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Webster’s Dictionary defines SERENDIPITY as:

The faggy whistling sound a homosexual man makes after he orders a Tom Collins at a gay bar.

To research this definition, I frequented a total of 243 gay bars over the last three weeks and 603 Tom Collins and 713 blowjobs later, I find this definition to be very true, although I noticed the key the whistle is blown in is a half a step lower on the Upper Eastside versus down in Soho. I was blown in the same key in both areas.

I had just started listening to a series of Osho lectures that day on The Dhammapada, the Buddha’s Diamond Sutra that some spiritualists would like to wear on their finger more than the shiny standard. I listened to about three hours worth. I have a condition known as S.A.D.D., or Spiritual Attention Deficit Disorder, and after three hours of just about anything, I’ve had enough, at least for the moment. So as much as I love Osho, I was ready to give him a rest for the day and hit the gay bar.

In my past life with Jesus, when he was giving his Sermon on the Mount, it starting dragging close to the three-hour mark and I pointed to my portable sundial I wore on my wrist and said, “Uh, Savior? How about ‘saving’ us a few minutes and cut to the friggin’ chase!” Thankfully the transcribers of that long, boring speech agreed with me and only “the chase” was recorded for posterity. I’m not kidding, I mean, “Blessed is the guy who cleaned the cow shit from my sandal when I cut over Farmer Brown’s fence and inadvertently stepped in a pile.” Jesus Christ!

So I was walking Abandon and came across some furniture on the sidewalk that was being. Let me back up…I was on my third Tom Collins at the The Dirty Bunghole. Uh, let me back up before that…

I recently moved. For the first time I have a separate kitchen, as opposed to what they tend to do in studios or small one-bedroom apartments in New York City, where they put one row of imitation tiles near a stovetop and call it a kitchen. My Mom had said that I could put a small table in there and since I am a momma’s boy and listen to everything my mother says—except maybe about cutting my hair and hussling more for work and cleaning my apartment and to shave before I tongue kiss her as my stubble always irritates her face—I decided to look into it.

I wanted one of those folding tables that are kind of rectangular and thin when they are folded up, so it wouldn’t take up room when I’m not stuffing carrot sticks and celery down my throat and up my ass, and that I could open up fully when I am entertaining guests with a 7-course meal like I two every Tuesday and Saturday.

So I’m walking with Abandon, after a few drinks at The Dirty Bunghole, which incidentally have really plump maraschino cherries, or so he called that thing he stuck in my rectum, when I came across not one but two folding tables and chairs. I had a personal training client in Brooklyn that I had to take a 45-minute subway to get to coming up and I didn’t really have time to come back and forth several times.

And then I saw in a box on one of the table some books. Now I have more books than I will ever need and ever since my 12-Step Book Addiction program I am able to walk by any bookstore without the slightest urge to enter it…but if I did enter it I would have to browse the New Age and the Health and the Sports and the Writing and the Gay New York sections… “There is a higher source than me.” Okay, I’m better now.

So in this box were some “spiritual” books. There was “Seth Speaks” which is a channeled book. There was Chuang Tsu, my favorite Taoist because he was funny as fuck. And there was THE DHAMMAPADA. No way!

So I gave Abandon her leash and said, “Girl, you’re going to have to walk yourself home,” as I grabbed one of the folding tables and those three books (I left How To Get Men To Buy You Drinks In Gay Bars as I had figured out that if you just stir your first drink with your cock, every other drink would be bought and paid for the rest of the night.)

On the way to my client in Brooklyn, I read the first sutra, or section. It was only a few pages long but it was so full that I would feel ridiculous if I made my goal to blast through the book like a hotdog eating contest, instead of savoring it like a vegan brownie. Some points touched my heart very hard regarding helping others instead of just focusing on if you could get your dick sucked at the next gay bar that I was moved to tears, or rather, my bowels moved. It was too late to change my underwear and so I came up with the face-saving excuse to tell my client, that I sat in some dog shit while I was wearing my underwear inside-out on the outside of my pants. Seemed reasonable, I figured.

On the subway back, I considered plunging forward into the second sutra but then thought how the first really gave me enough to explore and stuffing more food down my throat at this point would either result in asphyxiation or some stranger giving me the Heimlich Maneuver, neither of which option appealed to me, so I decided to review the first sutra again.

At home that night, while postponing wiping the cobwebs off my new folding table that was conveniently located in my bathroom until I moved the clutter that I had relocated to the kitchen in order to deceive myself that I had actually cleaned a little in the main room, instead of just sweeping the dust under the carpet, so to speak, I received that while Osho had given a series of talks on The Dhammapada during his stay in his body, that he wanted to share more of his teachings to a modern audience with a different twist than he did some 25-plus years ago; he had learned a whole new slew of dirty jokes and felt it a shame that he didn’t get a chance to tell them to his listeners. And, more importantly, he was sharing with me teachings that he knew would benefit me at this point in my spiritual dysfunctionism.

So I started to channel Osho, if you would. Now let me explain my understanding of how my channeling works. I am not certain whether there is an actual being that is dictating to me while I act as the Earthly scribe. I think this is possible but the scientist in me doesn’t just settle for the frosting side. I tap into the energy of the being, whether that is my concept of their energy or a real energy pattern that expresses them, and it is my connection this energy pattern working through my vehicle that the information comes.

I get wisdom teachings that seem somewhat beyond my ball-scratching, gay barhopping, idiotic ways but nothing will come through me that is not somewhere in my data banks. In other words, I won’t be able to start writing in German or quoting mystics of whom I have never heard. Could this just be my subconscious mind talking? Could be. Could it be me tapping into the Cosmic Consciousness? Maybe. Could it be me tapping into a being? Look, I don’t know what the fuck it is, I just know it grooves.

So I started to open myself, and not just my butt cheeks at The Salty Seaman, and write for the transmissions from Osho that would come through my vehicle and into my notebook. I would spend each long subway commute transmitting, which gave me ample opportunity to scribe, as my new apartment is located in Bumfuck, New York.

And the flow just kept flowing. Often I would look up suddenly and have to quickly grab my bags and get off to avoid missing my stop; 45-minute train rides started to feel like minutes.  I found myself with 15-pages written just on the first sutra…the first page of the first sutra…the first two paragraphs of the first page of the first sutra!

You see Osho is like me in regards to the fact that he can talk not just about eternity—but for an eternity! He will go off on a million different tangents that all share their own wisdom teachings and then will eventually come back on point. An editor today would want to cut out whole 7-page sections saying, “What the hell—this is like seven books in one!” But Osho understood that learning, like life, doesn’t function linearly. And so he could talk for 2-hours straight answering a particular question that might have taken a “scholar” 30-seconds to answer.

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Osho told a funny story where one of his peeps asked him, “Osho, why do Jews have big noses?” She then saw that look that comes across Osho’s face when he starts to tap in and is about to go off on a very long diatribe and she interrupted and said, “Never mind! I know: it’s because air is cheap.”

Air may be cheap but not Babs' concert tickets!

I am not sure what will become of these transmissions. People have channeled everyone from Nostradamus to Jesus. I am already aware that a lot of the Osho crowd who think they have liberated themselves beyond the confines of conditioning will raise their voices in a serious naysay if I come out with a book that is claiming to be a channeling of Osho. Fuck ‘em.

I do know that my writing tends to be divided into three different categories and while they all share a similar overall feel, they each have a slightly different quality to them. When I write my typical nonsense, it flows and it feels pretty light for the most part and some lines even crack me up as I write them. [This piece took me about an hour-and-a-half to write and I never paused once or thought about what needs to come next, nor did I even edit it—but this may change after posting.]

These Osho transmissions have an interesting new feel. I can literally write non-stop and don’t have to worry about clean-up or editing and it feels like I am sitting in a private lecture all the while with a master who is using the databank of my resources—my experiences, my knowledge, my style—to share with me his message. And while I am receiving wisdom teachings that are beyond my mere intellectual understanding, on some level it isn’t quite as satiating because there is a part of me that feels like I am not creating but gathering. It’s hard to explain. Don’t get me wrong, I still dig it and will continue to do it. It just feels different.

