Rainy Morning

The kids back in school... I am alone. In just my undershorts I trim the garden trees and bush in the cooling rain; Grandma style, the Japanese approach to pruning in my Moss garden. Chop, chop, chop, clip, clip, clip.

I struggle with the thoughts of video, reaching too deeply into my youth, confronting procrastination and a swirling quagmire of shadows. Can I cut this? Should I test the waters? So many impressions, a logical progression from years of journal keeping and a youthful false start as a filmmaker. Fear of exposure, embarrassment, commitment, responsibility... my so many technical limitations and the complex complications of worthwhile creation.

And then there is my next semester of teaching. How do all these pieces fit together?

Calculating Catastrophe

Pending pain, as reminded, from time to time, by physical and social break downs. Glorious imaginative projects, often centered around Videocasting, dance on a mind tortured by terror. What terror? you say...

Narcissistic Prima donna was an art performance I created in New York twenty odd years ago, exposed in preview, a life of self absorption. As an artist all I have ever known, or attempted to express, remains self-absorbed. And now the depth of decay lassoing my daily consciousness brings forth this same old theme. Yet guilt riddled anxiety, facing the trauma of exposing one last time, all the madness, all the tedious madness, of a man who has not changed toward artistic maturity but instead the deadening disease of regurgitated reflection.

I still write a journal after 30 years and my thoughts have never caught the wisp of a muse. Do it, you say. Manifest your freaking vision and let it die in the air of actualized feces, fertilizing the creative with negative example. No man or woman of mindfulness can justify a contemplative angst of non-action. Better to pour my proactive shlock and serve it to the digital mainstream, to be dissipated into the stratosphere of crystallized dribble of modern social media.

Do it? You say. And I wonder who the hell you are to ask. Haven't you been reading my posts for the last thirty years, and hasn't 'how I am' as a fumbling procrastinating blob, stuck yet? Do you really believe there is something to do that is both possible and worthwhile? And you answer, in a cynical but supportive tone... "why not do all you can, no one will be effected much, and there is always the outside chance something will come of all of this.

Shaken but not stirred

Is it the weather or the transition from work to recess... a headache slips up the side of my head. Keeping focused, one wonders if I have always been, what is called, ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder). Just keep getting back to the tasks at hand and hope all will settle into place. Make life wonderful.

No Way if my way is the only way

Argumentative, combatant even, inconsistent energy level, fragile health due to lazy use of the body and abandonment to oral gratification... Opinionated, psychotic at times (rationalized or actual ramification to trauma), all in all transformational. Or is it all just talk? Begging the question, "What would be success?"

Rose, thorn and fragrance

The taste of life is so subtle, delightfully complex, bitter sweet... aromatic. Here in Nihon, we have the moist wave of clouds encircling my home, in the magical haze of the rainy season. Temperatures fluctuate from tropical forest to chilly damp mountaineering. My life is riddled with hard core emotional delicacies, a gourmet buffet of buffering challenges. I will not articulate these here, these petty chores, trails and tributaries, that crown all domestic and professional integrity. We all have sweaty brows in this climb up and out.

I tried unsuccessfully to retire the God concept, interwoven as it is into my pea brain personalized didactic. How can I teach in a head created by others, even when that head is my own? Yet I enjoy the skeptic's freshness, the raw dance of persistent ruthless critique. It is a cruel world, demanding an intellectual purity, always slightly over my own horizon.

I wish I could justify my primate tendencies... my swinging pendulum of man and beast. But the internal holocaust and its hedonistic healing are two sides of the same thick skull. Pain and pleasure is how we monkeys learn. I wish I could ask for forgiveness, yet so clear, I error in my very nature... my very core convoluted, to what is expected. I relentlessly remain responsible, within my own philosophical dictum.

In other words: Tragically, majestically, you get what you see... I stand here before you, naked, apple still in hand. Guilty as charged in my wild man innocence. Welcome to the real world, post-Paradise lost; Eternally Adamized.

