Storytelling

ON AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND STORYTELLING

 My grandfather didn’t speak often of the war.  The few times he’d reference it there would be this sentence attached:  “A dozen guys could march through the same jungle and when they come out the other side, there’d be a dozen different versions of what happened in that there jungle.” 

Because I enjoy seeing the world a certain way, I saw it as a sign, of course.  Two people brought this subject to the forefront this week; one a very good friend and the other my cousin.  Both are very intelligent men, who I have great respect for.  My cousin is the smartest guy I know, and I’ve known a lot of smart people.  He suggested we recreate our past to justify our reality or our present version of it. 

With that in mind; how reliable is any autobiography or supposed true story?  It’s always going to be skewed and one dimensional.  So what is reality and how dependable are we to discern it?

We only see a small portion of the light spectrum and can only hear a set frequency of sound waves.  That means there’s a lot we’re missing.  It’s for this reason I don’t like to rule anything out as being impossible; unless of course it has been proven.  We’re so arrogant to think we have all the answers.

I remember being on a baseball team as a child and the pitcher was the coach’s son.  He was an awful pitcher.   I remember one game he walked several runs in before a kid hit one over the fence for a grand slam.  After the game the coach yelled at us.  “Johnny can’t do it all himself.”  I remember being outraged.  He just did.  The experience stood out to me.  That guy really believed that his son wasn’t to blame for the game being stopped by the ten run rule.  He walked the entire team in.  How was it any one else’s fault but Johnny’s?

People see the world subjectively.  They see it how they want to see it, or expect to see it.  They recreate the past to fit the present.  What really happened?  How many factors are you missing in describing a situation from the past?  Every story, myth, legend, historical account that’s ever been told has been subject to this fact.  How can we take anything as being the truth?  It’s only the truth to us if we think it is.   These are the kinds of thoughts that keep me distracted. 

Even our memories aren’t the originals.   We are remembering the memory of the memory of the event as lastly stored in our long term memories, not the actual event.  Each time we remember something, we only remember certain details and we imagine the rest.  The imagined parts become part of the greater narrative that is the memory.  So the next time we tell it, we won’t even remember what parts we made up and what parts really happened.  Each time we retell a story, tiny details shift and alter and the emphasis on one theme or another gains importance.  A story can one time be a funny yarn about how wild and crazy you were as a young man and later that story could be a cautionary tale.  Every time you hear or read a story you should take this into account.  Did Johnny really give up a grand slam to end the game?  I don’t know.  I remember the coach yelling at us.  I remember us all taking a knee behind the dug out.  Then I remember a snow cone.  That’s it.  The story has become my focal point of why you can’t rely on people’s account of events.  I saw it first hand and made that connection at that moment.  Or did I?  Who knows?

It makes me think of the double slit experiment in quantum physics.  It suggests reality acts one way when no one’s observing it and another way when there is an observer.  Google it if you’re not familiar with it.  May I suggest there’s a lot more going on than we know at this point.  The more we learn the less we know.  Now to clarify that, it should be, the more we learn the more questions we give birth to.  The danger is trying to act like we know anything at all.  We just have theories.  That’s all.  Now, I know that terrifies a lot of people.  They gain great comfort in thinking that what they believe is the actual truth and they’ve found it and it’s all going to be okay.  They leave all those looming questions to someone else.  But deep inside, we all should know that stories aren’t one hundred percent reliable, especially ones from the ancient past.  Could there be ancient, divine magic woven into sacred tales?  I won’t rule it out, of course, that’s not my style.  That comes down to faith.  I respect people of faith.  But as far as being historically one hundred percent accurate, of course they are not.  They are subjective tales told by humans who were victims of the imagined memories they’d come to believe.

My cousin suggested how we see a moment from the past will depend on how good the future is to us.  People blame their horrible childhood for how bad their present is.

Throughout history we’ve always relied on people’s subjective view of the past.  But in the future we’ll be able to pull up any moment and examine it for how it really transpired.  Of course, as we’ve seen with “Reality TV” the records can be edited in such a way as to paint a different reality as well.   If everything is recorded in the future, they still won’t be able to read the minds of the people involved.  Oh, wait.  They’re working on programs to read thoughts as we speak.  What happens when the robots can read our minds, man?  We’re totally screwed then, bro.  Everyone’s going to have ocular implants that will display information at all times while recording what they see and hear every second of the day.  So if you wanted to remember something, you’d simply replay it.   Our brains will shift.  We won’t need to use our memories for the same reasons.  We won’t need to learn things the same way.  I wonder if we’ll lose something fundamentally human in the process.  Is it that filling in of the gaps that we all do when attempting to recall the past that makes us who we are?

I think there’s something to be said for this.  There’s the art of storytelling.  We should then take all storytelling as being a subjective form of art and enjoy the metaphors.  We, as subjective storytellers, weave patterns into our tales to give them meaning.  We aren’t reporting on exactly what happened, because that’s impossible without technology.  So here’s to the art of storytelling!  Here’s to the human experience.  And damn those mind-reading robots!

Karhythms and Coincidences. Part Two

On Karhythms and Coincidence.  Part Two

In the summer of 1999, I met my future wife.  She was running with her group of like minded friends.  Her band.  One of them, a guy named Craig, worked with Shad, the guitarist in our group at an Italian restaurant, in the Gold Coast of all places.  It was one block from my first apartment.   Craig and Shad became instant friends.   Shad was playing his music in bars and Craig became one of his earliest champions, outside of the Joplin crew.  I’d seen her once at one of Shad’s shows.  She was seated at the end of the bar, watching him attentively and clapping after each song.  Later, Craig told Shad that his friend, that hot girl at the bar, really liked Shad’s music, that she was a fan.  I remember remarking that she was really attractive and that was a good sign for future fans.  I don’t know why I’d thought that.  Pretty girls attracted more guys, I guess.  But I remember being envious of his ability to attract women with his music.  I wished desperately that I would have studied music.  I still do.  (Of course for different reasons.)  One night Craig brought the girl in question, the first female fan, Colleen, over, with a couple of other people to hang out in The Crow’s Nest.  It turns out I was there, but in my bedroom with the girl I was dating at the time.  So she met the others but didn’t meet me. 

