Ashley Guindon, a police officer working her very first shift, was shot and killed today by a loser asshole.
Ashley was 28 years old.
Sunday, February 28, 2016
Wanna Know What I Hate?
I am an emotional man.
I wear my emotions on my sleeve and on my pants ( I did not say "in my pants") and on my face and in my writing - my emotions see more of the light of day than my soul or my tortured personality or my truth.
Goddamn advertisers know exactly what they are doing and this pisses me off. They compromise my intelligence by superceding my defense mechanisms.
Even as time passes me by, many commercials are still aimed at my generation. I can be seduced by beautiful women hawking products that I think I need or want, but in my heart of hearts I know the message is not directed towards me.
I can tell by the women, I can tell by the product, I can tell by the music.
Yeah, the music.
Brief aside: I have been a fan of Playboy for most of my life. You can read whatever you want to into that and it doesn't really matter to me - I don't give a damn about your opinion. I have always been a fan of the culture of Playboy - the lifestyle the magazine represented.
It was always a bonus to look at these gorgeous women, but you get to a point in your life - very quickly - where you are older than they are. And you keep getting older while their age remains the same.
You can appreciate the beauty, but if you have half a brain in your head you understand that their reality can never be your reality.
I feel the same about the women I see in ads - if they are too young and too beautiful, they are not trying to sell me a goddamn thing.
However, the music is more important.
If they are playing music that I grew up with, music that I love - they are trying to connect with me.
And I get sucked in.
I hear a song that I love, a song that I can connect with and - kaboom - I am there. My brain connects with my past, my emotions respond appropriately and I am lost.
Until reality sets in, I get to the end of the commercial and it is some goddamn monolith of a company trying to trick me into understanding how badly I need to spend my money on their product.
I hate that moment.
In 1968, Jim Morrison blew a fucking fuse when his band mates sold "Light My Fire" to Buick for $75,000 for a commercial selling the Buick Opel. Jim was out of the country at the time and had no input into the decision.
He contacted GM and told them that if they ran the commercial he would sue them and destroy an Opel in public with a sledgehammer.
As far as I know the commercial never ran.
The first time I heard a Beatles song in a commercial I was stunned. It seemed like a horrific betrayal.
However, I understand Pete Townshend's opinion on the subject when he was criticized for selling his music for commercials and TV shows. He said: "They are my fucking songs, I wrote them and I will do whatever I want with them."
Brief aside: I have not done the research but I firmly believe that "Eminence Front" by Pete Townshend is the most frequently used song in commercial TV.
Anyway......................I have a difficult time reconciling my emotional connection with the music I love with commercial whoring and artists' right to make money.
I want my relationship to the music I love to remain pure.
I wear my emotions on my sleeve and on my pants ( I did not say "in my pants") and on my face and in my writing - my emotions see more of the light of day than my soul or my tortured personality or my truth.
Goddamn advertisers know exactly what they are doing and this pisses me off. They compromise my intelligence by superceding my defense mechanisms.
Even as time passes me by, many commercials are still aimed at my generation. I can be seduced by beautiful women hawking products that I think I need or want, but in my heart of hearts I know the message is not directed towards me.
I can tell by the women, I can tell by the product, I can tell by the music.
Yeah, the music.
Brief aside: I have been a fan of Playboy for most of my life. You can read whatever you want to into that and it doesn't really matter to me - I don't give a damn about your opinion. I have always been a fan of the culture of Playboy - the lifestyle the magazine represented.
It was always a bonus to look at these gorgeous women, but you get to a point in your life - very quickly - where you are older than they are. And you keep getting older while their age remains the same.
You can appreciate the beauty, but if you have half a brain in your head you understand that their reality can never be your reality.
I feel the same about the women I see in ads - if they are too young and too beautiful, they are not trying to sell me a goddamn thing.
However, the music is more important.
If they are playing music that I grew up with, music that I love - they are trying to connect with me.
And I get sucked in.
I hear a song that I love, a song that I can connect with and - kaboom - I am there. My brain connects with my past, my emotions respond appropriately and I am lost.
Until reality sets in, I get to the end of the commercial and it is some goddamn monolith of a company trying to trick me into understanding how badly I need to spend my money on their product.
I hate that moment.
In 1968, Jim Morrison blew a fucking fuse when his band mates sold "Light My Fire" to Buick for $75,000 for a commercial selling the Buick Opel. Jim was out of the country at the time and had no input into the decision.
He contacted GM and told them that if they ran the commercial he would sue them and destroy an Opel in public with a sledgehammer.
As far as I know the commercial never ran.
The first time I heard a Beatles song in a commercial I was stunned. It seemed like a horrific betrayal.
However, I understand Pete Townshend's opinion on the subject when he was criticized for selling his music for commercials and TV shows. He said: "They are my fucking songs, I wrote them and I will do whatever I want with them."