And then there’s my poetry and my fiction. This feels almost heavenly to me. I am aware before I put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, that the poem is already done on some level. I even have a sense of it, as if on some level I wouldn’t need to even write it, that I have already tasted and digested its richness. But it wants to come into words and while words can’t capture exactly a sense or a feeling or an understanding, they are what us humans use to communicate and it feels like there is a slight need for me to change the energy form from a more etheric state to a more solid one.

When I write my poetry, it feels like my heart is open and the receiving channel through which it enters me. When I write my nonsense, it feels like my head is the receiving channel—which doesn’t mean I am intellectualizing and thinking necessarily. Hard to explain. With the Osho transmissions it feels like my whole body is the receiving channel. My body feels almost hollow and the messages pass through me, somewhat mechanically. My mind is still active and periodically, even in the midst of writing something, I will make a comment to Osho such as, “I am a wordsmith and sometimes I may modify a word or two you are giving me for better craftsmanship” and he replies, “Do what you want”—all the while the pen never stops moving.

To read an earlier transmission from Osho, read the GREEN section of the piece “A Second-Hand Emotion” [http://rebelyogi.com/a-second-hand-emotion].

I am not sure when it will be time to share the Osho transmissions on The Dhammapada. When I do, you will see that is about a lot more than just a commentary on the Buddha’s words and more of a commentary on life. There are already some funny jokes in there as well! I am seeing that some sections lend themselves to be extracted for earlier postings. One in particular I may share soon is about Rumi’s beautiful line, “Out beyond ideas of rightdoing and wrongdoing, there’s a field. I’ll meet you there.”

Out beyond ideas of seriousness and saintlihood, there’s Osho. I’m hoping that through my vehicle you will meet him there.

With the tough economy, Swami X couldn't complain about his job as a mosquito researcher

I have been trying to go through 14 years of crap of which I have accumulated in part due to having Winona Ryder’s Disease, otherwise known as kleptomania, but mostly due to a vow of poverty I took when I was six because I was duped by stupid Christian missionaries who gave me wine to drink from a Coke can and then brainwashed me with the misinterpreted words of Jesus which they explained meant that poverty is the golden key to Heaven and that I should jerk them off. This has resulted in me spending any and all money that finds its way into my pocket on crap I don’t need, as well as being unable to listen to any music of Michael Jackson’s without bursting into tears. As I take my daily walks with Abandon, my broke ass comes across tons of the cross-wearing impoverished and all I can think is that my idea of Heaven is not having to see these bums every day—let alone for eternity!

For all you youngin’s out there, back before iPods and even CDs there was a technology called the audiotape. It played fine enough for the times but if you wanted get to the next song, you would have to hit FAST-FORWARD…then STOP…then PLAY…then FAST-FORWARD again… and keep doing this a multitude of times before you got to the blank space designating the few seconds of silence before the next track.

Between the iPod and smoke signals was the "audiotape"

Inevitably you would find the tape stopping in the middle of playback for no apparent reason and when you opened up the box radio or stereo you would pull the plastic case of the audiotape out and the tape which contained the music data would be attached to both the case and the stereo system like a world-class loogie that you still had in your mouth which was outstretched all the way to the floor and grabbing ants off the ground.

Not Guinness Book but still nasty!

This was also an era where when you made a “mix tape” for someone it involved hitting both PLAY and RECORD, as no one figured out back then how to invent the Superman button that could record in a single button. You also needed some serious math skills to figure out how to fit what you wanted onto the tape, because unlike a CD or MP3 where deleting a song can be accomplished with a single keystroke and rearranging song order is as easy as highlighting and dragging, if the mix tape ended when you had only recorded half the song, you would be forced to… REWIND…STOP…PLAY. That’s not it. REWIND…STOP…PLAY. No, not yet. REWIND…STOP…PLAY. Crap, I overshot! FAST-FORWARD…STOP…PLAY… You get the point.

The other day I played Sounds Of The Everglades produced in 1991 from Silver Bells Music, billed as “Nature’s relaxing sounds with music.” I appreciated that the word “Of” was capitalized, as I think it a crime against grammarity that the smaller words often get the shaft when it comes to capitalization. The description on the paper insert said it was an hour in length and that one should “Envision yourself in the Everglades as you hear the tropical animals and birds inhabit the Everglades. ‘With Music.’” And then it came back to me why I hadn’t played this tape in almost twenty years and I smiled, eagerly awaiting to hear again what I knew was to be coming. Why I saved the tape for that long did not come to me then and I worry it never will.

I hit PLAY on my stereo (still equipped with audiotape playback capacity) and I was instantly teleported to The Everglades where the crickets cricked and the tropical animals and birds were playing in nature’s philharmonic orchestra conducted by none other than Guido Cantelli himself! I found the synthesized chord that would shift etherically in the background very soothing. I could see the lush greens of the forest. I could smell the negative ions from the waterfall. I could—BZZZZZZZ. What the fu—? Suddenly the recorded sound of a mosquito was disturbing my relaxing envisionment as it buzzed my ears mercilessly! SLAP. SLAP. CLAP! I think I got him! And I was back to my envisioning.

Crickets chirping. Owls HOO-HOOing. Chimpanzees spanking it. The synthetic chord so pleasant it almost earned a label of “Organic” from the approval board. And then—another BZZZZZZZ! What the—? What kind of relaxation tape is this?? I would have liked to be a fly on the wall at the business meeting where one guy presented this brainchild:

“I’m envisioning a recording of nature sounds—crickets, birds, maybe an occasional frog ribbiting a love song for his betrothed. Suddenly the listener is attacked by a swarm of mosquitoes that don’t let up for an hour straight.”

“Do you think an hour is enough time to induce a total slap-happy experience?” asks his coworker.

“We’ll add a little synthesizer to help make the experience more complete, so that in just a single hour one can leave feeling totally irritated to their core. If not, they can get up, walk over to the stereo, hit EJECT, turn over the cassette tape. Close the carriage door, hit PLAY, go back to their seat or couch or bed and enjoy it for a second round,” he suggests, not even acknowledging that the listener would have to do this after a half-hour anyway in order to hear the second side of the audiotape—yes, audiotapes had two sides of recording pleasure!

“I THINK WE HAVE A WINNER HERE!” everyone chimes in unison and the circle-jerk begins.

At that point my fly ass would buzz all of their ears and request a starring role in their Grammy Award-Winning audio presentation. And by “Grammy,” I mean an award that a Grandmother would get for not pissing her diaper in the old age home for two straight hours.

Grammy, can you at least close your legs?

After listening to the tape for an hour, I must admit that once the stereo bellowed out the loud click of the tape ending and shutting off, I was feeling a lot more relaxed than when I first hit PLAY—oh wait, it’s not rewound—STOP…REWIND…CLICK… Ready to hit PLAY. I figured if I could endure an hour of hundreds of mosquitoes feeding ravagingly, creating newly-formed skin teats where their intravenous mouth needles withdrew my blood, what could my mundane life devoid of “envisioning” do that would be even remotely irritating to me?

"My feet itch. Do you think it might be Athlete's Foot?"

As I got ready for bed at 3:00 a.m. the blast of loud music broadcast through my window from the sidewalk below. Suddenly I craved the soothing sound of mosquitoes buzzing.

In any divorce, be it of marriage, work or friendship, when it comes time to part ways you always have to divide up the stuff, or make claims to some stuff that the other person has been “holding” for you. Often neither party really cares about the stuff, they just use them as tools to try and hurt the other by telling them what an ungrateful prick they are.

“The stapler always jammed and on the rare occasions it did work, usually only one side of the staple penetrated the paper, leaving you in that precarious limbo where you think it may just be good enough to hold but you’re never quite certain. So I brought in my own personal stapler for the whole office to use. Fuck you—I’m taking it back!”

What’s worse is when kids are involved. One or both members of the couple usually make a power play for custody of the child that is not with the child’s best interest in mind but as a stake to plunge through your former beloved’s heart whose sperm or uterus you foolishly used to produce the little darling. “What’s that, honey? You still want to see your mother once in awhile? Well, I’m sorry, if I get my way you will never see her again.” I personally know of two cases, one involving a relative and the other a good friend, where their partner was attempting to deny them either total or adequate access to build a proper relationship with the child. How quickly love can turn noxious and poison anyone who is unfortunate enough to inhale in your vicinity.

