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Charleston, West Virginia men My Life Story Writings

Falling in Love with Spiritual

I am not sure if this post is sexual and hence inappropriate or not sexual at all. It isn’t sexual to me. If it is sexual to you, then apologies. But there are things I am feeling compelled to talk. They are like giant bubbles rising up from my stomach and forcing their way out of my mouth. I may need to write a number of somewhat personal blog posts to get to the bottom of why I can’t stop talking about dicks. I don’t know where to begin, so I will just vomit up one little bubble about my life.

This is the story of how I fell in love with husband #1. Some of this has been shared before. So apologies for any repetition.

We will refer to this husband as Spiritual, because that was his name for part of the time I knew him. He goes by a different name now & this post is not intended to impact his reputation.

Spiritual was driving me to Michigan to attend a spiritual retreat. Spiritual was my spiritual guide, not my boyfriend. The eastern philosophies I was absorbing had taught me that obedience to a guru was the surest way to achieve enlightenment. God had contacted Spiritual and told him to be my guru. This seemed like a miracle, an answered prayer, since I had been praying for somebody to guide me.

Spiritual had made it clear that attending this retreat would be the key to getting rid of the ego. I had no idea what to expect. Getting in the car with a odd smelling male and going on an unknown retreat was not my cup of tea, but I had already accepted that the process of becoming enlightened was gonna suck. I was majoring in Tibetan buddhism & most of the stories of enlightenment involved eating shit, murdering people & doing all sorts of distasteful things. Crazy wisdom, they called it. But it was just the ego that found these things distasteful. Once you reached enlightenment, it was all worth it.

So we were speeding 80 mph down the highway in his van, when suddenly Spiritual said “There’s something we need to talk about…. THIS” and firmly grabbed my crotch, leaving his hand there. I froze. I tried to remember that it was just molecules touching molecules. It had no meaning. This is something I would tell myself when things were gross.

Then he pulled the car over to a rest stop. He said to get out of the car and stood there and said I needed to kiss him. I couldn’t do it. It’s like when you are trying to get yourself to eat a slug and you can’t. We stood there for the longest time. Finally he started screaming at me and I pecked him on the lips. We got back in the van.

We drove to his parents house. This was a shock to me, since I thought we were attending a spiritual retreat center. He introduced me as his girlfriend. I was confused. I thought he was my spiritual leader. I didn’t say anything. Then he went up to his parents room and lay on the floor naked. He said I needed to touch his whole body admiringly because he hadn’t been appreciated enough in his life. I did it.

Next, he said we needed to get married. Because he was Catholic and I had touched his naked body. (Catholicism had not come up before.) This idea repulsed me. I was still a teen and had no desire to be married, especially to him. So I agreed and started wearing his mother’s engagement ring.

As soon as we were engaged things changed instantaneously. He started yelling at me constantly. Making humiliating scenes every time we were out in public. He had yelled at me before (he called it giving me an ‘ego bat’), but now it was unrelenting. It never stopped. But still I fell in love with him. A cascade of molecules caused me to feel high when I touched his hand. I became very attached to him. Inseparable. It got to where I literally could not think a single thought without running it through him to see if it was true or false.

Technically him grabbing my crotch on the way to the spiritual retreat was not the first time we’d had physical contact.

After he became my spiritual guide, Spiritual told me that God had presented him with two choices. I must choose one or the other to stay on the path of enlightenment. Either ask my best male friend to “go down on me” or if I wouldn’t do that then Spiritual would need to perform the procedure.

This was far outside of my experiences and the thought of having to ask a male friend to do it would have been worse than eating a live heart. I would rather have killed myself. So I agreed that he would do it. On the appointed date he took me to a hotel room. I will spare you the details. But don’t worry- this is not an erotic story and it was not an erotic experience. I just lay there with most of my clothes on. I had had surgery on that part of my body as a kid and also many medical procedures. They hurt, but afterwards I got oatmeal cookies. This wasn’t too different. He stuck various things in me. I don’t remember what they all were. One was a blow pop. When I was a kid I would always get to choose a lollipop before the most painful procedures making them bittersweet.

He said he “came twice.” This didn’t have a precise meaning to me. He said it might be useful to touch other body parts. I said okay. That didn’t mean anything to me. I was just a bunch of molecules lying on a table on their way to achieving enlightenment. Afterwards I felt kind of relieved like how you feel when you are leaving the dentist office and are patting yourself on the back for being responsible. Poor Julien. What a doofus.

And not even that experience was unprecedented. It is just that I had this way of completely tuning out anything remotely sexual to the extent that it didn’t exist in my mind. I have told people before that I’ve never been hit on once in my life, but maybe it only seemed that way because my mind just wouldn’t process the sexual implications of any encounter regardless of how blatant they were.

