He sees you when you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake

It's Sunday and my mini vacation draws to a close. That's alright, it'll be another short week. Christmas has come and gone, a blur of activity that winked in and out of existence like a dimly recalled dream. Tomorrow it's back to work and other realities of life. I'll enjoy today as much as I can.

Christmas. The first part was spent at my grandmother's house with cousins and sundry. Traditionally, her house is the last destination of the day, but it was reversed this year mostly to accommodate my grandmother's waning energy, but also to enable everyone to spend time with immediate family and not have to rush. My mother had the idea, and it made sense for everyone.

The TV I got my mom wasn't a hit and caused a bit of drama. I had been looking forward to seeing her expression when she opened it; I wasn't expecting her to be bummed out, which, as it happened, she was. She said she was still happy with her old TV, which was a shock to me because she had expressed to me on more than one occasion that when she had the funds available, she was going to get a new one. Her TV was old, bulky, and losing it's picture quality among other things. Still happy with it? WTF!

Anyway, she said she was grateful for what I'd done and that she really liked the TV and wanted to keep it. There were indications as I was setting it up that she felt otherwise, but I held out hope that once it was operational, she'd feel better. She did, eventually, but it was rough going for a bit.

My mom felt lousy about appearing ungrateful. " I guess I'm not good with change", she confessed to me numerous times. She even wrote me a lengthy apology email. It all worked out. We had a good discussion and everything is fine.

For my part, I got a new iPad mini to replace my damaged one. I also got some much needed bedding. My bosses got us Apple TV, which prompted me to get my own new TV (same one I got my mom) with some of the bonus money they gave me. Turns out, my old bear of a TV wasn't compatible with Apple TV. So I took advantage of a sale the day after Christmas and, voila, I'm a little more modern.  Apple TV, by the way, rocks. Who needs cable? Not me, son! Haven't had it in years and years and now I'm even less inclined to get it.

So Christmas was fine. Spira and Missy D came to my mom's and we ate Chinese food and talked and stuff. A good day. I was happy to have the next several days off with a house all to my self. I practiced a bunch of yoga, sometimes twice a day, to combat all the sweets and other unhealthy food I'd been eating.

Yesterday, I saw the final Hobbit installment with Ali and Spira at the new AMC Imax theater in Somerville. Great effin' movie! Afterward, we got some coffee at a French bakery and ate some North End pizza from a little shop next door. Nice little area over there in Assembly Square. They've got Lego Land, the movie theater, and a ton of outlet stores. Who needs Kittery?

Alright, stuff to do. Last night I rented Dawn of The Planet of The Apes and it was very good. Today, I might watch another movie, but I'd like to do some writing and reading. Maybe meditate. We'll see.

Bye.

I feel good in a special way, I'm in love and it's a sunny day

Christmas approaches and the days leading up to it have been challenging to say the least, but not so terrible, either. Still, I'm hoping the next several days are laden with comfort and holiday cheer. Not such a tall order, but given the impermanent nature of every aspect of life, I'm not counting on it.

I don't say that with bitterness, although there are whispers of it there to be sure. It's okay, I'm aware of it and keep it in check. Our society is built around the notion that we can craft a life of security, of things staying the same. It's like trying to subdue an ocean wave with a net, but yet we continue on in the erroneous belief that it's possible.

I've been grappling a lot with the reality of impermanence lately. My spiritual practice has helped provide balance and insight. Instead trying to capture the wave, I'm focusing more on riding it. My success rate has been uneven, but fuck it, I keep trying.

I don't really want to get into what challenges have come my way but they haven't been easy. There have been times lately when I've wondered if I'll even make it to Christmas. I don't mean to be dramatic here, despite appearances. It's just that things have been happening that have been coming out of left field, as they do, at such a rate that the message is clear: Nothing stays the same, nothing lasts.

With that in mind, my aim has been to not dwell on the negatives in favor of the positives. For example, yesterday my roommates and I cleaned the house. We started in the morning and didn't finish until around six o'clock. Earlier in the week, I had reached out to Fred & Evangeline about doing some cleaning over the weekend. I wasn't sure what to expect, but they both were on board. So yesterday we went to town on the place, with the help of Fred's girlfriend, Emily, and made it look better than it has in years. We threw a lot of stuff out, did some redecorating....it felt good getting so much done. And it felt even better knowing I could have still been mildly depressed and somewhat resentful of the filthy state of our apartment if it wasn't for the action I took to initiate the change.