When Ninja and my relationship took a nosedive like the airline shot down on 9/11 over that field in Pennsylvania, I gathered together her stuff and wanted to get it out of my apartment ASAP. My place was a mess and a part of me was kidding myself that by removing her few items that I’d be really making a dent in my pigsty. But more so, I wanted to be done with her altogether and anytime you hold onto possessions of another, be it the first condom he filled at your pump or her nasty stained period panties that she wore every time of the month, you are keeping an energetic cord still linking the two of you and this, at the least, will drain some of your energy and at worst can be used in manipulative ways by an energy vampire. Sounds horror movie, I know, but I have been psychicly attacked before, not always intentionally, and the effect is real.

Without getting majorly into it, the best defense is a strong offense. I don’t mean you try to zap out the other person first so that they don’t have the power supply to zap you. I mean you boost your own self up through whatever helps to keep you feeling strong—fun music, good friends, prayer, enough sleep, etc.

Anywho… When I moved into the new apartment, I didn’t have electricity for the first three days. Coming from a humble background, read that as “brokeback” struggling, Ninja had dealt with several bouts of no electricity when her mother couldn’t find enough men to blow to pay the Con Ed bill. So the second day in my apartment, she came by with a bunch of battery-powered lights, lamps and lanterns that really lit up the place nicely, as if I had captured a couple of hundred fireflies and let them go wild in my house and then the cockroaches, feeling that their turf was being invaded, attacked them and in killing them their lights remained stuck on. In packing up her stuff, I almost wanted to keep the awesome crank-powered flashlight! But I wanted to get rid of everything and so I put all her lighting equipment in a bag.

She would always leave a drink container here and tell me that she’d get it next time but next time would never come. I had two of hers. In the bag, and by “bag” I don’t mean her haggard mother’s vagina. She also left her yoga mat and bag here (nope, still not her mom’s vagina), which she used at my yoga meet-up group, the second and final in three months that we were dating. I couldn’t blame her for her lack of attendance; I knew she was much more interested in sucking down unfiltered cancer sticks than supporting what I do. While we were still dating I kept bugging her to pick up the yoga mat and she told me, “Just give it away.” I held onto it forever and occasionally used it when I took or guided a yoga class.

Finally I had a meet-up yoga session and only Neato showed up. At the end of her private yoga session, she admired a yoga bag I had and said, “I don’t have one. I could really use one to keep my mat from getting dirty.” I told her to close her eyes and when she did I squeezed her boobs and ran away. I also gave her Ninja’s yoga bag. She was very grateful and I was just glad to get rid of it.

After the first and last phone conversation after break-up day, where I realized that no amount of vaginal benefits was worth putting up with this psycho for, I sent an email to her telling her that I gave her yoga mat to Neeto, a woman she had met a couple of times and talked to and really liked.

“You have a lot of balls doing that,” she said.

I was like, “What the fu—? You said to give it away!” But it was clear to me that there was no use in having a debate on logic with a sociopath and that her, “Just give it away” was only playing it “cool.” I also guessed that she didn’t really care too much about the yoga mat which, like the dozens of bags that I haven’t unpacked for 2 ½ months, she doesn’t use all that much nor need. And her “You have a lot of balls” was not a comment on my genetic anomaly of being born with three testicles but her trying to one-up me in some sort of power play once again, in essence saying, “I don’t care either way but what you did was wrong.” If I gave a shit at this point it might have worked. But I didn’t.

But I did call Neato up and told her that I made a mistake giving Ninja’s bag to her—despite Ninja directly telling me that I should give it away—and that I would give her another bag. And I did. I also apologized for the boob squeeze but found out that that was the first action she’s gotten in a couple of decades and she wanted to know if this meant we were going steady. I let her down easy by sleeping with her and not calling or writing or emailing or texting or Morse Code-ing or smoke signaling her thereafter.

My last phone call with Ninja turned brutal and after hanging up on her, I immediately deleted her phone number from my cel phone and deleted all of our text messages (her favorite way to “communicate”) so I didn’t have a fallback to go to when I was drunk dialing; I still had her mother’s number if I was desperate to get laid. Later, I wrote her an email somewhat apologizing as, regardless of her being a complete psycho, that was not the way I want to behave.

Among other things, I shared how when she said, “Good luck finding other young girls around thirty,” what she was really saying was “I am special and you took me for granted and I wish you hadn’t and I wish you could see the special girl behind the reactive ways–and fuck you for that!” But because we are all so afraid of expressing our true feelings and being vulnerable and getting hurt, we all tend to put on the bravado of toughness so that even if we do get hurt, it will only cut the surface story—as we have locked away our ability to feel and express ourselves authentically—and then we can call it a war wound and boast how we stood strong.

A guy will talk about nonsense with a girl at a bar because he doesn’t have the guts to say, “I just want to sleep with you and so I will put up with some of your tired-ass stories in which I have no interest.” A girl will listen to a guy bore her to tears about his work and his adventures drinking cocktails on a streamliner with Donald Trump just because she doesn’t have the cajones to say, “I’m so scared of being alone that even a loser schlep like you is starting to be considered acceptable.” A friend will tell his or her friend how nice her new outfit looks when all he or she is thinking is, “You look like a pig in a dress,” or “What was she thinking wearing those shoes with that?” or “I hate her—I just come over for the free punch and pie!”

"How much longer do I have to listen to your bullshit to get a blowjob?"

After awhile we have built up such a strong fortress of surface story that we don’t even know what the true story locked in the tower and waiting for her fair knight to come and save her is anymore. This is directly related to us wearing so many masks in order to seek approval that we’ve forgotten what our face looks like underneath the layer upon layer of masks. I once removed all my masks and looked like Guy Fawkes in whiteface and it freaked me the fuck out so I put those suckers right the hell back on!

Ninja and I are at different places in the game of life, not just meaning that I am old and decrepit and she is young and immature, but that I have realized that the ego that I’ve walked around with all these years is not me and I’m trying to drop it and she is at a point before ego destruction takes place, where one reinforces it to the hilt before setting off the nukes. I realize that when I get stirred up by something she says or does it is just an attachment to an old pattern of thought and she convinces herself that when she acts selfishly and inconsiderately that this is just her asserting her autonomy and uniqueness.

I am growing tired of fighting and desire in a partner someone who will boost me up rather than put me down. I want to be with someone who will help me to drop my bullshit and not revel when I make more piles of it as she rubs my face in it. I want someone who thinks about me and my needs and feelings at least as much as her own. And this is not Ninja.

It’s almost like on a spiritual level we are speaking two different languages and neither one knows what the fuck the other needs or wants. Where the simile falls short is that I know what I want and Ninja is not capable of providing it for me, for even if she called more than once a week or didn’t repel me every time I moved closer for affection, or gave up smoking, her actions would be coming from her mind, “Because this is what he wants,” and not from her heart, “Because this is what I want.”

And I know that what she wants is something that I can’t give her either. For she has to find her sense of self-worth on her own and it seems that I am only getting in the way of her self-discovery.

There is an over-quoted line of the Persian mystic and poet, Rumi, and I will only add to the overuse by quoting it again:

“Out beyond ideas of rightdoing and wrongdoing, there’s a field. I’ll meet you there.”

The field is where our Authentic Selves sit and enjoy the smell of the grass, and the feel of the wind, and the colors of the sunset. Outside the field is where our surface stories sit in the stands of a self-contained stadium; with synthetic Astroturf underfoot and artificial lights overhead; with walls that completely block out the wind and sun and people next to us who we don’t really care to know; where we either watch as spectators other people playing endless games, or participate in a game which has way too many rules to remember, let alone enjoy. All the time forgetting that our real life resides outside of this container.

With the World Cup going on, a fervor of “USA! USA!” could be heard chanted by the inebriated all across the country who, like the Irish, will find any excuse to celebrate by imbibing alcohol to excess. I’m guessing many of these seasonal fans don’t even know the rules of soccer, just that you have to kick the ball into the other team’s net and you can’t Rochambeau a guy square in the nuts. [http://www.southparkstudios.com “South Park” Season 1 “Mecha-Streisand at :50 and http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/103727 at 4:02] And the game is so low-scoring that even baseball seems a giant in comparison to the numbers on the scoreboard.

