gates out of my hell

This guy is my personal hero. We all should think about community in such a way.

great lakes, great escapes

Items from this weekend:

1) I drove 1400 miles by myself. 1408 miles, really. Part of it through a monsoon of sorts. The best part: post-storm, in the mountains of Pennsylvania, at dusk with a million fireflies.
2) Despite a broken middle E (busted, I believe, in the trunk when I had to brake suddenly due to the person in front of me – in heavy traffic – slamming on THEIR brakes for what appeared to be No Good Reason), I played my best. I’ve never been joined with my piano in that way before. People seemed to like it? The important thing is that I played my best, really.
3) People seen on the road:
a. Two old women in muu-muus wandering aimlessly around the parking lot of a rest stop;
b. The man from last year’s Dirtfarm Fourth of July party flyer come to life;
c. Hagerstown thug with tricked-out Pontiac Firebird; ‘SHADEY’ (misspelling intact) across the back windshield in Olde English, ‘MONEY OVER BITCHES’ in smaller Olde English in both windows;
d. Man who grabbed my arm and insisted on looking at my tattoo in a gas station; he then showed me his (“I WAS DRUNK AND I JUST GOT MY NEW TAT GUN!”) – it was an eagle (facing backwards) with a “USA” banner and big blue flames. “The eagle is watching my back,” he said. He tried to take a picture of me but I somehow evaded this happening.
e. Lost Daniel Clowes character with black eye leaning against truck in rest stop parking lot smoking sullenly and staring
4) I don’t think I’ve ever been in the same room with all of my closest girlfriends at one time, and it was somewhat magical;
5) Somewhere between October 2005 and today I grew apart from the context of my DC/Baltimore life, and though I still love my friends there as much as I ever did, we have diverged in some day-to-day way;
6) Emotionally exhausting, but worth it.

you can’t hurt me no more

I got to see Nurse With Wound play their first show in 23 years and though they only played for 45 minutes it was the entire Salt Marie Celeste set and it was entirely worth it. I was entirely sober and it was still beautiful.

D (happy birthday) is right about San Francisco. It moves differently from other cities. It is less interested in hiding its seedy underbelly. Where other American cities degenerate quickly (Levi-Strauss was right) into greyness and decay, San Francisco fades quietly to pink, green, cream. It is a place I would like to live someday. It feels entirely different.

Speaking of Levi-Strauss and cities, he wrote in 1955 regarding Washington DC: "… with the possible exception of Washington, D.C., which is neither wild nor domesticated, but is dying of boredom and captivity in the cage of radiating avenues in which L'Enfant enclosed it (Tristes Tropiques, p. 97)." Apparently we were just playing in the ruins.

I have been thinking a lot lately about the parameters of love: love without attachment, love without expectation. Raoul Vaneigem (I am rereading) writes: "Love in its turn swells the illusion of unity. Most of the time it founders and is aborted in triviality. Its songs are crippled by the fear of always returning to the same single note: the icy fear, whether there are two of us or ten, of finishing up alone as before. What drives us to despair is not the immensity of our unsatisfied desires, but the moment when our newborn passion discovers its own emptiness. My insatiable desire to fall in love with so many pretty girls is born in anguish and the fear of loving: we are so afraid of never escaping from meetings with objects. The dawn when lovers leave each other's arms is the same dawn that breaks on the execution of revolutionaries without a revolution. Isolation a deux cannot overpower the general isolation. Pleasure is broken off prematurely and lovers find themselves naked in the world, their actions suddenly ridiculous and pointless. No love is possible in an unhappy world. Love's boat breaks up on the reefs of the everyday. … Lovers should love their pleasure with more consequence and more poetry. (The Revolution of Everyday Life, p. 41)."
And Chandrakirti says:

First we conceive the "I" and grasp onto it.
Then we conceive the "mine" and cling to the material world.
Like water trapped on a waterwheel, we spin in circles, powerless.
I praise the compassion that embraces all beings.