Gimme twelve steps..

If wishes were fishes I'd never go hungry.
Being human I wish for anything that I don't like or that makes things difficult to just be different, easier. It seems to be that life a lot of the time is unfair and down right cruel. Is it any wonder that people will spend their entire life buying lottery tickets and dreaming about, and praying for the day that they will win. Then all their problems would melt away and they could just be happy. But money? Does this ever fix their problems? I am tired of buying into the idea that money = happiness. We, Americans, are addicted to the omnipotent dollar. People that win the lottery a majority of the time are more unhappy after they've won millions of bucks than before when they were living week to week, paycheck to paycheck.
In a nutshell don't wait for "your ship to come in" to be happy. Problems are the road to happiness. So don't wish all of them away.

My love
These words an offering to you

A drink of spirits and a dark soul this night
A candle on the porch in the face of a cyclone
Your guilt my love a severance of mediocrity
A hole in the reasoning of our conscience
It is the stinging whim of destruction

Your parents my love
Puppets on the stage of all his children
Controlling they jerk them about at their conviction
Some break the strings free to die in peace
Yet others tangle in their hearts
Disoriented without hope

So my love take your sugar pill
And forget the days we lived before
Put on your pretty shoes
And paint your face with the love in my heart
Live your years like the end will come
This the beginning of forgiveness and faith

The "wave" speech..

Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .
History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

Sometimes I am afraid that I will forget. I write down thoughts desperately and stow away keepsakes as if by compulsion. I sit by the river on nights when the wind blows through the trees and over the water, almost carrying my very soul away, and write down memories in my journal.
I wake in the middle of the night trying to remember something just out of reach. Some thought or face that has been lost to time and deteriorating brain cells. Is it possible to forget the beginning of the story? And if so can we ever remember the ending?

The life and times of people you know.

Here's a little bit of what I've been writing. It's still kind of a rough draft.

.... Life being so unpredictable most of the time leads most of us to believe that purpose is elusive in our short unenchanted minute here on earth. However consider that if life in itself is not an end but rather a means to an end, or different yet means to a means of a never ending end, the unpredictability is the “carrot on a string dangling in front of us” luring us on toward the ending, or the non-ending ending, and the purpose. Depending entirely on your view of life I suppose. And so the experiences of life, good or bad, and the daily struggle to survive these are what make up life and the world as we know it....

.... Being born is just about the most unmemorable yet utterly significant event that happens to us. More so unmemorable for us than for our parents I’m sure. My own mother tells the tale of her being in Kaiser Hospital in Vallejo, California with me in her womb refusing to budge an inch. My father, who had already been through this ordeal with my older sister, was nonchalantly at the barber shop getting a haircut. Half way through the haircut the nurse calls the barber shop telling the barber that “If my father wanted to see this baby being born he had better get down to the delivery room.” My father after hearing the news, having only half a haircut, made it to the hospital just in time to see the beginning of my journey into the world....

.... My grandparents lived right across the street from the beach and when I was little my parents tell me that I would just look out the window and watch the ocean swells roll in. Pointing out boats and seagulls to whoever would listen. I would play on the beach pretending to be a pirate, a sailor in merchant marine, or a castaway stranded on the “deserted beach.” I have vivid memories of learning to surf when I was young. My father had rented my younger brother and me longboards and wetsuits then set us free in chilly northern California Ocean. We splashed around for a couple days trying to figure the whole “catching the wave” thing out and then it happened to me first then my brother. I caught my first wave. From that moment on I couldn’t shake the feeling of being propelled atop the water pushed by the powerful hand of the pacific. Times meaning and significance seemed to melt away into the abyss which I was suspended above atop my fiberglass board. My teenage years were spent pursuing the adrenaline addiction of the ride and rebelling against my parents, society, and whoever or whatever other means of outside control of my self indulgent surfing fix....

Azusa

At the bottom of everything you'll see we were dead from the start. Drowning our conscience in the deep blue lies we told. Leaving the door to sleep cracked open for our beautiful disgrace. We'll shake our heads and drink the day. Or taste the barrel of the gun to drain joy cold in our heads. The innocent condemn the sinners and the guilty will forgive the saint. Here at the top of hell we found in paradise we laugh and sing already done. So very happy to find we were upside down. So please hide our pride and shine this little light all alone against the sunshine on Azusa.

Hang up!

My friend Brian has recently written and actually has been for awhile I suppose writing about the inconsistencies of the beliefs of the church that we grew up in. So after reading his posts I've done a lot of thinking recently on my feelings of religion and church. Most that I've tried so hard to hide from being public. I have come to the realization that 1. a man that is above question or doubt has put himself in a position to become corrupt. 2. A man himself cannot accurately judge reality without perspective. And so how can a man get perspective without counsel? Needless to say there are a lot of angry and confusing memories that cloud how I perceive the church. It has taken me a couple years to even get to a place where I'm "ok" with just attending a church again. I sometimes wonder if I can ever have a normal place in a community of believers. There have been so many times that I've wanted to just walk away from all communities that even loosely resemble that of my childhood. Though not to face my "hang ups" and outright anger isn't at all healthy or what I'd want in the long run.