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When I relocated back to Southern California a couple years ago, one of my dear friends, Red Dawn, sent me a note that ended with a reference to “Bagger Vance”. She said she felt certain that I would “find my swing”.

I am ever more convinced of the divine nature when I consider the eye of the needle that I have been drawn through to get to this point.

It is interesting that as I produce, what I am calling “Through-composed” video like the work above, that I realize all my creative efforts are flavored and informed by my experiences in the theatre.

My approach to creating this video was simple. The Internet provided the script. I provided the VO and the editing, and voi la!

My goal is to expand the idea to include several on-line actors all contributing to a finished “Radio-age / Internet-age” piece.

I walked away from Christendom quite a few years ago. I was met with the same paradox that many churchgoers are. On the one hand, you have the figure of Jesus, not a bad character to emulate. On the other hand you have Paul and the church. I was unable after a while to find common ground. Maybe that was the point. Maybe if it all worked so well, the world would have been a trouble free zone for the past couple thousand years. Maybe, just maybe, Paul was the stone in my shoe. I have been walking around with him, just slightly uncomfortable for 30 years. So, I favor the right foot, what the hell.

A few weeks ago I was thirsty for a drink of God, so I padded over to the place where I thought he might be kept (the internet now-a-days) and sure enough, there he was. http://www.biblegateway.com/ I even signed up for a daily free delivery of God soup and with both anxiousness and anxiety woke the next morning to step off the God wagon I had been on for so many years. And there he was, the same old Paul. Day after day after day….I don’t even have words to express how much I disliked that voice. Until I read this:

Philippians 4
8 -9 Summing it all up, friends, I’d say you’ll do best by filling your minds and meditating on things true, noble, reputable, authentic, compelling, gracious—the best, not the worst; the beautiful, not the ugly; things to praise, not things to curse. Put into practice what you learned from me, what you heard and saw and realized. Do that, and God, who makes everything work together, will work you into his most excellent harmonies.

In the troubling times we live in, we can’t run and hide. We cant find shelter enough or immunity. Pain is all around us, it is in us and on us. Our suffering is the same as Paul’s. We dont have to like it, but we do have to live with the pebble in our shoe.

What is the poultice? Grab on to love. Hold it tight and don’t you dare let go. We’re standing on a tiny blue ball that is spinning out of control and each and every day we have to persevere. We semi-wake from our semi-sleep and we put our semi-uniforms and go to semi-work where we will be rewarded with just enough to keep us locked into the chain of despair. So hold on dear ones. There is only one way out, and that is the way in.

Give yourself up to God. Redemption is just a smile away. Just a touch. Just a hug. It is just reaching out and taking the trunk next to you and with one great tearful eye, knowing that no matter how terribly turbulent this life may seem at times, that love – is there for each of us.

This year, I received a boatload of birthday wishes on Facebook. I smiled like the Cheshire cat all day. One million friends (OK, maybe I exaggerate) held out their trunks to me with a simple smile, a gesture, a touch. I didn’t touch the ground the rest of the day.

So that’s our job. We’re supposed to fill our minds with things that are true, noble, reputable, authentic, compelling, gracious, beautiful. We’re supposed to praise not curse. That’s all there is. Everything else was just a bad first draft. When the church found Paul’s little plastic waste can – the one right next to his typewriter, they picked up all the crumpled leavings – ironed the pages and published the book. They should have simply gone to the source – The one sheet still proudly clinging to the roller. And so, I present it here for you today.

Have a prosperous, productive and profitable day.

Oh yea, and stay out of the trash.

Well, since Donald Trump has reduced the standard of speech to gutter language, I guess it is appropriate that this brief posting echo this new standard in our language and our social fabric. F.F.F.F.F. There I said it.

How sad we are.

So, enough about me. Really what I want to write about today is a quantum revelation. Big Giant Head stuff. Pieces to puzzles falling from the sky, floating gently, rotating like snowflakes until they nest in the puzzle of my consciousness. When this happens, I am always amazed at the patina the world is painted with. The colors seem brighter, the gum tastes more pepperminty.

Right of way. That’s it in a nutshell. The answer to the question of life. All of them. No, not one or two. Not some. Not (we can make this apply, if we twist it) Not a bandaide, coolaide or bromide. Not a simple fix, not quackery or the rantings of a mad barber. Just “Right of Way” and the granting thereof.

