THE TOPICS OF CANCER

During the beginnings of World War Two, the American Poet Ezra Pound was living as an expatriate in Italy. When he wasn't running with and building the careers of the likes of T.S. Elliot, Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce, he was involved in speaking his politically incorrect mind over Mussolini's airwaves, warning his American boys at home that there was a war brewing, that Churchill and Roosevelt were scheming to create a scenario that would put America into the war, in spite of Roosevelt's sincere sounding Fireside Chats to the contrary.

And true to warning, that scenario took place in the "surprise” bombing of Pearl Harbor, when in fact advance intelligence knew about it and sat back and smoked a big fat cigar with the president and watched it happen. This was the single event that put America into the Great War, and to which our modern president is comparing to the Terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.

Old Ez was subsequently “captured” and locked in a open steel cage for many weeks in an open field, after which he was brought back to the homeland and locked in St. Elizabeth's Asylum for the Criminally Insane, a convenient subterfuge as the good old U.S.A. considered his fate while silencing his warnings. He was finally declared to be of “Unsound Mind” and was held without trial or protocol for 13 long years, until he was a thoroughly silenced and drained old man who could warn no one any further. At the behest of Hemingway, et al, the government, to hide its own embarrassment, let him leave the country and die with what dreams he had left never realized.

Nobody really said much about it, writing the great poet off as an anti-Semite because he made the mistake of using Mussolini's airwaves to post his warning. Nor has anyone said or done much about the treatment of American prisoners in the 50 years since the fiasco. That is, until recently. Oh don't get me wrong; they're still not complaining too much about the abuse of Americans in custody… the stink is being raised by a good part of the liberal element here in the USA over the supposed abusive treatment of the 110 foreign born Taliban and al-Qaeda terrorists and murderers that are being housed at Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. That certainly includes my flag waving yuppie neighbors across the street, the ones incidentally who've never crossed the street in the two years they've been here to say hello - yet still I wave, periodically, in great contrast to the bogus flags they paste in their windows in solidarity yet never wave. Seems that they're mad because the authorities shackled the bastards together, locked 'em up in cages, and then have been catering to them with their accustomed diet of falafels and the Koran.

Which started me to thinking about how I was once incarcerated, small sentences stretching over a period of 20+ years, and was continuously being shuffled back and forth from jail to jail in California during the sixties - always shackled, locked in holding pens ten deep, with real shit and cigarette butts caked to the floor - the very concrete floors on which we were forced to sleep in absence of the proper bedding. Meals? Ha! Maybe a bologna sandwich on hard bread, and maybe not -- for the entire day. Late at night, arriving back in lockup, too late for a meal there either.

Looking back it seems like nobody but us ever complained about the treatment we got. Or how we sat and seethed four and sometimes five men sandwiched into a two-man cell that measured six foot by eight, maybe a few inches less, especially when you calculated the placement of the urinal and the two steel framed bunk beds that came out of the wall on sturdy chains. No afternoon walks or exercises periods.

One of the reasons I lost all of the teeth in the upper half of my head and some of the lowers were those long painful nights in some cells without medical attention. Once, while locked in tight for six months, two of my teeth literally fell out of my head because of the infections. I pulled a third out to put an end to the pain. Finally I was granted a date with the dentist at county hospital. The date? Two months after I was through serving the six-month sentence I was in for!

So in all fairness we're giving them their own diet did you say? When I first started going to (adult) jail in 1959, the remedy and prescription for a bunch of tired, sick, diseased, addicted and deranged men was a quarter to half ounce shot glass of formaldehyde! That's right, folks… formaldehyde, being the simplest form of the gaseous substance aldehyde, used in fertilizers, dyes and yes… embalming fluid. And it worked fine for the detoxing alcoholic in the throes of Delirium Tremors, or the junkie fresh off the street. Or the occasional mental case they locked up in the wrong institution. Technically it was paraldehyde, but the same difference though, something like a molecule difference in composition, but still the penultimate depressant. No worry, though… blood and urine are a simple molecule apart in their chemical constitution too