Brief aside: I have not done the research but I firmly believe that "Eminence Front" by Pete Townshend is the most frequently used song in commercial TV.
Anyway......................I have a difficult time reconciling my emotional connection with the music I love with commercial whoring and artists' right to make money.
I want my relationship to the music I love to remain pure.
Saturday, February 27, 2016
If
If you truly love your cats, nothing can be accomplished.
You have been reading since eight a.m. You plan on getting up at 11:00 to get your day moving, to get things done, to create positive movement..
One of your cats jumps into your lap at 10:30 and, after circling around for five minutes, curls up and goes to sleep.
11:00 comes and goes; you cannot disturb this precious animal that is sleeping so peacefully and so trustfully in your lap.
You read until 12:30 and now your day is shot. All ambition is gone.
You cannot get yourself to exercise, you cannot get yourself to look online at job listings, you cannot get yourself to remove all the superfluous clothes out of your armoire in your quest for organization.
Yet somehow, even as you feel like a sloth, a loser and an uninspired fool, you know in your soul that those two hours actually extended your lifespan.
You know, intuitively, they were worth it.
You have been reading since eight a.m. You plan on getting up at 11:00 to get your day moving, to get things done, to create positive movement..
One of your cats jumps into your lap at 10:30 and, after circling around for five minutes, curls up and goes to sleep.
11:00 comes and goes; you cannot disturb this precious animal that is sleeping so peacefully and so trustfully in your lap.
You read until 12:30 and now your day is shot. All ambition is gone.
You cannot get yourself to exercise, you cannot get yourself to look online at job listings, you cannot get yourself to remove all the superfluous clothes out of your armoire in your quest for organization.
Yet somehow, even as you feel like a sloth, a loser and an uninspired fool, you know in your soul that those two hours actually extended your lifespan.
You know, intuitively, they were worth it.
Friday, February 26, 2016
60
Today is my brother's birthday.
He is 61.
I called him and inevitably the conversation drifted into this aging thing.
It sneaks up on you and suddenly becomes a concern, even though it has taken many decades to get you there.
We agreed that 60 seems to be the line of demarcation.
Ed said that 30 didn't bother him and 50 didn't bother him, but 60 did.
I took a more stressful path towards getting there - at 30 I started thinking about dying. At 48, believe it or not, I freaked out because 50 was looming in my future.
50 didn't overwhelm me but the fact that the 10 years between 50 and 60 went by in a heartbeat, did.
At 50 you can kid yourself that you are still youngish. Sixty just sounds older, especially knowing that when the next 10 years fly by you will be 70.
Heavy duty, baby.
We are both young at heart; most people do not guess us to be as old as we are. That is a good thing and it means nothing.
What matters is what is in your head. And your head knows that the years you have left to you are seriously numbered and frighteningly small in quantity compared to the years you have lived.
There is no getting around it no matter how healthy you are or how positive your attitude.
The cliche is true - life moves at faster miles an hour and the older you get the faster it moves.
You can dig your heels in and all you get is bloody heels.
It is such a strange phenomena; even though it takes 60 years to get to sixty, once you are there it feels like 10 seconds. And your mind just cannot grasp the reality of where you are in life.
Ed and I are lucky. Neither of us has had a major health concern to date.
But we are walking through the mine field. I feel like bombs are dropping all around me and somehow, someway, I have not been touched.
So many friends have had major health problems; so many relatives have died.
You gotta keep punching. You gotta re-wire your mind or learn to ignore it.
Worry and anxiety are a waste of time. It would be a crime against humanity to sacrifice your remaining years to fear of mortality.
Ed is 61. I am 62.
We got a lot to offer and a lot to accomplish.
No sense in giving up now.
He is 61.
I called him and inevitably the conversation drifted into this aging thing.
It sneaks up on you and suddenly becomes a concern, even though it has taken many decades to get you there.
We agreed that 60 seems to be the line of demarcation.
Ed said that 30 didn't bother him and 50 didn't bother him, but 60 did.
I took a more stressful path towards getting there - at 30 I started thinking about dying. At 48, believe it or not, I freaked out because 50 was looming in my future.
50 didn't overwhelm me but the fact that the 10 years between 50 and 60 went by in a heartbeat, did.
At 50 you can kid yourself that you are still youngish. Sixty just sounds older, especially knowing that when the next 10 years fly by you will be 70.
Heavy duty, baby.
We are both young at heart; most people do not guess us to be as old as we are. That is a good thing and it means nothing.
What matters is what is in your head. And your head knows that the years you have left to you are seriously numbered and frighteningly small in quantity compared to the years you have lived.
There is no getting around it no matter how healthy you are or how positive your attitude.
The cliche is true - life moves at faster miles an hour and the older you get the faster it moves.