The duplet is simple. Part one: Granting. Part two: Right of Way. Both deserve explaination and exploration. So, here we go.

All roads end here. Everything that I am, all my memories and molecules coalese at this time and place. I am this thinking mechanism on one hand, and an unexplainable phenomenon on the other. For the thinking mechanism, the whole machine is driven by thought. Thought changes the very form of my matter. Garbage in. Garbage in.

Thoughts can be garbage. Our lives can be a constant sea of thought garbage, we wallow in it, becuase we dont know how to not. We accept it, becuase our nose is just high enough over the top of the garbage mound that we can breathe – albeit stank. We accept the misery. It always amazes me how much crap we can take so long as get an occasional breath of air, a drink of poluted water and a cookie. We live this way, becuase we believe we deserve it. The little moments of bliss are accidents.

Yea, there is a stream of crap and it’s headed right for ya, but the good news is, you just have to take a giant step to the right, and it will flow right past. What you need is a handy pocket tool. A mantra you can use as a paddle to divert the stream. A new thought. A new way of organization and a patch to update the security holes in the OS of your mind.

I think it started a week or so ago, when I was reading the first few chapters of a book my son is working on called: “Letter to Get a Grip Magazine” in which the central character has some rather odious voices in his head. They are like mischievous children, malevolent, whiny bitches that point out to our hero his failings and weaknesses in a voice too loud. Finally, our hero comes across a piece of music that seems to quell the attack. To quiet the menagerie.

While I was reading, I would come to parts of the book where I would have to “portray” the voice of those voices. I had to create a “character” for them. When I listened to the recording…even though it was my son’s story. They were MY voices. They suck.

Various stratagems for quieting the voices have presented over time. Some of my favorites have been 1) The Theatre 2) Drugs and Alcohol 3) Sex 4) More drugs and alcohol – lower case this time. 5) New age cosmology 6) Ancient alchemy 7) Theology Apology and 9) Death.

I listened with rapt attention to the new age gurus speak to me of their wisdom. Enlightenment was an end-goal that somehow would be the end-game for the voices.

All that was required of me was surrender. Well, doesn’t that just suck? Not only do I have to examine my own mortality, die the little death, but now I have to fucking surrender to every asshole on the planet? WTF? And there’s the rub. Surrender isn’t quite the right word. It does not evoke the right current. Wrapped up in the concept of “surrender” is failure. Wrapped up in the concept of surrender is “Losing”. Damned dualism again.

Then came a new turn of phrase. “To Grant Right of Way”. Not sure exactly when, but in a recent moment of crystal clarity I was given a new concept. Grant Right of Way. Don’t surrender. Grant Right of Way. It keeps the voices happy. It gives them something to do. Something to chat amongst themselves about. They stand on the sidelines and watch the universe present itself to me. I accept all the input and hold it up to the switch. Do I Grant Right of Way? It is simple. Binary. Yes/No. Have a thought? Grant right of way? Yes/No.

It applies to people as well as to the physical interaction I have with the environment. With people it is very clarifying. When you Grant everyone you meet the Right of Way. Amazing things start to happen. Their edges dull. They become less important. Their judgments really don’t matter much cause hell, I am the one that granted them Right of Way. I – Grant. To grant means that I give something of great value. Right of way is free and unfettered access. I don’t stand in the way. I don’t deter or detour. I don’t manage or mangle. I just be. Why? Cause I Granted the Right of Way.

Then, back to the voices. I hear them now. They don’t ever really stop their chatter. They are the voices that were implanted by unhappy people, fathers, ,mothers, others…and being the good actor i am, I memorized the monologues, the plays the epochs. The chapter and verse is still playing on the phonograph of my mind. The difference is, that when I hear the recording, I can also choose not to grant right of way. I can grant right of way to empty space instead.

What remains is Christ. What remains is space. What remains is light. What remains is bliss. And you were happy breathing through that reed tied to the bottom of the polluted and stagnant pond.

Stand up. Get out – Grant Right of Way

There is a movement afoot. The eastern practice of meditation is inculcating the western world.

Perhaps if I wrote consistently from the position of digression, it would be less of a problem. But then, I digress even further…..moving on.

