Although I didn't have the vocabulary to describe it then, as a child I felt that I was surrounded by chaos.  I was pathologically disorganized, myself, without established protocols for personal hygiene.  My room was always a mess.  Piles of things.  My own body, even, seemed beyond my control.  My skin, my hair, my stomach, frequent headaches.  

My family was loving, but you wouldn't say routinized.  Even though I deeply craved order, creating it seemed beyond me and that caused me so much anxiety.  I've spent a lot of time thinking about this in light of having worked with autistic children for so long.  I realize now, that, as a result of feeling so at sea, I did what I have seen many of my students do, developed the same coping mechanisms.  

There are people who develop eating disorders as a result of their longing for a control they can't seem to get over their surroundings.  I have heard people say this: I couldn't control anything but what went into my mouth and so I became compulsive about that. Compulsive to the point of obsession and then sickness but all because of that need to have agency--to be able to determine, in a way, one's own future! 

So many of my kids with autism, when they get overwhelmed or when they are being pulled in a direction to which they object--what do they do?  We call it scripting--they repeat dialogue from a familiar movie, or lyrics from a song.  I have seen some kids repeat lines from a commercial, say, over and over and over for days.  It used to baffle me until I realized that I was sub-vocalizing lyrics to myself close to constantly.  

The repeated words can hold whatever you need them to hold and they can comfort you as your reality shifts in ways you don't understand. 

When you feel as though you are at the mercy of your environment--Joseph Conrad says, "like a kitten in a bag"--you take refuge in things that never change.  Things that are predictable, regular, with perimeters that are wholly knowable.  

That's what songs are to me.  Like mini-universes you can hold in your hand.  You can see them through completely from start to finish and all around them too, from beginning to end, side to side.  Mastering a song and being able to carry it around with you transforms you into a little God.  You can make of it whatever you want, pour anything you want inside--despair, joy, love, rage--and the skeleton of the song always remains the same.  Bones, structure, indestructible form--on that you can rely. 

Probably nobody cares, but that's why I started singing and why I was never able to stop.  As a kid I relished the chance to be alone, singing loud in the house, testing out songs I had memorized. At night, in bed, with my cat on my pillow I would sing myself softly to sleep night after night, sometimes covering my ears so I could feel the vibration of my own voice filling up my head, blotting out any intrusion from the disordered world around me.  I liked to lie in the bath tub, ears submerged and sing that way too in pitches as low as I could manage. In songs I knew I could always be safe, a little God who knew all the words, determined the rhythm, decided when to start and stop.  

Since the pandemic began I've reverted to my old musical, self-regulatory ways.  I take videos of myself singing and listen to them with strange frequency, repeating them over and over.  Doing this creates a sort of closed circuit.  No aggravating outside stimuli gets in, no surprises, no bad news--it's only me and my own voice and the little 3 minute world I created and I can live there unbothered for as many times as I hit the replay button.  

Music doesn't have to be performative, I guess that's my point.  Is it pathological or logical to use music the way I do?  Almost like a drug.  Logical, I say, far safer than any antidepressant probably, or certainly alcohol, even sex or whatever other things people employ to quell their anxiety and feelings of helplessness. 

Art is not just a consumable for others.  It's a life raft, it's something to bite down on when you're muscling your way through a crisis or trying to survive living with a brain that acts like it hates you.  Art can be the perfect cottage of your dearest imaginings.  Straight lines with perfect fourishes at regular intervals. Spic and span and gleaming. Everything in its place.  Every note polished just as you want it, every breath in time.  

Each word is a little box that traps a concept inside. One by one the boxes build walls around everything.  Everything you feel, everything you see, every object you touch, every state you feel internally, too.  I wish I could get a hammer and smash all the little boxes and let the realities flow out and flow together.  I wonder if we are doing a disservice to our kids at school, who are so resistant to language, in teaching them how to use it more effectively.  Maybe they are better off without the boxes, better with their more direct experiences of the world.  

William Burroughs identified language as a virus, and he is a (problematic) hero of mine.  Reprehensible, unarguably, and yet brave in that he tried to eradicate dividing lines--to break down the way language sections off reality--break down the bonds that hold together nuclear families.  Traps.  "The ties that bind are barbed and spined"  Joanna Newsom sang that, "and hold us close forever."  No thanks.  

A friend recommended "The Miracle of Mindfulness" by Thich Nhat Hanh and I am halfway through.  I don't disagree with anything, but isn't Buddhist literature ridiculous in a way?  Why spend all this time laying out these delineations in which you don't believe.  They like to make these lists: The 8 Fold Path, The 5 Aggregates.  Then they tell you there is no object, there is no subject. The object is the subject; the subject is the object.  Well, then why chop it up into thousands of words in a 140 page book?  Why all these sutras?  Ohm, I guess. 