It reminded me of poor old Ezra Pound again, rolling over in his own vomit and fever, as he lay incarcerated in Italy for weeks awaiting extradition back “home,” locked outdoors in an open steel cage, soaked nightly and tortured in the rain and the cold and wind to near death. Ezra's crime? Again… warning the soldier boys that their president and their government were setting them up for a designer war, designed according to the age old patterns fostered on Cain and Abel by their parent's selfish longing for the power and knowledge of good and evil. Those poor soldier boys have grown up now and become the all wise parents themselves, treating their entire countries to a fiasco of death and uncertainty, wherein all values are turned upside down and tossed in the wind like balsa wood air planes coming to land at the feet of Bush and Bin Laden, as the toothlessness and homelessness increase across the land, while the fair treatment of murderers becomes our priority.

Addictions are the stuff life is made out of, the evidence of things not seen. I'm paraphrasing the Apostle Paul, of course, when he was talking about Faith being “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Sure, addictions are physical. In truth, they are much bigger than a physical sensation; they are actually the world we manifest to live in as a result of desiring things: things for our mouths, things for our tummies, things for our amusement and death.

Oh, believe me, I've tried them all! From the chloral hydrate and alcohol combo that killed Hank Williams to the stupid lithium and tylenol fix that keeps the rest of the world sedated and unable to deal with their own misery. I even tried sex, food, and rock & for a while, spending hours obsessing over my CD collection and my girlfriend's enflamed vulva. Sometimes I'd even do it all at once: I'd eat her out while she pissed streams of the bright yellow liquid Prozac she'd processed into my mouth while listening to the Police on her Walkman. And you bet that I got my tripod out and made photos of that for posterity!

But real drugs are a nightmare incarceration that isn't as much fun as a wet female high on her own juices and lust. So I'm not here tonight, folks, to talk about horny young girls on ecstasy… no, this time it's about the major hardcore addiction number one: the habitual sucking of smoke from Satan's hot burning and cancerous bowels. I'm talking about cigarettes and the hell they've created for their foul following.

When I smoked cigarettes I too shared the nightmare with the rest of the world. In fact it was thirty-three years from start to finish, an interlude that took me to places that only a smoker would appreciate: from the reform school in early 1955 right up until a fateful night in March of 1988 when I suffered a blood clot in my left lung. Looking back, I see now that it was one long continuous lack of breath, interrupted only a couple of times when I was locked up in solitary confinement, and one other time when I made a feeble attempt at abstinence which lasted a full ten hours before I leaped onto the back of the first passerby with a pack and assaulted him.

Thirty-three years that left me feeling like a 33rd Degree Mason with a cancerous voice box, sitting trapped in a smoke filled room with 33 old geezers gasping about an imaginary world inhabited by gods and goddesses that they never could seem to materialize outside of the doors of their den. Well I did take a walk outside and inhabit that world, from the Pacific Ocean's depths with its evil sorceress Circe still ruling the waves, all the way up to the new found heights of the World Trade Center and a smoke so hot and dense it left me weeping, all the while wheezing out a wisdom that never really surfaced, but ended up exploding in my face - actually it blew up in my lungs and heart.

What occurred in my life that changed the addiction into triumph was sickness. It was a stroke, to be exact, shortly after the stroke of midnight on March 15th, 1988. I had just lit up and was savoring that first rank whiff of hot dry smoke when all of a sudden out of nowhere I was slammed to the ground with a force like the time I was attacked and beaten with a baseball bat by a bevy of young teenage punks. It felt mighty heavy all right, the incredible feelings that ran outward from my chest and erased the left side of my body. I was speechless and unable to explain it away, the disconnecting effect that had interfered with the natural synapse from right brain to left, or perhaps the other way round, I don't know. But what I do know is that even in the height of the psychedelic drug euphoria of the 1960's, I was never as spaced out as the state the stroke left me in.

