I spent half of my morning walk with my dog in tears, experiencing the full range from the misty-eyed trickle to the complete balling downpour. If I went to a headshrinker he would ask me, “What are you so sad about?” and I would respond, “Nothing.” He would then start parroting jargon that enough “Polly want a cracker’s has fooled him into thinking it is his own wisdom, instead of borrowed bullshit. “We call that Disassociated Depression, when the cause of the depression is unrelated to any specific incident.”
But the headshrinkers are trained in seeking dysfunction, a very “cup half-empty” way to look at his fellow travelers, and so they see sickness as easily as a crack addict sees giant bees with duck’s beaks swarming his head—even when there is no buzzing and quacking. Perhaps Freud saw everyone has being sexually repressed because his small sample of life exhibited this pattern and so he projected its dis-order as a universal truth. More likely Freud himself was a sick pervert who had penis-shaped pencils in his office, making his patients think, “Maybe everything is a penis.”
I was walking my beloved dog to who even the most boring, plain, dirty city block is a joyous opportunity for exploration. I was listening to music by Matthew Nichols (www.matthewnichols.com), a musician I met in the subway that I recruited to play for my last yoga class, whose music soars my spirit upward. I was thinking about my soulmate who, after what felt to me like an eternity of wandering aimlessly because she couldn’t read the simple map I had sent her over the Astralnet, which even included those always-helpful landmarks like, “When you get to the man selling fruit on the corner, make a left—but only after picking me up a few bananas—he has the best deal on bananas in the city,“ finally found her way back to me.
I was crying because I was overflowing with Gratitude and when it fills you from the bottom of your feet to the top of the head, it usually starts to pour out of your eyes. Sometimes projectile vomiting has been known to occur but I still contend that this is more often the result of a bad burrito than Gratitude.
The headshrinker would ply me full of drugs from his butt-buddy, the pharmaceutical industry, whose sole interest has nothing to do with “souls” and everything to do with dollars. I would walk around like a zombie extra from “Dawn of the Dead,” never to cry again. I would almost forgive them if this were because side-effect number 256 listed on the insert in a font size of 4 read “possible drying up of the tear ducts.“ But sadly this is not a side-effect of the drug—this is the written purpose of the drug: to turn you into a zombie with no feelings who is now capable of little more than background work in horror movies. Headshrinkers have become whores to not only the dollar but to their ignorance of the natural state of Man, which is overflowing Grace and expressive joy and not “just getting by.”
At times I started to feel like Brendan Frasier’s character in “Bedazzled” when he asked the trickster Devil (Elizabeth Hurley) to make him more sensitive because his love interest wanted a sensitive man and next you see him he is beach blonde and crying to the girl, “The sun is so beautiful with its golden rays and the flowers with their beautiful colors and fragrances and the ocean is so lovely and the wind blowing through your hair…” until she had to excuse herself, because side-effect #256 of being in the presence of a pussy is nausea.
It is not the false gratitude that one feels when his stocks are up (can any of you even remember what that felt like?) or you’re getting laid or have just urinated on a homeless man. Something has shifted. I am not grateful for anyone or anything—I AM Grateful. I am Grace. I am love. This does not mean that I won’t be drawn back into unconsciousness and lose my connection with Grace. Nor does it mean that I won’t be a pain in the ass and all my writing pieces forever hereafter are going to be about “walking through fields of daisies” with “the glistening sparkle of the morning dew.” It is just, for the moment, I have a taste of Grace that is so scrumptious and am feeling so completely satiated that it is hard to even think beyond this very moment.
When one makes a bold declaration like, “I am at peace,” or “I am celibate,” that’s usually when the Universe likes to fuck with you by placing people in your path that either bug the shit out of you or are super hot and easy. Then when you lose your cool, or lose your load, the Universe usually smiles and says, “Did you have anything else to say?” If you know what’s good for you, you shut your mouth, lower your head a little and say, “No, ma’am,” and realize you’re just the Universe’s prison bitch and the less you struggle, the less painful your stay is going to be. Carrying the metaphor beyond any semblance of taste, it is only when taking things in your ass feels just as pleasurable as when things come out of it that you become a free man whom no bars can contain.
We all can get in touch with Grace. We all have so much for which to be grateful. We’ve become so distracted that, like an ADDH child, we can’t seem to keep our attention still enough to focus on what is with us always and instead find ourselves running around the room shouting “Poopy Pants! I’ve got Poopy Pants!”
For you pricks who will bring up, “What about the starving child in India, what does he have to be grateful for?” I will respond that grammatical rules dictate that you should not end your sentences with a preposition. But the very question would tell me that you haven’t seen what I have seen and know what I know, at least consciously, that even a single moment—a smile, a laugh, a dance, a song, a hug, a cry—experienced fully, is enough to experience eternity.
I imagined a nuclear bomb landing on New York City, tossed by our own government, of course, but assigned responsibility to an Islamic group name something like The Brotherhood of Allah. The mushroom cloud rose high into the sky and the heat wave rapidly rolled towards me, vaporizing every living thing in its path. Almost as if it were background noise, I saw people running and screaming and crying. A few people were looting, because their life’s worth was based on accumulation and if they could just grab one more thing before they perished they believed this would make them feel complete.
I dropped to my knees. I was not afraid. I had no one I needed to see. I had no sense of urgency. I was just Grateful. And nothing, not even my impending transformation to particular matter, could stop me from being Grace.
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.-William Blake