Enlightening Nonsense

I had ordered sixty mason jars from a company to put my various herbs on display in my apartment. This was less to impress guests, as truthfully, most guests would probably be more focused on the dead body in the center of my floor, that I plan each day to throw into the Hudson but something always comes up, than my little herb display, and more to take my herbs from their dark hiding place of my cabinets, sadly huddling together and wondering if they’ll ever be called into action, and out into the bright, albeit messy, room where they will be seen daily, honored proudly and maybe actually used once in awhile as well.

When the jars arrived, I eagerly cut into the box, coincidentally with the same knife that I had used to kill the dead body on my floor, and pulled out a jar. I have a nice, stained wood piece that is about 7’ high and used to hold all my audiotapes until Toad had me box the tapes and put them up in my storage area, not seeming to realize that the likelihood of my climbing up on my dresser and pulling down a heavy box of audiotapes because I wanted to listen to “Electric Avenue” by Eddie Grant was about as likely as my having sex with the dead body on my floor—for the fifth time today. Just not going to happen, unless I’m able to get another erection, I suppose.

I had measured the cabinet/shelf—whatever the hell it is—and the space to hold the jars was 5 1/8” tall. The jars I had ordered were 5” tall and so it was a match made in heaven, similar to Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball, only I was hoping that the jars wouldn’t pull the same craziness that Lucy seemed to always pull and then I’d have to start mumbling in Cuban to myself until I finally exploded into one great “BABALOO!” [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAV3bOJaQuY] and then we’d kiss and make-up and go upstairs and have a four-way with Fred and Ethel Mertz.

The jars ended up being 5 ¼” tall, meaning the fuckers didn’t fit. I called the company and this salesperson told me I could send them back and that they’d only charge me a restocking fee. I told her that I had a dead body on my floor and that she’d be next if she thought I was going to pay for the incorrect information they posted on their webpage. She put me on hold and came back and said, “Okay, we’ll send out a call ticket so it won’t cost you anything.” I told the bitch I was still going to kill her, as I wanted her to pay with an equal spike in blood pressure like I had undergone when she essentially told me, “Our bad—you pay.”

I told Toad about the situation and she suggested I see if they fit in my CD rack. Like the American people who supported our lying government’s position about the threat of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, only to have no WMD’s found, then listened to the deceivers tell us that the Iraq War would be a “slam dunk” where we’d be in and out as quick as a teenage boy having his first intercourse, only to be six years later with over a million Iraqis dead, thousands of American soldiers dead—much more than the deceitful figures we’re provided by the same lying government—and tens of thousands of Americans permanently fucked up, if not from losing limbs or broken spines than from constant dreams of the horrors they witnessed while being sent to the meat grinder while their government licked its lips in anticipation of biting into the juicy burger, having to suffer silently by themselves for if they share their pain with a shrink, the government will remove their Second Amendment protection of their right to bear arms, I once again thought to myself, “Gee, every idea of hers that has been implemented has made my life miserable—I guess I’ll try this latest suggestion as well.” The jars fit and I started filling them with herbs.

So what to do with the 300+ CDs I had in the CD rack? (rack, that’s the word I was looking for before.) I put them in the former audiotape rack. The problem was that they kinda stuck out a little farther than they had in the other rack—oh, and the fact that this rack was slightly less than perfectly balanced. I’m thinking of going to the gym to rack up some reps on the bench press. If I ate animal products I might consider following my workout with a rack of lamb and relax as I watch the girl with the big rack that I picked up on the way home attach some decorative rick-rack to my curtains

For weeks I had the rack of CDs leaning against this street-acquired set of drawers, and by “drawers” I don’t mean a pair of dirty underwear I found on the street. I finally moved the CD rack to the small entryway from the main room of my apartment to the bedroom. Since I have my massage table folded up and in that area, it was a bit of a tight squeeze getting into my bedroom but it opened the room up and made me feel a lot better about the dead prostitute on my floor. I did consider that it would be next to impossible to bring any woman over 300 lbs. into my bedroom but it was a sacrifice I was willing to make. If nothing else, it will cut down on the time I spend searching craigslist personals, as I will now be able to discard the ads listed as BBW (I don’t really know what that means but I think it is something like “Big Butt Women.”)

