J.P.M.F.Y.F.

J.P.M.F.Y.F. - by Tim Easton
(from his album "Ammunition")

Jesus, protect me...Jesus, protect me

From your father's words

Not all of them

Just the ones that turn love into fear and hatred

And the ones who say they are above me

And then point their fingers down at me

And the ones who judge me when I'm troubled

And then tell me on my street that I am lost

And they tell me on my doorstep that I will burn in Hell

Jesus, protect me...Jesus, protect me

From your father's words

Like the ones who only speak with anger

They're screaming from my television

While stealing from the hand that feeds them

And demanding that you are the only way

While spitting in the face of love

With one hand on the Bible and the other in the purse

Jesus, protect me...Jesus, protect me

From your father's words

Like the ones who turn their back on the dying

And laugh in the face of pain and suffering

They would kill in the name of freedom

Or the ones who would manipulate the constitution

And try to make laws of their opinions

While walking shoulder to shoulder with greed and violence

To the ones who would start wars in your name

To the ones who would attack me for this song

I sing Jesus, protect me...Jesus, protect me

From your father's words

Not all of them

Just the ones who turn love into fear and hatred

Home

I find myself dwelling on the idea of "home" much more frequently lately. The next 6 weeks....let alone the next 6 months....are going to yeild a great deal of change for me. Good change, for sure...but with change often comes a need to recharge and check in with "home" and all the people, places and feelings associated with it. I consider myself to be one of the most fortunate to have my "home" in such a place of beauty. I honestly can't think of any other place on earth to where I'd rather return than Marin county and our beautiful Bay Area. So much about this place just reminds me of everything I love and value and cherish in my life, and every time I return I feel as though my sense of self is somehow recharged and validated by the fulfillment I get from being home.

Home is a place where I can walk for 4 hours in the wilderness and not see a single human being. It's also a place where I can walk down the street and run into an old friend I haven't seen in years. It's where I spend hours laughing with my family, and where I'm reminded of why I love them. It's where I can spend an entire day and night on top of a mountain with an old friend and never want to come down. The sunsets are unmatched. The stars are always out. The deer and turkeys share the road with you, and the air is always fresh. You can recycle cans, bottles and paper when you're walking down the streets of Fairfax, and you can't look anywhere without seeing green.

The people - my people - are just as amazing. They care about the world both in sentiment and in action. They have passion that leads them down paths that are not only respectable, but inspirational. They defy convention and seek out happiness and success where most would never think to look. They overcome obstacles that would floor most. Most of them can out smart me in any discussion, and outwit me in any debate, but can still make me laugh until I cry. They've taught me about patience and about determination. They've taught me about compassion and about humilty. They've taught me to stand up for what I believe in, even if the people around me disagree, and that there are infinite ways to reach happiness. In knowing them, I've learned how to let go of pain and how to laugh. I've learned how to love unconditionally, even if from a distance. I've learned that sometimes people find what they've been looking for all their lives when it seems like it's too late...but really it's just in time. Some of them are my teachers, some my source of laughter. Some look out for me, while others give me someone to look out for. Some I've only known for a relatively short time, others I've known longer than even they know. But in them all I've found guidance, friendship, inspiration, support, lightness of heart, love and the freedom to be myself. They are home to me, and they continue to be the pillars of meaning in my life. They are my foundation.

And since leaving home, I have continued to build upon that foundation, finding others who emulate these values and sentiments and who have become a part of what I call "home." Over the past 5 years I have met just as many amazing people who inspire me in ways others have before, as well as in ways I could never have prepared for. I have found love of a whole new depth, and laughter unparalleled. And now as I prepare to leave both places I've considered home, I feel sad but fortunate to now have TWO places to which I can return and feel as though I'm coming home.

I guess home is much more than a place, or even a series of places. It's a feeling, and a sense of belonging. A sense that you have existed somewhere, been a part of something, and felt an impact by the people and places you've come to know. And, hopefully...if you're lucky...you leave an impact as well...so when you return...even if it's years later and just for a visit...you can somehow slither back into place...and feel as though you've been there before.

