#fiddlinggrasshopper

GRASSHOPPERISM #20 “Everyone Breaks”

This may sound eerie or strange. This may sound negative or unreal. But I believe that everyone, at some point, breaks. Everyone breaks. And it is not negative, eerie or strange. It is very real, and can be one of the most positive, life changing events that can happen to you, ‪Grasshoppers.

When I say that “Everyone Breaks”, what I mean is that everyone has a really bad moment. A time when everything shatters. They are not the same person they were before their break, and they may never be the same afterward. Change is inevitable. And change can be one of the positive things that can happen, if you embrace it. It just may take some time.

I’ve written about a few “breaks” of my own if you’ve been reading my ‪‎Grasshopperisms, my stories or listening to my songs and albums. My first break was a panic attack on a flight to Amsterdam on April 1, 1993. There have been many others. And, like Humpty Dumpty, I’ve grown better and better at putting myself back together again.

I don’t enjoy breaking. Who does? Humpty Dumpty didn’t dig it. Sitting there on that wall, all high and mighty, happy as an egg, and then there Humpty was, laying on the ground in pieces. And all the King’s horses and all the King’s men couldn’t put Humpty back together again.

Here’s the lucky part. None of us are Humpty Dumpty. Everyone has the capacity to put themselves back together again, it’s just that the pieces of us may not fit back together in quite the same way.

If you were at my concert in San Francisco in late January 2015, you saw me have a very public break. I call it my “Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Breakdown”. The wall I fell from was high and hard. And worse, there were people there to see it! How embarrassing. Getting on stage when I was out of my head, anxiety ridden and self-medicating with booze and pills, to perform. I don’t remember the performance. I’m sure there wasn’t much of one. But the positive aspect of that very public break was that I WANTED to change. And I did.

I’m lucky to have a history of PTSD and anxiety in my family history. I know that sounds absurd. No one wants to have a gene pool that give them the ticks and whistles they have. (I call them ticks and whistles because they’re the eccentricities that make us into who we are.) But, one can’t control their own gene pool born, and one can’t control the surroundings their born into; they are just where we came into the world and what we need to deal with. Cope with. Make the best of.

I believe that we can become greater and better than anything is standing in our way. To overcome our obstacles is to use our “flaws” as positive tools for becoming and creating someone and something remarkable out of us. Our wreckage is the foundation for the most amazing, beautiful being. Us.

My Dad was in in the Vietnam War. War is uncool. For anyone. And what happened to him there is indescribably awful. The jungle, hot with humidity and mosquitoes and mud and shit and filth and danger, being shot at and bombed by other people, in a War that he didn’t want to be in. This caused him years of trauma and anger and self-medication.

Now, my Dad lives in Mexico’s Mayan Riviera half the year - in what he and my Uncle Jim called living like a “decadent Robinson Caruso”. The other half of the year he lives with my mom (they’ve been married for 46 years) in another paradise in Central Minnesota. I call it Wobegon. It’s the area that Garrison Keillor writes about. Keillor’s fictitious creation, Lake Wobegon from A Prairie Home Companion, is real. The towns he’s written and spoken about for years: Avon and Holdingford and Freeport are all real. And nestled in the forest near them, is my parents home. My Dad has found happiness in having two serene paradises and in changing himself.

Again, change is inevitable. And change can be very positive. My dad’s break was in Vietnam. I think most of us sent to a war we don’t want to be in may experience a break. That’s why so many veterans return from war with what we now call PTSD. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. That’s a shitload of bad words. Stress. Trauma. Disorder. No one wants trauma or stress or disorders. But we have them. Nearly all of us.

When American World War Two veterans returned from that war, veterans sometimes were said to have ‘shellshock’. That’s the title society gave it. There was not a lot done about it, and no acronym like PTSD existed. Many of the veterans self-medicated with booze or whatever else they could find. But it wasn’t discussed. Not much. It was mostly hidden.

I don’t know if it was my Grandpa Bronson’s time as sailor on a battleship in World War Two or a culmination of events, but toward the end of his life, when he was about 80 years old, he started to have anxiety attacks. Thankfully, my dad knew what they were, knew what it was to go on anti-depressants and he helped his dad, my Grandpa, through the anxiety.

The chain was there. The anxiety chain. My gene pool was rigged up that way. So, when I had my first big break at the age of 20, it was kind of inevitable. Given my gene pool and life story to that point. What sucked is that I felt like I had no one at the time. I felt crazy as a loon. I felt like no one else was there to understand what was happening to me and what continued to happen to me. In fact, I never was the same. It haunted me for years. I wanted to be “Old Gentry”. I wanted to return to who I was. It took me YEARS to realize that who I was, was gone, and that who I am, is who I am.

I realize I sound like Popeye now. “I am what I am and that’s all that I am.” But, shit, Popeye was right! When I realized that I am who I am, then it was like letting off a giant pressure valve from myself. I was not going to try being anyone other than who I am. And no proving myself to anyone, especially to myself, was just, pure freedom.

I was lucky to have my break so young. I certainly didn’t see it that way then though. I went on The Search for a Cure. And during that Search, I acquired shitloads of tools. So many tools, that I used to say to one of my therapists, “Cathy, I don’t have a toolbox, I have a toolshed! I have a back-how, I have a crane. I could erect a skyscraper with all the tools in my toolbox!”

But here’s the deal: no matter how many tools you have in your toolbox or toolshed, everyone breaks. And, the likelihood is that life will throw you a curveball when you’re expecting a fastball, and you’ll strike out so hard, you’ll fall flat on your face. (I realize that right now I’m using a team sports reference, which is funny, because I’m the worst team sports guy in the universe – playing basketball with me is like playing basketball with a lungfish, an armless monkey or a blind sloth.)

The cool thing is this: when you strike out and fall flat on your face, when you fall off the wall and all your pieces break again, the important thing is not get despondent or turn to negative coping mechanisms, but to instead use the glue in your tool box and glue yourself back together again. You’ll be a little different than last time you broke. But who cares? Fuck it, what’s the best that could happen?

Not everyone will get the new you. That’s one of the hard parts. They may not understand the changes you’ve gone through. Your drinkin’ buddies may not understand why you’re not meeting them at the bar. Your musician friends may not understand why you don’t want to play out live anymore. Your scuba diving buds may not understand that you’re just not into diving right now. The key is RIGHT NOW. You get to decide! It’s not fear. It may just be reassessment. And you may just do all that again…who knows?

I’ve said I’ve broken lost of times, so I’m going to list a few…please keep in mind…I’m no saint…

As I’ve recounted more than once, the panic attack on the plane to Amsterdam in 1993 was pretty hilarious. And severely, teeth grindingly scary. 20-years-old with long hair, a pasty white face, a Layne Staley goatee, a black motorcycle jacket on, my thoughts racing through all the rock ‘n’ roll pillaging I’d done, getting wasted on Wild Turkey to cope with it. Positive coping tools: not yet acquired.

Then, there was landing in Prague in 1995, all charged up for an independent study year abroad I had put together myself. No programs. Just me. Indie me. Like usual. Too stubborn and headstrong to join the herd in an arranged abroad program. It was freezing cold when I got off the plane, and all the Czech I had learned at Stanford and Berkeley meant shit, I was a two-year-old invalid language-wise, and the jetlag launched me into a panic attack. My dad calmed me down that time during a very expensive international phone call, and I ended up staying up all night using a coloring book to go to sleep. Coloring like a child. I was 22 years old.

