O, where are you going?" "To Scarborough fair," Savoury sage, rosemary, and thyme; "Remember me to a lass who lives there, For once she was a true love of mine. -Frank Kidson (traditional)
São Paulo We’re just hanging out, embracing amnesty while we’re coming down to rejoin gravity We’re just flying low, enjoying speed and careful reads of Tarot o’er the river and through the woods and any other place where spirits good and if this ain’t your cup of tea, don’t go I’ll see you there next season in Sao Paulo don’t need no flowers in your hair nor Scarborough Fair ain’t a single sort of cliché to beware We’re just spreading wings and flying on with feathers that life brings forgetting nests and trees now come before in favor of some unfamiliar shore and if this ain’t your cup of tea, don’t go I’ll meet you there next season in Sao Paulo don’t need no flowers in your hair nor Scarborough Fair ain’t a single sort of cliché to beware the kindest courage you’ll ever know is the want to love and the will to show that the sweetest kiss you’ll ever receive is the one with which you leave We’re just setting free, hearts we held dear in our ten year history like mandalas of sand eroding time as if we knew one stitch would save us nine and if this here ain’t your cup of tea, don’t come, no, no this glass ain’t half full or empty- it’s just done you can love the one you’re with, but you can’t be, no, no in two places at one time and still be free
#vanlife101. Venice Beach, CA. Autumn 2005
Songs don’t just imply movement; they embody the very waveform of acoustic agency. Even the most mindless and generic three minute pop tune attempts to trace an energetic arc, transporting listener from verse to chorus to verse and back before the inevitable bridge (one hopes), a momentary pause or shift in perspective before the obligatory ear worm hook pounds the climax home to satiation and beyond. Like the dialectic of life itself, songs engage us in a kind of call and response between the message, groove and vibe. At best, a song is an ecosystem, a world unto itself that draws the listener in and carries them away to a particular somewhere lodged deep in the voluptuary longings of their own imaginings.
I remember only snapshots, Polaroids of moments that place me guitar in hand, working through the initial riff of São Paulo that occupies the verse. Specifically, I recall one morning early outside the Peet’s Coffee in Venice Beach which featured a park style bench just to the right of the shop. My red 1989 Plymouth Voyager van was parked nearby, red kayak and blue mountain bike atop, sliding side door wide open revealing my wayfaring van lifestyle. Reading still raw lyrics from a laptop perched on the bench, I explored a new alternate tuning like a dog with a bone, chasing the basic riff with new chord shapes and leaning hard into the melody’s essence, allowing it to decide what the next chord might be. Surely no later than 6 or 7 a.m., I was adequately caffeinated and in full workflow mode.
A man driving a black Mercedes coupe squealed into a parking space, practically stumbling out of the driver’s seat in his urgency to place a coffee order. He seemed to be in his early thirties, and, pausing to adjust his designer suit, shot me a look of absolute disdain, as if to say, ”Get a job, bum.” But something about that look didn’t ring true. What I actually intuited on the receiving end was a sense of utter envy, even if he himself could not locate it within. Little did he know that in some way I envied him as much or perhaps more than he may have envied me. I, the intrepid crusader for personal truth though miserably alone and resource-poor and he, the well established company man with a full checklist of societal approvals and demands and yet- one imagines- a veritable stranger in the company of his own thoughts, desires and sensibilities. Two equally enviable, equally envious early birds- fun house mirrors to each other- worming their respective ways through an ever wriggly world.
I don’t know, can’t recall if that paradoxical juxtaposition of values partly inspired the lyrics, but in retrospect the energy of contrast is definitely contained by São Paulo.1 In full disclosure, I’ve not yet been to Brazil, but have worked with and befriended a goodly number of Brazilians and include them in my extended Latin American family, so it wasn’t too much of a stretch to import São Paulo as a generic place holder for x marks the spot- which is to say, somewhere preferably south of the border, which is not here. São Paulo certainly seemed more far flung and exotic than any cliché locale in vanilla-infused Gringolandia and as an unanticipated bonus added another saint’s name to my burgeoning song repertoire.