Closet meditators. YES ! MEDITATORS COME OUT OF YOUR CLOSETS !

but we cant. Our closets are our chidler-spaces. Let me explain. When I was a kid growing up in Lompoc California, we dug holes. We dug these holes in the sandy soil of the coastal town known as Lompoc. For more information see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpDD0eOq-0o Not that this is the Lompoc of my yout, but this 1940 film was shot there. But I digress. Again.

We dug holes in the ground. They were our forts. We covered them with cardboard and a thin layer of sand and we created a subterranean world all our own where adults couldn’t find us. We stole candles from cupboards and stayed in our lairs for hours reading comics and enjoying the cool shade of our caves. At least that’s how I remember it. Of course it all came to an end when some ersatz adult fell to his death as he crashed through the fragile eggshell of our cardboard ceiling.

When we couldn’t dig holes we would arrange the furniture in our bedrooms and drape it with blankets creating tent cities that we could hide away from the world in. You remember these. This is a common human experience. Every kid has made one. You remember how it felt to be inside. Womb-like. And that was indeed the point.

Meditation v/s Medication. Throughout the Eastern world people seek to quiet their minds and to attain a state of celestial calm. It is in this state that wisdom and revealed consciousness coalesce and the little mind-made-me acquiesces. Little moments of P&Q – Peace and Quiet. For me, my mind has always been particularly disturbing. It is what a friend at the SOJ calls “Monkey Mind” Continuous chatter about nothing. Just noise. To wit, I really don’t even have any interest in the content. It is all just repetitive…blovious….garbage. But I digress.

Back to the closet. It has this quality. It is my fort, my tiny hole in the ground, my blanket covered furniture. My quiet space that grownups cant fit in. It is my fort. Now add some science.

For years I have been fascinated by the science of sound. All the way back to the greeks and the modes, it has been apparent that different sounds and frequencies elicit different emotional states. Not just emotional states, but states of being. Let me repeat that …. States of Being. Important. It is important because we must draw a distinction between a state of being…and a state of mind. The former is eternal. The latter….material and transient. What I have been fascinated with is the idea that the meditative state is a state of being, or a state of consciousness. A connection with the eternal. I achieve it in my closet. I do it by sitting on my woofer.

Yea. Just when you thought it couldn’t get any more bizarre. Or I couldn’t find any more obsequious or antiquated language to use…yes, I sit on my woofer.

Frequencies and the use of sound to achieve balance in the chakras as well as the entrainment of the left and right sides of the brain using binaural sounds is well grounded in science. There are tons of data and research on this. I have been sifting through it with great vigor. And this is the stuff of a life’s work, not blog entry.

The bottom line, is that I have perched my bottom on a woofer. As a musician, I thought to myself…”OK self….if it is all about frequencies…and changing the frequencies for optimal health at the cellular level….if I use the concept of sympathetic vibration to get my whole body vibrating at certain frequencies…this could have curative, restorative effect. Hence, sitting on a woofer.

In my closet. I have a chair. It is mounted to a subwoofer. I drive it with an MP3 player. I use the frequencies of sound associated with the chakras produced from a sound generator (software) and I meditate in my closet, surrounded by, enveloped by, hugged by, covered by, loved by, the vibrations of sounds. Entrainment. It is very cool.

In Santa Barbara California real estate is….well…let’s just say it don’t come cheap. In my little room’ the space is all premium. I forfeit some closet space for the sake of my sanity. It is where my consciousness practice happens. Perhaps the most important practice I do. But I digress.

America: The Grim Truth
By Lance Freeman

April 08, 2010 “Information Clearing House” — Americans, I have some bad news for you:
You have the worst quality of life in the developed world – by a wide margin.

If you had any idea of how people really lived in Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and many parts of Asia, you’d be rioting in the streets calling for a better life. In fact, the average Australian or Singaporean taxi driver has a much better standard of living than the typical American white-collar worker.

I know this because I am an American, and I escaped from the prison you call home.

I have lived all around the world, in wealthy countries and poor ones, and there is only one country I would never consider living in again: The United States of America. The mere thought of it fills me with dread.