There’s the day I found out that this one-eyed bartendress I’d been dating was pregnant and getting an abortion the very same day my ex-girlfriend, Alyssa, showed up to San Francisco to have a drink, and another ex-girlfriend, Lisa-Raquel was flying in the next day. I stayed up all night drinking vodka cause I couldn’t slow my brain down and my back was hurting so bad I wanted to put a knife in myself. At some point, I had the wise notion to drive through the night in my 1976 Volvo sedan - like Tim Roth in the early 1990’s flick “Bodies, Rest & Motion” - while listening to Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours” album on cassette - with a six pack of beer on the floor near enough to open more as needed. When I got to Auburn, California to visit Lisa-Raquel, I had drained all the beers, and I backed into her mom’s and step dad’s mailbox in the cul de sac in front of their house. Somehow there was no official break; I just knew that something had changed from a series of very disturbing thought and choices. I was 25 years old.

One night in San Francisco, my friends Sterling & Doug and I climbed onto the roof of a downtown apartment building during a party. The cops were called because they thought we were thieves. After prying us down off a fire escape, handcuffing us and keeping us in the hallway for several hours, they let us go. So we did the best thing we knew we thought to do at 6am after being released from handcuffs: go to a transvestite bar on Polk Street and continue drinking. There, after several more drinks and several more hours, I realized I had a first date scheduled with Nelli – a morning date - so I had the balls to call her and asked her to come pick us all up. She, surprisingly agreed. And, at 10am, the three of us - completely loaded with booze - then loaded into Nelli’s SUV, and she began to cart us across the Golden Gate Bridge to my apartment in Strawberry near Mill Valley. While on the GG Bridge, Sterling climbed out of Nelli’s sun roof onto the hood of her SUV, holding the windshield wipers as we drove through Saturday morning tourist traffic atop the most famous bridge in the world. Nelli dropped off Sterling (irritatingly), and we went back to my place. Nelli broke out some speed, she and I snorted it, and then I decided to go surfing, while she and Doug played on the rainy beach at Fort Cronkite. I caught no waves. I was a mess. By the next day, Super Bowl Sunday, I had a drug and alcohol fueled panic attack that was so incredulous, I forgot that I was pumping gas and drove away with the fuel pump sticking out of my tank, cracking the hose off as I drove away. No, not pretty. I was 28 years old.

Then, there’s the day my arm “fell off” at the shoulder after surfing while I was in Gualala, California staying in Doug’s yurts, just before I flew to Vietnam to surf off my family’s war torn ghosts (self-described) and ended up in a torrent of hell and tortuous pain for seven weeks in Southeast Asia only to return and have 9/11 happen within weeks of shaking hands with an armless man outside the War Remnants Museum in Saigon. His arms had been blown off my U.S. land mines. The U.S. was beginning to invade Afghanistan. It all broke me. I was 29 years old.

I write these with tanGentrycized, esoteric, run-on sentences because these experiences were so frightening. Some of them stupid. Anxiety is a run-on sentence in your mind. And the negative coping mechanisms people, like me, have used to combat the mind fuck just aid in the mind fuck.

But every time I put myself back together. I glued the pieces. I became a little stronger. I made albums. I toured. I found new love. I traveled. I got on a board again. The monster was quelled.

My 30’s were filled with awesome tidal waves of absurdity and pain. I’ll refrain from writing stories about them here, but you can listen to a number of my songs to get the gist of what my mind was serving up. What the monster was fueled by and how I was fueling it. Or maybe, those stories will surface later.

These days, I find that the monster is small. Like a little blue furry Grover I can kick in the corner or just get his cuddly monster butt to settle down. I still have little breaks from time-to-time. Arguments with girlfriends and family, old feuds that really bug me, human beings that I allow to get in the way of my chill. But, in the great scheme of things, these things are pithy. I love the word “Pithy”. Arguments with people, needing to move, money problems, even health problems, they bend and turn and rise and fall like the waves of our lives. Small problems can be so pithy.

I truly believe that I was lucky to break early. I’ve had so much adult time to find out what happened, and then stop caring about what happened. The ‘why’ is not the answer. The answer is to just to accept you as you are.

We’re all a little fucked up. The most fucked up people I know are the ones that don’t think they’re fucked up at all. I feel bad for people who think they’re just fine, that they have nothing to work on, that they have no issues. People with no issues scare me. People who don’t argue with their partners occasionally - they scare me. People whose lives seem perfect on the surface - they scare the living shit out of me. I prefer to know who I’m dealing with and I want others to know who they’re dealing with, so, as a result, I wear my heart on my sleeve, my brain on my fedora and my issues right on my chest. A spiritual tattoo on my chest that reads: HERE I AM. I’M FUCKED UP. ARE YOU, TOO? WOOOO!

I write this for the ones that say they feel alone. Misfits. Ones that think they’re different. You’re not. You are JUST FINE. You broke. Fuck it. What’s the best that can happen? You can be better. You can become better. You can find the baddest ass’ed fiddle ever and play your heart out, Grasshopper.

I don’t wish these breaks on anyone, but I believe that it happens to all of us. It seems that sometimes these breaks occur when someone dies or when a lover leaves them or when they reach the end of their lives. This makes total sense to me. Change requires a bit of death. And most of us are a little scared of death. (Note: not Evel Knievel though. Evel was a bad ass. But man, he broke the shit out of himself. Evel was like the living nonfiction version of Humpty Dumpty.)

There are many examples of people who change a great deal when they’re facing the end of their lives. Of when they come close to dying. Or when someone close to them dies. A mother, a father, whoever raised them. It changes them. They can’t go back. Maybe, there are some who only have their break during the last moments of their lives. Me, I’m glad I had my big break early. And then the little earthquakes afterward. Aftershocks.

[Now, here’s how my silly mind works: when I wrote ‘big break’, I tanGentryingly equated that with when an artist has their big break. They finally have their shot at success or fame or whatever. So, maybe my big break {down} was, in essence, my big break!]

[Also, when I wrote about ‘little earthquakes’, I thought about Tori Amos’ album named Little Earthquakes, and at one time, as an artist in my early 30s, a critic called me “Tori Amos with testicles”, which I thought was the coolest title.]

So, I’m writing this to let you know you’re not alone, Grasshoppers. There are so many of us out here. So many who cracked, shattered, broke from reality, turned into someone else we didn’t like or didn’t want to be. Anxiety, depression, agoraphobia, booze, drugs, PTSD, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), chronic pain…man, I’ve had it all! And, it’s awesome that I did, because I’m still here. Maybe to write about it. Maybe to help you through it. Maybe to just be bone dry honest and let you know that you can be bone dry honest about it, too, Grasshoppers.

We’re out here. All us Grasshoppers. The Pirates. The Misfits. The ones at the edge. The wallflowers. The leaders who don’t want to lead but will and are. The Lost Boys. Tink and Pete. The broken. It comes in so many different shapes and sizes.

Maybe you once could walk, but now you can’t. Fuck it, what’s the best that could happen? Who knows? Look at Stephen Hawking? After he was wheelchair bound, he had three kids and discovered secrets in the universe NO ONE had ever discovered.

Sometimes, I must admit, it would feel better to have a physical deformity than something internal, because at least people could SEE it. I know. That sounds morbidly insane, huh? But, um, wouldn’t it? I mean, all those crazy fuckers in your head, leaping around. The Crazy Monkey Mind. Wouldn’t it better to literally HAVE a monkey on your back and have society accept that?