Once for example, this guy kept putting my hand on his dick and I kept moving it off his dick. This didn’t register as sexual to me (despite being an adult), it just seemed like nonsensical behavior, as though someone was trying to touch my elbow with his nose. I didn’t want to touch the gross slimy slug but I didn’t see the male as sexually motivated.

So anyway, before I became his girlfriend or even his disciple, Spiritual insisted I hug him every time I saw him (which was not desired since he reeked of b.o.) and then he would sing this song, “You always give me a boner.” Then he would explain how he got a boner each time he hugged me. Obviously this should have been a warning sign as to what would happen if you got in a van with this guy. But I had changed a lot of diapers as a kid and babies sometimes had boners. So I just saw it in that light, not a sexual one.

And he would sometimes ask if I could remove undergarments so he could study their fabric due to his interest in fabrics. Luckily, I didn’t do that. If he had said it was necessary for spiritual reasons, I would have, but I didn’t want to do something icky just to increase his knowledge of textiles. He would also say weird things about how my br–sts seemed to be attached to my chest. I just filed this under molecules talking about molecules. Things that had no rhyme or reason. So many things in life, so many things people did, just seemed nonsensical to me. They had no explanation. Molecules talking about molecules.

And it worked both ways- I would frequently say and even act out sexually explicit things, like writing songs about rape that (in my mind) were songs about colors or turning in a giant picture of a dick for my final art project which in my mind was a picture of a tree. But this is a subject for another post.

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Charleston, West Virginia Music & Songs Plants and the Emerald Kingdom Politics Uncategorized Videos Writings

Paw Paw the Ringing Boy (Video) & Why I Hate Eastern Religions (Sorry!)

As I’ve said before, I never know what to say about songs. I don’t think they have literal meanings and yet it feels so haughty to say nothing at all. So, I will say I believe this song was inspired by my experiences with spirituality combined with the woozy feelings of spring.

My spiritual experiences have mostly involved the complete subjugation of myself to another person. This is why I got married the first time. First, I had to go on a private retreat with my spiritual guide to achieve enlightenment (I was a teenager at the time, so it seemed to make sense.) Then of course while driving me to the “retreat” (which turned out to be the basement of his parents’ house) he had to grab my crotch to subjugate my ego. Things degenerated from there until a few days later I had to marry him since I had now touched his naked body which was too pure to be touched out of wedlock.

I don’t think my experiences are unusual, but just what you should expect when dealing with a Spiritual Person. When you see Spiritual Things going on, rest assured there is something dark and perverted behind the curtain.

But why? I don’t know. Maybe because humans can’t be spiritual. It isn’t real. The spiritual world is something we connect to- just like we connect to dogs and plants- but not something we can embody.

If it wasn’t unpopular to do so, I would want to warn people away from all Buddhist & Hindu spin-off movements practiced in America. “Eastern Religions” as we call them. It is not the religions in their natural environment I object to. Even though my degree is in Tibetan Buddhism, I think it is hard, maybe impossible to understand the role religion is playing in another culture, so I don’t have an opinion on whether these religions are good or bad in faraway places. (Although I can say, the history of Tibetan Buddhism is basically a blood bath.) But I do object to the form I see these movements taking in America. I have been involved with a number of them, and while I understand how they excite people with the promise of new horizons, I have never seen them play out well for anyone in the long run. Even meditation (I used to practice Transcendental Meditation) is, in my opinion, better left alone.

My involvement in these realms did lead to many of what you might call spiritual, blissful and transcendent experiences. But I imagine a person could have many of these same experiences from doing drugs. Drugs would probably be preferable to the extent that the person would realize there was a recreational, escapist quality to these states of mind, rather than believing they were rising up to a higher spiritual plane.

One problem with all Spiritual things, from meditation to Christianity is that they tend to create a ricochet between two polarities- good and bad, bliss and suffering, etc. The more a person attempts to bind themselves to one side of this polarity, the stronger the other side grows. But since you are attempting to identify yourself only with the positive side, the negative side gets projected or suppressed until take on a life of its own. Like a poltergeist. One way this can play out is the “spiritual” person becomes a magnet to the dark people who now balance them out. That is how things played for me.

Anyway, here are a few more problems I have with Americanized Eastern Spirituality.