I was sitting at my computer, minding my own business, when I heard a huge CRASH and my head snapped over to see the CD rack had tipped and spilled all my CDs in an unsavory pile all over the friggin’ place—on the floor, behind the massage table, on the windowsill. After letting out an expletive or two, I started to deal with the mess. I would grab a handful of CDs from the windowsill and ten more would come crashing to the ground. More expletives. My dog ran into the foyer right by the entrance to my apartment and nervously shouted out, “What the fuck’s going on over there?” I told her to mind her own fuckin’ business and shut the fuck up and don’t ever use that kind of fuckin’ language in this apartment. A half-hour later the CDs were back in the rack and the rack was back against the wall.

I was talking to my friend Tisha on the phone [see “Eleanor Fuckin’ Rigby” http://rebelyogi.com/eleanor-fuckin-rigby for some of my past interaction with her] about her dramatic experience with acupuncture last week, which included strange body sensations and a floodgate of emotional tears, when CRASH—the friggin’ thing fell over again! I got most of her story and, needless to say, at that point I was like an A.D.D. kid who just popped open his vial of Ritalin to remember that he had lost his last pill in a poker game. I told her what happened and was clearly distressed. She started going on with her story and I was wondering whether she was deaf or just insensitive to the fact of what I had just endured—for a second time. Just like one of the lessons in my post entitled “Cryophilia” [http://rebelyogi.com/cryophilia.html], people and situations don’t remain frozen in time and sometimes the game plan has to change when life and circumstances take over. I told Tisha I couldn’t focus on her dragged-out story and had to go. She seemed annoyed by this, thinking that I should be capable of relaxing with 300 CDs scattered all over my floor; apparently I’m much more adaptable with dead bodies.

I hung up and my mouth became like that of a gutter rat puking up all the rotting garbage it had ingested in its entire vermile life. “WHAT THE FUCK! FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU! YOU MOTHER FUCKING COCKSUCKER! SHIT! SHIT! AHHHHHH!” Yes, I even used the word “Ahhhhhh.” I felt a feeling of complete rage that I hadn’t felt in a very long time. While a New-Age yoga poser would most definitely say, “Let it go and fill yourself with the divine light of love,” before I added him to my dead pile, there was something actually beautiful in its totality. It was probably like Jesus dumping the tables the merchants in the temple when he said, “This is a house of worship and you have turned it into a den of thieves!” if my memory of performing in “Jesus Christ Superstar” serves me correctly—so complete and authentic with no holding back that all any witness to the outburst could do would be to look on and say, “You go, girl!”

I wanted to blame Toad for yet another one of her shitty suggestions but as motivational speaker Sam Crowley says, “The root of ‘blame’ is ‘lame’,” and I may be called a lot of things but I’ll be damned if I’ll be called lame. A lot of anger was brewing in my cauldron related to my cluttered life and the feeling of overwhelm with cleaning up, clearing out and moving forward. Not to mention I would have to spend another half-hour cleaning up this crap.

And suddenly the sky felt my pure fury as thunder clapped loudly and the clouds burst open ejaculating their full liquid loads onto the face of the planet for the money shot. I realized that I had created this storm. That while I have become aware of my ability to influence the weather, just intention alone would not have had such a dramatic and immediate affect without being plugged into the powerful source of the complete expression of my emotion to fuel the fire. “Emotion” is “energy in motion” and that is what I put out there. But because I hadn’t channeled it towards anything in particular, the Universe grabbed it and helped release it back to its source with Her storm.