So it was a stroke, I later learned. But at the time it happened I was afraid of it and just lay there in a pool of vomit and blood, the cigarette smoldering on the bathroom floor a half dozen inches from my face. I had no concept of what had just happened to me. When my live-in found me there hours later I was incoherent and unable to answer her. That is, until she attempted to call an ambulance. For a moment my soul stirred and I leaped at her throat, stopping her dead in her tracks. I always did intimidate her, she was fond of telling everybody in the neighborhood who would listen. But I was more intent on stopping her intervention - her middle class interpretation of my problem and its solution -- and rather, go through my own changes, unassisted by the professionals and their prescriptions. If I had died on that bathroom floor, then so be it. Right now I'd be writing you all from heaven, where I would have gone to join Elvis in his great mansion in the sky.

But the only death I experienced was the death to an old way of life. That cigarette was destined to be my last cigarette and I knew it right then and there, lying on the bathroom floor. My first conclusion was I had lung cancer; the pain in my chest seemed to suggest it. It was only later to be identified as a blood clot in my already ravaged lungs.

And the identification might have never come, had it not been for a second stroke, which hit six months to the day from the first one, with the further damage of a heart attack from the stress of it all. When I finally did show up at the hospital - which visit, by the way, netted eight prescription drugs dispensed for my equilibrium - all of which I summarily threw in the garbage can on the way out - the doctor was not sympathetic.

Because I was still addicted, of course. Oh, I was through with the smoke, I knew that - but I was still in the throes of an addiction. Only the withdrawals seemed to go unnoticed because of the pain attending the stroke. Perhaps that pain was the withdrawal, after all. Regardless, the addiction remained because it was still occupying a vast part of my body, having yet to unstitch itself from the vital organs and make its long convoluted journey into my bloodstream for egress out. Years earlier, when leaving intravenous drug use, and still later, while leaving alcohol behind, there was that same pain of overabundant toxins encumbering the blood stream as the stuff tried to find a new route out of a thoroughly entrenched jurisdiction that had come to be set up in the years of chemical abuse.

So it is with all addictions and their withdrawals: they announce their going when they are damn well ready to go… and not a minute beforehand. And they don't do it the way you expect them to, nice and easy-like, like the way they came about in the first place, gradual and connected to so many fond memories like getting laid for the first time, or lighting up after a completely scrumptious meal. The list of pleasantries can only be measured by each individual's imagination.

But real transitions don't take place via lines of arbitrary association, when the mind is fooled into thinking erroneously. Nor are real transitions grievous. Like the first time I fasted on liquid other than alcohol for ten days. It was a fast of naturally distilled liquids, concocted daily from the squeezings of fresh fruits and vegetables. And on the tenth day I had an epiphany… sort of in in reverse. Because on the morning of the tenth day of the fast I awoke startled to find that I had not smoked for over 36-hours - and what was shocking was that I hadn't even noticed! The habit had gone from me, without any fanfare whatsoever. In retrospect, I see now that my little tiny longings had disappeared and were replaced by the greater world around me. It was a shift in consciousness, that's all. I didn't have to chew gum, glue nicotine to my skin, or stick needles in my ears… I merely was returned to a consciousness in which smoking was not part of the reality. Kind of like a little child, who walks right by the cigarette machine because she notices a flower growing out of a crack in the pavement at her feet - or a bubble gum machine!

No withdrawals, no trauma, no longing. The fast had purified me and the toxins were replaced for those ten days with nutrients and enzymes, fresh minerals and deep breathing. The body was no longer paramount, and the mind was free to revise its behavior. Oh but I didn't learn that time. I didn't take the smooth and easy way that had been offered to me. Instead, my powerful ego chose to take the bumpy road out of there, with the stroke and debility that followed. What my stubbornness to change left me with was the very real symptom of withdrawal in its place. I guess it made me a “man.” I sure in the hell wasn't a woman, but I could see how just as many females fall prey to the all too human trap of addiction and its message.

