How Silly Synchronicities Inspire Faith in A Benevolent Universe
Much as I appreciate Carl Jung for introducing the concept of synchronicity to modern humanity, it was just that: an introduction. Which means it is a concept that we should investigate from many directions and expand upon.
So how can we do that? Because synchronicity is, at its heart, something we experience subjectively, one of the best methods is to notice how synchronicity shows up in one’s life.
In my case, one thing I’ve noticed is how many times synchronicity seems authored by a stand-up comic. Not necessarily a good comic, but a benevolent one that understands that much of the experience of being alive is, on its face, rather silly.
Which brings me to the “Three Dogs Defecating/Piss Six” synchronicity.
Being able to stop easily to take pics is one of the reasons I prefer riding a bike to being in a car.
Yesterday, I took one of my usual post-work bike rides, enjoying the variety of red, gold and yellow fall leaves on the trees I passed and savoring how the cold air encouraged me to keep a steady pace and get more exercise out of the ride.
Passing through a park, I glanced to my left and saw an elderly man walking a cute brown dog and as I looked at them, the dog stopped, lifted up its leg and began to pee.
Chuckling, I looked away and continued my ride. Around the next bend, I saw to my right a woman with one of my favorite breeds, the Japanese Shiba, and yes, the dog had stopped to squat, its butt facing right at me, a nicely formed piece of poo gaining access to this world through it.
Shibas are cute, even when pooping.
Hmm, I thought, I seem to be attracting defecating dogs. Then, I wondered, Does the word “defecate” include pee?
(I checked and apparently, unless one can piss through one’s anus, it does not. Still, I like alliteration so let’s stick with it, defecating dogs.)
As I continued up the path, another park appeared on my right and I thought, “If I see another dog…” and sure enough, another small dog, this one black, had stopped with its owner, leg lifted in the air, taking a leak.
I wondered: Maybe these dogs are communicating through a form of telepathy and telling each other it was a good time to let loose their excrement into the world?
Then, I noticed it was 4:20. Do dogs get high when they defecate?
In all seriousness, all of this was likely just a funny coincidence.
After all, in most discussions you’ll hear about synchronicity, they seem a heck of a lot more serious than this. And Jung himself said they were more like “meaningful coincidences” and I wasn’t sure this qualified.
Still, I think humor is an important element of being human, so it was meaningful in that it made me laugh and was another reminder why I so cherish riding my bike through this ever-interactive world.
And that brings me to this morning.
It was an unusually lazy Saturday morning for me, I had a schedule-free day ahead of me, so I had allowed myself to sleep in (in my case, this means 8:30) and didn’t get out of bed until a phone call from my wife just past 9 to help her find her missing keys.
As I made up some breakfast, I struggled with a concrete plan for the day. Eventually, I decided I had to start with some sort of project relating to my writing because I will make this a paying gig in 2020.
I let my mind sit with that idea as I ate and eventually decided to continue working with a technological project I’ve been struggling with: how to turn audio recordings I do on my bike rides into text as efficiently as possible.
The two apps I’m using to transfer audio to text.
I’ve recently downloaded a voice-to-text app and a better voice recorder than the one that comes with my iPhone 6s and decided I’d simply figure out how to get a 20-second recording onto a page in front of me.
Long story short, I was able to get one with only a few errors and I was easily able to correct those and send it to my Gmail account from my Yahoo! Mail account.
At this point, I made a small error, which I didn’t realize until now and which I think adds some evidence to this being an actual synchronicity: I opened the Yahoo! homepage instead of the page for Gmail and that was what led me to the “Piss Six.”
I say this adds evidence because I find synchronicities often happen when I do something I wasn’t expected to do. For example, if I go out into the world with only the plan “let’s have an adventure” and sort of follow my intuiton about how to do that, it’s likely I’ll experience some synchronicities. It’s almost as though acting in a less-planned, more random way paradoxically triggers the Synchronicity Plan.
Anyway, there at the very top of my Yahoo homepage was an article about an American college football player who’d performed a “dog peeing” celebration!
Yes, I’m sharing this as much for the Kamala Harris news as its tie-in to this post. She’s awful!
Typical to the way every article is overstated by the Attention-Seekers of the modern media, the caption says “(it) will be remembered as one of the most boneheaded decisions in sports history.”
Now, the media critic in me could have easily taken this story down a very different path from this post, elaborating on why I feel this sort of writing lacks integrity, but I’ll leave that for a future post and just make a quick aside: this was a game between two rivals who are nowhere near the national spotlight in the sport, a game that has only minor implications even in the 2019 story line, let alone history, so that caption is just as silly as what the player did.
And if you’re about to say, “Well it got you to click,” I’d correct you and say, “No, the fact that it aligned with the ‘Three Dogs Defecating’ yesterday was what made me click.”
Having said that, it sure did make me laugh! Because there’s one final aspect of “Three Dogs Defecate” which I forgot to relate. And that is, and I swear this is true, I had this strange scene in my mind after seeing the first dog pee of people at a music festival or somewhere public inventing a new dance craze called “The Dog Piss.”
And I could see in my mind’s eye a row of people all lifting their leg—exactly as dogs do and exactly as this wide receiver did—in time to whatever music they were listening to (I was listening to a recent concert by the Disco Biscuits, so it was to the beat of their song, “Tempest” which I ‘saw’ this).
When I see the Disco Biscuits in 2020, I promise to bust out the Dog Piss Dance!
Yes, I grant you—my mind is a very strange place to dwell!
But that brings me back to this silly synchronicity. For I feel that one of the drawbacks to much of how we adults perceive the world is we’ve taken the fun out of it. We aren’t open to laughing with it. We feel we need to be serious in order to be adults. Really?
Nah, I’m serious about a lot of things, but my overall outlook about life must include a large amount of humor. Because when I am in my most pure moments, when I am in a state of flow, I find the world is full of undeniable humor which can be found almost anywhere I turn my attention to.
Now, to end this with some metaphysical speculation, I believe that the meaning of synchronicity is reasonably clear: our inner and outer worlds are connected in a very real way, a way that is not dictated by our control. I think most who talk about synchronicity suggest this.
But I take it a few steps further: I believe that synchronicities tend to reward us for paying attention.
In other words, if you want to experience more synchronicity, I suggest three steps:
1) Believe in the possibility of the concept. That’s all. You don’t need to be ironclad about it being real. Just be open to the idea that it might.
2) Having done step one, believe it will happen in your life.
3) And last, and this one is key, appreciate it.. You see, I’ve found that when I give my attention to synchronicities and show gratitude for them, they seem to increase.
A few more speculations: Perhaps the nature of the synchronicity is that it speaks to our individual nature. As a person who appreciates humor and absurdity, I have these kinds of funny synchronicities. Someone who doesn’t likely would not have even noticed the three dogs.
If I hadn’t noticed, a part of me wonders maybe I wouldn’t have accidentally opened the Yahoo site. Who knows?
What I do know is seeing comedy in the world and then having a synchronicity based upon that humor makes me feel good and suggests that whatever is behind synchronicity has a playful sense of humor and is benevolent.
In fact, feeling like the universe is benevolent is what prompted me to share this silly story because I feel that so many people in our world today, whether it’s due to having a religious perspective with a God that is to be feared or a secular outlook that believes that the Universe is meaningless and random, feel the Universe doesn’t care about them.
I think it does. So much so that it wants to share a laugh with us! Because my life is improved by having these experiences and for me, that’s really all that matters.
And now, I ask you, do you experience synchronicity? If so, what kinds? What are their nature? Are they funny? Serious? Sad? Profound? Beautiful? Let me know in the comments. And as always, for now, thanks for reading!
Shameless Self Promotion Time: If you enjoy my writing, please check out my novel, “The Teacher and the Tree Man.” The full 80-chapter story can be purchased as an e-book or as a paperback from Amazon or as an e-book at Smashwords. You can also purchase the book in each of the 20-chapter “books” (there are 4, for a total of 80) at Amazon as well (book 1, book 2, book 3 and book 4). If you are a member of Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited like I am, you can read the individual books for free. If you like reading and discovering independent authors like me, I highly recommend joining Kindle Unlimited!
Here is the synopsis: “The Teacher and the Tree Man” is a modern American epic fable about a Teacher in love with Nature who discovers a human head, a Tree Man, living in a tree in a forest near his house. The novel is about our need to unplug from our culture and re-discover ourselves in Nature. It is a fun-yet-deep look at: the media, our education system, drugs in our culture and our inability to listen to each other in the political arena.
What Happens If You Say “Yes” To Life?
I have a good friend who once told me that the reason she enjoyed my company so much was because I said yes to her suggestions, no matter how outlandish they might seem.
The two of us had some pretty fun adventures together but it wasn’t simply because of my agreeableness. No, it was because of her warmth and playfulness–she was easy to say yes to!
Sadly, because our culture has certain rules in place to “protect” us, we could have gotten into some serious trouble for some of the things we did. At the very least, a stern talking to and a ticket or maybe a few nights in jail or, at the worst, even a longer stint in prison. Such is the sad reality of the United States prison industrial complex.
