This, your 38th b-day, marks two years to the day since i set sail on a jet plane out of Denver, Colorado, leaving behind the continental United States and becoming westward bound for Eastern points abroad.... My first stop in Maui, Hawai'i does sort of seem like a long time ago now, although ingeneral, these travels seem to have flashed by in the span of a few days for me.... IT certainly does not feel for me like two years have elapsed! And yet, here i am, in India for the second time, exploring possibilities for teaching and income that seemed never to be open for me back in the states; and having been through a short four months in China, a long eleven months in Thailand, and going on eight months total in India on two separate occasions (with some short visa stopovers in Malaysia, Cambodia, and Singapore), i guess there has been a lot of water under the bridge these last couple of years! From arriving in India in late 2011, all through Bodhgaya, the holiest Buddhist spot on Earth, and the Dalai Lama's Kalachakra ceremony; exchanging a silent greeting with the Karmapa; the Vipassana retreat that ALMOST didn't happen; the Unconference in the woods; Bombay at Gopal's place in Andheri; Kalimpong and Darjeeling; Delhi for a week; Bangkok and Koh Phangan in Thailand; Singapore and life-decision-direction-making; and now, solo-shifting to the basement of the Little Wonders Playschool here in Delhi.... i have tried my best to focus past my intense distractions, and keep my attention centered on the present moment at all given times over these past couple of years; and IT has been deucedly difficult to do so! i have attempted, and not entirely succeeded, to create my own focus rather than blindly taking on the focus which has been pushed onto me by outside forces; and i continue working on this today, even as i write these lines....
And now that i now find myself alone in Delhi, single for the first time in years and with adequate space to explore my OWN internal experience.... Well.... i don't really know what to do with IT! Hahaha....
i am bumbling along, paying attention to my surroundings and the signals of the universe, figuring out positive and progressive actions on a day-to-day basis; i stretch a little bit in the mornings (when i remember!), and try every day to build either contacts or clients here in Delhi town for either educational or musical endeavors.... i am writing a happy, poppy song which will hopefully feature some Hindi hip-hop lyrics from excellent writer and friend Arpita Bohra, which i hope to record in a local studio with some of the really good musicians i've been meeting here, and maybe try to release IT as a single here in Delhi somehow.... We shall see!
And so here i sit in my basement office, penning these lines on my doddering G2 phone with my archnemesis, the Autocorrect, battling me at every turn, as my new blue laptop computer sits unusable with no OS and no possibility of one without an ethernet cable, of which one i have no idea how to find....
Ruminating and reflecting on the past two years is the theme of my day today (as well as being thankful for my friend Zach who i have not seen since 2005!), and while i am not sure what lies ahead in the clouds of the future, my effort remains focused here on the present moment, where i need more fresh vegetables to eat, more sleep, more music practice, and more grateful meditation towards the universe and the ever-sustaining Tao which binds the galaxy together! These things are clear to me, and so i will continue towards them with an open heart and a hope that we all shall come together with each other in this lifetime....
On the horizon is the expanding of my Taro operations - into a website detailing the Taro Of Longevity system, a video series on Intro to Taro, and the establishment of my remote reading services onto the worldwide web, for starters....
*****
Slice of India: 12ish-year-old boy, picking through garbage piles, with a white bluetooth on his ear
*Strange in every shape*
Bizarre and somewhat telling dream, in which i'm supposed to play a benefit show for an old couple, and there's press for IT and all, and one of my bandmates is like a 20 year old kid, and we're all going on an old bus like IT's a school trip to do an interview for the press, and i have all my guitars with me but i don't have my multiFX pedal; and the kid bandmate (who looks like Parvati's boyfriend Peter!) says to me "Well, you better not forget IT for the show," in a pretty snide and condescending manner; and i get pissed and take him by the scruff of the neck and i say, "Let's take a little walk for a minute...." and i proceed to tell him all about how i've been doing this for 15 years, and he's a total noob and can't be telling me what to do, that he's got no call criticizing me about anything, etc. etc.... And as we walk, the bus transforms into a school hallway, and the Peter-like kid gets smaller and smaller until he's about four or five years old, and i'm still walking him along by the scruff of the neck, chastising him as my bandmate! Eventually when i've said my piece, i walk him back to his classroom, and put him back in with all the other five-year-olds, where i then sit down and all the little kids are suddenly older and are my classmates back at the Day School, and we're all sitting around reminiscing about the good old days back in school.... :-/
*****
Creative design and artistry are some of the main avenues and forces in my life which i have used to perceive my self as an agent, rather than a victim.... By intentionally designing my material goods, their color schemes, their qualities; by crafting my own tones, their feel and lyrics; by managing and maintaining my general atmosphere and surrounding friends through choices which reflect my psyche and my desires, i have created the illusion of my control over the world.... But not only control! No, moreover, a beautiful creation of artistic splendor, reflecting myself back to myself at every turn, like a madman dancing with himself in a hall of mirrors, dancing the melodrama of his life and captivated by each passing snatch of his own face as IT whirls by in a thousand ambient directions....