You can dig your heels in and all you get is bloody heels.
It is such a strange phenomena; even though it takes 60 years to get to sixty, once you are there it feels like 10 seconds. And your mind just cannot grasp the reality of where you are in life.
Ed and I are lucky. Neither of us has had a major health concern to date.
But we are walking through the mine field. I feel like bombs are dropping all around me and somehow, someway, I have not been touched.
So many friends have had major health problems; so many relatives have died.
You gotta keep punching. You gotta re-wire your mind or learn to ignore it.
Worry and anxiety are a waste of time. It would be a crime against humanity to sacrifice your remaining years to fear of mortality.
Ed is 61. I am 62.
We got a lot to offer and a lot to accomplish.
No sense in giving up now.
Thursday, February 25, 2016
No Dream Indeed
Inspiring night on Tuesday night.
Popped down to the state of Massachusetts to spend some time with my brother.
He associates with a higher caliber crowd than I do.
My friends are typically morons, psychopaths, mental defectives, drug dealers, thieves and alcoholics.
My brother hangs with the members of Symphony Pro Musica out of Hudson, MA. This is a group of musicians who perform classical music out of the sheer passion for it and the joy of expressing themselves through their instruments.
These people are exceptionally talented and perform at a very high level. This ain't The Ramones in the garage.
They had a dinner/fund raiser type thing on Tuesday night which I attended with my brother Ed.
The restaurant was excellent and the company was even better. We shared a booth, intermittently, with four other people, all of whom play in the orchestra. (My brother plays with them as well.)
It felt so goddamn good for me to spend time with people of this caliber and with people who are a cut above, intellectually.
The conversation was interesting, there was laughter, there was some down to earth.
You get stuck in a rut in life, associating with the same people in the same way ad infinitum. This keeps you stagnant as a human; no room or opportunity for growth. No room to even consider that maybe you are hanging with the wrong crowd.
When you get around a whole different set of people and when your reaction is "Holy shit I feel so alive" that, perhaps, is a sign that you are living the wrong life.
I was fascinated by the fact that I was in the company of people who are doing exactly what they love in life. Performing in an excellent orchestra and, for many of them, teaching music during the day.
What a foreign concept.
Imagine spending every day doing what you love all day. As opposed to dragging through every day with your head down and your spirit tortured, only to stagger home to the apathy-enabling comfort of a cushy recliner and a bottle of booze.
Please do not misinterpret - my close friends and my family are quality humans of a high caliber. Unfortunately, the people I work with and those who ripple out from there are just not my kind of people.
One of the many reasons I prefer complete silence to any form of communication.
Anyway, that's it - no great revelations here. I was happy to be exposed to a different world, one that operates on a higher plane, one where people actually like their lives.
I am fairly certain I did not dream it.
Popped down to the state of Massachusetts to spend some time with my brother.
He associates with a higher caliber crowd than I do.
My friends are typically morons, psychopaths, mental defectives, drug dealers, thieves and alcoholics.
My brother hangs with the members of Symphony Pro Musica out of Hudson, MA. This is a group of musicians who perform classical music out of the sheer passion for it and the joy of expressing themselves through their instruments.
These people are exceptionally talented and perform at a very high level. This ain't The Ramones in the garage.
They had a dinner/fund raiser type thing on Tuesday night which I attended with my brother Ed.
The restaurant was excellent and the company was even better. We shared a booth, intermittently, with four other people, all of whom play in the orchestra. (My brother plays with them as well.)
It felt so goddamn good for me to spend time with people of this caliber and with people who are a cut above, intellectually.
The conversation was interesting, there was laughter, there was some down to earth.
You get stuck in a rut in life, associating with the same people in the same way ad infinitum. This keeps you stagnant as a human; no room or opportunity for growth. No room to even consider that maybe you are hanging with the wrong crowd.
When you get around a whole different set of people and when your reaction is "Holy shit I feel so alive" that, perhaps, is a sign that you are living the wrong life.
I was fascinated by the fact that I was in the company of people who are doing exactly what they love in life. Performing in an excellent orchestra and, for many of them, teaching music during the day.
What a foreign concept.
Imagine spending every day doing what you love all day. As opposed to dragging through every day with your head down and your spirit tortured, only to stagger home to the apathy-enabling comfort of a cushy recliner and a bottle of booze.
Please do not misinterpret - my close friends and my family are quality humans of a high caliber. Unfortunately, the people I work with and those who ripple out from there are just not my kind of people.
One of the many reasons I prefer complete silence to any form of communication.
Anyway, that's it - no great revelations here. I was happy to be exposed to a different world, one that operates on a higher plane, one where people actually like their lives.
I am fairly certain I did not dream it.
Tuesday, February 23, 2016
Coming At It From Yet Another Angle
"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other peoples' thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."