Am I talking about the sort of activities that hurt other people? Of course not. No, I’m simply talking about using certain substances that, for whatever reason, our society says we as grown adults aren’t allowed to decide we can use. Believe it or not, drug offenses still account for nearly half of the people in our federal prisons and 20 percent of the almost two million incarcerated people in the U.S.
Of course, in recent years one of those substances, marijuana, is becoming legal in many countries and states, including my home state of Washington, but even there the rules are, umm, hazy. For example, for some reason adults aren’t allowed to smoke marijuana at a concert in Washington state, yet we are allowed to consume alcohol.
Now, which would you rather be around at a concert—someone stoned or drunk? I think most people in my generation (Gen X) would say the stoned person and perhaps even the now elderly Baby Boomers would answer that way.
But for whatever reason, when the law to legalize marijuana in Washington state was created, that restriction was included. Hmm.
Now, where I am writing this from—Japan—God forbid if most Japanese people were to read this post. Their minds have been so polluted in their “education” system by government propaganda that most believe marijuana is as dangerous as hard drugs like heroin or cocaine. And the penalties against possessing even a tiny amount of weed treat people as though they are as big of a danger to society as a rapist.
Meanwhile the same government that pushes that propaganda on teachers is profiting on sales of tobacco to the tune of tens of billions of dollars.
And here I am writing all this, as an employee of said government for the past 15 years and, if this essay was written in Japanese, I don’t think I’d publish it.
But you know what—fuck it, I’m gonna say “yes” to my desire to share what is such an obvious truth to anyone that even digs this tiny way below the surface on the issue of drugs and Japanese society: the government here is wrong and immoral for imprisoning people for possessing, consuming or growing cannabis. They should be ashamed of themselves.
Wait, wait, wait—I am not really into shaming others. Still, I wonder how many people are in prison right now, some of them for years, simply for choosing marijuana over alcohol or tobacco here in Japan? All of this in spite of the fact that the science has consistently shown marijuana is safer than those legal drugs.
But even if it wasn’t, why do we allow our governments to have such control over what we are allowed to put into our bodies?
When I was in my 20s and I was trying to come up with a way to solve the “drug issue,” I found it rather easy: legalize all of them. And then, promote responsible use. How?
Well, if you were to get high and commit a crime under my system, not only would you be charged with the crime you committed, you’d be charged with “irresponsible drug use.” How many people would then be scared off of trying something like PCP? Maybe not the best example as I am not sure a PCP high looks all that fun.
Okay, how many people would be scared away from something that isn’t damaging to the body, something that one can’t get addicted to and actually promotes anti-addictive behavior, such as LSD? Probably quite a few.
And that’s fine. Some people prefer to live their lives cautiously. We need such people.
However, what we don’t need is a society where everyone is cautious all the time. Because I can tell you (and have in this essay), I honestly believe you are not reading these words right now if LSD didn’t exist. I honestly believe it was one of my more harrowing-yet-enlightening acid trips that caused me to contact my parents to help me out of the spiral of addiction to hard drugs.
I saw how far down I’d gone and how it wouldn’t be much longer until I wouldn’t be around. But better than that, I saw the beauty of the world and saw reasons for living—how precious this life is, how much I was taking it for granted. And that gave me the courage to do something which comes hard to a lot of us—ask for help with something we feel ashamed about.
But back to saying “yes.” If I wasn’t the type to say “yes,” I would have never had a magical experience with that friend I mentioned at the start of this essay. We were at a concert at Washington’s beautiful The Gorge Amphitheater, both high on some good acid and weed, sitting high up a grassy hill, the music of Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys washing over us from the stage and her asking me, “Have you ever looked deeply into someone’s eyes before?”
Well, umm, I think so.
“Let’s try it, okay?”
“Sure.”
She knew I’d be game.
And so there we were, two good friends, staring deeply into each other’s eyes. Now, I think even if we’d been stone sober this would have been a fulfilling, fascinating experience.
But in this case, with our consciousness opened and deepened beyond its default mode where our egos are mostly in control, looking into her eyes was like both looking deep into the soul of human history and the soul of this one, unique individual expression of humanity.
It felt like I spent years in there, but judging by how long the music was on and by how long we were gone from the people we were at the concert with, it was probably only a minute or two.
But … wow … just wow.
And yet … yet … not only two decades after having that experience are we still not allowed that experience by our culture’s rules, but if I was a person who was doing the job I do now—teaching in public schools—in my home country, I probably would hold off on my saying “yes” to publishing this story. Even though it goes against every fiber of my being to do so.
Why? Because if my employer read it, or a parent of one of the students I taught read it, it’s possible that I’d be reprimanded, or worse, fired. And it’s possible that there’s a version of me in the US who has had a similar experience, who has 15 years of getting rave reviews from her employers, who has students who love how she brings fun to classes in a school that is too often stressful and too serious, who is writing a similar essay to this right now … but won’t publish it until after they’ve retired, if then.
This really hit home with me the other day when I was chatting with a friend on-line. She was talking about the struggles she went through with her ex-husband and how it was due to nasty messages he’d sent her that she was able to win a judgment from a judge.
Now, in this case, I’m all for someone’s on-line utterances causing them trouble because, wow, the things he wrote to her. They were definitely not written in the spirit of saying “yes” to life, let’s just leave it there.
And she told me that she was told by her divorce attorney, “Never post anything on-line that you wouldn’t want a judge to read in a packed courtroom.”
How many of you feel the same way? Please, please understand something. I am in no way holding a negative view of you if you feel this. No, in fact, I think you are simply being smart.
And that, well, it’s really sad. It tells us that in a modern world that often talks about how free we are, we often self-censor simply because of justified fears about what might happen if we speak openly.
And is it really great advice? I mean, what if that courtroom is packed full of Nazis and you posted a brilliant essay about why Nazis are so fucking stupid? If the judge were to also be a Nazi and he were to read this essay, well, you might suffer for having posted it.
Would that really stop you? I mean, sometimes I’ve thought that many of the anti-authoritarian things I’ve said over the years could lead to me being imprisoned or worse if our culture devolves into an authoritarian dystopia. so. Should such a fear stop me? Or, as I believe, should it be all the more reason to share it … because perhaps by sharing it, it’ll encourage others who feel the same to have more courage and, by doing so, it may stop that dystopian world from being created in the first place.
Now, before I close this out, I want to give a tease of the next topic I want to cover, and this is a BIG one because I think it can not only vastly improve your own life, but it would also have a pretty big impact on making our world, at least our world on social media, a much more enjoyable one.
And that is: why not, instead of acting on the worst aspects of ourselves on social media, we acted on our best aspects?
I can tell you, from 20 years of making a point of this, my experience of social media has been, for the most part, absolutely wonderful. I’ve got good, deep friends all over the world. Some of them are people I trust as much as I do anybody in my physical world, if not more. Some of those same people are people whose voices I’ve never even heard.
And it’s all due to an insight that came to me in the late 1990s when I first started going into things like America On-line chat rooms: the fact that my physical body is not in the presence of these people I’m communicating with means I can either act on my worst impulses and be an asshole, or I can act on my best impulses and be more loving.
So, I chose the latter. On a few occasions, this has caused me or people I’ve been interacting with some emotional pain. But for the most part, it’s been a great experience and I’m often thankful to whatever part of me that provides such sudden flashes of insight and, even more, to that part of me that says “yes.”
Because honestly, while I’ve said yes to things that can or could have gotten me into trouble, I wouldn’t want to live my life any other way. And, I’ve grown to trust the Universe, to trust that if I am acting with good intentions, saying yes in these ways won’t lead to serious harm. Setbacks sometimes? Sure. But setbacks, in my way of seeing things, are also great teachers, which means they aren’t really setbacks at all, are they?
And besides, imagine if me writing honestly about an insanely beautiful, profoundly life-enhancing experience of connection with another human being and the whole human family that was aided by using an illegal drug were to lead a future employer or potential business partner to say, “Sorry, but I don’t think I can work with you.” If that happened, would that be the type of person I’d want to work with in the first place? Perhaps by being upfront and honest about my experiences will help weed out the kind of people I don’t really want to be involved with and will help lead to the type of people I do.
Because I honestly believe we live in an intelligent, co-creative, benevolent Universe, one which sort of “plays along” with us as we play with it. And the last thing that Universe is going to do is punish us for living our Truth as we see it. In fact, I find that I hear its Call louder and louder to not only express my Truth but to live it.
In the end, I feel like saying “yes” is one of the reasons I feel blessed. Not only has my life has been full of experiences that have fulfilled me and made me laugh, I am constantly marveling at how weird it is just to be here, floating on this giant rock at thousands of miles per hour through the vastness of space with seven billion other unique individuals.
But it’d be a lot weirder and a lot more fun, I think, if more of us could start saying “yes” more often. Saying yes to things that, while society may look down upon them, we know not only won’t harm anyone but will make our experience here better and will thus lift up our spirits so we make the experiences of people around us better.
So…is there anything you can say yes to today that you would have said no to before? Give that some thought, maybe even give it a try, and get back to me with your results. As always, thanks for reading!
