Music Time in House

So I now have an apartment in Ithaca, in the top corner of my building, 5 floors up, above Ithaca's Glass on the commons.

My room has a wall of three windows, under one of which my bed is nestled in the corner. We have two couches, one comfy, one not; and two chairs, one comfy, one not. We've got two 5' tye-dye tapestries on the walls, another 8' tapestry is going up over my bed soon. At the back of my room is hung a 15' X 20' red backing to a large tapestry, hand-sewn and wove with recycled cloth. The face of the tapestry looks out at the kitchen in the far back of my room.

We've been sitting here in the living room half of my room smoking a hookah and listening to live and funky jazz music coming from the top of a bar across the street. Now I'm about to go to bed but I wanted to update people on my location.

 

I'M BACK IN ITHACA EVERYBODY!

 

I'm living here with Kevin and Andy from back home in Williamson. Kevin and I just got jobs with Max's in the bottom of the Holiday Inn across the block. We're working mornings, so we sleep early mostly, sometimes, so come hang out with us sometime during the day!

We have guitars, mics, a bunch of instruments, and you can bring your own, WE PLAY MUSIC HERE! COME PLAY WITH US!

That's about that, so I'm off, sorry it's been so long, might not have any people watching anymore, that's ok, at least I put out the message, even if it's just an exercise in writing out my intention.

Going to NY

I'm leaving soon back to NY, Tucson is my last stop West Coast. The work study program at the Garchen institute is 2 months minimum comitment, so I don't have time to do it this time around, unless I wanted to bail on Kerry in the apartment in Ithaca, which I don't want to do. And I want to work with the day camp!

So I'm going to go for finger rock again, the sun turned us back last time, and this next run, we're starting earlier and bringing a lot more water. Wish us luck.

Island by Aldous Huxley, you must read.

And other than that, I'm just helping Harry out with stuff and playing with Michael. One of the cats caught a horny toad today, which is actually a fat flat lizard, that was pretty cool.

I'm excited to see you all again.

And sorry I didn't write anybody, but I lost my little book with the first 2 months of names and contact info in Washington :(

The unconditional love store is really turning out, feel free to get involved anytime!

Finger Rock

There is a notch in the western peak of the Santa Catalina mountains. Within that notch, a large boulder jabs up, and off of that large boulder, a smaller spire of rock jabs up. And It looks like a hand pointing upward growing from the top of the mountain.

I've been looking at that spot on the horizon since I've been in Tucson. Today, with two brothers I met at the University of Arizona, though they're not students, I'm going to that rock.

The day's started well, reaffirming an intention of love, facing east meditating, I opened my eyes to the risen sun.

I have had a wierd pain on top of my right foot, but I'm going for the hike anyway, I think the pain is from wearing flip-flops and walking 6 miles on concrete. Flip-flops are bad walking shoes. But I've got my good trekking shoes and when I wear them it feels like I'm realigning my strained right foot, so hopefully the hike will make it better, and not worse.

Got an apartment!

Right on the commons! Kerry signed for it yesterday, really sweet.

So that's where I'll be all summer, still looking for a third person, we'll find one for sure though :)

Until then, I'm still here in Tucson, waiting on a response from the Garchen inst. Though I'll likely head up into the mountains in the next couple of weeks regardless.

Reading Eugene O'Neill's plays and Keats's poems and Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison.


In other news:
Let's open the unconditional love store. I've got the prospects for first quarter growth drafted, it's pretty peachy. Contact information forthcoming, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't start buying stocks once we go public....
...We just went public.

