"Never Had It So Good.."

So I limp into the coffee shop the other day and ask the barista how he's doing and he says "Never had it so good."

He said it in that distinctly New York way which you don't hear very often in Southern California and it made me feel tremendous joy. My coffee-slingin' Bodhisattva brother sounded ruggedly sincere but with a sprinkle of ever-present irony. Ralph Kramden-esque. Perfect.

I guess this was my version of meeting Buddha on the road.

"Never had it so good."

Blues Wisdom, y'all. And ya' don't stop.

Baseball And The Human Heart..

Baseball is designed to break your heart. The game begins in Spring, with fresh hopes renewed, the rains beginning to subside, that first gorgeous glimpse of the blue skies of summer yet to come, flowers budding to life all around, and the World Series hopes and dreams of 30 teams and their fanbases, extending far beyond the limits of their respective cities.

The season always extends into a long summer, which inevitably brings with it triumph and despair; one heroic moment followed by a flights of clumsy error - leaving us on the edge of our seats in anticipation, waiting for the next epiphanic burst of joy to explode off the bat of one of those talented men we admire so much.

You can keep your museums and cathedrals and great architecture, for me, the most wondrous thing in the world to behold is a perfectly turned six-four-three double play to kill a rally by the visiting team. In those moments, as the warm summer nights extend later, I'm a kid again. And I'm lucky enough now to see it through my 9 year old boy's eyes as he learns and plays the game I've always loved.

But, for all that exuberant joy,the harshness of Autumn eventually sets in; bringing with it some cold realities. It tells you that the long, difficult winter is beckoning around the corner. That nights will grow shorter and colder, the grass will freeze over and be mushed to slush and mud, waiting for the sweetness of spring, for bees buzzing around, and the cleats of wide-eyed young boys and girls playing games on her. The blankets get heavy and the sunshine seems to recede into the land of dreams and memory.

Unfortunately, for 29 out of 30 teams 9 (and for their fans), that dream of childhood comes to a grinding halt. The clouds roll in and that last glimpse of that long sweet summer, the kind that we hope will last forever as a kid, is gone. Tears are shed. Families are depressed. Hopes are crushed. Cities are sunken in sorrow.

This is my 31st consecutive year of not seeing my beloved Los Angeles Dodgers win the World Series. It's also the 7th consecutive year for my favorite team winning the National League Western division, only to fall short in the playoffs. So, like others, I feel the tinge of sadness, I scrutinize roster moves and bullpen rotation decisions. But mostly, I'll just miss the summer time. Miss that feeling of joy at the ballpark. The smells and the sounds that take me back to being a kid again.

But I don't dwell for too long, because sooner than I think, Spring will arrive once again, bringing with it the hope and promise of a new day, a new year, and another chance to chase that childhood dream and make it live forever.

The Church of the Wayword Wolf..

No one or thing is going to absolve you from loneliness or pain. Your healing is your responsibility. The alleyways of childhood do not release us willingly, so we have to develop the tools to release those ghosts and slay those dragons.

But here's the rub:

Many of us grew up modeling an outdated version of Masculinity; one that was rooted in everything from ancestral traumas and emotional repression, to fear or scarcity mindset and absence of personal accountability. As a result, many of us learned to navigate the depths of the wilderness alone, taking false pride in some individual notion of power or strength. It served some of us for a while. Despite not having a compass or a map, some of us found our way out of the woods and back to the pack. Some of us finally came to accept that The Age of the Lone Wolf is Dead.

Our lives are not are own. They do not just belong to us. We can be fathers and brothers and leaders and caretakers, or we can be Ghosts.

When we can deal with trauma and the daunting notion of our Jungian Shadow Self, we can begin to open up to new possibilities. We can begin to rebuild trust. We can begin to feel worthy of love and find the strength to give the love we never had.

The most difficult part of the process is learning to admit where your trauma and your lone wolf survival instincts (including your tendency to isolate) have hurt others. Accepting responsibility is a heavy thing and facing it, head on, takes the kind of courage that is only sustainable when you have the support and love and accountability that comes with returning to the Pack.