Imagine this: You’re in a Target Department Store, at the toothpaste aisle, looking at floss, and you start thinking about your job, and your kids, and your car needs to go to the shop, and it’s snowing outside, and you have a dance performance in a week that you aren’t ready for, and you know your husband is cheating on you, and suddenly, you’re having an anxiety attack, your back seizes up, you get a migraine. So, one of your tools in your toolbox is to get an actual monkey out and then have the monkey climb on your back. Inside of hyperventilating or popping a Xanax or running out to your car in the cold, it would go like this:

1. You reach in the toolbox you’re carrying, pull out a monkey, then place said monkey on your back.

2. Monkey starts screaming and pulling floss, toothpaste and mouthwash from the shelves on the ground.

[Note: no monkeys were harmed in the writing of this silly desired misfit mythology.]

3. Store employee arrives immediately.

4. You say, with gentle ease, “I’m sorry, I’m having a panic attack because I’m really fucked up right now, so I put this monkey on my back to represent what is happening inside my brain.”

5. Store employee says, “Oh, I’m so sorry, ma’am. Would you and your monkey like a place to sit down? Let’s get you feeling better right away. And, I’ll make sure and clean this aisle up, too.”

This is not terribly realistic. Instead, we have to keep our stupid Crazy Monkey Minds inside us. And sometimes their screaming. Really. Fucking. Loud!

So, what I’m saying is that, if you haven’t broken already, maybe this is it. This is your break. The monkey is screaming. Let it out. Let it go. And, if you have broken at least once already, then you can use some tools in your toolbox to get yourself chilled.

Don’t have any tools in your toolbox? Here are some that work for me (diversity is key here):

1. Meditation (buy a book about it. Just breathe. No need to be a Buddhist. But Buddhists are way cool.

2. Therapy (therapists are not like Sigmund Freud, and they won’t lock you up or put you in a straight jacket. It’s HEALTHY to see a therapist. H-E-A-L-T-H-Y.)

3. Exercise (swimming, surfing and SUPing are my go-to’s because I’m a Waterman. But anything works. Walk, run, bike, play tennis, golf, play bocce, play Twister.)

4. Medication (there is nothing wrong with a little anti-depressant when shit is bad. Then, you can get off it later.)

5. EMDR (I call it Pong, like the 1970s video game. Google it. It’s cool.)

6. Massage (no, not with a happy ending. I like deep tissue to really get the shit out. Like exorcizing my demons.)

7. Movement: Pilates, Qigong, Tai chi. (I do my own form of movement that I call Pilgong.)

8. Write.

9. Create art.

10. Make music.

11. Talk to your friends and family. (Be honest.)

12. Drive. (Safely.)

13. Go see a movie.

14. Laugh.

15. Laugh again.

16. Laugh like an insane person even though you’re not.

17. Smile (not like a hippie. Not like Snidley whiplash. Not all faux. Really fucking smile.)

18. Use your senses and hear, feel, see, smell and taste the world around you without moving or doing anything.

19. Take a day off.

20. Do nothing. And enjoy it.

Here’s a funny thing to conclude: while I wrote this Grasshopperism, I started out by listening to Joy Division’s Everything Must Break to get in the mood. But now, as I reach the end, I’m listening to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon. Dark Side is the band's homage to band founder Syd Barrett, who famously ‘broke’ while on stage in the late 1960’s. Maybe Syd got where he wanted to go or maybe he just needed a few more positive tools in his toolbox.

So, to pay my own homage to the late Ian Curtis (who wrote the lyrics to Everything Must Break) and to the late Syd, I’ll leave you with these wonderful lyrics from Dark Side’s final song Eclipse written by Roger Waters. These lyrics, they seem to fit. Right here, right now.

And, if you’re a Floyd fan, I’d say it’s time to put on “Dark Side Of The Moon”, Grasshoppers. What a great album. Now, let Richard Wright’s organ play…

“All that you touch And all that you see All that you taste All you feel And all that you love And all that you hate All you distrust All you save And all that you give And all that you deal And all that you buy Beg, borrow or steal And all you create And all you destroy And all that you do And all that you say And all that you eat And everyone you meet And all that you slight And everyone you fight And all that is now And all that is gone And all that’s to come And everything under the sun is in tune But the sun is eclipsed by the moon”

For more Grasshopperisms and writing, and to speak to me about Artistic and Media Consulting, please email me at [email protected].

GRASSHOPPERISM #19 - “What Is The Best That Can Happen?”