Wasn't it Eve who offered Adam the first joint, anyway? The first fruit of a small herb that had grown in stature and had come to be known as a tree - not just any tree, but the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Only our stubbornness to be informed by a Creator has led to that particular herb ultimately working the opposite effect on us, leaving us to languish in a lethargy of our making, filled with the pain and disbelief that follows desire.

Buddha was known to sit under that very same tree for a lifetime at a sitting, listening to the complaints of passerby's, coming to his own conclusion that its one's desires that create the addictions, not the light-bearing particles that dance about us in wonderment, enticing us with their magic molecules and chemical chains.

Think about it the next time you light up. Is it really not the Devil belching and farting out his words through your mouth? Those original and fluent dreams of the Creator… dismally gone up in smoke. And having lost their power, these myriad pipe dreams have now coated our otherwise transparent environment with one more layer of soot. I guess if addictions were really a personal matter, it wouldn't matter at all. But your addiction is ultimately your gift to the earth and me. Why deliver the Breath of Life as second hand smoke? Why kill a good thing for the rest of us?

A little over 200 years ago in stuffy New England, Massachusetts made state sanctioned education mandatory for children: state polished policy and propaganda as pabulum. Until then, children followed in the footsteps of their parents or their community, building worthwhile skills. The ones who didn't sometimes became artists or drunkards and way wanderers.

There is a famous painting by Rubens, depicting the front steps of the Academy at Athens. A solitary figure sits brooding in the midst of the steps, surrounded by a dozen or more assorted individuals who are animated with communication amongst them. That personage is recognized as Ruben's characterization of Michelangelo. In addition, the other assorted old bearded scholars and mathematicians are identified, and with them, the very young poets, some yet in their pre-pubescent form of children, sitting next to the old men in concentration and conversation, each learning from the other about the nature of the universe. (I know… I know… there weren't any women in there in that painting… remember, these were the days before political correctness made a mockery out of history.)

These were, of course, the days before political correctness, when wise men and women spoke the truth, to their beheading or not. They knew that truth is always communicated esoterically through time from individual to individual in terms of relationships. What was spoken between these wise ancestors of the past was not the sugarcoated correctness of today, intended not to offend another, or having the sole purpose of building a false sense of self-esteem. It was just obvious information that they were bartering back and forth, couched in mathematics and delving into the relationships that bind the earth and the sun in their orbits. It was all sufficient to build the vessel of the 20th century - the one that everyone is now afraid to go any further in.

Ah yes, the state was clever, creating the original peer group to pressure its constituents into following the lead sheep. They observed that hardly anyone ever ventures out beyond the group to which they were assigned to at birth. Kindergarten. Teens. Twenty-something. Thirty-something. Middle-age. And finally, the nursing homies and death. All in order, and all in the proper group.

But the problem with education offered up in these state-sanctioned and institution-ridden classrooms is that it only works in similar class determined environments. I'm reminded of one young man who complained to me that his fancy college darkroom was overcrowded, and he wanted to come and use mine instead. I let him do it once, after which he never reappeared. While we were talking, over the mixing of photo chemicals, he asked me where I went to school and I told him I didn't. I told him that I learned how to print photos when it became necessary to do so, once I had shot my first roll of film.

“Well how did you know what to do?” the student in him asked. “I didn't" I replied. “Well…” But I cut him off and reassured him that I learned it all over a period of six months, when I was thinking heavily about the same things he was now thinking about -- how to proceed. But I didn't make the mistake of asking a teacher, I told him. “It was real simple, it was,” I told him. If I was going to print some photos, I decided, I was going to have to find a place to print them. So I busied myself with nailing four walls and a door together, wiring up some red bulbs and outlets for the enlarger, plumbing up a sink for the chemicals to wash themselves out and away from my precious photographs which started appearing about then. “But, but…” he continued to stammer. But he was not able to print a single print in my darkroom, it turned out, and he ran back to the university (Columbia College) and his mommy's bank account.