The genesis of the song itself was an event that from the outside seemed innocuous enough but was experienced like a slow motion atom bomb exploding inside me, heart and mind shattered to smithereens. In truth, I am eternally grateful for that prompt into self combustion. It was precisely the catalyst that would launch me headlong into the fertile abyss of the next stage of my life, a fundamental loss of ego identity and the inglorious dark-night-of-the-soul return to Florida, just in time to spend the final five years of my beloved father’s life in close proximity.
But on this particular sunny, status quo Los Angeles day- a day like so many others- I drove quite contentedly to my server job at Earth, Wind & Flour in Santa Monica, a buzzing homestyle pizza and salad joint with sawdust on the floor and a ponytailed old hippie in compulsory Hawaiian print shirt to greet you.2 A call came in on my archaic Nokia cell phone, name and number on the scratched LCD screen triggering a deep warmth and slight giddiness, the kind imparted by a whiff of a missed lover’s perfume. It was, in fact, that of an ex-lover, or dare I say THE ex-lover, the one whose indelible mark had been slowly seared deep into my psyche and soul over the course of a decade and to whom I must respectfully credit the initial seeds of this book/album. Indeed, the spiritual trajectory my life took after meeting her in college in 1995 was unequivocally mystical and surreal; in many ways she became an inadvertent guru of sorts, a teacher of esoteric truths via the default parameters of simply being. Ten years, two states and many iterations of coupledom later, we were still miraculously in each others’ lives at that time, though- it would seem- not for much longer.
The call was awkward and brief, leaving me nothing short of shell-shocked. Passing my turn onto Wilshire and blindly hanging a left instead, I drove on in a state of dumbfounded silence- for miles south past Venice Beach and beyond, as if by some hibernating magnetic resonance being pulled towards her Laguna Beach lair. It wasn’t until the restaurant called to ask where the hell I was that I snapped out of it and hightailed it back to Santa Monica, arriving to a red-faced manager and an hour late for the lunch rush. There are occasional experiences in life for which one has not words, much less actions, hardly prepared for the throwing down of the cosmic gauntlet. Like the tarot’s Arcanum XII card- though not necessarily by one’s own volition- one hangs in a muted kind of void, cocooned against the villainous barbs that line the stems of life, awaiting liquefaction of the body and its prophesied resurgence - and sometimes simply waiting- in vain for only god knows what.
Rage is a soul companion with which I unwittingly entered this world, likely as leftover homework from the last go-r0und. Rage and a particular recalcitrance towards agency, a thwarting of easy fixes. Even in the womb I was a relentless kicker, a puncher, though I seemed to veto any opportunity to come out and face the inevitable music. When I was finally jettisoned out into the world, it was, I’m sure, a most unwelcome exodus, eyes remaining closed for the better part of a week. A mild mannered and compliant little pisher on the whole, when my ire was lit I threw great theatrical tantrums concluding with my pièce de résistance, the slamming of head full force against the nearest wall or floor. It made for phenomenal cocktail hour entertainment if not otherwise supplying an obvious reason to drink.
I’m not sure where I first learned to contain it, to drive it hard like weary cattle into the hinterlands of my own choleric, repressed nature. Mom used to enjoy the idea that she broke me of those habitual tantrums, as if somehow she emerged victorious from my terrible two’s, swaggering out of the corral with stirrups still humming, dragging cooly on a Marlboro. My best guess is that like the herpes virus my vitriol eventually went undercover, adding yet another layer to the wash-rinse-repeat cycle of the great karmic laundromat, ancient Chinese secret notwithstanding. Later, between fifth and sixth grade at a North Carolina summer camp called Deep Woods, it would rear itself temporarily like a retrograde phoenix with an axe to grind, then fall back into slumber until ninth grade at a boarding school in Connecticut, a fancy little place called Hotchkiss.
