today i read my day away.

i have not been present at all today. mainly, it’s because i’ve been immersing myself in this whole atmosphere of my favorite band in the whole world the Red Hot Chili Peppers and their questionable, shall-we-say pharmacological, adventures. i literally spent every single waking hour, with the exception of eating lunch, reading this book. i had already read the first quarter and then in one marathon reading day finished the rest of it today. so this atmosphere has served as a distraction for me and i haven’t really been thinking about the path at all. it only entered my consciousness on one occasion which was during lunch, the only time i wasn’t reading the book.

i don’t really quite understand yet why it happens to me, but it’s an uncanny pattern of cyclic vacillation with this path i’m engaging. i invariably follow up a few days of intense presence and equanimity with a few days of sunken spirits and doubt and inability to live in the moment. i have to just stick through and keep closely observing my mental states and hope to figure out eventually how to be present all the time. but anyway, if i look back just a couple of months, i was unable to spend any whole day present. this whole thing of spending a couple of days being bathed in the luminous sheen of mindfulness is still relatively new. so, i guess i’m just bound to relapse into my old habits of ego-mind and compulsive thinking and inner unease. it’s ok, because this is a training of the mind and i’m on a good path now. it only goes uphill from here.

anyway, i was truly touched by Anthony Kiedis’s heart-wrenching account of living and growing and playing music and fighting with a terrible demon in the form of an eight hundred pound gorilla beating the life out of it’s slaves from its long-term perch on the shoulders of the afflicted. i really penetrated into his world as i read this story and his voice truly shines through the words on the page. also, there’s something poetic about the way he writes, but not in a conventional poetic sense. it’s very artistic and beautiful. thank you A.K. for presenting humanity such glorious gifts and such love.

so, although i veered quite sharply away from the path today, i enjoyed it greatly. it was a day spent in the presence of true artists and true creativity and true and free humans. i truly share your feelings, AK, on this following quote; i know exactly what you’re talking about:

“You know I love pot, and I love beer, but I am totally sober, just because it completely stopped working for me.”
Anthony Kiedis