And then you wake up feeling not so hot, feverish, sore.  New Years Day off, followed by two days, and now a third, all full of worries.

Up on Tralfamadore, artists enjoy sexual relations (within the context of marriage), allowed to them by the spirituality of their work, consequently an appropriateness with the electromagnetic energies given.  Expert at achieving a comfort with artistic expression and working upon such things on a regular basis, the artists reach the inner sanctum.  Having bared their souls, a commensurate and appropriate award awaits.  Down here on Earth said relations are gained and practiced more through less spiritual pursuits, having more to do with the successful accumulation of financial and professional security in a world of crowded spaces.  And this is particularly true of metropolitan areas where art, theater, music are not the main thing, and even worse so where lying and PR are the thing.  Such places are, indeed, close to hell.

So it goes.

For the first time in a long time, I’ve gotten out to a coffee shop...  and to the library.  I find a couple of books in the spirituality religion section, a little book by Thomas Merton, The Silent Life, and Father James Martin’s Jesus, A Pilgrimage.  Wearily I’d gone out for a stroll past the reservoirs, stopped in at the Catholic Church, without much inspiration for long prayer, leaving without much inspiration.  The rain came.  Still no long reaching mom.  Tired of the wine selection at the little deli, the chicken salad, the cold cuts...  Ah, finally, Mom is calling.  She is still alive.  At the checkout, the nice lady suggests, after I ask about the yoga, that there is a Tai Chi class on fridays.  "lots of nice ladies..." she tells me.  She recognizes from before.  Both of us quiet flirts, bookishly.

To be so crass as to mention the word "porn," is, as in all Capitol cities, but those upon enlightened planets far away, where life forms existing have figured out that the spiritual truth and motive behind anything is first and foremost, if things are to work out smoothly, kindly, peacefully, appropriately, is frowned upon greatly.  And to frown, for citizens in towns of the former, is in turn good for their own social standing.  "How upright am I, that I am putting the theater of porn in its place as unholy and decadent."  Besides the avoidance of awkward conversation, there is, from the point of view of success, on Earth, much to be gained from denouncement of things any creature would actually consider healthy, normal and intriguing as an example of his or her own species creativity and healthy vigor.   And what this all sets up is an ever increasing and uncomfortable hypocrisy.

And resulting from this hypocrisy, strange talents emerge.  And then finally what happens is that the great adepts of the moral shallows, bombastic, full of tales of "good and evil" (when things are pretty much the same, as long as we're not murdering people, stealing from the elderly and children) eventually achieve supremacy in this order that far too many have agreed to cooperatively create.

The artist, the free thinker, is shunned.

Even Ancient Rome had some health to it, witnessed by the little village of Pompeii, which to them was probably their own version of launching themselves, their true selves, to a far away planet where pretty much everything was absolutely okay, even those acts considered most licentious back in the big city of self-importance.   Tralfamadore, indeed, where people, human beings, as they really are, are welcome.

And note what happens to those great systems of hypocrisy, once they fall:  after the pieces are picked up, after the bombed out bricks are piled to build, a new attitude comes.  Berlin.  Love Parade.  Techno.  Acceptance.  Celebration.  Back to the tiled offerings in the happy houses of Pompeii, which of course gets a bad wrap for being annihilated by a geography that was born into the very deep lusts and creativity of the entire Big Bang Universe itself.



Then later,  after a good nap, just shutting down on all the worrisome thoughts concerning all my failings and failures and what will happen next and all the lack of a real career stuff, sleep and meditation, I wake up enough to go to bed, but then doing so, maybe I look at my iPhone screen too much, I am awake again, and so I end up reading, even as I worry that I am not able to rest.

Strange, how the spiritual is just what the Prodigal Son requires.  The two seemed fated to connect.  How else would the prodigal, who never really had evil intentions, just susceptible to the addictive undisciplined nature of human beings, be able to strive on after falling so?


And I think, oh, god, what crap is this that I have written above...  There's too much risk now being a writer, as anyone can take the slightest thing you say and be offended by it.

But at least Father James Martin's travels in the Holy Land following the ways of Jesus is entertaining, as I worry about my aging mother, up there, all alone, far away, in her cluttered apartment, and mine is bad enough...