Alien Nation

It's been a while since I've felt this alone. Only the last time I felt this alone, I was ACTUALLY alone. I knew no one, had no real purpose, and felt completely insignificant in any part of the world. This time it's almost the opposite. I feel overwhelmed by a sense of purpose, and a sense of obligation to the world, but I feel alone in that impulse. My life is about to change drastically in 3 short months. This life that I've built here in Los Angeles - the job I worked so hard to get, the people who have become my family, the man who I've loved for the past 2 years, and the place I've come to call home - it's all about to be gone from my reality. All of it...as it is never was. Something about that hit me tonight, for whatever reason.

Everything I've learned over the past 4 years out here...all the personal obstacles I've overcome...the sense of identity I've found within myself...the love I've found in others......it has all brought me to this point in my life where I am right now....this calling that I can't silence or deny...and I have no choice but to answer it and to move forward, even if it means leaving behind everything I've established here. It's ironic how -upon entering this city - I felt the most alone I've ever felt in my life. And now...after having felt perhaps the most accepted, confident, and loved I ever have in my life...I suddenly find myself alone again, on the brink of a new step and a new adventure.

I'm so torn between this human need to cling on to the companionship I've found here in Los Angeles - of all fucking places - and this deeper need to venture on my own path alone, and to explore everything this world and this life has to offer me.

It's a double-edged sword, this calling to live life as fully, deeply and with as much meaning as I possibly can. I feel that my life is a string of contradictions: a need to connect deeply with people who fulfill a part of me, and a need to be free of attachments and indulge in my independence and try, with abandon, to fulfill my potential as a human on this earth.

It's a lonely road, I'm finding, as so few fully understand me. I guess I can only hope that those who have will not drift too far from me as I wander.

Beat to a Pulp

Beat to a pulp

I just talked to my best friend, Joe - an ancient soul living in the body of a 21 year old college student....I'm convinced. He's probably the smartest, wisest, kindest, most genuine and noble person I know - in all the right ways. One of the very few people I've met in my life who I know I met for a reason. He has a way of finding a simple answer to even the most complex of qusetions, as if it were obvious all along. He's the kind of person you'd want ruling the world because he's patient, even-tempered, and has an all encompassing sense of inner peace - even though he may not know it yet. He's my hero.

He's been in Kenya since January, traveling around & soaking up the culture, richness, poverty, ignorace, wisdom, depth, value of Africa, or at least a small part of it. He shares my need to travel -and not just to see the world, but to feel it, experience it, soak it up, and be a part of it.

There are so many fucking people living on this planet, and it shatters me to think how few are actually doing something to really be a part of it, to really recognize the suffering that takes place on such a vast and regular basis, and to contribute - even in just a small way - to the healing that is so desperately needed just to maintain a sense of balance, let alone recovery.

I'm guilty of it. I live in one of the most polluted and jaded cities in the world, and I work in an industry that thrives on capitalistic values that are very much at the root of the cancer of society. Greed, pride, ignorance, self-interest. I'm shocked daily by people who toss aside morals that to me seem so blatantly "right" just for the sake of making a buck. "Why should we close this deal with Camel Cigarettes? Because it's a million dollar deal! Sure, I think smoking is wrong, but we need the money."

Burn in hell.

I see it killing each of us every day...the people I work with...the ones with values, at least. This sense of a void of meaning, this cloud of convolution, this complete and desperate resistance to "settle"...as Drew said so perfectly "every day it takes a little piece of my soul." It does. I need out. We all do.

The only thing that keeps me going is the fact that I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. That light being my impending trip to India. People keep saying that 4 months is such a long time to spend in a place like India, but to me it's nothing. How can I really see, feel, experience, learn as much as I want to in 4 short months. That's only a 3rd of a year, of many within a lifetime that so many people spend in suffering.