It was a long, productive day. At the end of it, I was looking forward to watching a movie, playing music, relaxing. I went to my room and started to make my bed. My iPad, unbeknownst to me, was under one of the blankets. When started pulling them off the bed, the iPad fell on the floor. When I picked it up, I saw that it had a long hairline scratch down the middle. Shitty, but barely perceptible. Then I saw that the there was a dent right where the volume control is. More shitty. Then I realized that it had dented itself into the mute position and wouldn't budge. Fuck! Oh, and then I read online about how to pull the dent out - someone had the exact same thing happen to their iPad - and basically I made it worse. The end result: a small patch of spiderweb fractured glass around the dent.

I use my iPad a lot, so this sucked. No more Garage Band, no more music, no more Netflix (can't watch on my PC for very long before my computer crashes), no more podcasts. I almost made it a full year with it. My mom had surprised me last Christmas with it; it was a great gift.

The thought struck me, as it sometimes and thankfully does in the early stages of something like this, that what would happen if instead of being bummed out and angry at the world for fucking around with me, I made the conscious decision to not heap any more shitty-ness onto an already shitty event? Would it even be possible to dispense with all of that? Maybe?

Well, not maybe, but yes. We can't control the events of life but we can decide how we're going to react. And the best time to decide is in the early stages when worry and stress and everything else that accompanies the bad things that happen haven't grown sturdy as oaks. So, I gave it a shot but it wasn't easy. It wasn't so hard, either. I just had to keep on top of the thoughts that crept up about how crummy this loss was.

I reminded myself that this one unfortunate event was threatening to overshadow the accomplishment of a thoroughly cleaned place. In times of strife, all of things that have gone right tend to get stamped out in our minds, like the never happened. I went downstairs and practiced yoga for a while. I had some energy to burn, despite having spent hours and hours cleaning. Throughout my session, thoughts about my iPad swam into view, but they didn't stick for very long.

Oh, you do what you can do. Everyone alive on this planet is subject to impermanence, to the rising and falling, the giving and taking. None of us are immune. I try to remember that when thoughts that the Universe has a vendetta against me leak out. I'll see about getting the iPad fixed or getting another one. May take a while, either way, to happen, but who knows? Maybe St. Nick has something up his sleeve.

Peace.

We drank champagne and danced all night under electric candlelight

I'm pretty discerning when it comes to shopping. Not always, there are the occasional impulse buys, but over the years I've honed my skills through the admixture of  patience, intuition, studied analysis, and possibly even divine grace. I've come away with some cool finds and great deals. I'm speaking mostly to online shopping and the only reason I'm bringing this up is because I just purchased from Amazon Stephen King's Cujo in Kindle format and an mp3 of Phill Niblock's Works For Hurdy Gurdy and Voice for under ten smackers.

I've been contemplating reading Cujo for a few weeks now. It's one of his books I've avoided mostly because of an association I've maintained between the book and the movie, as if they one in the same. It's rare that I make unfair assumptions like that, but I did. Anyway, I read a ton of reviews for the book and most of them were favorable. And, hey, I'd pay more than that for a six pack of beer or a matinee showing of The Hunger Games: Part Whatever.

This Niblock album is what I've been hoping to find for a while now. It's three tracks are micro-tonal drones and the combination of hurdy gurdy and voice sounds beautiful. The voice and hurdy gurdy often sound so much alike it's to distinguish between the two. For those reasons and the drone-like quality of the compositions, it's been a powerful talisman in both my yoga and meditation practices. And I like having it on when I'm reading or writing. Cool that I came upon this piece of music that fit the desired specifications I'd been looking for but was having trouble articulating in search engines.

Still on the mend. This cold has decided to stick around for a bit. I'm going to go take it easy. I'll read, perhaps watch a movie (The Wolf of Wall Street is streaming on Netflix). We'll see.

Take care, loves.

Shave and a haircut, two bits

Had an absorbing and intuitive yoga session after work this evening and I feel centered and rubbery and hale. This life throws a lot at you and much of it sticks. Yoga revitalizes in multitudinous ways; it is one of the several reasons it's an integral part of my life; so integral that I'm often surprised, even though I've been an avid student of the craft for years, how deeply it matters to me. I still harbor slightly the fear that if I take more than two days off, I run the serious risk of parting ways with yoga.

That is just a mind-generated fear. Spira says I'm a yogini and I think she means it. I tend to agree with her. There is no longer Kevin and yoga. It has become, with the slow grace of time, Kevin=yoga. I'm so thankful it's a part of me, that it's something abiding, a powerful ally. Because, man, I don't need to tell you that life isn't always a lazy Sunday in the meadow. We need all the allies we can get.


So, real quick, here's what you should be watching: Black Mirror. A brief description of the show would be that it's a modern twist on The Twilight Zone. I'm only two episodes in, so whether that is a true assessment I couldn't say. I can say that it's very well done and, based on the two episodes I've seen, it's a stark look at the dark, dehumanizing avenues modern technology take us down.

Listening to a lot of Robert Wyatt these days. Love that man.