But education can also be extremely problematic, depending on where we are at when we get the information called education. In a classroom full of peers or in a bar full of queers… in a dressing room full of sneers or in a land full of tears.

Many years ago I accidentally wandered outside and stumbled into the wilderness that the homeless walk the length and breadth of. I still have yet to understand, but I know now that the teacher is not confined to the classroom, nor is the student.

Who is imparting the education? What's the teacher want out of it? A relationship? How 'bout a paycheck! A tenure. Is this teacher just teaching you what she knows, or is she giving you the information you require to search yourself for the particular and individualized education that you need in order to formulate your own world? The sooner you get it, the sooner you use it to get out of school! Teacher though, maybe never gets loose. Which is possibly the best use for a schoolhouse anyway -- a repository for aging educators who might otherwise gum up the rest of your futures.

I got my first PHD in a jail cell sketching a picture of a murderer. “Life Drawing” we called it. He got life, I got awakened. He was my teacher, and instead of correcting my paper, he destroyed it and nearly destroyed me as well, but for being pulled off of my neck by some of the other homies in the cell. I got another degree a dozen years later locked in a different cell, and still another degree a dozen years down another road, where jails are no longer built and maintained, where condos grow up out of vacant lots and take their place.

My girlfriend's dad came once to visit me. His daughter was half my age, so he and I should've been in the same peer group, but weren't. “You should get an education and a job,” he came to tell me. At 50 he had retired from his desk job at the university where he had once practiced “architecture,” according to a degree he received twenty-five years earlier. It didn't seem to bother him that the degree was no longer up to date, that the collapsing new buildings being designed these days were of another time and material.

I showed him my darkroom and pointed out that even with his degree in architecture, I knew he had to hire a carpenter to put in the additional room extension that his daughter had learned to masturbate in. Of course he couldn't build anything, let alone a relationship with me. But I think he was most offended because he realized that his daughter slept right there in the middle of the floor on a crusty old mattress that lay in the corner of my studio. We hadn't even bothered to build a bed frame to fuck on.

He's one of those guys (was, cause he's dead now) who had one education, one job for life. He raised one family, bought one house and retired only once, sufficient that he had done it all. I told him that I was not one to retire, that I am a working artist in search of an education. The essential difference between he and I, if it were to be measured, was that he received a paycheck, whereas I didn't. Oh yeah… and that I am an architect of lives, not the opaque walls and windows he was so intent on raising between us.

When I came of age in the 1950's they hadn't even invented transistor radios yet. For entertainment we teens hung out in telephone booths and bowling alleys, and the rougher examples like myself caroused the bus stations and hustled the old faggots that lived there. Or at least it seemed like they lived there. They sure in the hell weren't there to catch any bus. So when all this hoopla about “the gays” started going around I wondered what was all the fuss.

I mean let's face it… the gays didn't come up with a new way of behaving or treating one another, contrary to all the manufactured hype. History says that since time began it's always been the same tired ass game of who's going to remain on top, and for how long, gender differences aside. His Story did I say. Of course it's Her Story too.

Nor did they find a new way to relate to all the other people who just happen to live outside the master bedroom - whoops, outside the group domain. The in-your-face attitude of the gays is not so much different than the one I encountered at countless Klan Rallies, A.A. meetings, or yuppie sports bars - environments that consider everyone else in the world to be ignorant and unyielding. These are scenarios in which only the accusers are considered to be of any worth. Gay? I'd call it sad.