This is not control, and i am not a victim; yet these truths have been but recently recognized, and the perception of myself as a victim of the world's cruelties and the resulting artistic habit is many, many years deep at this point for me - not to mention colorful and fun! IT seems to be a well-appreciated part of my persona in the world - perhaps the chief part! - and yet masks a frustrated and paranoid urge to flee into the darkness, away from the whips and scorns of a sneering and insensitive populace, down into some Phantom-of-the-Opera type of macabre artistic martyrdom.... And yet with such seemingly positive aspects to share with the world ingeneral, IT would seem that i have got the whole thing quite backwards, and am obsessively holding to an experience of "victimhood" which no longer applies to my current millieu.... With the encouragement i have from all corners in pursuit of artistry and sharing in these ways, IT seems only natural to follow the good vibrations, and to feel somewhat loathe to make any alterations in a good thing! And here once again the question lies, starting me in the face: How am i to make change, when the very change that needs to be made leads away from some of the "best parts" of my self....? Hmmm....
*****
Wow, this is one of the longest train delays i've ever experienced! IT's taken an hour-and-a-half to go five stops on the yellow line, and at this point i HAVE to get off art Central Secretariat and hustle back down to Little Wonders, instead of meeting Shruti, the not-quite-ready-for-prime-time graphic designer, to give her dough for a MusiQwest logo that i'm not even going to use because Tiffany made me a better one....
On driving in India:
Imagine that there was no such thing as a traffic light....! How would traffic function? At intersections, how would all the cars and motorbikes and bicycles and pedestrians work their way through to the next street? Traffic must continue moving forward, and there can't be eternal gridlock at every streetcorner - no one would stand for that! So you have these motor vehicles which can go as fast as a running cheetah, yet at a light-less intersection, you can't afford accidents every two seconds, so everyone has to slow down and skirt by each other slowly in their general order of arrival; the chaos follows a pattern, as everyone just sort of feels their way through to the next street.... IT takes a little while, but everyone gets where they're going, eventually.... This is exemplary of traffic in India! Oh, AND there are traffic lights here as well! :-/
Just saw "Man Of Steel" opening night with Sujana and Swastik and Sajit; and WOW! They took the quintessential one-dimensional superhero and made IT work for the, uh, modern era! For anyone familiar with the material, IT was clear that a lot of thought went into the players, the theatricality, the ambiance, and the FUN! Haven't seen so much shit flying around and collateral damage since Matrix Revolutions; and, speaking of which - Morpheus got fat! Omg! The scene with him running in the tight dress shirt was priceless, and well-contrived.... Also nice to see Kevin Costner making a well-timed appearance, dragging his bones out of the grave of his career to have them put right back in by a giant CG Kansas tornado! :-D
File under "Real-Life Comedy": Nikhil, in the auditorium with me to see the free "Egaa" movie, asks the girl sitting in the first seat of the row if she can get up so that he can enter the row of seats.... Once she stands up in the aisle, he promptly sits down in the girl's seat and gets comfortable, for one second before he realizes what he's done, and says "Oh, i'm sorry!" as he quickly gets up in embarrassment and moves on down the aisle, as i die laughing X-D
*****
RIP my fallen doppelganger, Nolan Farrell, who passed away at age 34 during Sonic Bloom Festival last weekend.... We had a crazy four years hearing about each other as the "Long-haired, bearded, guitar-playing Nolans" in Boulder CO without actually speaking or meeting with each other; eventually, enough karma had to build up that someone who knew you well met me somewhere, and i got you my email and phone #.... Finally, we were in first-person contact, and i knew IT was kismet from the very first email you sent to me! You wrote just like i would, full of mythology and spirituality and transcendence, and i knew we were slated to have an epic and auspicious meeting!
