RSS SPIRIT

A Space Into Which The Go Juice Spirals





We all need to ensure our love areas are clean and uncluttered, so we can host love graciously. Take a moment this spring, after you have checked smoke alarms, to make certain your love 'heating ducts' are fully functioning.

Start by considering your basic appreciation of love. What are you asking from love? Are you asking for it to be videotaped while one or all participants are masked and moaning? Or do you ask that the one you loved in 5th grade return to take you Calgon-style away from all this? It is OK to ask a lot of love, but be flexible. Love is a negotiation. Sometimes in exchange for baby oil wrestling matches you get to give somebody your 7 personalities.

Love is never hurt by a mint or two. Does your breath stink? Cup your hand over your mouth and say into your palm, I want love, what did the last syllable smell like? Also, make sure the organs relevant to love are springy and plump. Ride your bike around the block to get lovemaking muscles such as buttock and calf into form. To run after love you want to be able to pump those legs quick off the starting block.

From a spiritual perspective you should sweep out the ghosts of old lovers. Exes can really haunt you. There is only one way to put them in their place. Have an hour long fantasy in which you have your way with the specter of an old flame. This will scare them out of your life and back into memory's trophy case.

Love, like basements and ass fat, can quickly become marred with detritus when the hoarding instinct is turned on too high. We must toss out, off and away all that clogs, sags and bloats. Love requires bright light, good cross ventilation and space to gestate.

Because bunny like reptilian love lays many eggs full of wonder, actually magic seeds that grow again from the ground, a bounty: the apotheosis of sensuality, i.e., in your touch an ethereal symphony.

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Form and Function for Royalty



Both types of people come down the street, bedecked and bedazzling. They frequently are encumbered by a bundle of goods. Each group has the power to shock with their audacity. For only hipster chicks and old men can wound with their outfits. Leather over windbreakers, pants ridiculous and decades old, bags clutched conspicuous and Aldi style double stuffed.

Hipster chicks and old men saunter without pity. You will get out of their way, rest of the world. For it is these two types of people the world exists to please. Yes, the kings and queens of the world are young women with mega attitude bordering on psychotic as their choice of shawl and geezers with hard opinions fanatical as their choice of wool sock.

Who would have thought these two seeming bi-polar expressions of humanity would quietly collude to be the top dogs walking the street?

Right this minute the coolest hipster chick slid by on a skateboard. She wore Mondrian worthy accessory colors. Then ambled down the street this most appealing old man in three different plaids, a perky hat and a bag of light bulbs.

I would like to request a show on UHF in which an old man and a hipster chick hang out on a stoop, look out over their domain and reveal their secret for staying on top of the human social organization pyramid. They might also talk about clothing strategy; the critical importance of shoe choice and creative uses for old metal band-aid containers.

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Visual Metaphor Alert



We live as we breathe. With great joy one moment and in the worst condition imaginable the next.

I was thinking about this as I was bouncing down the street on a wonderful day this week. The sun was out, there was much pleasing to the eye walking the sidewalk. It was one of those days where it was like - you know it's nice out here for a pimp.

Then I thought about all the gazillions of people in terrible circumstances. People who are starving, sick and living in Iraq. I thought about the unspeakable tragedies that can affect decent fun people who just want to live and love and make the world a better place. Without notice you can get wasted in this world, whether by natural or man-made horror. Nobody is immune. Not in today's world. Small after all is the circumference required to wreck a thousand lives in a moment.

I am not sure this is a word that will make it into the OED anytime soon, but it popped into my head while I walked the street in a dialectic stupor.

Perildise

function: noun

etymology: a compound of peril and paradise

1. A state of loving life but knowing full well tragedy can arrive without warning or mercy.

2. A philosophical state or conclusion that accepts every part of life and still embraces life in the present moment.

Sentence: While in the Green Zone drinking a smuggled cold beer and watching ESPN in an airconditioned mess hall while eating fried chicken, Corporal John Doe felt acute perildise as he considered the insufferably hot road to the Baghdad airport, how dangerous it was and how much dread and fear roared just outside the gates.

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Sometimes You Gotta Ride Over The City





Bicycles pedal past, some hunched into the wind, some with the wind at their back upright in repose. An old man still in winter gear cruises past with a much marked iron contraption. A sunglassed Slav slices past on a tall bike faster than traffic. One after the other: a crunchy chick in fatigue colored helmet followed by a cute Dorothy type on a shiny Schwinn.

Do not get in the way of the slender but raptor-like courier with two-dollar bike and no liability insurance. Nicer are the big-butted handle bar leaners. They are on long trips across town and only are mean when provoked. Couriers will slice you down and crate you up and ship you faster than you can say, "Get that Bike Safety Awareness Day registration number."

Old man coasts slowly with psychedelic colored bike along sidewalk. His baseball cap is black and displays a white stenciled law enforcement shield. He was preceded by a Patagonia clad guy with one of those 'pick your own color' shoulder bags. Is he courier, trust fund baby or law school student? Where he locks his sturdy mountain bike we will never know.

Another hipster dude with sleek helmet, slick bag and slight build. The sun high up blinds against chrome and passing car windows. Rolling Puerto Rican dude flashes by in a customized hybrid with steel carrying cage in back, adorned with weather worn American flags.

