Communication is kind of sacred to me. It’s like sharing space, but the space is in my and your head and our heads are so vast – it’s divine when you really can get a feel for someone you’ve never met (or maybe you have) through this communication connective tissue. Shoot, I don’t watch tv or listen to the radio or read any news sites or magazines. But somehow I am ultra current and cutting edges. I’m an edge cutter. Because I listen. You know, tap into that collective unconscious. I share my mind space with any mind that is open. The more open, the easier it is to share more. It’s sacred to write and converse and to support others ideas and growth. Everyone grows. Until we don’t anymore. And then we’re dead. Dead is not growing and not changing. But the mind is always changing and growing and it’s really something to have virtual intellect jamming with little words or big words. Just soul and idealism. Idealism and soul. Bring me your open mind.
I wanna be all deep and engaging. I wanna be all romantic and alluring. I wanna be all brilliant and inspiring. But I’m not, but I’m not, but I’m not.
I’ve got it in me – or I have once upon a time. But in the past year this change has become massive and I’m going for broke. I’m going for unrecognizable me when I’m through. I’m going for the full burn, the temple turn to ashes and me and you dancing through them like we ain’t never gonna die. Like we know we’re gonna die and we’re choosing to burn it all anyway.
There’s a little destruction in true love. There’s a little love in true destruction. True destruction never means anything. It must be performed with generosity. Let no cold heart injure others. To destroy for the heck of it – now, that’s true love. I love you so much, I want to bite you.
I practice self love by destroying me all the time. Pointlessly destroying me. Bringing myself cut flowers. They die. They die, too. My bouquet of eventual wilt.
But no matter how often I resurrect and morph and rise, I’m a boring theme of repeated shortcomings and I’ve lived long enough to see the pattern. I want to be defined by passion and perseverance. I want to be shaped by curiosity and wonderment. I want to draw identity from perfect, secret beauty. But I’m not. But I don’t. But I try.
Suddenly, it is not poetry random singing and naps. It’s confrontation with my shadow self letting herself be known to me. I was unaware she had been following me this lifetime around. I thought I’d be horrible. But my shadow is innocent.
Let me ask this: if you don’t enjoy writing in cursive: you don’t take to it naturally and don’t do it notably well, then do you work on it and improve or do you just type, use block letters – maybe don’t communicate at all?
I wanna be all perfect and gentile. I wanna be all compassion and levity. I wanna be someone who changes the world. And starts this October. But I”m resting. But I’m discovering. And I need to touch.
You know life is weird when you flick on the hotel room lights and just because you’ve stayed there twice this week already, it feels like home.
Or is it because it is a private pleasure – a personal indulgence with double doors, king sized beds and mirrored jacuzzi tub – that I have chosen to feel so at home on my third nite in this swank Vegas hotel room.
Maybe I am running away from something and appreciate the respite.
Maybe I just need some sleep.
But I’m having too good a time to be tired! I’m playing dress-up make-believe for a living and I am four different characters this week: a paranormal goddess at Ghost Fest 4 on the haunted Queen Mary this Saturday, a pirate at Lobsterfest also this Saturday, a snake-charming burlesque dancer on NBC’s Friends With Benefits (airing in January) and most of the time; a Princess.
http://twitter.com/toadstoolpeach http://tinyurl.com/facebooktoadstoolpeach No kidding.
And it occurs to me that the performing arts are the perfect career for this little Chaote. It doesn’t take a genius to note my penchant for identity research. Identity is a pretty profound concept to me. Worthy of a career choice and inspiration of many behaviors, relationships and aesthetic assertions I’ve entertained through the years. Sure, the whole no-schedule/no-routine thing works for my personality. Sure, the connection with a massive community and the pure beauty of performance works for me well, too. But what really hooked me in the performing arts was the chance to literally question and recreate personality. Not just mine. When we realize that personality is malleable, and what parts of us are actually personality-driven, then we are touching the core of identity. And sometimes I think that is one of the very unique things I get to explore as a human. I get to question existence.
Go, humans!
I know some of us don’t and some of us avoid it. I know some of us live as if it’s already happened and some of us are so simple, we are blissfully blessed. I’ve always wanted to be simple, but that’s just not my lot in life. It still gives me something to work towards perhaps.
No place like home in a hotel room in Vegas for a snake-charming princess like me.
Sometimes you just gotta get away.
Of course when I say ‘you’, I really mean ‘I’.
Sometimes I just gotta get away. Is it something specific to my personality or is it specific to all humans and I am just joining in that race. The human race.
