“Thin that I thawed before this batter.”

Bwahahahahaaaa! Thank you songlyrics.com.

#88 lyrics

Yes, it’s crystal clear.

Actually. I was checking up on a lyric for this song I’m digging, #88, by Lo-Fang. I have the song in my head a lot during the day, when I’m walking or on the train to and fro, but there is one line that just seems totally wrong, as in, poor choice. It goes something like, “An idea growing quietly from something within spreads quicker than the cancer that destroyed your mother’s skin.” I’m all for fresh analogy, but that is so insensitive and there had to be a better one to use than that. It’s one of those that seems highfive genius at four in the morning, but (should) make your toes curl when you wake up at noon and reread it.

However. I am really enjoying whoever made this attempt to get these lyrics online. I think I will sing these from now on instead:

Untitled

Talk about originalogy! And a little post-modern repetition, to boot!

La Tsampa

Just under my noes, literally on the other side of my block, is an AMAZING vegetarian restaurant, La Tsampa! It’s tucked behind its organic store and the food is made with organic love! I had their full menu deal for 22 EUR which came with a starter, an main dish, and dessert. My starter was some kind of faux-meat samosa that had traces of fennel and pecans. It also came with a brightly coloured salad of various greens and shaved carrots and beets. I never enjoyed beets raw before, but I could taste the garden in them and loved them! My main dish was their Goulash Quorn and fava beans.  So perfectly seasoned and cooked I couldn’t tell/didn’t care I wasn’t eating meat. Also joining the goulash was dark green steamed spinach, bright orange squashed glazed with something that was sweet and savoury at once, and a temple shaped mound of brown rice with topped with toasted almonds! It was so perfectly presented. Enough food for while still having white space on the plate! For dessert I had the beautifully dense chocolate pie with crust made from pecans and a graham cracker type base. I drank a glass of Josef Ale, which is also a bio beer.

On my way out, I picked up some eggs and bananas and a load of bio beer and wine! About to dip into fairtrade Malbec a soon as I finish this sentence.

Been thinking the last days on the train.

Things are unstable. I feel this in my life. My emotions are all over the place and I am not consistently good when I’m alone too much, which has always been a sign for me that I need to get my shit together. I am in one of the loneliest times of my life and my spirit house is getting a total overhaul. For the good, I believe, but this hall of mirrors is killing me. I don’t have the the regular Christian check-ins that say, “You’re doing good! Way to be working for the kingdom.” Man, sometimes I just want to feel like I’m not a bad guy despite the shit I’ve done and that “at least God loves me.”

And then I have this part of me that so badly wants to share the wonderful things in this world with someone. To sit on a tall wall and watch the sun play on the parallel lines the planes leave in the sky as it sets. And to kiss and to hold and to make love and to dream and to eat yoghurt out of the jar together. And here’s is the craziest part. I have never in my life had so strong the desire to have children. I still want to hold off for a few years(which won’t be too hard given my current state), but I am sometimes very near tears from the thought of the love I already have for them. The love I am SO ready to pour into them. I want to be the Giving Tree. Not sure if it’s just my physiology of my age or what.

But then I remember that I need find my grounded-ness again. I need to let my compass settle after this astroid I called out of the sky. I need to find again how to be ok with lonely. And lonely in another country.  Staying off Facebook these last several days has helped. I do remember last time I was single for a long stretch the animosity I would sometimes feel for happy couples. I’d come back from tour and everyone else would have a boyfriend or girlfriend to pick them up from the airport. I’d take the tram and haul my suitcase into my quiet apartment and try to take advantage of my time.

Essays In Love quotes

Reading Alain de Botton’s book(his first!), Essays In Love. It’s a delightful read with fun story and some decent thoughts on love that feel like he’s discovering them as he’s writing them down, which allows me to take them in easier even if I don’t fully agree. However I sounded in my last post, I haven’t given up on love and its forms. Here are a some from the first half of the book:

“We fall in love in love hoping we won’t find in another what we know is in ourselves, all the cowardice, weakness, laziness, dishonesty, compromise, and stupidity. We throw a cordon of love around the chosen one and decide that everything within it will somehow be free of our faults. We locate inside another persona perfection that eludes us within ourselves, and through our union with the beloved, hope to maintain (against the evidence of all self-knowledge) a precarious faith in our species.”

“The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn’t ring.”

