...and they lived happily ever after. Smith & Lady: poets, artists, photographers & adventurers.
Our relationship was forged to the soundtrack of Yoko Ono's magic,
frenetic, love-laden song, "Walking On Thin Ice." ( play song )
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I was thinking about the Cleveland Five, the young men who were led astray and attempted to damage a bridge. I’ve been musing about bridges and the affection I feel for them and what this means in the context of my sadness over the situation of the Cleveland Five.
Bridges are powerful. In a physical sense, it is a very notable thing when a bridge is built to connect one side of a city to another, one community to another.
Sometimes they’re controversial, like bridges that have been built over neighborhoods, eliminating some existing housing, erecting a physical barrier in the neighborhood. But that’s not where I’m going with this. I’m interested today in the positive aspects of bridges. I’m interested in bridges that connect.
So there are bridges that connect such that we are one world, one peace, such that we know we are one piece of world. These bridges go all around the world. You can always find a bridge by just watching a video and learning about the beauty of another culture:
And there are bridges between the material world and the mind of God (however you define It, God/Goddess/Reality/Interconnectedness)… bridges that make God more perceptible to us, like praying, just meditating and perhaps talking to God, thinking about God, doing something good, appreciating reality.
There are bridges that connect you to me, family member to family member–the bridge of communication is one of the best bridges of all. There’s also the bridge of example, but it is very good to be able to communicate respectfully and hopefully joyfully with each other. It’s a good thing to be able communicate well as a mature adult, although I wouldn’t say that just because one doesn’t communicate well doesn’t mean that they are not mature. It’s just that, well, it helps a lot. And although although it hasn’t been very prevalent in modern life, I think that with social media, it is becoming more so, and that all people are really starting to wake up, look around, see what they are doing and not doing, and adjust accordingly.
Thich Nhat Hanh keeps coming to mind. I would like to write something fresh and encouraging and good and entertaining for my weekly walkingthinice.com blog. My state of mind is such that I am not sure if I am in the right or wrong by not doing a particular project. Sometimes I think that rightness depends partially on the process one goes through to do the particular thing that is being evaluated as being right or wrong. There’s a kind of hysteresis to many processes.
Another thing that comes to mind is that I am holding a bunch of concepts in my mental hands, my buffer, and sometimes the concepts slide in and around each other when I don’t mean for them to. At least sometimes it produces good and meaningful results anyways.
But I’m holding these concepts in my “hands” and I sigh. How do I explain it? I am a multi-threaded process?
Which reminds me of semaphores. I am not very familiar with the word but have used the concept in programming. The word “semaphore” keeps on occurring to my mind the past two weeks. Wikipedia says “In computer science, a semaphore is a variable or abstract data type that provides a simple but useful abstraction for controlling access by multiple processes to a common resource in a parallel programming or multi user environment.”
Reality is providing me with clues–Thich Nhat Hanh and semaphores.
I have been thinking for a long time about my brain and the knowledge that is made available to me, and wondering how much of it is stored locally in my brain tissue versus how much is encoded on a quantum level elsewhere and can float in to me. I really don’t believe that I am limited by skin anymore.
How much is steeping, and how much can be compartmentalized, made distinct? When I sit in a room it is like steeping in the room, and the attributes of the room become available to me. When I invest in a group of smart people, I become smart in the topic of their specialty, although sometimes this takes time. Or if I watch a violent movie, the movie impresses itself on me and my subsequent reality in a way that I don’t like unless I somehow negotiate the situation well. Thich Nhat Hanh says to consume mindfully and that one benefits by not watching violent media.
I have a toolset, a mental toolset that I use to negotiate and navigate reality. It is still in development, but it works somewhat. I’ve got a mirror in my toolset–that’s for sure. I have my computer–my computer is a good tool for my toolset. And I have my notepad. Oh, I’ve got Spotify. And I’ve got praying, and I’ve got meditation. I have my word.
There’s what I already have, and there’s what I would like to add to the toolset or know that I already have anyways. I would like some capacitors and filters and transformers and transistors. I would like seeds, especially heirloom seeds–I’d like to be an aunt and I would like to make sure that my nieces and nephews and my family (everyone is my family) has good food to eat, and their descendants for as long as the Mother Earth will do it, and that Mother Earth will do this for quite a long time. I would like the future in my toolbox, the good future. I would like Nature and Civilization coexisting wonderfully forever. And the good present. And compassion towards the past.