I likely perfected the art of the silent cry that first year at boarding school, learning to wail in my bunk for hours in complete silence so as not to disturb my bunkmate nor alert him as to exactly what kind of homesick pussy I really was. I recall viewing a print of Munch’s The Scream in a college art history class and being chilled to the bone to feel that I knew his work at a visceral, cellular level. Many distant decades beyond prep school, I discovered as a new yoga student that a similar technique of constricting the epiglottis to create a kind of ocean like sound while exhaling had actual application in a yoga context when coupled with the controlled in breath as well. This specific kind of pranayama, or breathing technique, even had a name: ujayi breathing, which translated from the Sanskrit meant victorious breath. Funny…it didn’t feel victorious at the time. More like hell on monster truck tires.
But that sunny, status quo Los Angeles day, perched at the helm of my red Plymouth Voyager bearing due south, I was plunged again face down into the muddy Appalachian trail with anger management Bobby and his steady-handed hatchet holding court, circled back to the midnight desolation of my ninth grade bunk, returned to as many abandonments and betrayals as has endured my soul in this life and perhaps in those past. It’s the kind of dissociative PTSD phenomenon that launches one into some astral orbit of self, recognizing and revolving around things familiar simply as a perfunctory reaction to habit and muscle memory but devoid of reasoning, taking cues from executive functions but never actually engaging, dragonfly-skimming the surface of life and flitting from one interaction or decision to the next without so much as a hiccup of thought, deadpan eyes revealing all. I spent three days or so like that in a kind of invisible, hermetically sealed tomb, feeling as though Arturo, the daytime salad guy at EW&F, had double wrapped me also in cellophane at the end of his shift along with the freshly sliced cucumbers, tomatoes and shredded carrots. That sunny Los Angeles day, I died another death when she told me flatly that she no longer cared to know me. She had her reasons; Lord knows, she did. But after a decade of investing in deep friendship and what I experienced as a true romance of the spirit, however itinerant, the discord was too much for my heart and mind to fathom.
In any case, she hadn’t even suggested a word of disapproval for the nomadic shape my life was taking until my newly acquired sailboat disappeared mysteriously from its anchorage in Marina Del Rey, and I circulated a lengthy email to friends and family regarding my current status as a “captain without a ship.” Taken to exploring the challenges of van life by necessity, I had actually begun to enjoy the radical simplicity of life as an itinerant artist, maximizing my music making time while minimizing my overhead. As a narcoleptic, I could think of nothing more spot-0n and comical than effectively dragging a bed with me wherever I went, my own private Idaho’d version of that old American Express mantra: Don’t leave home without it.
I can’t possibly know what finally took her over the edge to expunge our ten year history once and for all, but I suspect it matters not. One does what one must in this magnificent shit-storm of a life, come hell or high water. I lasted another two months or so living in the back of my van, shuttling between work shifts at the restaurant and beachside writing sessions, and when the sun went down I sought out the least conspicuous place to park for the night, more often than not the restaurant’s back parking lot after the owner had gone home. This made for a remarkably efficient post-dinner-shift commute and, for the most part, I was convinced I had sufficiently hacked the capitalist system to my advantage and was living my best LA life rent free.
The reality, however, was decidedly more bleak and short lived.
Café y Gallopinto. San José, Costa Rica. Summer 1989
In June of 1989, at the precipice of being cast out, launched, blasted off into the definitive desert of a man’s great becoming- one that, alas, never fully arrives to that sanctified promised land of hairy chested Herculean oasis- my parents financed for me a summer vacation return to Costa Rica, the land and heartthrob of my youth, and, I suspect, quietly hoped for my ritual ascendence into manhood.
