O.S.'s trig palin: What You Don't Know

This post was written for Open Salon in response to one trig palin had written about me yesterday evening.  I was compelled to set the record straight.  Those who read it on this site will undoubtedly be confused by it.  It was all tongue in cheek and meant to please the OS crowd.  If Open Salon is anything besides a writer's site, it is a social networking site.  I've already made some wonderful connections, and this particular one provided us with a new set of back steps as well as a new friend.
By the way, although I am sure it is obvious, trig palin is the name Steve Barber uses on OS....like I needed to tell you this....

Everyone on Open Salon knows and loves trig palin.

Okay.  Everyone knows trig palin.

For those who do, you understand.  For those who do not, you might want to think twice before revealing your true name and home address.

However, thanks to my impulsive resourcefulness, my husband and I know trig better than it is healthy for any sane human to know the insane.

But we had a problem.  Our back steps were collapsing.  It was a serious problem for me because they are just outside my studio doors and are my only recourse to our small patio and the promise of fresh air.  As fresh as it can get living in midtown K.C. anyway.

They say that desperation makes people do desperate things, and I have proven to be no exception to that theory.  Those warped and unsightly steps were having a major detrimental impact on my sanity as it relates to my ability to get the hell out of this house any day, at any hour, and for any reason and to do so from my own door.  I desperately needed an exit plan.


trig palin's expertise in that area was my ticket.  Of course, it was fairly obvious upon meeting him that the man had a few loose screws (many of which were used in the construction those back steps, no doubt), but he seemed like a good egg and after checking out his website:   Http://deckpro.atspace.com  it was clear the man knew what he was doing.  At least insofar as working with wood was concerned.  Ummm...Scratch that last reference.

 Trig arrived bright and er...um...early at nine o'clock on Saturday morning accompanied by his assistant, Nano, whom it was clear was the brains behind the duo.   For a man who stated outright that he is not used to having to get up in the morning until he was ready to do so, nine o'clock was like dawn to the poor sod; but he is a trooper and after two cups of coffee he got right to work.

Unfortunately, so did the fickle atmospheric conditions so that not long after the compressor was fired up, nail guns plugged in, saws and drills primed, the skies opened up in torrential objection.

This placed trig and myself inside the house for a well over an hour during which time I fed him bagels and coffee and let him peruse my portfolio while he feasted.  (Okay people.  Get your minds out of the gutter.  It was a legitimate portfolio.)

He asked me a lot of questions.  We discussed his music and watched a couple of his living room performances on Youtube.  For those who are not aware, in spite of his ongoing dance with insanity, the man is a wonderful singer/songwriter whose work is truly worth checking out.

But while we were sitting around the dining room table, I noticed that he kept fumbling with his cell phone.  Naturally, I assumed he had probably missed his shrink appointment or his group therapy meeting at Psychotics Anonymous and needed to reschedule, so I ignored it.  How was I to know he was secretly making photographic records of my artwork as well as my very movements?

And while Saturday was a wash, Sunday proved a very productive day for our trig, (he must have made contact with that shrink and picked up his meds.) and he, along with his helper, Nano, (who is hands-down the most adorable dog in the known universe!) worked like the madman that he is all the day long until the job was complete.

Nano palin

While I am now suspect of pretty much everything that oozes from trig palin's mouth, I must admit that he is a superb craftsman and is such a tenacious worker that I had to practically force-feed him a roast beef sandwich in between his nearly maniacal weilding of the nail gun, since he adamantly refused to take a break.  (No doubt the result of both missing the appointment with his shrink as well from guilt at having lied to me about the true reason he agreed so readily to do this job!)

And although our new steps are everything we had every dreamed they would be, having trig here for two days did take its toll on us.    

Bob and Susan before trig palin

Bob and Susan after trig palin

But just look at the end result!!  Was it worth it?  You bettcha!

I would hire this crazy artisan again in a heartbeat.....as soon as I am released from the rest home.

Why I Cannot Write Today

Last night the sky opened up and some celestial jokester let loose with over five inches of water in the overnight hours.

What does this mean to me?  It means the basement feigned the qualities of a swimming pool (which had probably been a life-long dream of the dreary little sub-space) ; a very filthy, hugely unsanitary swimming pool.

Of course, the entire aquatic transformation took place while my consciousness was wading through the deep waters of its own nocturnal delusions with these same wily gods taking hold of my attention in realms I have yet to find a map to.  So naturally, no human intervention was available till morning.  

However, the sump pump was a real champion and came to the rescue like some skinny, unimpressive, iron-based Don Quixote with too much time on it's hands...or components; thus sparing us the need for wet suits and water-wings.

Unfortunately, there remains yards and yards of oozing, black sludge, which the survivor in me keeps assuring my brain is entirely earth-based and not the blackened contaminates of raw sewage.  I choose to believe that story having spent several hours in it already.

I am sharing this because I can't share anything else.  I am too busy playing in the mud.