It would take a Bob Dylan concert to bring us together for our first real encounter.  Bob Dylan had become a link in a chain of karhythms that tied us to the beat poets. 

We purchased tickets to see Dylan and my mother told me that it was Bob Dylan’s song “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” that had been a source of great comfort to her.  Just the week before she had been struggling through a painful incident and she played that song over and over on her drive to Branson.   She had gone to stay a couple of days in her friend’s cabin near the lake.  She needed to leave town.  It was a sad time for our family.  We were all traumatized by it and my mother had told me the story of how that song had given her such comfort.  She hadn’t been a huge Bob Dylan fan, she was a Simon and Garfunkel and a Peter, Paul and Mary kinda gal.  It was the latter’s version of the song, I’m pretty sure, she was listening to on the drive to Branson, but we talked about how important Bob Dylan had been to music and so on and what a perfect song he’d written in capturing how she felt at that moment, about how much strength it gave her.  I found it strange that I was going to see Bob Dylan for the first time, having bought the tickets the same day she’d driven to Branson.   Bob Dylan was in the air, let’s just say.  Like the universe was saying the Bob Dylan concert was a significant event.  It was important that I was seeing him.  I can’t explain it. 

So it happens that Craig and Colleen among others of their group were at the concert as well.  Craig and Colleen came down to our seats to talk to us.  Only I didn’t know who she was at first, having had consumed many beers. I just thought she was some random pretty girl seated near us.  She looked different than she had at the bar watching Shad play.  She was wearing a homemade shirt and her hippy attire.  We struck up a conversation.  I was very excited to see Bob Dylan.  I tried to stress the significance of it.  I was still reeling from the idea that it was important that I was seeing Bob Dylan.  I compared it to going back in time and watching Mozart perform.  It was historically relevant that we were seeing this man in person.   At the end of the conversation I invited her to a party at our apartment. There was no such party, but I figured if her group showed it would then in fact turn into one.   She was very easy to talk to.  I felt as though I’d known her from somewhere before.  She was so familiar to me.  Traffic getting out of the lot kept them from driving all the way down town.  She still lived in the suburbs.  

I was directing a sketch comedy show in a small theater on the north side and invited Craig to come see it and to bring his friends.  We needed audiences.  So when he did arrive he brought with him Colleen, among other friends. 

Another concert had been scheduled for later that week, this time it was Tom Waits.  While I’m a huge Tom Waits fan, it had been a long summer of concerts.  I don’t like the crowds.  So I opted out and Craig ended up with my ticket. This we decided after my comedy show, at the bar across the street from the theater.  So Colleen asked me what I was doing that Saturday instead of going to the concert.  She suggested that since Craig and the boys would be at the concert that perhaps we should hang out until the show was over and meet up with them.  For some reason, I was under the impression that Craig and Colleen were involved to some degree.  This turned out not to be the case, but at the time I was leery of inferring anything other than a plutonic evening of hanging out.  A few days before Saturday, Shad insisted that Craig and Colleen were just friends.  Craig had a thing for Colleen’s sister Dawn, who lived in San Diego.  He was going to eventually move out there to be with her.  But still, I assumed the outing wasn’t a date.  One smaller coincidence, but one that helps me forever remember the date, was that my brother Josh and Shad were born on the same day at the same hospital.  It was August Twenty-Sixth. They literally met at birth in the paternity ward in Joplin.  It would take another eighteen years for them to meet up again. 

So on Shad and Josh’s birthday, August Twenty-Sixth, I took Colleen to my favorite Mexican restaurant, just down the street from The Second City in Old Towne.  I ordered a pitcher of margaritas because we were hanging out and drinking together.  I figured that’s what you did when you hung out with someone.  As I’ve said, she was extremely easy to talk to and she laughed at my lame humor.  The margaritas helped.  We bonded over our parents’ mirrored hardships.  She’d gone through something similar, but hers had ended differently.  As we were leaving the restaurant I stumble out the door, literally tripped on the rise and I caught myself on the buzzer outside on the wall.  It rang throughout the restaurant for a while before I could get my balance.  Colleen found this to be the funniest thing she’d ever seen.  I tried to wave an apology to the nearest waitress as we hurried away. 

The late summer heat still blanketed the air.  She suggested we go to the fountain in Grant Park.  We still had some time to kill before the concert was over, a lot of time actually.  We took a cab to Michigan Avenue and strolled through the park, talking and laughing.  When we arrived at the fountain, it was gurgling and dormant.   We stood talking, when a gypsy lady, at least that was my first impression, mumbled to get my attention.   She was hunched over and short, so I bent forward to hear what she was saying.  As I did this she stuck a rose into my hand.  I then realized, or assumed, she was homeless.  So I pulled out a dollar and handed it to her.  At least she was trying to sell something instead of just begging, I thought.   The next thought was that she could take her rose back and sell it again to someone else.  I didn’t need the rose.  But she’d disappeared.  I looked around and couldn’t see her anywhere.  Well, I thought, I’m stuck holding this rose now.  Honestly that went through my thick head.  Oh wait, there’s a perfectly lovely girl right there, maybe she’d like it. So I handed it to Colleen.  Now she wasn’t in my head and didn’t hear my stupid voice going through all of this.  She simply saw it as a romantic gesture.  So she grabbed me by the shoulders and pulled me into her.  And just as our mouths began to explore one another’s the fountain erupted! 

As if on cue, the lights came up, the music blasted classical music, and the water shot high into the air.  It was just like the beginning of Married with Children.  What an omen!  Love and marriage indeed.

To mark the occasion of our first meeting we named our son Dylan.