Where are we racing to? The finish line is the only real deadline and from here it looks like Death. Racing toward Death we humans us all. Then again, maybe it’s just me trying to get away. Trying to forget my personality again and again. Because deep down, I know that identity is a shape – a code we use to communicate with others. Identity is communication. My identity is not me. ‘I’m’ not me. Knowing that gives me the freedom to roam throughout personalities, changing quickly and often just for fun.
But I don’t feel like being someone specific right now. I don’t feel like pretending to have an identity. I don’t feel like communicating at all.
I am at a pool party in Tampa, Florida, where I have been brought in as a featured guest for Fetish Con. I see women playing alter egos, I see men playing servants, I see hotel staff playing bartenders and convention staff playing security. It strikes me as odd that all of these people actually believe they are whom they say they are. The way I see it, even the security man is playing a role. We’re all role playing all the time.
Some costumes are more fun than others.
I’m bored with my personality(s). I’m tired of everyone else’s identities. And I wonder to myself if there is any way to communicate without identifying at all. This lonely heart wants to connect without buying into my or someone else’s person. But this keyboard, even now, is what I’m buying into and this keyboard, even now, is getting in the way. To write this at all, I am buying into a perspective as if it’s mine. As soon as I stop typing I am not communicating anymore. My identity of writer is forgotten.
And I guess all that’s left to do is be quiet.
Some people say they find peace in the silence. But ‘I’ didn’t find anything at all.
I’m not sure what’s important anymore. Other than how passionately and immediately and totally I can experience anything. The greater the challenge, the higher the risk, the more important it is.
I’m not talking about playing with your life here. Or am I?
Consideration of the ego and practice of egolessness accomplished. Realization of money, it’s meaninglessness, it’s flow, it’s power affirmative. Transcendence of illness, injury, and upset complete. Symbiosis with the natural, moving, growing world effective. Manifestation of Will fruitious. Karmic flow engaged. Position in society established.
Gurus are bored out of their minds. Renegades are bored out of reality. Discordians are bored out of fun.
I am bored with what contemplation, seeking and evolution have in their front pockets. I am here to Find Out how far any direction goes.
The giant stomping barbarian racing always forward at the horizon dragging herself by elastic dread locks pulling in opposition into infinity behind.
Never been too good at meditating in the usual sense.
Though I’ve practiced meditating for months consistently and traditionally at a time, I still get really annoyed at how slow it is. So I stand up and go to the drum and bass club and dance to give shape to the dark, chaotic timbers and sequences. So I carry the bike down to the street and ride like my Electra was a Harley, just peddling and moving through the air – the wind moves across my face and I am free coasting downhill. Or I pick up the poi and find a natural spot – like my Hollywood rooftop, the edge of the ocean or sometimes at the base of some great mountain – and I spin circles surround me until sacred geometry fortifies my space and I know freedom through repetition inside inside.
Oh, I meditate. But I can’t stand sitting still.
But just dancing doesn’t meditation make. Meditation is a One resulting of the stacking of odds. Comfortable kicks, a plump sound system, responsive floor, open minds and one killer dj up my chances of being lifted, being educated, being danced. By what? What is dancing me?
These questions is where my meditations have presently brought me.
My practice then, is asking myself say, when I am reading a magazine by candle light in my brewing bath tub, “Who is reading the magazine?” “Who is taking a bath?”
Simply by asking, you are there. Happy to be alive no matter what you look like or remember or think you deserve. Who is typing this text?
To disassociate with identity is to disassociate with death just for one moment. When we don’t believe we deserve death, for just one moment, we build the thing that doesn’t die. So when we come back from meditation, we can continue living with the faith that some part of us will go on. Through which we maintain our sanity faced with mortality.
Deserve does not exist.
There is nothing you can do to deserve to be happy, healthy, successful or loved. There is nothing you can do to deserve to be unhappy. You are alive and that is what makes any of these happy/unhappy options possible. Just consider: if you never existed, then you could never be happy. But you do exist, so I figure that gives you a near-one chance comparatively.
Near-one…. Zeros and ones. Chaos and manifestation…. Near one is probable.
Just existing makes you probable for any outcome. And so I’m not sure there is anything beyond living a life of statistics that would make any particular outcome more or less possible. You didn’t “have it coming” and you can’t “earn your keep”. Possibilities are noncontingent upon effort.
When you do put in effort, you are just stacking odds in your favor.
However, what you believe you deserve can change your life. You see, if you believe you don’t deserve an available Lover, or respect from your associates, or to learn how to play the harmonica, then you certainly won’t manifest those things. But if you believe you deserve gifts from your friends, collaboration with your mentors, understanding from your family, then it will be there … probably … probability.