I watched a YouTube video a guy made collecting all the reaction shots around the country when Donovan scored a winning goal for the USA team that helped them advance to the next round. I found myself smiling broadly at the people who were so overwhelmed with utter joy that the team they associate themselves with had taken the lead in an athletic endeavor. I might have even found myself a little envious, as I haven’t felt an allegiance or loyalty to any team, group, people or country in two days short of forever and it looked like a lot of fun that I was missing out on because I just couldn’t find it in myself to give a shit. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbn3rOPmR9w my favorite is the black guy jumping with the cap at 2:22]

So July 4^th came and went and I’m guessing there are at least several dozen people with fewer digits on their hands today then they had just a day ago. Most of those people will now be limited in their counting ability to the number nine. But seriously, what better way to celebrate the Colonies independence from Britain than by blowing shit up?

But what people don’t seem to fully get is that on July 4, 1776, the Colonies declared their independence but without the bang to back that up, it would have been little more than a street punk being held back by his gang of misfits as he shouts towards some other Neanderthal, “I’LL KICK YOUR ASS!” knowing full well that if his crew let him go, the first thing he’d need to do to an ass is wipe his own—from shitting his pants.

The two time periods I admire the most in American history is the Revolutionary period and the 60s. The reason being, in both these times the American citizens had had enough and said, “That’s it, we’re not playing your bullshit game anymore!” In the 60s, the pressure cooker of the Civil Rights Movement, women’s rights, great drugs and better music culminated to an explosion when for the first time ever we had a televised war and the meat-grinder of Vietnam pushed the young, and old, over the edge.

In the Revolutionary Period, just about all the Founding Fathers were pretty well off. They could have taken the piddly tea tax and still lived like kings. But, like when George Washington was offered the position of King and he said, “We didn’t fight George III so that I could become George The First,” they knew there was something greater than wealth at stake here. And not only did they put their wealth on the line, they also put their sacred honor on the craps table. And this was even more valuable to them than life.

If the same situation happened today, most Americans who are well to do would say, “I can put up with a slave master whipping my brothers and sisters as long as my bank account stays moderately in tact.” And they wouldn’t even consider risking their sacred honor—because they have none.

Those rag-tag soldiers got together, looking like something dragged out of a punk concert mosh pit, only less contrived, often taking their own personal weapons to the battle front to fight against what was known to be a superior enemy in every way—except in spirit. Yes, Barack, they ran to their “guns and Bibles” and they weren’t condescended to by their Commander in Chief for doing so; they were honored. There was one quote I read where a governor in the Colonies said, “I don’t know what the British will think of these soldiers but they sure scare the heck out of me!” Two hundred and thirty four years ago, brave men and women backed up a “declaration” with the muscle to make it mean something.

Today we are so pussified that we not only slave away long days at jobs we don’t like, where most spend four months of the year as indentured servants to the IRS, but the government treats our liberties worse than King George treated his piss boy [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGfXiIXTpE0].  The most anyone raises his voice is in a grumble but very few have the balls to stand up and take action. We celebrate “Independence Day” and yet we are more dependent on government than ever. Perhaps we should celebrate July 4^th by honoring the movie starring Will Smith. At least that would be more honest.

We are seeing liberties stripped away from us left and right and told that this is for our own protection. “Protection.” From a government that can’t even protect our own borders—one of the few legitimate jobs of the Federal Government—that not only illegal aliens slip through as easily as a finger into Paris Hilton’s underwear, but that helicopters of Mexican military have actually crossed and entered into American airspace! (Haven’t heard of this? This means that either I am a “conspiracy nut” or your mainstream media is a bunch of bought and sold whores. But check out [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHGgFgTiyWw] if you still doubt that you’re going to pick up some serious mind-numbing disease from screwing around with the mainstream media’s version of the “news.”) And we pretend that having granny take off her foot-fungused crabby shoes at the airport makes us somehow safer from the boogieman “out there” that we are told “hates us for our freedom”—by a government that erodes our freedom daily.

On the day of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Franklin said, “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.” Today’s pussy would rather be slowly suffocated than cut herself free from the noose that slowly strangles her and risk nicking her powdered neck with the knife. She would certainly never risk her own neck for the freedom of another. “Hey, it’s not my problem.”

Besides cel phones and the Internet, that is a big difference between today and 234 years ago. Back then, they would rather cut their necks by their own swords than by the will of someone else’s blade. And they realized that it was their problem and they hung together for something a lot more important than a friggin’ soccer game.

We’ve all heard of George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and his famous descendent from sexing one of his slaves, George Jefferson, who became famous for “movin’ on up to the East Side,” on CBS, as well as Ben Franklin, James Madison and the local baker of the area, Simms Bardon, who to this day no one has been able to figure out how he filled his jelly donuts to bursting. These men were great leaders, great visionaries. A man like George Washington was on the battlefront with his men, unlike the Generals of today who sit in the safety of some cushy office and have their secretaries schedule interviews with the newspapers and magazines magazines in between visits to the White House for a round of golf with the President and never have to sully their manicured hands with the blood of their men.

But do we know of even one soldier who fought and died so that we could sit here today and laugh at the buck-toothed, limey bastards who drink warm beer across the Atlantic ocean? These men, regular guys like you and me, dropped their jobs, their families and many of them their lives, to fight the good fight, back before fighting over oil and domination and control of others became the motivation of our government to kill her citizen soldiers. Let us take a moment to honor those unnamed soldiers whose blood, to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, “has watered the tree of Liberty.”

And let us take inventory about what is really important to us and what we would be willing to give up in order to protect this. If all we come up with is a desire to make more money so that we can buy more useless crap to entertain ourselves and our families so that we don’t have to ever sit down and have an actual meaningful conversation with them or our neighbors, then not only do we pale in comparison to the Founding Fathers but we don’t even deserve to lick the sole-less boot of the rag-tag soldier that risked it all for love, love of country, honor, duty, family—and us.

The time is coming, my countrymen and women, where we will be asked just this question. Under the guise of some most-probably self-created “National Emergency,” they will ask our soldiers to violate their oath to the Constitution and round up not only individual’s weapons, like they did during Katrina in direct violation of the Second Amendment [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sm5PC7z79-8 at 1:11], but also to collect people to send to the concentration camps that are well-documented to have been built [Watch the documentary “Camp FEMA” in full at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sm5PC7z79-8], all the while our media whores laugh at even the mention of containment camps.

Are we going to march obediently into the camps because we still believe that our government has our best interest at heart—like we believed when we went to war with Iraq over “Weapons of Mass Destruction” (that were never found) and that we’d be in and out (which we weren’t) and that we had achieved “victory” (which we didn’t) and that Obama would bring our troops home (which he hasn’t)? What will it take to get us off of our couches, where our fat asses have made a permanent indentation, and fight “the good fight”? Waving a flag and cheering our representative soccer team while ignoring the real threat among us is not patriotism. It is cowardice in the form of denial.

“America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”

—Abraham Lincoln

REFLECTION:

What are the most important things for you? Your freedom? Your honor? Your children? Your dog? What would you do if someone were to threaten one of these? I have read countless cases of Child “Protective” Services (CPS) taking a child from the parents of a kid for frivolous reasons—and the parent allowing this to happen! Perhaps they believed in the legal system and felt that they would get their child back after going to court. In one case I heard a lawyer talk about it was a year later and still CPS had his kid in custody—where a study has shown that a child is five times more likely to be abused, paling only in comparison to being an altar boy in the Vatican.

And I have heard others say that they would shoot and kill anyone who came to take their children away from them. I’m sure the media would portray them as a gun-toting, militia nutcase. I would portray them as someone who is not a pussy.

What would you do? WHAT WOULD YOU DO? This is less a lesson on preparedness and more to challenge you to ask yourself what it would take for you to get off your fat ass of “I don’t want any problems” and realize that the problem is here—want it or not.

MEDITATION:

I want you imagine a nightmare situation like the above and go through what you would optimally like to do. If you don’t prepare now, not only in the physical means but also mentally and spiritually, you are going to do absolutely nothing if the crisis ever comes to fruition.

“Now is the time!” This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualization.”