Another karhythm happened a few years ago, but more recently.  I had written my second novel The Primrose Path and was very proud of it.  I sent out what must have been fifty query letters to agents and managers.   The ones I heard from all said they liked it but it didn’t fit with their agency or some variation of that.  I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. I had an author friend of mine read my query.  She made a few suggestions but overall it was a good letter.   I was growing more depressed by the day.   In the meantime I had written a play for my brother Ryan who was living in Chicago.  He was acting and had been in a few plays.  He is very talented.   He called me with an idea about reincarnation.  For fiction reincarnation is a wonderful concept in my opinion.  It’s up there with time travel.  So after several phone calls I sat down to write a play that he could star in.  We figured he was in with an acting company and could most likely get it to them.   We had a reading at the theater with a group of actors and it was received very well.  I was able to really hear it for all of its strengths and weaknesses and I did some major renovations on it.   And then Ryan presented it to the producer.  At first the producer said he was interested in maybe doing the play.  But he back peddled around the end of the year.  I began to think the problem was me.  Perhaps I was cursed.  I don’t even know if I really believe in curses but I was in a dark place.  The producer, though he really liked the play, had booked the theater to another lady who’d written a musical.  He’d done business with her before and he knew her well.  Ryan was moving to LA at the end of spring.  His wife had taken a job there and, being an actor, it was time for Ryan to make the leap from the minors of Chicago to attempt the big leagues of Hollywood.  The play had to be done that spring or never.  It looked like I couldn’t even get a play produced.  The cursed concept grew as more rejection for my novel came my way.   Then in late January or early February my wife’s grandfather passed away.  I had given up hope for the play but it was still on my mind.  At the church during the funeral service my son Dylan asked rather loudly if the priest was Jesus.  It triggered a thought about God and my concept of God.   I began to pray.  But it wasn’t a conventional, “Dear God,” prayer.  It was more of a meditation and a chant.  I closed my eyes and chanted over and over again, letting my mind vanish almost.  Only the chant existed, “Please lift my curse.  Please lift my curse.  Please lift my curse.”  I don’t know how long I did that for.  I went to a strange place for just a moment.  Then the service was over and we all went to an Italian restaurant to eat lunch.   I was seated at my table when a text arrived on my phone from my brother.   “They’re going to do the play.”

Ryan had given the play to a director who he really respected.  The director had directed several shows for the producer and had a long standing relationship with him.  The director must have spoken with the producer and the producer decided to do two shows on Fridays and Saturdays instead of one.   The director really wanted to direct our play. He too was moving to LA and it would be the last play he’d direct in Chicago.  So, the musical would be the early show and we’d be the late one. 

The experience taught me a great deal about writing.  And working with my brother was a true gift that I will always have.   That summer I wrote another novel Devil Music that I am also very proud of.    It gave me a better understanding of writing multiple characters.  Imagining actors in the roles helps, for those young writers out there.   I don’t know if there really was a curse, or still is, and I don’t know if I was able to lift it long enough to get a play produced and therefore be afforded the invaluable experience of working with my brother before he left town for good, but then again, neither do you. 

Here’s a story that I like very much.   What’s it mean?  Probably nothing, but it’s interesting.   I wonder how many people you’ve been in close proximity to as a child or as a younger person, but never met until years later.   You’ve always been a younger person, though, right?  On a basic level it just means, we all move around a lot and there are hot spots where people gather.   You’re bound to run across someone you’ll later meet.  But I’m still playing what-if.  It’s fun.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1285238/Engaged-couple-discover-paths-crossed-Disney-World-toddlers.html

I remember my family’s first trip to New York.   I was sixteen.  We decided to have lunch at the Hard Rock Café.  My hometown friends, Dan Dunham and Clark Rhodes were there.  Neither of us had any idea the others were going to be in New York City.  My family walked into the crowded restaurant and we were awaiting our table when I heard someone shouting.  “Hughes!”  “Travis Hughes.”  I was shocked.  I looked around and finally up to the balcony to see Dan Dunham, a guy I grew up with, one of my best friends, and another really good friend, Clark Rhodes, standing in the balcony waving to us.  They were on vacation visiting Dan’s uncle who lived there.  We were visiting the Italian side of our family on Staten Island but had come into the city to do touristy things and wound up at the Hard Rock for lunch.   We were a thousand miles from home.  Strange things can and do happen all the time; anomalies in the coherent fabric of reality?  But spend your days rolling dice and looking for patterns, eventually you will go insane.  Trust me.

Karhythms and Coincidences - Part One

On Karhythms and Coincidence.  Part One.

When I was a young artist, someone, an older artist friend, gave me a copy of the novel The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho.   It’s the allegorical story of a young shepherd and his journey to Egypt from his homeland in Andalusia.  It’s a book about finding one’s own destiny.  The underlying New Age message is that if you really want something, the entire universe conspires to help you along your journey to achieve your dreams. It’s like that book The Secret.  Now, according to one theory, which I will elude to from time to time, destiny is the plan you laid out for yourself before you were born; when you were ready to return to earth and face your karmic sentence.  But putting reincarnation aside for a moment, the book was a great inspiration to me as a young writer setting out to chase my dreams.  I should buy a copy and give it to a young artist I know.  I’m sad to report that I lost my copy along the way.

There was another book out around that same time titled The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield.  This novel’s theme is similar in that it is about paying attention to the signs of life, especially the coincidences.  These coincidences and happenstances work like road signs along the way, essentially.  So in my early adult years I paid attention to coincidences and took note of the strange twists in life’s tale.  Many of the biggest moves in my lifetime have been shrouded by these strange events.

Two teachers, one my junior year, followed by another, more adamant one my senior year, steered me toward writing.  I had always been a writer but I didn’t realize that’s what you called someone who did it for fun.  My first book was written in kindergarten.  I can remember sitting at our kitchen table and drawing the picture of the super kid flying out his bedroom window.  He’d accidentally found some radioactive kool aid and acquired super powers as a consequence. The scientist who accidentally left the kool aid out was desperately trying to track the super kid down.  I was five so the words were spelled phonetically and it ended openly, as do some of my adult books.  I had my first success in sixth grade with my Boogerman series.   The heartfelt story of a booger that comes to life and the people’s lives he touches.  So for whatever reason I have always been a writer.  My imagination is a fertile garden.  I don’t mean that as a boast, I’m just telling the truth.  I can’t help it.  It’s perhaps more of a curse than a gift.  It gave me frightening childhood nightmares.  It makes the world a strange and almost foreign place for me to navigate as an adult.  Ask my wife, I still have the mind of a child.  The question would be, where did that come from?  Genetics is to blame for a lot of it.  My father is an incredible story teller and my mother loves to read.  Now according to the theory, I chose that combination of personalities to achieve my destiny of becoming a writer in this life.  I had been in search of such a karmic pattern and found it mixed perfectly in them.  I chose to be left handed, thus more likely to be creative.

