3 things

there are so many things to be grateful for. here are 3

1. listening to an artist who really means it, gets it, feels it, lets it out, and lets the world witness it. (pictured- d'angelo. his voice and words and melodies mean so much to me it's almost pathetic.)

though we all have gifts and talents, how many of us can say we truly SEIZE THE POWER and allow ourselves to follow through with our true desires? it's not enough to dream (i have found). stepping out of the shadows, putting yourself out there, REACHING FOR THE STARS as they say is no easy task. it takes action and passion and holding your head high in adversity. i respect artists and activists, actors, originators and pioneers. they inspire me everyday and i want people to love me like that too one day, when i am worthy.

2. family and friends.

i hope i live a long and healthy life; the circle/cycle blows my mind. as human beings we are so gifted and yet cursed with the questionable "gift" of higher thinking. the knowledge of our own death, the hourglass, the slow-motion guillotine, is the only real truth in life, and with that comes the fear for our own livelihoods. but greater for me is the fear of losing those i love. as childish as it may be, i cling to my family and friends and rely on them daily. maybe one day i will be forced to face true solitude or walk a plank of some kind without a safety net or even be abandoned by somebody i "need". we never know what might happen, so i try and tell everyone with my words and actions and time whenever i can how much i cherish them in my life.
if you're reading this...THANK YOU!

3. the natural world.

whether we call it nature, nourishment, vitamins or fuel, i call it LIFE FORCE.
i'm grateful to my friend _______ for turning my whole life around 3 years ago. she had suffered from what i think is a normal state for most people living on earth- that is, they don't know they are suffering- her entire life. growing up on a dairy farm, eating animals and their by-products was all she knew. when she had stomach pains, bloating, a cold, skin disorders, or any other symptoms, the solution was shoveling more mucus and disease forming dairy on top of it. until her early 30s it was all she knew, and like most of us, she didn't question what she knew.

now, since being animal and dairy free for years, she is a new woman.
she was always tired. shadows under her eyes. long, drawn out colds year-round (i suffered the same. we chalked it up to stress, climate, city life, partying, germs. that was not the case). bloating all the time.

i used to fear for my life around her if she had pms. it was literally an evil aura that surrounded her. cramps, crying, backache, moods suited to an executioner, and crippling long periods.

fatigue
moodiness
pms
constant hunger
depression
stomach aches
overweight
bloating
acne
cravings
emptiness
sickness/colds/flus
addiction to sugar

THESE ARE ALL SYMPTOMS THAT WE AS A SOCIETY HAVE GROWN TO ACCEPT AS NORMAL

....except it is not normal. or necessary. or natural.
everything in life is diet and toxin related. we are what we eat.

everyone feels like shit! and i used to as well, though i didn't know it.
since giving up animals and dairy (i'm guilty of the occasional slip up but very rarely. a splash of milk, something made with butter, a piece of fish. i notice and feel weaker for it, but i let it pass. i do it mainly when i feel guilty for requesting someone else to change or make an exception for me. we all need to work on asking for what we need WITHOUT THE GUILT, especially when we know it's our higher being asking!) i live my life in a new way, looking at food and food addiction closely. we have been trained to think of garbage as a treat. it takes acknowledging and re-training of the mind and palate to recover from this lifelong conditioning. i think we all suffer from food addiction and no one really talks about it. they talk about drugs and cigarettes and sex but not food, the LIFE FORCE, the three squares a day, the fundamental fuel for our amazing bodies to run.

i'm grateful i live in a place where i have beautiful, healthy food readily available to me. i have the drive to take care of myself and others and though i can't control what anyone puts in their mouths, i can try and inspire them to make different choices. and keep motivating myself too! we never should settle- our bodies can be even better than they are today, even as we age year by year. the myth that with age comes disease, pain, cancer, and hopelessness must be proven as just that- a myth.

doctors, pharmaceuticals, psychics, counsellors, nutritionists, consensus- we can listen and moan and deny until we are blue in the face, but deep down we all know what we should be doing, and eating, to live a beautiful life.
 NO ONE KNOWS BETTER THAN MOTHER NATURE.

http://www.goveg.com/

image: recorded by request or by storm?

once people start listening, talking becomes more challenging.
and once people look, they're likely to look again.

i've always favoured anonymity when it comes to performance. reciting a monologue or singing from the heart is fine if no one you know is out there. the audience has nothing invested in you; they don't know the risk involved. the pain even.

most of all, i hate being recorded. when i was a kid i'd dance around to pointer sisters wearing a life jacket and an old wig and heels that were five sizes too big and really throw myself into those moves. i could go all night when it came to lipsyncing. that orange shag carpet on 43rd saw more dropping-to-the-knees action than james brown.

but this was before everyone and their blind, deaf, armless grandmothers had an iphone.

last night whilst drinking copious amounts of vodka in my living room with friends, wearing an old plaid shirt that was literally ripped up one whole side and a pair of slippers, with my hair groomed in the manner of "homeless man" and a wild look in my eye, i was photographed several times!

