Nerdily, I have often had the inclination to change from calling Google Google to calling it The Oracle. You ask it a question and out pops an answer. But then I remind myself that the Oracle denotes “One” and the term Google implies infinite. More nerdily yet, I continue down this neuropathway of fuzzy math and metaphorical science using one of my favorite formulas ‘this is to that like this is to that’. If God- the One omnipotent, omniscient circle whose center is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere is now Google, then God is no longer One, but Many. God is All Of Us, Together, Combined. Not one answer but All Answers.

Full disclosure and perhaps needless to say, the idea of ‘Google as God’ is not unique. Just a simple image search of “Google as God” yielded a bevy of compelling images to choose from. I didn’t have the heart to do a web search. Sometimes you need to keep your head down to and get these things out before doing research, right?

Taking it a step further, does this mean that instead of Many praying, read Searching, to One, we are One praying to Many? Have we turned our faith on its head?

Perhaps this is the sea change we need to propel this Dawning of the Age, to kick this Great Turning in the ars. Perhaps we need to lean on one another and do our praying in private, no more circle-jerks of worship. More fuzzy math, think safety in numbers, perhaps our Searching is more potent in private.

But alas the intent of this prose was not to promote clandestine workstations. It was to awaken within us our radical dependence on One Another. We Ask questions and we Answer questions. We Search and we Get Results. We Plagiarize Wikipedia and we Edit to Reflect Truth as we know it.

Google IS God. We Are Google.

Amen.

“What a time saver!” If I had a dollar for every minute I spent  waiting with a forced smile on my face while someone dialed in their next doctor’s appointment I wouldn’t have to work here. It takes a fraction of the time to jot something down on your palm with something called a pen.  Have you seen these things? Crazy technology if you’re into analog; ball point, felt tip, indelible; selection as unique as you are. 

I am a skeptical new owner of a 3G iPhone. I claw at the touch screen with my finger that I pretend is a pen and make grave spelling mistakes and then hit send when my unathletic digit spills over the ‘o’ into the send icon.  When I pepper my words with the code of the streets I get white-cracker spell-checked by the machine. Upon seeing that I’ve just sent “dog seatbelt” instead of  the intended “ah-ite,” I notice I appear cryptic to the recipient who is now contemplating the complex associative thinking skills of yours truly.  I don’t send a follow-up text correcting myself but instead let them ponder the precious rarity of such a mind.

My user errors take on a life of their own and add dimension to who I am as a person.  Conversly and conveniently, I am able to separate myself from these errors when it doesn’t benefit me to claim them. “My new phone didn’t sync my calendar for some reason.” No. YOU didn’t keep track of your shit. Back in the day you memorized all your friend’s numbers. After that, you wrote them all down before transferring to a new device. Now you’re blindly whoring out your technology to any willing USB dangling from God knows whose PC.  We need to take more analog responsibility for ourselves and shoot a load of good healthy skepticism in the face of this extreme fundamentalist digital faith. Let us not grow lazy and complacent. Let us not lose our potential to self-manage our lives. Yes, let us embrace technology when it truly makes life easier but lets not fool ourselves when we’re wagging the dog.

What was I saying? I got a text.

Dare I say I embraced the unicorn long before its pewter likeness was dangling from someone’s turtleneck? When I was eight, my mom bought me a stuffed unicorn who came pre-named ’Lancelot.’ He had an iridescent, taffeta horn and he awe-inspired me. He was so much more than a fire-retardant, plush toy with 50 identical kin on the shelf. He was my loyal steed, his fine side-seated posture held tall in the face of more realistic inanimate items seemed to say, “I’m so regal I don’t even need to stand up ”. I placed my hopes and dreams upon this synthetic talisman, unaware that one day unicorns would be chic. Sure they’re groovy but who besides me knows that they’re awesome?  Owls are awesome too. Did you ever see an owl fly? They are nocturnal ninjas with  feathers that curl at the ends to break the wind silently. Did you ever hear a baby owl call for its mother who is hunting its dinner? It’s a soundbite you don’t want to miss. Did you ever make eye contact with an owl? Scariest staring contest ever. Deer are rectangular. Their legs impossibly long. They make unexpected grunting noises. I saw this stuff for reals. And now I have to fight myself to not blow $15 on a chrome owl piggy bank because, guess what, I love owls!