Ants in My Pants

I have quietly spent my Saturday absorbed in podcasts, and now will begin my day of expanding my garden and visiting a gallery opening. My pursuit of science, or at least the initial trappings of such, has revitalized my academic pursuits, from other visceral perspectives gone asunder. I haven’t time now to describe in detail this transformation, as there are too many variable. Instead I will simple acknowledge Hitchens, the podcast 'Point of Inquiry', and the comical biographical work "Letting Go of God" by Julia Sweeney.

Trying to Evolve

Perhaps I have found the adjustment to eliminate the trouble I was having with this software. In life there is so much personal work going on, yet the angst that 'time is too short for actual understanding' pursues... true transformation being more elusive than mere bug fixes.

Point of Inquiry, a secular humanist podcast, has me buying books again like crazy. Previous to this topic, on-line purchased books have been coming on my resurrected interest in film-making. Also, gardening and gardening books have flooded into my life, with trees following roses following diverse flower collections springing from feminine companionship, in and on every available space in yard, terrace, and house.

The transition I sense is grounded in my geography, an inner relationship with my house here in the hills of Japan. The anniversary of my wife's death looms on the horizon of summer bringing with it further reflection and the remaining deep pangs of sadness. My decision to pull in, and stay here in Japan this summer, is a shadowy choice. There are as many subconscious reasons as conscious, as I try to map out progressive actions, within a soft-focused vision of the future, laden by such dense fog.

There could be so much to say here, but I dissipate much of my reflective writing into a handwritten diary I use throughout the work day. Over 40 years of diary writings, spread across book shelves or stuffed into boxes stored in attics on two continents... so much fire wood for my funeral pyre.

Living Frustration

There is a bug in this software. Our social upbringing creates similar bugs in our psyche. Daily we are tasked to rewrite our own programming or learn to live with our flaws... Thus frustration.

Distinguishing Priorities

Living in Paradise, a place where fortune has placed me within arms reach of all my needs and most pleasures, has a residual effect: That massive excess hanging over my belt and making me short of breath.

It is as if there is a built in accumulating tab with all joy in life. But there is no causal relationship between happiness and payback. Instead, there is wise lifestyle choices and less wise lifestyle choices. But since I have come to equate eating in excess as my preferred activity over exercise, there is in fact a relationship between joy and risk.

There comes a time when daredevil eating needs to be packed in the attic along with extreme sports and psychedelics. At my age I need to know better and to act accordingly.

Haunting in Paradise

I calculated the hours I actually work and, including travel and mid-class lunches, I do not work over 30 hours on those full weeks I do work. The actual time is closer to 25. Yet interestingly enough the anxiety and disappointments, the frustrations and residual hard feelings, can last throughout my week... Into my dreams... permeating, even slightly poisoning the food I eat, the feelings I experience, the moods I express.

I feel I am working hard to eradicate these social dysfunctions but the causes are subtle and the cures radical and unpractical... most likely un-achievable transformations of character. Even though the disease itself is life threatening in its persistent blight on the delicate mechanisms of consciousness... What can a body do?

The solution may be a surrender to one side of this persistent duplicity. A loss of income, slipping into the cold hard world of cashless-ness, onto the loser side of this consumer society I seem to enjoy so much. Or a gradual undermining of my sense of self. Feeling that value of spirit, that my opinion matters more than the logistical management of mine and others egos. Is ego and idea permanently entwined, to where there is no hope of grace and dignity without Machiavellian manipulations?

Can I be a genuinely good person and yet still express character and individual flair? Let us hope what flames of pain and pounding one feels now will heat the irons to a greater tensile strength tomorrow. I will continue to try and filter through all these acidic emotions, hoping some clarity awaits down the road. One day, this day, today.

Trouble in Paradise

The dichotomy of my days has been growing. On one side are perfected times with family and friends and on the other a troubling time on certain days with passive resistance and lack luster interaction with my students. There has also been the recent car accident, which has reopened old wounds both physical and psychological. There is that run-away train feeling.