I was meditating the other day on the beach, and, until the past year, I had thought that meditating was a way to erase your thoughts, to enter a place of bliss or of no-thought.  Dude, I was wrong!  Thoughts always exist!  When you stop thinking, you’re dead! We are always thinking, using our minds, even when we’re asleep, dreaming; and for me to believe that meditating is way to stop thought was incorrect. So, when I was meditating, I was thinking, allowing thoughts to pass through my mind.  And when I do that, and not hold on to any of them, there are all kinds of pleasant and unpleasant thoughts that drift through my head.  Meditation directs my mind toward my thoughts, so I notice both the pleasant and unpleasant thoughts that arise really clearly. When I’m not focused on meditating or focusing on my thoughts – when I’m not “sitting” – but instead I’m active during the day or night - then pleasant or unpleasant thoughts meander through my mind, too.  I’m just not as aware.  And, what’s amazing is that my mind gravitates toward holding on to something – bad or good.  If it doesn’t have something pleasant to shift toward, then my mind gravitates, meanders, wanders down the dirt roads and asphalt freeways of my mind toward something unpleasant.  Sometimes, I think things like: “Man, my back hurts.” “Is my foot falling asleep?  What if I get up too fast after meditating?  Will I break my leg?” “I need to pee.  Don’t pee.  I need to pee” “Is that someone coming toward me?  What if I don’t know who they are and they knife me in the back?  That would suck, but it would be an interesting way to die.  Death.  Death and dying.  Breathe in life, breathe out death.  Are they still coming?” “Oh shit, I just realized I have no computer.  I hate that.  Let go.  Let go of the computer.  Fucking Amazon.  Sending me the wrong computer. They suck.” “My shoulder is KILLING me.  I need to relax.  Relax.  My shoulder is killing me.  Relax.  I need to relax.  My jaw is killing me.” Yes, all this, is contained in my meditations.  So, as I was on the beach meditating the other day, I then wondered: Why do our minds gravitate toward unpleasant thoughts when we are not focused on pleasant thoughts? This may not happen to you.  You may live in a world of unicorns and butterflies.  Where everything is pleasant all the time and no one has ever hurt you and you have no pain or suffering.  But if you’re reading this, then you’re probably human, like me, and this does happen to you.  So, Grasshoppers, what if we stop looking for the unpleasant?  And what if we stop looking for the pleasant?  What if we just don’t look?  What if we stop seeking?  We just are. Here’s another way of looking at this in a positive light: I have thought a lot about when people say, “What’s the worst that can happen?”  People say “what’s the worst that can happen?” all the time.  They mean it in a positive way.  It’s when people are getting ready to do something new, or preparing for something.  Maybe they’re excited about a performance or hiring new employees or their art show opening at a new gallery or they’re record is coming out or they’re speaking in front of 5000 people.  Maybe they’re going out surfing for the first time.  Maybe they’re leaving their country for the first time or seeing an old lover for the first time in 10 years.  Maybe they are going to a party they don’t want to go to or the have to go confront their soon-to-be-ex-husband as they get a divorce.  They say to themselves or to others who are embarking on this maybe-risky, maybe-not-very-fun or terrifying adventure: “What’s the worst that happen?” I was doing a show back in November 2014.  I hadn’t been on stage for a couple months, and I was rehearsing with Adam Hammer, Erin Ebnet, Jonas Dubin, Jeff Vee & Tommy Vee at the Vee’s studio in St. Joseph, Minnesota.  We were just ending our second rehearsal – we were going to be only rehearsing as an ensemble twice for this gig – and it was a full two sets of mostly original material written by Adam, Erin & I – 21 tunes – so it was a lot of material for six people to pull together in only two rehearsals. Toward the end of our second rehearsal, I said to Tommy, “That was pretty good.  We should be able to pull it off.” And Tommy said to me, “Well, the worst that can happen is we all die.” What?  Aahahaha!  I laughed so hard at that.  I kept laughing to myself all the way home.   I’m still laughing.  It was a brilliant statement.  Of course, the show went off awesome.  And really, what WAS that worst thing that could happen: that we all die.  It’s not negative.  It’s not gothic or morbid.  It’s just true.  All six of us there on the stage, and we all just die.  For no reason.  Or maybe we all were shot – (and I say this with great respect for The Eagles of Death Metal and their audience who were attacked by terrorists in Paris on stage during a concert last year).  Or maybe we all had strokes.  Or the rapture came and it was actually real – our souls left our bodies and went to Heaven (well, hopefully all of our souls went up and not down).  Maybe we were all gassed.  There was an explosion, a tornado, a freak earthquake, a landlocked hurricane.  So many ways for six musicians to die on stage.  It’s like an Edward Gorey calendar of comedic morbidity.  That really and truly would be the worst thing that could happen. What Tommy said was deeply spiritual to me, too.  In essence, what Mr. Vee was saying was: treat each moment like it’s your last.  Treat every gig like it’s not the end of the world and that it’s the end of the world at the same time.  Treat every breath like it’s your last, and when you get to breathe in again, wow! Amazing!  I’m alive, over and over and over. So, I started flipping that “what’s the worst thing that could happen” statement/question on its head by saying: “What’s the best that could happen?” Seriously, imagine all those moments when you thought to yourself, “Well, fuck it, what’s the worst that could happen?” and instead you embraced it, truly said, “What’s the best that happen?” I may have written about this before, and if I have, I won’t apologize because it is truly something that I could rewrite over and over, like that amazing breath I get to breathe with each inhale and exhale.   It is the best thing I learned from this therapist I had in my 20’s.  I’ve had a lot of therapy.  I started going when I was 21 years old.  I had been on The Search.  I was on The Search to find out what was wrong with me.   It started after I had this experience after a panic attack on a plane to Amsterdam, The Netherlands in 1993 when I thought I was going insane, and then I ended up with pneumonia for 5 days on the streets of Amsterdam with my friend Ruari and a Canadian traveler we met – my first ever trip to Am’dam – when I was 20 years old.  Weeks and months passed, me hitchhiking through Scotland and then down to London, off to Greece and the Island of Santorini, then to Vienna, Austria and on to Prague, Czech Republic, before I started to really think I was going to die.  This continued for about a year, as I moved about, back to Seattle, Washington (my home then) and then moving to San Francisco, California, going from doctor to doctor.  All kinds of ridiculous experiences, where I continued to need to pee every 2 to 10 minutes and my back hurt like mad in the scar I have where I had kidney surgery in 1987 for a birth defect.  I ended up at an acupuncturist in El Cerrito, California in 1994, and she saw me a few times until she gently suggested I go see a hypnotherapist.  I later imagined that her thoughts were like this, “This kid is super fucked up.  Why am I sticking needles in this kid?  He needs to see somebody.” So, I went to a therapist.  And I went to another.  And I went to another – this time a psychiatrist.  I saw 3 therapists before I ended up with therapist #4 – The Good Doctor.  I’d go see him in the Marina District in San Francisco.  And, maybe a year passed - a year of relaxation cassette tapes and talking and talking and books and talking and peeing and talking and hurting and parking on Pacific Heights to walk down the hill to see the Good Doctor and talking.  One day, he gave me the advice that is the best advice I think I have ever received from a therapist.  (Now, please don’t get me wrong here – I’ve received some really incredible advice from therapists – I still see one who is fantastic - and also some really stupid advice, too – a good therapist is like finding a good mechanic – they can fuck up your car a lot until you find the right one [input ‘mind’ in place of ‘car’ in the parenthesized sentence before this].) So, one day we’re sitting there, The Good Doctor is his over-sized chair, and me on a couch, looking at each other.  He in his khaki pants and button down sweater, me in some raggedy jeans and probably a rock tee-shirt from some Sub Pop label band I used to be into.  He with a receding hair line and me with hair cropped tightly to my head, Ewan McGregor-style, like in “Trainspotting”.  And, I had been talking about my need to pee all the time, or my need to pull the giant iron bar of excruciating pain out of my back.  Or maybe I was talking about my family, or my girlfriends, or getting jumped, or how awful my oh-so-miserable-woe-is-me past was, or whatever neurosis-of-the-week was fresh on my mind, and The Good Doctor said, “Gentry (pause with long New Age-like stare), sometimes you just gotta say ‘Fuck it’.” Seriously.  That was it.  “Gentry, sometimes, you gotta say fuck it.” Aaaaahahahahahaa!  Eureka!  I mean, really, Doc?  Fuck it?  That’s a lot of cash spent over the last months for two words that includes one word of profanity. But, I started to say ‘Fuck it”.  And it worked.  It really did.  I got over the ability to need to pee every 2 to 10 minutes.  I still had some ticks and whistles, but it seriously helped.  A lot. Lately, I’ve been combining these two things together, and say to myself, “Fuck it, what’s the best that can happen?” So, Grasshoppers, what is the BEST that can happen?  Really.  What is it?  I’ll go to the 3 things that are so very important to ask yourself in life to me. 1. What do you want? 2. Why? 3. How can you make what you want happen? Ask yourself those 3 questions with incredible thought and intention, and then ask: What’s the best that can happen? 1. You get what you want. 2. You know why you want it. 3. You make it happen. It’s that simple.  Defining what you want is the first, most important thing.  And it doesn’t have to be material.  It doesn’t have to be physical.  It can be mental or spiritual.  Or all them.  But BE SPECIFIC about what you want, because IT WILL COME TRUE.  Visions come true.  They just don’t always look like what you wanted because there are an infinite number of possibilities attached to every want.  And for everything that manifests, the universe will react to what happened.  The universe must compromise with what you have wanted and balance itself out.  If you don’t believe them, then don’t try to ask to ask yourself what you want and don’t ask for the best that can happen.  But if you do – and this is not like some bullshit chain letter or chain email – visions come true.  You put the effort out into the universe, the intention, the desire, and the result is that: it will occur.    It may sound like cockypop to you.  That’s the best word I can think of for this right now.  Cockypop.  Because, trust me, when I was in my travellin’ and jaded 20s, or even my early despondent and desirous and driven 30s, if I read something like this from some dude, I’d think, “Cockypop.”  Actually, I wouldn’t have used that fantastical word.  I probably would have thought, “That guy is a jack ass.  Fuck that guy.  Let’s go get a beer.” So, this brings me back to our desire and our want to gravitate toward unpleasantness.  If our minds can find nothing pleasant, we WANT unpleasantness.  Sitting and meditating is a way of showing that.  Sometimes.  We find that our “Monkey Mind” - as Mingyur Rinpoche calls it – wants to find unpleasantness.  Our minds seek it out.  Our minds seek out those that have wronged us.  Our minds seek out things that need to get done that we don’t want to do.  Our minds seek out our pains and our anguish, our obsessive compulsive desires for more or less, for pleasure or distraction, for pain or disturbed thought. But, what if we consciously try not to seek out unpleasantness?  What if we simply are aware of it?  We don’t have to try necessarily.  We just begin to train our minds not to look for disturbing unpleasantnesses.  Instead we recognize that they are there, in the same way that we recognize that kind and gentle pleasantnesses are there.  In this way, this balance, is how we can be aware of the full gamut of our minds and our wants and desires at a deep level for both the pain and the pleasure of the world.  How.  Cool.  Is.  That? What’s the best that could happen from all this? I don’t know the answer to that exactly, Grasshoppers.  It is individual.  You have to answer that for yourselves.  But, for me, the best that can happen from recognizing the balance of pain and pleasures within all of us is finding contentment, joy, happiness and love.  Being our own Buddha.  Jesus.  Fiddling Grasshopper.  Whatever way is easiest for you to see it and whatever words and terms you need, apply them as you wish.  We are all Buddhas if we want to be.  We are all Jesus if we want to be.  We are all Grasshoppers if we want to be. What’s the best that could happen? For more Grasshopperisms and writing, and to speak to me about Artistic & Media Consulting, please email me at [email protected]

