Better Than Life

When I left Seattle, I had an idea. Hell, I was on a crusade. It was simple (1. Get to the farm. 2. Farm.) and looked like it would work out well. I had people interested in the idea, who had their own ideas, and I saw how it could all come together.
Now I've been sitting on this piece of land in Tennessee for four months, alone and unaccomplished. How did this happen?

"A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside of it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably." - Ludwig Wittgenstein

You know when Wile E Coyote paints a road onto the side of a building, and then the roadrunner dashes off into the painted scene? That's what happened. In my imagination, I developed the idea of what was ahead for me, and then I moved forward in my imagination.
Throughout the course of realizing, over the past week, what I've done, I have had some pretty wild thoughts. Initially, I overreacted by discounting imagination entirely. I felt like I had been a fool (I had) and that I should have never fantasized or speculated about the future. And on top of that, I lumped some things that I honestly believe into the "just my imagination" category.
Now, imagination is a powerful thing, and I believe it is a necessary thing. And like any other function of our minds, it is a tool. To build something with wood, you start with an axe, but once the tree is down, you move on to the other tools that you need to get the job done.

I'm glad I recognized that, because I was on my way to cutting out a huge part of my life. That would have been a huge step backwards for me, since anything that I have started since autumn has been a result of rediscovering things I had cut out previously. The road I've been on since December has reunited me with my spirituality and my emotions, and no matter what I thought I might have had ahead when I got here, it would have been just as unsatisfying as any other life I've led, if I did not have those very significant parts of myself integrated.

I see what I've done, I see how I did it, and I see how I could very, very easily do it again (and again and again and again). Frankly, it is hard to not want to do it.
At the end of the Red Dwarf book, Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, Lister is living in the Bedford Falls of It's A Wonderful Life. He has been sucked into the novel's game/drug hybrid, called Better Than Life,* and has been living happily in this virtual world. [Yes, I am absolutely spoiling the end of this book. If you think you'll read it one day, you should just skip ahead a bit.] Once he realizes what I realized about myself, he decides to leave. But.

There, in the middle of the street, a pink neon sign hung over a shimmering archway. There was his exit, just as he'd imagined it. On the other side was reality.
It started to snow. Christmas Eve.
How could he leave them on Christmas Eve?
What harm was one more day? He turned away from the dissolving exit and crunched up the drive to 220.
One more night of that pinball smile.
Just one.
He couldn't leave them on Christmas Eve.
But, ofcourse, in Bedford Falls it was always Christmas Eve...

So now this is the good part. Now, I get to grow as a person. Now, I get to learn to act in spite of myself.

..... .... ... .. . .. ... .... .....

Whatever actions we make, they are based in our minds, on our intentions. So rather than just going out and doing something,** I want to examine my intentions. One thing that I realize every time I end up in this position (and it was only as I typed those words that I realized that this is the position I always end up at) is that I haven't been reading. At these times, I start over, re-reading the books that have most inspired me to consider my intentions.

Illusions:
Siddhartha:
Ishmael:
Round the Bend:
Beyond Civilization:
The Element:
Wild At Heart:
Leadership and Self-Deception:

Keep reading
Keep talking
Keep active
Meditate

..... .... ... .. . .. ... .... ..... .... ... .. . .. ... .... .....

*Imagine the Nexus from Star Trek: Generations***

**In the moments before writing, I texted to Age: "I feel like doing something in the face for this realization, and throwing bricks and bottles doesn't sound as horrible as it should..."

***I can't believe I just brought up Star Trek.

mon petit monde

I'm playing with the idea of starting a new blog. I'm pretty sure that would take my blog total up close to a billion unmaintained blogs. But hell, my world is small, and getting smaller every day.

For example: in September 2007 I signed into okcupid and saw a profile that captured my attention. Even though the girl lived over a thousand miles north of Tucson, we struck up an intense correspondence. It wasn't long before we discovered that we used to live across the parking lot from each other in Murfreesboro, TN. Eventually she came to stay with me in Tucson, and the day she departed I got an email from someone else in Tucson who, it turned out, had also come from Murfreesboro, and in fact also lived across the same parking lot from me & Leslie.

And at a show last night, back in Tucson after so many years, I met someone else from Murfreesboro. She even knew people I know.

But sometimes other connections can be even more interesting. Like in dreams.

Yesterday morning I got an IM from my friend Linnaea, saying she'd been thinking of me. In october, she had a dream about me that led her to contact me. The resulting conversation played a huge role on me rejoining the Long Road.

And while I was at the Murder by Death show last night, my friend Marc was asleep and dreaming:

By and by, I'm not sure exactly why, but I just woke up from accidentally falling asleep and had an amazingly lucid dream of us traveling together. You handed me a homemade friendship bracelet someone else had given you from someone we had apparently met before, and said they had sent it to us to show their life had improved from knowing us. Crazy.