Okay.  I should stop here and explain something.  I enjoy thought experiments.  I love to suppose what-ifs.  This mindset allows me to consider anything without passing judgment on it as preposterous or impossible.  I imagine instead the implications of something if it were to be true.  But I have to fall back on my title, I don’t know, but neither do you.  That’s the whole point.  Anything’s possible to me.  It’s dangerous at times because you want to believe something and so you might get caught up in, say a conspiracy theory, and really let it affect your life.   I used to be like this when I was a young man as well.  Now I’m a bit more skeptical, but I still enjoying looking around at all the things I know and trying to see if the theory fits.   A lot of times there will be things you can point to and say well, that can’t be true and so the credibility of a theory loses its sway.   But as you can tell, I like the theory I’m eluding to so often here today.  I’m still looking for inconsistencies.  I’ve yet to find one.  I’m sure others will be able to. 

You might say “What’s the theory?” at this point.  We’ll get to that later. For now we’re only talking about one aspect of the much bigger theory.  This aspect shows up in many other theories.  Note: I sometimes refer to philosophies as theories. It keeps us all on the same playing board. 

So in college I took a job at Garfield’s Restaurant in the Joplin mall.  It is here that I met the people who would affect my life in tremendously profound ways.  For the first time, this group of friends understood the real me.  They saw the artist I was becoming and they treated me thusly.  They were fellow artists coming into their own as well.  We were a remarkable group, I have to admit.  The theory suggests we came together because we were supposed to.  Perhaps we’d even known each other before.  We certainly inspired one another.  I often joke that had we all studied music as children we would have become the next Beatles.  Only one of us had studied music, however.  He is the best guitarist I’ve ever known.  He indulged me by putting a few of my poems to music.  We likened ourselves to the modern beat generation, only of varying disciplines.  I think that most artists experience this early camaraderie with fellow artists.  I even think it happens with non-artist.  It’s when you’re looking for your mate so you run in packs.  It happens in college.  You leave your childhood and re-invent yourself at this age.   You form a band.  Maybe it’s not a musical band, but it’s a band non-the-less.  The Gang.  The Posse.  Some people in my home town formed them with their young adult church groups. 

So when one of our ilk moved to Chicago with his new wife and fellow comrade, I ventured up to visit them. This was at the end of their first summer in the windy city.  It all started when I was standing in my parents’ swimming pool talking on our cordless house phone.   This was back when that was still a thing.  It was my friend Paul and he was describing the view out of his thirteenth story apartment.  It is important to note that I have always been fascinated by large cities.  Growing up in the country, I always pretended to be in a big city.  I imagined looking out the window of my parents’ car and seeing tall buildings where fields were.   So I could picture in great detail what he was describing.  It sounded so incredible and to hear that he was able to live this way and it wasn’t scary or unsafe at all.  He lived in a very nice neighborhood.  Being naïve they’d moved to the Gold Coast.  They were in the thick of it, right above Division Street.  To see the Hancock Building they only had to look up.  He called to tell me they were filming a movie on his block.   He was watching actor Tim Roth walk along the sidewalk.  He tracked him into a bar across the street.  He hung up and rushed to the elevator and scuttled to the Hotsy Totsy Bar to stalk the famous actor.   He never mustered the courage to speak to the Reservoir Dogs star but he did strike up a conversation with the bar tender.   Tom Neery, as was his name, a name I would hear often in the coming years, though I never met the man, told Paul about a job opening at his former place of employment.  He even gave him the permission to use his name when applying.  They liked referrals there.  They didn’t trust complete strangers coming in off the street.  The bar was called The Last Act.  It was located exactly across the street from The Second City.  For you who are not from Chicago or familiar with comedy, The Second City is holy ground.  It is from here the likes of John Belushi, Bill Murray, John Candy, Mike Myers, Chris Farley, Tina Fey just to scratch the surface, all got their starts.  Saturday Night Live’s Lorne Michaels favorite hunting ground for talented comedians and improvisers is The Second City.  Now, a few things about me: I was obsessed with Saturday Night Live from the first episode I ever saw.  Both my brother Josh and I were both for ever changed by that experience.  The Church Lady was the first skit we watched.   Ironically or coincidentally, the ability to laugh at the Church Lady and not feel like I was sinning was the first step in my growing awareness of the hypocrisy and inconsistencies of my childhood religion.  I grew up very afraid of making a mistake and going to hell.  Another thing about me, I like to consider myself a fairly funny dude, when I’m in the right setting of course.   I was voted Class Clown and all.   My brother and I would do Hans and Franz impressions at family parties and in front of my parents’ Gang.  Ryan, my youngest brother, who is now an actor, could do every character Dana Carvey did.  So to me SNL was part of who I was growing up.  It had a major impact to say the least.

My friend Paul convinced me to come and stay for a few weeks.  It was early September, the best time of year to visit Chicago. His wife Cheri had inspired me to start reading Jack Kerouac and it all felt very On the Road to travel and sleep on his couch.  He was working at The Last Act Bar.  I asked him how funny some of the comedians were.  He said they didn’t have anything on us.  One of the things that had brought our group together besides our artistic natures was our senses of humor.  We were all funny dudes. 

I couldn’t wait to hang out at his work.  It was going to be the highlight of my visit.  I arrived and they picked me up from the airport.  I can still remember the feeling of driving up on and then into the tall buildings.  My neck was craned and my eyes full of moist astonishment.   Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun” was playing on the radio.  It was 1996. 

