The Head is a place you must learn to make your friend (also, "No Wasted Time")

The head is a place you must learn to make your friend.

From the beginning of this blog, I had two original ideas: one, give my personal history to my friend who I haven’t seen or heard from after two decades, and second, for the writing to energize his efforts to heal himself.

Now in my friend’s case, tackling a wildebeest would be more fun than his headaches---don’t know the cause, can’t cut the medication---it’s a defining distraction, let’s say. So whatever problems you face, be thankful if you’re head is a physically comfortable place. But don’t feel sorry for T.J. If you’re an expert on chronic pain, I’ll gladly put you in contact with him!

My friend Tammy Brewster is cleaning her house today in Georgia, wondering how she managed to find things this way this fine spring day. For this writing, I go to a room in my head I’ve been meaning to straighten for some time, kind of picking up this and that so you can get in but mostly just peeking in and smiling and saying, “that’s something I’m going to get to on such-and-such a day,” meaning you’ve just made peace with the fact that you are simply not going to get to it now, however much you sincerely may care!

You can work with yourself and your surroundings to create the state of your mind. It’s one reason silence is such an excellent starting point for finding a useful thought. As soon as you are able to stop your thinking and glide for two seconds, you are living!

"no wasted time"

So I’ve set out to be the peace I seek in others, the laughter I seek in others, the wonder I seek in others. I got a crash course in the nature of such things when I married a girl I’d met six weeks before.

The insight that’s come to me is that I should always remember the day we drove across Kansas, because we had not planned to be there four days before, just as we were then completing a trip to Colorado that I had not planned to take with her, since we had previously never met.

There is a feeling running through the beginning of things, a greatly inspired sense of assimilating one’s purpose, summoning one’s strength, and joy, set into whatever relief the situation provides. The joy can simply be turning away from panic or fear, or the joy can be an apotheosis of emotional treasures, for joy is what it is not---but more.

When you like the companionship in your life, you choose it as a goal unto itself. I tend to relate to people as an individual, dealing with existence in the ways an individual does, but the cultivation of my individuality shares in the product of one person, sharing the sacrifices of her life and time while I devote all my life to awakening the work I dreamed I would make, with moment-to-moment bits of clarity assuring me that I have found a way to be myself.
Everything that pours out of my connection to the love that makes creations finds some way into the light of my closest human companionship. Already my privately cultivated world, which I’d so recently learned to successfully treat as my own faithful companion, poured forth in its excited, primal bits, as the novelty of sharing every communication possible spurred me to talk through much of that four days’ ride. We chose to go it without one hotel stay, making our car our home, our love our substance, our journey, our purpose. Somehow we could discover in the elements of some new place a life set to support our dreams, our discussions, the pursuit of a better life.

You begin to know a better life as you find it, and without a doubt, there are healthy activities we’ve learned to pursue that promote well being, with many more we’d like to try; we have the feeling now about our bodies that we were beginning to have about our lives that day, when we stopped in Cloudland, Kansas, music and miles our only companions just days after a hastily-called wedding at her family’s house, the same family from whom she’d never spent a full day. They are people we think of fondly even now, as events would eventually tie me to the pleasure of better knowing them.

There are roads we cannot find when we fear we are lost, and calls that super cede many things that contribute to what is called the pursuit of happiness. Yet there are transitory possessions, and there is the one chance to begin seizing the enduring and critical opportunity to find some place in the siblings of humanity that you make. Fortunately, that chance drifts by the side of the living every second of the day, and its existence is the pillar of my optimism.

That day on the road, started when a state trooper rapped on our window to make sure we hadn't frozen, represents innocence. Later that day I was moved to buy a comic book during a fill-up. I gave it to her to read, and she did so, aloud, to pass the hours of that day that varied between cloud and sun. The Fantastic Four were all normal people in this story, living lives orchestrated to consist of the simple pleasures of pursuing non-super-heroic lives. Well before the Matrix, this story from 1981 or so featured the discoveries of their present existence within tiny androids alive in a constructed setting, set in motion by the man who hates them and links with them throughout their serialized (and fictional ) careers, Victor Von Doom. He's an angry, vain fellow who dresses like an armored stand-in for Death, jealously trying to destroy someone who'd pointed out a mistake to him, which pride would not countenance, leading to his own personal disgrace. But the things you think about, the choices that make your life real or happy, those are the creative inspiration you take away as the fantasy resolves over the course of carefully drawn pictures that lead into purely imaginary abilities and obstacles.

