Folk #1: "You are a Good Man, Charlie Brown." Thinking good thoughts for a better future. Over here I am doing my best to be a stoic, a sunny-fried skeptic, and a totally dispassionate, Zen Warrior. I have been recalibrating & refocusing my daily meditation practice: visualizing death in a million ways. Oh, no, not what you are thinking. Ok. Yes. Maybe it is what you are thinking; it's understandable, it's the question on everyone's lips in my little progressive, blue-bubble town, but that is not the only thing I'm thinking. I have been conjuring up scenes of my own death in a thousand, quite dramatic ways. Falling off a mountain, attacked by a murder of crows, drowned in a raging river, arrows in the back, torn apart by a pack wolves, struck down in an epic Captain Blood-type sword fight, trampled underfoot by a herd of wild-ass buffalo. Funny. It's all quite liberating. A deep cleanse. I have found a certain icy-calm center, deep in the murky depths of my own being. Think classic Ego Death. The craziness of the moment to moment seems like silly, pointless, easily-dismissed & ignored white noise, super-easy to overlook & to tune out. This over-amped, ridiculous, comedic-tragedy channeled through our deeply corrupt, toxic clown? Vapor. Mist. Fog.