I would like to plunk parts of the set onto the template with the understanding that the set is very large, and that what I plunk onto it might not always be pithy. I would like to plunk pieces of the puzzle onto it, the n-dimensional puzzle such that reality can interpolate gently, understand with compassion, extrapolate beautifully, and coat irritants in metaphorical pearl to remove any harm without harming that which has irritated. I would like language to be useful but for those who don’t have precise voices to not be limited by lack of technical know-how; I would like for every good impulse to be augmented and every not so good impulse to be transformed or damped.
I am not sure if this relates to your particular threads of reality or not, but it is some helpful stuff for me, and I share it with the caveat that I wish for you to explicitly wish to “do no harm,” but even if this seems silly, I wish for it to not cause harm regardless, and rather, to cause blessings.
Smith, me and Mandycat are on a spaceship. Sometimes it’s just me, actually. But most of the time it’s the three of us. It’s our apartment. Our apartment is the spaceship cabin. And we are the passengers of the events that we read about. And sometimes we are the captains. We can always take the helm of the spaceship and help the events around us, too.
The other day I was cutting out our new insurance ID cards from Progressive and at the same time I decided to put together the spaceship model, OUR SPACESHIP EARTH. It struck me that we are going to be driving backed up by Progressive now in our big wide spaceship earth. And I also found a bunch of four leaf clovers that day. Very auspicious.
We have platinum membership on OUR SPACESHIP EARTH so I wonder what that means. Does that mean that we are VIPs? I think we are VIPs if we remember that other people are VIPs, too. But back in the apartment helm, we are definitely captains of this realm. And sometimes outside the realm, too, when we settle in and gel into the moment, listen to its sounds and understand what is going on with the flow.
Several years ago I asked the aliens to beam us aboard. I think they are telling me that we are already on-board.
The meaning of OUR SPACESHIP EARTH is to realize that although Earth is a big wonderful place, it seems to be finite at least in the everyday grasping of it and understanding how to utilize it properly, and that this spaceship is to be respected and maintained, especially the garden part of it. We are still in Eden; we were never expelled.
I do not think we will need to use our ID cards other than to have good assurance that we are covered, the Precautionary Principle. And I like the idea of it being with Progressive. Does that mean that we’re driving our spaceship in a progressive direction now? I like to think so. Progressive with all the good connotations.
I know that the Universe is affected pretty profoundly by what one puts out. When I do an issue of the city poetry zine, a lot of poetic energy returns to me as payment. When I spend time learning stuff for work on my own time, more paid work comes back to us as payment. When I volunteer for an activist cause, frequently the next day there will be some court ruling in favor of my perspective. This is indeed a Reality of Mind, and the microcosm of one’s local environment affects the macrocosm profoundly.
As a person concerned with the material I put out and help with for the Universe, I’ve had a bit of a time understanding how to rationalize my role as co-writer of our new book, Stations of the Lost and Found.
I pick up the book, and sirens charge down the street. The air gets excited and the birds stir. The sun goes behind a cloud. I open it and read its words of crimes past, and I make disclaimers to the Universe. I wrangle.
But intuitively, there’s this ball of volition in me, a ball of understanding, and it feels that the book is a good thing. Not that I want people to do the actions in the book, but that Smith’s life is a life I might have wanted to have lived just to have seen it.
Hard life, for sure. Taking pictures of his penis for art. Armed robbery. Shooting himself up with cocaine. Seemingly countless injuries as he tore against the very edges of the fabric of reality. Talking matter-of-factly about masturbation. Showing his wounds from women and daring to write about crying. Oozing art and poetic dividends from the scars in his skin, the falls, the hemorrhaging, the cancer.
Strangely enough, even as his wife I am sympathetic to his character in the book as he moves through his twenties trying to figure out how to find love. Strangely enough, I want the character to find true satisfaction in his relationships with either Red or Maudlin. More sympathy for Red as she was his wife.
I want him to straighten out through that ordeal. I want for him to have not put himself in jail, but I love the stories of his experiences in jail. Love his story about his fear of Ringo but I wouldn’t want anyone to experience the situation:
For the first six months I was in the tiers. A tier is seven two man cells and a shower, all enclosed in bars. Each night we were locked into our cells, and each morning let out to wander the six by fifty foot communal area. Our tier had Ringo. He was big, black, brutal, and did not like me, not because I was white, but because I wouldn’t get out of his way when he walked. And he walked all day in a continuous oval with a short detour each loop around me. He was working towards hurting me, and said so. Ringo scared the shit out of me. But I scared me more because I wouldn’t give in. When I’m that afraid, I seem to go out of my way to piss off what I’m afraid of. And what I was afraid of was bigger, stronger, faster, meaner, and an admitted fatal fighter. I felt ill.