Oh yeah, I attended the Klan functions all right, as well as assorted Pentecostal soirées into hysteria and howling at the moon… I mean, the Son. But it was not a different feeling than the one I get when I “attend” one of the gay functions that proliferate the modern landscape. The fact that I feel like I'm “attending” when I encounter a queer is identical to the same remote connection I got from inside a gathering of nazis -- or democrats, for that matter. Unless you're part of their group, you're really not welcome. For that's the only thing they all have in common, the only thing they allow is total allegiance to the exclusion of everybody else. Exclusive clubs that are sometimes polite to others for show or contrivance, however mostly not very inviting to anyone but family and friends. Duh.

Indeed, what's so unique about another special interest group asking the rest of us for something to enrich itself? And at what cost to us! It's the same old demand on the worlds' resources, demanding that all the other groups in the world come to attention, take notice and do penance. Children have always been handed the problem of wrestling attention away from the adults, who are usually too busy giving the attention to one another instead of the kids. But then the kids get older and even more attention deficit than the adults who preceded them - by the time they reach puberty they're literally starved for attention. And then they gotta eat something. Why not each other? Thus early on they figured out how to live in tantrum, milking in tandem the so-called lesbian drama and other modern myths of political superiority and correctness for all their worth.

That's all, folks, really. It's not even about sensitivity, or reaching out and accepting someone else's pain. Cause they aint doing it, that's why. They aren't setting the example they preach to others. They aren't living the life styles they're continuously accusing other people of not living: the loving and all-accepting, prejudice free acceptance of other's ideologies. Nothing got any better when one guy decided to stick it up the asshole of another, instead of between a woman's wet and waiting thighs. That's all, folks. Nobody is any better off for the additional drama that all of this gayety has created for a diminishing gene pool.

That's all. It's really not worth typing too much about. These flamboyant men and women who grow up ugly and depressed and demand that we force our already fragmented attentions on their growing pains are not particularly gay individuals, despite the propagandized shit and shinola. I might as well go into a black church with my white face on and demand that I set policy instead of the pastor, or into a women's bathroom and insist I share the mirror.

It sounds stupid all right, but then that's what it's come down to, with women reporters entrenched in the all-male athlete's locker rooms and blatant transsexuals invading the boy scouts. And the irony is that every one of them complains and recognizes that they don't belong there, while at the same time demanding they be wholeheartedly accepted without prejudice or denial! Must not hurt their darling feelings, you know…

Nowadays it seems like everybody is pissed off about being excluded from somebody's group - but not a single one of them wants to make the changes or adopt the values that are part and partial to that groups' central core and premises for being. They just want the benefits that particular group has worked for and provided for its own members. The usurper really doesn't give a shit about becoming part of a greater whole, only in creating a greater hole from which to suck out whatever vicarious existence they can get away with while promoting themselves via their confused agenda. How can this be so? In the final analysis it's all just plain posturing. However, when we explore the bigger picture we can just make out the reality beneath it: the telling testament of an ugly and immature angst arising to devour us.

I for one don't care if I am ever accepted into or joined by any of the aforementioned groups. Only individuals are welcome to me, and on their own terms I have grown to accept them in return. Queer or not is not the issue. Black or white, ordinary or unusual… it's all awareness to me. A big dick, or a big clit… the same. But the big difference between “me and them” is I've opted for a life style that infringes on nobody. It's the hermit's life, but I'm also willing to share the monastery with anyone willing to get along with me. And if they choose not to, then they can get along on out of here. `Nuff said.

Everyday I wake up with the world on my shoulders. I have a job, but I receive no paycheck. Is that what you want? The insecurity of not having the money to pay rent or buy food? Unless of course you can figure the way to motivate yourself to produce the goods, or motivate others to provide them for you. Ha!

The Artist's Life. Many tell me they are saving up for the day they can devote themselves to the life they wish, but many of them are already old people and ready to retire, with their dreams still buried deep within their heads, and deeper still within the bodies that will be buried with them.

When one walks the street or visits the bank or coffeehouse, others observe and relate. So that when I pass, the people either move out of the way with a curse, or they bow their heads in mutual respect. They have encountered an artist in passing, and they must relate to me as such. Once I met a young college student who told me he was an artist. Since my studio was located next to the Savings and Loan, I walked him next door and asked the teller Joanne to tell me who he was? She said… “Oh his mom has an account here… he's a student enrolled at the University of Cincinnati and draws freely on her funds.” Hmmm. An artist?

