Category Archives: Meditations

Dealing with shit and trying to figure “it” out.

Bad Dancing

I realized that I learned how to dance (or was influenced) from watching the rhythmic flowing moves of the Spartan Cheerleaders on Saturday Night Live.

My wife and I were hanging out on the couch channel surfing and enjoying the day off together. After a while we came across a channel playing old Saturday Night Live episodes. This minor moment, sitting in front of the TV, finger mindlessly and repetitiously smashing a button on a remote, changed my perspective on understanding the small influences that play into people’s lives.

Cheerleading for a chess tournament is a great set up for a joke but nothing more not something that influences people’s entire lives. We were watching these two characters on our little TV screen and I noticed a look creep across her face, at first I thought she was confused by the SNL skit, but as I watched her watch the Spartan Cheerleaders dance for a little while she started to say things like “hey you do that!” and “Oh God! Did you learn to dance by watching this!?” I then understood the look wasn’t confusion but recognition.

I chuckled and thought she was making a bad joke, I focused on our TV set and the longer I watched Will Ferrell and Cheri Oteri dance their moves I recognized more moves from my own bad-ass repertoire. I realized in that moment I was not in fact a good dancer, just a confident dancer and I confidently moved like Saturday Night Live’s Spartan Cheerleaders.

I can now, looking back, only think about how Luke Skywalker felt, dangling, hand chopped off telling his evil and its maligned realization, “NO… No, it can’t be true!”

It was a moment of stark and immediate transition from judging the actors on the screen for being goofy dancers to ‘my god I am a goofier dancer and I learned from them’. After considering this life altering event I have reassessed and I’ve now determined not I nor the Spartan Cheerleaders are bad dancers, we just do like we do.

I’ve never been a great dancer. There are many times in my life I can look back to with fond reminiscences of moments I spent dancing. Skanking the night away at ska shows or dancing and slamming into others in the pit at punk shows. At prom, where I had more than one fine lady dancing around me, causing my teenage raddled brain to think that there was not a person that graced this green earth that pimped harder than I pimped at that moment.

I’ve done the robot everywhere my boots have led me, from the top of Rocky Mountain peaks to the ancient land of Afghanistan, from my mom’s Baptist church to that Taco Cabana I went to that one time. My twenty-first birthday celebration was a celebration for everyone in that upstate New York dance club when I fused Merengue, Booty Shake, the robot, and the sprinkler all into a terrible concoction that never should’ve been released onto this plane of existence. Ladies were throwing themselves at me and it was very nice of them to do so.

I do the tootsie roll without remorse, I shake my ass without course. I dance when I wanna, when the heart yearns for it, when acting the fool is my destiny. I don’t know if it was Will Ferrell and Cheri Oteri, curse or blessing, or just a nudge in the right direction. A nudge that told a younger me that if I was dancing to not give one single fuck, not even if I’m a distraction my own team because… damnit I am dancing and you can excuse yourself from my awesome if you can’t handle it. To all the goofy or bad dancers, grab yourself some courage whether in giving it all away in the spontaneous awakening of your consciousness when you step on the floor or a beer or some shots, and get on the dance floor and join me in shakin’ that ass.

Like the lady said in some variation, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be a part of your revolution.”

So get out there and dance motherfucker, dance.

Dreams

M16

I had a dream last night that I’ve had many times before.

Back in the mountains of what seemed like Afghanistan, in one of those dry valleys with rock faces reminiscent of Mars, mountains so old they’re crumbling under their own weigh. A small stream twists and cuts its way through the rock for untold eons and it creates the valley I’m standing in. This place seems familiar like somewhere I called home for a small piece of my life.

I’m in full battle-rattle; DCUs (desert camouflage), tan combat boots, wonderfully fitted helmet, LBE (Load Bearing Equipment) vest chalk full of canteens ammo and grenades, Kevlar vest, and a semi-trusty M-16A2 rifle. I either look terribly silly or an intimidating sight to the back-water tribesmen and nomads that fill the dreamspace. In reality I must look like an invader, something foreign and barely recognizable as a fellow human being in all that gear. But I see myself as the epitome of military professionalism, no smiles for the children that gather to look at me and my compatriots occupying a little piece of their part of Earth.

I see myself in a convoy of military vehicles filing through the valley that has stopped to allow a band of nomads to pass across the road in front of us. I watch them as they flow past us, robes and cloth flapping lightly in the wind. I’m a few vehicles back from the front, watching for any ill will in the form of weaponry from those fellows or the surrounding area. We barely notice a child of no more than twelve come from out of the dust and walk straight up to the lead vehicle in the convoy. One of his little hands pulls a 9 millimeter pistol from his cloths, point the weapon into the open driver-side widow and begins to fire and unloads the magazine into the vehicle.

The driver was leaning back and the kids bullets found the passenger. As soon as he was able the driver disables the kid and with a quick motion the kids arm no longer bends the way its suppose to.