I arrived to catch my flight at Miami International Airport, puppy faced virginal twenty year old that I was with a swooping quaff of blond hair that, I would in retrospect realize, was fit to drive the Ticas mad- a worthy prop wasted on a gameless innocent. With me I carried a small duffel bag of clothes and a student backpack containing two small, soft cover Penguin publications which were to be my self-appointed summer study- Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching and a greatest hits compilation of TS Eliot’s poetry, The Wasteland and Selected Poems. As so much in life comes in threes, it seemed inevitable that I would be approached at the airport by a Krishna devotee wielding an absolutely free ISCON publication of the Bhagavad Gita, for which he would see to it that I eventually surrendered twenty dollars to Krishna after an engaging though slightly abrasive conversation, in part due to my irritability in the face of overt salesmanship or evangelical fundamentalism of any stripe, dot or denomination.
Once back in the tropical Eden in which I spent seven pivotal years as a child, I occupied a glorious summer exploring old delights anew and, barring the exception of a painfully quick rendezvous with a saucy thirty-eight year old mother- a clumsy deflowering won in a coin toss masterminded by my devilish travel companion Neil- I spent most of those glorious three months not getting laid but rather wishing it so while hungrily drinking in the sounds, smells, tastes, grooves and impressions of life in the tsunami of fecundity that is the tropics, cells and synapses akimbo and bursting with life. Backed by the literary soundtrack of those two diminutive volumes which I carried with me everywhere (often leaving poor Gita behind due to her sheer size and weight), I dipped into them erratically and spontaneously, most often while lingering over umpteen cafés con leche or galloping plates of gallopinto con huevos y platanos maduro, duly reaching for my RDA of wisdom or ferreting out some inspiration or ineffable hiccup of wonder and beauty for which one recedes into the bountiful cupboards of art and spirit hardly enough.
Little else
in life
pleases a man
so much
as
a coffee
and
a conundrum
I wonder if it’s not place that is a man’s first true romance? Before he can reason, long before he has any agency at all, he knows only the womb, and then the tit, and then the eyes. He knows the heat. The smell of mother’s skin, the taste of her milk, her voice. The swaddle of cooing warmth that rescues him from wetness, the homeward bound plush of breasts, the heartbeat of Source- or the distant echo of motherland at least- locked out as he is now on the cold, cruel periphery of paradise.
From that idyllic Costa Rican summer sojourn of 1989, it would be thirty years, give or take- thirty years of the great give and take of life that binds worldly lessons to a central girding of truth, of an accumulated aggregate of perspective and experience fused with the unique encoding that determines who we each are and how we will meet the day. It would be thirty years of clandestine, contortionist negotiations between head and heart and penis before they each reconciled themselves to a treaty, a truce, or- better- a merging into union. What the heart longs for, what the body craves, how the mind interprets and distorts, ingests and assimilates- these are, I submit, some of our species’ greatest challenges after the basics of sheer survival are met. Considered as a whole, these essential quandaries of the masculine trajectory may well form the seed of much of the fractious religions and fractured societies spanning the globe.
Thus was the enigma framed for me in one of my Evergreen College era, pot induced reveries of free form scribbling in which the authority, wit and penmanship of the apparent writer was wholly divorced of the person I knew myself to be; this character had his own distinct personality and insights well beyond my local purview and pay grade. In all his visitations through the years, he’s never once offered a name, so I’ve taken to calling him Swami Groovitude Ganjananda (or just Groovy for short). As far as I can tell, neither he nor I are biologists or scientists of any kind, so please regard the following as exactly what it was- a doobage inspired riffing on the great Beavis and Butthead-meets-South Park episode that seems to be the equivalent of my life playing out in real time before me.