So the next day after I arrived we took bikes around the neighborhood and he gave me a local tour.  We went out to Oak Street Beach and then across to Lincoln Park.  We ended the tour by going to The Second City.  I stood and examined the carvings in the façade.  The faces.  Then Paul noticed that The Last Act wasn’t opened for lunch. They were supposed to be.  He took me through the alley and into the beer garden and then into the back door.  There behind the bar stood a stocky old man chewing on a cigar.  He was short and funny.  He was a man from another era; pissed off that his bartender didn’t show up.  He tried to call the guy but there was no answer.  The guy was Tom Neery’s best friend.  He even tried to call Tom.  He looked at me and asked Paul.                                      “You’re buddy know how to bartend?” he asked, removing the cigar stub and gesturing at me with it.

            “Sure,” I lied.  I’d waited tables for three years, I could figure it out.  So I called my mother and told her I was staying.  She said she figured as much when I’d left.  I slept on Paul and Cheri’s couch for a few weeks until we moved downstairs to a larger apartment and I slept on an air mattress in a spare room.  I came to study at The Second City for the next two years.  I received a lot of attention and it went to my head.  I was acting for fun, it wasn’t my dream.  It was to be a source of creative exercise to help my writing.  But there for a time, it appeared I could really pull it off.  I didn’t have a solid enough acting background to make the Second City Touring Company, so I left.  But I met some fascinating people, some I would later see on TV and in the movies.   By my second year, Paul and Cheri had learned enough about the city to realize that where they were living was not a practical place for two kids in school.  They were looking to move to a more reasonable neighborhood up north.  That’s when I decided to call the other members of our group still back home to come and have an adventure with me in Chicago.  Four of us rented a large, gorgeous apartment in Lakeview.  Eventually there came to be eight people who had worked at Garfield’s in Joplin Missouri living within a two block radius of each other in Chicago.  We called the central hub of this group, our big apartment, The Crow’s Nest.  Magic and insanity ran rampant in that place. The first Thanksgiving none of us went home and we enjoyed a raucous feast and I reflected on the strange events that had brought us all there.  It was here in The Crow’s Nest where we coined the term karhythm.  It was the combining of karma and rhythm as in the karmic rhythm of life.  We took notice of it throughout our journeys through the city and would report strange coincidences we’d come across.   Bill, an actual painting and sculpting artist, one day suggested a new name for a red crayon to be Neck Red.  On our way to lunch to Bamby Thai Restaurant, he sang the tune for Warrant’s “Cherry Pie” but the lyrics were “She’s my Bamby Thai, tastes so good makes the Chinese cry.  Sweet Bamby Thai.”  He stopped and knelt over and picked up a red crayon on the street and showed it to me.  “Karhythm?”  He put the crayon in his pocket.  In the year 1999, we vowed to really pay attention to the world.  Somewhere I have written down all the karhythms we reported to each other that year. 

TO BE CONTINUED…

 

The Newest Year of them All!

On family and the holidays

The holidays are over.  For some this is a sad realization and others it comes with a sense of relief, and then for others, they are charged with a new sense of purpose and determination to get back out there and give it a little extra this year.  New Years Resolutions!  Our month long Christmas orgy is over. It was what it was, right?  

I think one of the interesting things about the holidays is the amount of self reflection that unconsciously takes place over the course of all those parties; spending so much time with family and old friends.   We look at our families and we see them for all their scars and truths, we know their real natures intuitively because we know them to dwell some place inside of us as well.  They are extensions of our selves.  Often the thing that irritates one family member about another is the very trait that they themselves struggle with the most.  Some people have the self-awareness to see this.  And so they make an effort to correct it, though it will always be an effort, one that they will often lose sight of along the journey of living their daily lives; caught up in the flow of the world.  That’s why the whole ritual of the holiday season is good for us.  It gives us a much needed break from living the same day over and over again.  It gives us the chance to reflect and hopefully recharge enough to get back to pushing that damn boulder up that hill.

The trip through your past, facing and reconnecting with people who knew you when you were a child, makes you fill in the gaps that you’ve inadvertently taped over about yourself.   But while some are self-aware and able try and think before acting or speaking, many, many others I fear are not.  What is self-awareness any way?  Is it an over active frontal lobe?  People who are not self-aware have less electricity running through the front of their brain?   I know that when we drink, that’s the first area of the brain to fall asleep.  That voice in our head goes to bed and we continue to ramble about the party, the dark passenger doing things for us.  That’s another topic though.  I wonder why for certain people that voice is very loud, often too loud, and it makes them neurotic.  They have trouble getting anything done, they’re like Congress.  While others that voice is barely audible and sometimes not there at all.  If it is there it’s not very wise.  And then for others that voice is a paranoid lunatic, suspecting every one of plotting against them and imagining everyone’s worst thoughts projected back at them.  I remember in Sunday School the teacher told us that voice was Jesus.  So why does Jesus make Mr. Franklin think his neighbor is angry with him because he didn’t wave at him today?  Or make him assume that every comment that comes his way is loaded with spiteful subtext?  Because they’re not channeling Jesus?   Jesus loved his metaphors.  People tend to forget that.  But really only for Jesus was that voice Jesus.   

But this brings me to an interesting thought experiment I heard about.  The Zen master said to his congregation to try something different the next time they were to come into conflict with another person.  They said step away from the situation, if only in mind, and imagine summoning a being of light.  It could be Jesus, or the Virgin Mary, or Buddha, The Archangel Michael, or Mohammad or Krishna, or Harry Potter, you get the idea.  Imagine calling upon Ghandi or Mother Theresa and asking them to take over your body for a little while.  You then ask them to handle the situation for you and to show you how it could be done with grace.  They will tell you to imagine yourselves living the other person’s troubled life.  And once you have done this, you say, but that’s no excuse for acting like a total bitch.  And the being of light says, yes, this is true, but remember, you’re not perfect either.    And you say, if they’re going to dish out shit to me, then I’ll dish it right back.  And the being says, take the high road.  Kill them with your poise and wisdom.  Here let me show you.  And the being, wearing your body like a suit, steps into the conflict and soothes it rather quickly, then they proceed to show you how to best handle the situation by showing the other person that, while irritated, you still have love for them.  You learn to speak rationally.  And the conflict ends with a new understanding and truce.  The being helps everyone see things from a higher perspective.  And then it is over and the being returns you to your body.  So where does this being come from?  Was it inside of us all the time?  Is that what they meant by saying that voice is Jesus?  It could be Jesus if we let it.  Jesus is a concept in this case; an ideal to attempt to live by.   The Zen master said to go around acting like you are enlightened and eventually you just may stop acting and start being.

