Literature

Book Love. 💙💘

        I adore books!  For me they have been the windows to many parts of my life.  There have been types, styles, and recordings of certain musicians that I would have never gotten to experience if it were not for a book the I read that opened my eyes to its exsistance.
         A very good case in point is Ray Manzarek's Light My Fire. I had listened to the Doors but I'd never taken in an entire album of their work.  It was not until I had read his autobiography that I was opened up to his amazing life.  It was knowing that he took many of his phrasings and melodic ideas from songs he learned taking piano lessons as a child that encouraged me to listen to these great works and virtuosic playing skills of the band.  Also his words told me of a band called the Grateful Dead.
          He hated this other great band of the late 60's.  He called them self-indulgent, over  intoxicated, out of tune, and sloppy when he wasn't speaking of how selfish their Keyboard player was.  Thus turning me off from listening to the group for years and years.  But one day I was on an extended road trip and stopped at a gas station to get some tunes for the tape deck to keep me awake. 
        I saw a tape of the Grateful Dead's American Beauty on sale and I grabbed it up.  I had read they were hard rock for their time and wanted stay awake for the rest of the drive.  What a mislabeling for my ears.  I though I'd hear something like Steppin Wolfe or something that would evolve into Stone Temple Pilots, instead I hear beautiful hippie jams of rebellion and intoxication.  Though beautiful, it wasn't the brutality I expected when I got into extreme metal like Dimmu Borgir or Cradle of Filth years later.
        After falling head-first in love with this mellow group of recreational drug users I started reading the vast library of work on this group.  I found out they are the most written about music group in history and I fell in love with Jerry Garia's oral biography of his life Dark Star.
          This book captures his life in the exact words of those who were around him.  His family, friends, most of his co-workers, and partners would tell of this man's life as they were around the man living it.  Every detail from how he lost the finger on his right hand from a childhood game to his battles with cigarettes, heroine, and diabetes to how these effected the life of those around him and his art.
         Finding that the cigarettes did more damage to his body than all the hard drugs he used encouraged me to give up smoking and watch what I ate and try to stay away from the extreme amounts of candy I would eat.  No matter how much I respected his ability to play the guitar and preform music; what I took from that book was to not live a life of pure indulgence to the point of shortening the life I do posses.
          I still love and adore biographies and autobiographies to this day, but I have expanded my readings to religious books of all religious beliefs, formal philosophy, and science fiction past the types that were made into bock-buster movies.  I have learned so much reading how others succeeded or failed in their existences, or how their world view shaped who they were and the world it created for them. Being able to see their pit falls helped me watch for them or attempt to avoid them.
       None were more so than Voltaire.  The man wrote and spoke his mind just to be persecuted for it. He spend most of his life on house arrest.  But the joke was on his captures.  Voltaire lived in a beautiful castle and his lover was a gorgeous and brilliant woman that came to him.  He spent his many hours drunk, fucking, and writing works that we still love and learn from today.  He also avoided the plagues being locked in his own home and lived to be an ancient old man of the late 1700's.  His persecutions caused him to live a life we can be enriched by all while we have enjoyed the good fortune of knowing he was happy and blessed unlike Dostoevsky.
        Dostoevsky on the other hand angered those whom forced him into military service, torture, and starvation.  He turned to gambling and booze to try to calm himself and the world of torment he was forced to live.  When these did not work he turned to religion and writing.  His craft became some of the greatest novels ever written in any language.  We also know he died starving and alone.
        Voltaire was a giant influence upon the structures and beginnings of the United Sates. Ben Franklin met with Voltaire during the Revolutionary War for ideas while he and John Adams tried to get monetary funding from France. 
        I also can't help to think for all the influence that great French thinkers had for our country I see us heading the same direction as Russia of the late 1800's.  Any differing views or beliefs are silenced by prison, forced labor, military service, falsified criminal charges,  or a silencing of their communication abilities by censorship of all mediums they can use.  I don't think it is coincidence the Salinger had most of his life's work under lock and key till many years after his physical body's death.
         