—Martin Luther King, Jr., “I Have A Dream” speech

High heels. You can’t live with them…you can’t live without them. Oh wait, that’s women. But seriously, when I’m tripping the night fantastic, have the perfect combination of coconut oil and semen keeping my hair standing at attention like in “Something About Mary” [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X9n42v-OUk] a nice pair of stiletto heels polishes my look to make me feel scrumptulicious!

We know why men wear high heels—UH, GAY—and what better way to say, “I’m queer, I’m here, check out my shoes!” than with 8″ spiked stilettos.

But why do women wear high heels? When a woman wears high heels she is essentially walking on her toes, which hyperflexes the calf muscles so that the leg looks more defined. If you have “Snackwell” legs, i.e. fat-free, the muscles of the legs will contract and the desired result will occur. If you have “Halvah” legs, i.e. 66.66 grams of fat in a single bar and tastes like sawdust, you are so conditioned by society and your insecurities that you are putting up with the bullshit without getting the benefit of the burger.

I am not saying that when I see a nice long pair of legs walking by wearing a pair of high heels I don’t think, “Oh, I wonder if that comes in a 12!” But think about it, if you saw a guy walking around flexing his biceps non-stop, you would think either he had such a huge ego or that he was mentally deranged. Either way you would find him ridiculous. But a woman will do this very thing and think it “fashionable,” all the while potentially causing herself serious imbalances in her musculoskeletal system. And it is fashionable, which is a sad statement on our culture.

Our culture would sell gag sticks to an anorexic if it would support an industry. It would sell testicular prosthetic implants (synthetic balls) to dogs that have been neutered [http://www.neuticles.com] (why not a doggie vasectomy instead—limit the reproducing and save the balls? Oh wait, that would limit later sales as well!) It would even sell tuxedos to penguins if it weren’t too busy selling them a raw deal with pesticides and DDT from our rampant dumping of poisons into the environment. [http://antarcticsun.usap.gov/science/contenthandler.cfm?id=1436]

So I propose weighted gloves for guys to wear that will result in their biceps being flexed every time they raise their arms. Stupid? Moronic? Idiotic? Of course it is! But no less retarded than high heel shoes. And the crazy thing about it—they’d probably sell!

Three days at my new apartment and I had already seen more cockroaches than in twelve years at my last residence. In my last place, I only saw three. One was already dead. One I found later dead from eating health food. The other I let get away and spread the message that Swami X’s crib was a dead zone.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dj3dOfNlD68]

I saw my first batch of critters near my dog’s food bowl, which I had grown into the habit of leaving out all crusty and nasty. I went on a killing spree that hasn’t been seen since the likes of Pol Pot. Then every few days one would crawl by with its fat ass like it was Jennifer Lopez at the Mtv Awards and SMASH!

And then I met “The One.” I was in the kitchen and there he was. I went towards him and was ready to smash him with a hammerfist—not to be confused with a hammerhead, which is a type of shark and a ridiculous thing for me to have in a kitchen; a bathtub less so—and he just stood there and looked up at me.

I thought how I had the power of life or death over this little creature of God who because of a public relations campaign that had the ladybug considered the cute little beetle with a score of children’s books and a full-length movie to her name and the cockroach portrayed as the dirty, disease-ridden, tyranny of evil bugs, it had seen the bottom of more boots than probably any other being on earth, besides Eliot Spitzer when he would rent a $5000/hr. dominatrix at the Emperor’s Club.

Normally his ass would be dead as fuckin’ fried chicken but he happened to crawl out when I was in a transition period and I didn’t want to kill him, I wanted to help him. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PeyiU3uWJ8&feature=related] And so I surrounded him with my cupped hands and said, “Crawl on. I won’t hurt you.” And he did.

I took him to my window and opened it and chucked him outside on the sidewalk, knowing that unlike the World Trade Center jumpers, he would survive the fall. Perhaps I should have looked down to see if any human was passing by, as this could have been quite traumatic for the little guy to land after a twenty-foot freefall on a human’s head who would most probably freak-out and try to swat and stomp on him.

Since that day, I vowed not to kill any of these beautiful brown bugs that happen to be running an exploratory campaign in my apartment and have caught and released at least a dozen of the little fuckers. Any bugs of other-than-brown color get the hammerfist.

When I was younger, we used to periodically find black ants crawling in our house. One time it was summer and we were out in the backyard and my father stomped on some of the black ants and their ant hole. I was like, “What the fuck?” as even back then I cursed like a drunken sailor who just banged a fellow sailor that he assumed was straight because of the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. My Dad justified his Fatwa against the innocent ants with, “They’ll just come into the house.”

It made no sense to me. Here these ants were, minding their own fuckin’ business, crawling around in the area where they had always lived and, like a Native American, my Dad was wishing them to the corn field, which was a reservation in the sky with no casinos.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PeyiU3uWJ8&feature=related]

Gandhi said, “A nation’s progress can be judged by how it treats their animals.” Sure the statement is grammatically incorrect—as it should be “how it treats its animals” or “…how its people treat their animals,” but it still has merit, even if it has little syntaxically.

What gives us the right to snuff out the life of any creature, whether it be one we find tasty or one we find repulsive? “Because we can” is not a declaration of a right but a fact that has no bearing on consciousness choice. We can stab a kitchen knife into a baby. We can throw rocks at cars. We can have sex with little boys. We can blow up innocent women and children. But unless you are a psycho, me as a juvenile, a priest or a Muslim, our ability to take an action doesn’t make it a right.

When I was more active with animal rights, I was handing out information fliers to the waiting line of people outside of the Late Night with David Letterman Theater. Jennifer Lopez was going to be on the show and because she had recently started a new fashion line that featured the use of fur, PETA had decided to voice their discontent for her choice and her fat ass. I made an original sign: JENNY FROM THE BUTCHER’S BLOCK.

Most people on the line didn’t care either way about the issue, as they were typical of the mindless masses that just wanted to have their brains removed from their heads and washed, as they are entertained. One woman got aggressive with me. She said, “In the Bible it says that God gave man dominion over the animals.”

I told the sadistic bitch that dominion could mean “stewardship,” “leadership,” “responsibility” for the rest of God’s creations. I didn’t go into all the ridiculous things that the Bible says or the fact that it says God gave “man” dominion and that all he gave women the right to do was bleed from their vaginas.

She told me that this phrase meant that humans could exploit animals. That’s literally the word she used—exploit. How could we ever justify exploiting anything, which literally means taking advantage of, abusing, or “to make use of selfishly or unethically”? [http://www.answers.com/topic/exploit]

I ended up being shoved across the street by a 6’5” thug cop, filed a complaint with the Civilian Complaint Review Board and was notified 10 months later that the they found that the police pig acted within the law? What the fu—? I thought he would lie that he manhandled me! I guess in a corrupt system, there is no longer a need to deny your abuses [see The S.S. Persia: Ship or Nazi? at http://www.animalliberationfront.com/Practical/Shop--ToDo/Activism/The_S1S_Persia-ShipOrNazi.htm]

In the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, he lists the first limb of the 8-limb system of yoga as the Yamas. These are considered “attitudes” or “behaviors” and sometimes even “abstentions.” One of them is Aparigraha, which can be translated as “not seizing or grasping,” taking only what is necessary and not taking advantage of any person or situation. Perhaps we can utilize not only this principle but also a book that, unlike just about every “religious” bible throughout history, no wars have ever been fought over in its name.

Even if you did believe humans were designed and should eat animals, looking at how grossly obese we are as a nation, do we really need to eat that much of it, or even meat every day? How many of you have gone even a single day without swallowing some animal product or its derivative that resulted in the exploitation of another being?

“We were hunters and gatherers!” Really? I would argue that before our hunter/gatherer stage we were fruit and berry pickers. But even if we came from “hunters and gatherers,” do you think that they killed and ate meat every day? If you’re going to argue in order to justify your taste for blood, at least be moderately consistent in your logic. By that logic, because we come from a long history of violence, we would raise our kids on violent television and videogames. Oh wait, we do.

All living creatures have the right to life, be they insect, animal, human, cute or ugly, big or small. We don’t have the right to kill life just because we have the power to do so.  So I suppose I’m a Right-To-Lifer.

