Hermetic Order of the Tapioca Equinox

This morning I got up a bit early in order to do a little bit of yoga and chanting before work. In the middle of my last chant, I heard a forceful "meow," so I opened my eyes. Poxie was on the edge of the mat standing on her hind legs with her paws together, moving them up and down rapidly as she does when she is begging for food.

I had already fed Poxie this morning, though, and she didn't stop her motion when I opened my eyes and looked at her. She just kept going, so I kept chanting. Maybe she isn't actually begging for food; maybe she's just saying grace. Or something...

Here's a very amateur photograph of Wednesday's lunar eclipse, in case you missed it then or maybe you caught it but are missing it now. I'm big into celestial events. A lot of people tell me that the moon and the stars help them realize their insignificance in the grand scheme. For me, it's the opposite. I feel more significant than ever, sitting beneath such grandeur.

My problems and ego games, however, do become insignificant. "Ego games" includes both "good" and "bad." All of that slips away, and what is left is something luminous and enduring. I feel the part of me that was around before birth; I feel the part of me that's there in the space between my thoughts. Or something...

I'm gonna share a song that I wrote shortly after the first full lunar eclipse I witnessed. I could check when it was, but I'm feeling lazy at the moment. The latest this event and song could have occurred is 1996. I wrote the music for this song in Venice somewhere between 1993-94; it started out as a really serious song about Froot Loops breakfast cereal. Somewhere along the way I decided the Froot Loops people didn't deserve the free advertising, no matter how delicious I thought their cereal was at that point in time.

I redid the song a little over 10 years ago after wathing a total lunar eclipse in one of the best possible locations, way up Route 14 in the middle of nowhere, somewhere within Vasquez Rocks National Park. There is almost no outside light interference in that area, and the landmarks are surreal: they used to use the park to film alien terrain for Star Trek.

I was working on a shoot at the time, and someone I met on that shoot reminded me of someone else and we got to interacting and soon I got to writing. The song sprung out of that interaction, juxtaposed with another interaction from a couple of years before. I explored the idea of woman-as-moon, and I explored the feeling of intense alone-ness after a connection with another disintegrates. After a lunar eclipse, the shadow of the earth passes on and the light shines again; in life, intimate connection occurs again, with the other wearing a different mask the next time.

As soon as I figure out how to be less hung up on masks--both my own and others'--I'll share the secret with you...

[Keep in mind this is an old song and I didn't know what I was doing!]

lunareclipse.mp3

Lyrics: lunareclipse.pdf

It took a few days to arrange, but I brought a cat home yesterday. Not just any cat, but Poxie Cat. She is likely to take on a few extra nicknames, but Poxie is so popular I might not be able to withstand the backlash if I attempt to change her name.

And yeah, I have posted a lot of pictures of cats on here previously, but none of those cats were officially mine. This one is. That doesn't mean I don't love those other cats, but that's one of the things that makes Poxie different. Just one...

When I went to the shelter to pick her up, there were people gathered to say goodbye to her. One of the people there to see her told me, "Poxie's going home today. She knows; I can just tell!"

As if to prove her right, Poxie just walked into the carrier to leave with me. I made a quick stop at the local pet store to pick up some food on our way home, and I knew people there knew of Poxie, but I was still surprised when the cashier lit up upon hearing her name. I shouldn't have been surprised at all when a woman who worked at the pet store came out to say hello and goodbye to Poxie as I was leaving, but I was, just a little. I have never known such a popular cat!

When we got to the house, I was expecting to have to ease her into her new surroundings. Instead, she hopped out of the carrier and started exploring. It was as if she was a child at an amusement park; her little tail was wagging rapidly and she couldn't contain her excitement. As pictured below, she just loves all the windows.




Poxie is well known for her tricks. Below, I'll give you a brief glimpse of one. When people come over to my place to eat from now on, I'm going to have to coach them in order to increase their resistance. She has her begging technique down to a beautiful, irresistible science...

This song isn't a new one, either, but who's gonna know? I wrote this one years ago, feeling abandoned by god. When I'm in the right frame of mind, that idea strikes me as absurd. From time to time, however, I get caught up in the wrong script and there's seemingly nothing to do but read the lousy lines in front of me.