Either/Or A Fragmentation of my life. Was it good or bad? It sure was words on a computer screen.

Isn't it strange how some 1 you know can have such a great impact on you....?

Current mood:Indulgent

Category: Friends

On Sunday (Back in April) I had some time to sit down to a news paper. Though this is not something I do on a normal basis, I did apon this day. I was reading through the local part of the paper and came to the anniversary and engagement section. Laughing to myself, I stated that I always find myself not knowing any of those involved in these celebrations. But, as I looked through it, I chuckled that one of the ladies looked like an old friend of mine that I had, at 1 time, been very close to. Thinking that it could not be her I did not even think about it. Then I saw the names of the soon-to-be bride's parents. They were my old friend's! OMG! She's getting married to the son of one of my college professors! OMG! This is so cool. Totally a shock to no end, and I could not be happier for her. I heard she'd been through alot sence I'd been around her via her mother. So this bit of good luck and potential of great things was a great sight to see.I thought about the times I knew her and was close to her. Then I thought about how these interactions had such a great impact on my life!

I met her @ a music camp while both of us were in high school. She was very outgoing and I was quite the shy and quiet guy. She came up to me one of the days and we walked to the new library and talked for hours on end. We continued to see each other durring the camp and near it's end we exchanged e-mail addresses and went apon our seperate ways.

As time went on our e-mails turned to chatting and evetually I asked her to come to a high school homecomming dance with me. Beyond my comprehention, then or now, my mom suggested that she come and spend the weekend of the dance @ our house! She'd come up, see the game and half time show, spend that night, go to the dance the next night, stay another night, and go back home on that Sunday.This did end up working out and we had a grand time other than I was sicker than a dog. Though forbidden we spent our nights in my room talking and hanging out, swapping stories, and jumping @ every sound that came from any part of the house! @ the dance we had a wonderful, if not reserved, time being with those I knew and had introduced her to @ the game the night before. Though the week end seemed to fly by, she went back home, and soon after made a request, by e-mail, to be my girl friend. Although the relationship did not last long, she was my first girl friend. Little did I know how much more she was going to influence me.

Though only friends we continued to e-mail and chat. She told me of all the things going on in her life and eventually I learned why she had broken up with me. Though I should give more detail to my reader, I will only say that situations were of the upmost in drama and family conflict and I more than understood her need to part ways, and to be with those who could be with her in person and comfort her.

Time went on and we both got into new relationships. We still talked, but only as friends, still antisipating our next encounters at the next music camp. There I was her buddy. You'd think we'd been joined at the hip. If you saw one of us you saw the other. I was also her confessor. New life experiences had come into her life and some of them could have had life long concequences. I was there to talk w/ her and be there as the friend she needed. The week went on with us as close as ever and talks of, maybe, being a couple again. We parted ways to once again be friends through the internet.

The decision to pick my college had come to it's time limit. I needed to choose where to go. I had scholarships to any school I'd like to go to. Each audition I did was met with $ and a promise of a great education. But my friend and I had been talking alot. She was sure she was getting out of a relationship, and I was the one she wanted to be with when the timing was right. With this information I knew I wanted to be able to be near her when we made this progression, so I chose the school closest to where she lived.

I moved there in late summer to start the marching band season. Every time I had a chance to go see her I went. I was there nearly every day and durring this time my friend saw that we were not ment to be. (This also ment she had 'better' prospectives in wait.) Even though we did not get back together as a couple I became close friends with her parents at this juncture. It came that I called her mom, my mom. When I needed something a mom can only do; I'd come to her. She also became my spiritual adviser and mentor. What she taught me and showed me still affect me to this day.

Time went on and my college courses started. I made the top jazz band (as a freshman) and there I met the woman who is now my wife. My wife and I met and in that week we were the best of friends. We seemed to be what the other needed and life continued on without my old friend untill one day, much later on, we ran into each other while I was on a walk and we got to talking again. She was with a guy I went to high school with but we still wanted to catch up a bit on each other's lives. We talked and got each other's phone #s and talked very sporadically.

