It’s 7 a.m. and I wake up to “Let Her Go” by Mac DeMarco, which I remember liking the quick Ringo-esque and beach/sand-in-shoe-gaze guitar pick up a lot of when I first heard it and still did consistently through the first week I made it my alarm. Though now I sort of get the message and follow the source somewhat push-puppety out of bed to turn it off but avoid the impulse to change it because the effect of waking me up is met and that’s fine.
[Minutiae of morning routine is omitted though not the reasons why]
Routine is paramount for me. I’m like an unstable element aware that without my valence shell balanced by pre-determined hours of reading and writing and allotted quota of web-surfing I quickly decay into a volatile radioactive substance that manifests in malaise, callousness, and general dispassion for the otherwise appreciated and beautiful nouns around me.
On the morning walk, taking the left direction today the marine layer is low and I could be walking in a very high altitude, though I think only 40 feet above sea level. Before I plug in like a cyborg to my aptly named “feed(s)" I meditate.
In the monastery we would wake up before the sun rose. The sun is like a giant glowing rabbit that eight billion greyhounds beneath it are chasing. Getting up (or focusing on yourself) before all that global momentum, inadvertently due to its massive size, yanks at you like a tiny comet on your own orbit allows one to move at their own pace and at their own volition. The opposite is true. Any individual proceeding through their day from a sleep-in is doomed to arrive “late” or stressed to every subsequent plan.
A free-spirited (and oblivious to the words comprising its name) cockapoo skips in the air above the sidewalk, from down the street it hears my keychains that sound like a glitzy dog tag. The human whose caring for it nudges into a driveway and lets me walk by, “oh he loves to make eye contact” and he does.
[Reading the Los Angeles Times is omitted]
On my bike, those thoughts accustomed to keeping up on two legs fall behind, not into dust necessarily but at the corner curb of a street I just turned away to lose them on. I substituted four medications intended to keep me physiologically balanced with daily bike rides in Miami, Doctors hate me. Younger and three car accidents ago I used to ride down the boulevards but unless I have to, I prefer the streets parallel. California is nice, there’s a stop sign on nearly every street so that egoistic drive to outperform cars in cheatingly met at a low risk.
Close to the beach I pass Driftwood Street, the fourth in a row of streets named chrono-alphabetically. I remember and repeat the 2002 re-adaptation of Dumas’ “Count of Monte Cristo” line:
Dantes: Zatarra, strong name.
Jacopo: It means Driftwood.
*"I should write my article…as soon as I wake up” I repeat like new-age (which is to say ineffective) mantra as I doze off at 11:33 a.m. UTC. Generally people complain about snooze, but people that like to have lucid dreams probably wouldn’t. Because I’m in the 5th round I know that I’m dreaming, so when these punk looking kids want to fight me for reading in their spot I’m lucid enough to punch them really hard, but unfortunately not enough to call off the posse that’s triangulated my position via solipsistic G.P.S.
Around 12:50 p.m. I dream I’m on a ship having to replace a hole in the bottom deck. The storm sounds terrible outside though the hole issues water into our ship like a clogged toilet. Though the deck hands are anxious as though death is imminent; I wake up and leave them to their fates in that realm where possibly someone assumes my position in that traveling or omnipresent circus where the sub-conscious inhabit as a reprieve from waking life.
This time I go for a walk to smoke around the block. Apparently that cockapoo is my neighbor and exhibits a very different demeanor behind the flimsy front yard fence as he barks as though he could do something. Is the fence tantamount to some mental narrow-mindedness that elicits some defensive response of the enclosed ego? Contrastingly, does the comparatively overwhelming open space of the sidewalk and world beyond that fence represent a broad or open mindedness, where humility and curiosity take center stage in the mind of the wanderer?
I intentionally jangle my keys a little more while babbling cutely to the pupper.
[Wandering omitted]
On my hammock at 1:30 in the afternoon I stress about what to write, replay the day and remember the Ship of Theseus, something that I’ve been thinking about this month more often as I transcribe journals dating back to (as of yet) 2006 (though there are some from 2005 that I’ve yet to begin and’ve sort of held off until the end to reveal the oldest version of myself to…myself primed for such a confrontation.)
Reading and going through these sincere confessions of my younger self is supplying me with new “floorboards” to piece together this “ship” of mine that’s been sailing for nearly 3 decades. Every day the waves of advertisements and distracting information wear at our hull or rust our fixings and unless we’re highly selective and filter through the material around us to pick out the best parts we might replace our patient and meaning-sensitive idiolect with a more prevalent and popular internet-argot, if our pre-adolescent predilection with 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the Little Prince, or the Giving Tree is replaced sub-consciously with People or TMZ the shape of our vessel to navigate these rough waters inevitably changes. Remember that if 99% of the events and occurrences in the world are beyond our control, then certainly 1% is allocated to us in the form of choice – the choice to accept or reject what to integrate into ourselves, the choice to say yes or no to what occurs.
“I have to write something.”- Me at 2 p.m. in the front yard with no socks or shoes on.
Is it vain of me to just recount, with a little fictionalization, the events of this day, and to assume its article worthiness? Perhaps, though I’m admitting my defeat in speaking directly to the insanity of the current events around me. Cliché may be shrugged of due to virtue of it being what it is – cliché (which in itself is such a clichéic thing to say, I know) but lets not judge the validity or character of a noun by the form it takes (ad hominem), though one attributed to Mohandas Gandhi I come back to over and over is:
You must be the change you want to see in the world.
I’m not passively hoping to make it past the fence that keeps me narrow-sight/mind-ed, nor am I going to haphazardly assemble this body with crumby parts considering the journey I intend to make, I’m going to consciously choose who to be, how to interact with this world and the people that have (with good or ill intentions) helped me appreciate the phenomenon of existing, and pay it forward, give something back. Something inspiring the resilience, potential, and interactive capabilities of the spirit.