Even in the case of a human fetus, paying a gonif doctor to Hoover out the little egg yolk is just beyond the pale. I am only pro-abortion if it involves cutting out the crooks and cutting up the unborn with a rusty hanger.

While I wish I could tell you that my Biggest Button is an outie that freakishly extends three inches from my abdomen like the bottom lip of one of those African women who pierce them after stretching them below their chins, I am cursed with a fairly average innie. I am also hesitant to share with you my Biggest Button, for there are a lot of douchebags out there who once they know what it is, will devote the rest of their lives to pressing it and thus turn me into one of Delgado’s bulls who will snap into a rage at a push of a button.

But since I seek to end my life of struggle, what better way to do so by sharing with you one of my vulnerabilities so that you can exploit it and I can then murder you in an O.J.-ian coke rage and have a jury find me innocent because it is composed of a bunch of racist, sexist, anti-Semitic homophobes who think, “That there Swami X is good people.” And so I share with you how to turn Swami X red without having him stand on his head or by strapping a belt around his balls.

My Biggest Button is to be misunderstood and misrepresented. Funny for a guy who writes in hieroglyphs, no? I’m guessing Jesus had the same problem when he spoke in parables and one of the reasons why more people have been killed in his name than over any other reason other than crossing O.J.

When someone thinks they can make claim to know me or what I think based on a single piece or a series of pieces I have written, or a single action or a series of actions I have, uh, acted, I become like Mount Vesuvius—shit brown with a burning hole ready to spew liquid. Or is that like Obama as he turns to flaming shit the very Constitution that he taught at Harvard Law School?

This button extends to others being misunderstood and misrepresented as well. To say for instance Hitler was a “bad” person because he just so happened to systematically kill about twelve million people—did you ever have wienershnitzel with him? Have you ever tossed rocks off a bridge onto a Jew’s head together? Have you ever goose-stepped over a bunch of gays wearing velour? Then how the heck could you judge a man based on a little thing called World War II and the Holocaust? I knew Hitler. He not only had a little prick but was one as well and not just because he liked the smell of char-roasted Jew.

I was once at a family event and my Dad said to my nephews that Alex Rodriguez, the Yankee baseball superstar, was a “bad man” because of some indiscretions he had involving saying or doing something stupid. I don’t even follow baseball and I came to A-Rod’s defense. “What kind of stupid statement is that, that he’s a ‘bad man’? Who the fuck are you to judge his ‘goodness’ or ‘badness’ based on what, a few actions?”

“I think he’s a bad man and I have the right to my opinion,” he said.

“You can think whatever the fuck you want, whether it is right or not,” I said, “But to tell your grandchildren definitively that he is a ‘bad man’ is teaching them that the worth of a man is based on a few actions as interpreted through some old man’s feeble mind.”

My Dad stormed off annoyed and I told my nephews that he had to change his diaper because he is a “bad man” that after years of taking it in the ass from Mommy X he can no longer control his poo. Later in the party, my Dad, to his credit, came up to me and said, “I shouldn’t have said that he was a bad man. Maybe I should have said that I didn’t consider him a good role model.” I told him that I thought that would have been fair and apologized myself for saying “fuck” in front of the kids and telling them that he was going off to change his diaper when clearly he was just going to sit in his own shit all day.

This button of mine developed over many lifetimes where I, or people I cared about, were misrepresented. When my friend Jesus was blasphemed, I lost my shit and every lifetime thereafter I have had a proverbial chip on my shoulder regarding this issue, by which I mean a potato chip that has a proverb written on it.

I even balled Jesus out about this, telling him that he took the easy way out, dying and all, while I had to remain here and listen to all these misinterpretations of his words by people who pretend to know him or what he meant. He told me to chill out, that at least they were devoting themselves to something and that it is their faith that would bring them to a better place, regardless of whether it was directed to a false idol or not. He explained that he represented the Highest Truth and, indirectly, their worship of him was worship of the Highest. It’s hard to argue with Jesus and so I just said, “Fuck you, carpenter’s son—and by that I mean ‘Karen’,” because I known he hates that song “Close To You” and then went off to a corner and masturbated.

So when Yogini Pea wrote me an email saying that she doesn’t like to see me abused by some shurikan insult-throwing Ninja and seemed to have formed a conclusive opinion about Ninja, I told her that she didn’t know the Ninja and that she should shut her hairy-armpitted ass up. Now Yogini Pea was clearly writing out of care for me and my wellbeing but as she pressed my Biggest Button, I had no choice but to become bullish.

Would Yogini Pea’s negative opinion of Ninja adjust any if she knew that Ninja has experienced so much frustration of late that she has felt as if she is a disappointment to herself and that when she told me that I could live with her only to take that offer off the table about a week before move day, she felt a disappointment to me and it was this which overwhelmed her into a week of silence? I’m not justifying the behavior, which most certainly doesn’t have any place in a mature relationship. But perhaps more of that “compassion” we hear so much about in the pseudo-spiritual world would be expressed if we didn’t claim to “know” all that has gone into bringing any person to where they are today and weren’t so quick to judge them.

I write only select portions of life, usually situations where I exaggerate, stretch the truth and downright lie to make a point. To assume you know about anyone I write about—let alone me—based on fictions I use to represent slices of Truth, is to deceive yourself that you are anything more than a fool.

If you were to read my pieces “Fake Swami” [http://rebelyogi.com/fake-swami.html] and “Curry-Colored Horse” [http://rebelyogi.com/the-curry-colored-high-horse.html] literally, you would think that I hated the antagonist Lina and that I would rather use the rice dicks of six Asian fags as dental floss than to ever have to be in her presence again. This is just not true—I find a strong load shot by a gargantuan black cock to act as a water-pik that clears any debris from my teeth. And also, for the most part, I enjoyed talking with Lina. Her blowjob was a bit, shall we say, “toothy,” but as a conversationalist she was all gums.

I write about drama—or nonsense in dramatic form—so I am not going to write about how I was walking holding Ninja’s hand and feeling like Kate Winslet in Titanic when she was at the bow of the boat with her hands outstretched with Leonardo rubbing his boner against her ass. It’s just boring and gay. I leave that tedium for the mind-numbing blogs that write entrees like, “I was at the bank today. There was a long line. I was frustrated to have to wait so long. When I got up to the front window, I realized I had grabbed a withdrawal slip instead of a deposit slip. And so I left, feeling very embarrassed.” Or that great invention called Twitter, named because only “twits” would use it, where the former post would be abbreviated to something like, “Long line at bank. Grabbed wrong slip. Left embarrassed.”

But the problem is that rather than seeing that I am only taking a slice of reality to represent a greater Truth similar to Plato’s “forms,” you take the few crumbs I throw to you and, like a starving Ethiopian, you claim it to be a 7-course meal. What I share with you is not even an appetizer. Enjoy it. Dismiss it. But don’t claim you know anything based on it.

When I met Toad in person after some email banter and her reading my un-blog, she told me that I was very different in person than I was in the electronic world of webpages and emails. When I hung out with Yogini Pea in Florida, in between feeding frenzies with my folks, she said that she liked the Swami X in body much more than she liked the Swami X in electronic signals and pixels, only partly because she preferred fucking a real dick as opposed to a cucumber while gazing at a picture of me on the wall. Both of these women only tasted a little of Swami X, partly because I was dehydrated when I met them and only shot a small load that even the sperm bank would only pay half for, and what they could still clearly see was that Swami X the fiction is different than Swami X the man.

Sure we share some similarities, like our hatred for blacks, Jews, gays, women and everyone else, but there is something so distinctly different from the real-life Swami X from the monster that I capture in the cage of my un-blog, which when released off the confines of the page and breathed life into only creates a Frankenstein in the mind of the reader. “Monster X.”

I share with you my trials and tribulations, and by “trials” only the non-felony ones, and you think my life is nothing but trials and tribulations. Yes, there is a lot of drama in my life. But there is also a lot of time where I am by myself, watching movies on DVD or VHS, or reading, or walking my dog and nothing earth shattering happens.

Why would you choose to be so arrogant that you think you can understand Who I Am or judge anyone I write about without even knowing Who You Are? When you do this you seem like boring housewives who have gotten so caught up in your soap operas that you would swear on a stack of flushed Korans that Susan Lucci is Erica Lane.

