Saturday Morning Re-post: Cahuenga Dream

I drove down the 101 South this afternoon, got off the Cahuenga exit and crept through Hollywood. When Bob Marley came on, I was transported, as I nearly always am, to another life nearly thirty years ago. I was going to write it, the memory, the music, the sway, a porch, was it the beginning of spring, another college year? Tonight, bourbon in my throat, I searched for the words and typed a bit, knew it had come before and found this:

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Acupuncture Dream

On the way over, I knew already what I was going to think about when the needles were in, the door was shut and the music was on. I knew that I was going to go back to you, to a house on the side of a road, a wooden porch, a Carolina dusk of sticky left off soft, a folding chair with rusty legs, your worn khakis and the reggae sway as I pulled into the driveway. I knew I'd think of it as I drifted off, my channels open, your guitar put down as I leaped into your lap, my head thrown back where you kissed my neck, your wide smile, tilting.

All Retch and No Vomit

How long has it been since you've listened to Alan Watts' cool voice and been mesmerized? Have you ever listened to Alan Watts' cool voice and been mesmerized? I read Alan Watts when I was just out of college, when I lived in a white farmhouse on a country road in North Carolina with a boy I loved. While I might have been a tad too earnest in my explorations, an earnestness that tipped precariously close to pretension, I learned about Zen Buddhism from Watts' books as well as the more mystical aspects of Catholicism, into which I'd been baptized but had lost interest in somewhere around age fourteen. The two titles that come to mind were Myth and Ritual in Christianity and The Way of Zen, and I might be able to rustle up my dog-eared copies somewhere in this house in this life that I live right now. Both books affected me profoundly and gave me the beginnings of what I might call a more settled approach to religious belief and practice. I might, perhaps, delve into them again and see if the fuss they provoked then still carries weight now.  I listened to countless tapes of the man, too, because so many of his lectures and talks and teachings were recorded, which leads me to why I'm even writing about Watts here. I stumbled upon this recording of a talk that Watts gave, one of many hundreds that are now accessible on the internets, and as a parent frequently called upon to impart some kind of sense and wisdom, I found it resonant.