The first thing is, don’t get into this unless you have to. I did, and didn’t, so I know what I’m talking about.

Feelings are tender all around, and one is liable to fire off personal attacks without knowing the reason why. [Now how would he know that? -- Ed.] There’s a bunch of us out here wearing our hearts on our sleeves, and that gets kinda tricky. At any rate, I encountered some generational debate today and fell right in. Who’d have thought. It was the usual stuff, younger blogger/activists sick and tired of being put down as an email army that doesn’t really DO anything, or much worse, being lectured from the high and mighty temple of consciousness expansion and exploration of the inner world, vs. the continued tendency of some of us to keep pushing their buttons. In particular, the younger ones — those who could be my grown children and college-age grandkids — feel put down, left out, and abandoned by being told too often that we felt so good to be alive back then and regret that they do not. “No, not in the same way. How could they?” And so it goes.

This is most unfortunate, and I relent.

But as for the ’60s, I was there, and I felt something that hasn’t come again. As I declared this morning somewhere else in cruder terms, to me that means we* have to keep pointing in that direction. Not “back,” but to that psychic space. There is something to pass on, even if we don’t realize it yet. Some of us have substituted homilies from hell for holy imagination, and many of the rest have bought other lies and died inside. It’s all collateral damage from the blowback.

Mostly we forget, but the Universe is still there.

It’s true, I’ve written some embarrassing things in my day. This may turn out to be one of them.

Hell, I’ve done some embarrassing things. I’ve also written a number of self-revealing pieces quite outspoken in their anger and pain about certain aspects of my upbringing and its relationship to everything from domestic politics to the fate of the world. I don’t do this for the money, I do it for art and education (my own). I have a talent for putting feelings into words, even if they’re nasty. in the end, I do it for love.

I catch a lot of flak for the anger and always have. Most people want to shut me up or call 911 — a perfectly natural reaction — but I don’t have a choice. Wherever I go, there’s swamp water up to my belly button. This, I am assured, is a birthday present or at least an I.O.U. There is no dike or levee. I’m talking about open access I can’t shut off, nor do I want to. In fact, I recommend doing whatever you have to do to get in the same condition. It’s something else. You can’t be more open (or exposed) than when you’re wading naked in the Okeefenokee, trolling with your pecker for alligators. On the other hand, you might meet a mermaid looking for a good time. This inherent capacity for growth has yet to be appreciated by the masses, who would rather blow up the swamp and kill all the nasty varmits. (Trouble is, they always miss and hit each other.) But that’s where I am, all the time, so I notice things. Like walking down the road, as innocent as you please, until you realize you’re carrying an empty suitcase.

Ouch.

Now, considering what you know about these things, what you’ve learned from years of observation, from literature, culture, and the panoply of insights and experience that constitute your breathing days on earth, there ought to be something in that suitcase besides the smell of someone else’s after-shave. There ought to be, but there’s not. You have to stop along the way and get the things you need, except you don’t exactly know what they are.

This is where it really gets interesting, I’ll bet. I’m 62 years old and never thought I’d ever say that.

There must be some kind of madness that comes over me when I visit other blogs and leave a comment. It’s like I have this defect where I think I’m being friendly and helpful when I’m really mostly criticizing, or worse, preaching. So don’t let this happen to you. Don’t think you can drop the plastic dog poop in the lemonade and be invited back to the next wild party. And yes, a part of me does want to be invited. The rest of me has already got its bathrobe on or hopes we get snowed in. That’s just how it is.

UPDATE: Wait!!! i just left another comment and it was OK. I AM NOT A JERK! Just sometimes.

It was one of those days when nothing really mattered. Not that anything was trivial, though, more like each event was illuminated by a larger good.

In the morning I took a short forbidden peek at Digby’s blog. Yes, it’s against my religion now, but Digby writes so well, and by sinning dost thou know thyself. After reading a few fine sentiments and recapitulations of abuse, I was hurting too. Of course I left another dark, didactic comment, signifying only that my blogfast has outstanding merit. But I still haven’t been able to reliably replace the sharp adrenalin jabs of fear I obviously crave with anything remotely as enlivening as terror. Does anyone see a problem here?

After a cold, rainy yesterday, today was warm, blue, and calm. Puffy white clouds floated low around Taos Mountain, casting blue-black shadows on the slopes that pull you into the depths of the ocean of air. Today the sky was luminous and blue, and everywhere the sunlight touched, something sparkled. About 68 degrees and not a breath of wind.