Yet in dealing with this natural bathospheric disaster, it occurred to me how many hats I wear.  Or, in this case, perhaps, goggles and scuba gear.  It is something we all share:  Flexibility.

So, during this little break that I am taking between doing the laundry and getting online quotes for submersibles, I went through some of my old, old drawings looking for this one.

It refers to that adaptable format of changeability, mask-wearing and the brilliantly distributed aspects of persona that have allowed me to be simultaneously both Susan, the writer/artist AND the sanitation-man's version of Jacques Cousteau.  Coincidentally, it even contains references to rubbish.

The poem is impossible to read in the illustration itself, which is why I learned how to type:

The faces that capture my eye

Pointedly fix on my need

To validate all that is human

Replete with my failures and greed

I court the world as a spy does

Varnished and fixed like the moon

Each gesture becomes a device

Befitting the face I assume

Suspect of everything foreign

I feign a contempt for debris

While secretly harvesting rubbish

To liberate remnants of me

* The drawing on the floor of the nervous smiley face confronting a gun has the caption: Go ahead!  Make me have a nice day!

The sun is supposed to return to us in full by tomorrow.  In the meantime, I'll be bailing.

OVERWRITERS ANONYMOUS

I have a confession to make:  In addition to being a word-aholic, I am an over-writer.  I write until I am so full of the words I craved in the hours before the feast that I cannot consider one syllable more without feeling decadent or risking serious intellectual heartburn.

So, I push myself away from the computer feeling a slight tightness in my head and a mild sense of bloating in my thoughts.

I worry that I probably wrote too much, that I've gained too much mental weight tasting all those rich vowels and salty consonants and wished I had exercised a little more restraint and avoided indulging in that one last sentence; however reduced in content I fooled myself into believing it was.

And then comes the inevitable and I say to myself:

"This is it.  I'm expanding inside like the universe and can't get my thoughts down fast enough to burn off the excess ideas.  I don't want to lie awake again tonight with literary indigestion; ruminating over that verbal concoction I devoured with such heady passion then tossing and turning against the burn of what was left unsaid.  I'm getting fat with ambition and if I go on like this, I'll be as big as a thesaurus in six months.  The expanded edition."

Yet by dawn, I am starving again.

And on it goes.  Day after day after day.

It is getting to the point that I think of little else.

I watch the chocolate sky before a deep summer storm and see poetry.

I listen to the velvety chatter at a party and hear the smooth blend of phonics usher in the delectable topic sentence for another blog.

I hear the buttery curl of words as they unravel in a foreign tongue and despair that I don't understand this extrinsic food.

I digest juicy, real-life stories and ponder name changes and clever obfuscations to broil a safe tale where no one gets burned.

I know I should enroll in Word Watchers, but isn't that what I am already doing?  How could watching them more make me crave them any less?

So, here I sit.  Plump with ripe options for this fruitless indulgence never minding that I often have to feed alone.

Not caring that fewer and fewer are able to stomach my distracted company and tend to recoil from the excessive girth of my ample vocabulary.  The one that I deliberately amassed one word at a time over many years through my gluttonous frenzy.

Lately, I have forced myself to consider cutting down on my intake of thoughts and the subsequent word-laden repasts that I share with such abandon.

No one else should feel obligated to ingest this much confessional food just to please the hostess, and I don't want any psycho-intestinal flare ups to occur in anyone after leaving my prolific table.

Which is why I am considering a fast.

Perhaps indulging only in soup.

As long as it's not Alphabet Soup, I think I'll be fine.

TAGGING TRANSCENDENCE

It occurred to me this morning that I have been an unwitting participant in my own life.  I don't recall ever asking to be here or reveling in joy once it became obvious I wasn't going anywhere else; at least not in the foreseeable future.

Oh, I'm sure my ever-loving soul has a handle on the larger picture, but what good does that do my conscious mind?

Okay, okay....meditation can lift me out of my body and enable me to commune with my spirit guides or my angels or whatever other disembodied entity feels compelled to take the floor; but honestly, am I willing to believe all that?  And what practical application can there be if I do?

I am no newcomer to the whole philosophy of consciousness expansion and transcendentalism, which is really seriously messed up given my present attitude towards much of it.

Since the age of fourteen when I stridently liberated my beleaguered psyche from the nuns and Catholic school, I have heavily perused, plumbed and, in some cases, propagated every belief system and metaphysical arena of thought that I could get my energetic forcefield around, with the only exception being all realms of obviously dark, satanic or just plain disturbing connivances.

 I spent untold hours in my teens and twenties twisting my limbs into yogic postures a white girl with knock knees and a D-cup has absolutely no business undertaking and totally messed up my inner ear chasing after my inner being with all that inner breathing.