The difficulty of the choice to deny a false yet benevolent seeming reality resonates in the character's reactions, leaving us questioning what sort of denial will we accept if, on the surface of things, some side of ourselves is truly satsified. The surprising exercise of inventing one's own sound, motion and sense of time from the pages, which represent the creative nexus of drawing and writing, stimulated my new bride happily, and she began to glimpse the hidden power of contemporary comics in motivating my academic success and undoubtably the nature of my listening ability, which tended to explode with resonant images carrying emotional content associated with the symbols of each person's words. She did, incidentally, put it some other way, but her observations continue to challenge and delight, as well as aid, her blushing spouse.

This seemed to keep away her nausea; it had not been but since I met her that she’d regained interest in her food. This was final part of a decision to, without outward drama, give up on the wonderful woman she could create and give to the world. I could see she was deeply sincere, truthful to a fault, concerned for people and the consequences of her own actions, and carried an understanding of the wide-eyed dream of the life we all might know, but for the misunderstanding of its possibilities amongst the wide cast of humanity’s participants.
I have never had sorrow more than over what I discovered wasted. But such is one tree down the long path of life. Still, somehow my friendship with this girl evoked everything so warm and generous and humorous about her, provided her with happiness she’d grown afraid for which to hope, if I may phrase it so awkwardly. Truth without guile, beauty without style: if only I could tell you how glad it made me to get her interested in eating, something I could make her do by example of my own faithful appetite, an appetite for a simple life and a common touch while not truly understanding overly much about status or fame. However, an innate sense of guitar playing as the bridge to extemporaneous theater had led me to quixotic illusions that I might assemble from my confused psyche songs and a life of making music for people in concert and do all that position, done successfully, could give me opportunity to do, in terms of promoting, thoughtfully, the causes of the week. The weak.

I have auditioned for many roles to continue my survival, all predicated on honest, no-hassle dedication to freeing an inner muse, while occasionally fearing the outer man would age beyond the successful recognition of those dreams. No one’s dreams should ever be used against them, but sometimes you are simply afraid of death because you cannot deal with wasting your life. Yet you think of how others live with their own dreams, and only in time does it become simple again that life in the broader sense traffics in conflict, since some dreams violate the notions of others, or even the viability of bringing anything from those dreams to light. That is very personal business within everyone.

I’d hoped to pursue the muse, literally return to the mountains I’d climbed the summer before, become a very healthy person with a bright and generous life. Now there was someone there when I showered, there in some park in Tennessee while I’m using the bathroom, even---another person, a female, just as I’d always wanted, beside me in every meal, usually based on some meal we bought just for the purpose of splitting together. All these things I now share with you, I gave them to her, first on the promise that we would decide, in the course of every single day, if we belonged in this relationship, based on the idea that every love requires freedom, though that is hardly the only element one thinks about. I did not want to live a life I dreaded fulfilling, I did not want to live a life with my choice erased. What I found in time, is that once you are accepted for all that you are, in the vision of knowing all that you consider right and motivating and all you would become, you are likely to reconsider every day and conclude without doubt that if you are so happy to see a person smile, if you are so moved by their sharing nature, if you are so enamored of the way they enjoy things and understanding of what causes them distress, you will likely find that you do not need to waste time on reviewing the
quality of your choice, but will probably relish its wisdom.

When you mess with your lover’s hair, when you rub their sore spots, when you get some little thing from the fridge or help them find something or tell them more about something you know they find personally interesting---when you think about who they love and what they’ve learned, when you consider what they’ve done for you, when you wonder what activity might be a terrific fit for the two of you, you are having something that preserves memory, increases the values of one’s personal experience, something that brings peace to the willing and composure to new pictures in life. It is no wonder that much grief is born of its absence.