Succinctly entitled: Solving for Y: on the mutant male chromosome, the lesson came in several parts, but relevant to the question at hand was the sardonic notion that the notorious Y chromosome, responsible for testosterone and, consequently, all aggression, violence and warring engendered in the male of the species (particularly during mating season and- lest we forget- mating season for human beings is 24/7, 365), could also be referred to as the existential WHY? chromosome, a restless genetic anomaly that imbued Homo sapiens males with an inherent curiosity and an equally irrepressible urge to venture forth, explore, assault, inhabit, possess and claim dominion over. Ganjananda’s cartoonishly slapstick wisdom seemed to seep out as a combination of perennial philosophy and punk aesthetic, fusing wit and word play as it voiced itself through the jagged slur of the ballpoint pen which he held in my hand, weirdly off-kilter between my middle and ring fingers, yellow legal pad turned at angles so as to render the neat notebook lines nothing more than wallpaper backdrop to be graffitied. I always welcomed his presence and laughed audibly upon reading his better puns as they spilled out onto the page, firing at a furious pace and though not always cohesive, loaning themselves easily to song lyrics. Many of his better ironic and paradoxical notions were written into my early crop of college tunes, though sadly neither of us ever collected royalties. Ha!
Furthermore, in that one particular session, Ganjananda reflected upon the shape of the X vs Y and noted that the female chromosome’s two feet were wide at base and firmly rooted in the Earth; she is connected with the natural cycles of birth and death, the seasons, the waxing and waning of moons; she is largely satisfied to burrow down, nest, stay put and find value, beauty and meaning in the natural world as it is, unchained and changeless. The unstable male chromosome, conversely, with arms spread skyward and legs either bound together or one foot planted definitively upon terra firma while the other dangled whimsically off into ethers, seemed to be at minimum pondering its next step if not in abject surrender and obeisance to sky gods and the absolute overwhelm of a cosmos unknown. Indeed, Groovy said much more on various occasions, but this will do for now- a mere sampling of his mythopoetic imaginings and bizarre disposition.3
What a curious thing it seems to me at present, to have run so many times from the sweet love of a woman only to be teased back by lust or some obscure, intangible hunger undefined. Yet this hunger of its own accord, naked and trembling with desire, beguiled me, left me shaking in the cruel, depleted jowls of morning. The bones of my grown self have always known, deeper than subterranean marrow, what I crave now as a man at the mid-century mark is hardly different than what my infant, soiled self wailed for. From the impossibly petulant demands of a constantly shifting whim to the shimmy sham love shack of a succulent bosom and the bare assed collapse into nothingness and beyond- where man and infant consummately agree is in the experience of Woman as the Source of all sacredness, born and reborn as we are from the very mouth of the Goddess Herself. Something there is so unparalleled in the pure transcendence of making love that no adulting, rational mind can fully grok, as evidenced by the abject loss of self and even in the erotic begging to be annihilated, drained of life force and broken of agency, of willful collusion reduced simply to an utterance, a pittance of funeral ash at the pyre. Portal and prism of life as we know it, oh, Great Puanani of All That Is, I bow to Thee!
There is nothing so powerful on this earth as the potency of the Mother; this we know.4 We hold this truth to be self evident. Woman with child is not to be trifled with, taunted, scorned, poked mindlessly with a stick. Take your life in your hands when you meet mama grizzly in the woods. Outside of that- in the sordid realms of man and his beleaguered ilk- there are few things quite as powerful as a man whose heart and penis align, matching ball caps and knickers, playing for the same team. It took me thirty years to know this, to arrive at an understanding. The knowing of a thing, of course, not being the same as the actual being of it; integration from head to heart to root (or root to heart to head, as you prefer) takes time, a slowly roasted process of awakening to the caffeinated awareness of a fully embodied self. I’ve all my life struggled with this, at pains to simply allow myself be. But look here- here I AM, alive and livened, aroused and arisen by the process of awakening to small batch slow roastings of alchemical loins, drinking in the toasted beans’ aroma long before sipping at the inevitable first golden cup of day’s elixir.