Ask people to best describe Jesus’ nature to you.  Especially fundamentalists.   Not to say I condone labels but okay, for the sake of my point.  What would Jesus be like to talk to and be around?  Remember those T-shirts and bumper stickers that read: “What would Jesus do?”  Why didn’t the people who put them on their cars stop and honestly ask that question in every situation they were in. Maybe some did.  I hope so.  One thing Jesus did well, besides turning water into wine and healing the sick, was to prioritize what is important and what isn’t.   Keep the prize in mind at all times, the prize being enlightenment and all else becomes less important. Jesus didn’t hang out with the popular people or the upper class, did he?  He chose the fringe guys to hang out with.  He turned the other cheek.  He cared about everyone, not just one group or another.  People tend to forget so much of what they learned every Sunday in their local churches.  They are caught up so much in the daily events of their lives that they don’t have time to quiet the outside voices to listen to the inside one.

So we know this is true about people.  We know that no matter how much you try to make them see things in a greater perspective they will never actually change.  Despite what the movies tell us, people do not have a great character arch.  They may become self-aware enough to want to change but these things have become too ingrained into who they are.  Nothing makes sense outside of what they have always believed.  So those of us who are self-aware can say, okay, they won’t ever change, so I have to accept that and understand that and learn to work around whatever trait it is that most irritates me.  It is a difficult task to attempt, no doubt.  But that’s family, right. 

So we get to hit the restart button and we get back to our lives in the newest year of them all.  It is okay to say, this year, I’m going to try to become the best version of myself ever.  Good luck with that.  Remember that thing you’re doing is the exact same thing your father does, or your mother does, or your sister does.  Do try and listen to that being of light some times.  They just may help us all have a better world to live in.  Amen!  Or, I don’t know. 

I DON'T SAY MERRY CHRISTMAS, IT'S OFFENSIVE!!

I don’t say Merry Christmas, it’s offensive.

ON CHRISTMAS

For those who don’t know me that well, I’m kidding.  F**k those tree huggin’ radicals with their sanitized, sterilized, politically correct, horse shit.  You know why kids these days get so sick?  They don’t have immune systems.   They never learned to fight off all those germs.  Saying Merry Christmas to some one is only as offensive as someone coming up to you and saying how was that Cubs game, if you’re not a Cubs fan.  “Can you believe that fat kid won American Idol?”  “Oh, I’m sorry, that’s offensive, I don’t watch American Idol.   Why would you just assume that about me?  How dare you?”  Yee-ha!  Go America!

So let’s talk about Christmas now.  It’s what you do in December.  Now it’s what you do in October.  We love sugar, don’t we?  Don’t get me started on sugar.  But Christmas, now, that’s a topic.   We should all picture Burl Ives now, wearing tinted glasses and a straw hat, possibly in the form of a snow man but perhaps in a white suit with a black bolo tie.  Definitely with a white Van Dyke mustache.  Can you smell the chestnuts roasting? Oh, I think you can.  Did it just get real creepy in here?  Back to it, Sivart.  Am I the only person who thinks it’s all pretty weird?  Christmas.  I know, it’s for the kids.  I mean, I like it, for the most part, I’ll play along, but it is kind of weird.  The whole thing.

What are we all doing?  Carried away much?  So let’s break Christmas down.  What is it, firstly?  I’ve been charged with having to explain it to my alien friend Sivart606 from Alpha Centauri B.  Good dude.   Well, it’s the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ.  Well, okay.  So December Twenty-Fifth is Jesus’ birthday.  No, but…Why’d they pick that day?  Excellent question, Sivart.  Nobody knows when Jesus was born.  So early on, someone, most likely a Roman, decided that usurping the pagan holiday would help ease the people into their newly reorganized religion. You know the one that saved their Roman Empire and brought the people back to them.  Kept them in line.   “These pagans have always celebrated on and around the winter solstice.  How can you expect them not to celebrate their favorite holiday?”  “You don’t, you just change it to be about something else.” Kind of like taking the focus off of one thing, the original reason, and playing up another aspect.  Wait, that’s sounds kind of familiar.  It reminds me of what Santa Claus once said, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”  But that’s impossible!   Ah, but of course the eye of the needle was referring to the skinny tunnels that led under the walls of ancient cities.  The camel had to be stripped of all its gear and cargo to kneel and be pulled and prodded through the tunnel.  So you can’t take it with you? asks Sivart.  No, buddy, that’s the point. 

So…When did it get so weird?  Well, I’d say it slowly evolved and became the bizarre, month long celebration it is today over the millennia.  Customs were added to older customs, many went back to pagan rituals and customs.  Gift giving and the Yule log being examples. 

Gift giving?  Why do we do that?  It’s not, for the most part, a genuine thing and so what’s the point of doing it?  When it is a genuine thing, then I’m all for it.  Give a gift to someone you love or someone you don’t even know, by all means, please do.  But the majority of gift giving at Christmas time is out of obligation.   We run around, fight each other, camp out, spend money we don’t have to give gifts to people that don’t need them or in most cases don’t even like them.  Can’t we all just call it a truce and stop?  If you see something and you think, oh, Javier would love this rug.  It would really pull his whole space together.  And you get it and you bring it to your friend Javier and you give it to him and he gives you a heartfelt thank you, even though now he feels obligated to get you something equally nice, but that’s not the point, Javier, then I’m all for it.  Give and give.  If someone is in need and you can help them out with a little gift, that’s what it’s about.  But not this. Gift giving should be a spontaneous action that comes from the heart.  Okay, says, Sivart, it is the one time of year you let the people who mean something to you in your life know how much you appreciate them.  Whatever, Sivart.   My wife is going to most likely (have a highly negative reaction towards me) when she reads this.  Because I don’t actually buy people gifts.  She does it all.  And I am very, very, very thankful to her and I want her to know how much I appreciate all she does.  It’s not easy and she busts her ass.  I should take a much more active role in stuff like that.  It’s just that I don’t get it.  It doesn’t really mean anything to me.  If I had my say, we wouldn’t do it.  Bah-humbug!   Have I lost the Christmas spirit for saying this?  I do like to see my children’s faces on Christmas morning.  But they get too many things and it doesn’t mean as much to them; certainly not as much as it did to those poor kids during the Great Depression, that’s for sure. Put that in your stove top hat and smoke it.  Okay, but there are those times when it is exciting to see those kids of mine truly excited.  But that’s it.  So, in conclusion, you should buy a couple of things for Christmas when your offspring are still young and gullible, but then that should be it.   