When she called her parents that spring day to tell them she was half a country away, that her first honeymoon plan didn’t make sense but with enough of everything we owned packed busily into our car, she would not be needing her old job, her old room, nor any worry for her concern, but she had decided we should try my original plan, to leave the hometown and search for a fresh start. The fact they trusted and loved her meant the choice of the help was only a phone call away, but she took this leap without more than a phone number to an apartment manager---actually, purposed to house mostly elderly residents, by my dear friend David’s mother, my host the summer before one week. I’d had a taste of adventure out there, and I found a satisfying way of mixing with total strangers.

Sometimes you long to get away and sometime you yearn to fall in love. Imagine the feeling of one day finding yourself in the process of both. That’s something you can check for perspective whenever you’re working along the flow of Who is going to become What!

We’re just talking about how fun it would be to shoot pictures and make up stories with friends. It’s what we’ve just done. There’s no place in the past too dark for me now, because there’s a light in my day today that speaks of a life filled with whatever is most fun next.

Fun a minute ago came just before I sat down with memories of our badminton-style game we’d invented in the park. But that wasn’t where writing about that would begin: there was a more fun way. Look for some way to do what you’re doing that is fun and still gets it done: that is a theme recurring in my life, which exists to create one life that harms none, to serve the joy of another that wishes to harm none. Simplest purposes created the past two days, which took me deep into the solutions and alternate possibilities to improve details on a story that’s waited inside me all my life, made with the process which dominated my boyhood. This time the story is meant to entertain me truly at all ages.

The president of Liberia , Ellen Johnston Sirleaf, talks to John Stewart after the television comes back on; for an hour we made our own fun by ourselves. “No photographs,” I said as I faced the dresser, thinking how we might be in too latent a state to produce pictures. “This is the kind of time,” she said from on the bed, “when I might have pulled out the camera to make pictures of myself making silly faces.”

Glad we tuned in tonight: not only did we feel inspired by the Cynac street video of gorgeous Swedish women, but we just saw “their” culture mix with “ours”: She just made jon a chief. With full costume ---“I’m assuming , and I’m just assuming here, this is in a 39 regular...” And Colbert was just recently knighted; what do you know about our media people here in America?

Turkey, ground, and fat free cheddar cheese, the last of the spinach leaves on torilla, toasted over the stove eye in the communal kitchen down the hall, while Kenny told us of his wonderful two bedroom Ocean Beach home in the days when he was still married, with a living room his friends joked about, all for five hundred fifty dollars.
“You can’t find anything that good like that anymore!” he exclaimed wistfully, as though marveling at how he lived in early days here in California.

As I collapsed happily all over her, she watched The Biggest Loser with I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant on the alternative channel; I simply rested and, while awake, took a dream like look into the wonderful creation in my mind. I’ve dreamed many times of comic books that I find and hold and enjoy without remembering their reading, mostly found in some public place (or perhaps in a room open to my wandering).

This one, titled "The Vanishing Wave," I’ve been "reading" over the course of this month, since 4-4-09, visualizing as a dreamlike source of pure excitement, a state jarring loose such a multitude of details included to make the story great. Without taking the time past the first two hours, there was a good story present, but I have been taken to a very satisfying place in my activities as I drew out the dreamatic scenes, always sensing there was still something shadowed in the story, as though I had previewed it, and sensed it in a connected and full way, a sight of the end in the distance to which I could journey with my imagination, picking the symbols out of my psyche while meditation on the characters gave me an indestructible link to my imaginative engagement with my knowledge in the many days of my youth. I suppose some would consider my life a fulfillment of providing a haven for the inner child, striving to remain free of outward conflict, so that the light of possibilities and agility necessary to formulate new concepts and relate them to previously integrated learning. This sense of fun serves a sublime purpose, to make one play with ideas and experiment with thought, leading to a more interesting look at the world around us. Having previously seen ourselves as the DNA of god, we could wonder at the sense of sublime vision in our creation around us and laugh at our inventive nature.

Make Fun, Ask Questions Later

(The Dreamatics---“That would be a great name for a band,” I said, and reflected upon three times over the next twenty minutes)

So the t.v. is off, and she decides to take my picture first. She begins narrating, and I’m never sure if it’s on video recorder or photograph, so it takes me through a trip of mercurial mental postures. I wanted to leave in these records the notion that we’d taken our badminton rackets and birdie out to the park again to recreate our invented sport. So I began posing as though discussing our recollections of the game.