Yet the time seemed to stretch on, and our schedules just didn't coordinate; and finally IT took a random encounter (of course!) to bring us finally together: a bluegrass jam up in the First Street Pub in Nederland brought us unknowingly together, and IT took the cosmic prestidigitation of Tiffany Grell to realize with whom she was speaking in the corner by the stage that night, and yell out across the room "Hey NOLAN! Come here!" for our first and only meeting to take place.... Taking a break from the jam and surprised by the summons, i meandered over, and finally met.... Myself!
Nolan Farrell was a scholar and a gentleman, a tech-savvy compu-guy and a musical humanitarian who hid out up in Ned most of the time because he couldn't deal with the hypocrisy and political tightening-of-the-net that he observed around his country of birth; he wished for the freedom for all, and was met with a reality that did not sit well with his kindly and pirateering spirit.... He and i made plans to make music together that never will play out, as i went travelling in Asia two years ago and he went on an ill-fated journey to Sonic Bloom last week; yet i hope that i shall somehow find my musical direction infused and imbued with his spirit, if he cares to share with me from beyond this mortal veil.... You are remembered, my doppelgang brother, and we shall connect through the sheets of dimension now, though worlds of continents and debris may lie between our paths....
Tomorrow morning is the Summer Solstice
*****
IT is a comforting realization to pop into, that each set of choices we make in our lives brings about a whole shift in lifepath and clear new direction.... Each choice acted upon creates ITs own reality, fully formed and vibrant, which takes off soaring from the flashpoint of action; once launched, this set of constructs will continue onwards, affecting all following circumstances and happenstance....
This occurs for not *one* set of choices, but emphatically for *all*.... Each set of choices then spins off into ITs own reality, running directly parallel to the temporal experience of consciousness, which appears to the naked eye to continue forward unabated! Yet all the while, this newly created paradigm, this renaissance of being, shoots forward unbridled and free to evolve as IT will.... IT may never be experienced by the waking temporal consciousness as a “reality”, yet if ITs future was glimpsed, as something resembling “daydream” or “fantasy”, the process is in motion and is being carried out on a dimensional plane subject to ITs own contracts and whims, and perhaps indelibly removed from our conscious sight....
Many of us lead our lives in the frustration that we have tried and tried to perform actions that “never turn out as we planned”; and although we may beat this dead horse until the cows come home, IT is better that we might lie content in the understanding that though we may not “live to see the fruits of our labors,” in the countless moments that we make our motivated choices, our following actions have created countless parallel existences shimmering invisibly forth.... Actions in which everything that we hoped would spring from our hearts and our minds has come to pass, and carries on ITs legacy unfettered by the seeming caprices of a constantly shifting universe....
*****
For a random Sunday night, not having any other real "date" options, i took myself on a Hindi dinner-and-a-movie date in CP, eating some "kathi kabab" with really thin roti, and the couple of big cupfuls of raita i needed to dairy-fy my mouth from the piquancy of the delicious dish i was eating! Very much like a soya-based Sloppy Joe with some really thin bread, the meal was richly red and really deliciously-flavored, and i had to really man up to get IT all down.... Without the raita cooling things off, i'm pretty sure i would have been down for the count at the standing-tables-only street food stall with the ragged children watching me in bemusement as i would drool and snot all over myself in a pathetic parody of self-control....
Also, let's just keep in mind as we move forward through the world, that a "kebab" almost anywhere is a bunch of food on a skewer, but please don't think that's what you'll get if you order a "____ kabab" in India, because here, "____ kabab" means "____ mashed and cooked"! Sort of like ordering a "sandwich" and getting sliced vegetables....! :-/
After the festival of nose-blowing and mild hyperventilating, i went across the street to check out "Raanjhanaa" - my first self-Hindi date movie! Showing up at the window to buy the ticket a few minutes before showtime, i was excited to be "right on time"; this was, of course, before the manager behind the ticket window informed me that i could not come in the theater with my shoulder bag, as is general movie policy here in the city.... i looked at him with blank consternation and asked, so what are we gonna do about this? i have no weapons, guns, explosives, or recording devices of any kind! i'm just a regular guy and i'm just here to see a movie! He pointed me around the building and said that i would find a bag-check somewhere vaguely back there somewhere; with the 500-rupee bill still in my hand and shaking my head, i wandered back around behind the building to find.... a liquor stall-store! Beer and wine and 30 drunk guys chaotically mashing up to buy their booze! And not a bag check in sight.... And of course, there's no way in hell i'm leaving my bag with the guys in the liquor store and their drunk clientele.... So back to the front i went, where i showed back up at the window and strongly indicated that there was NOTHING back there, nada zip zilch! And the manager sighed, and sold me the ticket and had me leave my bag with the lady security guard inside; why we couldn't have done this to begin with, i'm still not sure.... He told me to not leave any valuables in the bag, and i replied, "But that's why i have the bag, to carry around my valuables!" Sigh....