It is still and always but dawn in this good life, I tell you, friend! The mango colored hue of sunrise suggests a turning, an unfolding, a stripping away of cocoons and detritus, dead skins of former selves. There is to be had a tilling of soil into itself, a telling and retelling of creation stories around the winter fire, heroic tales to help ferry us home after the hunt. Let us set course and stand vigil, triangulating sky and earth and self. Let us unravel the map and envision the relish of treasure. Like our sister salmon, let us know that our central truth lies within, and should we navigate our way back to that cradle of river delta and splash our way up the familiar Salish creek, that very truth would set us free- if alone we allow it.
Hops Don’t Lie. Olympia, WA. March 20, 2022
It may seem oddly discordant to begin a new endeavor on an end note, as if to start the year in the midst of winter, but perhaps all of western civilization is as fucked as that, the honorable Julius Caesar himself presiding as the original deep state schmuck. In god’s name, what kind of wanker begins life in the midst of the season of death and decay? Dialing back the clock to the Babylonian calendar, which borrowed from the predating Sumerians, the birth of the year rightly begins, as does all natural life, at the beginning of the life cycle- which is to say springtime- roughly as it reaches its apogee at the vernal equinox.
I sit here precisely on that august occasion- the vernal equinox- settling in at the Oly Taproom after a three day Ayahuasca retreat and toast the new year, Olympia style, with a hazy IPA. Not the recommended way to return to the world after a sacred medicine ceremony, I grant you that, but it is something of an auspicious confluence, so I make the arduous and calculated sacrifice to celebrate with a cold one. The calendar reads March 20, 2022, and it most definitely feels like the beginning of some kind of something, though what it is ain’t exactly clear, to echo the Buffalo Springfield of a bygone era. Not unlike the vague obelisk a-shimmy in the night sky, peering down from behind her silver cloud-lined perch to occasion the momentary swoon, I, too, am beginning to feel the hazy. Riffing on Shakira, I mouth the words “my hops don’t lie” and earn myself a stingy chuckle from this audience of one. It’s a tough crowd tonight.
But beginnings are also endings just as endings beget the chaos and calculus of new begins. Caesar knew this and in homage to Janus, the two-faced god who looks both to past and future, decided the year should begin then, on January 1st. While defying natural law, it makes its own kind of megalomaniacal sense, I suppose, in this time of modern day megalomaniacs and sociopathic, reality-tv narcissists extraordinaire. Strange though it seems, the great lengths to which a man will go to justify his petty gods and gold encrusted petticoats (Midas-sized metacarpals notwithstanding).
To wit, in this inebriated moment as I write, a woman and child are somewhere no doubt being buried alive under the rubble of a shelled Kyiv apartment building. These are the caviar and blood stained bookmarks of history; these, the bastard repositories of unchecked human vanity and its penchant for perverse guffaws. We are- to be sure- a blood thirsty lot, our species, born to an epigenetic cluster-fuck of trespasses and untold misdeeds and horrors. Kick the can down the road if you must, but none of us are clean. Somewhere in the cobwebbed recesses of our DNA lingers at least one ancestor gone buckshot postal, incestuous horn-wearing halfwits dragging knuckles thick through the fetid bogs of time. From an historical multigenerational lens, as it seems to me, we all have blood on our hands. Not a one of us is innocent, inculpable. Not a one.
Yet despite the heartbreak and dismay, the disbelief and news-soaked malaise, there remains a single certainty, a singularity, a unity gain of frequencies in the immediacy of now. Spring has sprung and her resilience marches on, despite the vagaries and odious derelictions of mankind. Let us welcome her new-come buds, her birdsong flirtations, even as she beckons us with open arms into her fold. Let us hold with joined palms the entire spectrum of life for better and worse and reconcile ourselves to the complicated algorithm and pulse of sentience within time and space, hallowed brick and mortar of our three dimensional home.5
Let me be clear- pimping the wares of nature’s season of fecundity is not to excuse away the tyranny of monstrous men and the destruction left in their despotic wake. Nay- it is instead a clarion call, the peal of our iconic national bell, cracked though it may be. That liberty and justice for all sentient life prevail, and for the good Earth- our sacred mother, Pachamama- however ravaged she finds herself today. It is indeed possible to entertain two distinct yet oppositional truths together and still navigate at plumb. The center can hold, I tell you, all the more when we finally disband our binary stations and swing to the spectrums that light and sound and all manner of physics enjoin. Binaries are only applicable at a comfortable and abstract distance, but ask any twelve roosters to pinpoint the break of day and you’ll find an entire grain silo of speculation between dawn and dusk.