Grasshopperism #18 – “Get Rid Of The Box (There Is No Need To Live Outside The Box If There Is No Box)”

People sometimes talk about The Box.  They talk about living outside the Box or thinking outside the Box.  I realized last week, when I was on the beach talking with some friends, that it’s impossible to live or think outside the Box if there is NO Box.  

What if you have no Box to think outside or inside?  What if you have no Box to live outside or inside?  What if you’ve never had a Box?  And how do you get rid of The Box if you have one?

I believe The Box can be defined in a lot of ways.  It’s a very subjective idea, but one that comes up so often it must have some kind of loose definition to each one of us.  So, I asked a few people.  People living here in Paamul, my friends, who might be people that others might say are the kind of people who live Outside The Box.

Some said that The Box was society and society’s norms.  Some equated The Box to economic and religious rules.  Others said that it had to do with what people won’t do.  Others said it had to do with reinvention, and that the Box was something to leave behind.  

I think The Box is a human construction, a perception, a very blurry and deceptive way to look at what is possible and what is not.  I think that almost anything can be defined in terms of The Box.  Our lives, our jobs, our families, wealth, the countries we’re born in, the invisible boundaries between countries, the invisible boundaries between people.  It’s also The Box that we all live in, known as the universe, and beyond that, the Milky Way galaxy.  It’s also time and space.  Metaphysically it can be expanded to more than just societal rules.  So, really everything could fit into some Box, if we subscribe ourselves to it.  Even our own consciousness.

So, yeah.  Big mind blowing stuff.  Whoa, Nelly.  All right.  I’ll stop.  I’ll pull back and say what I believe The Box is for this Grasshopperism, and why I think The Box is something we can get rid of.  It’s a concept we human beings use to apply the word ‘should’ to ourselves.  Examples could include:   “I should go to college.” “I should have children.” “I should have a good job.” “I should save up for retirement.” “I should wait to go on vacation.” “I should buy a house.” “I should exercise today.” “I should get married.” “I should be a straight and not gay.” “I should be a man about this.” “I should be a man if I was born a man.” “I should believe in God.” “I should meditate.”

It’s also when we use the term ‘shouldn’t.  Like: “I shouldn’t quit this job.  I have to pay my debts off.” “I shouldn’t go to Chile because I need to pay off my student loans.” “I shouldn’t sell my place and move to Europe.” “I shouldn’t learn an instrument; I don’t have time.” “I shouldn’t talk to that person; they were mean to me.” “I shouldn’t give this relationship a chance; my friends think she’s a bitch.” “I shouldn’t get a divorce; my religion says it’s a sin.” “I shouldn’t trust that person because people are bad.”

‘Should’s and ‘shouldn’ts.  ‘Can’s and ‘can’ts.  ‘Supposed-to's and ‘supposed-to-not’s.  What.  The.  Fuck.

The Box is what you put yourself in because others tell you what you should and shouldn’t do.  You should make a certain amount of money.  Do a certain job.  Have the right amount of debt.  Take the right amount of risk.  Date the correct people.  Love the right people.  Live within the boundaries defined.  Look the way we say.  Listen to what we say.  Watch what we watch.  Smell and eat and taste and swallow what we smell and eat and taste and swallow.

We is Us.  We created the Box.  Us.  Humans.  Our consciousness.  Our ethics and our morals.  Our cultures and our sub-cultures.  I truly believe that most beliefs in the world, the ‘Great Religions’, all say very similar things.  The same concepts.  They are: To Love.   To be good.   Not to hurt people.   Not to kill people.   And generally speaking, just don’t be a dick.   Yes, I believe that what Jesus, Mohammed, Abraham, Moses, Buddha and Lao Tzu were basically saying was, “You’re a human being.  Please don’t be a dick.”  

To me this means: Don’t harm people.  Don’t drop bombs on people.  Don’t hurt children and please try to be good to animals, too.  But everything else, generally speaking, is ok.  If you want to live in a Box of your symbolic choosing, then please go right ahead.  If it’s comfortable there, that’s fine with me.  

But here’s the amazing thing I realized: I am comfortable having No Box.  I never had one.  Or if I did, it was a very, very large box.  And it’s grown so now it’s maybe the universe or infinity or beyond.  Just like what Buzz Lightyear​ said.  That’s my Box.  One where I do my best not to harm anyone in any way ever.  Beyond that, though, to look at what The Box is and how you can free yourself from it, is this Grasshopperism.  

I read this yesterday in an except from advice to various Buddhist practitioners in prison by Ven. Robina Courtin​ from ‘Notes On The Path To Enlightenment’:

“I remember in particular one program about nature by an Englishman, Attenborough, who is very well known in England. He was discussing a particular group of ants in Africa and their habitat, their anthill, and explaining how amazing they were. For example, he pointed out, their home, which was maybe ten feet tall, had many levels, where different ants did different things; how skillful they were. And how their basement, if you like, was kept at a very precise temperature for this reason and that. He said that these ants had evolved in their sophistication over the years and was truly awestruck at their talents.

The Buddhist view could be, in a sense – big deal! Ants in their nature do not have the mental capacity to calculate technological things, but the fact that they seemed to do these things by instinct shows that the karmic imprints to do them are strongly in their minds – and that these imprints are from human lives, when that mental capacity was evident. These busy creatures, all following their instincts, were simply reincarnated humans who obviously had developed very sophisticated technical skills – look at today’s world! – but because these skills had been developed and carried out as humans in conjunction with huge attachment and grasping and the rest, these delusions had caused them to be born as lower creatures who nevertheless kept the imprints of their technical training.”

No matter if you choose to believe in reincarnation or not – I’m still not sure of the idea myself – but what is amazing about this couple paragraphs is that, yes, it's phenomenal that these ants could construct something as amazing as this giant ant hill - as equally amazing as constructing a cathedral or a skyscraper - but these ants do only this.  That is their Box.  All they can do is their very minute & specific task in this ant hill.