Calm down, I know what you’re thinking; I’m a self-centered, deluded milk-toast who actually believes I’d be successful if it weren’t for everyone stealing my good ideas. I can admit we share a common cultural reverence for such mystical creatures plucked straight from our national backyard minus the mythical horse who can only be tamed by a virgin, who knows where this thing came from. One can safely assume that in our boxed-in lives, we value trinkets and images that remind us of who we were back in the day when we communed with nature our animal brethren revealing to us in private moments their own unique strengths our characters revealed and updated by these sacred encounters with them. Now, we’re lucky to have a fenced in yard with a terrier to crap in it. We know this on some level and try to tip the balance back again by throwing our money at things that will remind us of a history that provided us a simple kind of sanity.

It has been observed that the unicorn is the only fabulous beast that does not seem to have been conceived out of human fears. The current cultural fixation on this goat-like entity indicates a paradigm shift away from fear and toward hope, with a splash of virginity and a phallic object of powers believed to treat poison (what a load for that poor virgin to swallow.) If the other trendy subjects are similarly analyzed and the strengths they represent called out, owls are quiet, stealthy, and solitary.   Scarce qualities these days to be sure. Can you imagine an owl multi-tasking, yuckin’ it up with the other birds in his tree while texting his young not to wait up tonight? Deer are abundant and graceful vegetarians with strong rumps and necks for climbing. Again, an equal and opposite response to the detached complexity of modern life; a species high in population with an environmentally sustainable food source and strong body built to transport itself. Consider a deer with thunder thighs rolling through McDonald’s in a Lincoln Navigator? Not so much.

Trends are born and reborn as a response to what’s missing. If we study fashion alone, we have fully stepped back to the 70′s and 80′s, complete with braided headbands, roman sandals, and the same neon, sunglasses frames that used to come with a Happy Meal.  What does this tell us? I think we are concocting a potent milieu, an amalgam of cultural awakening combined with a  punk rock sense of disenfranchised independence and anarchy, to result in a force to be reckoned with. We are going to have a love fest capable of kicking the squares in the face.

So who cares if I liked it first. What matters is that it’s happening, the pewter unicorns swinging from our turtlenecks as we answer the call of what’s missing. As we step back into the wild and reclaim our authentic existences.

In my present life,  I have a three-year old who pretends to be a mouse named ‘Cheese.’ Her care is never an after-thought. I live and breathe to keep her happy and comfortable. She is at the forefront of my mind even in the absence of consciousness. When she calls out in the night, my feet hit the ground before the second ‘m’ in mom is launched from her lips. Having a child places your heart outside your body for the rest of your life. I’ve called this feeling ’scary love’  ever since the day I brought my daughter home, terrified of the greatest potential for loss I had ever encountered. Not hamster-sized. This is big love, and I’m not talking about polygamy here.

Smell is one of the swiftest conductors of memory. In one hamster-bedding waft, I am back to having scabby knees, velcro sneakers, and mini hands spending hours at a time daydreaming, tinkering, watching, playing, and being lulled to sleep by the likes of Pooh, Rabbit, and Piglet. My biggest vice is butter, my delinquency is skipping ballet class, my contraband is a water balloon, my daily dilemma is deciding to trade a scratch and sniff for a fuzzy.  My parents are constants. My sister is both my best friend and my worst enemy. My mental map is one block squared. I am still occasionally carried or strolled pretending to sleep, squinting my eyes in the deep concentration of pretend.

I don’t remember when I got my first hamster maybe because there were several in my life. One would get lost and soon replaced later to be found post-mortem in the far recesses of a closet. With each new rodent I’d pour a fresh, woody bedding, position the iconic chrome hamster wheel, hang the nifty water bottle, fill the small dish with pellets, and set my responsibility free. Occasionally I’d pick him up, Hamilton was always his name no matter which hamster I was on and regardless of gender. (Stonewall Jackson was our dog, I guess we had a thing for past presidents in our family.) Usually he’d wiggle his nose and stare plainly at me, with two unblinking inky irises. Once in a while and seemingly randomly he would bite me with his long yellow teeth and I’d reflexively throw him back into his aquarium, indifferent to the velocity of his fall or the impact of his landing. Occasionally I’d usher him into his acrylic ball and let him run around the room futliley clawing his way forward until he inevitably collided with the junk in my room and had to change course. Often times he’d pee during this pause, his tiny brain rebuffering.