Past victimhood, even of the most brutal variety, does not absolve you from the responsibility of your actions.. But we must first navigate of the darkness and back into the light of the pack; So that we may see.

May this be the season we leave the wilderness and rejoin the pack.

A Soft Duet..

Some late nights or early mornings,
When you strum the perfect chord,
And the lyric is just right,
It feels like your heart will burst into dandelion dust.

A soft duet between you and the Creator.

You don't dare tell a soul.

Do You Really Want To Know Why?

Because it's finite.
Because it's the only way to make the voices truly stop screaming.
Because it's the only solution with no more "what-ifs."
Because these meds that you're required to take to "save your life" have side effects.
Because rehab doesn't always work.
Because the voices, even when they're not screaming, don't ever stop.
Because the pain doesn't stop.
Because it happened when you were young and it will never go away.
Because it didn't happen to YOU.
Because you don't recognize yourself.
Because you tried for so fucking long.
For so many years.
In so many incarnations.
In so many decades.
In so many fake smiles.
In so many jobs.
In so many situations.
In so many bands.
Singing so many songs.
That no one will ever hear. Because the art is medicine, but only for so long.
Because their love was not enough to fix you.
Because money or approval or fame cannot stop the darkness.
Because the drugs don't work when you aren't sick.
Because the world is just sick in a different way.
Because you don't understand.
Because you don't understand.
Because You DON'T F*cking Understand.


*Wrote this the morning of Anthony Bourdain's suicide*

The Rebirth..

Kneel before Her, For she has been All Things:

Sainted Mother, Jostled Lover, Unkempt Feral Child, Ignored Wallflower, Tattered Party Favor, Stolen Innocent, Vengeful Eve, Junkie Prophet, Starry-Eyed Soul Gazer, Scorned Wife, Masquerade Mimic, Secret Guardian, Tainted Temptress, Midnight Muse, Runaway Heartbreaker, Pedestral Goddess, Gutter Gypsy, Bonnie to your Clyde, Psychotic She-Devil, Sultry Servant Girl, The One Who Got Away, The Girl Who Broke Your Heart, The Witch Who Wouldn't Burn, The Born Under A Bad Sign Baby..

Throw roses at her feet, And ask permission To be Reborn.

On Masking and Intimacy..

Post-meditation (and guitar) thoughts:

You can't have intimacy if you're pretending on any level. If you're masking, even if it is to avoid pain or to numb a response to past trauma, you are unable to be Intimate in that moment (even if your heart/brain/ego want to argue otherwise).

This is not a criticism; as pain, fear and trauma can be very real and must be confronted if you're going to hold any hope of defeating them. No, it is simply an acknowledgement that intimacy requires courage and vulnerability, even when it causes discomfort.

Tearing off the mask is hard. I've masked for almost my entire life. I know it well. I have deep compassion for the masks I see. But, the truth remains: You cannot have intimacy if you are, in any sense, pretending.

It is f*cking painful and difficult to face the truth: both the Beauty and the Terror. As a result, I have long been the Chief Architect of my own Loneliness, building my elaborate mask to navigate and shapeshift my way through trial, discomfort, fear and upheaval.

My principle work these days is in taking a sledgehammer to those walled-up defenses and in continuing to strive to be a person who is open, receptive, available, accountable and wearing my actual face.

If someone is going to love you, me or anyone else, let it not be for any projection or affection. Let it be for The Messy. The Real. The Beauty and The Terror. It's all gotta be in there.

And believe it or not: It's the Good Stuff, y'all.

The Search For Meaning And Connection In A Postmodern World..

I can't say I'm a fan of the cynical, bleak, melancholy tone that currently permeates American culture. Few things trouble me more than the idea that we are deep into an age of disaffected irony, where "trying" and "caring" just aren't cool.

Being suspicious of effort, passion and discipline is a vicious strain of pessimistic bullshit. I understand that it may be a defense mechanism, a buffer of sorts. Some of us use this as a layer of protection against the anxiety of our potential failures, but let us not forget that reflexive naysaying tends to also stunt the dreams of others. The cynic often looks wise, but rarely has the courage to be vulnerable; and vulnerability is what can make human endeavor truly beautiful.