And lets not forget the time I tore all the ligaments in the ball of my right foot while hoisting my top-heavy body through some yoga routine that was intended only as a meditative salutation to the sun; not as a preparatory drill prior to handling an assault weapon.  I was supposed to be finding God; instead I spent the afternoon looking for crutches.

Clearly, enlightenment was not to be found through my body.

In high school I was big into yoga and theosophy and the teachings of the ascended masters.  In college I took my turn at Transcendental Meditation.  During the initiation process (which came only after the two-hundred and fifty dollar fee was collected...a fee that has now risen up to $2,500!) I was given a mantra.  My mantra.  My SECRET mantra.

This was the sacred word that would lead me deep into those inner-space bubbles of cosmic thought; that would catapult my essence into the cosmos where I would unify with the Divine.   My mantra.

I was told that everyone was given a mantra unique to them; one whose supernatural beams were so imbedded in the soul that only God could void them.

I was instructed to repeat it to myself at the onset of meditation and strictly forbidden to share it with another living, prana-sucking soul or my vow of allegiance to my guru and ability to convene with the transcendent would be divinely revoked without any refunds.

For years I kept this evanescent blessing to myself; long after I had abandoned that particular avenue towards enlightenment.  I knew the power had gone out, or perhaps, it had never been fully plugged in;  but for whatever reason, I respected the directive of silence.

 At least until I began to understand that the only way I was going to charge my soul would be with a battery of illumination that came strictly from my heart and by freeing myself from the shackles of theosophical and dogmatic restriction wherein each doctrine and practice claim nirvana was best reached by swallowing their particular manna.

Eventually, I abandoned the notion that I could not become a more enlightened, holier person unless I became a rigid adherent of a specific belief system or placed my incomplete understanding in the Lotus-positioned lap of a highly-paid guru; someone already claiming to have tagged celestial base and is now home free.

Perhaps the first indication I had that there were more areas of separation than there were epiphanies of oneness came at the realization of one single deficit that every religion, belief system and formal, spiritual convention had in common:  The Us and Them factor.

From my early years of Catholicism to my years donning the theosophical garb of everything from Transcendentalism to Tarot cards, I found the singular thread of self-righteousness weaving a heavy garment of insolation throughout all of them.

Obviously, there were some outstanding and holy individuals within all of these churches and organizations who clearly understood the concept of humility and love and proved to be the exceptions.

 However, not in numbers enough to convince me that one way excelled over another.  In fact, I'll go out on a limb here and say that I witnessed far more examples of feint sacrosanctity within these hallowed halls of meditative plundering than ever I did at the mall or the pizza shop.

Once I removed myself from the metaphysical shackles of those esoteric rituals that seemed so foreign and out of sync with the daily confrontation of cosmopolitan artifice, I was able to finally understand unity in it's fullest sense.

 Suddenly, there was NO difference between me and them.  I had finally come within reach of grasping the blessed truth that I was, indeed, ONE with the heaving masses of pedestrian thinkers just trying to cope with whatever awaited them at the next sunrise.

I smiled with them, cried with them and reached deep into my reserve pockets of compassion to know them as I solemnly rejoiced at the fact that I AM them!

I am not begrudging anyone else the right to seek clarity by a specific path that resonates with them.  I am not implying that there is not great good in all forms and fashion of worship or that ritual is not a valuable technique in which broader doors of thought and understanding can be nudged open.  I am not even suggesting that everything, once it is confined within a regimented platform, is all smoke and mirrors.

Where God is sought, there He will be found.  He has no favorites.

However, for me, I find it best to canvass the world for greatness armed with humility and acceptance; particularly an acceptance of the fact that I am just a poor schlep like everyone else and one who claims no special edge, advantage or understanding of the game but only an unbreakable resolve and a willingness to try.

And so, when I at last spoke out and questioned others about my sacred and secret mantra, I was not at all surprised to discover that nearly everyone I asked had the same one that was given to me.  Upon further inquiry, I found that everyone of a particular age group at the time of initiation is given the same one!  At eighteen years old, my mantra was AING.

The way it unrolled for me mentally was A-ing.   'A' followed by ing, like the suffix forming verbs from nouns.  In retrospect it would appear that even then in my sincere but fickle quest for God and goodliness I was thinking like a writer.

I do find it uplifting and centering to attend mass on Sundays, and there was a period of years when I attended every morning.  There is something to be said for the tactile ignition of clean scented sanctity as it falls to earth in the devout gestures of sacred rituals, and I won't deny that transcendence is more easily glimpsed from an inviolable pew than from a gum-laden bench at a bus stop.

But easier is not necessarily better, nor is the experience always genuine.

I think that by graciously straddling despair as we steadfastly negotiate our daily truce with disappointment and struggle, we stand to yield far more redemptive graces and everlasting wisdom than could be gained from any mantra, mudra, meditation or surface investment in sanctified ritual.

So, for now, I'd rather seek God by mixing it up in the streets.


 Aight?

Tagging transcendence in the masses, yo......  Se la vie,  Aing.