I am gonna have to fast fwd and get to the big sur event and come back to Larry and his hot springs later, I never got to my friends gig and ended up in Larrys backyard so to speak….will be back to this later.
“Till peace we find, tell you what I’ll do everything I own I’ll share with you”
– Dave Davies (click on the name for the song!!)
The 19th dollar is for you my friend.
The venue is the gas station opposite Ross on Sunset Blvd LA, the time is approx 7.10am - the characters are myself and a lady working behind a bulletproof glass sheet in a small booth in the station. Its a sunday morning.
One of my best friends just played the Greek Theatre the night before, in a band that is sure to emerge as one of the greatest Ireland has ever produced. I have 19 dollars but want to see them play in San Fran that night.
Not having enough money for gas for the 5 hour trip isn’t gonna stop me: I’ll just go, try to go regardless. So I ask for 18 dollars worth of gas and then give the 19th dollar as a tip. The entire dynamic changes, what had been a robotic societal transaction turns to the the warm spark of humanity…how amazing is it that one fuckin dollar can change everything!
…SHE SHOCKED, pulls back the glass barrier, a smile and wide eyes thanks me and tells me how people come in there and ask her, a minimum wage worker to pay for some of their gas. (I think instantly not too long ago that was my method of hobbling through the world)..she thanks me again, giving me the warmest smile (that almost makes me cry as I remember it, typing this out) I feel my trip is blessed from the beginning and I depart.
as i was sitting in my car in the shell filling station up by sepulveda and Washington there is a homeless guy begging for change. This hippy looking dude gives him what looks like some coins. What do I see the homeless guy buy with the money after the guy leaves?
A fucking newspaper. I just thought that was brilliant!
…are you checking out this site because you saw the ad? I am wonderously excited!
These following posts best summerize who “I” am:
http://www.walking08.com/?p=163
“We are not alone. Specifically, the human genome does not carry enough information on its own to determine key elements of our own biology”
A human as a superorganism? Humans as a superorganism? ponder, ponder….
How much mitochondria on earth? A fuckin lot, do you think those mitochondria care if they are in Jimmy Harlows left bicep or Angelina Jolie’s liver? No, NOOOO they are doing their own thing, they are here following a pattern (or a biological directive) beyond singular human muscle or organ cells, beyond humans…yet they are us as much as anything else..are they not?
And how relevent is distance to these things that exist in all OUR cells? Are the mitochondria in the muscle cells of my foot any further away from the mitochondria in my jaw than they are in a newborn baby’s tongue in Pakistan this morning? Bare in mind they (mitochondria) have their own DNA and can technically be considered ’alien’
Wired has a great article about ‘us’, and Science Daily reiterates the point, humans have more foreign, esentially alien cells in our bodies than we have human cells, there is more bacteria in you, than human. your a hybrid not a human…..
http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/news/2004/10/65252
Do you know whats inside you? A pharmacy beyond the insanest dreams of the maddest scientist, an electricial grid so big that it could replicate the internet in 1/millonth of its wiring, primative alien entities making love and making babies, little spaceships making energy in every cell…..do you know where the party is at?
Miyamoto Musashi claimed that he had never been beaten and could not be beaten. Read the book of 5 rings and you will find a lot of ……., there is one part though where he explains that you must train day and night to be able to take advantage of the present moment.
To step into the here and now is the most terrifying and opportunistic event a self reflective organism (i.e. you buddy) can do. So I can believe for that reason that he was never beaten and that his legend today is somewhat justified.
Open up 3 windows or tabs on your computer, have them all on youtube, play 3 different songs, with different beats and what not: likelyhood you will have dissonance, it won’t be comfortable to listen to it…now turn off two, any two and listen to the one thats left, I’m betting that its more comfortable to listen to, less grating, etc and you can get into it no matter what it is.
Thats what the human wants.
Confusion / dissonance scrambles the organism, it is not a state that we are inclined to tolerate too long.
The extreme danger is that in a bid to end the dissonance we choose one way of believing, thinking and living. It may not be our way, the best way, but it is a way and it is better than the feeling you get with 5 trillion songs playing at the same time.
slow down.
I wrote this poem last week about the collective trauma the landmass of Ireland and its inhabitants have suffered over the years of its life…
They raped you and beat you
and put you in homes,
Terrified and threatened you and cut out your tongues,
“We’ll Kill You, We’ll Kill You, We’ll Kill You”
Pedophiles and silence rings,
Foreign soilders and foreign kings,
ashamed and depressed and forever in chains
Soaked in poitin and whiskey and black pints till the end,
going to our graves with words never said
‘Don’t ever put a fuckin hand on me again,
I’ll blow the heart out of your chest and the blood from your vains’
the IRA and the rebels, soon to go sour and become like the rest
Ca bhfuil an Teanga? the pride and the love,
the power, the glory, the heart and the mind
buried under mountains of terror and history we cannot see with our eyes
Eire, mo mathair, is mise do mhac
agus ta me airais agus taimid aris
I think the Walking project has taken an incredible turn for the most excellent! I am no longer seeking or accepting corporate sponsorship. I have a paypal thing on this after some articles if you like to then tip me if not then dont. good luck!
the reason why your not bursting with happiness is because the architecture of your life does not reflect your true self. where you live, where you work, what you say and what you do. there is living or there is hiding and running.
childhood and what comes from it
….coming soon
so I am driving down the highway, and I am thinking to myself: when it comes down to it the key to your healing is pleasure. In that very moment, I feel a massive jolt through my body, there is smoke EVERYWHERE and there is a pink bag in my face, the windshield is cracked on the drivers side and the entire passangers side. Apparently I have just crashed and the destinies of three people collide.
