THIS Rhett Butler Will Never Die

Relatively, I am not sad these days. It seems that as I keep up a regular practice of meditation - that is meditating for at least 15 minutes, once a day - I am able to refresh my spirit enough to cast off the creeping shadows of sadness and depression that approach my consciousness every day. There are things happening in and around about my life that could lead to a pretty strong episode of depression but the joy that clearing my energy via meditation is relatively saving my life right now. Fuuny, but I thought that I'd spend my time writing this blog energy talking about the things that are not going right that could bring on a depressive episode - but I didn't. I jumped right to the good part of the story and talked about what is working. I'm kinda proud of myself for doing that. And happy that this happened. All the same, just for the sake of clarity and record, I do want to talk about these things because they are not going to go away on their own, not very easily a...

This is my annual, typical, probably getting boring blog entry about my relationship with my dad. Dad's birthday was yesterday (October 5, 1932). He was born in Springfield, Ohio and that is where he is buried too. He died on September 7, 1969 in San Leandro, California). 36 years, 11 months and 2 days of living in this world was all the time he was allotted to figure things out with. His last couple of years, he became very quiet. Well, he was a pretty quiet man all the time that I knew him - he was not a big thinker or talker (the total flip side of how my step-father was - he was a huge talker and very extroverted. probably the greatest influence by an extrovert I ever experienced was from him.) no, my dad was very introverted. and where I was going with that thought was that the last couple of years of his life he was more quiet than usual - and I think that was because of the physical pain he must have been in. He died from lung cancer. 75% of his lungs were eaten up by the ca...

Continuing on from what I was talking about in my last posting, I've come to realize that I've just experienced what I call, an existential realization that doing anything at all with your time in life is futile. How I recognized this happening was because it happened to me once before. 20 years ago. I was at UCSC and discovered a new manner of creative self-expression which I felt could lead to ultimate discoveries of self-awareness.  That was when I was taking playwrighting classes and my mind was open to so many avenues of creativity. I felt that becoming a playwright was the grandest calling I had ever experienced. I began to work on ideas for several plays all at once. My mind was in constant motion and truth be told, I was the most manic I had ever been in my life. After about two weeks of this high anxiety and very little sleep, I had an epiphany of thought. In the flash of a second, I realized that no matter how different my work could be, compared to any other playwrit...

So I've been taking this online novel writing course with one of my most favorite, living authors (Francesca Lia Block) for the past 5 weeks. She invited writers that had existing manuscripts to come and learn under her guidance how to get our stories written in a fashion that could help us sell them (for publication). It took me awhile to figure something out about what her methods and goals were, but now that I've figured this out (for my own sake at least) I feel torn about whether I want to learn how to write this way or not. I wouldn't call her method or goals formulaic, but in a way, that's how they are starting to seem to me. Here's what I'm starting to think is what's going on. Popular fiction has "a feel" to it. There are standard elements of storytelling involved that hook readers that work to keep them transfixed while reading a novel. The reader wants to be drawn into a mysterious series of events that contain tension and unexpected d...

This dream memory is from yesterday, so I do not have crystal clear memory of everything I saw and experienced, but I do remember the essence of what was shown to me. This is what I need to record and share. I was in a world of another dimension. It was a dimension similar to this earthly one; people looked like people, buildings and cities etc looked as they do here. The thing that it took me awhile to realize was that the matter of which everything was built from was "less dense" than the material density of our world. Things were not transparent, but they were "softer". The closest idea I can give you of what matter looked like was that it was malleable like play-dough but it looked like the dense styrofoam-like stuff they make floatable toys for swimming pools with. What I started to see happen was that people were walking around and with just their hands, they could make this stuff manifest out of the air and shape it into whatever they wanted it to be. (Li...

This was the first time that I've ever experienced this type of healing meditation. I've listened to recordings of these bowls on CD for years, but have never felt the effects on my body like I did tonight. I sat in the front row as close to the bowls as I could be. I sat with as straight a back as I was able to for as long as I could. I did not practice deep breathing, mainly because that's something that I'm just not doing right now. One thing I think that's missing from this guys technique (haha I'm a critic right off the bat) is that he doesn't make it a guided meditation, telling us which chakras are being affected by the different toned bowls... I'd just like to be able to do my own visualizations of working with corresponding chakras while a certain bowl is working on that chakra. In the end result, I don't think that for now that this is necessary. Maybe in the future, I'll find someone that does do that. I'm just mentioning this ...

Not sure why I slept so well last night and even woke up early this morning from a very curious dream. So here we go... I was sitting in a very full diner/cafe with my chromebook, very busily writing away (hopefully working on my novel!). And I just happened to look up and saw Scarlett walking into the cafe. I really don't know if she did not see me, or if she simply chose to ignore me and not sit with me. Which would have been a simple progression of her current method of treating me - of ignoring me. But I really do not think that she knew I was there. Practically every single seat in the place was taken. I don't know how she even got a seat at all but I saw her sit at three different tables, the last one was next to a table where about 5 women were sitting and she was her typical jubilant self and asked them all how they were doing. After seeing her move around so much and still not seeing me, I sighed in desperation and decided to speak to the person sitting nearest to m...