Mr. Love was the best Buddhist I have ever seen.  He spent all that time with the Roshi (the one I considered a fraud), scrubbing and polishing, humbling himself.  He got aggravated on the phone if you called while he was trying to sit, you could hear it in his voice.  I remember a story about him burning a bunch of his artwork, but in hindsight maybe that's apocryphal.  Burning his artwork.  You would have to be so far along to do something like that. Far along on the path to Buddhahood, I mean.  Or maybe he was already there.  Maybe he was ready when he went.  He had brought the ancient, doggedly loyal sensibility of his Judaism to the practice of Buddhism and he'd elevated both.  I wonder where he is now? Somewhere he deserves, I hope.  

"Beyond good and evil there is a field, I'll meet you there," Rumi said something like that.  The same friend I mentioned before said it to me today while we were talking.  I know that field.  It's the one I see in my dreams when I am running.  Bounding along, not separate from the action, but running itself, as light and lean and effortless as the very essence of running.  I don't even need the thrill of flying in those dreams, but running like that is enough to achieve bliss.  I got a taste of it a few times last year, doing all that running. It was hard and boring until in an instant it wasn't.  Suddenly, all at once I was full of breath, buoyant, gliding down a hill, but as easy as falling down, painless.  

Maybe meditation is like that.  I could achieve something close to that incrementally, couch to 5k style, I'd just have to stay consistent.  I don't know what stops me.  Osho has some passage in "The Book of Secrets" that is like an admonishment, "What are you reading this for? 'If you don't start now, you're just pretending you're going to do it, if you're planning, you're putting it off, it's just pretending."  I don't know why I keep pretending.  The boxes we build around things make life complicated and painful, but it's a complication and pain that's familiar.  I'm attached to all my problems. Who will I be if I melt my mind away with mastery of the breath?  What am I if not my problems?

Years ago I went to Ireland in the fall and stayed with a couple I had met in Wildwood the previous summer.  Joe and Emir.  Once we were getting drunk talking about Irish history, Joe teased Emir about her being sympathetic to the British.  Emir, in a small, little-girl's voice, a lilt, looked up at him and cooed "No, Joey, I hate them, I truly do."  

That was twenty years ago now and I still see her perfect, rosy Irish face, framed by glossy blonde hair.  The giant eyes, the freckles.  She was so sincere, fragile, but fierce.  The hate she referenced was in her very DNA, she had no self-consciousness about it, no shame.  Her hate was as wholesome and as natural as a head of broccoli.

How does it fit in?  I don't know.  Something about us only being ourselves in opposition to The Other.  We can't live like this forever, I know,  I can see that now, but I guess I'm not ready to give up my pettiness yet.  I saw a pick-up truck parked outside today with a Trump sticker and wanted to slash its tires.  I know I'm not ready yet, but I'm trying.  I'm trying.  

Who on the Internet hasn't made a play on 2020, 20/20 hindsight, or 20/20 vision?  There's something to it, though, and my being 42, a nice even number and having been born in 77--extra lucky.  The numbers will eat you alive if you let them, they're as bad as the words.  But here is something true: I am starting to see, from this vantage point, the path my life has taken, the patterns, the geometry of it, how times of suffering have lead to moments of realization and healthy changes.  If you zoom out, you can start to see the same kinds of patterns on a larger scale.  I am starting to believe that, even in this dark time, there is a reason for this suffering, something better beyond it.  Not bigger better, not ostentatious, but maybe a peaceful realization, a quiet joy, something closer to unity, some of the little boxes falling apart.  

Everybody on the Internet claims to be an empath, but I know that can't be true because if it were heads would be catching on fire left and right.

The Internet takes you from holocaust to gunshot wound to sneering satirical news story to cat meme to sentimentality porn to actual porn in a matter of seconds.  My brain can't deal with it.  My adrenals are shot and I feel the confusion in my body too as restlessness, fear, low-level chronic pain.  I have to find a place to put it where it doesn't hurt me as much.  Recipes and emails, only.  Maybe some crochet patterns.  It's easier by far to trust the televised news than to wade through the layers of propaganda, opportunism, advertisement, and plain hack, hollow journalism on here.  Who can you trust?  NPR? Reuters? My suspicion never stops, my "follow the money" never stops and the gnawing distrust, the refusal to be a sucker--it never allows me to relax and yet...I end up believing everything anyway.  Or more specifically, I still bear the psychic burden of being perpetually in a defensive mode, not quite believing anything I read, the burden of perpetual uncertainty, AS WELL AS, all the fear, guilt, shame, empathy, joy, envy, etc. of just believing and accepting everything I see/read at face value.  