Shameless Self Promotion Time: If you enjoy my writing, please check out my novel, “The Teacher and the Tree Man.” The full 80-chapter story can be purchased as an e-book or as a paperback from Amazon or as an e-book at Smashwords. You can also purchase the book in each of the 20-chapter “books” (there are 4, for a total of 80) at Amazon as well (book 1, book 2, book 3 and book 4). If you are a member of Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited like I am, you can read the individual books for free. If you like reading and discovering independent authors like me, I highly recommend joining Kindle Unlimited!
Here is a bit from the synopsis: “The Teacher and the Tree Man” is a modern American epic fable about a Teacher in love with Nature who discovers a human head, a Tree Man, living in a tree in a forest near his house. The novel is about our need to unplug from our culture and re-discover ourselves in Nature. It is a fun-yet-deep look at: the media, our education system, drugs in our culture and our inability to listen to each other in the political arena.
Adventure or Safety, Which Do You Choose?
I’m at a crossroads. Literally.
To my right: the bicycle path runs almost directly toward my house, about a 20-minute ride, and the sky above it is full of a uniform, glowing white cloud, the kind of cloud that says the storm has passed and all will return to normal now.
To my left: the path runs away from my house but will eventually circle around to it, about an hour-long ride, but the sky is filled with the dark clouds that had just thrashed us with one of the strongest thunderstorms of the season and as I ponder it, a jagged spear of lightning splits the clouds.
Exciting, if a bit dangerous, I think.
But I’m feeling energized, maybe even charged by the storm, and a longer ride seems like what I want to do.
Still, is it the right choice? Am I taking an unnecessary risk if I go that way?
Suddenly, I realize that what I’m pondering is the choice between adventure and safety.
But that’s not how my mind phrases it. No, as it often does when it wants me to really notice something, to actually pay attention, it spits out an alliterative phrase but this time it uses both my native tongue and the language of the locale I live in, Japanese.
It asks: “bouken or boredom?” Bouken is Japanese for “adventure” or “risk.”
Too often in my life, I choose the latter: boredom. I don’t frame it that way, of course. I usually use words like “pragmatic, safe, smart, reliable.” Things that make me feel better for having made that choice.
And before I go on, I want to make something clear: This post will argue for choosing bouken, but that doesn’t mean it’s always the right choice.
In fact, on this late July evening, I chose bouken but that may not have been the wise choice.
But hey, that’s one of the features of a good adventure; it ain’t always gonna be easy and, if your adventure is at all like mine was this steamy July night, you might even face your own mortality during it.
So yeah, after calling my wife to let her know I’d be home in an hour or so, I went left.
First pedal, second pedal, I’m off and …
Another electric spear pierces the sky.
A bit on the nose, I think to the Narrator Behind the Events.
Try this sometime (it doesn’t matter if it’s a lightning-lit journey or a boring boardroom meeting): Imagine you are video game character. You feel you’ve got some free will, and you do, but there are people out there—the video game players—”playing” your character.
And, if your game is good enough, others might tune into your channel; so yes, in another dimension, you are on a “YouTube channel” of some alien teenager streaming the playing of your character.
Now, check it: do you think many people are gonna tune in if you are always choosing boredom? Even worse, are any of these players even going to play your game if your default is the easy, boring path?
I mean, maybe some would still play you. Maybe these aliens have lives like ours; jobs that numb them, families that aggravate them, and they just need some entertainment to veg out to: “Yeah, let’s play Good Ole Boring Bryan tonight. No danger there. I don’t even have to think or feel anything to play him.”
Fair enough.
But is that the game you want to play?
Or do you want to play the game where radical, unexpected things happen, a game that will surprise, scare, enthrall and elate you?
Think on that one for a second. Feel it.
So there I am, biking, I’ve got some tunes on, the Disco Biscuits, my favorite band to bike, too. Good energetic, ever-evolving, solid rhythms combine with ethereal, Soul-provoking guitar and keyboard licks. Such music helps me connect with my body, mind and soul.
I approach the “halfway chill point,” or at least that’s my name for it. That’s because when I do this route from my house, it’s about 12 kilometers into a 25 km ride. Today, it’s about 4 km into a 16 km ride, so not the halfway point.
However, if you look at the map in the picture to the right, you can see this corner, the very furthest southeast on the map, and when you turn, you start heading west and back toward home.
In addition, there’s a great natural grassy field you can stop and chill at there. In late spring, I took my son on that ride after a particularly rough morning with him, and we had a good father-son chat there.
So yeah, this corner means something. But on this night I keep going and after cycling for a few hundred meters, I find myself on an elevated berm which parallels a golf course for a few kilometers.
The skies keep flashing lightning, but I’m not hearing the thunder. So it’s far away. There’s still some moisture in the air and it feels good. It’d been up to 106 F on the heat index that afternoon and I’d biked over 18 kilometers in the heat of it so the darkness, mist and lower temp feels refreshing.
To my left is the golf course; my right is a suburban/rural Japanese community. It dawns on me: there’s nobody out. Just me.
This time I hear the thunder. And then another rumble.
What if…
This is it?
A bolt from above, I’m fried into another reality. Someone will find the carcass; yeah, me, sprawled out in some disfigured way. Nah, that’s not how I’d stage it; no, I’m laid out with a blissful smile on my face, dead to be sure, but laying next to my bike, dying doing something I loved.
Yeah, that’s all tragic; but that’s not the point here.
What if…
These are the last minutes of my life.
The fear. It hits me. How silly, how stupid.
This is why nobody bikes in thunderstorms, Bryan. You’re gonna be on some Darwin Award lists. Probably a distant runner-up, but still, kind of a stupid way to go.
But no, no, it’s not, I mean, I don’t, it’s not… whatisthisLifeforifI’mtodierightnowwhat’sitfor–
I’m fine.
I can hear some chuckles, a few high fives, a few relieved breathes. My game players and viewers have been watching this; I’m interesting, worth tuning into.
And that’s when I know I’m gonna be fine. They don’t want to lose an adventurer.
A boring dude? Well, they wouldn’t even watch, would they? So maybe he’s safe, too, only because nobody’s tuned in. Or wait…no, he’s safe because he went home away from the storm.
But did he feel the rain, did he appreciate the coolness of the dark? Maybe. Probably.
But what he didn’t do? He didn’t have a check-in with mortality.
And that’s when it strikes me: an adventure quite often is accompanied by risk, by danger, by even a threat to one’s life.
So yeah, sometimes we get hurt on adventures. Sometimes we get scared. Our stuff gets damaged, or stolen.
Do we learn anything, though?
Maybe we do, maybe not.
Maybe the only thing I learned is I can get a blog post out of choosing adventure. Maybe for me that’s enough.
What makes choosing an adventure worthwhile for you?
Thanks for reading.
Shameless Self Promotion Time: If you enjoy my writing, please check out my novel, “The Teacher and the Tree Man.” The full 80-chapter story can be purchased as an e-book or as a paperback from Amazon or as an e-book at Smashwords. You can also purchase the book in each of the 20-chapter “books” (there are 4, for a total of 80) at Amazon as well (book 1, book 2, book 3 and book 4). If you are a member of Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited like I am, you can read the individual books for free. If you like reading and discovering independent authors like me, I highly recommend joining Kindle Unlimited!
Here is a bit from the synopsis: “The Teacher and the Tree Man” is a modern American epic fable about a Teacher in love with Nature who discovers a human head, a Tree Man, living in a tree in a forest near his house. The novel is about our need to unplug from our culture and re-discover ourselves in Nature. It is a fun-yet-deep look at: the media, our education system, drugs in our culture and our inability to listen to each other in the political arena.
Nature Addiction Withdrawals
I’m feeling super grumpy this week. Why?
First, I’m feeling the pressure of time. It’s midway through the third week of my six-week summer vacation and I’m behind on some of my goals. You may have noticed I didn’t put out a blog every day as I said I would. Most likely you didn’t but I certainly did. And I beat myself up for that.
Not that I don’t have excuses (no, I won’t blame our dog, Jelly).
First, I lost all of last Wednesday after a bike ride to enjoy the sunrise at a riverside park resulted in a flat tire far from home.
Then on Thursday, my computer, which I just bought in February, suddenly crashed. I spent most of Thursday and much of Friday and Saturday learning to fix it. No luck. Frustrated, I decided to re-install Windows altogether.
Point is, I could have forced myself to write the blog, but I didn’t. Told myself it was vacation and it was OK.
Yet I’ve come to realize something about myself: writing is a form of therapy, it helps me relieve stress and sort things out in my head. I am an an ENFP personality type in the Myers-Briggs system (MBTI) and one of our characteristics is we have to verbalize our thoughts to make sense of them. Thus, next time you see someone talking to themselves on the subway, give them a break, they are probably just an ENFP figuring this crazy world out.
And yes, I’m certainly “guilty” of talking to myself. Why do you think I like cycling in Nature so much? But hey, I’m not embarrassed by my behavior; I’ll talk to myself anywhere if I feel it it’ll help me get a grasp on things. (You know that I did a lot of talking out loud when my tire burst!).