I think not. I think that the way people relate to you defines you - as far as they are concerned. Unfortunately. But it's the parents, the peer groups, the schools, the nations - that's the combination that defines us. People are not going to treat you in other way except the way they perceive you. If you happen to be serving them Starbucks coffee, perhaps they'll tip you. But they're not apt to think of you when they want an artist for some odd reason in their life. Oh, maybe the other students will play the game, but an artist needs a greater world in which to come to terms in/with. It is incumbent for the Student to change the labels that were affixed at birth, and communicate that subtle change to the hard-line keepers of tradition. (That's where you come in.)

That greater world lies within grasp. It is within each of us. And it is here - there, and everywhere - from which our definitions arise. “All truths wait in all things,” claimed the good grey poet, Walt Whitman, “they neither hasten nor delay their arrival.”

What defines you is the relationship you maintain with others. In this 21st century, especially this American economy, that's often determined by how you make your living. Alas, the Artist's Life requires you to make art consistently out of your days and nights, as your single and solitary offering or commodity of exchange.

But more fundamental to life is how you relate to the experiences, which are common to all. If you sign the rent check with mother's bank account - she is the artist, you're not. If you make small talk on your bosses' time clock, you are defrauding him/her; you're not making art. The Dadaists stated it simply, at the beginning of the last century, that the artist should become “progressively unemployed.” They cautioned that it shouldn't be done all at once, so as not to wreak havoc in life. And the prime reason was/is to do so in order to know one's self. In fact, they concluded, being unemployed from others is the only way that you can find out what it is that you uniquely do.

But watch out… what is provisioned for you as you seek the Artist's Life may not be what you expected. Your teachers will appear out of nowhere to instruct you, not from some hermetically concealed classroom. In addition, your experiences may have no apparent connection to your limited perspective. Your awareness will be overhauled, but not in any familiar way like when puberty rewired you or the drugs you took ingested you. Your awareness will become the more tangible part of reality, the place where you make the changes that lead forth the Life that you envision. Everything else will become a Lie, to be replaced by Life.

And if you happen to be making “art” at the time, then it will be the Artist's Life… otherwise we're really just talking about Life itself, nothing magical or mysterious about it. So wash the dishes, bitch… and shut up. (Just kidding, grrrrls)

After several years in the hermitage I have taken on the attributes of a monk, growing the long twisted ideas and even the beard associated with the mountain ascetics of history. Maybe the beard is four feet long now, although the yardstick has it anywhere from 19 to 30 inches in places. However, research has shown that when hair is dreaded, matted and twisted by the elements into knots, it's true measurement unraveled is twice the length of the knotted state. Sounds like something Einstein might have uttered; yet it is a true indicator of the principle behind growth. As for the twisted ideas, they too seem to have taken twice as long to materialize, having to come to fruition over their equally circuitous route homeward and downward into the earth from which they spring.

Still, occasionally I leave the sanctity and security of the monastery to see if anything's changed in all these years, as if to tell a story, an old, old story. One such night I arrived at a church in a definitely Mexican neighborhood that has recently began to gentrify from the influx of young white suburbanites buying up the cheap property and incidentally, the Mexican's homes. But who would have thought these young sophisticated youth from suburbia would disembowel the very altar places as well, careful to keep the stained glass facades intact to hide well their hedonistic pleasures behind. To the white boys with education and wealth, it's 2002, and this is their politically correct version of the old college frat house sensibility. These guys are living in obvious luxury in the middle of a ghetto, partying and smoking and drinking and computing, and pretending they know how to relate to the Amigos and Amigas of the barrio, who are likewise living there in the middle of a ghetto, drinking and smoking and playing their own computer games out in relative obscurity with their new neighbors.