Even still, I need it. I need to feel something real. Sure I've experienced pain - the universal pain we all feel....the void of childhood, the loss of lovers and friends, the longing for those we know we will never have, the constant struggle to find something familiar within yourself and within another....But there's so much more. We get so wrapped up in these personal struggles - which are very real, don't get me wrong, and very necessary to a point. But they're just the tip of the iceberg of a bigger, more universal suffering of which we're all a part of, but so often fail to acknowledge.

Everyone keeps telling me to "be prepared..." "Be prepared for the poverty.....be prepared for the illness...be prepared for the ignorance, the filth, the suffering, the violence, the anger, the hate." But the truth of the matter is there's no way to prepare. All there is to do is to strip myself of expectations, of my needs, my beliefs, my values, my fear....and go. I need to allow myself to be slapped in the face, beat to a pulp, and spit out by something so blindingly real that there's nothing left of who I was before. I need for all my judgements, my hate, my insecurities to be belittled by this "bigger picture" of which I am just a mere particle, floating on a small, insignificant path. And then - and only then - will I know what's real, what's true, what's right within my own mind and heart, and what part I'm meant to play in this big, cyclical game of life.

Or not.....we'll see.

Individualism

"...I said to myself, 'I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me...shapes and ideas so near to me...so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn't occurred to me to put them down.' I decided to start anew - to strip away what I had been taught - to accept as true my own thinking."

-Georgia O'Keeffe

Why I Love My Job

An Ode To Trigger (By Shirley Wong)

Trigger took off for London
She was off to see Big Ben
For days and days she left us
We were lost without our friend
Without The Trig to bug us
We could finally get work done
But how we dearly missed her so
Cuz we love that giant smelly ho

And as this story continues
Before she crossed the pond
Trig couldn't help but do it
She called out Bass and Wong
Don't lay a finger on my cube
Don't you even dare
But what kind of friends were we
If we didn't show we cared?

So welcome to the jungle
No fun 'n games today
Get your ass to work, Trig
Blackline was due yesterday!

Beneath The Green-Light Remedy

People in LA run from the rain. They live in such a tormented bubble-world that is so cut off from the reality of nature's control over our lives that they literally RUN from it! LA is built in such a way that people are inside 24 hours a day. You wake up inside your overpriced apartment, get inside your gas-guzzling car, drive through a concrete jungle of buildings only to drive inside a parking structure, get inside an elevator that takes you to your 10th floor office...inside! You spend 9 hours inside only to turn around and do it all over again to get home. Even now, looking out my window to my patio (which has walls around it to give me "privacy" from the outside), all I see is buildings...homes, apartments, restaurants, shops, cars. My poor birds, who sit right in front of my patio window, stick their little heads through the blinds, desperately trying to find some connection to the outside world, and all they get to see (through the lattice walls of my patio) are buildings and cars driving by. They don't even react anymore when a firetruck drives down the street, 10 feet from my front door, blaring it's siren. It's truly sad.
It's raining today, so I decided to take a walk. Rainy days are the best days to take a walk in LA because there's absolutely no one outside. It's barren, and it's one of the few times you can actually notice the sparse remanents of nature around you. My street has an unusually large amount of greenery & trees on it, but you never notice them until you walk out into the rain and are free of the usual distractions that keep you from looking up: people walking by on their cell phones, horns honking as two cars fight for the only remaining parking spot, people pulling in and out of their driveways. And then all of a sudden you feel a rather large drop of water fall on your head, and you look up to see that it came from a surprisingly beautiful tree that you never noticed, even though it's 10 steps out of your front door.
LA is a city that never stops. People living what I like to call "the green-light remedy," filling their lives with a constant flow of activity in order to avoid dealing with life in the moment. But on a rainy day in LA, if you know the right backstreets, you can find yourself living in one of those real moments...not the pretentious kind that you hear about in songs or low-budget indie films...but the real kind where you find yourself, for a brief moment, existing in the REAL world...the kind that was here before the buildings and the pop culture we've created over it...the kind where you can feel the tangible proof of the natural world spitting and blowing against your face, and for that brief moment you feel alive in way that even a night on the Boulevard could never compare to.