I got to know these creatures well experiencing care and love on an infinitesimal level. Eventually I was able to discern the nuance of expression behind those beady eyes. I was able to sense these creatures’ fear, irritation, boredom, and very real need for love. I smelled of their fur, heating it with the warm air exiting my nostrils before breathing in The Hamiltons’ sweet pheromones. Scent bonds creatures together. I do the same thing now with the top of my daughter’s head inhaling the swirly confluence of her hair, a coordinate that is fleeting-moving upward and more level to myself. There is a similar sweetness to her smell. I breathe her in and become drunk on scary love and impermanence, arriving immediately into the present.

This zen state spent huffing my daughter’s cow-lick is unsustainable.  I am called to return to the now with presence of mind leaving behind the hamster-bedding induced state for my life in the here and now. The seductively sweet hamster bedding took me back to a time and a place when I was the lucky object of scary love and my attachments were few. Now I am the bearer of scary love forced to exist moment to moment with my heart on a tricycle, in a sandbox, swinging dangerously from a tire, my heart who says hello to someone who doesn’t say hello back. I still get randomly bitten from time to time. The difference now is that I can’t throw down and walk away. I must hold. I must love no matter what.

This next idea forces me to use my least favorite word of all time: lozenge. (Actually, it is the plural pronunciation of lozenge that makes my skin crawl and I think I can get away without uttering said pluralized noun.) Why do we have to be so conspicuous about our addictions? Can’t a lozenge perform the same task as a lollipop without so much pomp and circumstance? Why do I have to see your tongue reaching for your morphine like a mouse, clenching with its back legs on a blade of grass as it reaches for a distant dew drop with its front?

Maybe I’m just bitter; while I obey the system and carve out my measly fraction of the proverbial pie, you stroll in, clad in second-hand smoke, blatantly getting high in front of me, and then ask me to expedite your disability forms so that you can get paid sooner to stay at home and dream up creative ways to ingest your narcotics. And I have to top it all off with a “sure I can” as much as I don’t want to. Who’s the real winner here?

I won’t deny your pain. Who am I to say it’s not valid and that you aren’t exaggerating if not fabricating an ailment to get your mits on the sweetest, designer painkillers on the market? I suspect this is the same conundrum the doctors prescribing face. What is one to do with “intractable, chronic pain” but diagnose, prescribe and treat. It’s a great patient satisfier. It’s also the lesser evil here. Believe me, as the one answering the phone when frequent flier number 73 calls, it’s best to have the written prescription at the ready, otherwise you’re in for painfully elaborate fairy tales about prescriptions resting precariously on toilet basin ledges (lost narcs), pain that makes one not want to go on (suicide threat), patients on their way over to sit in the lobby and wait (pain in the ass with a dash of threatening to my physical well-being), etc.

I am coming to realize that there are a lot more opiates and psychotropics being enjoyed than I once thought. Much of the adult population is on something mind altering. Drugs are ingested, if not licked in your face, to placate the soul, insulating one from the vulnerability of feeling things that are supposed to be felt. Aren’t we supposed to plod through life the old fashioned way; experiencing break through happiness every now again between all the pain and suffering?

Like a lot of fetishes, in a natural progression, drug use evolves from a dark secret into a glorified and endorsed version of itself. Like the continuum flows from a closeted gay boy to a gilded-gonad, gay pride parade, the zenith of our drug use is the tonguing of our drugs,  loads sexier than swallowing, injecting, inhaling, or dermal adhesion. The behind-closed-doors, household secret becomes a badge of honor, a personality trait, an eccentricity with a cute little lolly as a prop to boot. Welcome, “Morphine Lollipop Barbie.” Drugs are way more fun when you aren’t ashamed about using them.