On the particular evening I visited the church in the barrio, it was to attend an open house and weekly music event hosted by the residents. On the way in I passed maybe 20 cosmetically produced young suburbanites there, drinking beer and smoking reefer in the basement, two floors removed from the festivities upstairs. That night a hip-hop group and a Japanese jazz trio were performing for the privileged class. But these elitist examples of American youth didn't come for the music and performance; they came to escape the boring situations at home with mom and dad. So I climbed off my bike, parked it in the corner, ignored them and took my seat upstairs in the front church pew, in a cold room with three Japanese jazz musicians and allowed myself to be whisked away to a limitless world beyond Pearl Harbor and the Yellow Menace my ancestors warned me about.

But it was only after the performance that the real entertainment began, only when I reentered the downstairs' room to mount my bike and be on the way did it become evident that the absurd theater of reality was about to lift curtain on another of life's unforgettable scenes. But more than just a story, this is a testament; complete with the surreal evidence of the tragic terms in which our youth have come to judge the world around them. It was about 6 degrees outside, and as I maneuvered my bike into place for exit I pushed by the young drinkers on the couch, remarking that it would be a cold ride home. One youth, shocked at my presence but still connected enough to notice that I was definitely not one of them, said incredulously, “You're just going to take that bike?”

“Well, it's my bike, son…” But he didn't believe that, and turned instead to his friends and said “Sure… he wants us to believe that it's his bike.” However they were reluctant to get involved, eyes glazed over and such, and so he again was forced to face me alone in his dilemma.

I repeated… “It's my bike son, so you'd best move out of the way or I'll be forced to ride over your foot.” He was alarmed enough to not challenge me, although he and his buddies could have won the fight with hands down. He just gasped and turned away from me, confiding in his friends “Wouldn't it be weird if this guy just walked in here and stole that bike and nobody did anything?”

It was obvious that he wasn't going to do anything, except roll another joint. Me, I was happy to be once more in the cold wind riding east towards the even colder wind blowing in off of Lake Michigan, erasing the punk's words from my ears until it was at last time to write them down for all to hear.

It is an amazing world, when a guy like me - sober and undrugged, on a bicycle and headed home to fulfill my obligations to the community in which I live - is judged to be a suspect. by a group of underage drinkers, stoned on pot, each trying to escape the responsibilities they have been saddled with. These children are so out of touch - as even I was as a youth - that they can't yet determine whom in their midst is the thief. Ironically they have placed the onus on one who has devoted his life to honoring and building the communal trust, and should be an honored guest in their midst. But hey, I have just as hard a time trusting them as they do me!

The correct phrasing is: “How do they get me to participate?” With the exception of a couple of self-styled soul mates in the distant past, I'm certainly not sleeping with any of these women. They are here for completely different reasons.

These women aren't interested in having still another nervous breakdown. Rather, they are looking for breakthroughs. They are looking to put in a new image of themselves, replace the worn out and objectified version with one that is fully functioning and up-to-date. These are women who want to know who they are, rather than pretend to be the person their friends and lovers have decided they should be.

Ahem… I'm talking about liberated women, no less. But here in my studio they don't have to substitute one false impression of themselves with another. We're not talking political correctness here! We're talking about the ability to assume whatever identity she wants to assume for herself, without anyone's approval or disapproval. That's where I come in: I offer her a trial run, by giving her permission to be whoever she wants to be in my presence. My only function is to feed back to her the positive awareness of that choice - not to feed on her.

Unlike the boyfriend -- whoops, the “girlfriend” -- or parent, I have no designs on these fragile creatures in my midst. I have carefully removed my restrictive designs in order to facilitate the growth of freedom. They are free to go…

But of course there are those who come here just to prove to themselves they can do it, get naked and free and run around my studio gesticulating. But don't worry, America, they're your daughters and they're just having some old fashion fun, albeit in a safer context than the usual one they were forced into.