The first is me: playing the role of Diarmuid Brannick here in LA to heal after discovering that chasing the money for healing is a spiritual trap, the second character is a man of between 43 and 53 (who can tell?) driving a less than new pick up truck..it seems Brannick has run into the back of it and him….lets continue
He gets out of his truck and passes by me without even acknowledging that I am alive much less asking if i am ok, presumably because the incident is my fault it doesnt matter. He checks the licence plate on the back of car and then goes about calling on his walkie talkie his boss or whoever…it seems he needs to make a delivery and now he can’t.
I give him my licence and ask if he is ok, he tells me “yeah I’m ok”. Next thing a booming voice is saying something, turning around I see a cop car, the white and black, and a young female cop directing me through the window with both jestures and the booming amplified megaphone voice to pull in off the highway. (I was smoking weed in my car in venice beach a couple of weeks ago when I heard a cop doing that directing someone to pull in and I instantly thought ‘I need to get one of those loud speakers for my car’ and I think I will)
Anyway she is the third character, a young gorgeous latino woman playing the role of the cop. She has us pull into a gas / petrol station and then she commences to take the mans details first. Before this and in between this, the man begins his pantomine:
he is talking on the walkie talkie and then talking to the cop but he is saying the same thing:
“this always happens when I try and do something for someone” “I was going to change my insurance and now I can’t” “I need to get to xyz and it looks like now I won’t be able to” blah blah blah
As he is talking to the cop giving the details of the incident from his perspective, I go to get my camera from the trunk / boot…this is real art and I want to record it (obviously ‘on the sly’ as we say in Ireland) I want to capture the mans pantomine.
His pantomine is his insistance on putting the incident into a context that justifies why he cannot do something and reinforces his way of seeing the world. My pantomine for the past 11 years has been: the reason I cant heal is because I dont have the money, i dont have the x, the y and the z
Anyway it seems my battery is out and so i get the other one to put in the camera, after doing this I see that i dont have tape…at this point the cop walks a few feet over to my car to get my information and licence. She has beautiful legs and and that weird tweed cop uniform material with its weird brownish color is tight around her legs, but it is not tight around her crotch where my gaze has set, I move my eyes to see the contours of her hips…beautiful…I look to her face, she has beautiful tanned skin and dark hair combed tigh on her head, American female cop style.
And so it is my turn to reveal myself: she asks me for my licence and I give it. She asks me where I am going and I tell her the Venice exit. She asks me do I live in Venice and I tell her I am just visiting, which is technically true. She asks me do I live at 1201 East Drachman street, I tell her I do and it is a lie.
I felt the fear of telling the truth and the imagined consequences and in response to the fear I lied…what more needs to be said?
To be continued
Bullshitting is the glue that holds the society I was born into together: never say what you really think or feel, never show your true self..and that brings me to what I see EVERYWHERE with people under the age of 30, they still need a note from their parents.
Remember when you could go into school withour your homework or not go in at all as long as you had a note from your parents to say its ok. To authorize your actions…well. well well. what the fuck do we have here? Meeting people all the time from all over I see again and again and again and AGAIN that they still need permission from their parents to live. Some say they are close to their parents but would never tell them that they take cocaine on the weekends or that they do x or y. They show a false self that they know will be endorsed by their parents not the reality and so the relationship can never grow or become something more. The relationship is stuck in the parent child loop until one of the parties dies. then it ends.
the end.
Objective: To lose conciousness at the point of ejaculation, see a white light / clear screen.
Ingridents: Creamy oatmeal, Cinnamon, peanut butter, banana, jam, an apple and some weed.
Top secret instructions: make a pipe out of the apple with a pen to pierce it (you’ll figure it out), smoke it until you can feel all senses come alive, if they don’t then stop, nothing is gonna work. Then eat the oatmeal and other stuff together, if its not the most delicious thing you ever ate then something has gone wrong: stop, if it is continue…feel full but so relaxed at the same time, with the deliciousness of what you ate still reverberating through your self.
Run a shower, not too hot, get into the shower and get down on your hands and knees with the warm water hitting your lower back and pelvis, lean on one hand and pump with the other, let your body build up with tension like it normally does in this type of activity. then at the point when you can feel your gonna come start immediately to make the O sound. (like you learn at meditation or whatever) blowing against your cheeks and lips with your mouth closed, you should be able to feel the vibrations in your lower back and around your groin, keep making the sound increasing in intensity until the point you come..you will lose conciousness and see a type of transparency / whiteness where the pictures your mind forms normally is.