Steve Jobs
You have probably heard this or read this before; it is an excerpt from the commencement address Jobs gave at Stanford University in 2005.
I am always hammering away at this "living your own life" thing; that is because it fascinates me that so few people are able to do it. It saddens me to know that the vast majority of people in the world are deeply unhappy because of this inability.
Life is structured in a way that almost guarantees you will become trapped.
Most people don't know what they want to do at a young age; so many people don't even know who they are at a young age; so many people never figure out who they are.
But you gotta work. You gotta make money.
So you take a job thinking you will figure something out. That is if you bother to think at all.
A lot of people mindlessly accept that "this is just the way life is"; that you will work for forty or fifty years and if you are still alive at that point you will retire to a meager existence.
No matter how it happens, you fall into a "career" or a succession of jobs. Most likely in a situation or situations that you despise.
If you buy a house and have a family, the hole gets dug deeper.
Financial obligations are crushing, they are fearful - you don't want to lose your home so you keep the shoulder to the wheel and your head down.
As life, real life, passes you by.
Another excerpt from Jobs speech: "..................for the past 33 years I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: 'If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today? And whenever the answer has been "no," for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something."
That is an excellent approach to life, but for most people there are no options. They despise what they have to do every day but because of lack of education, because of lack of job opportunities, because of lack of guidance or good advice or courage or willpower or honesty on the part of employers and employment agencies.......whatever excuse or reality you can throw into the mix - they are trapped.
In the very next paragraph Jobs says: "Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool that I have ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."
That to me is the key to all this. Getting to a point where you feel you have nothing to lose. Getting to a point where you are not hanging on to security or routine at the expense of your soul.
This ties into something I read about Buddhist philosophies that resonated with me.
Drunken monkeys. Buddha talked about drunken monkeys in your head, those voices that bounce around in your skull preventing you from thinking clearly, the loudest of which is fear.
Fear of making sweeping changes because you might lose all your money, you might lose your home, you might lose your security.
But what if you do? What if your entire life comes crashing down around your head but you find the serenity of being exactly who you are? That most likely is a sign that the life you were living was the wrong one; that that life was not your own.
You will get an apartment, you will find another job, you will survive.
I feel Carol trembling as she reads these words.
The point is not to be reckless. The point is not to be afraid to dream big, to take big chances, to take any chances.
Shake things up, baby. You only have one life and it passes at faster miles an hour.
You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
Steve Jobs
You have probably heard this or read this before; it is an excerpt from the commencement address Jobs gave at Stanford University in 2005.
I am always hammering away at this "living your own life" thing; that is because it fascinates me that so few people are able to do it. It saddens me to know that the vast majority of people in the world are deeply unhappy because of this inability.
Life is structured in a way that almost guarantees you will become trapped.
Most people don't know what they want to do at a young age; so many people don't even know who they are at a young age; so many people never figure out who they are.
But you gotta work. You gotta make money.
So you take a job thinking you will figure something out. That is if you bother to think at all.
A lot of people mindlessly accept that "this is just the way life is"; that you will work for forty or fifty years and if you are still alive at that point you will retire to a meager existence.
No matter how it happens, you fall into a "career" or a succession of jobs. Most likely in a situation or situations that you despise.
If you buy a house and have a family, the hole gets dug deeper.
Financial obligations are crushing, they are fearful - you don't want to lose your home so you keep the shoulder to the wheel and your head down.
As life, real life, passes you by.
Another excerpt from Jobs speech: "..................for the past 33 years I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: 'If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today? And whenever the answer has been "no," for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something."
That is an excellent approach to life, but for most people there are no options. They despise what they have to do every day but because of lack of education, because of lack of job opportunities, because of lack of guidance or good advice or courage or willpower or honesty on the part of employers and employment agencies.......whatever excuse or reality you can throw into the mix - they are trapped.
In the very next paragraph Jobs says: "Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool that I have ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."
That to me is the key to all this. Getting to a point where you feel you have nothing to lose. Getting to a point where you are not hanging on to security or routine at the expense of your soul.
This ties into something I read about Buddhist philosophies that resonated with me.
Drunken monkeys. Buddha talked about drunken monkeys in your head, those voices that bounce around in your skull preventing you from thinking clearly, the loudest of which is fear.
Fear of making sweeping changes because you might lose all your money, you might lose your home, you might lose your security.
But what if you do? What if your entire life comes crashing down around your head but you find the serenity of being exactly who you are? That most likely is a sign that the life you were living was the wrong one; that that life was not your own.
You will get an apartment, you will find another job, you will survive.
I feel Carol trembling as she reads these words.
The point is not to be reckless. The point is not to be afraid to dream big, to take big chances, to take any chances.
Shake things up, baby. You only have one life and it passes at faster miles an hour.
You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
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