Find that Sage in the New Age Bin.

Dog Poet Transmitting.......

May your noses always be cold and wet.

Perhaps a little more strolling down memory lane, with the usual digressions, allusions and references, which is the reason for the post in the first place, not just a need to travel in private spaces, or get self-indulgent in some astral, woodland pool of nostalgia. We're always looking for resonance and simpatico here, if it doesn't resonate with the reader and provoke memory that mysteriously links to the appearance of things long forgotten, then, what good is it (grin)? Seriously.

There are all sorts of strange things coming out these days. Joni Mitchell says he is a plagiarist and I see from the search that it involves paintings as well and there are many references to his stealing from Jack London and others for his books. I had long ago heard about some information concerning his not having written “Blowing in the Wind” (a non-informative article, embarrassingly apologetic and even making Bob 10 years younger than he is) and “Don’t think Twice”. There's a lot of smoke there. There must be some fire. The idea that Dylan could have accidentally, just osmosis like, inhaled these tunes out of the atmosphere is pathetic. I'm not judging him, cause I don't know. I'm just pointing it out cause it came up in my windshield today and it relates to the activity of Mr. Apocalypse. I've never had this problem of draining a suspect lizard out of the ethers. Perhaps we have entered the time of crashing icons, breaking like cheap china, on the unfinished flooring of this new age. I do come up with the occasional cheap and metaphorically tinkered lines here and there but... good grief! I'm busy (grin).

I miss Maui and working with my former collaborators, Bud the Birdman and Franklin Russell, named on our albums as Bud the Creep and Franklin Stratosphere or Franky Blue Stratos. Franklin was so named for being something of an airhead and Bud; “Why do they call you Bud the Creep”? “You'll find out”. No matter how bad things got for me on Maui and... they got horrifically bad sometimes. (I was between Woodstock and Maui during the darkest period of my life), if you don’t count my childhood; no matter how bad it got, there was always the soothing presence of the ocean. I would sit on the seawall in Kihei in those troubled times and such a sense of peace would come to me, though there was little enduring peace. By day there was the maintenance of the efforts to create or earn my daily bread and by night, the efforts to create or spar with the locals in some beach-side park. I reflect on how totally crazy I must have been to do things like that and can't fathom it, or how I managed to emerge unscathed, given how badly mauled you could get from unexpected and unfortunate encounters, much less, looking for trouble. Bud and Franklin were around for a lot of that. Bud was a fairly accomplished martial artist and, although nuts in his own way, not the same kind of madman as me.

Now and then, people come out of the woodwork, mostly due to Facebook. Sometimes I remember them and sometimes I don't. I travelled between a haze and a blur on occasion and there were always people coming and going, or peripherally connected to whatever weird creation we would get up to. Some of them went on to become spiritual teachers and some of them just went on and some of them go on and on and on, accompanied by titles and relative degrees of self-importance, all of them, unique peas in a pod, speculating on who is the pea soup and who are the chunks of carrot. You can scroll down and see all their vast credentials and justifications for why they are gurus, but not really gurus, just regular folks, reflecting back to you what is hidden within for whatever the fee is. They are on some kind of a circuit where they go from place to place to get together, with an assorted group of characters who do whatever it is that they do and not do, somewhere between one hand clapping and one hand with the clap. There is a seemingly endless list of books, an endless list of audio CDs with dozens and dozens of Dr. Wayne Dyer. Of course there are DVDs, with another several dozen from Dr. Dyer. There are 83 different card sets for divination and ritual self-abuse. I don’t doubt that our vomitus superficialitus doctor is there represented too. And... how could we possibly advance without kits? Yes, there are 63 kits and the good doctor is represented in multiples again, as should be expected. Somebody is getting rich. You too can become a spiritual teacher, nearly overnight for only 4,000 dollars and you get impressive documents of achievement that you can frame and put up on your wall.

I don't think I'm welcome somehow. Perhaps I am too cynical. I don't have my own set of cards and kits. This is the kind of thing you become when you have the whole package and a lot of degrees. Of course, if you really want to go for it, you become part of a husband and wife team that channels schizophrenic entities going by the name of Abraham but there's some number of them. You become so successful that you publish over 700 books at the beginning of the bio and then you have 800 at the end of the bio. Now that, that is impressive and includes mobile phone apps. Somewhere near you, this year, is any number of events and boat cruises. If you're a trust fund baby, a lost soul with no road map, an ambitious huckster with no moral compass, or just a garden variety psychopath, you need to know where to get your instruction manual. Then you can become any one of a number (or all of them) of permutations of 'coach'. Coach this, coach that; past life coach, future life coach, Karma coach, the types are vast and all of them cost money. Of course there are money coaches too and they also cost money.

When I was on Maui, I ran across all sorts of people in the new age dens of Makawao, Kula and Kipahulu. Kipahulu, past Hana, is infested with trust fund beneficiaries, who preen and posture in their own little fiefdoms. I met one lady from Australia who had inherited 30 million dollars.; She liked to walk around topless, dressed like an incarnation of Ishtar, when dressed at all. She had a lot of cute boys around her and owned a slice of paradise high on rocky cliffs. She was a mean customer that you had to negotiate around. The scammer scene in the new age trust fund moneyverse is something else; those who live off of them and give them fealty and admiration, for the fortunes of their birth, sans anything of value. I wasn't ever invited much because of my enterprising efforts at defacing their posters at the number one posting zone, where I was employed as the Deli Lama. I got around to making my own posters and there would be a host of people coming around each morning to see what new outrage I had gotten up to; Les Visible channels Ted Turner from the Haleakala crater, or one imaginary talent after another, where I claimed to be able to do this or that. The community was not amused, so... there went the invites (grin).

I'd run across Elan Vitale here and there. He inherited some humungous amount of money from his parents and made himself into an artist who could rent commercial properties for tens of thousands a month. I'm not dissing him, just strolling down memory lane. He put an enormous, near full size, metal whale up in one of the Kamole parks. I see now where he is divinely inspired, or so it says on the web site. Here's a mean customer who also made his millions. I was close with his brother for a while through association with the same woman named Kim. She disappeared into New Zealand and I never heard from her again. I often performed at Piero's Cafe. These days, Piero is also a very successful artist. He's got quite an impressive spread way past even Kipahulu in Kaupo.

I realize I can pepper this treatise with all sorts of names, famous and not so but I'm coming to the end of this particular ride. I don't know what my point was... maybe just bringing things up and seeing what gets said about them. Here's a memorial page. There are some shots of Poppy. He was the one that was going to get my song to Willie Nelson but he died a few days before Willie got back to the island.

I think about Maui a lot. It used to dominate my thoughts when I wasn't there and was in Woodstock or somewhere. Since I came to Europe it's receded. I remember all the good things about it and tend to forget all the problems and dangers of the place. The mind journeys on imagination's ship. It remembers what it wants to remember and forgets what it wants to forget, or thinks it does.

Life comes in stages and certain things automatically arrive in each stage, whether you are ready for them or not. You think you got here or there by choices, or accident and maybe it's something of both but different things come at different times and we should never try to convince ourselves that we haven't gotten everything we wanted. You never know what's around the corner and the best you can do is to prepare yourself rather than trying to troubleshoot around corners you can't see around.


End Transmission.......

Visible sings: ♫ Listening to God in the Morning ♫
'Listening to God in the Morning' is track no. 13 of 13 on Visible's 2007 album
'The Sacred and The Profane'
Lyrics (pops up)


There will be a radio show this evening.