But no, the best way for me to verbalize my thoughts without getting locked up in a loony bin is to write. And when I write, I feel better.
So here I am, writing.
However, as I was rushing to get on with the few goals I’ve set out for the day, I realized there is something else that is likely a cause for my grumpiness: Nature Addiction Withdrawal Symptoms, or NAWS for short.
Yes NAWS really gnaws at me… Ha ha. (Why is there an unnecessary ‘g’ in ‘gnaw’? This is the sort of question one of my more astute Japanese students learning English may ask me some day, to which I will answer, “Good question. Answer: Because English is crazy!”)
So what is NAWS and why am I suffering from it. Well, I think you can guess what it is; basically, for those of us who spend a fair amount of time outdoors, when we have periods where we don’t get outdoors, we become grumpy.
How long are such periods? Well, Nature is more forgiving than, say, alcohol or crack cocaine, so I think a person addicted to Nature can go a few days before noticing the symptoms. But it likely differs depending on how addicted you are.
Now, I hope you can understand a few things: As a recovering addict, I’m both poking fun at addiction and also taking it seriously. I mean, I really do think there is something to this, and I think as a culture we all suffer from this disease. I believe our disconnection from Nature, which is also a disconnection from ourselves, is at the heart of many of our societal issues. So yes, this is serious.
That said, of course there’s a difference between being addicted to Nature and drugs, the former is good for you, the latter is not.
Another difference is the withdrawals come on slower and more subtly but once you feel them, they are definitely there.
Now, why in the heck would a guy on summer break in the middle of summer be suffering from NAWS?
Short answer: It’s really fucking hot here. I live in the hottest part of a hot and humid country and late July/early August is usually the hottest time of the year.
It certainly has been this year. Every single day from about 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., the heat index has been 100 and over, peaking at around 110. And it doesn’t really cool off over night, that index stays in the 90s until near midnight and gets up to the 90s by 6 a.m.
So that means six hours of 80s, but it’s a super muggy 80s, like 75-90 percent humidity.
Still, I found out on that 3 a.m.-to-5.a.m. bike ride last week that if I can get past all the spider webs that cake on your body (but which you don’t notice until you stop moving), it is reasonably pleasant and definitely the best time to get my Nature fix.
But man, the withdrawals are too strong to wait. So this afternoon, I ate my lunch in the shaded forest near my house. Yes, it was hot, muggy and a bit buggy. But I feel a little bit better now.
Still, it wasn’t enough. So I’m gonna go to bed early tonight and get up at 4 for a morning bike ride. Hopefully see another spectacular sunrise, but this time without the flat tire (I’ll stay closer to home just in case).
And while I’m outside, hopefully I can sort out my thoughts, de-stress about my to-do list and feel grateful again to be a part of this crazy world.
In the comments, let me know what you do to defeat summertime blues. For now, thanks for reading!
Shameless Self Promotion Time: If you enjoy my writing, please check out my novel, “The Teacher and the Tree Man.” The full 80-chapter story can be purchased as an e-book or as a paperback from Amazon or as an e-book at Smashwords. You can also purchase the book in each of the 20-chapter “books” (there are 4, for a total of 80) at Amazon as well (book 1, book 2, book 3 and book 4). If you are a member of Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited like I am, you can read the individual books for free. If you like reading and discovering independent authors like me, I highly recommend joining Kindle Unlimited!
Here is a bit from the synopsis: “The Teacher and the Tree Man” is a modern American epic fable about a Teacher in love with Nature who discovers a human head, a Tree Man, living in a tree in a forest near his house. The novel is about our need to unplug from our culture and re-discover ourselves in Nature. It is a fun-yet-deep look at: the media, our education system, drugs in our culture and our inability to listen to each other in the political arena.
Synchronicity or Science, That is the Question
And could the answer be both?
I’m watching Interstellar, the 2014 sci-fi drama, and it dawns on me how the family structure of the protagonist, Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), is similar to mine.
In particular, his children: a 15-year-old son (mine is 14) and a 10-year-old daughter (mine is 9).
There’s a sense of “I’m meant to be watching this now.”
I start to wonder if it is an example of synchronicity. Apparently, psychologist Carl Jung, who created the concept, tried to define it several times in his life, but the one that is most commonly used is “temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events.”
Huh? Let’s try to simplify it: two things happen around the same time that feel connected but have no apparent cause.
Is that better? Maybe not.
In a way, I think the fact that the definition of synchronicity is hard to pin down is a perfect metaphor for how we are still at the dawn of understanding it.
Why would I think my experience watching the movie might be synchronicity?
Well, I had the rare idea to watch a movie but didn’t know what I wanted to watch. So I do what I often do in such situations, I randomized the choice. I opened “Netflix” and just spun the “Award-Winning US Movies” category and it landed on Interstellar.
Now, now, Bryan, you are discounting the algorithms! Perhaps it was just Netflix’s algorithm, knowing what you enjoy that led it to call up Interstellar.
Fair enough. Probably some truth to that.
In fact, I think the deeper we dive into this world where A.I. knows more and more about us, the more we may get this sense of destiny to the things that occur in our life. Which means it might become harder to tell what is synchronicity and what is not.
But what about something that happened recently that has no connection to the A.I. world?
Last week, our dog, Jelly, was sick with diarrhea. After bringing her home from the doctor, my daughter showed me a chart on the backside of the medicine bag she’d received. It showed the comparison between dog years and human years. Jelly is one year and four months old, so she’d be around 20 years old as a human.
We all reflected about how this meant Jelly would likely die before all of us. That made us both sad and appreciate her more.
A few minutes later, I opened up a recent issue of Rolling Stone magazine and, as I paged through it, found a short interview with David Crosby where he talked about his love of dogs.
“The thing with dogs is they have a short lifespan. That’s because they are living seven times as fast as we are. So every 15 years or so, I lose a friend, and that’s a hard thing. But if you love them, they make your life better.”
Unlike the Interstellar example, I didn’t question whether this was a synchronicity. Part of how I define synchronicity is it feels meaningful on an emotional level. Not only did this experience fit that criteria, it also filled me with a sense of awe at the mysteriousness of reality.
But what does it all mean?
That is the question, isn’t it?
In short, I think it means that our inner world is much more connected to our outer world than our modern worldview would have us believe.
The wall between subjective and objective exists, but it may also have windows or even doorways. And sometimes things will pass between those windows or doorways.
I wrote in my most recent post about the idea that we are in an age where we are shifting from a more solid, objective world, one where the walls are more impenetrable, to a more fluid objective/subjective world with flimsier walls.
In my life, it seems like synchronistic experiences happen with more regularity than they used to. I can remember a decade ago where maybe once or twice a year, I’d have a stretch, maybe 3-4 days, where they’d be more noticeable. In the past five years or so, it seems to be occurring every season. But in the past two years and especially this year, it feels like I’m always on the edge of that awareness and if I open myself to it, I realize they are happening reasonably frequently.
This last part is also an important part of the equation, I think. That is, being open to it. Skeptics often say synchronicities are “just coincidences” which can be explained away by mathematical theories such as the law of truly large numbers, which states that “with a large enough number of samples, any outrageous thing is likely to be observed.”
Perhaps, though, mathematics actually point to an argument for synchronicity existing? Jung believed that numbers are the likely archetypes of order and play a major role in creating synchronicity.
Besides, the first idea seems to discredit how magical math is. For example, music, which often has an otherworldly quality and impacts us on deep emotional levels, is based on math.
Mathematical theories such as dynamical systems theory are well beyond my pay grade in grokking, but also may hint at how the concept of synchronicity is not opposed to math, but supported by it.
Personally, while I appreciate those who try to explain these things with logic and words, I also recognize that for me, these experiences feel different, like they are occurring on a different wavelength, than more common experiences.
I think Jung was ahead of his time in coming to this concept and we still may be years, decades, or even centuries away from really grokking it. Who knows?
All I know is, my life feels a lot more wondrous and lived in when I remain open to things like synchronicity. For that reason alone, I’ll continue to explore this topic in future posts. In the meantime, share some of your experiences with me, if you have any!
For now, as always, thanks for reading.
Shameless Self Promotion Time: If you enjoy my writing, please check out my novel, “The Teacher and the Tree Man.” The full 80-chapter story can be purchased as an e-book or as a paperback from Amazon or as an e-book at Smashwords. You can also purchase the book in each of the 20-chapter “books” (there are 4, for a total of 80) at Amazon as well (book 1, book 2, book 3 and book 4). If you are a member of Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited like I am, you can read the individual books for free. If you like reading and discovering independent authors like me, I highly recommend joining Kindle Unlimited!
Here is a bit from the synopsis: “The Teacher and the Tree Man” is a modern American epic fable about a Teacher in love with Nature who discovers a human head, a Tree Man, living in a tree in a forest near his house. The novel is about our need to unplug from our culture and re-discover ourselves in Nature. It is a fun-yet-deep look at: the media, our education system, drugs in our culture and our inability to listen to each other in the political arena.
Are We Living Through a Phase Shift in Human History?
Re-Examining the Meaning of 2012 and the End of the World
Our era is paradoxical: We are overloaded with information yet the social controllers are intensifying their efforts to herd us into an increasingly small Cage of Acceptable Thoughts.