*I honestly do sometimes forget, and even take for granted, all the things my wife does.   She rocks!!

An excellent example of how customs have been added over the years, we’ve added a new one.  Elf on a Shelf.  It’s funny how that one starts out strong and then, by about a week or two in, that thing’s being thrown around the house and wherever it lands, is where that sneaky little bastard ran to in the night.  I have to admit, we lucked into a pretty funny Elf on the Shelf situation.   Last year someone bought us the Elf on a Shelf.  But technically it wasn’t the same Elf on the Shelf that was all the rage, it was a strange knock off elf.   And he’s a creepy looking little shit with a leer on his face, somewhere between Bob Hope and Hannibal Lecter.  He’s Chucky in an elf costume.  So after a couple of weeks my wife brings home the real Elf on a Shelf doll.  She’s all doe eyed and adorable.  So I had a ball with his creepiness once she arrived.  The original elf, the kids named Elfie.  You’d think my kids would be more creative but whatever.  And the new, real Elf on a Shelf was named Bella.  When I’d write notes to the kids as Elfie I’d write it with my right hand, note I am left-handed, and I’d purposely try to write like a kindergartener by using simple words and writing sloppily.  And when I’d write as Bella, I’d write as eloquently and properly as I could.   The couple had a tumultuous relationship.  He loved her from first sight.  She was afraid of him (at first.)   One morning the kids would find him holding her in his arms and her smile would appear very forced.  He wrote that he luved her.  She’s so pritty!  And she’d write, help me.  It put the kids in an awkward position because if you touch the elves they will lose their magic for one whole night.  She wrote that he scared her, but the kids didn’t want to touch them to pull him off of her.  So the next night she fought back and tied him up and hung him off of a cabinet in the kitchen with string.  She explained that they had had a heart to heart talk and that he wouldn’t be bothering her any more.  The next day he was found in the corner of the bathroom with his hands over his face, like he was crying.   He wrote that she broked his hart.  Then after that, my wife suggested I was taking it a bit too far and they became friends and it all went back to me just walking around the house at night trying to think of places I hadn’t hidden them before.    He really likes that spot in the window.

This all leads up to Santa Claus.  Saint Nicholas, Sinterklaas, Kris Kringle.  Of all the customs, this one feels the strangest to me.   It started in Greece in the fourth century, when Saint Nicholas of Myra, a bishop, became famous for his generosity toward the poor.  He kept these poor young girls from being prostitutes by giving them dowries.  They made him a saint later and gave him January Sixth as his day.  Children were given gifts on that day until Martin Luther came along and suggested they move it to December Twenty-Fifth to bring the children’s interest back to Christ over the saints.   In Germanic culture the god Odin had a white beard and took nightly rides across the sky.  When converted to Christianity these concepts were married with Santa Claus.  The Dutch put a red cape on him.   Eventually all these versions merged into what is now Santa Claus.  And then in New York he really took on a whole new celebrity.  And poems and songs further added to the folklore over time; Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer being a more modern addition to the lore, for example.  Before I had children I was split on the whole concept of lying to my children about Santa Claus.  But since everyone does it, it’s okay.  It’s fun!  And it is.  And it will be very sad when they admit they know the truth.  That will break my heart.  But still, it’s weird.  The whole thing is a lot of work and money and time.  Ask my wife.  She’s running around like a one-eyed jack watching two flagpoles.  Maybe I should stop writing this blog and go help her out a little.

Just remember what Santa Claus always said, “He who is without sin, throw the first stone.”  Martin Luther never realized what he’d done.  So technically Santa Claus is pagan.  So that means the pagans turned it back around didn’t they?  I see what you did there, pagans! 

On Taking Back America

Yee-ha!  Remember when this was the greatest country in the world?  I’ve got to be honest, how would I know if this was the greatest country in the world?  That’s what they told us all, right?  But I never lived in another country.  I’ve seen the news and movies where it’s pretty shitty in third world countries.  Sure, those are third world countries. What about other first world countries?  Are we really better then those countries?  I’m just asking, of course.  I don’t know, remember.  We could look at statistics, but we’d better not, right.  Might not like what we see. I know we can kick anybody’s ass.  Is that the number one thing that makes a country great?  We have the best military, thus we’re the best.  Is that what you want from your country?

I’ve always found it strange that you’re supposed to hail your allegiance and your entire heart and mind to the country you were born in.   I didn’t choose to be born here.  At least I don’t think I did.  That’s for another blog entirely.  But for the sake of this entry let’s assume we don’t get to choose the country of our birth.  From a fairly young age I’ve always wondered about that.  It’s really not fair, is it?  I got lucky and was born in a very nice place in a seemingly nice country in a good era in which to live.  I saw it dwindle and tarnish slightly but I also saw it through some pretty good times.  I still love the nineties!  Good times, indeed. 

What is it about us that we have this innate desire to hold sacred the place of our birth and origins?  We take it very seriously and personally.   We love our country because we were born here.  That feels odd to me.  I don’t hate America, in fact, I feel that same pride in my country that we all have.  I just wonder where it comes from.   Is it because we feel connected to it, because we understand its culture because we are the culture?  We also feel this way about the earth itself, right?  I imagine some future where we’re intergalactic travelers who are very patriotic about the Sun.  “I come from the Sun’s solar system, and you can kiss my human ass! Yee-ha!”