Good luck my friends!
you mean here, you mean now
eternity is not the hereafter…this is it. if you dont get it here you wont get it anywhere
– Joseph Campbell
Everything I know comes down to this: What your afraid to do but want to do is your path. What you want to say but are afraid to say is your voice. You keep finding yourself here now but you want to run because your afraid. The enormity, the vastness, the luminosity swallows you and who “you are”. essentially who you thought you were cannot live here and now and you die. you die. oh to die and to for your corpse to be carried away. The separation from God, the separation from the womb, the separation from your mothers arms…the separation..
Language: what the wizards use
Language codes imagery and with it spells are cast. With language time becomes an entity, love becomes a thing and everything is broken down and seperated. With language I can colonize your mind, direct your thoughts and exert some control over the processes of your body, if I am good enough at it. But what I do to myself with language, “I am x” “I am y” I am….this is the worst thing in the entire world.
Believe
“Believe in yourself. Believe in your own potential for greatness. Believe that you can change the world. It is something that is within each of us.” - Evan Tanner
When you touch the desert floor
Your quite breath it blows a storm
If friendship was the message, the message was received
If the end was the beginning
the beginning has begun
“society, have mercy on me
I hope you’re not angry if I disagree
society, crazy and deep
I hope you’re not lonely without me”
– Eddie V
When I broke down in the desert, and the water in the bottles amongst the mess in my car was so hot that to drink it made you sick, i was just there for a few hours, but i could feel myself losing lbs of water and feeling like shit, not having slept the night before or eaten in about 16 hours..
I got up off the ground where I was lying by my car, i faced the desert and put my arms up in exclamation, ”what the fuck can I do?”…It felt like the desert was saying to me:
“I could end you in a few hours, suck the life out of you before the sun even goes down”
Before Evan Tanner died, and before getting stranded in the desert (for a very short period of time, dont get me wrong) I thought that I needed to go there with no food and no water and no crutches and let destiny carry me back alive.
I was at Nadia’s computer when I saw that Evan had died in the desert…I can’t tell you what I learned from his passing but it changed me..I know what he was looking for out there…
The point I am trying to make, I suppose is this, when you go out to do something like that your trusting in a force that is beyond language and the linguistic orientated model of thinking. Your trusting that your destiny will unfold and whatever happens was meant to be. You wait for ‘what to do’ to come to you. You don’t think about it, it thinks about you.
If healing was a woman, I spent all my life trying to find her, trying to contact her, but she’ll come to me. There is no way to find her, just wait for her to show herself and do the things that makes her smile; feed the people even when you have no money, say the things you really feel, tell the truth, be the voice of the animal tied to the fence beneath the burning sun in Indio. Be the voice of the world.
“An Achilles’ heel is a fatal weakness in spite of overall strength, actually or potentially leading to downfall”
you were 13, there was two matresses laid on the floor and you and paul marconi were practicing stage diving, jumping from the bed onto the matresses like you were at a sonic youth concert or something.
You got up off the floor after one dive and began hobbling, immitating an injured person and you imagined people inquiring if you were ok and you felt the warmth of that attention…
Last night I cried for hours in my car, I didn’t turn the camera on and record it cause I didn’t want to, I just wanted to cry, just roar crying: “why did you leave me” “WHY DID YOU LEAVE ME”….
I am peering into my very soul now and I see exactly why I do what I do, why I am where I am, and the trillion dollar question: What is wrong with me? - I know the answer
I don’t care anymore if I sound pathetic, “needy”, weak, whatever, I suppose needy being the worst: The emotional taboo. I have to say it and not hold it in, I have to express it. Cause its the truth to me. I have held in my feelings my whole life.
I remember being so embarassed when we were in Sweden at the homeless world cup, when I broke up crying saying to McCann, Greville and Bar: “you don’t know what its like to be left behind“..I was so ashamed with myself after for showing such weakness..
I can say now without a shadow of a doubt I am healing, it is the most bizare experience. my cruthces are gone and with them some pyschological cage…I am to heal here and now or nowhere or never.
here now here now here now here now
whether you know it or not your in the exact same boat as me
I fuckin love California.
Last night as I was hobbling to my friend Jake’s place by Hollywood this homeless guy in his own form of urban trance starts mumbling at me..then he breaks into an arms into the sky type trance talk, animated with a calm intensity: he calls out to me and tells me that I am the king Jupiter!! Jesus Christ, people pay 1000’s of dollars to hear that type of stuff here. I should get these homeless prophets together and do a seminar with them…
Anyway, an update. An update of thoughts first and events second:
Thought 1: life should be improvised before it should be planned, Thought B: language is a trap: it traps objects, creatures, plants, events. Words reduce the the process of living, life itself into separate and distinct ‘things’. it puts flow in boxes. A beautiful woman walking by you on a summer afternoon is as much a process of nature as ’she’ is a ‘human’.
Monday 16th: California swallows my crutches
for the first time in 11 years, over 4000 days I actually lose my crutches, not break, have stolen, drop into the harbor or freeze but LOSE them. I take this as a sign and continue on living without crutches. maybe the project should end here lol.
Unknown day: the wonderful Emilie Conrad Said
probably one of the most profound things I have ever heard: “if you know how your going to get get from A to B then creativity is dead”
That for now is “it”
is just to love and be loved in return.