I'm not trying to sound special here, honestly I think I relate to the Internet this way because of my age.  I grew up attuned to network television, books, radio.  When we got cable, especially MTV, I thought the wide world of options and the rapid cuts from shot to shot might eventually drive me crazy.  Well, I guess ultimately they did.   

I don't know how anybody stands it, but younger people, they've always had to process at this pace, they don't know any other way.   I don't know whether to pity or envy them, I wish I could see side-by-side brain scans of my brain and a 20 year-old's brain. How does a brain withstand an entire lifetime on the Internet?  Will it end up stronger, smarter, more resilient?  Will it burn out faster?  Last longer?  Lack vital survival skills: an attention span, for example?

I watched three videos on YouTube yesterday of people who had claimed to have gone to hell and returned, then I watched the governor's update on coronavirus numbers, then later some old Saturday night live clips, and then a short doc about a family-owned restaurant in Brooklyn.  I watched another YouTube video months ago of Sadhguru explaining the reason so many people have thyroid malfunctions nowadays.  He said the role of the thyroid, in part, was to sort of contextualize all the stimuli that a person encounters over the course of time, stitch it together in an understandable narrative and sort of metabolically, hormonally, prepare the body to accept that stimuli as being normal/natural.  The thyroid's job, he said, was to protect the person from being jerked around (I'm paraphrasing) by all the disparate information within his surroundings, to regulate the body's response and keep it functioning evenly, predictably.

Well, think of the demands the Internet--on top of the regular-occurring stimuli of daily life--makes of the little thyroid captain.  Here's a terrifying story about how we're all going to die, and now here's Gwenyth Paltrow reading her mom's texts, and now here's statistics on racial violence in America, here's an article about how you are complicit in said racial violence, here's a discussion thread with posts by women who've experienced late miscarriage and now the phone is ringing and somebody in the family is sick and now there's a flash flood alert and a siren is blaring outside and ask not for whom the siren blares!! 

Moral of the story: cancer in my thyroid. 

Lately conceptualizing an overarching, ubiquitous consciousness within which we, as individuals, are immersed always.  The consciousness is a broad river, constantly moving.  I picture our bodies like cups.  I see a string of cups suspended just above the river, each with a tiny hole in the bottom.  The river rushes up and fills the cups, but then, slowly, day after day, the water from the cups drains back into the moving river.  Once you've gone completely back into the river, are you the same as you were in the cup?  Yes and no, back in the river you're not configured the same way, but you're not destroyed either, you're free to join your source--to finally rejoin the whole.  The separation, the cup, is temporary--it's limiting, confining, and fragile.  The river is forever though, and will keep on filling different cups--an endless variety of cups--that in turn will drain back into the river, on and on, etc.

It's hard to believe in God, it's hard for me.  I'm reading a book on Hermeticism and one of its major precepts is that old chestnut: "As above, so below" which the Lord's Prayer also echoes ("Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven"). Occurred to me suddenly while watching TV yesterday, probably not a revelation to anybody else, but--look how a mother is a model for God on earth.  A mother loves her child unconditionally, sacrifices herself, devotes herself to the child's needs.  The mother creates the child in her womb, the child is part of her, yet separate.  The child might receive adequate love and attention from the mother, yet still turn out to be selfish and irresponsible. Not every mother is God-like in her child's life in the sense of being very loving  or even in the custodial sense, but every one is in the creator sense.  It's a universal truth, not even just a human truth--the drive of the mother, after having created her offspring, to protect and care for them.  When you zoom out from this planet, from this plane of existence, I believe this pattern probably persists at a macro-level.  A benevolent creator who tries to guide, who tries to nurture its creation--not just for the sake of the creation, but for the sake of the creator itself.  It's not just an altruistic, self-sacrificing drive either--in a way there is self-preservation at stake too, the deep desire to perpetuate one's being through progeny, to be a part of the future---of indefinite generations going on--in a way, to live eternally.  What's set in motion, stays in motion.  For motion's sake alone! 

The squirrels came and ate all the pears off of Joe's trees and afterward he commented how much stronger the trees looked--how they weren't sagging anymore and the leaves looked greener, more lush.  Sometimes when you lose everything you thought was valuable it's like a new vitality comes over you.  When you unload your fruits, you are stripped of the weight of all the expectations that accompanied that fruit--all the pies and cobblers you would have had to produce! There is a new freedom in just having to put energy into the core, build up the roots and trunk, don't worry about the products anymore.  Take the sun and water and put it right into your very center and next season--watch out.  The bounty will be astounding. 

