#grasshopperism

So, my friend Gentry Bronson has been writing a series of Grasshopperism for quite some time. As someone that has been examining their life, I find these writings to be extremely insightful.  In fact, as I was making major shifts in my life, I wish these had been around to guide me as I was navigating through certain events in my life.

I decided to pull them together in an easy to read post.  Feel free to enjoy and share.  Thank you Gentry. 

GRASSHOPPERISM #21: Release The Push

GRASSHOPPERISM #20: Everyone Breaks

GRASSHOPPERISM #19: What is the Best That Can Happen

GRASSHOPPERISM #18: Get Rid Of The Box

GRASSHOPPERISM #17: Find Your Audience, Find Your People

GRASSHOPPERISM #16: Sometimes You Gotta Go In The Cave

GRASSHOPPERISM #15: Do A Concert For Nobody

GRASSHOPPERISM #14: Letting Go of Letting Go

GRASSHOPPERISM #13: There’s No Reason To Be Bored

GRASSHOPPERISM #12: Work Less, Make More Money

GRASSHOPPERISM #11: The Working Loving, Living Ant

GRASSHOPPERISM #10: Live An Imperfect Life

GRASSHOPPERISM #9: Bring It Down

GRASSHOPPERISM #8: Are You Truly Happy

GRASSHOPPERISM #7: Forgive Yourself First

GRASSHOPPERISM #6: I Am Gentry Fucking Bronson & I Am Just Gentry

GRASSHOPPERISM #5: Become Your Own Hero

GRASSHOPPERISM #4: The Value and Art of Doing Nothing

GRASSHOPPERISM #3: When In Doubt, Paddle Out

GRASSHOPPERISM #2: Passion, Time & Valuing Yourself

GRASSHOPPERISM #21 - “Release The Push”

“Sometimes you gotta take a left and put on a new suit of clothes.” - Grandpa Bronson

“When I allow it to be, there’s no control over me.  I have my fears but they do not have me.” - Peter Gabriel from his song Darkness

This quote from my Grandpa LB and these lyrics from Peter Gabriel go through my head all the time.

Have you ever wanted something so much that you push and push for it?  Do you want your music and your art and your writing and your ideas and your business to reach people so badly that you feel like you’re pounding your head into a brick wall over and over again?  Do you ever feel like you want your pain and suffering to end so badly that you are constantly on the search for a cure?

If the answer is “yes”, then stop.  Right here.  Right now.  Stop.  Stop the push.  Release The Push. 

We Grasshoppers are many times fueled by passionate desire.  We are fueled by a desire to create, to change the world, to show people something they’ve never seen and to experience something they’ve never felt before.  We want this so badly that sometimes it hurts.  And sometimes we hurt so badly we want to push for the hurt to stop.

But what if we just stop?  What if we release the desire?  It seems simple.  And it seems impossible at the same time. 

I want to tell you about years of wanting.  And then realizing that when the wanting is released, you can achieve so much.  Doors open.  What you want can happen.  It’s amazing.

I just did a workshop with Elle Cosimano this past Saturday.  Elle is a brilliant author of Young Adult fiction.  About five years ago she decided to write a book.  She had wanted to write a book for years.  She had no previous experience, no MFA and was working a job as a very successful real estate professional.  But she was unhappy, dissatisfied.  She spent several months in Mexico during one summer writing her first book.  Then, she amazingly did all the research and work required to find and land a good publishing deal.  A two-book deal.  She’s now releasing her fourth book – with another big publisher - and she relocated to Mexico a few years ago with her husband and children.  She worked hard to make that happen.  She was tired of The Push.  Tired of The United States and her profession.  So, she “took a left and put on a new suit of clothes.”

Elle is one of the many Grasshoppers in the world.  And she is one of my many inspirations.  She “Found A New Fiddle”.  She wanted something and she made it happen.  It took time and it took patience.  And she was gracious enough to share her experience and knowledge with us this past Saturday.