Can you understand this or are you too busy rubbing your own feces over your body to take in anything but the smell of your own shit? I represent greater Truths through the thin slices I share, but the measly slivers I offer themselves are too little to fully taste the pies of which they are representative, and by “pies” I mean vagina.

Yes, my Biggest Button—and all my buttons—is my mind’s own creation and it is my responsibility to extricate it on my own. That being said, it is still there. Many of my buttons have rusted locked from me drying out the lubricant that allows them to depress; either that or the BP oil spill took away their supply. But some definitely still exist.

Whenever you push my buttons you are doing me a service, you are reminding me that it is not time for me to put my scalpel away just yet and that until I gouge these things out of me, I’m subject to “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” and “The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to,” to quote Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy.

My issue. My responsibility. My Hell.

But I warn you, if you choose to press my buttons, I will hurl fire and brimstone at you and extend my Hell to encompass you in its ravenous appetite for douchebags and all the praying to Jesus won’t save you from my wrath. Press at your own risk. I would much prefer a finger up my ass to a finger on my button but I know you can’t help yourselves, can you? You hurl shit with your assumptions and conclusions and then you complain that what comes out of me is crappy. Remember the old adage:

Hurling shit only leaves your own hands smelly.

Why do you need to pretend you “know” and that you can capture a 5^th dimensional person off a two-dimensional page, the same way you capture images from Google? Who I Am is too vast for your simplistic brain to grasp in its entirety and if you were to admit that, you would have to admit that you don’t know shit. But you sure like throwing it.

And so you judge and declare adamantly how much of the world you “know” and how “certain” you are on topics you know nothing about, like when life begins or if a finger up one’s ass during orgasm really increases the distance of the ejaculate, when the only way to know anything is to know it from your own experience. And the only way to know anyone is to know your Self.

.

REFLECTION:

Explore your “beliefs” to discover what are your Biggest Buttons. It could be a topic like animal rights or abortion, or maybe a political belief like Obama is not a Socialist, regardless of that belief being factually incorrect. Maybe it comes from the defense mechanisms you used to survive emotionally growing up that turned into conditioning, such as that you don’t have enough, or that all people who “have” are undeserving, or that no one can be trusted, or that if you allow yourself to become vulnerable you will only be hurt. Think about anything that if contradicted would put your panties in a bunch that not even O.J.’s cellmate could unwind. These are your own self-created buttons. Yes, circumstance helped dictate them, but you were the scribe who put them down on paper and the factory worker who molded the buttons and the installer who put them in.

You can justify all you want that, “But this is an important issue!” or “This is not a button but a Truth!” Bullshit. I don’t get up in arms that a tree exists, despite it being a “truth.” Nor does Jesus give a shit whether you pray to him as a savior or pray to a rock as your Lord and Master. The questions to ask yourself are:

• Do you want to give so much power away from yourself to others?

• Do you want to allow others, be it people or circumstances, to be able to control your mood, your emotions, your outlook solely by pushing one of your buttons?

• Do you want to find the unchanging place inside where peace of mind is not traded like a cheap commodity?

• Then what are you waiting for?

.

MEDITATION:

Imagine that you have a tumor, a cancer you have created out of your own unconsciousness. Figure out what pattern of thought or action created this cancer. Now get out your scalpel of awareness and start cutting away this malignant growth. When you are free from this mass of dis-ease, think back to when you first started to develop this sickness, and change the pattern to a healthier one. This is the only way to remove all the remaining tentacles of this cancer. Now it is up to you to fill in the remaining hole with love and life.

So Ninja told me she would take me into her place in Bed Stuy. Granted it would be my first interaction with black people in awhile but I didn’t have much of a choice. At Peter’s big Food Feast event, as it was off-season for “Survivor” and the guests needed to follow something else that was equally mindless, K-Tron asked me how my move was going. I announced that the road trip to Poughkeepsie ran out of gas and that Ninja had picked me up in her 18-wheeler and was going to take me in, at least temporarily. [The fact that I wrote “18-wheeler” has nothing to do with the 18” depth of Ninja’s vagina which I have only managed to reach bottom on two occasions, one requiring the attachment of a 4” extension to my penile unit and the other involving a tantric technique called “Shove Your Leg In First,” not to be confused with “Shove Your Head In First,” which requires one to build up their lung capacity to that of David Blaine’s in order to avoid suffocation.]

It was a Thursday night, D-Day minus 9 days, that I called Ninja up and told her that she should sleep over my soon-to-be ex-place on Friday night, as my brother-in-law and sister would be coming Saturday morning with their van to help move my stuff into her apartment. She got back to me at 2:15 on Friday morning and told me that I couldn’t move in with her.

I was aware she was dodging her landlord for many months but we had talked about me moving in with her and she said I was good to go and so I never thought the “not paying my rent” factor would be an issue. Well, it was an issue and now the second plan was bad to the bone. What the fuck is up with these women giving me like no notice before kicking me to the curb, somewhat literally?

The last week in my soon-to-be ex-apartment involved my mother scouring craigslist (hey, she found my last apartment. If you can put up with a little nagging—okay, a lot of nagging—the woman is good with fieldwork!) and spending every day out of the apartment before 9:00 a.m., visiting various places and brokers and bears, oh my. I had some annoyances, from waiting half an hour for a 9:00 a.m. meeting with a broker who never showed and never called thereafter, to a broker, shall we say, “grossly overestimating” (read as lying about) the square footage of an apartment, to searching in Brooklyn, Queens and finally Washington Heights, areas I had never really explored and felt like a stranger in a strange land. In between all the researching and calls and emails, any free time I had was spent boxing and bagging everything I’ve accumulated over twelve years [See George Carlin classic on “Stuff” at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPOfurmrjxo&feature=youtube_gdata] and fitting in a client or two here and there in order to pay for my crack habit, and by “crack” this time I am referring to Ninja’s vagina.

One night after a full day of being a walking zombie in a hellacious search to not become homeless, my parents called me and bugged the shit out of me. When I reported the latest places I had checked out my Mom said, “Why are you looking in that crappy area?” I lost it.

“You sent me that listing and I fuckin’ went!” Needless to say, my Mom got upset and got off the phone and my Dad was telling me what “you have to do” and I was like, “I’m already fuckin’ doing it! What the fuck is your petty advice accomplishing?” Granted I was a bit strung out, and by “strung out” I am referring to the shell shock of going down on Ninja and finding myself tangled up in a tampon string, but my parents useless needling felt like an acupuncture school drop-out with no graduation day for you-oo-oo. My parents hung up the phone and looked into adoption.

In the search, I did meet a few nice brokers, including Anthony who I talked with about the dead-end life of living just to pay bills and the life-end death of bullshit religion. Unlike the other broker pimps I met, Anthony genuinely wanted me to find a place and be happy, whether it involved him smacking around one of his bitches and getting paid or not and I now consider him a friend.

I went from considering a huge place in a bad neighborhood in Brooklyn, to a smallish place in nice neighborhood in Kew Gardens, Queens and finally settled on Washington Heights in Manhattan. The decision was in part because I wanted to stay in Manhattan so I could get to Grand Central to take a train to my brother’s once a week to go hiking with him and our dogs, as this was a great bonding moment between brothers that we had only started to enjoy about two years ago; since they don’t let dogs on the subway, if I were living in Queens or Brooklyn the only way to get Abandon to Grand Central would be via a cab and I’m just too cheap for that.

I also finally found a place that felt a little more “homey” and by this I don’t mean black. Unlike other places whose windows faced a brick wall five feet away, this one had a nice amount of windows and a big set of windows in the main room that faced the sidewalk where I could actually see trees from it! It was the last place I saw on a day when I was completely punch-drunk and I had hoped it wasn’t going to be one of those nightmares that you wake up to and say, “Jesus Christ! You were much prettier last night after drinking three pitchers of beer by myself!”