Over the course of your life you become different things to different people.  You're not a Good Person or a Bad Person.  You are your actions at any given time.  You are an instrument of karma, maybe. This age of social media has perverted the ego even further beyond how perverted it already was.  Every person sees himself as being primary, as being The Center.  The bigger picture gets obscured when you focus on yourself as Main Character.  Think about how you have been a catalyst in the lives of others.  I have been cruel to others and hurt them, but I have been loving too and have helped some people.  A lot of times I have played a bit part or had some slight influence on another person's life for better or worse.  Isn't that just as important as being a protagonist?  Maybe it's more important in a way.  

When I went crazy back in high school the people with whom I had brief interactions--a receptionist, a cashier, a person passing on the street--glowed with a sort of holiness.  They became angels to me, or devils.  I saw them as guides and tempters, deities who were continuously putting me to the test.  

I'm not really crazy anymore (?), but it's interesting to think about all the roles we play in the lives of others.  How many times are we unaware that we have saved somebody or edged them closer to despair? I have to get my head out of the Internet circle jerk and really take this to heart.  I'm just a strand in a web. When I interact with another--let it be with love and gentleness, because my role as a bit player in so many other people's lives might count for way more, in the end, than what who I think I am as the star of the show. 

Ram Dass said, "Treat every person you meet as if he were God in drag." That is a new mantra.  I have been overcome lately by a feeling of relief.  A relief in letting the old idea of how important I was dissolve and fall away.  I listen to people's accounts of Near Death Experiences on YouTube every night and play Dr. Mario and they are all so similar.  They talk about a life review and feeling the pain you caused others as your own pain, and the joy and comfort you caused others as your own joy and comfort.  I feel I've always suspected that's how it would be.  That you'd have to balance the books this way in the end.  

They all say they feel enveloped by love, they don't feel frightened and they don't feel alone.  I hope it's real, I hope it's real, I hope it's real. 

The earth may be dying, but she's alive enough to show me weeds and birds and I'm alive enough to appreciate them.

Maybe I wasn't alive enough to put kids out into this world, but I'm alive enough to care for the kids others made. 

Maybe I wasn't alive enough to lead, but I'm alive enough to serve.

Probably I'll never make a significant scientific discovery or be admired by very smart people, but I was alive enough to sing.  I was alive enough to cook, and write, and love! 

Sometimes I don't feel alive enough to feel pleasure, but I can be alive enough to enjoy my memories of pleasure, to allow and honor the pleasure of others.

I wasn't alive enough to ever be a great beauty, and even if my attractiveness is diminishing by the hour, I will long be alive enough to appreciate beauty.  Beauty needs a beholder to be beauty at all. 

I'm alive enough to sing, even if it's just for myself.  Even when I'm not alive enough to sing, I am alive enough to be still inside of a song someone else is singing.

When I'm not alive enough to speak my own words, I'm alive enough to listen and take on another person's burden, alive enough to be there to help them organize the chaos in their mind.

One day I won't be alive enough to stand, and I might only be alive enough just to know I'm alive.  

After that my life will get less and less until I'm only alive enough to nourish the birds and weeds I appreciated when I was alive enough to walk. But maybe even that is Alive Enough! 

I think it's time to stop being aspirational.  Maybe there is no big perfect experience. I think the gnawing expectation of complete bliss steals the Joy of Enough.  If you revel in Enough that can be so freeing.  What if where I am right now could be enough?  I wouldn't need a golden palace in heaven when I die.  I wouldn't need the perfect body, perfect hair, to write the perfect book, make the perfect song, have perfect relationships.  I could dispense with the psychological tyranny of always trying to be better. I would be able to finally settle.  Settle into the cozy little cottage of Enough.  I might be able to shake off the persistent shame of not Doing my Best or Having it All.  I might be able to finally rest in there.  

What a weird place to be on the spectrum between the obsession with fame and the desire for privacy, anonymity.

Brian told me once about a story he read where after years of social media narcissism and a culture of unchecked self-aggrandizement, the pendulum swung the other way and people wore masks and hid from surveillance cameras.  Everybody wanted to be a ghost.

Today I caught my reflection in the window while I was buying water ice and with my big sunglasses and surgical mask, I was unrecognizable to myself!  I shut down my Facebook page too, I feel the urge to sink further and further back into the ether--for people not to know me, not remember me.  That seems more desirable to me now than attention, and yet I am writing this. (But nobody reads this.)

This morning I had a thought about life here on earth being a gestation period.  Maybe we're meant to develop as souls--serve, learn, expand our spirits--and when our bodies dry up and slough off, consciousness emerges into another phase.  A better one?  An easier one?