A recent trend to increase classroom size, with classes expanding to upwards to 35, and the dumbing down needed as more troubled and lower teared students enter the pool with current demographics shifts... less students born into the school system means more of the bottom placed in previously unattainable schools... But all of this reads like rationale. My job is whatever is placed before me, as well as the emotional adjustment needed to deal with the challenges of both the classroom and administrative challenges of my employment.

The 'run-away train feeling' is a life time of teaching and living catching up with me. Those tail-ends of unresolved emotions, heated up by the layering of new feelings. In affect, my trying to please everyone and not succeeding.

I have made several adjustments, each day to the various needs of my students, in the diverse classroom settings I currently teach. Some of it has been quite successful while other attempts are lost in the numbers. At core, though, is my awareness of my inevitable responsibility to my life situation, i.e. I am in charge; parallel to much is also outside my control, i.e. I am not in charge.

This duplicity, with my will to master my situation on one side, and this observation that so much is outside my ability to control, has me grasping at straws.

An emotional centering is advisable now. I can feel my mind trailing off in distinct directions: relationships, work related, needed transitions for the future, distracting yet essential pleasures, the trials and tribulations of driving, parenting, maintaining this richly diverse lifestyle...

Time to psychologically regroup and set my priorities in order. But there is so very much on my plate and much of it so very delicious. Perhaps the best perspective is slowing down into this moment and managing the particular place I am... Look deeply at this feeling of insecurity and dissatisfaction while tasting the sweetness of all my many many blessings.

Cool Morning

I ask myself, "Why was it, I didn't take a walk all weekend, but instead stayed by the computer, and even there hardly did anything constructive?" But no reassuring answer followed. Friday was beautiful, in part, because it included a walk with friends and my son.

Another week has begun, something needs to get me out... I understand this... yet... "Let's find time to take a walk today!" I say, as if making a plan... Insisting it is a plan.

Needing to get my friends involved, to combine this simple task with my strong socializing need; combine my need for affection with motion beyond the expedience of the bedroom.

"Expand my definition of physical pleasure" I reaffirm. Survival by depletion of my copious form is as relevant as the dissemination of semen. Though one is dependent on the other, my lazy nature settles for the path best lubricated. Dark humor aside, exercise is essential for my survival.

I need to internalize this message and get the job done, day after day, after day.

Wicked Wonderment

A deliciously dense cloud covers my mountain home. The patter and ping of rain splattering endlessly on my tin roof comforts me. Even the cool air feels refreshing, safe here in my wooden steel framed castle.

Thankfully the despair and disease that cursed my yesterday has subsided to normalcy, peaking as pleasure in being alive. Life is lovely when your children are safe.

There is such a torrent of collective pain as we watch via accessible media the wars of the world. We understand so much of what can go wrong. This is why I spend so much time lingering in beauty and peaceful pleasures, simple solutions, and sweet gentle affections. I hope to be more and more a beacon of bliss and less detractor and cold-hearted critic.

So deeply ingrained is my ego-based grumpiness. So much more useful would be a likability factor amped-up to max... so much better for me, my family, my students, and all the many who must contend with my cantankerous nature each and every day.

Factoid May=Depression

In the waves of trivia, in which I swim, came the factoid: December, despite the myth, is not the highest for suicide; May is. May comes after a hard sad winter but May's spring brings no relief. Believing in the future is always a risky proposition, when the present doesn't work well. I live in paradise, so, by default, I am an authority on sadness... something to do with comparative perspectives.

Today I see I have these romantic ties to my tools as a symbol of prowess, more than any massive hunger for the creative process. I want the cool factor of being seen as powerful, by operating top-of-the-line cool stuff, though I am not as willing to do the legwork of mastership of these tools.