I have a sneaking suspicion that I’ve insulted someone out there. Like I said before, I won’t deny anyone’s pain. Pain is real. My version of pain is emotional. I suffer from depression and medicate minimally because the alternative is crippling- my couch has a gravitation pull stronger than the will I can muster up with a serotonin imbalance. But I also practice good emotional hygiene by recognizing feelings, allowing them to have a seat in my heart, and sitting with them until they pass on through, no matter how much I squirm and revolt. Medication can help us but we need to help ourselves too. And feelings need to be felt to some degree.

To be certain, physical pain is a completely different animal. And I can’t even begin to understand what it’s like to live with chronic pain every waking hour of ones life. Pharmaceutical action is warranted in treating this sort of pain. But how did we arrive at a lollipop delivering it? To me this signals the normalization of suppressing the flow rather than abiding by it.  Approaching pain with a stun gun and a cage rather than observing it, studying its habits. It may sound puritanical and even harsh but the morphine lollipop has ushered us into a world in which feelings are bad unnecessaries.

We should be licking our wounds with our tongues, not our narcotics.

Shabby is now chic and is no longer a pejorative term. Distress in no longer distressing but comforting and pleasing to the eye.

Things are no longer made to withstand a calendar year let alone a lifetime. So when we see something dressed in the patina of age, we subconsciously interpret the wear as a sign of good stock.

For items of authentic wear, there is an element of comfort in knowing that you are injecting yourself into the history of an object as well as inheriting a subtle history you weren’t a part of previously. And there is the sweet satisfaction of subverting consumer culture by reducing and reusing.

A more stymied psychology lies beneath our love affair with brand new shabby chic. Wares churned out and shipped out to mega retailers like Target and The Gap are distressed at their conception, fake histories painted on in mechanical lockstep. The product beckons us; “Come hither! I am seasoned and wise, yet you will be my first!” As a race, we’ve never been able to resist the oxymoronic; a bearded lady, a flying pig. Why should it be any different with an experienced virgin?

This I found while Googling ‘distressed jeans.’ In its candid, endearing, ESL frankness, it is a bay window overlooking our affection for hand-me-down chic. “One of my Friend, use to wear ripped jeans often. While telling me benefits of that type of jeans, he said, it is prestige to wear them. Because it shows, you are most confident guy or girl in the party and you are get noticed by everyone. I feel my self more adventurous when in ripped jeans.”

Who doesn’t like prestige, feeling adventurous and to you are get noticed by everyone?

Wearing and using the worn out is also an expression of our freedom here in this overly abundant, super power nation. Just like the bevy of options we have to hydrate ourselves with, this is just another choice we are welcomed to exercise. In less spoiled rotten parts of the world, the used look carries no sense of irony. And feeling adventurous is a redundant concept.

But, being a resident of the lower 48, I too enjoy my fair share of Craigslist, Goodwill, Ebay, Freecycle, auctions, and garage sales. In fact, I must confess I have a fetish for the non-new, seeing life as a stage and my role as set-designer. I prefer a squeaky, chipped, Waterfall High Boy to the lime green, Ikea, particle board chest of drawers, hands down.

If new things are no longer intended to last, then our supply of authentic distress is finite. Who will receive our subtle histories if there is no object remaining to carry them? This is the anxiety-provoking bit and is perhaps why we are clinging more fiercely to these relics than ever before. We are connoisseurs of past personal histories but who will know us? Surely our progeny with remember us but, sadly, people aren’t the best vehicles for history.  It has been said that every time a person recalls a memory,  the act inaccurately alters that memory. Objects don’t remember that time you spilled coffee on them. They just continue on, adorned by a telling brown ring.

Where does this leave me? I can’t prevent crap from being made.

What I can do is continue to foster talismans of history. I can commit to quality and resist soulless produce. I can embrace contradiction; it may be old but it’s new to me.