As a creative type, I resist such efforts. And one way I do that is by finding fellow creatives, people who inspire me to look a reality through a variety of lenses.
I live in Japan, a country where most people don’t communicate in my native tongue, so I often rely on the Internet, books and other media to discover such inspirational, creative thinkers. However, I can’t usually interact with such people, which is why I end up writing as much as I do.
That said, recent events in my life have led me to re-connect with one of these inspirational, creative people. I really treasure this friend, the rapidity of his mind and his willingness to question everything, so hope we can remain friends for a long time. My other friends are wonderful, but are much more conventional in their thinking.
Two people who definitely are not conventional thinkers are comedian Duncan Trussell and writer Daniel Pinchbeck.
And last week, I listened to a conversation between them on the Duncan Trussell Family Hour.
Before we go on, I’d like to ask you to read the following reflections that were inspired by their conversation with a really creative, open, fun mind. Imagine the possibility that it might be true. Or that there is some truth mixed up in the madness. Okay, let’s get into it.
I first heard about Pinchbeck about halfway through the ‘00s when I read his book, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl.
Now some people, including Trussell and myself, feared that writing a book that investigated the idea of a shift occurring in 2012 could end up harming Pinchbeck’s credibility in the long run.
It probably did, but with people who never could have believed him in the first place so it probably doesn’t matter.
And on the podcast, Pinchbeck offered: “Actually in that book I never said that anything in particular was going to happen at or around December 21, 2012. I feel more and more, if somebody was really paying attention, totally vindicated that we’ve moved into kind of like a permanent, semi-psychedelic reality.”
Do you feel the same? I do. I’ve probably had around 100 psychedelic trips and yet this decade everyday reality just feels a lot more like those mind states than it did before 2012. A lot more fluid, playful and tricky.
Let’s just play with the idea that there was a shift on or around December 21, 2012, it just wasn’t the kind of shift we usually think about when we hear words like Apocalypse, Armageddon or the End of the World.
We tend to associate these terms with physical, natural disasters like volcanoes, tsunamis and giant asteroids. At least that’s how Hollywood interprets them for us.
This shift that occurred around December 2012 is more about our inner worlds than the outer world.
In fact, the word Apocalypse comes from the Greek word meaning “to uncover, reveal” and I believe this uncovering and revealing, this shift that occurred around December 2012 is more about our inner worlds than the outer world.
Of course, the inner and outer worlds can’t always be cleanly separated and, Pinchbeck argues and I agree, one of the aspects of this shift is that the wall between inner and outer seems to be getting more porous. In fact, this may be happening to walls everywhere, which means ol’ Humpty Dumpty best not get too comfortable, and “tear down that Wall” will be more inspiring and in flow with the times than “build that Wall” will.
Yet how long is this shift going to last? And what is its nature?
Trussell answered, “No one predicted that the Apocalypse, or the interim state between the lifting of the veil, would be a complete diffusion of all Truth like a hyper refracted warping fun house mirror of literally everything including the identity. Who would have called that? No one would have thought that. If you were to take a person in the 1980s and drop them into this dimension they might think, at the very least (this is) some kind of dystopian dream, a weird nightmare they were having, but they wouldn’t think things were doing OK, in the normal sense of the world. I like it, it’s a fun Apocalypse, but there definitely seems to be an apocalyptic flavor in the air.”
In his essay, “The Occult Control System: UFOs, aliens, other dimensions and future timelines” (which you can read for free if you are a Kindle Unlimited member like me), Pinchbeck writes about how a number of indigenous cultures have referenced this period as a transition period between ages.
The Aztecs refer to it as maybe being 10-15 years long, so if we go with 2012 or thereabouts as the starting point, it’ll last into the early-to-mid 2020s.
Just think about historical events right now and the way things feel like they are progressing. Use your gut on this one, don’t rely strictly on rationality. Doesn’t it feel like the 2020s may be a turning-point decade, much as the 1940s were to the 20th century?
The Aztecs said we have been in a 5,000-year period of a Sun of Light, a period where humanity focused on the outer, material world and explored it through technology, science and rational thought.
Yet now we are heading into a 5,000-year period of a Sun of Darkness and the focus will shift toward the world of the psyche, the dream world and subjectivity. Reality will become more subtle, malleable and permeable.
Can’t you see how this is happening (and has been since the mid 1990s)? Look at our technologies: they are breaking down the external limitations we previously lived under. Nowadays, it’s no problem communicating with people all over the world at no cost. Thus, the boundary of distance has been all but dissolved. Also, we have things like 3D printers, so a person can draw a relatively crude 2D sketch and turn it into a 3D sculpture. Furthermore, a person can be a musical amateur like me but with apps like Garage Band, can create a song with several instruments. It may not be John Coltrane or Jerry Garcia, but it still sounds pretty good!
Our capabilities are increasing and many of these have to do with this extra layer of reality that is somehow both material and non-material. So, folks, we’ll have to keep hashing this out as I’ve surpassed my word count. For now, thanks for reading!
Shameless Self Promotion Time: If you enjoy my writing, please check out my novel, “The Teacher and the Tree Man.” The full 80-chapter story can be purchased as an e-book or as a paperback from Amazon or as an e-book at Smashwords. You can also purchase the book in each of the 20-chapter “books” (there are 4, for a total of 80) at Amazon as well (book 1, book 2, book 3 and book 4). If you are a member of Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited like I am, you can read the individual books for free. If you like reading and discovering independent authors like me, I highly recommend joining Kindle Unlimited!
Here is a bit from the synopsis: “The Teacher and the Tree Man” is a modern American epic fable about a Teacher in love with Nature who discovers a human head, a Tree Man, living in a tree in a forest near his house. The novel is about our need to unplug from our culture and re-discover ourselves in Nature. It is a fun-yet-deep look at: the media, our education system, drugs in our culture and our inability to listen to each other in the political arena.
My Grandpa: A Real Man of the 20th Century
What follows is more than the usual obituary. It’s about my grandfather, Walter Fitzgerald and the author, Larry Shook, was Walter’s next door neighbor in the late 1970s/early 1980s and got to know him pretty well.
And I’m sharing it as part of a series of posts about family, fatherhood and manhood. Last week, I wrote about my 14-year-old son Oliver and the challenges in his life.
When I read this article, I found myself connecting deeply with my grandpa because not only was a lover of getting out into the world and roughing it, engaging with it, he was a sensitive, warm man.
He died when I was nine and I remember being really sad about it. He was my favorite grandparent, the one I felt the most connection with. I have a visceral memory of him feeling like a warm-hearted rock, someone I could trust, and I associate this memory with sitting on his lap. It’s no wonder my mom is such a lovely person!
Anyway, I was surprised that when I was telling a friend about him over dinner last week, I started to choke up. I mean, he died in 1982. But this made me realize that the laws of time may be much less intense when it comes to the ways of love. We lose someone, we’ll always feel that.
The main reason I’m sharing this article, though, is because I feel those of us in these confusing times in the 21st century can learn a lot from this man of the 20th century.
Too much of the dialogue today seems to be demonizing men. It sometimes feels like a vengeance for patriarchy: you’ve been oppressing us for all these years, now it’s your turn.
How about let’s stop oppressing each other?
Anyway, I’ll be certain to re-visit this topic in future posts. For now, please enjoy this well-written article about a wonderful man, my grandpa, Walter Fitzgerald.
“Walt”
by Larry Shook
State Magazine (August 1982)
Walter Fitzgerald, my friend and neighbor, is dead. He passed away Monday morning, July 12. He was 82.
Late in the afternoon of Walter’s death I stepped over the low fence that separates our yards, stooping under the intertwined limbs of the big old apple tree and bent lilac that mark the portal where my four-year-old son and three-year-old daughter also climb into his yard. As always, the yard was well-groomed.
The small vegetable garden which is positioned in the center of the yard was in rowdy leaf, the two Early Girl and one Champion tomato plants climbing lustily in their cages (perhaps sensing something, Walt set out only three tomatoes this year instead of his usual five), the beets, carrots, onions and peas marching in rows which Walt’s wife, Mabel, said she got straight this year for once. All along the yard’s perimeter the red-leafed plums smoldered as if through haze, and everywhere things—peonies, roses, ferns, plenty of plants I cannot name—grew in good health and under control.
I’m trying to help you see this because it will help you understand something about Walter. It is a neat and restful yard, but it is not fastidious. Not the yard of a garden-clubber. It is a not-entirely successful attempt at being domestic. Were the yard not so clearly marked by the touch of a woman’s hand, it would probably appear to be merely harnessed and nothing more. This is the yard of Odysseus come home to live out his years with Penelope. Through the foliage in the distance, bobbing peacefully on the waves, you can almost see a worn-out adventure ship.
He was born in Helena, Montana, in a time when the frontier had just barely settled down. Son of Marshall, a dairy farmer, and Bessie Hoffmann, a beautiful woman. In the Helena of Walter’s youth, legends in the West were still on the streets. Men like Elmer Keith, who walked around with a black powder six-gun on his hip and who went on to become known as the dean of American gun writers.