I see later into that day and the passenger is lying in the medic shop of our little out in the middle of no-where fire base made of mudbrick, sandbags, plywood, and Hesco-walls. The medic’s shop is roomier than one would expect seeing it from the outside, two full hospital beds and all manner of equipment kept immaculately clean by the professional combat medics that call that place ‘the office’. On one table a doc is pulling expended rounds from the passenger’s body, he’s laid up, drugged, no pain where his mind is. The shooter – the kid – is on the other bed getting his arm fixed up by another medic, another soldier holds an M-4 carbine and points it at the kids head from a few feet back waiting for him to move the wrong way, emotions are a mother fucker some times. “Point that thing somewhere else.” Doc doesn’t like guns in the office.

The passenger wakes up. He’s a big man and when not on missions or planning for them he’s in the gym that is found on the firebase. Somehow the US military machine moved all the work out equipment you could want to this back-water alien place. Big-Man wakes up and the kid’s staring at him. Big-Man opens his eyes and the first thing he sees are the eyes of his would-be failed assassin. He blinks any dreams out his eyes and his arms flinch out and begin to strangle the kid. Doc and his medics pull him off, the soldier with the gun laughs as they pull the kid away into a different room.

I see a flash… I see my dad, he looks old and frail. We’re walking together down the street. He’s having trouble walking, he looks like he’s in his eighties, he’s 54. He was Navy reservist during Vietnam, they tell me he was exposed to Agent Orange while the fleet was anchored at Yankee Station. He smiles a lot, so do I, some sort of lopsided thing I plaster on my face. Fake smiles are all I could do for years after I got back home. My dad’s smile was kind of fake too, maybe not fake, more like something to keep things from getting awkward as he figures out how to say whatever it is he is going to say, more of a real smile than I can muster. We share a walk; we say things I no longer remember.

I wake up.

I have this dream from time to time, sometimes I am the child, sometimes I’m Big-Man, sometimes the driver, sometimes my father, sometimes the bullets, sometimes the valley, and sometimes one of the nomads, all aspects and many perspectives. When this dream haunts my thoughts I’m forced to think that I share the fate of living with all mankind.

I’d be anyone else if I possessed a different perspective. I am what I am. You are what you are. We are what we are in relation to our experience and the way we behave to stimulus from the world that we perceive and interact with.

Sometimes I think that we’re all sharing the same soul. That somehow none of us are different, that if put in anyone else’s shoes, having to live the lives others lived, I would’ve made the same decisions anyone else has. Sometimes that thought makes me smile; times like after I’ve had that dream the thought makes me weep.

I Ain’t Cryin, I Got Allergies is All

So I just got home from school, the drive took me a lot longer than usual. About half-way home I got hit with a blast from the past, a good fucking dose of mental images popped into my head while I was driving, of some of my past experiences. The images were so intense and they were in concert with a really bad migraine that was making itself known. The pain was telling me, “You better look at these images and feel this pain. You look and feel until you cry.” My eyes started to well up. I had to pull in a parking lot and get my shit together before getting back on the road.

Now I am welling up again. I feel the pain creeping back into my skull, the only thing holding its full force back is the sound of my fingers tapping the keys in front of me. It has been fucking years, I can tell I’m not done with the specters of the past, maybe I’ll never be done. I want to close my eyes and take a nap, but I know what waits for me on the other side of those fucking eye lids.

 

I listen to chill music when my mind overflows and work through the thoughts that barrage my mentality.

This time its: Tycho – A Walk

What do you do when you get flushed in emotions and have to get your head right?

Historic Time and the Process of Change

American

Meditation: from the Online Etymology Dictionary –

c.1200, “contemplation; devout preoccupation; devotions, prayer,” from Old French meditacion “thought, reflection, study,” and directly from Latin meditationem (nominative meditatio) “a thinking over, meditation,”

 

I feel caught up in ever shifting tides, like I’m caught in currents of history long processes of transforming  thoughts and the shifting of cultural beliefs. I close my eyes and I can see the changing of the guard, the old world and its philosophies digested or discarded or incorporated and always influenced and influencing as the new-bloods shove their way to the forefront of the current. Countries, kingdoms, and old nation-states clamoring to be king of an imaginary hill, to gain a bigger piece of a nonexistent pie as old empires and their old colonies fracture and themselves transform into the next phase of their existence.

Sometimes it feels like I can do my part by dragging myself along for the ride and do my best to be a good example. If you want justice from the world be just, if you want wisdom seek wisdom, if peace is what you want then be peaceful. Learn patience and strive to be.

My dreams scream to me to leave my shattered banners behind, the symbols of old regimes belong in the museum not on the march to my grave, it’s the ideas of revolution that matter to me. Equality, Liberty, Solidarity. Discard whatever rules you and rule yourself, break the power of the belief in symbols and seek meaning. My soul whispers, ‘set the terms of your own sovereignty, no one knows better than you how to be you.’ So I try to rise up and be the best that I can be in any given moment at any given task. Every day I wage a revolt against myself, some days I win some days I loose, but it feels I’m in a constant state of transformation.

You can’t expect someone else to change your world for you. Like the cat said, “Be the change you want to see in the world.”

 

Listing to Tupac – So Many Tears  (read the lyrics if you haven’t already)