I remember The Jefferson’s theme song, “Moving on up (movin’ on up), to the East Side (to the East Side), to a deluxe apartment in the sky-y.” I was moving on up, alright—116 blocks uptown. But it was no “deluxe apartment in the sky-y” and there wasn’t an Asian guy and black guy dancing and lip-synching! [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcggr_23WJU]

It is mostly a Hispanic area. That’s “Spics” to you and me. When my parents and I went to lunch on the day of the signing, the waitress barely spoke any English and when I stood up on the table and shouted, “THIS IS FUCKIN’ AMERICA! SPEAK FUCKIN’ ENGLISH OR GO BACK TO WHEREVER THE FUCK YOU CAME FROM!” everyone just applauded, thinking I was doing the famous, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” scene from Network [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGIY5Vyj4YM]

I didn’t hear back from Ninja. Day after day I called and texted and sent Morse Code and talked through my two Styrofoam cups connected by fishing line and still—ring around the collar [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3N_skYSGoY]. I finally looked up and contacted her sister and mother to ask if they heard from her, as I was worried. I wrote the piece “What A Relief!” telling how I got to the point where if she finally got in touch with me relief would be my feeling of non-choice before anger, as I was hoping for irresponsibility over injury. [http://rebelyogi.com/what-a-relief.html]. Her sister told me to go to Vegas and put $1000 on “Irresponsible.” I didn’t have a thousand dollars or a bunch of friends to go with on a road trip and kill and bury a stripper and so I wasn’t in it to win it.

A week later I received a text message from Ninja saying something completely irrelevant to her not responding to any of my, “JUST LET ME KNOW YOU’RE OKAY!” messages, making me think she was off her medicine and back to salivating into her drool cup. Just like how if I were to screw around with other vaginas that would be a deal-breaker for her, communication is almost as important to me as pussy. Her lack thereof was my deal-breaker.

There’s more drama to tell: from non-stop music blasting all day and night…to working my Spanish to the level where I am street fluent, which means I can ask, “Is this crack cut with anything?” to either a drug dealer or a pimp…to major drug dealing across the street and in my building…to cheap fruit and, of course…cockroaches.

Let’s say hypothetically that I hated black people. Okay, maybe that’s a bad example, as it’s not a hypothetical but… You coach me on how to relate to a black man by having me read about the history of the struggle of the black people, so I can see where he has come from and what he has been through. You teach me about psychology so I can understand the anger and frustration that he must have felt from growing up in a racist society. You share with me the science of the difference between our skin colors, that his is just more densely packed with melanin, to help me separate the skin from the being. You give me techniques to speak to him in a way that will respect his needs and feelings. But when he’s finally sitting directly across the table from me, all I see is a nigger.

Jesus wasn’t giving us new “commandments,” he wasn’t trying to teach us new “techniques” of outward mastery; he was working to transform our “inner racist” so that all commandments and techniques would become obsolete. But we have resisted the transformation. We act like caterpillars desperately refusing to go deep inside the cocoon and leave it in a completely different form. Because what will become of our caterpillar self? That has been all we’ve known and to discard it seems like we will be discarding our very Selves, rather than a shell that doesn’t allow us to spread our wings and fly.

When we fight in relationships, be it with friends, families or our “significant” others (as if certain people are “insignificant”), what we are doing is desperately holding onto our caterpillar as we pull our backs up into an arch that says, “You’re a grubby little worm!” Perhaps we close ourselves off and run into the cocoon, not to transform but to hide in darkness, only to emerge the same tubular little larva as which we entered.

It is not the other person that we are mad at; it is the anger of knowing on some level that we are capable of expressing so much more and yet are trapped in a cocoon of our own conditioning. Most of us are so unaware that we mistakenly call this prison a home. Otherwise we would never stop clawing at its walls, through numb and bloody fingers, for even the slightest chance of liberation.

We are not afraid of losing the other but of losing ourselves, the false selves that we have held onto desperately. We put on make-up and go to the gym and take supplements in a desperate attempt to preserve that which needs to crack and be stripped away and buried in order to discover the God inside the temple. As time starts to work its magic, and the wrinkles appear and the dissatisfaction grows, we have the choice to either hide in our cocoon and avoid the world around us, or accept that a cocoon is no place for a butterfly and to fly away, forever leaving the safety of our former residence.

All we hold onto, be it ideals or beliefs or struggles or issues or religion or hatred or another person, is only a way to keep our hands too full to open to grace, to open to the unknown, to open to our Selves. And so we throw all our energy into “saving the world” or “killing the infidels” or “getting healthier” or “religion” and forget that ALL of these are just cocoons and that the only purpose of ANY of these is to help us grow into our butterflyhood, that in and of themselves they are NOTHING and IRRELEVENT.

.

Ninja and I have had several serious fights that have lasted for hours, where she essentially tells me what a hypocritical, lying, manipulative, fraudulent, piece of crap I am. By the fifth hour I have usually grown weary of defending myself while trying to honor her needs and feelings and say, “I’ve had enough. Get out!” The repeated pattern has been that she will become emotional and apologize right then or in a text message later, saying that it is not me but her insecurity that is the problem. Sometimes we even have make-up sex. But whether after the cooling off period or the orgasm, I am expected to forget the insults and derision, to burn them in my cigarette with the tobacco of character assassination and pretend the smoke is not giving me cancer.

I have tried to make her aware of her cocoon but she lashes back, claiming the prison she calls home to be her defining uniqueness, when it is nothing but a gathering of conditioned behaviors that might have served to protect her from the storms of long ago but certainly doesn’t bring lift to either one of our spreading wings. Her distrust has her bring things up from the past, such as pieces I wrote over a year ago on my un-blog about people that I haven’t thought about since, interpreted through eyes not acclimated to life outside of the cocoon, and this keeps her unable to see all the colorful flower petals that I leave at her feet as anything more than dull. Somehow this reinforces her belief that she was a caterpillar, is a caterpillar and will always be a caterpillar and has her resenting those who don’t embrace her self-imposed limitations.

It’s become clear to me that while Ninja is definitely committed to making us work, while her insecurities and issues of self-worth are her guiding force, she will always look at me as a nigger across the table.

.

It is time to fly, my butterflies. Your wings are sprouting and the time of being a caterpillar is passing, whether you accept it or not. We can fly together or fly apart—but I need to fly.

Remaining in the cocoon will only lead to death. Breaking free will also lead to death, a death of all you held onto that you thought was important for survival but in that death will emerge a brighter life that takes flight. Remaining in the cocoon will lead to a slow rot, safe but dim in both its character and its wit.

Wouldn’t you rather risk being eaten by a bird in a world of brilliant colors than remaining safe in a black and white existence? I will no longer stay on the ground and try to entice caterpillars clinging to their cages that there is something more. My choice is made, whether by me or from a higher power that I am powerless to resist. I choose to fly. Join me or remain on the ground but I am ready to soar!

Perhaps one day we will sit on a flower together and laugh at who we thought we were and remind ourselves when we start to grow comfortable in our smugness that we are not even aware of our current cocoon and the next transformation ahead of us. I wonder if we will be ready to drop our butterflyhood for something else…for better or for worse.

“Let me be your alarm. Open your eyes. You have slept long enough. It is time to awaken. The morning is knocking at the door.”

—Osho from Meditation: The Firt and Last Freedom (p. 258)

The Native American young man had asked the father of a woman in the tribe for his daughter’s hand in marriage. As was the custom in this tribe, the father of the bride would assign a certain dowry that the suitor needed to give him in order to be accepted to marry his daughter. Because his daughter was not considered “a great catch,” not excelling in any particular skill and not endowed with what one would call “standard beauty,” the assigned dowry was for a single horse, which really wasn’t considered much.

That night the young man snuck into a rivaling tribe’s encampment and stole twenty-four horses. The next day, in front of the whole tribe, he presented all twenty-four horses to the father. The father was surprised by the gift and said to the suitor, “I told you that the dowry was for just one horse. Why did you give me twenty-four horses?”

The young man responded, “I only had one day. If I had more time I would have gotten more. I want my future wife to know that I value her more than all the horses in the world. ”

Ninja came over and brought me a chocolate bar called “The Chocolate Conspiracy,” probably because she knows I like chocolate and am a conspiracy realist. Coincidentally, I had met the young man who was the founder of the company at the last couple of raw food festivals at which I had presented. It cost $6.99 for a 2 oz. bar of chocolate. I asked Ninja incredulously, clearly still tainted by my Jewish past, “You spent $6.99 for a chocolate bar??”

She said, “You are worth it.” And suddenly I felt like an ugly Indian fiancé with no talent whose father had just been given twenty-four horses.