He later described the dream in greater detail:

We were sitting on benches, almost like bleachers but not in any kind of stadium, with you two rows up, but not really that far away, just so that you were behind and slightly higher up than I, and we were on a ship, sailing away.
The size of a yacht, but something older, more character than a modern ship
And after the exchange I mentioned on FB where you gave me the bracelet, I turned back and was looking at what in the dream seemed to be the city of Seattle, wondering if I had left anything in my apt…like I really just sort of took off on impulse. I came to the conclusion that I should trust myself and believe that anything I really needed, I already had on me.
that's sort of where it ended.
What's weird is that the bracelet was something from someone you and I had helped together, a thank you gift.

Oddly enough, the thought in my head is that this person was a prostitute and we had somehow helped her with her life to the point where she didn't need to be anymore.
Thanks man…like i said, it was pretty fucking powerful.

Meanwhile, here I am in Tucson, staying with Leslie and her husband Charles, who share some of my interests in home and community. And while Charles and I are making supper, I get an email from Stephani, a friend from high-school, telling me she's going to be living in a yurt on an organic farm in Tennessee come the spring. And another Stefani, who lives in Tucson, and whom I met on a train two months ago, posted something on my facebook wall about Tennessee farmers who get paid for generating energy on their property.

I'm not sure if stories like this happen all the time, and I'm just superstitious enough to obsess over them, or if I just have a knack for attracting weird stuff, but either way it's frequent enough to have hundreds of stories.

adventure, excitement, really wild things

FRIDAY
I met Pam in the Safeway parking lot at Sunrise & Swan, at 9AM.
Actually, I met Pam at Barnes & Noble at Broadway & Swan, three years ago. She was one of the co-workers who regularly attended MetalHead at the Cactus Moon. And then she was one of the previous co-workers who visited Seattle, back in the day. But this day, she was a traveling friend.
Pam had a desire to be Navigator, so I had the somewhat rare pleasure of driving.
We had remarkable conversations on our way to Scottsdale, to Taliesin West, the winter home of Frank Lloyd Wright.

SATURDAY
[farmer's market, library, drinking with Charles]

SUNDAY
[Superbowl Sunday, hungover, meditation, cleaning, driving, hiking, picnicking, hot tub]

MONDAY
[OMG henna]

TUESDAY
[WTF henna, words from Linnaea, Miss Joan, Ethiopian food, cosmology lecture, MBD show]
[Court Anonymous's Small World: "Do you know Jena?" Yes. "Do you know Tommie?" Yes.]

"I know there's better brothers, but you're the only one that's mine."

validation

"Gay bar." I'm at lunch with one of the most influential people in my life, and once we're seated and starting conversation, these are the first words I hear him say? His wife explains that we are at "the local neighborhood--" and he interrupts her. So here I am, at the local neighborhood gay bar, with Daniel Quinn. The Quinns are known here: Rennie's paintings are on the wall, and whenever they are seated, the servers set the table with black napkins instead of white.

I don't know how to start a conversation, and for whatever reason Mr Quinn was not starting it either. Rennie, his wife, was more chatty, though, so we both took the back seat and let her lead the conversation. Over an hour and a half we talked about a wide range of things, so I don't remember everything we talked about. She asked me where the Barnes & Noble was in Seattle, and said they had only been to Elliott Bay Book Company & Third Place Books, for book signings. They love the Icon Grill, and that seemed to redeem their entire opinion of the city.
This is the kind of conversation we had. I was sure that my mind would go blank when I got there, so I asked people to help me think of things to talk about. Leslie gave a a dozen good ideas, and Scott provided plenty as well. I was prepared to talk about so many very different things. And we talked about Barnes & Noble.
(I was delighted that, when the subject of nook came up, Daniel Quinn had no idea what we were talking about.)

After the ebook wall had been breached, I asked if they had a large library or if they just put books back into circulation (they live within sight of a Half Price Books). They only keep books that they expect to revisit, but even so these are enough to require library stacks. Their neighbor has a nook, and loves it. THIS IS WHAT KIND OF CONVERSATION WE HAD.


Including, among other things, a lunch with Daniel Quinn, couch surfing, a personality test, my entire life, and the future of the world.

http://www.ishmael.org/Interaction/QandA/Detail.CFM?Record=667
Personally, I feel we're doing "better than expected." I've been very impressed with the ever-increasing awareness of our situation that reveals itself in books, graduate-school theses, publications of all kinds, and in every medium. To my way of thinking, a "Quinn-changed" mind is ultimately always a "self-changed" mind. It's very different in a cult; a "cult-changed" mind is NEVER "self-changed."