Amongst all other uncertainties, this much we know- there is no Plan(et) B, no referee’d do-over, no instant replay to consult as we languish here on the eleventh-hour line of scrimmage, a mere button’s push away from indiscriminate annihilation. The red phone rings and we pick it up, only to discover 1979 calling. Deja vu, she says in her best honey-smooth Dionne Warwick croon. Did you miss me?
Sprouting into our preteen and teenage years during the burning Bush and Reagan era, my sister and I arrived like cannon fodder to Florida’s evangelically redneck gulf coast at the mercy of two loving parents completely oblivious to the writhing wiles and machinations of the antebellum south and its rancid swamp cabbage swill. It seemed to me at the time like an arbitrary enough inferno in which to waste away, sinners at the hands of an angry god and what not, given the myriad other potential hells that a cold war America might have wrought. Life seemed nonetheless overwhelmingly fragile and precarious to my intellectually curious and empathic being and a very, very long distance from the beloved Costa Rica which had pampered me in a veritable garden of mango-laden Eden for the majority of my first nine years of sensory input and memory.6
Back in the United States, however, I awoke countless nights to sweaty nightmares of nuclear warfare and demise, charred awareness melting into oblivion. It struck my precocious ten year old mind as absurd and surreal that grown-ass teachers, as a matter of policy, would ask us to hide under our desks in the event of a nuclear strike. Was no one doing the fucking math here? Clearly… NOT. Mostly, like a second term Reagan, we were all asleep at the wheel (minus the vigilant few who were not), minding the till and paving the way for big business to get even more bloated, while gathering up labor unions and environmental regulations like stray kittens in a burlap sack. Down at the local polluted wetland, a few heavy stones would rid us of any leftover New Deal vermin. At the height of the Reagan-Bush regime, it seemed like freedom was just another word for nothing left to fuck. Golly, Beav, wasn’t life swell?
Recently I happened upon the original scratch paper lyrics and saw that the initial chorus used the words San Francisco, though clearly it struck me as being too cliché, which is likely where the jab at dog eared ’60’s clichés came from.
In fairness, the proprietor Dennis was staunchly NOT a hippie, despite all accoutrements to the contrary.
For an actual mind-bending, science based and unwittingly feminist account of genetics and sex chromosomes, please read zoologist Lucy Cooke’s new book Bitch: On the Female of the Species . This is a great article too: https://www.redbull.com/gb-en/theredbulletin/lucy-cooke-zoologist-animal-kingdom-gender-interview.
For a fresh and powerful perspective on the age-old Mother Earth trope, check out Charles Eisenstein’s recent musing on Lover Earth.
Far easier it is, I realize, to play armchair general from this cozy beer soaked stoop than to be betting every second against the house in the streets of Ukrainian cities. For heroic hometown Neo’s fighting the good fight, besieged as they are by a bloated empire of reptilian Smiths, it is a showdown of biblical proportion, to be sure. Davy, run and get your sling, brother. It’s time to see their Smiths & raise them a wascally Wesson they won’t soon forget.
The first two years of New Jersey toddler life were, I’m told, garden state status quo, spent occasionally soiling the obligatory diaper but more often than not employing the sandbox as coconspirator, much to the chagrin of the neighborhood mafia cats and the woebegone sod who had to clean my shitty tuchus up.