The Zen Guy, Ch. 12

Part I:   March Sesshin, Prairie Zen Center

Each moment birth and death.

Each moment no birth and no death.

A movie containing an infinite number of indiscrete images

like a Turin machine without the 0s and 1s.

No movie, no images.

We are not a  noun he says.

We are verbing.

But verbing is not a noun.


(and the soundtrack was the new Moe cd "What happened to the La Las")


Part II:  Marina Abramovic

"The Artist is Present"

or is she?

"The Grandmother" of performance art in a retrospective at MOMA.

and a soon to be release bio-documentary on HBO:  "The Artist is Present."

The Artist is Present is literal.   Marina sits on a chair, at a table, all day, every day, for three months.

You participate in the art by siting there with her at the table--as long as you like.

Marina wears a special dress to relieve herself while performing.

She is silent.  You can do whatever the hell you want to on the other side of the table.    Or you can just be present like she is doing.   Just like Charlotte Joko Beck's eye gazing practice.    Though that only lasts for 30 minutes at a time--at least how it is done at the Prairie Zen Center.

Marina is supposedly practices Tibetan Buddhism.  She also trained with a nutritionist and a personal trainer to get in shape for the performance.

The core of this exhibit, she explains, is to sit with her body and mind in the present.  Perhaps by focusing on the present, she encourages the audience to join her.

Supposedly, Marina doesn't like to rehearse:-).

The Entity, Ch. 3

Love Slave
I know what you're going to say
You want to do something scary today
Sure I want to have some fun
I just don't know about some of the things that you've done
But I'm your love slave
And you'll get what you crave
Oh you've got a crazy thirst
And every single kiss is just like the first
Oh you have sucked me dry
How many more times do you want me to try?
Because I'm your love slave
And you'll get what you crave

words and Music by Marshall Chapman:-)

A time for every purpose under heaven, Ch. 1

Sangamon Critters

Q:  What does Sangamon Critters do?

A:  We are a reptile and amphibian rescue group.

Q:  Huh?

A:  We are a small group dedicated to the rescue of unwanted reptiles and to herpetological education.   Our immediate objective is to provide safe and healthy environments for our charges and to find suitable, permanent adoptive homes for reptiles and amphibians that come in our care.  We will take in reptiles and amphibians that can no longer be cared for or are stray, if space allows. We re-home reptiles through careful screening and an adoption contract. We also spend alot of our time in classrooms with children teaching them some pretty awesome things about animals. We want to be able to make as many kids as we can LIGHT UP! These kids are as bright as the sun when you bring something wild into their lives.  We are supported solely through donations and private contributions, and we are run by a small staff of volunteers.

Here is our adoption policy:

. Adopters must be at least 21 years of age and live in a stable environment. Applicants must demonstrate the ability to care for a reptile financially, including providing veterinary care, quality food and adequate shelter.

Our reptiles are for pets only, breeding is prohibited.

The reptiles in our care were strays, abandoned or purchased from pet stores. Less than one percent were knowingly purchased from breeders. These circumstances make our reptiles unsuitable for breeding. If you wish to breed, please buy your reptiles from a reputable breeder.

 Prior to adopting out reptiles into new homes, the following procedures will be followed:

- All reptiles will be monitored for not less than 30 days to ensure a healthy appetite, determine temperament, and watch for visible medical problems. A fecal test will be performed. If appropriate, the animal will be treated for all obvious health problems and if necessary, a veterinarian will give the reptile an overall examination for any problems.

- Once determined healthy, the reptile will be listed with Reptile Rescue as available for adoption.

- All prospective adopters must fill out and submit an adoption application form and answer all questions completely and honestly.

- Once an adoption application has been received, Reptile Rescue will attempt to ascertain the knowledge, experience, and capabilities of the potential adopter has with regard to providing proper care for the species selected. A background check may be completed on the adopter to verify personal information. The adoption will remain pending during this time.

- Not all applications are approved.

- Adoption fees range from $25 to $100. Please ask about species specific fees

- Reptile Rescue may make courtesy calls to determine a happy and healthy adoption.

- During the first year of adoption, the adopter must notify Reptile Rescue if the adopted reptile has died or has been lost or stolen.

- Under no circumstances, will the adopter be allowed to sell, trade or give away the reptile. If care can no longer be provided for the animal, the adopter is required to return the reptile to us.

The adopter releases Reptile Rescue of any liability in regards to the health or behaviour of the reptile adopted. While it is understood that every effort has been made to provide an accurate assessment of the history and health of the reptile, Reptile Rescue explicitly disclaims warranties regarding medical status or behaviour of said animal. As the adopter you agree not to hold Reptile Rescue liable for any claims of injury to property or persons or otherwise caused by the reptile.