As time went on my life headed down hill, till one day I called this old friend to see what she was up to. She told me she was throwing an apartement warming party and I should come over and meet her friends. I was there as fast I could get there. She had drinks, and as she headed out the door to get more, she told me to help myself to what was there. She'd be back asap. Boy did I ever! I was so loaded by the time she returned I don't even remeber her getting back. I was making an ass of myself and getting sicker all the time. @ this she took me back home to sleep it off. Little did she know that I had alcohol poisoning from my binge. If I had not passed out on my belly I'd be dead today.

Although this sounds like it would be horrible, and it was, it was another turning point in my life. When I came back home from the hospital my (now) wife told me she found me passed out and could not wake me so she had to call an ambulance. (Much more to that story but will be in another writing.) This near death experience turned my life around. I went into everything at full tilt. I was in school again, I got married, started a band, and changed religions in what seemed like no time @ all. I became who I was wanting to be. Nothing was to stop me again.

Though some bumps in the road have taken place sence then; I have continued on that path. I still am going, with a few detoures, but I'd going into life in a way that would make Voltaire himself proud.

While thinking over the rest of Sunday, I saw how much impact one single person had had on me. A person whom I did not spend much time with in face to face contact, but one that changed me so greatly. Was all the change good? Maybe not. Looking back she was just words on a computer screen. But it did create the person I am now. It caused me to choose where I went to school. (Maybe I should have gone to a better school; maybe the one my dad went to, or maybe the largest universaty in the state...) But this inter-personal relationship swayed me. These decisions put everything that followed into motion. It even caused another major turn further on down the road. But I'm here! This is who I am! Thank you! If you ever read this, all I can say is WOW! Who would have ever known, while it was all going on, that this is what it would come to??

"Freedom is what you do with what has been done to you." - Jean-Paul Sartre.

Simone de Beauvoir & me.

Of late I have been reading the works of Simone de Beauvoir and can not help but almost feel as if I am in love. To give you a little bit of her back ground, if you are unfamiliar with her, she was the woman that spent much of her life being Jean-Paul Sartre's main love. Each of them had many lovers other than each other but found that they spent most of their time and works with each other. They would have been married but Sartre belived that that was much too bourgeois and they never did.

I have been reading one volume of her autobiography entitled Force of Circumstance II. In it she speaks out against the country around her. They are engaged in a war with Algeria and the French army is torturing, raping, and slaughtering people of a poor and underindustrialized nation. She speaks out very venhemently against these atrocities and is found to be Un-French by her fellow countrymen. She goes as far as to denounce her home counrty and leaves it all the while doing her journalism for her and Sartre's paper fueled with articles about the horrors taking place in the hands of the French military.

I could not help feeling just what she is writing about in connection with the current war in Iraq. Our soldiers are doing just what we were told we would be liberating the Iraqi people from. We are only liberating them from their lives; if they are lucky. And one should know that I feel that life in the only thing that should never be sacrificed. It only comes about one time and living it is everything that you ever do.

Simone also speaks of an account she had with her brother-in-law who was trying the rationalize what was being done durring this war. He tried to say that the torture was only in issolated instances and that the military was only acting in ways that it needs to to combat a savage land and equally savage people. I heard these same things told to me durring my political ravings of administrations past and wars current. When she descibes what she was feeling physically durring, and right after, those conversations with her brother-in-law I could not help but know in absolute detail exactly what she was feeling.

I would suggest her writings to any one with any sort of leftist inclinations, even a slight acknowlegment of woman's equal rights, enjoys great women writers, or is one who takes interest in existentialistc philosophy and its application to real life situations. She is an amazing writer and to know that she wrote these works long before it was en vouge to do so by a woman makes these writings that much more powerful and impressive.