Consider this: you are the only people in the developed world without a single-payer health system. Everyone in Western Europe, Japan, Canada, Australia, Singapore and New Zealand has a single-payer system. If they get sick, they can devote all their energies to getting well. If you get sick, you have to battle two things at once: your illness and the fear of financial ruin. Millions of Americans go bankrupt every year due to medical bills, and tens of thousands die each year because they have no insurance or insufficient insurance. And don’t believe for a second that rot about America having the world’s best medical care or the shortest waiting lists: I’ve been to hospitals in Australia, New Zealand, Europe, Singapore, and Thailand, and every one was better than the “good” hospital I used to go to back home. The waits were shorter, the facilities more comfortable, and the doctors just as good.

This is ironic, because you need a good health system more than anyone else in the world. Why? Because your lifestyle is almost designed to make you sick.

Let’s start with your diet: Much of the beef you eat has been exposed to fecal matter in processing. Your chicken is contaminated with salmonella. Your stock animals and poultry are pumped full of growth hormones and antibiotics. In most other countries, the government would act to protect consumers from this sort of thing; in the United States, the government is bought off by industry to prevent any effective regulations or inspections. In a few years, the majority of all the produce for sale in the United States will be from genetically modified crops, thanks to the cozy relationship between Monsanto Corporation and the United States government. Worse still, due to the vast quantities of high-fructose corn syrup Americans consume, fully one-third of children born in the United States today will be diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes at some point in their lives.

Of course, it’s not just the food that’s killing you, it’s the drugs. If you show any sign of life when you’re young, they’ll put you on Ritalin. Then, when you get old enough to take a good look around, you’ll get depressed, so they’ll give you Prozac. If you’re a man, this will render you chemically impotent, so you’ll need Viagra to get it up. Meanwhile, your steady diet of trans-fat-laden food is guaranteed to give you high cholesterol, so you’ll get a prescription for Lipitor. Finally, at the end of the day, you’ll lay awake at night worrying about losing your health plan, so you’ll need Lunesta to go to sleep.

With a diet guaranteed to make you sick and a health system designed to make sure you stay that way, what you really need is a long vacation somewhere. Unfortunately, you probably can’t take one. I’ll let you in on little secret: if you go to the beaches of Thailand, the mountains of Nepal, or the coral reefs of Australia, you’ll probably be the only American in sight. And you’ll be surrounded crowds of happy Germans, French, Italians, Israelis, Scandinavians and wealthy Asians. Why? Because they’re paid well enough to afford to visit these places AND they can take vacations long enough to do so. Even if you could scrape together enough money to go to one of these incredible places, by the time you recovered from your jetlag, it would time to get on a plane and rush back to your job.

If you think I’m making this up, check the stats on average annual vacation days by country:

Finland: 44
Italy: 42
France: 39
Germany: 35
UK: 25
Japan: 18

USA: 12
The fact is, they work you like dogs in the United States. This should come as no surprise: the United States never got away from the plantation/sweat shop labor model and any real labor movement was brutally suppressed. Unless you happen to be a member of the ownership class, your options are pretty much limited to barely surviving on service-sector wages or playing musical chairs for a spot in a cubicle (a spot that will be outsourced to India next week anyway). The very best you can hope for is to get a professional degree and then milk the system for a slice of the middle-class pie. And even those who claw their way into the middle class are but one illness or job loss away from poverty. Your jobs aren’t secure. Your company has no loyalty to you. They’ll play you off against your coworkers for as long as it suits them, then they’ll get rid of you.

Of course, you don’t have any choice in the matter: the system is designed this way. In most countries in the developed world, higher education is either free or heavily subsidized; in the United States, a university degree can set you back over US$100,000. Thus, you enter the working world with a crushing debt. Forget about taking a year off to travel the world and find yourself – you’ve got to start working or watch your credit rating plummet.
If you’re “lucky,” you might even land a job good enough to qualify you for a home loan. And then you’ll spend half your working life just paying the interest on the loan – welcome to the world of American debt slavery. America has the illusion of great wealth because there’s a lot of “stuff” around, but who really owns it? In real terms, the average American is poorer than the poorest ghetto dweller in Manila, because at least they have no debts. If they want to pack up and leave, they can; if you want to leave, you can’t, because you’ve got debts to pay.

All this begs the question: Why would anyone put up with this? Ask any American and you’ll get the same answer: because America is the freest country on earth. If you believe this, I’ve got some more bad news for you: America is actually among the least free countries on earth. Your piss is tested, your emails and phone calls are monitored, your medical records are gathered, and you are never more than one stray comment away from writhing on the ground with two Taser prongs in your ass.