When I started working at Bancroft I learned about the four functions of human behavior according to B.F. Skinner and one of those was attention.  So many things we do we do solely for the attention of others--to be seen. Is it possible to outgrow the need?  Sometimes I think I can feel myself getting past it, but my involuntary fantasies tell the truth.  I always dream of writing the perfect song, making a perfect recording and feeling the glow of everyone finally recognizing my genius (that was a joke).  Is the deep need to make art just another expression of our need for the attention of others?  Yes, probably, but at least making art is a thoughtful, constructive way to assert yourself.  Better than a cheap status update.  Or is it?

Years ago, back in the 90s, I took a sleeping pill and wrote in my journal as it was taking effect.  I wrote that in the future there would be a literary movement called "Literature of the Immediate" and that instead of conceiving stories, essays, arguments, people would literally just write about what they were experiencing in the moment.  I saw Twitter coming a mile away, I guess you could say.

We're here now.  A lot of people don't let a moment's planning, second-guessing, or refining get between them and what they want to say.  Is it better?  No, I don't think so, and I am trying to go back to the old way of thinking before I speak/write.  Still--the moment is all we really have so....

There goes the monkey mind again trying to categorize existence--are you famous or are you anonymous?  Are you taking your time to think carefully enough about what you want to say and writing for "real" or are you throwing any whim that bubbles up right onto your Facebook page?  Is it weak to want others to see you or is it just natural?

Alt-right conspiracy wackos see mask-wearing as prostration to the Illuminati or whatever, an admission that one is a sheep.  But what's wrong with being a sheep?  That's what I want to know.  Every time I try to control anything, life just happens to me anyway.  So....baaaaaa, I guess.

I grew up a block away from a railroad and there was a freight train that went by most mornings between 1 and 3 o'clock.  When I went to college and then came back, the train suddenly started waking me up, but up until then I had been so used to it that I'd never even heard it.  There is this phenomenon that exists whereby some things become so familiar to you that they become virtually invisible, almost imperceptible.

That's how I think about death now.  I've been afraid of it so long I couldn't help but think about it all the time, and now that the pandemic is here, it's been at the forefront of my mind even more than usual.  I think of death as a constant companion.  We shrink away from the word, consider it so exotic and ineffable.  The great existential mystery.  It's not.  Death is more real and more natural to us than life, by far. 

If death is off and life is on, you were off for the entirety of time until you got turned on and then you'll stay on for 0-100 years or so and then you'll turn off again and be off for the rest of time.  I used to think that was tragic too, but it isn't.  I saw Sadhguru say in an interview once that your body is just like some dirt you borrowed from the earth and when your life ends you have to give it back.  In the meantime, life is like a window screen and death is like everything on either side of that screen.

Your body and your mind are just a filter against which material reality continually registers causing you to have an experience of that reality.  What that filter mostly does is create the illusion of duality in order to force you to distinguish yourself from your surroundings and to categorize the stimuli in your environment.  This thing is not that thing, this is another thing, that's something else.  

Consciousness is ok sometimes, but mostly it's exhausting because it makes us play the never-ending, (well, losing) game of classifying objects, feelings, and experiences into neat little rows and columns.  That's the screen doing that.  Chopping up reality into little boxes.  Breaking up a single beam of light into a grid-like shape shining on the opposite wall.  

The waking mind is mostly a nuisance because it works overtime trying to justify itself.  It separates you from the world around you and tells you how special and unique you are.  In doing so it surely sets into motion every pathology, physical and psychological, that exists among human beings.  

A lot of the busywork it does involves convincing you that death is terrible and unfamiliar and The Worst Thing.  But take a look at what's really going on.  Every night you lie in bed and allow your consciousness to dissolve and it feels wonderful.  Once in a while you become so engrossed in doing something or perceiving something that you feel your ego melt away and it feels wonderful.  Sometimes you achieve such perfect communion with another human being that time stops and you experience a nourishing, blissful stillness and it feels wonderful.  

Those are times when the screen goes up and death creeps into our living experience and those are some of the best times in life!  I don't know if any part of individual consciousness persists after death.  I suspect not, but sometimes I don't just suspect not, I HOPE not.  My best guess for what happens when we die is that you'll feel the bodily tension relaxing and letting go and, just like when falling asleep, you'll feel your consciousness fading, blending with your surroundings.  Probably the dying brain puts on a little show for you and you get to see all your dead loved ones again which will be nice, and then--asleep, no pain, so separation, complete unity, no constant grinding of the mind or muscles.  The ultimate healing.