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."

conditioned existence

Going outside to talk on the phone, visiting with katie at Nathaniel's wedding

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well check this shit out

[Christopher Anonymous]
10:16am
[i am] burning up with desire and passion and need get out
[Christopher Anonymous]
10:19am
yeah i feel SO restless lol
i feel like...hmmm...I'm not a normal person like
you do A then B and move to C and everything is ordered and arranged according to how it "should" be
i don't even think I could do that if i tried haha
[Court Anonymous]
10:23am
me either, bro
and, i think you do try.
or you have tried, in the not-too-distant past
so you know what works and what doesn't
[Christopher Anonymous]
10:27am
i THINK i'm best at music idk lol
[Court Anonymous]
10:28am
sure you know
[Christopher Anonymous]
10:29am
yeah
i believe i tell myself i think
and prevent myself from pursuing it cuz i'm scared
and want to try and be normal
[Court Anonymous]
10:30am
well it's good to not keep your views cemented, to always question them
i hear ya
[Christopher Anonymous]
10:31am
i'm not against taking the time to consider what is and isn;t
i just seem to be my biggest enemy in the arena of my passion and goals
[Christopher Anonymous]
10:36am
I seem to have trouble doing this all on my own...I'm not a follower, and I couldn't lead many people anywhere lol...but I need to find something in the middle and make it work

time on fire

Two weeks ago this time yesterday, I was just sitting in a train station in Seattle. Two weeks!

In the weeks preceding that, I was stressing about how to get "everything I could not do without" into my pack. I bought a pack more than double the size of my original pack, and still didn't fit it all in.
I've been shedding things since then, and am pretty sure it won't be long before this pack is far more than I need. Keep this up long enough, and I'll become the monk I set out to be three and a half years ago. (Only three and a half years?!)

Since I've arrived at my mom's house we've watched three movies (probably eight hours), and three and a half hours of TV. I haven't been here for forty-eight hours, and I've slept for twenty of those. I remember Geshe Michael Roach talking about returning from a three-year retreat and spending days watching movies. So I don't feel too bad. But I've only been "gone" two weeks! Am I just throwing myself into comfort? When I hit the road again in a month, will it be as painful as these past two weeks have been?

Yes. That's the point.
It's like being on fire.

testing

Trying out a new phone app that will, hopefully, make blogging from the phone suck less.

I just got into Hollywood. Already I prefer the previous hostel. Those people were all Travelers who happened to have parties. First impression here, these are mostly Partiers who happen to be traveling.
As a guy from the shuttle said, "eh, LA. The movie stars can have it."

Checked in with my father. He asked, "what are we meeting for?" Meeting? "I thought we were meeting each night with a cop." We're not meeting tonight. I'm in LA. Why would we meet a cop? "I was waiting for a cop, for the pill." What pill? What's going on? "Oh, I've gotta go, Court. I'll call you back in five minutes."
Rinse/repeat x 3.
Can't tell if he's on drugs or if his brain's gone wrong due to some blood sugar issue. He said his blood sugar is fine. Guess I just have to trust him for now.

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like a band of gypsies we go down the highway

So here's the plan at this point:
at the end of november, take a train from seattle to berkeley
after x days in berkeley, start making my way down the west coast, stopping in at as many communes as possible
try to make it to mom's house for xmas
january 22 is nathaniel's wedding in casa grande, az
spend a few days in tucson
my march, make it to east tennessee
- hopefully visit linnaea and her ex
- hopefully scott, leslie, charles, adrienne & valerie will be able to come along

other than that, it is just a matter of moving from collective to collective, learning and contributing as possible

update:
December: California, Texas
--Berkeley for a few days
--SP meetup in SF on 12/10
--meet up with kim & visit alcatraz
--get to texas, visit aunt jo & my father, xmas with mom & jenny
--visit plum blossom sangha with robin
--lunch with daniel quinn
January: Texas, Arizona
--visit Jessie in El Paso
--spend a few days with the Samberg family in Casa Grande (Nathaniel's wedding)
--visit with leslie, chip, age, val, dawna, corbin as much as possible
--visit stone curves
February/March: Hawaii
--WWOOF on Maui
--meet up with Lisha, maybe attend Decompression
March/April: Arizona - Tennessee
--meet up with Leslie & Chip
--spend time with Nashville peeps
--put up Private Property signs around the farm, give hunters fair notice
--visit Linnaea
May: New York, Vermont
--visit (kidnap) Chris
--visit Katie, Charissa, Andrew
--visit Twelve Tribes / Back Home Again
June - July: Virginia
--volunteer at Innisfree Village (innisfreevillage.org)
August: Tennessee, Nevada
--work on the farm (cutting down overgrowth in fields, mending fences, etc)
--collect my sister & whomever else, go to Burning Man: Rites of Passage

these being, of course, tentative and merely highlights along a path of couchsurfing, WWOOFing, and visiting intentional communities.

find your own dream

In his 1931 The Epic of America, James Truslow Adams coined the phrase "American Dream." He says: "It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position."

When I came across this, I expected to find a statement that I disagreed with. But I think it's a pretty good statement, really. But even as he defines it, he admits, "too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it." Why? What's the problem?

I've been kicking it around for a few days now, and finally, I think I put my finger on it. Social order.

[...]

"There are obviously two educations. One should teach us how to make a living and the other how to live. Surely these should never be confused in the mind of any man who has the slightest inkling of what culture is. For most of us it is essential that we should make a living...In the complications of modern life and with our increased accumulation of knowledge, it doubtless helps greatly to compress some years of experience into far fewer years by studying for a particular trade or profession in an institution; but that fact should not blind us to another—namely, that in so doing we are learning a trade or a profession, but are not getting a liberal education as human beings." The quote is part of an essay by Adams entitled ‘To “Be” or to “Do”: A Note on American Education’ which appeared in the June, 1929 issue of Forum. The essay is very critical of American education, both in school and at the university level, and explores the role of American culture and class-consciousness in forming that system of education.

[...]

The Element, by Sir Ken Robinson

[...]

Buckminster Fuller: "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."