“It is one of the ironies of love that it is easiest confidently to seduce those whom we are least attracted. My feelings for Chloe meant I lost any belief in my own worthiness.”

“On his first date with Chloe: Silence was damning. A silence with an unattractive person implies they are the boring one. a silence with an attractive one immediately renders it certain you are the tedious party.”

“I wasn’t thinking anything cruel while I ran my hands and lips across Chloe’s body, it was simply that Chloe would probably have been disturbed by news that I was thinking at all. Because thought implies judgement, and because we are all paranoid enough to take judgement to be negative, it is constitutionally suspect in the bedroom. Hence the sighing that drowns the sounds of lovers’ thoughts, sighing that confirmsL I am too passionate to be thinking. I kiss, and therefore I do not think – such is the official myth under which lovemaking takes place, the bedroom a unique space in which partners tacitly agree not to remind one another of the awe-inspiring wonder of their nudity.”

“It can seem as though we’ve met them somewhere before, in a previous life, perhaps, or in our dreams.”

“Therefore, in the mature account of love, we should never fall at first glance. We should reserve our leap until we have completed a clear-eyed investigation of the depths and nature of the waters. Only after we have undertaken a thorough exchange of opinions on parenting, politics, art, science, and appropriate snacks for the kitchen should two people ever decide they are ready to love each other. In the mature account of love, it is only when we truly know our partners that love deserves the chance to grow. And yet in the perverse reality of love (love that is born precisely before we know) increased knowledge may be as much a hurdle as an inducement – for it may bring Utopia into dangerous conflict with reality.” 

“It was perhaps a pedantic matter over which to come to such a decision, but shoes are supreme symbols of aesthetic, and hence by extension psychological, compatibility.”

 

Dark days.

The thing I am coming to accept, now in my mid-thirties, is that I will never be known. Not in the full way that I believed ten years ago was possible. That way where I can present my puss-ugly holes and necklace of dead babies and know that I am still wanted, loved more even. That way where the knower looks at me and sees the complexity, puzzle,  pessimism, and life ‘n shit and says, “Yes, I know you,” and I believe it. Someone hungry for me!  The one I imagine at the fire in the loneliest nights and riding thermals beside me on the brightest days. Please, please, PLEASE!!! Don’t fucking mention anything about a “God-shaped hole!” Or Jesus as my BFF that will never let me down. I haven’t given up on spirituality and all that, but I’ve outgrown imaginary friends.

My ex-wife couldn’t handle my dark WAY before I fell in love with someone else. Then it was impossible. The closest thing I’ve had to a soul mate (whom I love in many ways, but never with eros) left my life without a word of explanation. However, the throbbing hurt it caused and thoughtlessness of it fucked the shit out of any comfort I had from believing at least one person knew me. This hope and the hope I had for Heather and I to someday get to a place of deep knowing? Fuck it. I often find a place of santosha, but it is a dark existence and the light of recognition flits in and out like a shooting star fizzling into the atmosphere.

I am fucking getting tired of looking up.  And if and where I find the god that loves me like my heart needs he/she/they/it will be living in the shit piles.

*

ps – Don’t worry about me. I’m fine and I don’t want to talk about it.

All You Need Is Loves

I am reading Roman Krznaric’s book, WONDERBOX, and this is basically what he says in his chapter on love. He goes on about how the Greeks were so much better at loving than we are today, but I think they were just better at labelling. I am a lover. And this is what I mean by it. These loves are alive and we know them. And just as if you’d only eat one thing you’d be deprived of other essential nutrients it’s good to not be too heavily in love with just one type of loving. Broaden your palette. See where you’re deficient. And, for the love of God, please don’t burden any one person by expecting them to fulfill all your love needs!!!

unfinished: thought on direction

I just tried to put my mind back into my nine year old self. I was just looking at an old photo of me where I had to be around that age, wearing a Transformers shirt with a bubbled-out plastic picture of Optimus Prime. I am holding an indistinguishable piece of paper and I’ve look full of mischief. The silver Honda Civic I would learn to drive in is waiting in the background to deliver me many powerful memories that would lead to adulthood. This person in the photo is ME about twenty six years ago! I can see how I saw the world then, my concerns, thoughts. But the view is a bit of the tunnel view as if I’d try putting on that Transformers shirt now, only getting it around my head. The loudest thing I see, though, is hope. I was always hopeful.

evolving leftovers