Tip of the Tongue

Listening to Beck live I realized how much I have been conditioned to think that what I hear on a record is permanent, that the same thing can be done the same way time and time again and further more, that I want to hear the album version of life, the rendition that I am used to, and not only that, I want everyone to sing along in my key, in my time, and I want to walk through the streets with people that know when to approach and when to walk away.

There are no signs I need to obey except for my own and it cannot be that much of this. I have things to take care of. Sleep apnea causes me to be tired all the time yet I have not had a machine in almost two years because I do not want to be hooked into the wall when I sleep. 

CPAP machines are straight out of a Philip Dick story. You see us in the airport. We are usually fat and jaundiced and look as if we have given up on life. Then there are those like myself. Or am I the anomaly? A man that survives years of smoking Winstons and Marlboro Reds and ounces and pounds of weed and resin, a man that puts chemicals in his nose and enough booze in his system to hold a family of ducks. Then he stops and his life carries on and this snoring that was filmed by a woman he might have loved keeps coming to the surface. It is like thunder among trains. It is like one of the favorite things that I love about my neighborhood: noise. Noise, and I want to be left alone.

That is another strange concept. I want to be around all of the action and I want to let love flow between me and the people I know and don't know. Then there are other times where I want to walk outside, from my truck to the porch and back without hearing, "Mr. Zach". I want to say you never move or you got nothing better to do than sit and wait to yell at the people passing by? I'm a busy man, goddammit, got things to do. Other times, on other days, the same exact scenario, and I walk down the street because I want to be a part of life, whatever that might be. 

I want to believe that everything I encounter is delivered by the divine and that it is the way I choose to let it seep through and collect, or whether I filter and sift some of it out, or whether I block what is coming in altogether. Sometimes it is necessary to block what is coming. This does not mean that every act of man is a gift from God. This only means that I must be aware of how every act of every other man affects me and then determine where I am.

Yesterday was not the first time I heard somebody say, "He's trying to play God." What that person meant was that he did not want to hear and did not like or agree with what the other person was saying. I think the wrong words were used. I think the one playing God was the accuser. I think the accused was just playing himself on a stage that was created by God and the accuser decided that he needed to not only write his own lines but the lines of the other actors as well.

So…if yes is the ultimate answer to the universe, are there ever times when I might be denying the divine by falling into a play that God has not made? The answer is yes. The determination is less simple. So if I am a part of God and I am walking around this earth encountering other parts of God, and I am also encountering a myriad of ids running loose and am not well enough equipped to determine the fine lines sometimes, what am I to do? This is when the need arises for silence.

What is it about life that man has been conditioned to think the best way to figure things out is to run and think and preprogram and drink of every idea and every philosophy and every question when sometimes the best answers come when we stop, when we let the water fill the bathtub and rest. Is that not how relativity was discovered? Is that not how Jim Morrison finally determined what was best for his tortured soul.

De Mello says that we do not want to wake up. If we woke up there would be nothing left to chase. What De Mello did not say is that we are already awake. Or maybe he did. Maybe I just wasn't paying attention. I am not one that retains all he reads, and I have been accused of reading to escape the moments of life.

I did read something that said that all we take in is available for recall, and although a man like me thinks that he remembers nothing about what he has read, that it is up there somewhere. It is like trying to think of the name of a person you have know all your life. It is one of those tip-of-the-tongue moments.

Maybe awakening is just like that. It is within us, sitting on the tip of our tongues and instead of getting silent and letting this come forth, I walk with a determined step, more determined that others follow the same path, I sing with a baritone, holding space only for Waylon and Wille and the boys when really my songs may be coming to me in the form of Nicky Minaj yet I do not want her on my sidewalk. I cut off what will lead me to the tip of my tongue. I sift through all that you say to prove you wrong.

I wrote nearly everyday of the year 2000. I believed that somehow it would be momentous to bequeath this gift to future generations. I believed it would be my opus. My magnum opus! There for the inhabitants of Mars to read what was happening in Iowa City way back then when people still lived on Earth…and as I wrote this magnum opus, I discovered one of my favorite things to do, alone in that room that had a permanent smell of bulgolgi and a window through which I wrote about snow and fallen leaves, was to race the clock, to start around eleven thirty at night and write as quickly as I could, to get all of the words out before midnight...

...somewhere I got the idea that this was not writing, that guys like Henry Miller and Thomas Wolfe and Jack Kerouac were frauds. And somehow this aligned with my own notions, with the same notions that everyone has, that I am a fraud…Well…I'm here to tell you that I'm back. I'm here to have fun. I'm here to put down my words--words that are not carefully crafted (I have always been a bad editor), but words that come from a place that is sometimes beyond me, from a place that I cannot channel when I am crossing the street to avoid myself….And I am here to share them without thought or care of what anyone does or does not think.

END

You want Smells? Read the three pages of Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward Angel where he describes nothing but...

You want the Street? Read Ann Petry's novel of the same name

And there is a book by a Jewish writer about the streets of New York that I thought was called The Walker, but cannot seem to remember the exact name because I'm having a tip-of-the-tongue moment...