Fire and Rain and a Little Insane

As I have mentioned, July was supposed to be and proved to be a hard month for me, going back to parts of June when things happened that I never would have expected and now serve to have a profound effect on my projects, delaying the publication of my books and setting my teeth on edge (grin), concerning human relationships and my understanding of them. I won’t get into names or certain details because that serves no good purpose but I will do as I usually do and employ allegory and other literary devices.

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Dog Poet Transmitting.......

‘May your noses speak to you before you open your mouth’.

Over the years I have been engaged in many collaborative projects and I have come to see through direct experience how difficult it can be to make things happen in a group setting when one insists on being hands on. The result of this has been for me to be hands off, most of the time.

My initial position, when I have the authority to do so is to let everyone else operate from their agendas and intentions and then see what happens. I do this because I want to see what’s going to materialize in advance of wider and more dramatic efforts further down the road. I generally work alone for good reason because I can depend on myself to bring a ship into harbor without sabotage of either an intended or unintended kind. This means that some of my projects will not be as good or professional as they would be with the help of others, who are gifted in areas where I am not; my music recordings are a good example of this. I don’t have an engineer, arranger, a band or collaborator. There’s just me, hacking my way through the underbrush and not being any kind of a qualified landscaper or horticulturalist.

With my written work there’s less concern, since I’ve got a better feel for what I’m doing and a higher level of expertise, concerning construction and structure. Of course, I’m still limited in various ways, having left school in the tenth grade and being self taught the rest of the way. There’s no question that I would profit from the efforts of professionals as I go along but they’ve been slim and none for most of the way.

In the 90’s the owner of ESP Disk signed me with Sony/CBS in conjunction with a German distribution firm and destroyed the recordings my band and I had made, leaving me to sink like a stone when I was in every Tower Records outlet on the planet. In the early 2000’s Mandrake of Oxford published my first novel and left out the final edit, while misspelling the title of the book in 3 different places, on the cover and inside the book. It was a real disappointment for me to see, “The Dark Spendor on the spine of the book” when the title word was ‘splendor’. I was starting to think like that blues singer, “If it weren’t for bad luck I wouldn’t have no luck at all”.

I’ve got a lot of stories like this but I’ll spare you the bloodstains and autopsy photos. What amazes me is that I kept on going. All the jobs I took were simply to finance my creative efforts and that meant doing everything on the cheap and distributing my work for chump change or giving it away for free. Finally, I decided I wouldn’t do anything for money anymore and rely on the kindness of the universe to see that I got some amount of donations, without ever actually asking for any. I think the result of this has been to convince people that I am independently wealthy, instead of being as poor as a church mouse (grin).

I’ve always had a certain assurance and faith that the cosmos was taking care of me and would take care of me. The more I tossed any anxiety and concern into the wind, the more the cosmos worked on my behalf and I learned the meaning of the secret oasis of sustenance in the deserts of existence and the hidden places of Nature. However, it’s one thing for me to be convinced and another for others to share my belief and that has created problems in my passage as well. I’m not lazy and I try to make myself useful every day but Saturn is a hard taskmaster and he is prominent in my horoscope (which is a good thing really). You have to add in that I am an eclectic and eccentric character and likely to be disturbing and sometimes frightening to those who don’t get where I’m coming from or where I may be at in an particular moment. I take risks and have adventures that seem to put my life and my health in danger and it’s not easy to explain the reasoning for this to others. It’s not easy to get people to understand that I am acting on faith to push the dimensions of limitation just as far as I possibly can. Meanwhile, I’m in great shape and getting better by the day. The proof is in the pudding.

In a few days, I am supposed to be smooth sailing for some time to come and it is going to improve and improve and improve. Every source I have gotten input from says so and my invisible friends corroborate this. It appears that the more the forces and conditions of the world go into turmoil and confusion, the more my fortunes will improve; odd that.

People who expect quick returns would be better off playing the stock market than playing with me. I’m not a short term investment but productive over the long range and I suspect, profitable as well. These things take a finer and deeper faith in the long run and anyone lacking that should seek their profits at the racetrack or get into hedge funds.

I’m going to go back to limping along, as I have done so far, with the assistance and support of those still willing to be so engaged. I’ve got more material than I can even remember possessing and more is added by the day so, sooner or later the result of a lifetime of effort will see the light. This is true of all of us, we get out of life what we have put into it and have only ourselves to blame if we have been insufficient or displayed bad judgment.

I don’t do mass advertising and I don’t have deep pockets investors. I don’t glad-hand or engage with dubious sorts for the furtherance of my career. I don’t rely on schmoozing and uptown cocktail parties so I don’t owe any of those people anything and I don’t have to soften or compromise what I say in order to be a part of that world where elegant lies take precedence over obvious truth, in the small degree that I possess any. If what has been promised in the near time fails to materialize as quickly as it formerly seemed that it would, I rely on the divine to grant me the angels I need. I intend to rely on the divine for everything to the extent that I can do so and let the chips fall where they may. This may seem to be the harder and less predictable road to those who place their faith in how they work the marketplace but I know what kind of monkey business can come out of that and the only monkey I have any interest in is Hanuman.

Once again, I’ve been talking all around something for the purposes of discretion and propriety and that’s a good thing because there’s no telling what epiphanies and realizations may yet manifest out of what now appears to be a frozen engine. The divine works in mysterious ways and that means we often don’t understand what’s going on. My belief is that we will understand what we need to and be left out of the loop about what doesn’t concern us because it’s being accomplished by some other part of the spectrum.

I fully expect many things to be accomplished and realized soon enough and I’m content with leaving that in more capable hands, recognizing that everything is a test and sometimes we pass these tests when we don’t contend with the more intelligent and powerful forces in operation. It is one of the most difficult challenges for everyone to know when to let things take their course. We are not the helmsman, no matter what we think, nor do we know the extent of possible misfortune when we attempt to be the helmsman. I’m not going to concern myself with the operation of the Crockpot because a Crockpot takes care of it all internally and doesn’t require stirring and micromanagement. Once the top goes on it does what it was constructed to do. I’ve said all I have to say on the matter and now it’s time to post this and move on to the next thing, unless I decide to go and get a cup of tea in the interim.


End Transmission.......

Visible sings: ♫ Love is Bound ♫
'Love is Bound' is track no. 12 of 12 on Visible's 2007 album 'Almost A Capella'
Lyrics (pops up)