Coming out of my stupor of rage, I grabbed my iPod and put on my expensive Sony headphones that cost about $150 ten years ago and played a special brain entrainment CD from a pack of three that cost $150, also purchased when I was pissing my money away like a woman with a bladder infection. The CDs are supposedly “experimental,” which probably translates in legaleze as We are not responsible for any brain damage that may occur due to listening to these CDs. Using them I have felt some dramatic shifting in brainwaves to a more sleepy, dreamy state, perhaps the result of moving into a critically low brain cell level.

As the CD ended, a half-hour of total decompression, I took off the headphones, feeling calm and clear and a bit exhausted from the great build up and release of this orgasmic anger. I saddled up my dog and took her out for a ride.

The sky had stopped its echoing of my fury and the clouds were smoking an after-sex cigarette and the thunder clapper in the sky had gone home for the weekend. I saw two flashes of lightning that silently illumined the sky and the storm was gone.

Most straight people, and by “straight” I don’t mean that they bump genitals with someone of the opposite sex but that they follow the false paradigm that life is about working hard so that you have enough money to pay your bills and keep continuously just above the level of complete exhaustion until you die, don’t see that the Earth is just a giant mirror for what mankind is experiencing and feeling. It expresses tremendous beauty in the form of rainbows and flowers and birds singing and children laughing and it expresses a tremendous destructive force in the form of tsunamis and earthquakes and that one bird that sings off-key each day outside my window and those pain in the ass kids that buzz my apartment and run away laughing.

There is also an aspect of the Earth that, in her expression, is pulling away from us the overabundance of energy that if kept in containment would not allow us to live in body. In anger, the body would die from liver failure or a heart attack or some other “breakdown.” In love and joy, if contained inside, we would also not be able to live in body and may turn into one of those “spiritual” vegetables in India who sit frozen in “bliss” without the opportunity to look into the eyes of a mother who just lost her child or to see the joy of a child jumping up and down as his team has won the championship and—like the Earth—share in what is joyful and help distribute, and therefore dilute, what is painful.

That is why the Earth is sometimes referred to as Gaia, meaning that the Earth and all Her component parts is a conscious being that contains a whole host of parts that interact to help maintain a homeostatic system. Just like the human body, which contains billions of cells that function independently and in groups form tissues that function independently and in groups form organs that function independently and in groups form a body, while we may consider ourselves the center of the Universe, we are but cells in the great Heavenly Body. This is not to diminish our worth, for all individual parts go into the complex interacting system to make it a special being, but only a reminder that whether we like it or not, we are part of a greater whole.

I thought of how much energy and power each of us contains. By just splitting an atom you can cause a tremendous release of energy that can be used to kill 66,000 Japs in Hiroshima. Imagine the energy you can harness from a human being? And how would you use that energy? To create more competition and conflict? To create more cooperation and unity? The choice is ours.

Charles Barkley, the rowdy basketball player, was criticized for being a bad role model. He said, “I am a professional basketball player. I am paid to put the ball in the basket. I never signed up to be a role model.” I agree with him 100%. But the fact remains that whether you “signed up” or not, as a professional athlete you will have a tremendous influence on a great many children just because you can put a ball into a basket. You might have no obligation but you definitely have an influence. So what are you going to do with that power?

If I were a New-Age yoga poser I would say, “It is our duty to create cooperation and unity.” But I’m not. We have no obligation other than to be happy and authentic and even those are choices one doesn’t have to make, as proven by the abundance of people who have chosen to be a miserable fake.

My private storm reminded me of how powerful I am, that I have the ability to influence not just the weather but humans as well. That I can not only blaze the sky with lighting but I can blaze a human heart with inspiration and shine a light on the love inside of them about which they may have forgotten. What am I going to do with that power?

When I was touring North America with the musical “Man of La Mancha,” I had one of those plastic containers the size of a large book that compartmentalized all my bodybuilding supplements, from amino acids to desiccated liver. My friend Paulo had a similar case but his contained homeopathic remedies and herbs and other items common to a good-looking straight Asian man trying to deny that he has often thought about kissing another man. We put our respective supplement boxes in the storage areas above our seats.