Thank you so much Teri Carter for having me at last weeks Somafest!
In over 11 years I have never said to anyone “you are a healer”. Teri you are a healer.
Thank you forever
“Believe in yourself. Believe in your own potential for greatness. Believe that you can change the world. It is something that is within each of us”
– Evan Tanner
Evan Tanner former UFC champion was found dead on September 8th. He had died beneath the burning sun on what appears to have been a type of spiritual quest in the Californian desert.
I suppose this is relevant for a number of reasons. The reason I am so attracted to MMA fighters; their careers, training and competiton is because there are so many paralles between fighting and healing and the attitude you need to become a real fighter, a great fighter is the same as you need for real and great healing.
I dreampt of Evan this morning. I didn’t know much about him before I read the sad news a couple of days ago, but the more I read about him I see how simmilar our perspectives are.
“normal” people will never understand the need to go out and take risks that provide high spiritual gains if successful. There is not really much to say except Evan’s death has sent a very clear signal to me at least, that the desert and questing within it demands the utmost caution.
In the words of Robert Frost Freedom lies in being bold. God rest you Evan Tanner
Pay the people not the man
You heard it here first, I just asked the dude who works in the Mobil gas station behind the counter in the shop part has he ever been tipped by a customer and he said no, I gave him a dollar and told him about my new tipping program. The guy thought it was the best fuckin thing ever, I told him “Imagine how much money you’d have if every customer tipped a dollar, you’d be making hundreds a day” he broke his shit laughing in recognition:
why do we tip at a bar and not at a gas station? Why tip a taxi driver and not the servers at Sub Way?
Do it! Topple society by putting money in the hands of the people!
Whatever happened to Dermot Brannick? I killed him at the foot of the mountains in Southern Arizona on a day in March.
In one moment you can realize something that will change your life forever. For me it was that I am an Irish man and that my name was not Dermot but Diarmuid. Genocidal maniacs and their ‘Empire’ who came to spread the cult of greed across the world would not decide the language I would speak. To understand generational trauma and consequences in one moment, that is art, motherfucker, that is art.
When my best friend, and he is my best friend, the most loyal, most reliable, most courageous, most honest, most sincere person I know comes to my home on Christmas eve cause he has got nowhere to stay and wants to engage in a conversation so intense and potentially volatile that he unloads the contents of his Smith and Wesson onto the floor to show me that he is not gonna shoot me regardless of what is said, that my friend, is art.
When your crippled ass is standing beside a cage, fingers on the meshing, with a kid to your left, and as you both stare mesmerized into it: Kimbo Slice and Randy Khatami exchange punches with Bas Rutten circling around them burning with intensity….Kimbo against the inside of the cage sweating and panting literally inches from your face..turns to you and the kid and says: “you got some good days, you got some bad days, you gotta keep going“….I can’t film everything but that is art.
If I go into Taco bell and realize in a second that I should be tipping the server behind the counter regardless of the “rules” of who we are supposed to tip and not, when I realize that if even one in 10 people tipped 2 dollars to every working person with a pleasant attitude on a minimum wage job…then the whole of society would be turned on its fuckin head…I want the single mother, the immigrant, the outsider and the underdog to have the money so I pay the people and not the man….and that, no matter what you say, that my friend is art!
So I’m an artist agus nil a fhios agam cen fath nil tusa ag beo ca suila an ealaiontoir freisin.
That crazy Californian dude Tony Robbins, the guy with 300 times more HGH than a normal person, the motivational master, money grabber and 50% sense talking prophet says that the thing that really changed his life was raising his standards.
I am in LA to get $500,000. Thats it.
I am not here to get any less than that figure, I didn’t come so as I could sleep in a comfortable bed, to eat nice food or any food in fact, to drink, to wash or to talk shit in bars. I am here to get that money so as I can pay for my healing and pay my crew to make the film. That’s my standard, that or NOTHING. So if I’m sleeping in the grounds of the local high school, if I’m hitch hiking at night in the middle of nowhere after my car breaks down then they are just details. My standard is that goal.
What I see everywhere I go is people settling for second best and inviting the demons of unhappiness, boredom and pain into their lives and then just dwindling down the hours and days, months and years waiting for death to come.
My advice to you is don’t do that. Don’t settle for second best, EVER, your life and the lives of everyone you love are on the line.
I may not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but no matter how many times you smash me against the concrete I won’t break. And that is one of my standards.
Tip Me: 500,000 or less
“But if you aint about the ghetto, Then Fuck You Too,
Who care bout Rock N’ Roll when babies can’t eat food”
– Mos Def
I learned one thing over this past month: Kindness turns into love and greed turns into hatred. Its as simple as that. Constantly without fail, the divine is invoked during acts of kindness: “this is a blessing”, “there is a God”, “God bless you”.
You can change someones life with 3 dollars placed in their hand at the right time…my life has been changed by kindness: sweating and hungry by the side of the road in the desert, trying to get a ride 15 miles down the highway, 100’s of cars pass, they are ALL going my way but nobody will stop, they are going my way but they won’t stop, they won’t help me.