We looked at a studio for rent. Actually a casita, but it could have been a studio if it had been a little bigger, and the surroundings were absurdly gorgeous, the kind of scene to make a visitor from Ohio put a bullet in his brain. Green grass, flowers, water splashing in the acequia, and a cloud-wreathed mountain holding up half of the sky. Between the grass, flowers, flowing water and the mountain was a sloping meadow full of tall grass and wildflowers — and three big spotted horses, chomping and snuffling contentedly not 50 feet away. All of this in clean bright light at 7,000 feet, the air so cool you want the warming, sunlight on your shoulders like a comforting embrace. And don’t forget the sparkles.

The next stop was another studio rental, this one a shadow of the other. Highway traffic whooshed by in a constant roar. The stupidest baby robin in the world flew onto the hood of our car and sat there for the longest time. The studio did have fine north light. I stood at the tall windows and gazed out at what can only be described as a prairie dog stampede in the scrubby field beyond.

We came home. I put on shorts and walked two houses down to pick apples from a neighbor’s trees. Her house is on the Llano rim, and the view across the valley of the Rio Grande del Rancho to the mountains beyond is worth another bullet. To get to this spot, I had to walk past at least five dead cars, a single-wide, and about 50 yards of falling-down wooden fences; through a grove of giant cottonwoods; then across a swiftly-flowing stream (another acequia) on a simple wooden footbridge. More green grass and maybe 15 apple trees — different kinds — across a sloping yard. She wasn’t home but had left the picker gadget for me. It was like a supermarket of trees.

For supper I cooked crab cakes. How very droll, you say, but these are made in Santa Fe from lichen-fattened mountain lake crabs and delivered weekly to Cid’s organic supermarket, except when yuppie migrants hijack the semi in the canyon. We ate outside, looking at the same damn mountain and watching all the birdies with binoculars. At one point I counted seven different kinds of birds in front of us, all at once, in the branches of two tall dead aspens down by the water — yes, another acequia.

I felt powered by the sun today. When I left my desk and swam across the valley, I was nailed. Maybe not as good as terror, but it’s getting close.

What a time, boy howdy.

I’ve been dreading the anniversary of 9/11 for weeks, convinced that an attack on Iran would begin today in some kind of perverse Monumental-War-Crime-as-”Revenge” scenario. Waking up in the mornings overcome with fear and loathing, intimations of unspeakable disaster. So far, nothing, thank the Lord.

But to show you how this works, yesterday on the way back from Albuquerque I saw three different black Ford vans, windowless, with U.S. government plates, each separated by about 20 miles, on Interstate 25 heading north — and it really freaked me out. Shiny black vans, heavy-duty, driven by guys in civilian clothes. Could have been anything, right? Just like the “mysteriously” cancelled flights we saw at the airport. My personal life has been filled with emotional turbulence far outstripping the obvious provocations, too.

With a huge nuclear-armed war machine sitting with the engine running in the Persian Gulf (at great danger and expense), we’re all affected, whether we recognize it or not. This isn’t paranoia, all this stuff is really there. No one on the planet can be completely calm or sane under the circumstances, and anyone claiming to be or exhibiting unbreachable certainty should be viewed with great suspicion. (I don’t suppose this describes anyone you know…)

The blogosphere seems quite unhelpful in this regard. When I dropped in briefly for a visit last week after a still-ongoing blogfast (now at six weeks and counting), everything was just the same! It simply blew my mind: “Look how CNN and the Washington Post have got it all wrong, so-and-so’s a bloody liar, email this Senator, call this Congressman, isn’t this an outrage,” etc. etc. All absolutely true as far as it goes, but at this point, only pouring energy into the feedback loop. No one saying “To hell with this, let’s go throw rocks,” or “Fuck it man, I’m off to Maui.” No, of course not, I’m not advocating either of those, though I might go for “Let’s all grow beans and learn to run real fast!” It’s just that we live in a malleable world, but in this oh-so-crucial area, nothing changes…

(Billmon knew. If I keep saying that, he’s liable to pop up and contradict me, but I think he knew.)

I think it’s some kind of cosmic test. Either we all jump up to the next level and watch ourselves react, or we go on being marionettes. I’m as bad as anybody else — mysterious government vans??? — but as a species, how many times do we have to have our noses rubbed in it? I’m just sayin’.

I’ve been meaning to remind everyone of this for some time and now’s as good a moment as any, so if you haven’t done so already, be sure to check out my friend and extraordinary musician Chipper Thompson’s latest series of otherworldly images at Banjosnake. He also has some fine original gig posters he’s willing to sell and even sign. His personal Web site features imagery and his own original art that made my job as Web designer drop-dead easy — take a look at that and see what actual physical art and Photoshop can do.

