Los Angeles is on fire.  It looks and feels like Armageddon.  The air is unrelentingly hot, synging the throat dry.

Quote of the day

“I can’t wait to take my pants off and have a jack and coke.”

Path

Our difficulties are not obstacles to the path; they are the path itself. They are opportunities to awaken. Can we learn what it means to welcome an unwanted situation, with its sense of groundlessness, as a wake-up call? Can we look at it as a signal that there is something here to be learned? Can we allow it to penetrate our hearts? By learning to do this, we are taking the first basic step toward learning what it means to be open with whatever life presents us.  Even when we don’t like it, we understand that this difficulty is our practice, our path, our life.

Love is the answer.  Always.

Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Don’t search for the answers which could not be given to you now because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answers.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

One time I was in a ceramics class (god love liberal arts) from which I wanted to emerge with a parade of life changing plates, postmodern cups, style heavy saucers.  In the end I was left with a few awkward plates that didn’t lay flat, a handful of broken shards and bad lessons about patience.  It was at that time I realized, it wasn’t about what was produced, but what had been enjoyed along the way.   Sometimes being so focused on what gets made robs us of the “along the way.”

All of this is just a momentary dip in a stream.  Tributaries, drowning in big lakes, spitting back out into the ocean.  We wade in our waters and every day there is that elegant choice.  What is yours today?

Today a friend wrestled me to the ground and force fed me a cupcake.     And last night I was kidnapped  and forced to down a milk shake (shaka’shaka).  I hate when these accidental eatings happen.  Nearly as bad as accidental boozings, sans the hangover.

And in greener pastures… once I was pitching a fit over an ensuing electronic catastrophe, I was attempting to set up speakers, network computers, and make things happen that a smart-endowed geek squad should deal with, not me…nothing was working and I just kept trying and getting volcanic along the way.  Cut to my friend Taliny stepping in and demanding I stop, put down the cable and go to the park and meditate.

Me:   (Knowing I wasn’t going to get out of it)  Can’t we just do it here? (Irritated).

Her:   No. Get up we are leaving. Now. (Bossy).

Me:   (pouting, pissed and sorta stunned, I usually get called a bossy-sauce, but rarely do I receive.)

Us:   (park, meditated, spat out totally different person slash perspective.  Sun rays, green leaves, wind teasing tones in a whisper.  Back to human.)

There’s no way for this to come out in any way but pollyeanic, so here goes .. in each of us there is a park, you heard me right, you have an effen park inside, an open space within to calm, cool, collect and grab a freshy.  It’s right there all the time, we just have to step out of our storm and sit in that space, breath, and come back home.

If you are feeling slightly cracked today, you are not alone.  The universal pulse seems skittish and annoyed today.

That said, I’d like to share with you my previous evenings three salad with a side of snuff experience.  My friend had me over for dinner, I was pushing for a finger painting and word stream session, which he somehow took for getting nude.   We settled on dinner and a movie.  Dinner however entailed him making three separate salads, no entree.  He’s been a friend for a while now and is made of light, he wakes and looks at the day as great, I wake and think, ef this day, where’s my brew?  He grew up on a Sufi commune in the woods in England.  We’re dealing with a grade A hippy here, the real deal, not a trustifarian popping daddys dime for another didgeridoo and hair beading.  His parents were at the heart of it, at the Warhol factory, traversing the earth in a boat just because there was a craving to do so that year.  (This is quite a set up for a boring story about a salad I realize, but stay with me.)  He pulls out of the fridge every esculent green grown in the ground imaginable, around this time I start making false promises to be more like him and eat only things from soil or tree.  There was a lot of prosecco and then a nice stream of summer sangria.  Somewhere in there I happened upon a little jar like the image above, it looked like a powdered spice inside.

Me: “What’s this?”

He: “Snuff.  You snort it.”

Me: Not knowing at all what that means or what it’ll do to a human, “great can I try?”

A spoonfull on the hand and down she burns.  It is basically a vintage way to get at a mild upsee-daisy, akin to good ol’ fashioned tabbacky with some extra spice thrown in.  A sharpening of the senses and a brighten of my otherwise slightly sauced state..(devil, shoulder, whisper whisper, tickle, giggle).

Then we eat.  A pico de gallo salad (normally called a salsa, but okay), a bright and crispy green pea and onion salad, and a ex girlfriend’s Arab cabbage and carrot salad.  My body went into health overdrive.

Everybody loves to hate LA (myself included).  Yet there’s nooks and crannys about this city that feel like your grandpa’s big recliner chair, at the end of the day, you sink back into her body, letting her catch you, hold you.   The quiet contemplative view from his pad reminds me of this.  It’s in the heart of my hood, east side my monkeys, and there are hills here where you see beautiful, submerging canyons and houses that litter her slope, black palms cut against a mild, fading mauve sky and a silent view of the towering bodies of downtown.   It’s only those who spin into town harping on a dream who do not find these secret folds.  New York is a city where everything is right there, in your face, Tokyo has New York’s speed, with the polite demure demeanor of a school girl with white gloves, underneath Tokyo’s belly is a riotous, rabid circus of eccentric rule breaking, silent codes, passage ways.  Los Angeles is spread out.  To find her, you must get to know her.  Really know her.  There’s a lot of surface.  Many stay skimming it for years. I’m speaking of the typical vision Hollywood is known for, is repelled by or drawn to.  But dig into her crevasses and there are secrets, blazing sweet secrets for those who really seek to land.

xo … in other words, tonight is an evening for warmed sake.

Daniel P. if you read this entry, very nice to run into you and thank you for your words about the words here – it meant a lot today.

Highly recommended  :: coffee time morning surprise dancing to Shiela E.’s The Glamorous Life.

I dreampt I was in a small mountain town, and I was getting chased down and given a ticket for not having a furry collar on my coat among other mountain town infractions.  But the cop was insufferably hot and I wanted to bribe him with cookies, guest appearances on Conan and other big city allure.

My cop looked like this but with sandy orange hair, very tall and fit, in a ranger forest green get-up.

Tie. Me. Down. 

Okay monkeys.  It’s Thursday.  The sun in Lost Angeles is blazing naked bold rays, singeing earths skin and all of her collamorous ant farm-humans gyrating upon her.  Blessed.  Another day.

True Confession Tuesday!

I have a covert and long standing habit of flipping off officers of the law whenever sighted.  I have a superstition that if I don’t, I will get ticketed.  And in fact the few times I have been slapped with a naughty, I had not administer the bird.

In unrelated news, when I was little, my nickname was “the bird.”

The Bird Bird Bird, the Bird is the Werd.