On Desire Pt. 1

According to Buddhism, desire is the cause of all suffering.  According to Catholicism, Lustful and gluttonous desires should be suppressed. According to capitalist doctrine our desires should be satisfied by our purchases. According to the Pizza hut commercial the object of our desires (ostensibly the pizza) should be ignored and we should merely focus on the desired outcome: To become un-hungry.    Buddha, Pope Benedict, Adam Smith and the pizza delivery boy are all unanimous in proclaiming that desire is something to be avoided.

What a crock.

Feeling full, post-coital bliss, transcendence, standing on the summit, the end of an adventure, hugging your child after being away from home,  finally getting your shaking hands on that beautiful iphone........   These are all fine feelings.  I bare them no grudge but right now I want to stand up and flip the bird at both the federal reserve and the banyan tree and say that desire is the first thing we are born with and the last thing that leaves us when we die and it is a thing to be savored and enjoyed.

Think of what it means to lack desire: to not look at your lover with passion, to smell fresh-baked bread in the morning and not want to smother it in butter and rip it with your teeth, to see a blue ocean and not want to dive in, to see a gorgeous baby and not want to hold it, to find a great book and not want to open it.    The only people who feel this way are those who are dying or significantly dead inside.   I have watched elderly people successively lose one desire after another and it is the one sure sign that they are going to be leaving soon.    

The problem is that most people have been socialized to think that hunger should be sated, orgasms attained, and products pocketed in the minimum amount of time possible without ever stopping to feel how good it feels to really want something.   Our cultural innovation has been to shorten the cycles of desire and gratification so that they are indistinguishable.  

  People go into debt to shorten the period of desire and lovers become heartbroken when their desires are not immediately reciprocated.  I want to focus on the latter point for a moment.  

  How many times have you heard someone tell you how painful it is to be attracted to someone but he/she doesn't feel the same way?  How privileged this person is to be able to look at someone and be attracted to everything about them, to desire to touch and be with this person in every moment.  

  So kids, savor your desires 'k?  You've gotta live with them for the rest of your days and without them you'd be a sad lump of homogenous nothing.  (can you tell that I suddenly got tired?)

Big trouble in little china

Now seriously why can't we have one of these in the USA?

The fountain of mojo

A dearest friend.

A first rate humorist.

A musical prodigy.

An involuntary patient at a mental health facility.

The next time "no woman, no cry" plays on the radio listen carefully to the guitar solo. For just a second get past the fact that this -the most popular song in the world- has been played for you over 10^16 times. Listen to the guitar solo. It is one of the greatest moments of musical phrasing ever. It is entirely made up of the major scale, possibly the most colourless mode in music and yet some unknown genius crafts this particularly bland framework into a masterpiece of melodious, semi- blue note, emotional hooks.*
I once sat down with my dear friend Eric and handed him a mandolin. He had never even touched one before. To make it easy for him I backed him up on guitar and played the most popular and well known song of all time. After about thirty seconds of figuring out where to put his fingers Eric did a note-perfect rendition of that guitar solo on an instrument that he had never played before!** Every musician who knows him has joked about how much they hate him. This is why.

I have played in bands with Eric and watched as our audience impatiently sits through the whole song waiting for him to take a solo. My own attempts to impress through flashy guitar-work would go unappreciated but uneducated plebs in small towns in Iowa would stand up to applaud his piano solos.
My beautiful daughter responded to his playing in-vitro; the first noticeable movement of her life. Liddy (my wife) called me to feel her belly as Eric evinced music from the worn, detuned piano at my mother's Iowa double-wide.

You may think that I would be jealous of this man's abilities as they are far surpassing my own but I am not. In fact if you have never had the chance to be next to a true master musician as they bring transcendent creative force into the world I feel sorry for you. It is as though you have eaten those hard, bland tomatoes at wal-mart for your whole life whereas I have bitten the sweet, summer-fresh, heirloom variety from the garden of fertility.

All my life I've watched the most talented and brilliant people fall. Mostly it has been due to drugs. I thought Eric would be immune as a straighter edge could not be found. On the contrary what Eric fell to was his own gift. In the depths of excessive meditation he found a level of bliss that the world could not compete with. The same spiritual gift that brought him to the highest levels of musical expression took him to the taste of the enlightenment we all crave. Now he does not want to live in our inferior world; instead he just wants to get back to that state but can't figure out how. I feel like a flea trying to school a genius if I bring up a suggestion for him but I don't care. Here is what I think:

The love we feel for this man/boy can bring him back. The gift he brings to us can also nourish his soul. He is the fountain of mojo and when we are around him we can all feel it but somehow the mojo has stopped flowing back to him. It has stopped nourishing him. This is my own statement but also a request to of you who know him as well as those of you who don't. Give your love to this guy. If you live near him make the effort to go and see him. It's not scary. Stop living as though the police are watching you for signs of craziness. You're his friends dammit and you're supposed to love him. On the other hand if you don't know Eric then leave a comment here and I'll pass it on to him. I got to see him this weekend and I'll be back there again. Start to care. Bring your own gift of love into this world and you'll be more like him. Maybe then this world will be worthy of this great soul.


*I'm talking about the really famous live version that's on that compilation album that everyone has. This version, rather than the actual studio recording has become the de-facto standard that everyone has in their mind.

**Eric was already a master of two stringed instruments: the guitar and bass. They are both tuned so that the intervals between strings are fourths (do re mi fa). The mandolin is like the violin; tuned in fifths (do re mi fa so). The logical processing required to transform guitar knowledge to mandolin knowledge still crashes my brain after a year of playing both instruments.

Hello nobody

All the time I sit around thinking of things. I often ask questions that other people think are weird like:

How many tomatoes would it take to provide sufficient caloric energy to power a Boeing 747?

What the hell is all that extra universe for?

Why are men so afraid of kissing each other?

Questions like these have logical answers and they often reveal some crazy things about perception, politics, spirituality, morality and how ignorant we all are.

I like farms, sousaphones, latinas, and mangoes.

My favourite place is the ocean.

My favourite feeling in the world is when I'm proved wrong. I crave it. I desperately want to find out that everything I cherish is misguided because the internalisation of a paradigm shift is like a mental and emotional purge equivalent to the most powerful orgasm.

I believe that sex has the power to heal most of the malaise of humanity and that music is a direct channel to the concept of divinity.

My mother is always encouraging me to be a writer. She's going to regret that.

I think it's likely that privacy is a thing of the past and the best way to move forward in this modern world is to become a radically-honest, over-sharer. If you read this blog regularly then you'll learn more about me than you wanted to know. Except..... you're reading it so you did want to know it didn't you? In fact you've always wanted a friend who'll tell you everything didn't you? You lucky bastard, you just got a warantless wiretap into my brain and you didn't even need an unelected president and his woefully misnamed "patriot act" to get it.

Kiss your mother.


Note: Edited to replace line that bizarrely disappeared.