As for me, I’m wrestling with a multi-dimensional anaconda, but will no doubt return shortly if not eaten. Pray for peace and have a fabulous great day.

Arthur Silber rides the vortex every day. I don’t know how he survives.

We’ve exchanged a few emails in the past, and I know he “gets it” in a way that isn’t obvious on his blog, unless you have empathy enough to understand what’s behind the pain. I certainly do, because I feel the same way when I get pulled in. It’s really courageous, what he’s doing, allowing himself to feel in such full measure, like he’s sacrificing himself for our behalf. You may find some of his blog posts extremely negative and bitter, even dangerous for your emotional health, but a) is a thing “negative” if true? and b) this is a soulful person. Like I said, he rides the vortex.

What brings this forward now are his savage takedowns of the progressive blogosphere, what he calls the “liberal blogs,” in his most recent posts. He’s so right, I can hardly stand it, especially on their relationship to “the next world war.” I have friends, kindred spirits too, deeply and conscientiously engaged in the enterprise of blogging for political change, so it isn’t easy for me to say this: it’s like instead of enabling revolution as they imagine, the blogs have eaten it …and there isn’t any left.

(An inadvertent pun, but let it be.)

Arthur may be right about the war. I don’t want that. He’s hard up, so go send him a donation to pay the rent and buy some decent food. He may get so happy, he’ll stop telling us the truth.

My God, I’ve been blogging since August, 2002!

I wasn’t really sure until tonight. I fired up the old Blue & White G3 with the Radioland software installed to have a look at my old Salon blog, still on their servers, so I could copy anything worth saving before I have them delete the database. Months ago I’d saved a bunch of stuff from 2006 to 2004, and tonight I worked my way back all the way to the beginning. Ended up with a whopper of a text file, 504 KB.

But it wasn’t easy looking at those early years in Taos: the hell we were going through, the doubts and regrets, the lack of money. If that didn’t kill me, reading about it all over again came close. I honestly don’t know how I survived those few years when we lived apart. Nothing I’ve ever gone through has ever hurt so bad. And yet to a major degree, I was doing it to myself by what I interpreted events to mean and how I played those thoughts over and over in my head…

Possession by fear is a powerful seduction. Not a lesson easily learned, by any means.

It is with considerable regret that I continue to come up against the best intentions of positively motivated individuals and the collective behavior of many in general who seek to build a better world as best they know how. Even my wife looks at me sadly when I say I may never vote again. It would be difficult to overestimate the extent of my alienation from the culture that surrounds me, however. This is also not an evil thing!

As I sit here barely two weeks past my 62nd birthday, I realize that I’ve been on this road all my life. I seriously doubt I’m alone, either. After decades of defining myself as anti-establishment (while yearning like hell for the benefits compliance can bring), I now see this as just another team to root for. I’ve understood this intellectually for some time — most intuitive progressives do, I think — but to experience it on a deeper level is both shattering and liberating.

The pain and guilt of childhood had a higher purpose, it would seem. Parents consumed with their own conflicts set me up for what most would consider “failure,” despite all my gifts and talent, and roughly 10 years ago the patches started coming apart. Moving to el Norte was a monumental undertaking, an act of outrageous courage shading into high foolery, yet absolutely necessary, unavoidable, and ultimately perfect! I died many times. (Apocalypse?) Jungian analysis opened the door to the engine room, and once I was there…

Awareness and thinking are not the same thing. We’ve been bamboozling ourselves for thousands of years. The pain, guilt, and self-destructiveness of our world is no different in origin from the dynamics of everyone’s individual and collective psyches. Substituting one thought for another is business as usual, conducted in darkness.

Come the real revolution, I won’t even exist, and neither will you.

Well, I’m still not reading blogs and hardly any news, going on over a month now. That either makes me a potentially enlightened sumbitch or a better Wal-Mart shopper.

I did skim a news service article a while back about candidates going to Yearly Kos and how some bloggers were all excited about being a bigger influence on politics. Can that really be true? — and how would that make any difference if it is? Not burning questions, by any means. But the it’s still Wars-R-Us, right? So I am curious why people are still trying to elect more Democrats. Is it something in their food? I’m perfectly serious. It’s like, if you stand there with your mouth open long enough, a Holy Fly will come inside!

Me, all I hear is pants falling to the floor. The other day I was rambling on to my wife about how we could keep perishables cold if there were no electricity any more. Much more to the point, I’d think, but she was not amused.