And that’s just physical freedom. Mentally, you are truly imprisoned. You don’t even know the degree to which you are tormented by fears of medical bankruptcy, job loss, homelessness and violent crime because you’ve never lived in a country where there is no need to worry about such things.

But it goes much deeper than mere surveillance and anxiety. The fact is, you are not free because your country has been taken over and occupied by another government. Fully 70% of your tax dollars go to the Pentagon, and the Pentagon is the real government of the United States. You are required under pain of death to pay taxes to this occupying government. If you’re from the less fortunate classes, you are also required to serve and die in their endless wars, or send your sons and daughters to do so. You have no choice in the matter: there is a socio-economic draft system in the United States that provides a steady stream of cannon fodder for the military.

If you call a life of surveillance, anxiety and ceaseless toil in the service of a government you didn’t elect “freedom,” then you and I have a very different idea of what that word means.

If there was some chance that the country could be changed, there might be reason for hope. But can you honestly look around and conclude that anything is going to change? Where would the change come from? The people? Take a good look at your compatriots: the working class in the United States has been brutally propagandized by jackals like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity. Members of the working class have been taught to lick the boots of their masters and then bend over for another kick in the ass. They’ve got these people so well trained that they’ll take up arms against the other half of the working class as soon as their masters give the word.

If the people cannot make a change, how about the media? Not a chance. From Fox News to the New York Times, the mass media in the United States is nothing but the public relations wing of the corporatocracy, primarily the military industrial complex. At least the citizens of the former Soviet Union knew that their news was bullshit. In America, you grow up thinking you’ve got a free media, which makes the propaganda doubly effective. If you don’t think American media is mere corporate propaganda, ask yourself the following question: have you ever heard a major American news outlet suggest that the country could fund a single-payer health system by cutting military spending?

If change can’t come from the people or the media, the only other potential source of change would be the politicians. Unfortunately, the American political process is among the most corrupt in the world. In every country on earth, one expects politicians to take bribes from the rich. But this generally happens in secret, behind the closed doors of their elite clubs. In the United States, this sort of political corruption is done in broad daylight, as part of legal, accepted, standard operating procedure. In the United States, they merely call these bribes campaign donations, political action committees and lobbyists. One can no more expect the politicians to change this system than one can expect a man to take an axe and chop his own legs out from underneath him.

No, the United States of America is not going to change for the better. The only change will be for the worse. And when I say worse, I mean much worse. As we speak, the economic system that sustained the country during the post-war years is collapsing. The United States maxed out its “credit card” sometime in 2008 and now its lenders, starting with China, are in the process of laying the foundations for a new monetary system to replace the Anglo-American “petro-dollar” system. As soon as there is a viable alternative to the US dollar, the greenback will sink like a stone.

While the United States was running up crushing levels of debt, it was also busy shipping its manufacturing jobs and white-collar jobs overseas, and letting its infrastructure fall to pieces. Meanwhile, Asian and European countries were investing in education, infrastructure and raw materials. Even if the United States tried to rebuild a real economy (as opposed to a service/financial economy) do think American workers would ever be able to compete with the workers of China or Europe? Have you ever seen a Japanese or German factory? Have you ever met a Singaporean or Chinese worker?

There are only two possible futures facing the United States, and neither one is pretty. The best case is a slow but orderly decline – essentially a continuation of what’s been happening for the last two decades. Wages will drop, unemployment will rise, Medicare and Social Security benefits will be slashed, the currency will decline in value, and the disparity of wealth will spiral out of control until the United States starts to resemble Mexico or the Philippines – tiny islands of wealth surrounded by great poverty (the country is already halfway there).

Equally likely is a sudden collapse, perhaps brought about by a rapid flight from the US dollar by creditor nations like China, Japan, Korea and the OPEC nations. A related possibility would be a default by the United States government on its vast debt. One look at the financial balance sheet of the US government should convince you how likely this is: governmental spending is skyrocketing and tax receipts are plummeting – something has to give. If either of these scenarios plays out, the resulting depression will make the present recession look like a walk in the park.