Ah, anxiety. From where does it originate? I have been on the ever unfolding journey of meditation for some time now and my latest obsession has been with looking away from the mind and toward the heart. Last night in my yoga class I posed the question to all the seated yogis as they literally moved their closed eyes away from their brains and down toward their hearts, “how would it be to become a slave to the heart rather than the mind?” What would it look like, feel like, be like to turn away from the tapes that are constantly running in our brains, the commentary, the chatter, the lists, the reactions, the obsessions, the neurons of emotion that fire all day long and splatter up onto the walls of our craniums like cave paintings of advanced emoticons- how would it be to turn all that noise down and consult with the heart primarily?”

I have been feeling like I’ve been “idling high” as of late; envisioning worst care scenarios and feeling in general like the sky is falling. I fear of losing my loved ones. I fear that I am terminally ill. I fear that my fears will manifest. I have underlying, omnipresent nausea throughout the day and no, I’m not pregnant. I checked three times. What on earth is going on with me?

In many eastern cultures, a lowered gaze is considered polite and possibly reverential. On the contrary, an upward glance indicates that the mind is our sole container of wisdom or it can even indicate distaste such as in the rolling of the eyes. And notice how when you close your eyes, the mind relaxes as the eyes look away from the mind toward the heart. Then roll them up toward the mind again, eyes still closed and you probably start feeling tense again.

When I sit and practice meditation, I am able to come away with a healthy dose of equanimity. That is to say, I can hold my own emotions- things like fear, anger, and pain with a level mind. Just like breathing in a challenging yoga posture, I allow whatever comes up to have a seat in my mind however uncomfortable that initially might be. Then I breath, relax, feel watch, and allow. Allowing the difficulties to recede back into the darkness doesn’t assist them in moving on or through. Shining light on them, seeing them for who they are, breathing with them, allows them to slowly begin to dissolve.

So what happens to my golden equanimity between sits? Why do I become a buzzing bee of high frequency? Why can’t I hold all my nervous energy up to that healing light? My hunch is that I’m backlogged.

I’m a big proponent of keeping good emotional hygiene. Just like a kitchen, the mind needs to have the dishes done, the counters wiped down, the floor swept, and the trash taken out so that we can begin anew without the garbage and mess of yesterday getting us off on the wrong foot. However, if there is a high volume running through your kitchen, and only one disher, things aren’t always going to be nice and tidy for the next day. Sometimes the best we can do is let the dishes soak overnight.

I think I have been starting my days lately with a messy emotional kitchen. And things are coming into the mind and not getting processed or looked at and all I’m left with are those grotesque emoticons on the walls of my mind.

Why do we think we are so great that things require us to think about them? What happens when we look away from the brain and simply pay no mind to it. Nothing seems to fall apart. Life goes on. What happens when we view what comes through our minds with equal response; naming the thought, saying hello and then returning our inward gaze to the heart? The sun still sets. The moon still rises.

If I could hear my own vibration right now, I imagine it would sound like one of those dog whistles that humans can barely hear because it’s out of our aural range. After meditation, I feel the energy coming off of me resonating deeply like a mystical didgeridoo.

Thus, my quandary is this; do I remain in the unsustainable position of the overworked mind-slave, maintaining Godly emotional hygiene, or do I look away from all things cerebral, gazing into the heart, letting things fall where they may, keeping my eyes lowered, accepting all things with the same peaceful knowing? Something tells me I am going to miss out on a lot of meaningful eye contact that way, let alone all the juicy bits of narrative that make life interesting. I’m no ascetic. I am highly spiritual but I am not willing to retreat into a cave for months on end with my bowl of brown rice. I like contemplation but I also like participation. How do I prevent having to process all the emotional stamps of my day through the brain without adding even more to the to-do list? Is there a menu option to defer certain stimuli directly to the heart? How did Mother Theresa- the ultimate spiritual participator- do it, encountering all that suffering day after day, year after year, her inky brown eyes joyful until the very end? She operated from the heart and kept her eyes on the road ahead.

Perhaps it’s the application of faith on top of a riddle:  Faith that everything is going to be alright, even if it isn’t.

It has been raining incessantly. The sky reminds me of the time I had a layover in Detroit and was aesthetically violated. It’s cold and wet outside. The unfortunate worms on the sidewalk are too chilly to even wriggle back over to the earth. Everyone is sick or paranoid of getting sick. H1N1 has become a four letter word. We are in the midst of a pandemic and to literally top it off, the weather has to suck. I thought not having a sun-roof in my car was bad but with this gray thick nasty overhead, my crown chakra is all plugged up. 