I think I understand a little about Walt’s Montana. Over the nearly seven years that I knew him he told me a number of stories when some little thing would suddenly light a memory as though it were a motion picture screen. And when he talked, you listened, because he was not a garrulous man.
His Montana was full of game, real weather, beauty and sturdy people. Once I loaned him a copy of Norman MacLean’s A River Runs Through It, a splendid book which makes lusty and tender love to Montana as though Shakespeare were bedding a dancehall girl. Walt sat up with the book into the wee hours of the morning and hailed me the next day over the fence, “That’s just the way it was!”
Once, in high school, he went to a fountain for a drink and when he turned the valve, air in the line caused water to shoot up and hit a bust of Columbus, whom, it was known, Walter did not care for, for some reason. A teacher grabbed Walter. Walter pushed the teacher, causing the teacher’s head to go through the glass portion of the door. Walter was sent home. Another time a teacher grabbed him in his seat in reprimand for something Walt never remembered. Walt pushed that teacher, too, causing him to sit down hard on the note spindle on his desk. Walter always remembered those things well, because his father was a member of the school board and the events did not sit well with him at all.
As a kid, Walt worked for the U.S. Forestry Service, the U.S. Land Office and the U.S. Geological Survey. He spent a good part of his youth sleeping under the stars and walking. He would rather walk than ride a horse, and he didn’t think anything of covering 20 miles at a time (My note: This sounds like my attitude about riding a bike versus riding in a car!).
He became a surveyor. With the Geologic Survey he was a member of the team that performed the first major survey of the Grand Canyon. They packed in with mules and tents, and I think they spent the winter in the Canyon.
Along about Christmas, 1925, the Great Northern Railroad flung an army of men against eight miles of rock in the Cascade Mountains. Three years later, the army walked through the mountains, the famous Cascade Tunnel behind them, the longest in the Western Hemisphere (According to the Wikipedia entry about the Cascade Tunnel, it was surpassed in length by the Mount Macdonald Tunnel in British Columbia). On the 50th anniversary of the event, the AP wrote: “It was the golden age of American railroads when grimy crews of muscular men ripped miles of rock through mountains. Work never stopped on the Great Northern Railroad tunnel—no holidays, Sundays, days or nights off.” Walter Fitzgerald had been a soldier in the Great Northern’s Army.
A few years later he became a soldier in Uncle Sam’s army as a portion of the Great Northern was activated as 704th Railway Grand division. He served in North Africa and Italy. In North Africa, Walter and the fellows in his tent used to keep cribbage scores by notching a tent pole. The pole finally collapsed and the tent along with it. When the quartermaster replaced the pole, he said something like, “The insects around here are something else.” Walt and the boys said something like, “Ain’t it the truth.” That’s the only perfidy Walt’s daughter Leslie ever heard associated with her dad.
Walt met the tall strawberry-blonde Norwegian Mabel Olsen, a registered nurse, in 1942. He was a railroad soldier and she, an Eastern Star Mason (“I didn’t like it very much”), was helping out at the Scottish Rite Temple in St. Paul, Minnesota, by serving food in the service center. She served Walt a meal there just before he was shipped overseas, and Walter pressed for a date. They wrote to each other while Walt was away in the war.
It was after midnight on Christmas of 1944 when Mabel received a call from him as soon as the train bringing him home stopped rolling. “There’s an out-of-uniform soldier down at the St. Paul depot who would like very much to see you,” he told her. She didn’t even know he was back from Italy. This was still a hard time for Mabel and her parents, because her brother, Lee, had been killed only a few months earlier, on September 15, while sitting atop a tank that was crossing a river in France. Walt was aware of this; he’d received the letter about Lee’s death in the same mail as the letter telling him of his own father’s death. Mabel met Walt at the depot and was able to get him past the MP guard (Walt lacking a pass) only because she’d been feeding the guard down at the service center.
Walt and Mabel were married on June 25, 1945. Months later, Mabel was pregnant with Leslie, their only child, before she and Walt could get away on their honeymoon. Walter took his bride to Bieber, California, a rugged mountain town where he had once tended bar after being furloughed from the railroad. Walter loved Bieber. Mabel, the well-heeled Minnesota city girl, did not.
All told, Walter spent 42 years with the Great Northern leading the adventurous life of a railroad man. He retired as a Division Engineer, the best engineer the company had, in Mabel’s view.
By the time I knew him his life had become quiet. But among his things are bundles of snapshots taken over the years that show what his life had been like. It was full of flooding rivers, washed-out bridges, rockslides, landslides and sinkholes, collapsed snowsheds, track swept away by various elements and encumbered by various obstacles, and train wrecks. He had fought a war with nature.
Despite the rugged life he led and although he was what is known as a “man’s man,” he was one of the gentlest spirits I ever met. He loved animals and children and plants with an outright and natural warmth that was always touching to see. He and I hunted birds together a few times and fished together once. Mostly, though, we just visited around the house. He was well-read on current affairs and history. I found him unfailingly delightful to be with, reasonable in discussion, but I learned to avoid two topics at all costs: Richard Nixon and firearms control. He considered Nixon the only president in his lifetime who had a foreign policy; the National Rifle Association was probably his favorite organization.
“I’m what you call a black Republican,” he once told me, finishing the statement with a nod of the head that was like an exclamation point, his eyes merry.
His favorite artist was Charlie Russell, favorite book H.G. Wells’ History of the World, favorite poems The Shooting of Dan McGrew and The Cremation of Sam McGee by Robert Service.
I have never known a person who carried youth into old age the way Walter did. While I was always prepared for Walter’s death, I was never prepared for him to get old. He didn’t. And I feel like he was given a hero’s departure.
There was a gentle build-up over the period of a week, so that Mabel could have some long visits and a couple of good cries together, so that Leslie, one nephew, one niece, a close railroad buddy and Judy and I could say goodbye. Then a quick exit with a heart attack. After he had lost consciousness I went to the hospital to see him one last time. He was making a stony fist which I covered with my hand. I told him how I felt about him, although not out loud, and I know he heard me.
Goodbye, Walt.
Thanks for reading!
Shameless Self Promotion Time: If you enjoy my writing, please check out my novel, “The Teacher and the Tree Man.” The full 80-chapter story can be purchased as an e-book or as a paperback from Amazon or as an e-book at Smashwords. You can also purchase the book in each of the 20-chapter “books” (there are 4, for a total of 80) at Amazon as well (book 1, book 2, book 3 and book 4). If you are a member of Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited like I am, you can read the individual books for free. If you like reading and discovering independent authors like me, I highly recommend joining Kindle Unlimited!
Here is a bit from the synopsis: “The Teacher and the Tree Man” is a modern American epic fable about a Teacher in love with Nature who discovers a human head, a Tree Man, living in a tree in a forest near his house. The novel is about our need to unplug from our culture and re-discover ourselves in Nature. It is a fun-yet-deep look at: the media, our education system, drugs in our culture and our inability to listen to each other in the political arena.
“Thank You for the Gift of Another Day”
On the Power of Gratitude
“Thank You for the gift of another day. Thank you for the opportunities presented by this gift.”
Such is how I start every day.
When I was 24-25 years old, I was addicted to drugs. I lost four friends in that period; one to an overdose and the other three because one was probably high, driving back to Georgia where the three of them were going to enter re-hab, and nodded off at the wheel on a remote highway in Texas. All three burned to such a crisp that the local authorities took weeks to figure out who they were.
Even with such losses, I remained addicted. Once you are in that cycle, it’s not an easy thing to break out of. Even when you know you should. In fact, knowing it might make it worse; it’s just one more thing to beat yourself up about, one more thing to make you seek solace in the very thing you know might lead to your death.
But I was saved (I’ve written about it here). I use that syntax deliberately. I’m never interested in forcing my metaphysical worldview onto anyone else, but my experiences in life have led me to the strong conviction that there are other forces out there, some of them helpful, some which mean to harm us.
And for whatever reason, reasons which I’m still exploring 20 years later and likely will be for the rest of my life, one of the positive forces intervened to help me out of that situation.
I was in a jail cell in downtown Los Angeles, tossing and turning through the withdrawal symptoms that heroin and cocaine addicts experience, when I heard a Voice: “It’s over. You can move on now.”
It was loud and clear. Now, it’s funny because as I’ve related this experience over the years, the exact words have changed. I honestly don’t recall them. All I recall is the spirit of them, which was quite simply that I was being granted a second chance and that this harrowing experience was over.
In spite of the pain of being in withdrawals, I felt tears of gratitude well up. And during the next day and a half in jail as I waited to be released, even though I didn’t sleep and felt like I had the worst flu in my life, I was filled with happiness.
I told myself I wouldn’t take it for granted, that I’d be grateful for every breathe I would take going forward. Because others, not only my four friends but my girlfriend of the time, the first love of my life, who was lost to her drug addictions several years later, didn’t get that chance. Not everyone does.
We all know that people can be taken from this world through no fault of their own. Someone out taking their dog for a walk gets hit by a driver who has momentarily dozed off at the wheel. Someone who’s been healthy and the life of the party suffers a massive stroke at age 42.