And when they don’t help me, they in turn don’t help everyone I am trying to help and that makes hate starts to build in my heart.
Frank and Sylvia, barely a dollar to their name, been in and out of prison, they stop, open their doors to me and bring me to my stranded car. For as long as I live I will never forget that one simple act of kindness and I will do whatever I can to help them.
Believe me its hard to get out of a rut. Greed is God and people are frightened to be kind, they have all types of excuses why not to help someone and selfishly they want something back.
Even if you just want appreciation back you should look into your own heart and ask whats missing that you can’t just bless someone with kindness regardless of what they do with it.
Bas Rutten said something really interesting during our interview in July, “when I’m happy everyone has to be happy“…and I realize now, if I am lucky enough to be able to eat and there are people around me that don’t have a dollar in their pocket to put food in their mouth, they they have to eat too. If I have the money no matter what that money is for, I’ll feed them, otherwise the blessing of the food is lost, humanity is lost and its all for shit.
One last thing, “oh, if I give them money they’ll spend it on drink or drugs“, “I bought a homeless woman food once and she threw it in the trash“, “They don’t appreciate it”
If you don’t really care, your just trying out compassion like it was an exotic dish at a restaurant, you’ll allow any negative experience to go back to not caring, to justify your default setting: heartless indifference. You wanna look at yourself first before you judge another person and if shit ever goes sour in your world and you end up having to spend even one night on the streets, then maybe you’ll have something worthwhile to add to the dialogue.
JUST SHOW THEM THAT YOU CARE IF THEY LIVE OR DIE.
“Let a man in a garret but burn with enough intensity and he will set fire to the world”
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Let’s go back in time a little. July 10th 2008, sees me in Thousand Oaks California with my film crew Dos Vatos Productions. We are there to interview former UFC Heavy Weight Champion Bas Rutten for the film.
I know one thing before interviewing Bas, and that is that he is an exceptional character. He is probably the most loved of all MMA fighters. I knew the guy was mentally strong before the interview and the whole purpose of interviewing him was to try and understand his mindset so that I could emulate it in my near impossible quest to walk again.
The man is fucking insanely brilliant. I wrote to him afterwards and said that I learned more in an hour and a half with him than probably my entire life up to that point. And it was the truth.
I define a ‘man’ by the intensity and completeness of his spirit. Does he walk the hardest path he can find? Is he a friend to the vulnerable and the weak? Does his tongue speak the language of his heart? Does he fear nothing and nobody? I am fuckin telling ya Bas is that man. The alpha alpha alpha ALPHA male.
Of all the things I would come away with from that day, I learned from him a simple concept that has turned my world around:
When you say your gonna do something, then do it - ALWAYS Keep Your Word
Over the past 11 years I have traveled the world searching for warriors and healers and great people, I never found any.
On 10th of July in a gym in California I looked into the eyes of the only man I have ever met: Bas Rutten: the last man alive.
Help me pay for the editing of this interview
Wim Hof the real Ice Man, Tummo Yoga genius and life artist, the man who holds the world record for staying in ice for 1 hour and 12 minutes, will be imparting his knowledge of how to control the body’s functions to me. We will be training together in order to aid my recovery. The lessons will be filmed this winter.
Exact dates are to be confirmed, as with everything else all is depending on securing the project funding.
For now check out this Discovery Channel ‘Extraordinary People’ episode starring Wim
Help me pay for this training and shoot
Firstly I want to thank a few people, just a mention for now: the high priest of maximum buzz BQ, the money magnet David Gunthrie, the one and only ladies man turned family man Podge Walsh. Blogs are not really the place to credit people, so everyone will see their names in a special section in due course.
Pimps, hookers, freaks and cripples, good looking people with anemic souls, excited young Russians, working people and homeless vagabonds, A Mecca for bullshit cults like Scientology, a city doused with dollars beneath the desert sun - this is Hollywood!!
I spent most of the day asleep on a grassy patch by a traffic light on Sunset Blvd. SO SO tired…was thinking I should get a cardboard sign write “Give me $500,000″ on it, place it on my chest and continue sleeping but didn’t have the energy.
My friend Josh picked me up in the evening and I have slept since then. I am gonna get more sleep and then figure out the next steps.
So, I left my home in Tucson, Arizona on the 9th of August to head to LA to secure 500,000 USD for this project. First stop was a non related memorial service in Huntington beach in my desire to get to the location before night fall to avoid a possible disaster (See the previous post entitled ‘Challenge Your Destiny’) I employed super speed. Not something I advocate but I was doing more than 100 for most of the way…until the flashing lights appeared in my side mirror.
Stopping for fuel after my ticket, the car decides it has had enough. 4 jump starts later and reality kicks in. The car is fucked. Triple A tell me that my buddy who owns the car with me needs to be with me for me to be able to avail of the service. I am stranded by the highway, I tell the obnoxious piece of shit they sent to check out the situation to leave me there, he does…eventually he returns, on order from triple A to take me to the Desert Centre 5 minutes away: A cafe and post office and community of 200 people, slap bang in the middle of no where.