Speaking of the wrong script, I have been thinking about the Biblical creation myth a lot this week. It's a tale of bigtime abandonment: tossed out of the garden and there's even an angel with a flaming sword guarding the tree of life. That's what we get for having a little knowledge? I know, knowledge plus immortality pretty much makes us gods right here and now, and we can't have that if we're supposed to be "fallen." Whatever...

"Fallen" strikes me as another word for "incomplete." And I'm certain I have spent a lot of time feeling incomplete, feeling like god is somewhere out there or wholeness is something I can get ahold of somewhere out there... It's as if I'm a fragment of some greater whole, and it's up to me to find the rest of me somehow. "The rest of me" is often the divine part, or so I think; I often feel blessed with the ability to see god everywhere but inside myself. So I go chasing after people and objects and sensations and whatever, all somewhere outside of me, when all I really need to do to feel whole is just sit still and breathe.

In Dharma Bums, I believe Jack Kerouac says this: "Relax and enjoy God. God is you, you fool!"

That's beautiful advice, but it's also tough to take, especially in this society at this time in history: think of the billions and billions of dollars spent by corporations to convince us that we really are incomplete.

Still, I'm doing my best to go with Kerouac's advice, living it one breath at a time. And now, an ode to those feelings of incompleteness. I think of this post as a sort of "sending away," as if recording the song was a way of putting those feelings into a coffin, and giving the song away is a way of burying it:

tapiocaequinox_fragment.mp3

Lyrics: Fragment.pdf

In honor of Venice, here's a little something from those days. In my more self-deprecating modes, I might call this the audio equivalent of a lettuce and ketchup sandwich. Sometimes, though, I listen to this and I think that maybe I was tapped into something for just a few seconds there.

The song is called "Ominous," and I made it with a microphone, some heavy effects, and whatever was lying around the apartment. I made noise by slamming the microphone into whatever. And yeah, the result is primitive, but it's over ten years old, so it's an antique...

Don't download this if you're expecting a "song." This is an instrumental, though you can hear some light talking in the background if you really strain. It's really just a rhythm or a collection of rhythms, and it seems to drift toward heavy and sometimes chaotic. It's a bunch of heavy pounding followed by echoes and shadows of pounding and then atmospheric noise gets in there and does its own echoing and shadowcasting, causing whatever it is you hear. I can picture some kind of ritual action taking place with this in the background, but that could just be the space I occupy today.

tapiocaequinox_ominous.mp3

I returned, bodily, to Venice a few days ago. I say "bodily," only because I had taken trips there previously when I was disembodied. I don't mean to suggest that I was sitting in my room and took some kind of mental or spiritual trips to Venice in the recent past; my physical self went there but I was not present. I was heartbroken on one occasion, and on others, I may as well have been heartbroken. I had no idea where my soul was, and that's the part of me I identify as "I." So it was good to get back there as the resident of an earthly body...

I say "back there" because Venice is where it all started for me, in one sense. I graduated from college and went as far west as I could to complete my education. I ended up in Venice. I originally thought my process of higher education would begin at an institution of higher learning. Instead, it began in an alley. Here's a picture. That window above the dumpster that's almost cropped out used to be my window. That dumpster there I used to affectionately call "the dumpster of love." I called it that because there always seemed to be some girl out there in front of it, having something akin to a nervous breakdown, crying and yelling all sorts of obscenities toward my building. I figure the guy in the apartment above me must have been some kind of player. I learned an awful lot in that place, lying on my couch, listening to the ocean and whatever young lady I always imagined woke up in the dumpster, crawled out, and began giving verbal hell to the man who put her there. It was better than having a television; the emotion was real.



I know what you're thinking. No, I'm not heartless. A couple of times, I even offered the young lady a glass of water or something... I didn't have much, because those were primitive times for me: I remember eating more than a few lettuce and ketchup sandwiches, for instance, and I wasn't about to just start making those for strangers. A glass of water was about what I could handle back then...

Speaking of glasses of water, here's a reasonable approximation of the view of the ocean that I had when I lived there. You have to look carefully. This view was enough for me, though, because I could hear it, and I could walk to it with very little effort.



Maybe that view isn't so much a "glass of water" as it is a sippy cup. A sippy cup of living water, outside my window. That sounds about right.

And now for that sound. This is a brief, wobbly (sorry) digital representation of what made every lettuce and ketchup sandwich worth it: I was able to sit in front of this for just a little while every day. This is when I started crawling back to god. I wasn't quite walking upright yet, but I knew where I had to go and what I had to experience: Living Water.