Such stories are part of the tragic nature of this world we live in. There are, of course, worse ones.
The point of such stories, I believe, is not to dwell on them, not to be consumed by their unfairness, but to realize that every second we get is a blessing, every second worthy of our saying, “Thank you.”
Now, have I fulfilled that promise to myself in the jail cell to not take any of it for granted? Are you kidding me? I’m human, after all—promises made, even the most sincere ones, are going to be broken sometimes.
And in this world of experiences that sometimes seem oh-so-pointless and hard to enjoy (waiting for hours at a DMV, anyone?), it’s hard to constantly remember to say thank you.
This, however, is why I start each day with that invocation. Because who knows, maybe one of these nights I won’t wake up the next day?
In addition, as I’ve grown older, I’ve learned that our challenges are often our best teachers.
Let’s look at not necessarily a hard challenge, but a challenge all the same. It happened yesterday.
Summers in Japan are hot. And I happen to live in an inland area that is often the hottest of the hot. So yesterday, my friends and I played a round of park golf in the hottest part of the day in the hottest season of the year in the hottest part of a hot country. Smart, right?
Yet it was a special occasion. You see, I was meeting a treasured friend, a guy I met in 2004, my first summer here, and who I thought would be here as long as I was. Then, as these things go, he moved back to the US several years back.
There was a group of six of us that wanted to get together. It’s hard in these busy times to get such a group together at an agreed-upon time. But because I hadn’t seen my friend for two years and this would be the only chance I’d get to see him, I wasn’t going to miss it.
Our original plan was to meet at 10:30, play park golf, go home to refresh and meet at a beer garden in the evening. But a typhoon offshore changed the plans, so we were teeing off at 1 p.m, the peak of the heat. It was hot (around 100-105 F heat index). I’m not going to deny that.
How does gratitude play into this? Well, lately, I’ve come to be grateful for climatic extremes because I realize they present opportunities for pleasurable experiences.
In this case, I knew the hotter I got, the better my cold shower and cold bath at the ‘onsen’ (Japanese hot springs) connected to the golf course would feel. So my mindset was, “Bring on the heat.”
And my friends can tell you, I was a ball of energy in spite of the heat. I had a blast out there with everyone, though I probably ought to apologize for yakking so much. Then again, it’s possible had it not been for my chatting, everyone would have fallen into a permanent, heat-induced stupor (we did actually see someone who’d been playing tennis next to the course being carted off in an ambulance!).
Anyway, after just over two hours on the course, I finally got into that bath. And in spite of the fact that it was designed for at most three people but an old man squeezed in so that four of us we were balled up like Japanese monkeys, it was like a slice of heaven. And when I got out, that hot air felt wonderful.
So yes, I’m a deep believer that gratitude is one of the great life hacks. It can be used to make difficult experiences cherished ones. So much more I could write about this, but I’ve well exceeded my 1,000-word word count (Please forgive me!) Not to worry, I’ll re-visit this topic in the future. For now, thanks for reading!
Phish: 7/13/2019, Set II: A Microcosm of 2019 Jamming
A Breakdown of Set 2 at Alpine Valley
(Blog Note: I think I’m going to post longer pieces I’ve written on Saturdays and Sundays during this six-week writing schedule. Some of these will be focused on topics you don’t care about. Like today is a detailed analysis of a phine set of music by my favorite band, Phish. If you don’t care, don’t read it. But if you do, and if you like what I’ve done, somehow let me know, either by liking this post, commenting on it, or reaching out to me on social media. This is all a part of me trying to find the best niche for me to focus my writing on over the next few years. Thanks in advance! – Bryan)
Well, all that’s left of summer 2019 for Phish are the annual three shows at Dick’s in Colorado on Labor Day Weekend. But just because the 21-show summer tour is over doesn’t mean we have to stop enjoying the music, does it?
Certainly not!
For the past eight years I’ve had a habit of listening to every note of every show and continued that this tour. So I’ve heard it all. But with five shows a week for four weeks and each show lasting 2 1/2 hours or more, just keeping up is a task so there hasn’t been much time to go back and appreciate what happened. (Though since writing this first draft a few weeks ago, I’ve managed to listen back to some of it.)
Thus, over the summer I’ll likely single out sets that I think are worth diving into and will post some of those findings here (I’ve also got some Disco Biscuits content coming). I will focus on 2019, but I may also do some older shows, too.
Phans everywhere know that the tour closer, Sunday July 14th at Alpine Valley in Wisconsin, was an all-timer, an “instant classic.”(Read this excellent review by Brian Brinkman of the GREAT Beyond the Pond podcast, the person who actually inspired the post you are reading!)
Fortunately, because of a Monday holiday here in Japan on July 15th, I had the rare chance to watch a Sunday show live. Even more fortunately, the stars aligned and kept my family members reasonably busy so I could behold that epic show with some concentration.
All I can say is: Wow. How lucky we are as phans to have a band that is still so willing to take chances, still evolving and can, yes, still jam a tune for 38 minutes!
Yet today, I want to dive into the night before. I’d heard from the previously mentioned Brian Brinkman of the Beyond the Pond podcast that the second set of the 7/13 Saturday Alpine Valley show had a real nice flow and highlighted some spacious playing. As I’ve settled into middle age (I’m 46 now), I appreciate more and more that kind of playing. Leave the ragin’ for the young bucks!
So I listened to that set closely, took some notes and want to share those with you today, okay? Okay? I can’t hear you! That’s better … let’s dive in.
“Halley’s Comet” opened the show and when I was watching live I thought, as I always do when they play this tune, “let’s take it for a ride,” remembering the glory days of 1997-98.
But alas, just past six minutes the tune came to another early end.
Fortunately they struck up a song that has really grown on me in the past year or two, “A Song I Heard the Ocean Sing.” And from here on out, the set is a doozie.
“A Song I Heard the Ocean Sing” doesn’t look like much on paper, a mere eight minutes, 45 seconds. Yet the song proper ends at the two-minute mark and then there’s 6:45 of ever-evolving, spacious jamming. The first three minutes stays in Type 1 territory but then a keyboard wash from Page at 5:00 takes the band into Type 2 space with Mike fading to silence, Fishman tastefully treating the cymbals and Trey experimenting with his effects effectively.
All the while Page stays on those lovely keys, leading the jam for two minutes and just after 7:00 his keys begin to float between the left and right speaker (great on headphones!) until the final minute of the song when he switches to the “circus organ” and the jam loosens as it prepares to launch into “Runaway Jim.” This 6:45 is a wonderful microcosm of Phish’s summer 2019 jamming style.
“Runaway Jim”: After the song proper ends at 3:24, the band tastefully jams in Type 1—Page on the baby grand piano, trading licks with Trey while Fish continues the shuffling “Jim” beat and Mike explores his fretboard. About one minute later, Trey starts in with the echo effect he’s employed throughout 2019 and which I am a big fan of. At 5:27 it almost sounds like Trey is ready to abort but Page shuns that idea by chipping in with an eerie, moonlit-walk-in-the-Transylvanian-woods keyboard and Trey returns with some more echoes at 5:51 as Mike plays the top of his board with a droning pattern. This awesomeness continues for about two minutes when Trey begins to soar and Page leaves Transylvania for the glamorous halls of Catherine the Great’s St. Petersburg royal court and then drives down LA’s womanly night time highways as Fish begins crashing a little harder on the skins. This blissful blast keeps things beautiful for the final two minutes of “Jim” until 10:35 when Trey strums out some chords, Page hops back on the baby grand and somehow Trey and Fish mind meld into the always rhythmically joyous “Undermind,” a personal favorite.
“Undermind”: Do yourself a favor: Just focus on Fish for the full 7:54 duration of this tune. When you are done, try telling anyone around that he is not the greatest rock drummer of the 21st century with a straight face. I’ll wait…
Couldn’t do it, could ya? Yes, we are blessed to have such a master back there holding things down.
Now, re-listen to the tune and appreciate how Mike somehow is able to compliment Fish, how smooth and effortless he makes it seem. Meanwhile, Page throws a killer organ solo from 1:57 to 3:13. The point is: Anyone who thinks Phish is Trey and three guys is an ass, an idiot, or both! Of course, Trey doesn’t want to be forgotten so he immediately follows Page with a very creative, well-executed solo from 3:14 to 5:45 when the song returns.
But is it over? No, because as we hit 6:20 we get about 90 seconds of Fishman drum fills where it’s clear the band wants to showcase their octopus of the skins. Wow. The crowd, often noticeably absent on the Live Phish SBDs, becomes audible just before 7:00 and the cheers intensify especially around 7:20 when it’s 30 seconds of pure Fish Love Fest.
“Ghost”: I do miss the build-ups “Ghost” used to get in the late 1990s. Oh, well, it gives a reason to throw an old show on the “turntable” from time to time.
So at 19 seconds, the song starts with that groovy, heavy beat supplied by Fish and Mike all while Page cackles on the clavinet. At 2:30 before the breakdown it sounds almost like Trey plays with the “Hold Your Head Up” riff that Fishman loves (ha, ha) and then “Ghost” returns.