Do you know what would have been more amazing to me?  If one of these Ants had said to his Ant buddies: “Dudes, I’m outta here.  I’m gonna go play the ukulele.”  And that Ant did it!

If I were wandering along in the African jungle and I saw a 10-foot ant hill, I’d be pretty amazed.  Fascinated.  A little scared even.  But if I looked down a few feet from the ant hill and saw one ant playing a teeny, tiny ukulele, well, then I’d be awestruck.  I’d freak out.  I might pass out from shock.  How cool would that be???

That’s what I mean about getting rid of The Box.  The Ant who plays the ukulele, the Any who leaves the ant hill, they are getting rid of The Box.  They left the Box behind.  But, here’s the thing, what if there was never an ant hill to begin with?  What if you were an ant that gravitated to playing the ukulele from the start without common knowledge about ant hills or building them?  What if, after playing the ukulele and living out your ant life, you suddenly discovered that other ants actually built ant hills?  You, The Ukulele Playing Ant thought this was a pretty cool thing to do, but when the Anthill Building Ants said, “You should come build this ant hill with us.  You’re an ant.  That’s what you do.  That’s what you should do, actually.  You can’t play the ukulele.  You’re an Ant.  You should be building ant hills.”  

What would you do?  How would you feel?  This is how my life has been.  

I grew up in Minnesota where people ice skate and play hockey throughout the long winters that reaches as low as minus 30 or 40 F.  Some of these same Minnesotans actually love the winter when it gets that cold.  They speak with accents like in the Cohen Brothers movie “Fargo".  Most of them live in homes in neighborhoods where neighbors are on both sides of them and across the street and maybe across an alley, too.  There is a cultural identity there called Minnesota Nice where people are extraordinarily nice to you – but it’s a surface nice-ness – and secretly some of them loathe you or may want to put an ice ogger into your skull.

Me.  I grew up in a 100-year-old farmhouse in the country in Minnesota.  I walked down a quarter mile drive way everyday to catch the school bus and listened to the wind whip at 20 and 30 and 40 miles per hour across the dead fields of snow covered wheat and old corn stalks, vibrating the electrical wires so hard that sounded like they would snap over my head.  I had black figure skates instead of hockey skates.  I hated the winter with every single frozen bone in my little body.  I didn’t have an accent from “Fargo”.  My dad was from Nebraska and he never had one – maybe I spoke like him or maybe I just didn’t ever speak like the other people.   My dad was a Vietnam veteran and worked at a prison.  He was gone most of the time working.  My other friends’ dads worked jobs at offices or factories or schools and none of their dad’s had been in Vietnam in 1969.  My dad had a beard and long hair and a Volkswagen van with “Reagan’s Here The End Is Near” sprayed painted on the front of it – he spray-painted the front of it himself the day after Ronald Reagan was elected President in 1979.  My friend’s dads had trucks.  

My mom smudged the house with sage, read from the Moosewood Cookbook, was vegetarian, had a Women’s Spirituality Group, bathed in front of me naked – there was a lot of naked-ness at our house – and had girlfriends with names like Lumber.  Other kid’s moms made hot dishes with crumbled potato chips on top and had friends with names like Mary who played the piano at the Lutheran church on Sundays.  

I did play the piano like old Mary.  But other kids played hockey or trombone in the band.  Whatever Box I thought I knew was so different from the other kids that I didn’t even know how to fit into The Box the other kids fit into.  The jeans I wore sometimes had holes in the patches that covered the holes.  My belt buckles and belts came from The Joint, where my Dad worked, fashioned by inmates at the prison.  My swing sets were made from bags – so much so that my favorite swing was called The Bag Swing.  My dad smoked pot and paraphernalia was kept hidden but within reach.  We had no carpets, we had rugs.  We had no shower, we had a bathtub.  We had no washer and dryer, we had the laundromat.  We had no neighbors, except one, the Landlord, Mr. Moreim, who was such a closeted homosexual that I believe it gave him a hump in his back from denying it.  After he evicted my family and I from our farm house in 1988 because I had a 16th birthday party filled with Punk Rock looking kids, his hump only grew.  The Hunchback Of St. Cloud Minnesota.

Once, for kindergarten show ’n’ tell, I brought my Evel Knievel​ doll with a red cape sewn on the back made out of red corduroy.  My mom had cleverly sewn the cape on his back and told me he was Superman now.  I was totally cool with that.  My Evel Knievel doll had lost his hands and feet – the metal inside his rubber exterior had long since deteriorated – and this feetless and handsless Evel Knievel - the same 6 inch superhuman that had once flown through the air using piles of comic books as his wind-up motorcycle ramp – was, for all my 5-year-old superhero purposes, now Superman​.  The other kids didn’t think so and they laughed at me.  I didn’t know why.  My Kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Knutsen, got mad at me for using words that were too big.  She put me in the hall for entire afternoons for saying that “I didn’t care what we did that day.”  And, at the end of the school year, she wrote me down as being a kid who should be put in the low Reading and Math groups.  I went to 1st Grade and studied low level math and reading and loved it.  It was pie.  It was butter.  It was so easy, I never had to think.  And I don’t get bored – born with I-never-get-bored DNA - so I amused myself with imagination.  What did Bill and Jane and Spot illustrations get up to in their time off from teaching snot-nosed 1st Graders how to read and do math.  Were Bill & Jane up to something naughty?

2nd Grade came and they kept me in the same math and reading groups.  It was cake.  Halfway through 3rd Grade, when I was 7 years old, they moved me out of the lower level and beyond the high levels into the Gifted Group.  Then, the kids really made fun of me.  I was no longer too dumb for the low level nor even too smart for the high levels, I was beyond that.  And so, I was in 2 different classes each day and never in one solid home room, walking hallways on my lonesome, and having occasional after school “gifted” sessions with 4 other young, little students.  Mrs. Knutsen apologized to my Mom 3 years after kindergarten for doing that to me – keeping me in low reading and math groups – but what she did was make me into me.  

In this way, and other small and large ways, my Box was never defined.  It was SMASHED open for me.  And THANK YOU!

Thank you, Mrs. Knutsen for instilling in me the very notion that teachers don’t necessarily know anything unless they're good at their jobs – and for making me realize that a mentor is not a teacher but someone you really look up to - a Hero not a Witch!  

Thank you, Hockey Playing Assholes who beat me up and chased me down and shoved me over on my little yellow Stingray bike – I learned that ice is hard and water is soft, and I prefer warm sand on my bare feet to 2 pairs of thick socks and 12 foot piles of snow & parking lot filth!  

Thank you, Kurt Airsman for wanting to kick my ass in high school, and when I fell to my knees and yelled rape you never touched me again – thereby forever proving that brains are better than brawn.  

Thank you, burning, boring Guitar Players for not understanding piano players – you made me stand out – you made me get more girls and get more gigs.  

Thank you, Minnesota for being cold and brutal and emotionally malnourished– you drove me out – far out into the world to travel and discover and learn and be larger than anything your small boxes could hold me inside.  

Thank you, College Professors for being so bad at your jobs that I did my own independent studies while at university and ended up in Prague, DJing and working for Art & Literature magazines and meeting Sacco Koster who booked all my European tours!  