Having spent my whole life sucking my friends and family dry of their resources to do MY thing, I resolve not to ask them for anymore help and to try and figure the situation out on my own. To make a long story short this results in 2 days sleeping in my car, 2 nights sleeping on the streets (including last night) and 2 nights in a homeless shelter. The previous 4 posts or so describe some of the adventures of the past 12 days.
I am so tired and my body is burning up inside, the car is still stranded, but is in the car of a young and brilliant man: Skyler from the Desert Centre.
I just got in touch with Josh, a brilliant actor, model and up and coming producer, working on his first movie. So I have a place to stay I just need to sleep and then I return to the warpath…stay tuned!!
I am at an Internet cafe in Hollywood now, after sleeping for a few hours on the grounds of the local high school. Lets go back in time to last Wednesday 13th of August:
I am lying on a bench, basking in the sun just outside the Indio county library waiting for it to open. An oldish but robust man on a bike pulls up, gets off his bike and walks past me. As he does he mutters something which I don’t hear, I ask him to repeat himself and then he goes into a story about a Mayan legend of a man who tries to shoot down the scorching sun, because its extreme heat has killed the women in the tribe.
From there we start talking and this man starts saying some profound shit. I ask him his name and not a word of a lie he replies “I have no name“…I take the opportunity to ask him what he thinks is happening in the world and what needs to change. He says the following:
“Tell me who can you trust and I’ll tell you who you are”
I, not used to this sort of question fall back upon a concept that I kinda half believed in but not really, i say:
“I suppose you can only really trust yourself in this world”
I can’t recall how, exactly, he transitions the conversation onto the subject of money but he does. He begins describing all the things people will do for money, for millions of dollars they will kill, enslave, destroy themselves, violate any principle or value for money. Then he lays it down real hard: They made money God “They even put it on the money itself:
In God We Trust
“But what they mean is in money we trust”
This set of a cascade of thoughts in my head. He’s right, we don’t trust anything or anybody but we do ‘trust’ that if we can just get enough money everything will be ok, we don’t have one single doubt that money will help us.
Spend time with Christians and you see their constant need to affirm and reaffirm that God is real and that he is here and loves them. No such affirmations are made with money. The whole western world has elevated it to Super God like status and chases it constantly without doubting its power or ability.
It is horded, how much they have is not spoken about, it is guarded and they are loath to share it. It corrupts, destroys and yet still they chase it endlessly. In that morning i realized something: we have lost all trust in each other:
ALMOST EXCLUSIVELY THE PEOPLE WHO HELPED ME OVER THE PAST WEEK WERE THE POOR, the people outside the cult of greed and money. They trusted me, trusted that i would not harm them and that i needed their help.
Money is a trick, the false idol of the bible. Money is a drug, that stimulates the greed of humanity and makes one person want to feed on the other to obtain it. Money is a lie, it has no value in the real world, it cannot be burnt for fuel, cannot be eaten or drank for sustenance.
On the societal grid we use it and I use it, but every since that day I have looked at it with different eyes: You take away its power by subordinating it to the values of truth, honesty, trust in oneself and others.
We need to put the trust back in each other and not in pieces of worthless paper.
Eric i trusted you when you picked me up at the side of the road that you would do me no harm and you didn’t you trusted that i meant you no harm and I didn’t.
My note book is full of these names of people I trusted and trusted me where no money whatsoever was exchanged over 10 crazy days that form a central bridge in the greatest documentary to be ever made.
Remember always: Time over money, Values over money, People over money - always and at all times
In each other we trust
Just got in this evening. Hitchhiked from the train station straight to Hollywood, its like a circus here. I don’t think I have felt so at home since I arrived in the gateway city to Siberia back in 2001.
Jaime and Porky opened the door of their car to me just at the entrance to the highway, they join a whole book full of names, that you will see in my right side pocket at all times…
Throughout my life I have had a re-occurring dream of having to drive a car at night and dying in a head on collision. Anyone who knows me since I started driving knows that I don’t drive on highways at night for that very reason.
August 16th see’s me on the side of the road at Palm Springs just before the 74 highway that passes over the mountains and leads to San Diego. I had hitched from the Desert Center, gotten straight on a bus and now was at the side of the road at around 6.15pm with my thumb out hitching again.
A car stops and the door is flung open, there is a woman in the driving seat and thats it, she says something like “get in sweetie”. I get in the car and she starts driving. She is drunk out of her mind and starts crying…her mother is in hospital and she is afraid that her mother will die. I am kinda taken aback by all this. The Last ride I got; the dude, a very nice man don’t get me wrong, described how he had shot two guys and stabbed someone else before becoming a Christian. But he was sober.