What’s amazing about this for me is that I met Elle 2 years ago in Mexico.  I was burned out on being burned out on being burned out with my music career.  I had just released my HUMAN album and I was soon to be touring The Netherlands and Belgium, but I knew I needed to be done after that.  I knew that I needed a new suit of clothes.  I had this idea – this incredibly preposterous idea – to write a book about The Fiddling Grasshopper – and then to help people make their visions and dreams for living a creative and passionate life come true.  I was passionate about making others passionate.  But how to do it?

About a month after I met Elle, I flew from Mexico to San Francisco.  Gathered some music gear and clothes from my storage unit in Petaluma and drove to Minnesota.  There, I intended to write.  But I did not.  I prepared for my HUMAN Summer Tour, then flew to Amsterdam and performed the tour.  I was on my game for the most part on stage – but for much of the tour I was miserable.  Depressed and in pain.  Drinking like a fish and taking pills to sleep.  When I returned to Minnesota, I was determined to write.  I began to write very, very slowly.  Then, I met a girl and got lost in that for a while.  I continued to write, a little faster now – releasing some of my work and philosophies to the world on social media.  Then, I decided I would try to embrace music again – against my gut feeling – and I flew back to San Francisco to perform.  It was terrible.  Atrocious.  Everything fell apart.  I went back to Minnesota again.  Broken in the winter.  Living through what I called my Shining winter – as in The Shining – Stanley Kubrick’s horror film based on Stephen King’s novel.

When I emerged from The Shining, I began to write again.  To think again.  Without any knowledge of what it would my ideas and words would become, but with the drive and the knowledge that it would come to fruition.  The belief that I was on to something.  Again, like I had when I restarted my music career back in 1999, I felt the world’s eyes on me saying, “What the fuck are you doing?  You’re a musician.  Do that.  That’s what you’re good at.  That’s who you are.  When are you going to do that again?”  The pressure to be the person I knew I wasn;pt anymore was ominous.  But I stuck to my guns.  I knew how to say “no”, even though I felt like people were looking at me and thinking, “What is Gentry doing?”  “What’s he building in there?” as Tom Waits sings.

I knew I had to do what I had to do.  This drive is what Grasshoppers into Grasshoppers.  While the Ants work, we fiddle.  We look like crazy people.  Fiddling away while the Ants store up for winter.  They look at us and think we have no idea what we’re doing.  Or they wonder why we’re doing what we’re doing?  We are not “normal”.  We are like Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters Of The Third Kind.  We do because we know it is what we must do.

This time though, as opposed to the many years I pushed and pushed and pushed for my music to reach the ears and hearts of my audience, I made Releasing The Push part of my work.  I knew that I had to do this differently.  That my life was also my work.  And my work was my life.  When your work and your life are intertwined, it puts a lot more pressure on what your work is and what it stands for.  I knew this already from being a musician and a songwriter.  I knew that when you put out raw, honest, uncensored emotion to the world there is great risk.  That the stakes are higher when your soul is involved, and failure and rejection can literally destroy you.  I knew that I should be dead.  My years of rampant self-medicating use of booze and pills and danger should have killed me 100 times.  A thousand times.  And maybe also, that years of deep rejection could have also killed me, as it did Nick Drake or Vincent van Gogh.  And then this very fact became part of my work.

Death.  And the knowledge that death exists.  Looming over absolutely everything.  But it is forgotten, swept under the rug.  That seemingly dark void.  The winter we never return from – floating down the River Styx – maybe floating in a haze of white clouds – forever gone.  That thing we try not to think about.  Maybe I’m different in that I had thought about Death for most of my life.  I had lived my life with the knowledge that I might die tomorrow.  But in a very dark and gothic sense.  Out of pain and not out of wonder.  Now, Death became the reason to Live.