Say, that's weather all right

Yesterday I saw the icy cirrus clouds come in streaks from the North.
And with them came cold weather and winds.
The winds stripped the small yellow flowers from the Palo Verde trees.
The small yellow flowers formed a blanket over the ground, and floated on top of the pool.
We humans protected the pool's water, not that it cared, by covering it with a plastic tarp, and clamping the north side against the winds.
Next the wind brought the red dust from the Catalina mountains to the North.
The red dust bit grittily into our eyes, and ground between our teeth, all while leaving a red film on the plastic pool cover.
When the night came, under the day-after-full moon, the desert cooled, and the winds subsided.
And in the cool weather of the night, large cumulous clouds, not even seperate, as a white/gray blanket in the sky, crept over the mountains.
When the sun rose this morning, it was darker outside than is customary for sunrise, and I slept longer for it.
Realizing the clouds were truly a presence I went out when I woke, to the first drops of rain I've ever seen outside of the mountains in Arizona.
From a back porch of a house in the center of Tucson, I saw the showers sparsly, then thickly, then splashingly join into the puddles of thier predecessors.
And watching the yard flood quickly, I saw bits of hail jump up from the puddles, revealing that each drop must have a core of ice.
And soon this was very obvious, as the wetness and streaks of rain yielded to a thick flurry of small white hailstones.
Small hailstones, that, for a moment, left a white streaking across the high ground, where the puddles and thirsting rivulets did not consume them.
Though these white streaks were quickly erased, as the downfall became rain once again, continuing to mat down and make sticky streams throughout, the dust which covered omnipresently.
Intermittently, precipitation has continued today, though cloudbreaks have taken precedence as the norm.
And through a cloudbreak at this very moment, the sun is shining from the west.
And to the east, over the city, there are two rainbows arched, one over the other.
The bottom of these two rainbows bright even to a melding of the colors, shining, it seems, with its own light where ROY G BIV joins the horizon.
The top, faded to naught more than an arched light in the sky, pulling vibrancy from the drab grey of the eastern clouds.
And my uncle assures me that I will sunburn again, come the end of this next week.

Berkeley in retrospect

I never met the people I went to Kenya with in Berkeley :(

None of them answered facebook, phones, or called.

So I went anyway!

I wandered up onto a big lawn where lots of kids were playing frisbee by a clocktower very much like Cornell's. Other kids were sitting around and there was a little hack circle. So I walked up, took off my pack and coat, and joined the hack. We played for a while, I got to know some of the guys in the circle and I was offered dinner that night.

After hanging out and seeing some of Berkeley I ended up at a naked dinner at the Lothlorian co-op. Though I only saw two naked people, the fajitas were delicious! Then I played bananagrams, met a guy who worked on a telescope in antarctica, at the south pole station, tracking magnetic resonation left over from the big bang, pulsating from the origin in the universe.

I hung out in a room that used to be the bedroom of a cult leader whose followers lived in the house before it was a co-op, and practiced group sex rituals.

Then for the end of the night, I was given a place to sleep in a redwood tree. There was a treehouse accessible from a bridge from the 5th floor of the co-op house next door. I left this poem in the treehouse:

In a tree housed
I sat open mouthed
disbelieving my good fortune

As Berkeley stops go
I've surely lots to show
for a naked dinner in food orgy preparation

Being quite clear
I haven't a fear
That my mind will slip grip on this destination

So if you do, keep open doors
I'll come back for more
next time I've crossed this nation

Under the Tucson Sun

My Aunt Maureen and Cousin Micheal picked me up from the Greyhound station yesterday morning, I was one of the only people I saw that day wearing a raincoat...

Since, I've cleaned the pool for my Uncle Harry, helped him sell and ship some ebay stuff, and we ran grocery and sundry errands while looking for more ebay stuff at a church rummage sale. I got 6 poetry books for $3, including a hardcover of John Keats' and Eugene O'neil. So now I have some reading materials, and I get to sit in the sun, and this is some intense sun.

I drove around today, I have a key to the truck and a key to the house so I'm going to explore the city and the mountains around. Tuscon is cool because it is surrounded on all four sides by different mountain ranges, the closest being the Santa Catalinas to the West. There's also the University of Arizona here, so I think I'll try my luck at getting some people together to hack the sack sometime soon. About 3 blocks away I found a park, big empty baseball and soccer fields with some basketball courts and gazebos it looked like. I'll head over there sometime to see if I can't meet some interesting characters, Liberty Park sounds like an inviting place, right?

I can't help noticing that everything in this city seems pre-fabricated and prematurely aged by the sun. However, Wal-Mart is thriving and shiny and air conditioned, and there's a McDonald's right inside, Oh Boy!

Dealing with the heat, looking into the Garchen institute, I just found a music healer who is associated with Garchen so I'm going to visit him while I'm here.