Our application process requires applicants to give us personal information about themselves (name, street address, age, etc) we use this information strictly to determine if the applicant can provide a good home for the reptile he or she wishes to adopt. An individual's information will not be disclosed to any third parties.

Rostov-on-Don, Ch. 5

Still waiting for Gogol Bordello's version of this song:

Everything is fine, Madam Marquise
Hello, hello, James, what news?
I’ve been away fifteen days,
At the end of the wire I call you,
What will I find on my return?
All is very well well, Madame Marquisa,
All is very well, all is very well,
However, though, I need to say one thing,
Just a mere trifle, almost nothing,
An incident, a silly thing,
Your grey Mare is dead,
But besides that, Madame Marquisa,
Everything is fine, just fine!
Hello, hello, Marten, what news?
My grey Mare died today!
Tell me, my faithful coachman,
How is it that this did occur?
This is nothing, Madam Marquisa,
This is nothing, everything’s just fine,
However, though, I need to say one thing,
Just a mere trifle, almost nothing,
She perished in the fire
That destroyed your stables,
But besides that, Madam Marquisa,
Everything is fine, just fine!
Hello, hello, Pasqual, what news?
My stables have they all burned down?
Explain to me, my model boss,
How is it that this did occur?
This is nothing, Madam Marquisa,
This is nothing, everything’s just fine,
However, though, I need to say one thing,
Just a mere trifle, almost nothing,
If the stable burned, Madam,
It’s because the castle was in flames,
But besides that, Madam Marquisa,
Everything is fine, just fine!
Hello, hello, Luca, what news?
Our castle is thus destroyed?
Explain to me, because I’m staggered,
How is it that this did occur?
Well it’s like this, Madam Marquisa,
Learning that he was bankrupt,
Not recovering from such surprise
The Marquis by gun did suicide,
Falling dead by the mantlepiece,
He knocked over all the candlesticks,
Putting fire to all the castle,
And it blazed from base to top,
The wind it blowed the fire,
Which jumped upon the stable,
And thus after that moment
The horse did die inside!
But besides that, Madam Marquisa,
Everything is fine, just fine!

The Artist, Ch. 10

When she was asleep, the woman next to her slept on her stomach
and snored.

When she was awake, the woman next to her talked about her prior girlfriend
and talked about her prior girlfriend.

When she was joking, she told the woman next to her that she could set a clock to
ever time she talked about her prior girlfriend.

When she was serious, she set an extra plate at the dinner table so that the prior girlfriend
could legitimately enter the conversation.

When she was paying attention, there were empty drum kits all over the house of the woman next to her.

Of all shapes and sizes, and in every room.

When she listened, she could hear them playing by themselves
and she fell asleep each night to their steady beat. 
Not so, the woman next to her, who rarely slept.

When she dreamed, she dreamed that she was talking in her sleep in her sleep
and her uncle, who was in the sleeping bag next to her told her in her dream that she was unsettled and depressed and still trying to work things out.

Then, in her dream, she was outside with her father.  And it felt good that they were chopping down the forest around her.  Only the bottom of the trees remained.  So she brought out a saw, and began to remove the trees so that they would be even with the ground.   Then, when that wasn't removing the trees fast enough, she pulled up the entire tree including the roots with her bare hands.

Because everybody knows that Questlove in the Roots has the best buttermilk chicken.

Cole Potential, Ch. 2

No one in the Kingdom of Cole Potential knew they were visited by aliens from the planet Haight Ashbury.    Which is not surprising.   The Haight's like to travel incognito.   The big surprise came when the Cole's started discovering the rose colored sunglasses left behind by the Haight's.  It was the sunglasses which changed everything.

Yoadrian Escobar was one of the first Coles to find a pair of the amazing glasses.  From the moment he put them on, he wanted nothing more in the world than to never take them off.   Which is quite understandable--for the Haights were all about the intensity of experience.  The specially designed rose tint on the sunglasses made the most desolate god forsaken planets come alive with ecstatic clarity.

And the Haights needed all the ecstasy they could muster when they visited Cole Potential.   For unlike Haight Ashbury, which existed in a universe with an almost infinite number of dimensions, the Kingdom of Cole Potential contained only two dimensions: length and width.  There was no depth anywhere to be found.  Adding to its prosaic reality was a rigid socialism enforced by their benevolent Queen, Poo the 12th, who promulgated that every Cole receive a uniform distribution of wealth, education, food, clothing, and housing.  As a result,  each bungalow in Cole Potential, including the Queen's residence, was a one room dwelling with a mud floor and stucco walls.   The Coles all wore a standard green rigidly constructed one piece tunic made of kelp that in more bacchanalian times would have been called a toga.  The usual dinner for each citizen consisted of lentils and fish.  Overall, the good citizens of Cole Potential lived a hard scrabble life working either as a fisherman or farmer.