I knew by resisting death all those years, that I was pushing against it.  Pushing against the natural changes that will inevitably lead us all there.  To Death.  The other side.  Losing my Uncle Jim in 2010 was the first chance to look at Death.  Then, in 2015 I lost my Uncle Eric, and then my childhood piano teacher Marilyn Kiffmeyer to cancer, and then my Cousin Pat to suicide all within three months.  Three funerals on the heels of my Shining winter.  Now, here I was reshaping what Death is, and that maybe I had not lost them, maybe I suddenly had found me. 

By not pushing against the natural river of life, I was just floating down it.  What a fucking relief!  I didn’t have to push anymore.  I could just…be.  So many have written about this and this philosophy of just “being”.  It almost seems cliché.  But what if you just let your creation, your art, your project, and your career “be”.  That it will come when it comes.  By gently directing your boat, your surf board, your SUP, your walking legs and swimming arms toward what you want, you will reach it.  Not by pushing, but by being in and with your work until you and it are ready.

Well, this is where Elle comes back in to the story.  Elle is a published author in the big leagues.  I knew that when I met her.  I knew that she may have some knowledge to impart, and I knew that having one beacon of light can move us all toward the shore, up the mountain and then call everyone else up there with us.  So, after 2 years, Elle offered this workshop.  A staggering six and a half hours about publishing.  My push to get published was not a push, I need to “allow it to be” as Peter Gabriel sings.  “I have my fear so it doesn’t own me.” 

Now, maybe, this was the time.  To not Push for it was to find the right time.  The right tools.  The right reason for writing.  Now, Elle had imparted on a small few of us, her own Grasshopperistic means to be successful with your creativity as a writer.  It was up to us to do the work.  Scary?  Of course!

Are we all scared of our work not reaching people?  Yes, I think most of us are.  Because we work to create it and if no one hears it, then it truly is like a tree falling the forest.  What does that tree sound like? If a songwriter writes one thousand songs, but no one hears them, are they songs at all?

I used to sit and write songs for hours, polishing them, reshaping them, driving my girlfriends and neighbors insane, and then I’d try them out solo or with the band at rehearsal, and about half would fall flat on their face.  My little child – Gentry’s Song #987 – would be beaten up by bullies on the playground.  And sometimes I wanted to push little Song #987 back out into the sandbox to show those bullies.  And then show the studio.  And then show the music labels.  And then show the audience.  But when I pushed those little frightened songs, they sometimes got beaten up even more.  Sometimes beaten to death, and they never appeared on any record ever.

After all the time I had pushed my music career, in my Releasing The Push and in writing about it, the doors were opening to do what you are reading.  I am living in Mexico in the Caribbean.  The sea is off my left right now.  I’m sitting in nothing but board shorts, I’ve worn underwear about 4 times in the last 2 months, and I’m writing what you are reading.  It’s all a part of the creative process, and I’m not pushing it.  I’ve Released The Push.  I am “living the dream” as we joke about here.  But living the dream is what it’s all about.  You can’t push the dream though.  Just gently nudge it, and it will happen. 

When you burn out on burning out on burning out, then that’s what my Grandpa LB meant when he said “take a left”.  I imagine a brick wall.  A long endless brick wall.  The Great Wall of China.  The Berlin Wall.  And me, standing there, beating my head against it, over and over and over.  Pleading for a booking agent to let me play their venue or a radio station to play me.  Begging labels to sign me to a contract.  Knocking on the digital doors of music supervisors to get my songs into a film or television show or podcast.  And then, beyond that, wanting audiences to “get me”.  And even further, to want women to love me.  To want people I looked up to to want my friendship.  To be accepted.  To be loved.  To not feel like a Misfit or a Reject.  Yet, I felt I was continuously mis-fit by people like a block in a round hole misshapen hole.  Rejected like an opera singer in a barber shop quartet.  No’s and not’s and holes and darknesses, until I finally stopped.

I just stopped.