Anyway, the lady is going in my direction and before I get my bearings about what to do, the cops fly by us and put a blockade on the top of the road. All cars must stop. It seems someone has been speeding on that narrow narrow highway, has come off it and that will be his last day on earth. We are forced to wait and this lady is saying that we need to go around the other way, the long way. I am telling her no, we need to on the 74. It suddenly occurs to me that:
1) I can’t let this lady drive
2) I really need to get to San Diego / Oceanside
3) The solution is I drive
This takes a good bit of persuading but I manage to convince her that I will drive her to her destination and then begin hitching again. We wait and wait, and wait. All the time she is trying to get back in the driving seat and assert that we have to go the other way. She is a lovely woman though: the rain has come down on her life and she has started drinking again after being sober for 6 months…anyways
By the time the ambulance, fire trucks and cops bring the dead mans corpse and jeep away and clear the road its dark. I suddenly realize I am driving a car that I am not familiar with on the narrowest highway I have ever been on, with a drunk woman next to me shouting at me at the site of a fatal accident in the dark…when we start up the highway amidst the shouting, she tells me that their is something wrong with the Axle so be sure to go very slow….”Ah, for fucks sake” I say “we’re gonna die on this road tonight”
What can you do? It crossed my mind to get out of the car a number of times and let her go on her way, but then I’d be putting her life and everyone else that was driving anywhere near her in danger. So fuck it, if I die tonight, I died doing the right thing. So I challenged my destiny. I Don’t want to make out like this was some mad dramatic thing…But these were my thoughts as I drove up that windy mountain in the dark with my incredibly bad eyesight, living the situation I had seen in my dreams into the waking world.
In the Art of War it says: Walk in the path defined by the rule - which means respond to whats happening now, not on past plans and ideas…if you want to understand me then understand this: I walk in the path defined by the rule
Tip Me
The colonists perfected the cult of greed…..raped the lands of the earth, in one week crossing the desert, a type of clarity has decended on me. I hate to use this type of language but I can only describe it as a ’spiritual’ experience.
The 12th of August see’s me sleeping behind a bush between the desert and the highway. Had anyone watched me from the time of about 11pm - 1.30am starting at the new construction site with the Home Depot in Indio, California, they would have no doubt they were watching a disabled homeless man in the tight grip of madness.
But just as the birds can see the earths grid, a man, a woman can too once they undo the brainwashing of what ever system they have come from.
“With bible in one hand and a sword in the other
They came to purify my land of my Gaelic Irish mothers
And fathers, and sisters and brothers”
Carlos Castenada in his sometimes good, sometimes shit book: The Fire Within describes seeing in this simple dialogue between the shaman and his apprentice:
“Seeing is a peculiar feeling of knowing“ he replied “of knowing something without a shadow of a doubt”
As I approached the bush where I would sleep, I found myself roaring “Ar ais, Aris” which means “back again” in Irish, with the feeling rising in me that we, the beaten tribes of the past: The Irish, the Great African people, the American Natives, the Aboriginal Australians, all the tribes of the world who had our tongues cut out of our mouths and were sunk into the ocean were back again to take back what was stolen: our languages, our values, our connection to our beautiful mother earth and our sincere relationship with our father in heaven.
My bad eyesight, the darkness of the desert night, and my willingness to allow my sub-concious mind project whatever it wanted onto the external enviornment made the bush in front of me look like a circle of people. It looked like a circle of people with their backs to each other, looking in all directions into the desert. A common thing you see in folk art shops, usually made from wood.
If I learned anything from my brief brush with the Arizona based ‘Warriorship’ cult in 1999, it was that you must bring an offering. I had some water left and we all know that plants in the desert love water (lol). I poured the water into the middle of the circle / bush and found myself praying for all the people in my life: my family, the Russian kids, the people I consider my sisters and brothers and then I find myself speaking Irish praying for the restoration of the langauges. I then laid down my sweatshirt for a pillow and my t-shirts for some bedding and went to sleep.
Watch my trajectory and you will travel it too.
Tip Me
hey everyone, am in transit now, have had an incredible week….get ready for my new “stuff” until then speak the language of your tribe.
“ar ais aris”
check back in a few months for the second part of this adventure.
in the art of war ‘Heaven’ means seasons and times, day and night..or I suppose natures moods.
I am on the western edge of Siberia now and the same thing that the Russians have used for countless centuries in response to the harsh winters: the Banya, has become my hospital. I am in it three times a week and feel amazing.
The mind conjures plans to do this and that but if it does not take into consideration the dictates of Heaven then failure is sure to follow.
Sun Tzu’s art of War is here, STUDY IT: http://suntzusaid.com/
What is healing for? I think that is the most complete answer that can be given. I Came across an article in a Russian paper where a guy (now quite famous in the martial arts circles) says the purpose of martial arts is to save your soul and I think it applies as much, even more so to healing.
i remember in Moscow, on Prospect Mira, the skies went dark and the rain pelted out of the dark clouds lashing and flooding the street…everyone, maybe 200 people or more on that massive soviet sized street, ran for cover in shop doorways and under the gazebos and what not at on both sides…a little gypsy girl of about 7 0r 8, in the most nonchalant way just kicked and toyed with a bag in front of her as she strolled down the street…I could see her not to far ahead of me near the metro station, she was out on the side walk completely oblivious to the rain and so was I.
The only two people who didn’t care were a crippled Irishman and a little girl. We were beyond the rain. Everyone else hid for cover meekly as if the falling water was acid and they were made of clay…
there is more going on than just this…’just this’ being what we see infront of our eyes and think through the the hard wires of our minds…
sometimes you have to let failure visit you, council you, cut you, kill and re-birth you!