Whether the collapse is gradual or gut-wrenchingly sudden, the results will be chaos, civil strife and fascism. Let’s face it: the United States is like the former Yugoslavia – a collection of mutually antagonistic cultures united in name only. You’ve got your own version of the Taliban: right-wing Christian fundamentalists who actively loathe the idea of secular Constitutional government. You’ve got a vast intellectual underclass that has spent the last few decades soaking up Fox News and talk radio propaganda, eager to blame the collapse on Democrats, gays and immigrants. You’ve got a ruthless ownership class that will use all the means at its disposal to protect its wealth from the starving masses.

On top of all that you’ve got vast factory farms, sprawling suburbs and a truck-based shipping system, all of it entirely dependent on oil that is about to become completely unaffordable. And you’ve got guns. Lots of guns. In short: the United States is about to become a very unwholesome place to be.

Right now, the government is building fences and walls along its northern and southern borders. Right now, the government is working on a national ID system (soon to be fitted with biometric features). Right now, the government is building a surveillance state so extensive that they will be able to follow your every move, online, in the street and across borders. If you think this is just to protect you from “terrorists,” then you’re sadly mistaken. Once the shit really hits the fan, do you really think you’ll just be able to jump into the old station wagon, drive across the Canadian border and spend the rest of your days fishing and drinking Molson? No, the government is going to lock the place down. They don’t want their tax base escaping. They don’t want their “recruits” escaping. They don’t want YOU escaping.

I am not writing this to scare you. I write this to you as a friend. If you are able to read and understand what I’ve written here, then you are a member of a small minority in the United States. You are a minority in a country that has no place for you.

So what should you do?

You should leave the United States of America.

If you’re young, you’ve got plenty of choices: you can teach English in the Middle East, Asia or Europe. Or you can go to university or graduate school abroad and start building skills that will qualify you for a work visa. If you’ve already got some real work skills, you can apply to emigrate to any number of countries as a skilled immigrant. If you are older and you’ve got some savings, you can retire to a place like Costa Rica or the Philippines. If you can’t qualify for a work, student or retirement visa, don’t let that stop you – travel on a tourist visa to a country that appeals to you and talk to the expats you meet there. Whatever you do, go speak to an immigration lawyer as soon as you can. Find out exactly how to get on a path that will lead to permanent residence and eventually citizenship in the country of your choice.

You will not be alone. There are millions of Americans just like me living outside the United States. Living lives much more fulfilling, peaceful, free and abundant than we ever could have attained back home. Some of us happened upon these lives by accident – we tried a year abroad and found that we liked it – others made a conscious decision to pack up and leave for good. You’ll find us in Canada, all over Europe, in many parts of Asia, in Australia and New Zealand, and in most other countries of the globe. Do we miss our friends and family? Yes. Do we occasionally miss aspects of our former country? Yes. Do we plan on ever living again in the United States? Never. And those of us with permanent residence or citizenship can sponsor family members from back home for long-term visas in our adopted countries.

In closing, I want to remind you of something: unless you are an American Indian or a descendant of slaves, at some point your ancestors chose to leave their homeland in search of a better life. They weren’t traitors and they weren’t bad people, they just wanted a better life for themselves and their families. Isn’t it time that you continue their journey?

Editorial Note from the author of the Trifling Blog: So, you think this is all bullshit? Well, if you want confirmation, talk to my son….oh, wait….you say you cant? You say his number has been disconnected? That’s because even as we speak he is on a plane heading for S.Korea where he is being employed to teach English for a year. Hmmmmmmm.

Yea, so I am using a literary device to deceive you into thinking I am out of breath. Yea, cheesy. Furthmore, I want you to believe that I am out of breath because I have been so busy. Rushing here and there, and then back again. Yea, that’s the truth. Then, finally I want you to forgive me for letting so much grass grow between installments here at the ol Trifling Blog, but as I’ve said….Ghasp…huff…puff….So, here’s the deal.

So, here’s the deal. God I love that phrase. Simple, direct, and yet you just know that if someone starts a sentence with this leading phrase…bullshite simply has to follow. Usually in a high pressure stream. So, I repeat…”Here’s the deal…”

My son and his wife are moving to South Korea. There, just let that sit with ya for a second. Yea, listen to the elevator music in your head, and just be with that concept for a second. South Korea. For those of you who may suffer from Geographical challenges, South Korea is a very long way away. Like, Gulliver’s travels far away. Yea, I’m pretty sure that Lilliputian is the Capital of South Korea, but I’ll have to check.