My head, bleeding down my face from beating my head over and over into the wall.  My eyes barely able to see through all the blood.  Dizzy, reeling.  I turned my head and looked to the left.  Down the wall.  There, in front of me, was nothing but space.  Long, effortless space.  And I could walk down it.  Toward whatever waited for me.  Yes, the wall was still beside me as I began to walk in a new direction, reminding me of all the rejection and all the pain and all the suffering, but I could walk and continue to walk.  Into space.  Into the infinite.  Toward fresh, new, opportunities and challenges and adventures I never expected to find. Suddenly I was writing This is what I mean when I write the Grasshopperisms about Finding A New Fiddle.  I had taken a left and found a new fiddle to play.

At some point, I believe the wall disappeared, or I forgot it about altogether.  I didn’t care that the wall was there because I wasn’t pushing anymore.  It wasn’t apathy, it was acceptance.  I wasn’t as scared because there isn’t a wall to beat my head into anymore.  I just needed to keep moving, gently pushing myself toward the direction I wanted to go.  Do the Work.  I still need to write the words and find the publishers, but now, just a little differently.  I have created my own opportunities by not pushing anymore.

Releasing The Push is not just for creativity.  It’s for life.  If you love someone but they don’t know how to love, let them learn.  You can take a left and walk away from their walls.  The walls that Lovers have can be high and hard, and your head and hands will bleed for years if you don’t turn away from them.  If you want someone to like you, a group of friends, a neighbor, but they just don’t, then stop wanting.  It doesn’t matter.  You will die and so will they.  That is not a bad thing.  That is change.  And being loved or liked does not matter in the great, infinite universe we live in.  And if you don’t like where or who you are, then go into your symbolic closet and put on a new suit of clothes.  You have the ability to change anytime you want.  It’s fucking fantastic.

If you are experiencing something that you feel you have no control over – something like chronic pain, bad health, a disability – then stop pushing to be something you are not.  This is a part of you.  This unpleasantness is part of the great balance that makes you into you.  Don’t push to try to get rid of it.  It’s cool, it’s you.  What a magnificent thing to experience both pain and pleasure.  Don’t push either one away.  Feel them.  Feel your feelings.  Release The Push.  Discover in both the pain and pleasure of your life, that the great creative fountain, the effervescent, phosphorescent glow of you, is made greater by your suffering and by your sweet delicious delight.

Release The Push and just be.  You never know what might happen.  Today.  Tomorrow.  This moment.  Be remarkable because you already are, Grasshopper.  We are all Grasshoppers, if we want to be.

Buy Elle Cosimano’s books at this Amazon link!

For more information about Elle, click to visit her web site.

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

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 #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 #17 – “Find Your Audience, Find Your People”

Who do you write for?  Who do you perform for?  Who are you selling your product to?  Who do you call when you’re blue?  Who do you celebrate with?  When something truly remarkable happens, who do you text?  And when something really weird is happening, who do you want to share it with?

No matter what you do, who you are, whatever point you are in your life, your career, your art, your creation or your life, I believe that it’s important to know who your audience is and to be able to find your people.  Find Your Peeps. Find Your Audience.  And commit to them with loyalty, communication and love.  Above all Love.  And Love is not a dirty word.  It's that feeling of connecting with people on a level that is greater than yourself.

I’m here in the Mayan Riviera, and as this photo shows, I’m hanging out with my Dad.  Dad, being my dad, my father, my friend and once of the foundations for being a Grasshopper, is definitely one of my Peeps.  Here, in Paamul, I have many peeps.  Many people that share the same vision for how life can be lived.  Differently.  But not differently.

I was talking to some friends on the beach yesterday, and someone mentioned that here in Paamul it seems that people live counter-culturally.  I thought for a moment, and then said that maybe that’s only a perception.  Maybe the way people live here is only counter to what other people believe is normal.  To live outside the box requires a box.  And, I’ve never lived inside that box, so actually other people’s lives look counter culture to me.