  1. The subjugation of the ego: We have an ego for a reason. It is our self-interested mind. If anyone wants to help you transcend your ego, run as fast as you can. You may as well get a lobotomy.
  2. The denigration of thought: These religions will subtly- or overtly- push the idea that thoughts are a negative thing to be transcended. An impurity of some sort. The guru will humbly giggle about how we all have thoughts- they are nothing to be ashamed of- and yet- let’s just try to gently push them to the side a little, shall we? Thoughts are clouds which block the sky of Pure Awareness. For a long time, I tried to restrict my thinking due to this pernicious influence. When at last I managed to release this notion and feel good about thinking to my heart’s content, my life filled up with color.
  3. Navel gazing: As a rule, I think people are better off striving for external goals than internal ones. Survival demands it. Families and communities rely on it. Navel gazing seems especially harmful to men. Males have a lot of energy that needs to radiate outwards. If they try to fold that energy within themselves, through meditation for example, they become pent-up and angry. You see this a lot in long term meditators. Poke their peace bubble and they explode. Women, on the other hand, are built to hold energy inside like a pool. But meditation is bad for them as well because it focuses on the mind and stillness, whereas women really need the freedom to feel and express their full range of emotions.
  4. Disconnection: Ultimately, a meditator’s life becomes all about themselves. They live in a little bubble and focus on controlling the weather within that bubble. Their goal is essentially their own personal happiness. And though they succeed at feeling high and connected to the universe, it is still a different feeling from the more thick and liquid connections we are meant to have with other humans. A deeper form of happiness arises, I think, when a person no longer cares about their own happiness, their own psychological state, but is focused on goals which transcend their subjective reality. Paradoxically, caring less about your own state of mind is probably the truest way to uplift it.
  5. Gurus and spiritual leaders: All I can say is do not touch these people with a 10 foot pole unless you want to get fucked hard. The strange thing is, you WILL have spiritual experiences around these people. I don’t know why that happens. Maybe it is self-hypnosis. Maybe they have absorbed so much blood and energy from their previous victims that it gives them a form of radiant power. But walk away. You don’t need these experiences. Regular life is more supernatural than any of these spiritual things. We are just so used to it that we forget. At the very least, hire a detective prior to any contact with a spiritual person. He will find bodies. Guaranteed.

Anyway this is just my opinion, and I know there are exceptions to everything. Someone out there was born to meditate, just like some of us were born to swim with sharks or bury ourselves alive. But when people push the idea that everyone should have a meditation practice, I want to hurl. Just get a second job delivering pizzas. Or learn to build houses. Our minds are already working the way they should. We don’t need to tamper with them.

To swing, to fight
A world at night
To shake, to weep
A world asleep.

They sleep, I see
No one touches me
They think I don’t know
The place where all the children go.

Paw Paw the ringing boy
When spring comes he will bring you so much joy.
Paw Paw the ringing boy
When summer comes then the world will fade away.

These things
A world of strings
But look, you’ll see
The world is me.

Alien, okay
I don’t care what they say
I am bought and sold
Although he is very old.

Paw Paw the ringing boy
When spring comes he will bring you so much joy.
Paw Paw the ringing boy
When summer comes then the world will fade away.

Your needs
A string of beads
I dance, I twirl
A milk white pearl.

Worlds fade, worlds end
I dance, I spin
No one touches me
Except for spirituality.

Paw Paw the ringing boy
When spring comes he will bring you so much joy.
Paw Paw the ringing boy
When summer comes then the world will fade away.




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Blue, Black, Silver, Water, Moons, Death & Ghosts Minerals, Mountains, Crystals, Ice, and White Music & Songs Nashville

Who Will Make Love to Me?

 

Are you ready for space? Grey alien with big eyes in pants suit.

 

 

It seems that, for a while now, the color white has been trying to take over the (human) world. White walls, open space floor plans, buddhism, yoga, kale smoothie detoxes… when will the reign of white ever end?

At the time I wrote this song I was completely swept up into the color white, trying to wear, eat, and decorate with it exclusively. White can be refreshing and protective, but geez, it can also be such a cold color, disconnecting you from everything warm and earthy.

 

Download MP3: Who Will Make Love to Me?

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Blue, Black, Silver, Water, Moons, Death & Ghosts Music & Songs

Hunger and Thirst


Blue Saint with cross and skullcapOne afternoon, this blue wave washed over me, and suddenly life felt like an endless sea of longing that could never be satisfied. Or as the Buddhists say (from Wikipedia):

A basic unsatisfactoriness pervades all forms of existence, due to the fact that all forms of life are changing, impermanent and without any inner core or substance. There is, therefore, a lack of satisfaction, a sense that things never measure up to our expectations or standards.

But the feeling passed, and I think Buddhists are pretty silly to claim that one emotion, one shade of blue, is the underlying nature of all reality.

Download MP3: Hunger and Thirst