I suppose mine is a common infliction. A consumer society soldier of conspicuous consumption. Convenience and pragmatic motivation (sugar, salt, and sex) seems more relevant for me to make things. Simple and expedient means more for getting me to do something, than the actual cool state-of-the-arts technology I covet. I like stuff now more than making stuff, objects over action... a toy junkie. But to get the job done, simple and in tune with some motivation is best for me.

I discuss this here after watching myself procrastinate. Procrastinate learning even the simplest of technology, all the while fantasizing ambitious complex projects.

The advent of spring means summer to me, after a hard muggy initiation, total un-productivity. Like life away from a big city, life without a product lacks a rationalization for existence. A city without an art process, a tool without mastership, a spring without vision reaching toward manifestation, are formula for depression.

Process justifies the tool. Depression is the recognition of factors without motivation for appropriate action. A feeling, a feeling that the vision really is meaningless, before giving the action a chance to wash all that self-doubt away, is a May depression and could evolve into a June suicide.

Though these theories might apply to an exaggerated version of reality, they still do not explain my wife's suicide in June 2000, nor why I circle the fire of art creation at such a distance. Am I a moth with a greater destiny than consummation in flames or simply a coward afraid of standing naked in my ordinariness as every man. Was this what Reiko tried to face, Her human ordinariness?

Thankfully I already live in paradise, and all this speculative dancing does not diminish the fact. Truth will triumph by the inevitability of 'what happens will happen' with or without us. Though, some of us will be missed deeply for a very long time. So all that remains is, what do I plan to do with my present symptoms: High Blood Pressure, lock jaw tension, and a perpetual resistance to radical but necessary change.

Happiness in fulfilling Times

There were moments in the aftermath of Reiko's death where it was hard envisioning being fulfilled again. Now I dance among pleasures... good friends, companionship, affection from my children... all the bounty of the earth, available within the peace and sanctity of Japan.

As I write this, I watch Claude LeLouch's classic 'Smic Smac Smoc'. How is it America never discovered Claude LeLouch?

I discovered his work as a film student, in New York City in the early seventies, and have never found much mention of his work, anywhere in the States, since. He combines a deeply philosophical romanticism with a love for the pure fun of cinema production.

Thankfully, I can still enjoy his work, on the miracle of a DVD six film collection, created by the Canadian 'imavision'. Quality and story last through time.

Petal to the Metal

My feet are feeling around for the kick start pedal on this day. Podcast distracted recently, proactive inklings dissipate quickly... need to keep plowing through. Glorious Golden Week can not be wasted by secondary objectives.

Whispering Thank You's.

The flowers abound, blessing brightly, color.
Soft sensual yet firmly wet.
Wild mental mountains of pleasure.
Pause
Glory in fifties, settling peacefully,
Hearts held in holding hands.
Soft silences
and, then,
we whisper

'thank you.'

Flowers' Flush

Sunny,
sided to proceed.
Motion to breeze.
Looking toward sunny,
forward to funny...
feeling a need to Spring.

Double Take

There is more than a duplicity in all moments... more like a kaleidoscope of variables... different threads lacing simultaneously through our head. Only mass murderers and the financially successful have the luxury of simplicity... the advantage of just two worlds, private and public.

Most of us see windows appearing along every corridor, looking out on fresh horizons chuck filled with alternatives. And with this inner and outer vision comes all that damn responsibility. We know what each world will be permitted to ask. Each new demension has the right to ask for our best... full honest consciousness.

Yuck... the task of being 'full focus on' is so daunting, even when one's self-expectations are as low as mine appear to be. Oh well... we grow our own ingredients, with our daily labor, and, if there is a maturing of produce, we get a tasty stew...

Then we get to sit, stewing in our choices. It is all very simple, in its complexity. All very complete, in its infinity of options. All so life like.

Crisp Freshness of Morning

It is I who am most crisp in the morn. Morning man despite a sleepless night of videocast viewing and twisting dream-wake consciousness. The simple reading of a seven rule diet point of view, and this Bloggers multiple responses, has me reemerging today as a dieter.

The Seven Horrible Truths about Dieting and Exercise