As a yoga instructor, I tell my students to send a line of energy out through their crowns for support in posture holds. As with dense gray skies and  sunroofless cars, this direction is hindered. It’s as if someone is placing their thumb over your blowhole.

I am the weather. It really is that simple. Power(s) that be, please return to us weathervein earthlings your golden orb before I blow.

Things I enjoy almost as much as I enjoy going to Best Buy:

~Playing with a bag of glass

~Having a kink in my neck

~The morning breath of someone I don’t care for

~Black ice

~Nausea

~Cancer

~Turbulance

~The cost of black printer ink

~Paying for C, Y, and K color printer ink just to make the black ink work

~Trying to remain calm in identifying which box of ink will be compatible with said printer

~Bag-o-lita (or however the fuck you spell it), The Pampered Chef, and Lia Sophia

~Your rage that leaks out in calibrated doses of ‘barely tolerable’

~Selective Hygeine

~Oversized cars

~Oversized cars switching lanes without checking their blind spot just cause they’re bigger

~Matinees on a beautiful day

~Sharing my itrip radio wave with Christ

~Sucking snot out of my daughter’s nose with the big plastic bubble sucker thing

~Splinters

~Yeast infections

~Zipping my flesh into my pants

~Cavities

~Vertigo

~Despair

~When the person next to you removes their unventilated shoes on a hot day and isn’t wearing socks

~Curdled milk

~The white stuff on the sides of your mouth

~The watermelon/fuscia color combo

~ Gratuitous use of the English language; the primary goal is to communicate, only once you make sense are you allowed to start impressing me

~That nobody seems to give a shit about the oil crisis

~The image of the polar bear in the ocean desperately searching for an ice cap to rest upon (Thanks, Al Gore)

After dickering at the Avis counter for ten years in baby time, we swerved over the Golden Gate bridge- algorithms of scaffolding threatening “syntax error” above us, the wind rocking us and singing us the lullaby only Rosemary’s baby could fall asleep to. Driving up to a wedding the next day, flooring our “upgraded” Hyundai Elantra up a nigh wall, I wondered exactly how we were still sticking to the earth. Such logistics should be contemplated only after one has survived them, never during the moment of physics in question.

The next day,we headed south on highway 1 along the coast from the San Francisco Bay area toward southern California where my maternal grandparents live. The passage was winding and the ocean so close I was able to sex the sunning sea lions from my passenger window. Then there was the whole deal with falling rocks. Nets were strung sideways to slow the boulders. However, they were in laughable proportion to the mass of their target. A slight tectonic hiccup and we become sun-kissed roadkill. The nets were more of an aesthetic comfort-an afterthought to increase tourism on the One, perhaps.  Of course, there is also the issue of wildfire in these parts; the scorched earth like perfect tinder waiting patiently to be ignited by a tiny flint- a firefly might do. All around, the flora, though beautiful and exotic, dons needles that taunt, “you can look, but don’t touch.”

All the way down this mirage of a state, I get the same sense I get when drinking large amounts of whiskey; you must enjoy now, for tomorrow may never come. An entire state that forces its inhabitants to become ascetics in their impermanence. It’s no wonder there are so many hippies. These people are not hippies by choice. The hippies are simply abiding an environment that asks them to enjoy, live in the moment, ride the wave, taste of the herbs, for tomorrow may never come.

There are many variables to be considered when on vacation that could attribute to changes in one’s personal modus operandi. Maybe it was the proximity of my imminent demise or maybe it was just plain old change of scenery; either way, I had such clarity of mind, such acute awareness to not only my surroundings and goings-ons but also my mental patterning and fluctuations. I felt truly Zen-like for those seven days. I have a journal to prove it.

Our trip home was another family friendly game of Russian Roulette. Three flights and a one night stand with the Westin in Dallas later, we arrived on terra firma, safely sedated once again in good old landlocked Madison, Wisconsin. My journal has sat plainly on the shelf since I unpacked. I can hardly wait for tornado season to come around…