At 3:18, the jamming begins. It takes less than 30 seconds for the usual Type 1 “Ghost” fire to subside and we find the band, again, entering spacious goodness. At 4:11, Mike throws on that heavy effect I love so much and uses it to trade licks with his bandmates for the next minute or so. Page hops back onto the baby grand around the five-minute mark and Trey soon follows into the stratosphere before crashing into some fiery chords. This jam explores and is endlessly creative, you can just hear them listening to and interacting with each other. This is jam rock at its finest, er, phinest.
Around seven minutes, Trey playfully adds a bouncy chord pattern and that leads him to climbing his fretboard as Page plays off his lead on the piano. At 8:30 it sounds like they could end it but they manage to find a rather epic closing pattern that all four join in on. The crowd seems to let out an appreciative cheer around 9:30 as the train barrels into Blissful Station until 10:30 when it calms down and transitions into “Golden Age.”
“Golden Age” clocks in at 9:41 which on paper seems set up to disappoint but has any of this disappointed yet? One of the reasons I love this cover is the rhythm track—Mike’s stuttering rumble is complimented by a drum track that I can’t comprehend but which I can always get my boogie on to. Another reason I dig this tune is because of the positive, spacy lyrics—our modern world seems to have a lame cynical default setting where we believe we are devolving into dystopia. However, I think it’s more fun, healthier and possibly even more accurate to imagine the future is ripe with possibilities. One of those possibilities that I love to play with is that, as the song suggests, we really are on the cusp of a Golden Age, an age of miracles and sound that’s comin’ round, comin’ round, comin’ round! Furthermore, the key first step to creating that age is for more of us to recognize this possibility and then to live like it can happen.
Meanwhile, as I wax philosophical, the band keeps playing and the actual song goes on longer than most in this set, not ending until around 4:30 but how better to leave the “well, there’s a golden age coming ‘round” than by having Trey launch into a sky-scrapin’, heaven’s-door-openin’, trapeze-walkin’ solo for a minute as Page’s organ helps him keep his balance.
Around 5:30 we get a rhythmic jam where again, Fishman just rules, and Mike is doing his thang. At 6:36 it sounds like the jam has died but they leave Type 1 and from 7 minutes Mike and Fish reveal in a “Golden Age” funk disco jam that makes me want to wear sunglasses at night and a rainbow afro wig to a funeral while I sling bling to Bavarian refuges. Just past eight minutes, Trey and Page lock in a groovy rhythm and this then transitions for the next minute, somewhat abruptly into…
“Back on the Train”: The first highlight of this always fun tune is at 1:34 when Trey plays the donkey bray, a running joke on this summer tour for a few weeks now, and then laughs through the verse as the crowd cheers. Can’t say they weren’t having phun on this tour.
I try telling my nine-year-old daughter it’s the noise a donkey makes as we are watching the webcast live and she says (in Japanese), “there’s no such thing.” Somehow that makes the stupid joke even funnier to me.
Meanwhile, the chorus winds up at 2:34 and the jam begins with Fishman chugging the locomotive down the tracks and Page on the clav. At 4:09 Page switches to piano and this leads the band into more familiar type 1 territory which builds nicely to an exciting peak from 7:46 to the apex at 8:08, but no, it keeps climbing and finally resolves into the song’s chords at 8:30 where it plays out and we get an actual five-second break before the familiar tom toms cascade to signal it’s time to look for the elusive…
“Harry Hood”: A nice one minute intro is followed by delicate, well-played and pleasing composed sections.
2:47: Does any phan not love this bouncy shuffle? Seems universally adored—I bounce for the full 51 seconds. At 4:08 we go to the brooding bit of gratitude to Mr. Minor and as always that resolves, this time in less than a minute, into the improvised bliss jam that adds to why this is such a beloved tune. I love the band interplay throughout this version, especially Mike’s contributions to the melody; not an easy feat for a bass player but one which he makes look so easy that I think we sometimes take him for granted.
Also never to be taken for granted is Page’s playing on the piano. Listen to it here.
Around 8:45, Trey meanwhile has to return a few more donkey brays and by 10:25 we approach the edge of the runway, prepping for take off, where we launch off to the end of the set.
Ultimately, this is not a standout “Hood” but it’s still one to feel good about, especially at the end of such a well-executed set. And that’s the case for each of the tunes in this set, too. None are going to make any all-time best lists. But one of the complaints some of us have had about the 2019 tour has been sets that don’t gel together, which is why this set stands out as one of the best of the summer. So do yourself a favor when you get a chance, go back and give this one your full attention and thank me later!
Thanks for reading.
Being 14 is Hard (An Intro to My Son’s World)
Do you remember what your life was like when you were 14 years old?
For me, that was the hardest year of my teens. It was the second year of junior high school. In my first year, I had a best friend named Sean Brennan. We hung out all the time. We talked in class and occasionally stirred up trouble. But nothing too outlandish, and both of us got good grades.
Our school counselor, one Ms. Larsen, didn’t take well to us, especially how we were both headstrong and didn’t take her authority simply because she was a “figure of authority.”
So she got her revenge; for that second year, she made sure that not only didn’t Sean and I have any classes together, we didn’t have lunch together (our school had three separate lunch times) and, worse yet, all of our classes were located far from each other so we couldn’t even see each other in between classes. It was before and after school only.
In addition, because I’d done really well in my first year (seventh grade), I’d been placed in some of the 3rd year classes so had a bunch of classes with students I didn’t know and who were bigger than me. Most of the dudes left me alone, but in what would become a pattern over my teen years, I fell victim to some of the female bullies, girls who liked to use their burgeoning sexuality and rub it in my uncomfortable face (knowing it was turning me on, but also knowing I was too immature or unsure of how to deal with it).
The short of it is: it was a very long year. That fall, I came down with bronchitis which developed into pneumonia and I missed two weeks of school. During that time, I suffered the first depression of my life (more to come!).
I bring all this up because in my experience as a teen and as a teacher of junior high aged kids, 14 is often a hard year. Especially for boys (I’d love to hear feedback from women, though, to see if it is a hard year for you, too!).
And now, living under my roof is one 14-year-old boy, Oliver. And he’s having a rough go of it. Which makes life, at times, difficult for all of us: me, my wife, Shinobu, my daughter, Ivie (age 9) and our dog Jelly, who just joined our family last fall and turned one in April.
Let’s set the stage. My son and I have our similarities and our differences.
We both play baseball; he started in second grade on his elementary school team and continues to play for his junior high school team. I started in first grade and played through high school.
I love watching baseball; he couldn’t care less.
Instead, he spends most of his free time playing video games. I get it; I played games as a kid, too, and into my adult years. Still do, though in recent months he has all but taken my PS4 into his lair and barred the door.
The games these days are incredible; the graphics amazing, the interactions so life-like. And you can play with people all over the world!
I never could do that. No, I was stuck playing by myself or with someone in the room like my brother or a friend and we had text-only games like Zork and early graphics adventure games like Time Zone on my Apple II-plus in the early 1980s. Oh, and we had a version of Pong, too, though it was a different one (like me, my dad often bought alternative versions of popular things).
But back to Oliver. So, he loves video games. And is damn good at them. He often plays with on-line friends who are several years older than him. For a while, he was on a “pro team” in the game Fortnite.
Ever since he was a little kid, he’s had a passion for games. He also likes making YouTube videos. But two summers ago, he innocently made a video when he was wearing nothing but his underwear (it’s hot here in Japan; I sometimes frolic in my room in the nude!). Anyway, some of the mothers of the baseball team found out, everybody got very concerned and then, in typical Japanese fashion, they told him: “No more YouTube channel.”
Apparently, junior high kids aren’t allowed to have YouTube channels in public schools in our fair city so they figured that he should start early. Talk about anti-education.
Which leads me to the last point: Oliver hates school. Never studies. Also very different from me. I’ve always been a student and always will be. And now I’m a teacher. So I like the school environment.
But again, I get it. Especially when said institution takes away one of the few things you love.
Anyway, he’s at a tough age. Personally, I am encouraging him to keep doing the YouTube videos, just fully clothed, and don’t tell anyone. He say he is. But I don’t know the extent of it because we aren’t so close and it’s hard to find time to talk to him; when he is home, he wants to play his games with his friends. Mostly, he sees me as a person who supplies him with things like ice cream, energy drinks, money and an occasional laugh (though usually my jokes are either unappreciated or not understood).
Oh, yeah, not understood. That’s a topic in and of itself. His native language is Japanese and mine is English and neither of us are great at the other, so yeah, that leads to some of our challenges, too!
So much more I can say but I’m approaching 1,000 words. So this is the background for what I hope will be more posts on this topic in the near future. I’ll be more inclined to write about raising him if I get feedback from readers telling me they want more on this.
If I write them, I’ll make one promise: I’ll be an open book because I think this sort of writing works best when we lay it all out there.
Okay, I’m just over the 1,000-word deadline, but deadline for submission has passed so you’ll have to forgive that. As always, thanks for reading!
Blogs I Follow
Teachers, Trees and Thrones! 