'Counter-culture' is such a strange term.  Culture itself is, to me, humans interacting.  So, is it counter to normal to lay on a beach looking up at the birds for more than just a holiday?  Living among sea turtles?  Living outside under palapa roofs with the internet but without wearing underwear?  Or is that simply another way to live?  Another culture?  And there are so may cultures around the world.  What’s important to me, is to be able to relate to people, to culture.  To find your Peeps.

Without getting terribly philosophical – even though I already have – and I ain’t no philosophy professor – I merely have a simple Bachelor’s degree in Humanities & Global Studies – I’m going to attempt to explain how artistically finding your audience is like finding your People.  An audience is like a really large group of super awesome friends – people who understand you and want to GET you – and who you get to take along for the ride with your creations.

When I sit down to write anything - a song, a story, a Grasshopperism, piano pieces - I have an audience in mind.  It’s good to be both broad & universal and also specific and detailed with the audience you choose.  Music is one of the ways I use to connect with an audience, and here’s how that works for me in songwriting:

First you begin with the intro.  The introduction.  The opening credits appearing on the screen.  That’s usually a musical introduction.  A riff.

After you’ve established that the song has begun, then comes the first verse.  The verses are the story.  The verses are for me and my intimate audience.  Truly the people that will want to delve into the meaning of the song.  The narrative.  That is when I have a specific audience in mind, and the details of the song are directed at them.  

Once you’ve detailed the characters, set the scene, determined the feeling of the song, the tempo, the vibe, then, comes the chorus.  The choruses are for just that: the Chorus.  The group.  To sing along.  To celebrate or commiserate together.  That can be as universal as one word sung over and over like my song Shine or a whole song that feels like a chorus such as Bruce Springsteen’s Thunder Road.  A broad musical landscape that makes people feel a certain way.  Like a grand group of Muppets on The Muppet Show (the original 1970's version) coming in with Bernadette Peters​ when she sings Believe In You to Robin, Kermit the Frog​'s nephew.  (If you watch this, try not to cry with great, effervescent joy.)

The chorus is generally followed by a 2nd verse.  The 2nd verse is where you can elaborate on the story.  Get the characters in trouble, show a little emotion, get a little angrier, show off other elements of your hero or heroine.  And that is then followed by that chorus.  Always coming back to that chorus to remind people what this song is about.

When the bridge comes, that’s usually where I can to go wildly and freely to what I like to think of as the complication is the story, the conflict building, the murder, the first kiss, the jump off the bridge and the freeing of chains.

Following that, you might have a solo, or series of solos, a musical introduction to the next scene.  There are also pre-choruses, interludes, and changes to time, feel, tempo, key, and infinite numbers of elements that can be thrown in.  But when you combine together these elements, you generally have some format, a form.  Something to follow or to just throw out all together.

Verse 1 followed by a chorus, then Verse 2 with another chorus, the bridge and then maybe a solo, maybe a 3rd verse and finally a resounding or sad or simple or Ewok​-celebrating-in-the-forest-on-the-Endor-Moon chorus.  Many times a double chorus to hammer the point home, and always leave people wanting more.

Finally, and occasionally, an outro, a fine to end.  The credits rolling.  And maybe trailing off with a fade.

This is merely a song and a song form.  But the point is that this song form caters to a specific audience.  An audience that is familiar with 20th & 21st century modern, Western popular music.  Popular music is anything that a lot of people like.  It’s not just our modern view of Pop music.  Pop just refers to what's popular.   Popular music has ranged over the last one hundred years to encompass Blues, Swing, Jazz, Barbershop, Ragtime, Rhythm & Blues, Rock ‘n’ Roll, Acid Rock, Country, Trip Hop, Euro Pop, Hip Hop, Metal, Neu Metal…I won’t continue because the genres get so broad and also so infinitely small.  The point is that this format is one that artists from Cole Porter​ to Louis Armstrong​, Buddy Holly​ to The Beatles​, CeeLo Green​ to Lorde​ have used to get YOU to listen.  To be their audience.  Adele​.  Well, she’s got this format all over everything she does.  And, Adele is awesome.  (And quite sexy, too.)  