Needless to say, the Haights quickly discovered that Cole Potential was not as advertised in their travel brochures. Even with their rose colored glasses, the consensus was that Cole Potential was a bad trip.  They hastily exited the planet.   In their departure, they left their sunglasses.  For the Haights also had a thing about littering.   Even the  Haight Indian with a teary eye seen in their commercials could not deter their natural propensity to litter.   But this story, as we shall see, is not about the Haights.  

When Yoadrian put on the sunglasses, his mind expanded like a slinky tied to a rocketship.  What had been two dimensions became 20 in a prismatic kaleidoscope of colors.  When the initial shock wore off, he looked around and found all his drab Cole dwellings transformed into exotic palaces.  His drab clothing became exotic and silk.  The drab Cole women walking on the square were transformed into duplicates of Racquel Welch and/or Ursula Andress.  This latter development was not especially drab as the Coles tended to be as universally homely as they were poor.

So what was so bad about a bunch of glasses that gave people the illusion that they lived in different circumstances?  The problem was that there were not enough of them.   Only 24 pair of sunglasses were found.  There was not enough to go around.   Jealousy and fights broke out.   Fearing that her socialist utopia would be undermined, Queen Poo the 12th had no choice but to step in.....

Cole Potential, Ch. 1

"Beware the giant robot that looks like a cow!"

"His name is Mu and he shoots electricity from his fingers."

Q:  Is the robot evil or good?

"Well, neither, I guess he is neutral--but he gets mad sometimes."

Q:  How do you make him mad?  If I kicked him in the shin, would that make him mad?

"Definitely.   Also if you cough on him that infuriates him.   Actually it doesn't take much to get him upset."

Anna Karenina:  You see where he gets that anthropomorphized robot figure from don't you?

Q:  (and speaking in stereo):  Perhaps, but I'm not afraid of anything made of flesh and blood.   Unless its very big or can operate machinery that can shoot high doses of radiation at me--with excessive diagnostic testing.  Is Mu natural or man-made?

"Mu is definitely man made.  That's why he has so much Cole potential."

Q:  We must work together to defeat this giant robot before I accidentally cough on him.

"You cannot defeat Mu by any conventional means."

Q:  Lets try unconventional means then.   First, I propose that we lure Mu to a large man made bridge spanning a bay.  Then, we make him take a long walk in park near the bridge.   At the exploratorium in the park near the bridge, we take him by surprise by feeding him many Vietnamese Sandwiches without the special sweet chili mayo sauce.   Then we stuff his mouth with Japanese glutinous bean paste desserts.   That will overload his circuits and eliminate his Cole Potential.  You will see.

"I like your plan, but that only solves part of the problem.   We still will have to deal with his pet snake Pythor (aka Mr. Doctor Professor Pythor P. Chumsworth).   And Matt, Mu's big brother.  Matt is even more difficult to deal with.  He is most vulnerable when he is angry, but he rarely gets angry.

Q:  Well, I may have a solution to your problem.  First with regard to Pythor, given that he is a constrictor we will dispatch him with my portable rock of infinite space and dimension.   Pythor will be unable to constrict such an immense object.  It will keep him occupied for an infinite amount of time.  For Matt, the situation is much more problematic.  What are we going to do with him?  I suggest that we book him on a United Airline Flight which will inevitably be delayed--thereby increasing his anger.   At that point, we will assault him point blank with our bazookas which fire rapid rounds of banana filled sticky rice.  That should be highly effective in dispatching Matt.   Are there anymore denizens of the Cole Potential universe we much deal with?

"Let me think about it.  There is one more factor we must consider.   Matt has a secret weapon--a station that floats in space.   When the sun shines on the station, Matt is invincible.   When there is no sunlight, Matt can be attacked."

Q:  I'm not concerned about Matt's secret weapon.   Again, we will have him travel on United.  That way, he will be kept in the dark as to his arrival and departure times.  That should neutralize his defenses.

"Pythor has one more power I forgot to mention.   He can multiply himself.  But his clones are not as powerful as he......"

World Wide Wine Consumption, Ch. 1

The Manchu

"The Chinese visitors always tell me I look Mongolian.   From the Manchu dynasty."

"When I was 18 years old I was appointed to be the next Empress of China.   This caused great controversy between me, my mother and my aunt as they were older and should have assumed the throne ahead of me.  Nevertheless, the Empress, my Grandmother made the decision.  However, days before my 19th birthday I disappeared without a trace because God had other plans for me."

But I thought you said you were originally from Taiwan--not China?