So, what kind of stones do these modern kids have? Large clanking ones. They are heading to a completely unknown part of the world to teach English for a year. Stones. Big clanking ones. I am jealous beyond measure of the adventure they are setting upon. Imagine, being young and full of art and life and immersing yourself in the colorburst of culture they are entering. They are the missionaries of the new millinia, armed with their blackberrys, their Mac-books and Mcpads….on Dancer, on Donner, and Comet and Blitzen. Yea, I don’t know why I went there either, except for the neat rhyme sequence. So here’s to you Doug and Roe, I doff my cap, and raise my cup, or visa versa. You guys are the balm, and I cant wait to see how the pups come out. But seriously, I couldn’t be prouder, or love either of you more.

Ghasp…huff…puff….things here in the BooBoo have been moving right along and along….working…..riding Myrtle….not writing blog entries….but all that can turn around in an instant. Just like life, one minute you got it, the next minute you aint.

So here’s to you Uncle Jim. I loved you in secret all my life. When I was small, too small for me to remember, I fell asleep playing at your house with Jimmie. I dont remember much, except for you picking me up and carrying me to bed. Your touch was warm and loving, your heart was huge. It was a simple act of making sure all the chicks were in the nest, safe and warm. But for me, it was a lesson in kindness and love, and how to truly be a man.

Dr. James D. Warrick
1926 – 2010

This past weekend, my oldest friend and I got together. He is a dear man whose name comes from Vaudeville. One  Mr. “Nosmo King”   For those that might not get it…Nosmo King = NO SMOKING.

OK, maybe you did get it.

Any way, I had a wonderful weekend with the afore mentioned friend from Junior High.

Nosmo has long been preparing the scrumptious repast called the the tri-tip. Endless hours of trial and error. Success and failure….until at last…the ultimate, the perfect tri-tip. Let me just say…..”yuuuuuuuummmmmmmm”. So….an afternoon of walking the isles of farmer’s markets, dialing in barbecues…filling propane tanks…ended in the most amazing  meal. We doff our caps, and say we all thanks.

And this is just the beginning of the story. For the rest, you have to peel back the pages of my book of life at least a gaborch. I just made that word up. A gaborch is the number of pages it take to go all the way back to 1978. I think we can all agree that is a gaborch.

One gaborch ago….the Kmart incident happened.

A little background….

In high school I was a band geek. So much so, that I was the President of said band my senior year. This meant, of course that the legislative bodies were under my direct oversight and the band exercised it’s power only under my approval. How dizzying. I am still reeling from the power.  But I digress…as I often do.

My senior year, I crossed the line. I went to the dark side, the choral side. Yes. I admit it.  This all culminated in my singing the national anthem at graduation, way back in 1975.  For you historians, the fall of Saigon was:  April 30, 1975 – So yes, I dodged that bullet but just barely. Somehow the fact that I could sing leaked out into the genpop.

Jump forward to K-mart back in the day of the “blue light special” where I was working my way through not going to school,  selling appliances.

It was at this juncture that my life took a particularly weird turn. Enter Cole Roberts. Yes, you know who you are. Are your ears burning? That’s because we are talking about you. Enter Cole Roberts and Scott Champlaine. These two gentelmen were in the process of producing “Godspell” the Broadway musical, way off off off off Broadway. As “off” as you can get actually. In an industrial building – theatre – in Simi Valley CA.  They walked up to me and said: “we understand that you sing” “We want you to audition to be Jesus”. And so, I did. This was the beginning of what would be a long love affair with the theatre.

From Simi Valley, Cole took this production to the CallBoard Theatre in Hollywood. Which was not so much a theatre as a church converted to that purpose. Mary Baker Eddy’s church, or so we were told. It was a little 99 seat non equity house and I became another struggling actor in Hollyweird hoping for a break. Well life went on from there to here, but this is where the title of this blog entry fits in…”Friends”

After 35 years, I spoke with Cole Roberts the other nite on the phone. It was like no time had gone by at all. Like the gaborch of pages that separated my NOW life from my Kmart life were never really there. We talked and laughed and come to find out, Cole has been telling the tale of finding Jesus at Kmart for the past 35 years as well. It is almost like time is just an illusion. And perhaps dear readers, it is just that.

Gaborch.