Finished reading King's 11/22/63. I enjoyed it. The ending got me misty. King hit the right beat, really nailed it. He's not really known for his endings. I don't know, endings are tough; you can't please everyone. A lot of people disliked the ending of The Dark Tower, but I thought it was the exact right way to end the story. But what do I know?

Now I'm reading Michael Talbot's The Delicate Dependency. It's taken me a long time to get to this book. I don't tend to read books about vampires, but this one is considered the high water mark of the genre and I loved Talbot's The Holographic Universe and reading about his friendship with Whitley Strieber. I'm about a quarter of the way in. So far, so good.

Been sick this week. Not too bad, a mere head cold that extended it's reign to my chest. Still, I'd rather not have been afflicted.

Yesterday was the two year anniversary of my father's passing. It's hard to believe it's been that long. I miss him a lot.

Well, it's time to wrap this up. I have matters to attend to.

And Billy has been plotting; I need to be vigilant.

I fuck the music, I make it cum, I fuck the music with my serpent tongue

Last week started off with a bang, or more aptly put, a loss. On my way out the door Monday morning, I discovered my wallet wasn't in my bag. Or my room. Or my house. Or anywhere else. I had used it the day before when I had walked over to Yoshi's for some sushi. Gone.

I went to work but not before retracing my steps back to Yoshi's, scanning the ground for my wallet to no avail. My guess was that if it wasn't still at Yoshi's, where I intended to call when they opened a couple of hours later, my wallet had probably fallen out of my jacket pocket as I cut through the park on my way home. I came up dry.

I went to work and called Yoshi's around eleven. They didn't have my wallet. I left work and went home to conduct a thorough search of my house. If the wallet wasn't to be found, I needed to take swift action to cancel cards, etc. Again, I came up dry.

It was a long day. I took care of everything I could. Fortunately, I only had a few dollars cash in my wallet. What wasn't so fortunate was the fact that I had just placed two checks, one from the IRS and one from Jana, who I dog-sat for, in it before it became lost. I hadn't endorsed them, but was still concerned someone might successfully cash them.

It took a few days for Jana to put a stop on the check. About two hours after she informed me via text that she'd done it, I got a text from Evangeline, who informed me that she found my wallet on our front porch. Someone must have returned it. We don't use our porch in the winter, so it was a good thing she spotted it while looking for a package she was hoping UPS had dropped off. Despite having taken measures to replace virtually everything in it, it was nice having the wallet returned with everything in it. A true act of kindness it was.

Throughout the ordeal, I was able to put my Buddhist practice into use by being mindful and not getting caught up in thoughts of despair and cynicism. It wasn't easy, but it was educational. I learned the value of skillful thought, of dealing with only the tangible aspects of my situation. And, again, it was nice, a blessing really, being on the receiving end of a kind act.
--

Last night was Tracy and Ray's annual Pub Quiz. As usual it was a fun time. These days, it's not an easy feat getting a lot of our friends together in one place; this event makes it happen every year. Not everyone can make it, but the turnout is always good. The quiz was fun and raucous as it usually is. Ray told me he had begun preparing for it around Thanksgiving. I think he started earlier than that, like late summer. My team came in second place. I took home some coffee and chocolate as a prize. Not bad. I ate the chocolate already, in case you're wondering. I'll bring the coffee to The Ultimate Perk tomorrow and see if someone there, hopefully Mary, will grind the beans for me. I'll pledge to do her chores for a month if she does.

I don't know how it could ever happen, but rather than a few hours in a night, I'd like to spend  a weekend with the folks I saw last night (and the ones who weren't able to make it). I think that would be a blast. But, hey, I'm not complaining; the few hours were well worth it.
 --
 What else? Well, I've been listening a lot of Death Grips and Robert Wyatt. Strange bedfellows I suppose, but what can I say, I have divergent tastes. I've been continuing with my Wheel of Time re-read, something I put on hold for the last several months. I'm on The Fires of Heaven and only have about a thousand pages to go. By the time I get to the books Brandon Sanderson wrote to conclude the series after Jordan passed away, I may be in my sixties. We'll see.

I'm thinking if life would toss me a bone in the relationship department, well that would be alright with me. It's time.

More tattoos on the horizon? Yes, just a matter of when. It's possible I may get one or two as a Christmas present to myself. Not sure, though, because there are other things I could use. Like a new TV. After buying one for my mother, I realized mine could stand to be replaced. I don't watch it that often, but it would be nice to have a new one to watch movies on . We'll see.

Alright, readers, time to go. Man, I miss Missy D. It's only been a week since I last saw her, but she's my girl and I miss her. Don't tell Spira, but it's Missy D. I want to see the most whenever I visit. Actually, Spira knows this. Ha!

Anyway, peace, and don't forget to eat your vegetables and scrub behind your ears and all that good stuff.