That’s the form and so that’s what I write to.  But not all audiences will enjoy this form of style.  Jazz and classical and avant garde audiences prefer different forms.  So, if I were to write for them, I’d change my own format to find that audience.

The strange thing about this to me, is that this idea not only applies to music & songwriting.  It applies to all art forms.  Form to reach an audience is intrinsic to dance, film, writing.  And, I believe then that form also applies to one’s cuisine and taste for food.  The recipe.  The chef’s style.  The grape grower and the wine maker’s format for making good wine.  The creation of chocolate and coffee, too.  So, then, it must definitely apply to all products.  The creation of products all require in inventor that can choose to use an existing form and bend it just a little, or the inventor can throw out previous forms and invent by not inventing what has been done in the past.  No matter what, they must build on or against something.  And the audience plays a giant role is what is created.  

Any creation has an audience.  But even further, each of us, in our great uniqueness as individuals, reach out to find our own audiences as people.  Those who make us feel even more ourselves.  To me, finding your people, is like finding your audience.  Finding your peeps is not just to find friendship, it is to find belonging, home, community, at times, survival itself.  Certainly Minnesotans need their peeps to get through the Hoth-like winters.  And Paamulians have survived hurricanes, fires, explosions, dengue fever, all with the help of their Peeps.  Buddhists might call this your sangha.  Corporations might call this your team.  

My peeps are everywhere.  All around the world.  There are not in one place.  They are everywhere.  My peeps know me to my core – or at least close to the core.  I don’t need to have to have to perform for them or prove anything to them.  They accept me fully - and when they don’t like what I’m up to, they support my change & evolution & reinvention.  Peeps - your people - are not necessarily who you grew up with, but they can be.  There are not where you live, but can be.  They are not who you work with or who you play music with, who you write with or protest with or politicize with, but, of course, they can be and hopefully some of your People are those people who you share those common experiences.  Peeps “reach across the aisle” to be beyond-friendship to me.  Someone that understands you and makes you feel understood.

Life can be a lonely place.  And, friendship, family, lovers and partners can sometimes make you feel even lonelier.  It is the disconnection from the ones we love that can that drive you into a dark and lonely place.  But your Peeps - they can see you in it and just let you be.  They don’t judge.  And sometimes they say, “Get the fuck up, you jack ass.”  Or, “Wow, dude, when’s the last time you went surfing?”.  Occasionally, they might just say, “It’s cool.  It’s all good.  I forgive you.”  Or simply, “You know what?  I love you.”

For people who create – which to me is all of us – our audiences are the ones who want to watch us, want to listen to us, want to feel what we make, want to dive into our creations.  I don’t have children, but I imagine that love bond is quite deep and there is risk in letting your children do new things and great pride when they do something extraordinary.  It may seem strange to some people, but that is how I feel about my songs, my performances, my records, my writings, my work as a Media & Artistic Consultant and the inspiration that my Grasshopperisms inspire.  If you’re reading, you are my audience.  And that also makes you one of my peeps in a way.  We are connecting right now because I have written these words and you are reading them.

I try to connect all the time.  I’m constantly looking for new people, for their stories, for where they came from and why they came from there and where they’re going and why.  In a plane, at a gas station, in line at the grocery store.   Some people think I’m flirting – and trust me, I might be sometimes – but really I am just trying to connect in a world that seems disconnected from itself at times.  The more places I go, they easier it is to start up a conversation with random people.

How does this relate to Finding My Audience and Finding My Peeps?  Because by learning about other people, their worlds, their cultures, their history and politics, why they vote the way they do, what their human experience is, it gives me more perspective and reference to relate to them.  To be able write a better song, find another passion project to help produce, write a better story.