It happened one day that the bus hit a big bump and both our boxes came crashing down, opening and spilling their contents all over the bus floor. Paulo and I were stunned and collected our pills in a trance-like haze, like two drug addicts who had just found a spilled container of Tylenol on the street. We titled that incident, “THE GREAT SUPPLEMENT CRASH OF 1994” and agreed never to speak of it again other than once a year to light a candle and have a moment of silence in remembrance of the day that shook our world.

I look back now at “The Great Supplement Crash of 2009” and laugh at how we mockingly turned a silly situation into a day of reverence. But I won’t look at “THE GREAT CD CRASH OF 2009” in the same way. That was the day I realized the responsibility of my power and that with it I can create storms or rainbows, that it is my choice to do with it what I choose. I can have a tremendous influence as a vital cell in our limited experience of Gaia or I can become a cancer cell, being destructive to a society that I often find painfully annoying. What am I going to do with that power?

It doesn’t really matter. The only obligation I have is to be happy and authentic. I can no longer “blame” anyone else for my world not being how I want it to be. I am a God solely responsible for my Creation…as are we all. And besides, that would make me “lame.”

ADDENDUM: I had used some packing tape to hold the rack with my CDs against the wall and actually leaned the folded massage table on an angle against it to keep it from falling over again. Now even I had trouble getting in and out of my bedroom—forget a BBW! The next day I walked out and lightly bumped into the massage table. Like the flap of a butterfly’s wing in Nebraska causing a tsunami in Asia, thirty seconds passed and then CRASH #3. I let out only one expletive, channeled any frustration that filled me to the sun and like a small fart, it was out of my system immediately with only a faint whiff of disgust remaining. Due to two previous opportunities to clean up my hundreds of CDs, I had developed a better system of cleanup and it didn’t take quite as long. I didn’t put the CDs in the rack again, knowing that if CRASH #4 happened, I would probably lose my shit and throw all the CDs in the garbage. Also, the dead body that was formerly in the center of my apartment is now at the bottom of the Hudson River, which means I need to find a new place to fill my water bottle.

REFLECTION & MEDITATION:

Consider what activities, thoughts, exercises that you can use to power your energy source. It could be chi kung, yoga, eating healthy, running, artistic endeavors, thinking about things that make you smile, hanging out with people who inspire you, etc. Imagine yourself filled to the brim with ALL your power. How are you going to use your power? Into what activities are you going to direct it? Will it serve you alone or will it serve others as well?

Imagine yourself walking through your day in your full power, expressing your full power in everything you do. Are there any actions of which you would no longer partake? Imagine the influence you can have over so many people. What are you going to do with that power? Whether an immune cell or cancer cell in Gaia, the choice is yours.

Oddly, i awaken w/many things on my mind & how to deal w/it all.. then, as i adjust my brain to get it ready to work ; but, i know i need something else b4 i work. maybe just 4 me.. a sense of self or something?? that is when serendipitously i find myself going 2 ur email. i just read Cryophilia. u r BRILLIANT, HONEST & INSIGHTFUL i love the vulgar honesty. not sure how i would feel if it were directed at me; but, there is a bit of me & everybody in this post & yes, i would post it. so, i am writing to u to let u know u brightened my day, made me return a bit more to my center & even gave me a way of reaching for a newer , fresher possibility for myself.

respect,

stephanie

the totally crazy & everything else…sometimes, all the time, part of the time.. zen girl

—Email received today from a girl I met at the last Yoga & Raw Food Expo in NYC and a reminder to me of how a small gift shared can transform a person…even if just for a day. Keeping a gift to oneself may keep a frown from blossoming into a smile; don’t keep your power contained. (Did you notice that I’m BRILLIANT, HONEST and INSIGHTFUL?)