Large man in brown with dental rearview mirror at his left eye. Another courier, then an underdressed whiskered hipster. They whip past as if powered by the sun. Down long bike lanes toward life, work and hopefully some love near covered bike parking at the end of the day.

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Will You Be Road King Or Road Toad?





It is that time of year when the robin returns and the urban pedestrian season begins. For those of us on the professional circuit, we use this time to brush up on the fundamentals and get ready for a monster season. Fitness of course is the first issue. Urban walking requires tolerance to low oxygen environments such as behind idling buses. Also you need a quick first step to jump a jaywalk in front of a cement truck.

Urban pedestrians become champions by doing a few basic things over and over. Staying alive of course tops the list. Never stopping is a close second. Professional power walkers can cruise through 18 different neighborhoods, 17 miles and 16 hours with only a couple stops for lunch, snack and a couple minutes in a park to enjoy the day.

Urban pedestrians should carry a few tools that have been road tested. A good pair of shoes tops the list. These need to assume for a changing environment over the course of a walk. A compass and a map never hurt a long trek. You would be surprised how helpful knowing which direction you are walking is. Also, historically, maps demonstrably help get you from point A to B expeditiously.

Nietzsche's famous axiom will help shape the urban pedestrian esprit de ped-X: That which does not kill me make me stronger. Here is a basic list of what can kill you and not kill you. Be sure to adjust for local conditions.

Kill you: trash trucks, cabs, SUVs, youth gangs, buses, drug addicts, hidden holes, drunk drivers, electrified metal plates, vicious dogs, drifters, trains, quick moving rivers, long check out lines.

Not kill you: old women, mail carriers, babies in strollers, ancient oak trees, haunted mansions, forgotten alleys, sunsets, sun rises, young beauties parading like they got all that (and they do.)

Victory comes not without sweat. Typically the winner arrives at the end of a monster power walk silted with urban filth, bleary eyed, occasionally delusional. But all is worth it when you arrive at an old dock in a quiet bay surrounded by fat clouds. The city gives it up 'freaky for real' only to urban power walkers.

We wish you a sterling strolling season ahead.

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Glitter Glorious in the Gloaming



The windows across the street that adorn the brick three-flats are as deep of blue as possible. They reflect the last gasp of light from the western sky. Above decorative cornices the color of something like "the unbearable blue of being."

Uh oh, somebody turned a light on. Thin white curtain shades a yellow glass ceiling bulb. Twilight is extinguished. But before she retired she swelled into the evening passerby something exultant and wee.

Imagine what happens when she wanders the streets.


Spending time with artists can take years off your life. This is a little known health issue that affects thousands of Americans. Artists possess dangerous levels of psychotropic electromagnetism. Within these energy fields people invariably begin engaging in "risky behavior."

"Risky behavior" may include fist fighting, weeping at the terror inherent in beauty, touching foreign language speakers while weeping, and most despicably, paper mache projects. In layman's terms artists constantly experiment with creative destruction. Occasionally those around them get swept away by these experiments.

In a safer world artists would have to display, in a prominent location, an explicit health warning. Something to the effect that: "Artists cut life expectancy on average 7-10 years." Or, "Danger, artists emit unsafe levels of mischief, joy and fantastical obsessions."

The sad fact is however, even if artists were required to display these risks with a forehead tattoo, people will still indulge in this most luxurious and wanton of vices. Artists are like a wild fling with a stranger behind a 7-11 dumpster. Exultation typically results as the brain surges full of dopamine and serotonin. But this blinds one to the numerous risks. These are not limited to existential anguish while not wearing pants.

If you cannot help yourself and take that magic carpet ride, there are a few things you can do to ensure your survival. First, never touch absinthe. Absinthe plus artists equal an untimely plunge from an industrial rooftop. Also, keep your wits about you, every hour yell loudly at the artist, "I know Satan is your master. I deny you three times so that you may not steal my soul."

The apt metaphor for hanging out with artists is the myth of Icarus. Icarus got mighty close to capturing total energy. But in doing so he was undone by unimaginable amounts of electronic radiation. That is, his wings melted off and he did like Wile E. Coyote 10,000 feet straight down.

Whilst you plunge with much purpose and acceleration, consider that a moment ago you were infused with universal infinity, and reflect that while artists are worthy of condemnation, at the end of the fall you have nobody to blame but yourself.

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The Inevitable Hot Love Is Standard

I sing a song of great gropes in a sweet smelling old car. For love perhaps finds its most vivid expression in the ample environs of bench seats and faraway AM stations. Acts of love performed in such conveyances are never quickly forgotten. Music urges us on and the windows must be cracked to vent the vapor manufactured by ardor.

I sing a song of a 1978 Ford Thunderbird floating down a forgotten city street. Inside love goes down on a carpeted seat, angled back voluptuously. A moment came after the spanking that was like a spoon full of heaven, a heaping one. A moment I will never forget, simply terrifying. I never dared dream that verily I would explode into a perfect verisimilitude of paradise.

I sing a song of a vinyl top V-8 U-boat of a sedan. Furtive love flowed as the wheel steered us lazily around the block. I sing a song of a deep groove sloppy grope while parked down a hidden hill. Years do not diminish these furious auto freak fests. In a reverie I do cry and sing of vast eruptions, joy's vengeful effusions.

I cannot bear it away, too much, too much. I cry at what has altered me irrevocably as I pull up my pants on an empty side street, somehow day turned into night.

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