Thank you, California for being so strange that I wanted to learn all about you – my personal sociology experiment – and then to discover that home is anywhere your mind can take you – not necessarily just where you lay your head.  

Thank you, Pain itself, for making me strive and search all my life for a way to kill you – only to return to you - Pain, as a source of inspiration for art and for the ever increasingly wonderful world of my mind – finally accepting that you and I, Pain, are the same - we are one!  

Thank you, Cops for arresting me and taunting me and following me around and falling in love with me only to remind me that you are exactly, in every way, what I am not – that you define the Stormtrooper, the Imperial Empire, the Sheriff of Nottingham, Captain Hook – that you are the villains, and Pirates, like me, are the Heroes – and that The Box you live and work in is tantamount to a giant ant hill with absolutely no art or merit – except to serve and protect...no one but yourselves!  

Thank you, Seattle music scene for being so rock-centric that I moved to San Francisco to do Tom Waits-inspired music and this unfolded into a greater world of art and music and travel than I could ever have truly envisioned!  

Thank you, Surfers for being such a hard group of people to fall in with – you Nazi Punk Surfers – so hard in your knowledge of the sea - and knowing that there are so few waves to go around that very few are let in to the Pack - to your Box – that you inspired me, with every part of my soul and being, to surf even more - to be one of you – to fit inside the Box you wouldn’t let me in!  

And thank you, Box, for existing only to remind that you never had to exist in the first place.

The Box is to be burned.  Set the cardboard aflame.  The Box is to remove the milk cartons and milk bottles it carries and smash it all in the streets.  The Box is gas, is vapor, is the ether.  It is not lava, not boulders, not concepts or words.  The Box is not to be believed in or to shape yourself to fit inside.  

The Box is what you confine yourself to, to say “I can’t” when really “you can”!  It is the excuse.  The reason against.  It is fear, pure unadulterated fear, that grows as you grow older.  The Box is money, if you let it be.  It is poverty, if you it let be.  It is your home, your house and your children, if you let them be.  The Box is not to be lived inside or outside or in between.  It is not a square hole in a round peg, or a round peg in a square hole.  It is censorship.  It is control.  It is judgment and it is prison.  The Box is the very cells you keep yourself in.

According to The Expeditioner.com, as of February 2014, only 46% of Americans have a valid passport.  That means that less than half of Americans can legally leave the United States.  54% of Americans live in a self-imposed Box.  They are not allowing themselves to see any more of the world than their own country.  This, to me, is incredibly sad.  But, again, if you choose to live inside a Box, I will not judge you for it.  I won’t understand it and I will find it sad, but I will accept your decision.

If you don’t believe in my concept of The Box, then I’m guessing you do believe in the idea that a prison cell is a Box.  A Box human beings put other humans beings in.  And, the startling statistics in the U.S. about imposing a Box on other human beings are enragingly, startlingly frightening.  

According to the Washington Post​, here’s what Democrat Hillary Clinton​ said in a speech at Columbia University on April 29, 2015: “It’s a stark fact that the United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population, yet we have almost 25 percent of the world’s total prison population.”  

And here is what Republican Rand Paul​ said in a news release on his web site on March 9, 2015: “Though only 5 percent of the world’s population lives in the United States, it is home to 25 percent of the world’s prison population. … Not only does the current overpopulated, underfunded system hurt those incarcerated, it also digs deeper into the pockets of taxpaying Americans.”

These quotes were fact checked by the Washington Post.  They are correct.  Approximately 500 out of every 100,000 Americans are in prison.  That means that for every 200 Americans, 1 of us Americans is in prison.  

Imagine how many people you see everyday.  As you drive down the highway in traffic, as you sit in your office, as you look out the window, as you watch television or search through the internet.   Imagine how many people you see.  Out of the 199 people you see, the 1 you don’t see is in prison.  Imagine the number that have been in prison already and imagine the number that will be in prison in the future.  These are your children.  This is what you pay taxes for.  These are the Boxes you put people in, Americans.  Me included.  I’m also an American, so I’m also responsible.

The most accurate metaphor I can give for The Box is prison.  And the United States Of America has the highest rate of incarceration in the world.  More than China.  More than anywhere.  More people kept in forced, confined, locked Boxes than anywhere else.  Every person sitting in prison costs every tax paying American money.  This is a Box on many levels that is incomprehensible.

Why I’m writing about prisons and passports is to define Boxes on a scale that is physical.  Metaphorically, we all have Boxes of some kind (even me who says I have No Box).  Our own bodies could be seen as Boxes that limit us with death freeing us of our bodies.

What I’m asking you to do is, Grasshopperistically, free yourself of your Box today.  Book a flight to somewhere you’ve never been.  Go buy that instrument you’ve always wanted to play.  Say “No” to something you’ve always said “Yes” to.  Laugh when it’s inappropriate.  Speak out of turn.  Quit your job.  Go ahead, do it.  You hate it.  Put your house up for sale.  Be nice when you’re in a bad mood.  Have sex with your husband or wife or girlfriend or boyfriend – it’s been awhile.  Go out for dinner, you have the money.  Go get a fucking passport if you don’t have one – it’s incredibly easy!  Buy tickets to see a play, a band, an opera.  Go to a museum.  Give someone a giant hug for so long it hurts.  Play with toys.  Dig out some old action figures or Barbie dolls.  Be unafraid to give a flying fuck what people think of you & what you’re doing.  

If you have to, think of me sitting here shirtless in the Mayan Riviera, typing under a palapa roof, the air at about 75 degrees F, wearing nothing but board shorts and a piece of amber around my neck, listening to Ludovico Einaudi​ and Leonard Cohen​ on Spotify​ by the beach on a Tuesday afternoon.  If you need to use me as a symbol, to think “I can do that, too”, please do.  If you can envision what I’m doing and that you want to do that, do it.  But, please do it your own way, because your vision will be different from mine.  

Go to wherever you want.  Don’t wait to retire, don’t wait to win the lottery and don’t wait to die.  Don’t watch a reality show to vicariously live through them, go do it yourself.  And, if you’re comfortable where you are, just do that.  It’s fine.  It’s cool.  Just don’t be a dick.  Be a good person.  But learn.  Try.  Please try to learn.  So that the human race can be better than yesterday.  So that we don’t end up a race of New Neanderthals.  Learn.  Burn.  Learn from and then burn your Box.  Learn like a new born baby and burn like a comet on the sky, Grasshoppers.  There is no Box, there is only you.  

Please reblog.

GRASSHOPPERISM #15 - “Do A Concert For Nobody”

So, I’m sitting around watching the snow fall, listening to Ryan Adams “Live At Carnegie Hall” thinking about this conversation that Jim McAlister and I had at the Local Blend Coffee Shop in St. Joe, Minnesota 2 days ago about Why we do the shit we do.  I mean, like, really why?  And not the shit that sucks, but the things we do for Love, for the Love of it, to make a change, to create, to make art, to inspire the world, to be leaders, all these things I think about and maybe you do, too.  If you don’t think about these things, then you’ve probably already stopped reading and you’ve moved on to some Meme or sound byte or something else Hallmark-like.  I’m sitting here in a little room in my family’s house in Wobegon out in the forest and it’s snowing…a lot…like really wet snow.  Like Snowmiser is crying or something.  I’m burning off the gallons of coffee inside myself and Ryan is talking to the audience back on November 17th, 2014, and I’m wondering Why, like Why do I do what I do?