Many things occur simultaneously; as I write she again recites the fact that the ground turkey had resulted neatly in three double servings. Also, at the moment, the History Channel features quartz crystal formation deep underground, evidencing a volcano that powers the Old Faithful Geyser of Yellowstone Park, which brings up my sister, who once lived there while training as a chef. In that gently rolling landscape, how much danger lurks beneath? (Ah, there’s a perspective fitting the place I’m holding in my “Dream Comic,” the pages of which I’ve been methodically discovering and rediscovering re-invented!) Capturing the complete events of a given moment consumes attention that moves impressions of those moments into the full place of one’s mental projections, though one’s mind naturally creates a commentary response of associations while reading along: that is the true reward, the self-discovery found in good reading.

I remember switching to left hand grip “for the next five points” when our first game was about 7-2 in my favor. In the second game, she thanked the tree on her side for ‘not letting me run into you, though it would have hurt you than it could damage my hard head!’ I’d switched back to that side on the third game, as the iron light post in her play area was hit with the birdie as we swatted it into play. “Point for the lamp post!” she would cheerfully call, and from then on, the scores were called with a tally for the lamp post each time, as the tree now on my side would receive, were it hit. “It’s playing, too,” she said, in an innocent, fun-loving and humble voice. At one point in that close game, the score was called 13-12-3. Jocularly, I called as though to our imagined player, congratulated the post on its record high score during this match. Our game is fun indeed, you can hit twice on your side, thus setting yourself up to be your own partner---“it wouldn’t be the first time, “ she said coyly.

I think we will go back many times, to see the patterns of the walked dogs and who comes to hang out, ever shifting faces in a city that we nonetheless treat with the familiarity of our own small towns, for we are happy here and engage things mostly within walking distance, though our transit adventure the day before was the first of many beach daytime visits, this one a brightened late afternoon sequel to the cool windy and cloudy night we went to participate in the oceanside beneath the full moon.

This visit to those memories, of the two of us laughing through most of the first two games, instantly becoming full of jokes again after the quiet few moments late in that match, made everything after sunset so comfortable and full of regard. But it did one more thing for us, creatively:

Early in the day, before the time became 12:34 am as it is now, I’d drawn a horned fellow, dressed as I was in the photograph on the laptop screen, in a host of poses for that character. All the while, Angela talked with her sister Dixie, who was preparing a traditionally delicious meat and potatoes meal, asking her when would be a good time for us to talk over the story from their personal lives that would become the basis for the horror/ comedy first story for d’n’a, our comic soon to debut on the web as I prepare three unrelated episodes to illustrate the range of tones and approaches of our concept quickly as we prepare the pages of drawings and words for “The Mountain,” an ominous tale based on the remembered experiences of real people, one of which is Dixie. In the meanwhile, we chose the places in which to Photoshop her drawings and I studied one more time my share of them, which has been part of a weeks-long consideration that surprised me, even disappointing me at times with the continued wait for its completion, but one that satisfies a need in me to bond with the understandings of what I choose to convey and have practiced to depict. How much more practice does it need? Some version available for Dixie to see would help her understand the imaginative devices by which we seek to explore the motives hidden beneath the surface of what began as an innocent gathering of friends that resulted in a tricky but successful upper-ear piercing and a suggestion from this new figure that will lead everyone to a shared terror and desperation.

So tonight, while posing with the badminton racket, I eventually noticed how my shadow seemed to crown my head with a shadow halo, crying out to be passed along as a symbol. Suddenly an alternative conception of depicting my angels seemed to bring together many imaginative experiments with depicting the nature of our minds, their processes. We experimented with the light and some angles on creating different shadow selves, each bestowing a halo created with the racket.

"I like that one," she said once: "looks like you've just turned to discover and meet your original self and said, 'he-llo!'" She was the one who evoked the word "original" when I tried to express what manner of acting is involved in the performance art that makes a live act "rock and roll." It is about an original form of acting.

Creating halos is a racket; We create halos with our racket; we play a game with no net because we use the cinder blocks erected between us, placed regularly throughout the parkway paths so that vehicles do not enter, and somewhere in set two we establish rules for points and serves when the birdie hits the boundaries, and the process of reacting quickly to the presented possibilities, as always, is the fountain head of fun, which I’m happy to remember, now as ever.

five letters, no sound