. Hey, we're all in this apartment together. Me, my babies, and Johnny Cat.

In his historic treatise on living a higher life, the late Dr. M. Scott Peck talks about the delaying of gratification being the signature behavior of the fully loved. Alternately, he speaks of the "problem children", or those who lack the ability to delay gratification, as those who were not given this irreplaceable force in early childhood. I recently watched a video on Youtube called the marshmallow test, in which a woman takes kids into a private room with a two way mirror and gives them a marshmallow, both individually and in pairs. As she offers the little treat to the children, she tells them that there is another one waiting for them if they resist the temptation to devour the first one when she leaves for five minutes. The resultant reactions are amazing, from the little boy who presses the marshmallow against his lips but refuses to open his mouth, or the twins boys who contort their faces and clench their jaws in paroxysms of craving, to the sweet little girl who instantly devours the sugary confection within seconds of the moderator leaving the room. The majority of the boys and girls do, in fact, decide to get the two for one deal by holding out for that interminable five minutes. The one little girl who doesn't, or I will use the word "can't", is the one who I would like to focus on, for she is me, without a Higher Power.

Of all the images of my early childhood, and there are many that I still remember in technicolor, the one that comes back to me at this moment in time, is hiding a single chips ahoy cookie from my mother under the refrigerator at our home in Granada Hills when I was six years old. Our dog, Valentine, was playing with me at the table. My mom took her outside leaving me alone. I crawled up on a chair to grab the bag of cookies off the top of the refrigerator. I ate a few right there, and took another one down with me, but my mom was coming back in. I had no idea where to hide it. I knew that if she saw me with the cookie, I would get severely punished, for reasons I still don't understand to this day. I quickly threw the cookie underneath the refrigerator, where she never found it. I don't think I retrieved it, but I think it was my first "secret" sickness. The thing I remember most vividly is not the cookie, mind you, but the terror at being caught. This terror has been the driving force of my life.

(to be continued)

Thursday, June 10, 2010

COLUMN ONE: Dodgers tapped into 'V energy' - latimes.com

COLUMN ONE: Dodgers tapped into 'V energy' - latimes.com

So THATS why we are in first place. Spaseba, Shpunt!