You can not work harder to not work. Stop working to not work. Deserve does not exist. Have it now.
Broken nose bleeding humility’s blood. That punch in the face that waters the eyes. That crack to the noggin that spins the outside world. That ringing in my ears is the only thing left after the egotistical delusions fall away.
I am humble tonite. Humble as this fight’s looser. Wondering whose side I should have been on all this time. Never to argue this evening. Never to respond in agreance neither. Just empty listening stares. The real kind of listening when I can’t even nod my head to urge your continue. I am not processing. I am taking in. I am below any Thinking I Know tonite.
I do not know. Obviously. I was wrong. Again – oh, this learning circle. I thought I was good at something. But I do not know how to dance. I do not know how to act. I do not know how to Love. I am not free. I have just been faking my self-definition so convincingly that I even thought I was doing it dead on. But only myself and those who are faking it too believed I Knew Something.
The real ones are reeling. Like me.
When we get to that reality (oh, this learning circle), where do we go? How do we admit that we are so distracted by whom we have been convincing the other convincers we are, that we forgot we are no one and now we can’t muster the finesse to make it matter in this moment.
Drowning in reality. Not the blaring kind. The bleeding. Hesitant to recreate and risk redecorating this crooked septum with another fine fist.
I bow to your forceful disintegration. I am in need of nothing anymore.
Yea, okay, I’ll hang up the phone now. Even though I didn’t say what needed to be said. I dropped the hook deep in that sea a couple of times, hoping you’d bite and … be on the other end. But it seems like every time I have a need of the loneliness kind, you have emotions that need far more care.
And they do. So I say, “How did that feel?” and “That must be hard.” Even, “I understand.” But no one on the other end of the cell phone, nor putting on make up one mirror away in the dressing room – I am naked. I am always the most naked in the dressing room. I am exposed and it’s not because I “love my body” and I want to show it off. I certainly don’t hate my body, but sometimes I do. I am naked because it’s my body and I don’t feel like it has to be covered all the time. It is as innocent and infantile as that.
Neither they nor you on the other end of this mobile conversation ask me, “How are you doing?” “What’s going on.” Even, “Hey, I notice your not holding eye contact today.” No one asks.
And that usedta woulda driven me nuts and make my loneliness -need a bigger issue, just driving in that disconnection feeling and barren loss of attachment feeling. I am an outsider of my own reality. I am outside my own world.
Oh, little Miss Renegade, how deep the personality dismantling experiments go. Oh, Little Chaos Magickian, how freedom and disintegration are just two interpretations of the same feeling.
Like celebration and anarchy. Like desire and destruction.
On tour, I’m such an introvert in the middle of social oblivion. I fight for a true moment securely alone. And I fight so often that I make it happen and make it happen, in my reality, so well, that when I need to reach out and touch, I find only the inside of my own introverted box. But I want to touch someone. I want to feel someone feel me.
But I’m going to make art of it instead. It’s so much healthier than sitting on the telephone waiting for you to “figure me out”. And I so don’t have the energy or security to reach out and confess of my own accord. Instead of being hurt or mad or martyred, I guess I’ll hang up the phone now.
Make art instead.
Damn dopamine. Why do I get so much of it?
Damn consciousness, why do I got more than my share?
There’s a reason we have a cap on our thinking and that is because if we really knew the truth …
Sometimes this body, that usually gives me so much pleasure just feels way too small and limiting for a being this size. I am vast and I know it is the damn dopamine talking.
But I’m tired of this containment. I’m tired of this ego building, which as a Libra, as an intellect, as a blessed one, I have done so well, like only the best of humans. Every performer has an ego complex. Good performers are self-defined.
There are no bad performers.
But I am the best. And then this presence I’ve built up around myself, that I can not see outside of nor exist outside of, for yes, I have created myself. This presence doesn’t work and the thing that knows where we’re going tries to self-destruct this container and all the decorations, including words, hanging off of it so that it can get out to its full size.
Oh, damn truth, why do you keep chasing me with your massive paradoxes and your endless insights and why can’t I just be normal, like the rest of the entire world appears to be, just cooking dinner and watching the television and setting the alarm clock instead of this gob damned feeling that I am the chosen one and there is something really important to do that I am missing the entire point of and always will until I finally get out of this fragile, stoopid looking, weak, fake container?
Oh, please bless me with another day of blindness so I can enjoy holding hands once more before I expand out and beyond.