"Right, but this was in one of my previous lives.   Don't you believe in Karma and Rebirth?  Sometimes I have access to my ancestors, right before I wake up, or in dreams.  Have you ever had that experience? Well, for me, I have been told by many fortune tellers on different continents the same thing--that I come from royal blood.  But I tell you, it was better I was saved from being an Empress.  Because power corrupts absolutely.  I don't know if I would have been strong enough to resist it.  You have heard of the expression `heads will roll', right?  The etymology of that word comes from the practice of Chinese Emperors having a swordsman right next to them as their servants pay homage to them by cowtowing.  If the servant so much as coughed or breathed too loudly while the Emperor was passing by the sword would fall and the servants head would go rolling down the throne.  But I wanted no part of that.  And Jesus saved me from all of that power."

"I've had a good life.  I like it best in North America.   I told my husband that I didn't want to go back to Seychelles.   He was French and hated America and everything about America.  He didn't want anything to do with America.   But I couldn't get him to stay in one place at any time.   He was always restless.  Always wanted to move.  Always trying to change me.  He was never really happy with me.   Not in the 23 years we were married.  We still are married actually.   I owned this bar and nightclub in Seychelles.  It was doing very well.   But a British couple came in one day and wanted to buy the place.  They gave me good money for it.  I could not refuse the money the offered.   I couldn't see myself long term in West Africa anyway.   It was too African.  I like it much better here."

"That's Men in Black part two on the television.   I have to have cable because of my job."

I don't have a television.

"That's great.  Because TV is not good for kids.   TV and the movies these days are constantly getting more and more outrageous to keep the kids' interest.  Like that pug that talks.   And in the process the kids get numb.   They don't develop any social skills.   They don't know how to interact with people anymore."

"So my husband came over here for awhile, but then moved to Tahiti and is working in a bar with his sister.  He wanted me to come with him.   We used to talk to each other on Skype all the time.  But then he stopped calling me.   I don't want to go to Tahiti.  What would I do there?  All the men are drunk all the time because there is nothing there to do.  The women have to run the place.   Its so matriarchal--not like here.   I like it much better here.   Thank God we never had any kids."

"You know our wine had a 7 out of 8 rating on Yelp?"

Things that don't go together, Ch. 10

Iphones and clothes.

First, a bit of history to bring us to the current date:

Chapter 1:  The beginning

The serpent tempts Eve in the Garden of Eden to eat the Apple.  She does.   As does Adam.  They realize that they are naked.  Then they cover themselves with clothes to paradoxically later undress to have sex.  See, clothes are what feathers are to a peacock.  Just a way to get noticed to attract a mate.  Now I'm sure there is much more to wearing clothes than that, but lets just oversimplify for now because that is what I do:-).

Chapter 2:   The middle

Lots of clothes and lots of sex.  Except during various times in history when there was a lot of religion.

Chapter 3:  The present day

Now instead of literally eating an Apple, Adam and Eve buy a Apple Iphones.  They don't actually have to take a byte out of the iphone to gain knowledge because Karl Marx was right.   Consumerism is the medium of consumption.  Facebook is the opiate of the masses.  Or something like that.

But now simply wearing clothes to attract a mate isn't so simple a concept.  You have to wear meta- clothes.  Virtual clothes.  Iclothes or whatever.   For the clothes must not only make your body interesting, but your entire online facebook twitter blogging persona (EOFTBP).  Sometimes that is not an easy concept.  Its not only what you wear, but where you have been, who you are with, and what clever quotes you can spin.  Without an EOFTB, you are just nayked, without the raygun:-)

(but it still might not hurt to buy a new car)

Silster Wilster Ch. 8

Sayings, jokes and silligisms.

1.  The suspect (from Pao)

So I got called to the police station this morning and had to stand in line with all these other people.   Then one by one these witnesses come up with the cops and are pointing at me and saying "that's him, I'm sure about it, he's the great guy."

2.  I listen to the wind (from Norb's)

We all move our jaws to create sounds.
The sounds aren't that important just as long as they are supportive and do no harm.

3.   The classic (from Notre Dame)

If you think your something, better let it go
Lest you mind remind you that its just not so
Let the strong grow weak
and the smart grow dim
here comes the cycle
all over again

4.  The island (from Kroeter, R.I.P.)

One day I'll find an island
a peace a time of grace
a chance and opportunity
one girl will change this place

5.  More from the island

Hey lets get the uge really drunk
Then see how many Naugles he can eat.

6.  Lord of the Flies

Lock you door, lock your door
the ris is coming!

7.  Scenes from the Graduate

Blueberry, bran, boysenberry
Muffin!
Elaine!

8. What am I going to doo with you?

9.   Happy is the man who can laugh at his own jokes
and few are his friends!