Ok, so that makes me think of Why I’m writing this.  The whole reason is because sometimes you need to “Do A Concert For Nobody”.  A concert for yourself.  And a concert can be anything.  Sit down and bake yourself a cake if you’re a baker.  I think of Kristen Wiig in “Bridesmaids” when she’s completely depressed, her life is in shambles and her cupcakery is gone, so she bakes herself one, intricately made cupcake.  And then eats it.

That’s what I mean when I say you gotta Do A Concert For Nobody.  I used to sit down and do concerts for myself all the time on the piano.  That’s how a ton of my songs were written, just sitting there, beating out the same 2 or 3 or 4 chords over and over and fucking around, singing words out of nowhere.  But a concert, it can just be for you on anything.  Any Grasshoppers’ Fiddle.  My Fiddle today is this laptop, pounding on the keys like it’s the keys of some old, rickety piano, some broken down, upright piano at the end of a dock to nowhere, like out in Tomales Bay, California.  Like some old, sad, broken-hearted piano that you imagine Tom Waits playing or the villain in Shrek 2 playing Nick Cave’s “People Just Ain’t No Good”.  This is my piano today.  This MacBook Pro from 2012.

I’ve been thinking about Why for awhile.  Why am I thinking about Why?  Because it has to do with what I Want?  How many times do you ask yourself what you Want?  Maybe all the time.  But, I mean, really ask what you Want?  Like specifically?  And then, go beyond that, and ask yourself Why do you Want that?  You Want to be a Rock Star?  Why?  You Want to be famous?  Why?  You Want to be rich?  Why?  You Want to be in Love?  Why?  You Want kids?  Why?  You Want to go to another country?  Why?  Really ask.   Seriously.

Why am I writing this?  Here’s Why.  I need to Do A Concert For Nobody and then I want to use that as an example of how I believe everyone needs to Do A Concert For Nobody once in awhile.  This is actually a slight sham because I plan to put it out for other’s to read.  But right now, this is for me.  And Why?  Because I believe in Doing Concerts For Nobody But Me.  And I believe in it so much that I want others to see the Value in it.  It’s a Grasshopperism.  And I believe in being a Grasshopper and what it represents so much that I want other people to join me, change the world, be leaders, invent something, be David Kamen from the documentary Slingshot, be Steve Jobs, Einstein, The Wright Brothers, Harriet Tubman, Bernice Gera the first female umpire in U.S. Baseball, Ghandi, Buddha, Nelson Mandela.  Think big.  Be larger than myself.  Inspire people to be larger than themselves.  Inspire you.  I believe in this shit.  And this shit is Valuable.  Changing the world, breaking down walls, blowing away artistic boundaries is not done by Followers it’s done by Leaders and New Thinkers and Free Thinkers and Visionaries.  Following is easy.  Leading is hard.  Putting your neck out about something you believe in is hard.

Why?  Because I believe.  My purpose has become to do this.  Crazy?  Sure.  Why not?  What do I have to lose?  I’m a lunatic.  I’m a Grasshopper.  I’m a person who’s fell to the bottom more times than I count, faced up to countless fears, had my heart broken and stepped on by everyone from women to music to life itself.  It’ll happen again.  All of it.  The rising, shining, effortless success and the bone crushing failures.  The incredulously painful rejection and the burning, seething delicious desires and cravings sated by getting what I Want.  And when you get what you Want, it is all the more delicious and wonderful when you know Why and when you sit back and think “I got what I wanted and I know why I wanted it.”

I Want you, some of the you, maybe the 10% who don’t think I’m a complete fragile, broken lunatic to get it.  To know that going out a limb is fucking scary, and so you do it because you believe in it.  Sometimes, my friends and fellow Grasshoppers, you just gotta say “Fuck it”.  Do it.  Paddle out.  Drop in.  

So, I ask Why?  Because it is Us who will make evolution possible.  It is Us who will defeat oppression.  It is Us who can destroy the walls of Fear.  It is us that can destroy violence, eradicate racism, homophobia, sexism, human trafficking, child abduction and tear down the prison gates.  Open ‘em up!  For Love.  For the sound of an orchestra, a blazing guitar, the Howl of Allan Ginsberg, the blare of Ornette Coleman’s saxophone, the searing words of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, breaking the chains that bind our minds and make us be Followers rather than Leaders.  

My father has been called a Bombastic Contrarian by some.  Maybe that’s where I get it.  My mom has helped hundreds of sexual assault victims through their traumas.  Maybe that’s where I get it.  I’ve seen the downtrodden of Guatemala, Vietnam, Mexico, San Francisco’s Tenderloin  and the Western Addition, maybe I see it everywhere.  And maybe that’s where I got it. This desire.  This Want.  I’ve fallen in love with Cops, with Borderline Personality Disorder ridden women, Estheticians, Hair Stylists, Escrow Officers, Gender Studies Majors, Russian Poetry Students, Rock Chicks & Wine Mongers.  Maybe learning about so many different women’s hearts is where I got it.  My friends are Freaks, Gays, Trans, Manic Depressives, Closeted Straights, White Dudes, Dykes, Musicians, Artists, Farmers, Losers, Dice Rollers, Cubicle Soldiers, Wealthy Philanthropists and Poor Philanthropists.  Maybe that’s where I got this desire to be a Grasshopper and find and inspire all my Grasshopper family out there.  

Here we are at the brink of where 2015 spills into 2016.  Guns and Planned Parenthood and Cops and Black Lives Matter and Republicans and Immigrants and Terrorists on our minds.  It’s very easy for me to say I think guns are stupid.  Guns are stupid.  Planned Parenthood is for the health of all people.  Women and all people should be able to govern their own bodies and abortion is a not a discussion it is a right.  Affordable Health Care is also a human right.  The color is one’s skin says nothing about who they are.  Police are killing more blacks than anyone else.  Why?  Why!?  Why do people want to not allow women to govern their own bodies?  Why do people want to put up a wall between the U.S. and Mexico?  Did no one learn anything from Berlin?  Why do people want to vote for a hatemonger like Trump?  Why do people think that all Moslems are Terrorists?  Why?  Why did Terrorist shoot the fuck out of a theatre where The Eagles of Death Metal were playing?  Fear?  Anger?  Ignorance?  Why do people break hearts?  Have children to make themselves feel better?  Criticize art?  Hurt people?  Is it a lack of Empathy?  Why?

I ask all this because this is my Concert For Nobody.  This is for me.  These are my beliefs.  And my beliefs are that I Want people to ask Why, to self-reflect, to go inward and ask Why they believe what they believe.  Also, what do we all Want and Why?  Why do we sometimes Want to hurt someone?  Why do we sometimes Want to make art?  Why do we sometimes Want to make one single cupcake?

I Want to help you discover what you Want, determine Why you Want it and then make it happen.  I’m the Grasshopper.  If you believe in something that you feel no one else believes in but you know it to the core of your soul.  A project, a trip, a desire, but you do not plan to be violent to anyone, then you are a Grasshopper, too.  This passion drives us to change, to create, to make, to be.  To recreate ourselves, to reinvent ourselves, to fall in Love again when our hearts have become stone, to get up again when the bullies of the world push us down.

And sometimes, a Grasshopper needs to do a concert for only them.  Write, paint, bake, sculpt, make a snow angel, build the effigy of a man and light it on fire.  For you.  A Concert For Nobody.  Sit down and play your fiddle, Grasshoppers.  I just played the fuck outta mine and it felt damn good.