However, after examining the munchies counter and finding IT to be entirely devoid of chocolate (a movie-theater first for me), i made IT, after all, "right on time" to my seat as the opening titles began for "Raanjhanaa".... Not a bad flick experience, for me not understanding most of what was said.... Weeell, maybe on second thought, not such a well-done flick either :-/.... Even in the proper Hindi movie, there were still a lot of phrases and sentences in english, enough for me to get a bunch of the language in patches here and there.... Also took a few surreptitious notes on Hindi words throughout the movie.... i'll have to do this more often!
*****
6/25/13: Happy birthday to me! A lovely guest-of-honor station at the Nirvaaha Organic Happy Tuesday Cafe, playing whatever music suited me in the moment, was my lovely birthday present from the lovely and Tuesdsay-happy Pulkita Parsai, with my dear guru and local tightwad Nikhil Thapar egging me on from the sidelines.... Then, later, a meetup with my Kalimpong family of Akhilesh, Swastik, and Sujana at Harry's Karaoke Lounge in Ansal Plaza, for an evening of too-expensive drinks forgotten in the laughing and singing of many fun tunes, both in Hindi and english, with everything from Blink 182 through Elvis, through to the anti-climactic ending of my "Secret Weapon" karaoke song, which shut down for some reason right in the middle, was re-started by the DJ, then shut down again, and re-started again, at which point i seriously considered throwing in the musical towel; but instead held on to finish out the song for my appreciative friends (all sworn to secrecy on the identity of my "Secret Weapon" song, of course)....
A last hurrah was had out in the deserted outdoor middle of the Ansal Plaza, where a moon over an amphitheater-seating area with a round stage could not be overlooked, and i played "Ghost Riders In The Sky", along with my song "Crystal Lucy" for my friends on the rings of stone seats.... A classic end to a wonderful birthday evening! :-)
*Birthday Message for me from Alan Canselo:*
Happy birthday, my brotha! Sorry thus message arrives a little late, but the past few weeks have been kinda hectic. I live vicariously through your exploits in SE Asia... What a brilliant move on your part. ;-) I need to find my zen, and I shall.
But enough about me, enjoy yourself thoroughly, you're doing great things.
Peace,
Al
- Thank you, my brotha! i'm definitely getting some interesting experiences and views on some very different life-and-lifestyles than we have back home; although, i think the main message which i've been seeing as the running connective throughout these whole travels has been "people are just people, doing the same basic things an a bunch of different ways"....
So in the end, IT all doesn't seem THAT unfamiliar, because wherever i've gone, i can somewhat relate to what people are doing and how they're experiencing things....
i still haven't been island-hopping around Indonesia, going into jungle villages with people wearing bones through their noses and shrunken heads hanging off their belts, so i can't really speak for much other than someone who spends most of their time in relative "civilization", with cell phones and payment plans and rent and the exact same kind of shit we all have back home
And in this regard, i feel like my travels are not as meaningful as they could be, because you don't travel from NYC to Jersey to see what life is like in exotic lands; and that's basically what i've been doing! IT's just that the same-shit, rat-race economic scrounging just happens to have this-or-that cultural flavor attached.... Which is to say, i may not have seen anything really different than i'm used to, even after two years....!
.... i just miss Mexican food ;-)
peace for now, let's be in touch ;-)
*****
Oh, the beautiful yellow-polluted sunsets of Delhi....! To walk out the door and have the city suffused in a brilliant and soft yellow-brown light - how magical! For just a little while, the world is magical again.... And as the light starts to dim towards pink, the orange of the glaring streetlamps begins to insidiously creep into the palette,
Soon becoming
indecipherable from the evening's light,
and once again
the electric sprawl
has conquered all
in sight....
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