Ray IS a Persuasive Dude

When the buzzer rings, I leave Ray up in his apartment and run downstairs to open up the heavy double doors to let Gerry the bass player in.

Gerry's bushy, black beard is beaded with moisture from the snow falling in giant flakes from the slate gray sky, and our greeting is a wet one as I clap him on the shoulder and water sprays everywhere.

As he follows me up the stairs, we discuss the new song (which, I explain, sounds like a Cure b-side from the Faith-  or maybe Seventeen Seconds-, era) but my mind is elsewhere, mulling over a question: Why did I automatically run downstairs to open the door at somebody else's apartment?

Am I so obsequious that I simply do someone else's bidding without being asked?

11/22/11 Rrrrargh

Work has been brutal, the last week. The accumulated karma of 15 years of slacking coming home to roost.

It feels like something inside me has been beaten - not defeated, but actually beaten, tenderized. A part of me has given up, at least for now, but even so, I can feel it lurking, waiting to rise back up and assert its stupid, foolish dominance.

4-7-08 Flowing with the Tide

Between Sixth Avenue, where the B train arrives on 42nd Street, and Fifth Avenue, a tunnel stretches to funnel commuters beneath the street. For some reason, today all of the trains in both directions arrived at the station at once, and the tunnel was full of people, hundreds of people bobbing along in the stream of bodies, all flowing down the conduit.

I was worried that, if I surrendered to the flow, relaxed and let the tide carry me, that I would lose my individuality, but I realized that if I relaxed my body, flowed with the mass, while keeping my eyes open and paying attention, that I actually was freed to be even more myself. I didn't have to push or impose my will, skirting between slower walkers and constantly searching for an opening - I could be both myself and a part of the crowd, anonymous, unremarked, necessary.

1-15-08 The Sutra of Lowered Expectations

Whenever I find something that I enjoy just for itself, like, say, writing in this blog, I have this pernicious tendency to fuck it all up with my ridiculous sense of self-importance and ambition. Well not this time, buckos. I found myself checking my blog traffic way too much and I've decided I've had enough of my shit. So I may be doing some rather self-sabotaging things in the next couple of weeks, just to pull the rug out from under my monkey-mind, cause he wants everything, and he doesn't care who he has to put in traction to get it, the little bastard.