and today i'm trying to remember just how atrocious the shots were. i think one may have involved a finger microphone, and i also recall myself taking a deep lunge to the right with a saturday night fever point with a friend in the background howling WHAAAAT THE HELLLL doubled over laughing and a whole lot of lip biting and grimacing and white people grooving (i believe rod stewart was pumping at that moment). no one needs to see that!

but they will.

i'm all for breaking out the camera for those moments when you need to make a memory. but sometimes it leads to feeling a bit vulnerable, especially when the pics go home at the end of the night with someone else. you never know which ones will be uploaded to which site, emailed around, tagged, re-posted, tweeted, saved on some stranger's computer, and looked at for years to come while you walk around in utter ignorance.

you need to make sure you're comfortable with the image you project at all times, because while that image used to be forgettable or changeable or maleable (by way of storytelling or recounting for example), now it is always being recorded in some way. media is everywhere, we can't escape it.  i was out for dinner in a restaurant and at one time i looked around to observe six out of eight people were on their iphones. and at some point that night were taking pictures with them.

they never showed me the evidence though.

SNAP! gotcha.



white trash

hey, here's a dead deer beside the road!
i know...
i've got it!
...my uncle tyrone has a spraypaint collection!
let's go to his garage and take it, then come back here and have us a
DEAD DEER SPRAYPAINTING PARTY!!!

that sounds so fun i'm about to piss my pants.
just let me finish this sentence about how you are the biggest wastes of skin i've ever encountered and the best part of you was scraped from the side of a test tube filled with rat poison and liquid stupidity and inserted into your mom by filling up one of those roll-out horn party favours and blowing the tiny retarded sperm at her uterus like "yeeeeeee-hawwwww" while she smoked a crack pipe and whistled dixie and i'll be right there to join you.

in a new jersey minute

i was just watching season 6 of the sopranos and watched christofuh choke on his own blood and die after crashing his ginormous SUV and rolling it 50 times down an embankment while high and nodding off at the wheel. it was so realistic. i was squishing up my face and my eyes got all squinty and my body was squirmy and i had to squelch the urge to squeeze out a tear.

"this is unbelievable. i can't take anymore. i just lost uncle junior to a mental institution, now christopher's dead, and AJ tries to drown himself next episode." i start getting really worked up and need to leave the room for a breather (cigarette) and call my sponsor (sopranos anonymous).



it's amazing in pop culture what becomes real. for a brief period (the entire year of 2007) i believed the sopranos were my biological relatives. i used to come into to the kitchen in the mornings in a big white robe and boxer shorts, go to the fridge, drink out of the tropicana carton, and slam the door closed so hard the house would shake.

when my ipod broke or i lost my wallet i'd shrug and mutter "whaddyagondo" to no one in particular.

i used to make my mom wear a name tag that read 'carmela'. she was forced to drive ziti over three times a week and wear her hair in a massively hairsprayed bleached blowdry coif at all times. once in a while she was permitted to wear velour leisure suits in electric blue, but she still had to wear three big gold necklaces, including the cross. 

when i started beating up strippers and followed one out to the parking lot during an argument one night, i knew i had reached my limit. the first step in having a problem is admitting it. or something like that. anyways i googled "seriously fucking addicted to the sopranos" and found approximately twelve-hundred-billion websites revolving around people who are even bigger losers than me. score!

i've been in therapy for years now and the last few weeks i've been relapsing. falling into old patterns like making a bowl of popcorn big enough for eight sumo wrestlers to have leftovers and lying in bed in the dark, watching the screen for hours, while the rain patters the window beside me and i lose myself in a life of crime, pasta, and baldspots. sometimes i sigh with happiness: god, i love my family!

because "a man who does not spend time with his family can never be a real man."

yeah...the godfather's alright too.

neigh

i am such a closet cowboy.
I MEAN GIRL!!!!!!!!! GIRL. 

i'm going to australia in a few days. it's summer and my man's brother owns a ranch with land. we are going to camp by the creek. i love the outback, especially the queensland outback; it's removed from the palm trees and humidity which is a miracle. you drive a few hours and the landscape changes to hills with red dusty ground. i sent him a message that i am starving for some time in the outdoors, wearing dirty jeans and my just-polished boots and no makeup and mexican silver. i want to lie on a horse blanket with him and smoke a cigarette. the horses will be grazing twenty feet away and the humidity will be just right and the sky will be a big black mouth not saying a word.

i want black beans over a fire and washing in the silty water and a game of tag at midnight. i'll chase him through the grasses of the outback, try to tackle him to the ground, roll on him until he's pinned and then beg him to take me to taroom, where he was born, further inland from the coast by a day. if you drive far enough in along railroad tracks there are dessicated kangaroo corpses and aboriginals walking on 50 degree sand without shoes. my west coast rain soaked eyes need to dry out on that road trip.