It is discouraging to try to penetrate a mind like yours. You ought to get it out and dance on it. That would take some of the rigidity out of it.
~Mark Twain
I Love Mark Twain! I have much swirling, curling, lingering and being born inside my head at this moment and would like to talk about all these things and will over the next while.
The unearthing of the foundations and the ripping apart the architecture of my mind has begun..
“Tomorrow is guaranteed to be nothing like today”
– George Land
we are told half of the worlds population lives in cities and that by 2050 2/3rds will live in cities. A city is like an organism, it consumes fuel and creates waste, it has a metabolism and in a way it also has a consciousness. It has the latter because it is made up of millions of people whose thinking creates, shapes, forms, deforms the city.
Now I was born an ambitious person, my dear parents God bless them for the shit they have had to put up with, would call me a dreamer..but I am a dangerous man, the ‘dreamer’ of Lawrence’s description. Anyway a mix of insecurity, ego and genetics has made me hell bent on leadership. And I realize now that the empire building stuff is bullshit, it, as an author I have now forgotten his name, when speaking of Napoleon called it ‘nothing without a contrite and humble heart’..I remember that quote vividly as Napoleon had neither and was in fact a dickhead.
But I believe in winning the cities…money, power, status, thats all gonna be piss down the toilet, worthless in the future.
Integrity, resourcefulness, innovation, resilience - genuineness, bodily physical wealth (health and robustness) I think thats what will count. Governments in their current form will be in decline…where will you be in the future?
Tip Me
the plane would lift off and fly into the sky, then as it was ascending it would suddenly drop and rise and keep flying at a really low altitude flying literally just above the streets…I am in the cockpit , the pilot… some times the plane would go down back onto the street so its like driving amongst the traffic, and I am powering it with my legs moving it on the street and I cant get it back into the sky..when i do i can never get it to proper flying height.
Thats the problem with flying and that dream has been reoccurring in one version or another for as long as I can remember.
What do you think it means?
I woke up this morning with the feeling I wasn’t flying the plane right and thats why I couldn’t control it properly.
“On a large enough time line, the survival rate for everyone will drop to zero”
– Chuck Palahniuk
The mystery of life unfolds at first really quickly when your a child and then dips into the mundaneness of the ‘details’ of living, but it hits you again like a baseball bat across the face when people you love die….
I’ve seen the world collapse three times, almost four and that fourth I thank whatever there is to thank over and over again that it spun one way and not the other…
I never believed in an afterlife, I only believed that they couldn’t die. Never believed, but tonight it feels as if there is something not so much ‘after’ but before, throughout and beyond our lives that we cannot see. Strip the names, the thoughts, the fears, the emotions and the issues away and most people think that the person then is gone…that’s what death does right?
But whats beyond, beneath and behind the name, the accent, the favourite this, the biggest fear or the most loved that? Answer that question and then you too go to the place where the lost ones are…
For us believing physicists the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
- Einstein
Tip Me
what is so bad about one state over another? I always thinks its hilarious when the doc’s scowl and look upset that I can’t walk and not doing whats recommended…brings so many thoughts to mind -
whats walking for anyway?
do you think one of them in a million years could answer that question, whats the point in walking? (What is it actually for?) Not knowing the answer to that question is infinitely more tragic than not being able to move a couple of bones for a few years
On my mission to recover, Germany came to me…I remember sitting on a beautiful summers day watching the pied Piper reenactment in Hamelin , north of Germany above the Buchinger Clinic in Bad Pyrmont…anyway in the town square there is a mosaic on the wall, (is mosaic the right word?) Anyway its the story of the pied piper carved into the wall high up in the town center.
do you know the story of the pied piper? who was the lucky one?
thats what it feels like this disease is an opportunity to do…and I think the reason people suffer so much when their body goes awry is because they have the physical pain, the emotional turmoil and the disease exposes the poor state of their soul..which compounds the problem and which is the real source of the inability to go beyond the pain
you want out? then let the disease do its work let it clean, envigor and multiply the force of your soul..then fall back on the force of your soul for healing and all else
is this science? no? is there lots of bullshit advice like this floating around? YES…
more than 10 years 24 hrs a day living in, with, through a disease you learn something and this is something I feel I have learnt. take it or leave it.
“Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all — the apathy of human beings.”
– Helen Keller
What stops the human animal from doing what s/he should, from reaching out on the instruction of his/her heart to rectify the wrong the eyes see and the mind holds?
Crippled hearts, fear hollowed out the lives we were meant to live and pain confirmed the absolute need for life to be hollow so the pain would be no more. Now the world burns. What stops you from acting when you know you should - how will that answer play out the rest of your mortal life?
we thought strategy and tactics, the ways, means and measurements to solve this and all else. And ‘how clever I am, I can figure it out’ and all that bullshit. But only the heart will solve this problem, pursue the heart and mind of God and act from it…
I remember in my attic room, 1998…emailing to anyone I thought could help, they said “follow your heart and you’ll be fine”..I thought “the last thing I need is this hippy bullshit”…and now I see the ONLY thing I need is that hippy bullshit…
“To know the height of the mountain, one must climb it”
– Augustus William Hare