You’d think I would’ve called my 85-year-old mother to thank her for my birthday check two weeks ago. You’d certainly think.
Still, this has been a pretty cool year so far, all 14 days of it. No requirement to confront my mortality yet, just the self-induced stuff from hiking in the mountains. The government’s going to give me my money back, with interest, and I’m still having fun in between the freak-outs. As Mr. Dylan says, “can’t stop carryin’ till I’m ready to unload, riches and salvation could be waitin’ round the next bend in the road.” Right now I’m about to make my dentist richer and get two crowns. They’ll cost a lot more than the new VW I bought in ’67, but just a little less than the premiums I didn’t have to pay since I killed the dental insurance. (God, or Dog, works in mysterious ways.) Bobby Z. channeled this decades ago in “Desolation Row,” of course. I have no idea what he’s up to now, but I’ll bet all his teeth were crowned a long time ago.
And yet, and yet. I find I’m more and more attracted to nothing. No, really. You know, breathing. Just breathing. Anything more complicated just makes you lonely, right? At this moment I can do no better than to quote my old friend Ed from Black & White Dreams (sidebar):
It’s funny how the “present moment” asserts itself in spite of our efforts to live beyond it. It is difficult to find when you need it. For instance, if you’re angry all you get is that voice-in-the-head firing off accusations, justifications, etc. No peace. When the future invades the present, you get worry, or hope, or the past, which usually takes the form of regret. Are you meditating? In that case you get the soundtrack to last night’s Doritos commercial.
At first I thought the first two sentences wrestled with each other, but now I feel they don’t. That’s obvious when you see the photo that paragraph is posted under. A fine endorsement of consciousness as ground of being, I’d say, but then I say a lot of things.
Nothing! It’s for Christmas!!!
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Please tell your mother that if she were
to send those birthday checks to ME, I
would be sure to call her right away and
thank her.