he tells me he goes back to taroom and the backs of trucks swing open to reveal six wild pigs swinging from hooks, and when you go into the little roadside restaurants the steaks are the size of dinner plates. people from 40 years ago walk up and call him by his family's last name. that lilting accent will tickle me- as it always does- and i'll smile so widely in reflex people will ask for my name, too.

me, myself and myanmar

i was here a year ago.
my least favourite animal in the world, the monkey, had unofficially taken over the city of bagan where we went into the mountains to see a marketplace. three of the horrid little bastards were lined up on a beam overhead and hissed and screeched at me so violently that i burst into tears and sprinted whimpering down the endless dirt staircase i'd just spent forever climbing and launched myself superman style through the car window to the applause of a hundred bystanders. ***may be a slight exaggeration***

that is my only monkey story. i am not one of those westerners who laugh with glee "YAY! THIS IS AN AMAZING TRAVEL EXPERIENCE, GET PICTURES!! DON'T WORRY, TAKE YOUR TIME, THIS IS FUN" while they have 10,000 tiny rabid monkeys swinging from their necks and grabbing the bananas they've been saving all day. i hate monkeys so much. here those three are, i hope they are dead now.

there were so many unbelievable things to witness in myanmar. we brought our own coffee since the collective advice from westerners made myanmar out to be one giant dangerous toilet with trees and no food. attention white devils: the coffee was delicious as the locally grown teas, and the cuisine was the best i've had in my life. similar to thai but even fresher and heavier on the grated carrots, avocados and delectable sea creatures.

the land is so fertile and varied that for such an economically and politically torn country the population by and large is well fed. in the cities the restaurants were lit with strands of red and gold lights and the floors were cool tiles and many people spoke english. those who lived in the cities in particular made learning english the mission of their lives and the lives of their children.

these women are sifting chick peas out of the grasses they grow from. everywhere we went the people were grinning and pressing food into our hands. everything was so delicious. i ate street food since it wasn't meat and it beats most fine dining here. maybe that makes me a feral (we knew that already).

the monk procession was one of the most emotional experiences of my life. 

a thousand of them waited in calm joy in the streets until they were summoned to come and eat their daily meal. their rice bowls were filled for them by women and men and children of all ages, burmese buddhist volunteers whose lives revolve around believing in the goodness of people and animals and generosity. the little boy monks were in deep red robes and the little girls had their heads freshly shaved and their robes were pastel pink.

they ate in silence on mats with their heads down until they were full and then they rose and brought their bowls into the streets and fed the homeless and poor of the city, those who had been waiting all day for the generosity of the monks, giving the generosity of their smiles in return. they did not look into the bowls that were passed to them but into the eyes of the monks.

i had tears leaking out of my eyes. i was so embarrassed of my culture, though i never encountered anything but love, curiosity and support during my time in myanmar. our values seemed as sick as cancer, as insignificant as a speck of dust, emptier than a crater.

this is the v.i.p. section of the airport.

in yangon, we took off our shoes and walked through pagodas of gold. there was incense and people lit sticks for the departed or just in prayer. it was quiet and the air was warm and fragrant. some pagodas, the oldest and best ones, were on the tops of massive mountains. we drove with hundreds of burmese in diesel trucks, then we walked up rock staircases or worn paths, and at the top would be another staircase or path, and then another, until at the top of the mountain you were suddenly in a marketplace packed with food and people as far as your eyes could see, and there were gorgeous pagodas everywhere.

you could tell the chinese tourists because they used the burmese children as human horses, sitting on cloth stretcher chairs on their backs and chortling to each other as the kids below them walked steadily straight up the mountain, hunched over and talking-gasping-laughing at times to the child beside him.

at night, i'd read by flashlight sometimes (the electricity goes off in most regions every few hours) or listen to music on my ipod in rooms like this. the beds and furniture were hard and the windows always looked out on something exotic and natural. this room was on top of a mountain and i could see monk processions winding up snaking mountain roads on the other side of a huge lushly green canyon. in the city of lake inle, outside the "hotel amazing" was a moat, and on the other side were dirt roads filled with scooters and little shops and the occasional expat wandering slowly through his life in burma.

more on places i've been and pictures to make you drool at another time. take a minute to think about somewhere else in the world besides your living room RIGHT NOW! i've enjoyed looking back.

winter skies

ain't no sunshine when she's gone.
correction: ain't no sunshine in this city for months on end!
this grey and rain is making me want to suck on the end of a deer rifle!

falling asleep with rain on the windows is gorgeous, especially when you pretend you are eight again and you make your pillows really scrunchy bunchy around your ears and yank the quilt up to your eyeballs and your pyjamas are matching baby pink satin with a drawstring waist and cloth covered buttons and your stuffed animal is a rabbit named harry and he isn't even complaining about being jammed under your armpit and you can peek up at the ceiling and imagine the shadow is coming closer and it's going to get you any second and then even as an adult you can't help it and you pee the bed and you have to call your mom to drive across town and change your sheets at 3a.m.

DAAAAAMMMMMNIIIIIIIIT!