Sometimes, I think it shocks people that I even have some of the friends I do or have dated some of the people I’ve dated.  I fell in love with a Cop in 2014.  That was really weird for people.  I have not been a cop-friendly person, and the cops have not always been friendly to me.  But, I recognized, this was my own bigotry against a certain group of people and I wanted to develop empathy for people I knew nothing about.  The relationship didn’t work out.  We’re not getting married.  We’re not riding off into the sunset.  But I did learn.  A lot.  I grew to have empathy for a group of people I originally didn’t like.  I still have issues with the U.S. police and I feel that they need to examine their levels of violence and fatal shootings and racism, but I did learn.  And, my empathy grew.  My peeps grew.

Learning is what I think so much of this life is about.  Learning is how I became and become a songwriter, a musician, a storyteller.  A traveler.  A survivor.  A meditator.  Shit, a Surfer.  There definitely weren’t any waves nearby in rural Minnesota where I grew up.  You couldn’t surf down the roof of the giant tin barn in my front yard.  I learned.  I wanted to learn.

Do you think that life is about learning?  About you becoming better?  About becoming a larger person?  About doing things greater than yourself?  Maybe you do.  Maybe you don’t.  If you believe and say “Yes” to these questions, then you’re on the road to being one of my Peeps.  If you say “No” to some of those questions, it doesn’t mean that we aren’t on a similar path, we just might be riding a different trail to get there.

The road trip is a very American idea.  Jack Kerouac​ writing “On The Road” is an American classic that generated an American ideal.  Taking the Oregon Trail.  Lewis & Clark.  Big Sky Country.  To me, that is how I think in many ways.  There is always another road to travel, another stage to perform upon, another word to write, another thought to think and another place to sit and meditate and travel to in your mind.  Going to the depths of the ocean of your mind.  This road trip is very symbolically life to me.  The search to find your People, your audience, connecting effortlessness along the way, and then the lonely road in between each person that is so meaningful.  Those long or short stretches of isolation mean more when we find the next Peep along the highway.  Pick up the next Hitchhiker or get picked up when you throw out your thumb on the roadside.

10 days with one person can mean more than 10 years with someone.  Performing to one person in an audience can mean more that reaching out to thousands.  The artist, the inventor, the leader, the creator, the human being, we want to connect.  We want to show off.  We want applause.  We want sales of our product.  We want to be legitimized by our success.  But that want, that part of us, is it real?  Is it necessary?  Can we connect in other ways?  Find our community?  Sex?  Union between two people.  Union on the football pitch?  Union in a sales force?  Teams and partnerships and businesses and crowds and throngs of people pushing and touching.  And then, we stop.  And are we totally isolated now in our over-connectedness?

That’s why I’m writing this.  To remind You, the Reader, that we are connecting right now.  And, I’m fully aware of that.  I’m fully aware of you, the Reader, and I am madly and fiercely typing on this laptop.  It began while seated on a plane to Mexico, and it’s being edited while I sit listening to the January breeze blow through the guano leaves carrying small droplets of sub-tropical moisture.  Maybe not for legitimacy.  Maybe not for appreciation.  But for simple metaphysically, artistically created connection.  And to remind you to do the same.  To reach out.  And then, beyond that, to want to be valued for the creations we make.  In this case, this connection with You is the value I want.  Then, beyond that, I want to be valued through all the ways possible: Karma, Positivity, Love, Promotion, Travel, Money, Gratitude, Inspiration and Inspiring others and the realization that those lonely moments are an essential part of wanting to reach out.  

Driving us forward to create.  To paint on cave walls, to start revolutions, to roll down the faces of epic waves, to make the fucking best greeting card ever, to bow the deepest bow ever in front of an audience of millions, or just one, You, reading.  A person.  One of my people.  The audience.  You.  One.  Interconnected with me.  Like we just breathlessness had wild sex, went on a 3-week road trip, meditated together, shared a party wave, played on stage to no one or everyone, the most beautiful and ugly audience in the world, You and me.  Let’s take a bow.

Please share.