Resumés are fucking boring. Here’s some life shit that’s happened that’s worth remembering at least.
In 2006 I took mushrooms with my long-time friend, [redacted], and experienced the collapse of consciousness. I saw the awareness of love and suffering rapidly alternating, up and up and finally exploding into a pure moment of timeless awareness. I became one with the “ground of being”, I “saw god”, and instantly understood yin-yang and Jesus. I knew that happiness, love, peace, and harmony are the flip side of sadness, hatred, violence, and dischord, and they are all the same, identical infinite perceptions of the same singular infinite phenomenon translated by consciousness into time and timelessness. This changed my life forever and also radically and viscerally affected every thing I did for the next months.
When I was 14, I justifiably said “fuck this shit” and ran away from home, stayed with friends from my shitty fast food job, and ended up traveling with them halfway across the state on school buses to 4-H camp (too old to be a camper, too young to be a counselor) where I stayed all the way through the week until the day before the camp ended. Eventually the long arm of the law caught up with me. I was driven home – along with those conspiring friends – while being lectured about morals for 2 hours by the camp director, who was arrested for embezzlement from 4-H the following year. Fuck the police.
In the first few days of our first week of our first 6 months in India we were routed by a series of frankly weird-enough-that-it-makes-you-really-think circumstances to Kainchi where we were honestly trapped by landslides outside the ashram of Neem Karoli Baba. We had incidentally and accidentally been traveling – sharing a little jeep – with a couple we had met on the train, one of whom was a devotee of said Baba, and who had not been to the ashram in years. Rarely, “the mother” (the Baba’s wife) was at the ashram in advance of a pilgrimage. We sat in a small room listening to the (amazing) 24-hour music vigil being conducted by Krishna Das and (more local) friends, took darshan with the mother who knew more about us than I was still comfortable with. I visited the Baba’s room and while sitting there was overcome with an overwhelming combination of a feeling of bliss and beauty and I cried for quite some time. We slept next door to the ashram and I had a prophetic dream of my son Nicholas who was born 4 years later.
When I was 12 years old I wanted a computer, so I could program it. My grandmother loved (probably still loves) to go to the horse tracks and bet on the horses. I went with her and my mother and my grandmother gave me $2 to place a bet on a horse. I picked one that sounded like a good horse, and it was 30:1 odds on the tote board. As it got closer to post time the odds kept getting worse and the horse posted at 99:1 on the board. Needless to say, it won, for $214, and my mother was mortified. She suggested we buy “some bonds” for “college” and I said (basically) “fuck that, we’re going to Service Merchandise™ and buying a computer!”. So I bought a Commodore™ VIC-20™ and I’ve been programming ever since (1984).
Going from single to visiting back and forth every month, to moving across the country to live together, to moving again together across the country, to married (because that’s the next step on the relationship escalator) to unhappy, to troubled, to churning, to “open relationship”, to doing deep work and strong communication, to revamping a building into a second home, to “separated” (two separate independent people supporting each others’ independent lives and relationships), to co-parents of a wonderful child – two people, amazing friends, living on the same property and having wonderful separate lives, that support each other, and family, and community. Our life is incredible and I don’t know how to advise anyone on how to get here.
I slept 5 hours over 5 days (2010), and, later, 7 hours over 7 days (2012) during silent meditation retreats. When I was on track to sleep 10 hours over 10 days (2013) I finally decided maybe I should just go home and find a different way to be on retreat, because not getting basically any sleep for over a week doesn’t really make me feel chill, no matter how much meditation is going on.
I shared a piss and conversation with Bob Pollard at 2am in a parking lot behind a truck.
I’ve held parties that have been amazing, and sometimes were just horrible, horrible ideas.
I traveled again in India on my own in 2012, visiting Gandhi sites and Tibetan-in-exile communities. I traveled to Dandi where Gandhi made salt during the salt Satyagraha and heard a teen listening to “Kolaveri Di” while standing looking at the sea.
I ate at the original Noma, the whole umpteen course meal with smoked birds nests, live shrimp on ice, food with ants in it, and the most amazing assortment of food, drinks, wine, chefs, and people; and got to go back into the kitchen to see how Rene and his chefs created the most amazing things.
I’m totes scared of heights, so I just ran full-sprint off a 50-foot high cliff when I went “cliff diving” with friends at the southern tip of Kona. It was awesome. I fully visualized falling off the insane 50-foot tall reticulated ladder up from the ocean every rung up. I got tired 2/3rds of the way through and just presumed I’d fall and die. It was great.
I met a Sanskrit professor from Kentucky while travelling from Kerala to Delhi. He gave me recommendations for a club in Pune. I listened to Low End Theory while riding a bus from Mumbai through miles of empty hi-rise condo buildings into Pune, met dismayed foreigners sucked into the currents of Osho and Iyengar yoga, and was ultimately misdirected by multiple auto drivers into a thumping 2nd floor Pune club where I spent the night drinking RC and coke with 3 young Indian men with whom I exchanged the secret knowledge of all the curse words we could write down from any language.
The story about going to Curly’s in Anjuna with my dear friend Arafat is too large for the margin and will require emotional commitment during a real (and probably fortuitous) social engagement to share.