Some of us hesitate with every step (an admittedly stunting way to live) and have a lot of our own trauma to work through. But part of doing that work is learning not to shit on the work of others.

Nihilism is a sexy fall fashion, along with weaponized humor, but it rarely summons the courage needed to heal, to listen and to Love. It can vanquish enemies, sure, but keep your eyes open for the unintended casualties of friendly fire. Words of discouragement and mockery hurt people, even when accompanied by acerbic wit.

I guess what I am saying, as a Note To MYSELF and Others is: Try not to make people feel bad for Trying, Creating, Caring. It's not a character defect to give a shit.

A Simpler Time..

Call me a blushing sentimentalist if you will, but I like to close my eyes and reflect on a simpler time for humanity; back when we would engage in flirtation with our burgeoning crushes by using prose scrawled in dactylic hexameter on parchment (you know, instead of prefabricated, prepackaged corporate emoji speak undertaken for the purpose of reducing vulnerability and any heartfelt attempt at deep, connective language).

And back then, if our attempts at love language were not well-received and we were feeling particularly melancholic and forlorn about the situation, we wouldn't tweet rage in 140 characters or less or consult the hive mind of opinionated facebook friends who would offer simplistic cliche-ridden messages of reductionist supportive banter. No, we would tackle the problem the way it should be tackled: By attempting to gain some solid life advice by way of providing a little bit of gold, blood and hyssop to the oracle of Delphy, as she pontificated during a deeply inebriated meditative state from the miasmic fumes of the beautifully decomposing earthbody of a slain cobra sprawled out beneath her.

Those were the days. Am I right, fam?

"I Got Soul.. And I'm Super Bad."

Godfather Griot,


When we write and perform what we think is ours, we are covering you. Every singer who grunts, screams, wiggles and thrusts on a stage, trying to spit heart and soulfire into an SM57 between a broken monitor and an all night band struggling hard to sound tight owes you royalties. Every one of us continues to sample your DNA. Thank you for saving us with the love energy, the life force, the primal groove that makes your body move. We are your children, happy to be chasing your ghost.


https://youtu.be/KS8Tf0MpIps

Phil Ochs Was Right About Mississippi..

Imagine working your fingers to the bone under brutal conditions in a meat packaging facility during a hellish Mississippi summer for absolutely shit pay, your very job function being to put food on the table for people who hate your existence, and then the feds come and arrest you for that "crime." Imagine their kids who during the First Week of School came home to find Mommy or Daddy gone, arrested and caged for that "crime."

Americans who support this shit are not good humans. You can bootlickingly harrumph about "legal" and "laws" but it doesn't stop most of those same complainers from benefitting from the very sweat and labor that produces the things they love and consume. Any defense of these policies is an outright excusing of the worst kind of human brutality. There are better ways, but I suppose it wouldn't engorge your hatesticks the same way, would it?

Looking at so many of my fellow Americans, it's so easy to understand what happened in Germany. It confused me as a kid, but now I know the truth: People love authority and they will bully and brutalize the most vulnerable among us to be on the side with the most power.

Try looking at Some of these things not through a political or cultural filter, but with some semblance of compassion and humanity? Can you do that? Are you still a decent human being? Or are you Just.. an American?

A Kind Of Holy Perfection..

In a room in a dirty second floor apartment, decorated with more local punk rock flyers than seemed rational or commensurate with defensible taste, we divided up our tabs of acid as Husker Du sang about how we've got to Keep Hanging On and time mysteriously carried us forward by some unknown and rarely considered mechanism.

After the dividing ritual, we got in the kind of car owned by teenagers who work car wash or record store jobs and drove on the highway toward Lone Pine canyon, arms out open windows, as an immaculate night sky quietly hummed above us like a withheld explosion.

We chased LSD with swigs of Gatorade and talked about aliens, sex, secret doorways and the holy hierarchy of guitar solos.

As the sun disappeared over the hills, It kicked in; and the three of us wandered deep into a forest now teeming with consciousness; tree limbs leaped out of the darkness and proclaimed greetings in a solidarity of living things, touchingly extended to us mere human teenagers, an unexpected grace.