I suppose it’s just human nature and we’ve been doing it since we were in tribes and we took pride in those tribes.  But we know on a higher level that we’re all human beings here together.   That we’re all related anyway.   Science and religion both agree that we all come from the same blood line.  There really was one lady with mitochondrial DNA that was the mother of modern man.  Knowing and feeling it, I guess are two things. Just because you’re related doesn’t mean you have to love them, right?  Look at your own families to confirm this.

So I’d like to present the concept of Us and Them.  It’s what keeps us apart and also on the flip side, it’s what strengthens bonds, I think.   It probably goes back to the tribal thing again or even alliances within a tribe.  There’s Us, the good ones, and Them, the other ones who have a different agenda than us, (or perhaps the same agenda but different means of achieving it.)  Think about a sports team.  It’s Us against Them and we generally don’t like Them and this dislike or strife against Them brings Us closer together.  It’s a great literary device, to have two enemies come together to fight a common foe and in the end the enemies are best friends and partners.  It brought them together.  Ronald Reagan wished aliens would come down to earth and in doing so Us humans would realize our differences and come together and bond over fighting them off. 

But there are so many forces working against this idea that we’re all in this together, that it will be very difficult to achieve it.  And it all starts with labels.  We assign labels to Us and Them and it makes it easier to bond with Us and strive against Them.  Liberals and Conservatives.  Blacks and Whites.  Muslims and Christians.  Rednecks and Gays.  Prison gangs versus other prison gangs. Can’t we all get along, prison gangs? 

And our system here in this, the world’s greatest super power is designed to keep Us separated from Them.   We know that’s what they do, right?  The powers that be keep us bickering amongst ourselves about petty bullshit while they do whatever they want.  It’s all like a pro wrestling event, our political process these days.   We can’t get anything really accomplished and we’re all so removed now from having any real say.   I heard about a political party gaining popularity in Canada called the Online Party.  Enabling direct democracy in the internet era.   They aim to eliminate partisanship by focusing on individual issues.  Their representatives are being held responsible for their actions by instant vote and count, based on an accountability oath.  People vote online and their representatives are bound by oath to uphold the wish of the majority or they will have to step down. 

Immediately I thought about the disastrous attempt of our government’s health care web site launch.  I know that’s what my conservative friends would be screaming right now; throwing their red flags in the air.  “They can’t even get that right, how would you be able to trust a site that lets you vote directly for things?” 

 *It’s important here to note that I hate politics and all the political bickering that is, in my opinion, the real thing destroying this country, so don’t assume that if I make a joke about conservatives or liberals that I’m one or the other.  On some things I’m liberal and others I’m conservative and I hate labels as this entry will hopefully explain.   It’s the whole point really.  I’m a guy speaking from the island of sanity in the middle.

But the idea that instead of relying on some bought-and-paid-for politician to act in our best interest, that in some near future we take back the democratic process and have a real say in how our country is run, really excites me.  I can also hear liberals saying, just because the majority wants something doesn’t make it the right thing.  But I’d suggest that the far wings would cancel each other out and the middle, or mentally stable people who understand there are more shades to everything than black and white, would then have the majority to run things the right way.  Whatever that means.  If you could trust someone to establish this system and make it safe from hackers and corruption, then I’d be all for it. 

You know what would hold us back and I can even make a prediction that it will; Fear.  Fear has done so much to keep us in the dark over the course of human history.  We are all so afraid of everything. Afraid of change.  We love to repeat the same safe day over and over again.   We so often find ourselves paralyzed by it.  It’s how people have held power and dominion over other people from the very beginning of civilization.  Fear is a great motivator.  Keep people fearful that if They get their way, then we’re all doomed.   I’ve mentioned that in some ways I’m more of an observer in this world, which is something I need to perhaps change, but it’s in my nature to sit back and see how things play out without passing judgment until after the fact.  People think they can predict the future and are usually so adamant about this imagined ability that they are willing to fight tooth and nail to avoid their worst fears from playing out.  I guess it’s better to be safe than sorry.  That’s the very definition of conservative isn’t it?   I’ve always found it fascinating that people who claim to have the most faith in God are usually those who are also the most fearful and conservative about things.   I remember hearing from church that you’re supposed to leave it up to God and not worry about everything that you can’t control.  It’s in God’s hands, right?  But I can name several conservative people who are the first to say, “No, you can’t do that (fill in the blank idea for doing something a better way).  Then the worst thing would happen if you did that idea.” It’s usually a bad idea until you benefit from it.  Haven’t all the greatest ideas in history met with the fiercest opposition?

To keep it balanced I also know that liberal parenting is one of the downfalls of an entire generation.  The ‘everybody gets a trophy’ philosophy has led to an entitled generation of spoiled brats.   But parenting and world view can be two different things.  I believe it is important to be a conservative parent.  Overly liberal parenting can lead to some pretty shitty kids who are difficult to be around.   As a soccer coach and a member of a neighborhood with a lot of kids running around, I can attest to this.  But, growing up in a conservative town in the Bible Belt, I’ve seen overly conservative parenting backfire as well, but again, it’s the two extremes that usually fail.   Remember, there are more shades than black and white.  Open your eyes and mind to them and you’ll see things are usually more complex than simple talking points.   Is it simplicity of mind or mental laziness to let your political party tell you how to think?  It’s just easier, I suppose. 

For the first time in human history we are all able to be connected instantly with each other.  We have the ability to have a say and to be heard.  Don’t you think that as a collective mind we know right from wrong?  That there are intelligent people out there who could propose ways to make our world a better place?  I think about the road blocks to this, partisanship and the quagmire that is our current political system and I imagine a future where we all have a say in how our world is run, people from the entire globe all connected.  Then there wouldn’t be wars over oil fields, would there?  Right now the system is designed for the interests of the large corporations not for the individual human beings who it was all designed to serve.   I hope that someday it will change but it won’t come from complacency and it won’t come from fear.  One day the Earth could be the greatest planet in our sector of the galaxy.  “We have true democracy in our solar system.  Unlike you heathens from Gleepglop Alpha Centauri B. Yee-ha!”