Then the odd backhand of salvation. I had smuggled one too many letters out of prison. This letter described a psycho guard and his abuse of prisoners and their families. The warden called me to his office, showed me the illegal letter and quietly said, “Smuggling is eighteen months. I wonder if you have anything to say about your charges against the guard?”
“What I’ve written is not only true,” I said, “but I haven’t even scratched the surface of Sarge’s verbal and physical abuse of visiting wives.”
Warden told Sarge to return me to my cell, and for me to think about the eighteen months and we’d finish tomorrow.
I went to my cage and I worried. I worried about tomorrow. I worried about Sarge’s retaliation. I worried about the eighteen months. I worried about my wife who was sleeping with an excon who was not me. And I really worried about Ringo.
Next day the warden called me into his office and casually told me, “You’re moving downstairs to the dorm. I’m making you head cook.” No mention of the letter, Sarge, or the eighteen months.
One thing every prisoner wanted was a job that got you out of the cells and into the dorm with its one locked gate, radio and TV. And of all the jobs, cook was cockerel’s walk.
Switching so quickly from such certain sorrow to overwhelming wealth fucks your mind, sends too many threads simultaneously in too many different directions. Yet I instantly flashed: I’m free from Ringo.
If you’re going to be in prison, the kitchen’s the place to be. The best thing about working in the kitchen was I could eat what I wanted when I wanted. And I could wander about and find places of privacy. The menu was pretty basic because a chunk of money allotted for prison food went to the warden’s house budget instead. Even though I had never cooked anything before, I’d cook things like fifty gallons of chicken soup. Once I was awakened in the middle of the night by the highway patrol who’d brought in a deer that’d been hit by a car. I’d never done it before, but I skinned and gutted that deer; did it two more times before I left. Whenever I felt like it, I’d fry myself a venison steak. Even when I fall into shit, I find roses around me.
There might have been ten of us in the dormitory, and over a hundred fifty in the prison. To be in the prison dorm, you had to have a prison job. There were dishwashers, food servers, people who fixed things inside prison, somebody who did lawn work and outside tasks and someone else who ran errands. There was no compensation to having a prison job other than getting to live in the dorm, having a little more freedom, and being treated a whole lot nicer. The dorm had a TV and radio and books to read. I always thought it weird to see prisoners sitting around the dorm watching cop shows on TV and rooting for the cops.
After I was down in the dorm a while, one of the trustees ratted out Ringo, who in punishment was supposed to be in a locked cell in a locked tier three floors up. We were all sitting around watching TV, and in walked Ringo, taller, stronger and larger than any of us. Rat was Woody Allen’s size.
Ringo said to Rat, “You ratted me out.”
Rat said no.
Ringo repeated, “You ratted me out.”
Rat really did rat out Ringo, and we all knew it. He had also ratted my letter. Rat started denying again but Ringo hit him hard in the face, knocked him to the concrete floor, and STOMPED five times on his head with his hard work boot. With each stomp, Rat’s head banged against the concrete and bounced up to meet the down-coming boot which smacked his head even harder into the concrete as Ringo said one word per stomp: “You. . shouldn’t. . have. . done. . that.”
None of us moved or spoke, not once. Ringo turned and looked at us to see if he had a problem, decided he didn’t, and left. Rat got up, stemmed the blood, and his head swelled to twice its size.
That’s when I knew I was not the me I thought was me, but the me I needed to be. It’s not my only lesson, but it is one that worked. Had I said or done something, one of two things would have occurred. I’d be dead, or the others would have rallied and we would have stopped Ringo. But had that second happy Hollywood scene occurred, at some time, at some place, Ringo would have found me and hurt me. I know now I did the right thing for me, but it did cost me my mirror mirror on the wall who’s the hero here of all view of myself.
I think the Universe has kept Smith alive because he has written his stories down and because he has pushed the boundaries as a kind of explorer. I’m hoping the Universe agrees and finds the story thrilling and interesting, but doesn’t let it cause harm.
~ Lady
~ ~ ~
The memoir Stations of the Lost & Found by Smith & Lady is available for $20 at https://www.createspace.com/3903652. We’ll have 20 physical copies in soon for first come first serve.
smithfeet