Our provisions were three bottles of water, a joint and a bag of apples. I found the skull of a small mammal long dead and wore it like a crown, unaware of course that I'd just inhabited my life's most pagan moment; the fact that we can't perceive all of time at once may be the greatest of the many tender mercies extended to us.

After what could have been minutes or centuries, the golden sun came around to kiss our skin again and the field we ambled through burst into a sea of purple.

Down in the vast distance of the ancient valley below, a train undulated across the earth like a snake.

It was a kind of holy perfection I might never see again.

My Magic City..

It's like when a murky line in a song you've been listening to and digging your entire life suddenly makes perfect sense; when the clouds part, the dirt washes off the windows and all you see is a garden pathway illuminated by the sun.

Somewhere between the revolving art galleries, the tent cities, the dive bars and the taco trucks rests the unobscured unredacted truth of our city; which is both shamefully ugly and crushingly beautiful, like the ornate and the austere violently colliding to make some kind of deadly, new and righteous dualistic vision.

L.A. is Raymond Chandler, David Hockney and Arthur Lee doin' it nasty up in the park (and you know which park). Sometimes, I still can't process the brutal and near perfect sweetness of it. It's a dirty, fetid city, full of haunted sidewalks and carnival barkers, scabrous neon wonderlands and dangerous alleyways, but it'll always be Magic to me.

Damn, I'm gonna miss this place someday.

Don't Be That Guy..

We are all trapped in our meatsuits on this beautifully strange spinning rock together, and pain and heartache are an inevitable part of the ride/journey/mystery. That being said, allowing this peculiar predicament to infect you in such a way that you become a naysaying cynic or vicious critic at every brush with beauty, artistic expression or mystery, is a rather dark road to travel.

I'm not advocating a position of reverence or even adherence, but if nothing else, maybe we could at least try to never be the reason why someone who loved to sing, doesn’t any more. Or the reason why someone who dressed so uniquely has decided to sheepishly conform to societal norms. Let's not be the deciding factor in someone who has always spoken of their dreams so boldly and wildly suddenly learning that it's better to remain silent about them. Try your best not to be the reason someone gives up on an integral part of themselves because you were demotivating, vocally non-appreciative or mercilessly sarcastic about it.

Creativity, art, self-expression, dreams, goals, life paths - These are sacred things. So let's not trample them with our own fears, insecurities or disapproving conditioning. And if you just can't be supportive, maybe try finding a little more "shut the fuck up about it" in your heart.

Happy Thursday, y'all. 😊

I Guess I Am..

It was a muggy early morning in October when I saw it, from the rise on a lonely stretch of West Texas highway. I pulled the Dodge over, thinking I’d both photograph and simultaneously pay my respects to what I assumed was a large dead bird. I stepped out into the morning sun, already burning like a furnace on the back of my neck, my boots crunching under broken road as I walked over to what was left of the creature. That’s when it suddenly hit me - I realized exactly what it was laying there. It wasn’t a bird at all; it was a Chief’s war bonnet. This thing was ornate, its quality almost mythical; covered in eagle feathers, red and black piping, a dazzling mystery of sacred bead work.

I picked it up, carefully, with reverence for the soul of its owner, and placed it on a nest of tall, dry grass behind some rocks on the side of the highway. I decided to surround it, both as partial covering and to serve as a bit of a makeshift altar; with dried leaves and various twigs. And I stood there for a few moments, flies buzzing around my ears and tears welling up in my eyes; watching the ancient morning sun warm the landscape, as the last bit of the dew evaporated from the tall grass. I tried to hear the Chief’s voice in what little bit of wind would whisper, but the trees weren’t providing much relief from that Lone Star fireball sky.

After a few more moments of quiet reflection, I got back in the Dodge, turned the key to the ignition, and my wheels hit the road. I fumbled with the dial for a moment, when breaking through the static came Mavis Staples, singing to me clear as a bell and warm as a prayer through the speakers.

“I wonder, child, are you on your way?” she cried. Four hundred miles ahead, Ms. Staples. Nothin’ but hope and mystery and a whole lot of road. I guess I am.