A list of things I love

• Figuring it out
• The tone of Lester Young's saxophone
• The feeling of effort
• William James. Fucking obviously.
• The banjo. The happy happy banjo.
• The eyes
• The smile of a woman
• When a kid or a dog takes a liking to you and you can't figure out why
• Making people laugh
• Fine, ok, people making me laugh too (but less so)
• Making dinner
• The plant growing food on it
• Seeing one of those bugs or spiders that make you rethink the universe as you know it.
• Two people excited to be talking to each other
• Creating something for folks to consider, and not lightly
• Thinking of something really charming to sign a letter off with
• Flavor combinations
• A well-worn baseball cap
• The feeling of coherence
• Floating in Epsom Salt
• Serving dinner
• Jacques Tatis
• Getting up early to make your lunch
• Nutritional Results
• Getting everything you can out of unhealthy decisions
• The Chicago Cubs
• Therapy
• Commanding Computers in an elegant manner
• Lookin' all professional
• The looks I see on faces every day (except when I stay in and rest)
• Jazz on a Summer's night
• My special and very favorite musicians
• Don Ellis and MFDoom and the Bad Livers
• Exemplary blood test results
• Lots of good produce (appropriately stored)
• Well made butter
• A successful grocery store trip
• The creek by my house
• When running into people that you know actually turns out to be quite pleasant
• Pickles
• Pickles just sittin' there
• The Rothko Chapel in Houston
• Getting out of anxiety/anger/confusion
• Simplicity
• Focus
• A ripe pear
• The new mattress I just spent $800 on, and the dreams that come with it
• The last item is sensitive women into the arts

A list of things I hate

• Parents of child athletes.
• Cops who approach you offensively or defensively.
• Assumption.
• Not respecting what's alive in other people, even if it's coupons or football watching.
• Feeling misunderstood.
• Feeling like a burden to somebody.
• Rejection
• The inevitable insignificance
• Personality -- the entire enchilada
• People eating cruncy things at work
• The common understanding of mental health treatment.
• Self sacrifice.
• Teaching of powerlessness.
• Pounding the love of learning out of people.
• The moment when kids figure out the pleasure of being a dick to somebody.
• Lack of responsiveness.
• Not understanding. 
• Never understanding.
• Being too obsessed with human striving that you lose a sense of understanding.

Bird Song

What do birds think when the earth is no longer scorched with drought? Lungs hydrated,
brain healed, bright-spread toes dappled in mud? I'll tell:

Forecast today: the X-Y plane is wobbly at best.
Evening storms ahead. Thunder may crash over my song.

Sometimes you are submerged, and sometimes you are not.
Sometimes there's a bug and sometimes there's a whole worm.

I am the general of billions of cells over.
Each sunrise, I put on a feathered cap. And mind a nest, made out of honey twigs.

My heart wakes before anything. Its thing is consistency.
It speaks in meter. Broadcasting a song that is enough so to transmit AM radio.

I'm starting to notice that if rain falls and I sing my head off in spite, the sky eventually answers in flight!

Wisdom

It's confusing to be the Buddha when you self-impose the thing that makes you him. It can become a duty.

The last thing he said was.....oh, fuck off! You know it's obviously already inside of you.

(dramatic last gasp)

Actually, they were instructions on how to spread light.

Gentle Me Soup

Vegetable broth--store bought (this is not about making your own)

A stressful day at work

One meditative evening activity (or, texting a person you don't know that well yet?)

Turmeric, and never be shy 

A big hunk of fresh ginger

Fresh-cut Leafy Greens (I cannot emphasize keeping a garden enough)

Liquid Amino or Soy Sauce

One egg. (The color of that yolk better pop!)

A lemon (if you have it)

If your nose is stuffy, or throat hurts, I guess a pinch of cayenne will do, but this is not about that. We are cultivating something much more mild.

Throw all but the greens in the pot at once. Let it arrive to a nice rumble. This step should take several breaths, but there is no wisdom in telling you how many. You decide how many you need. When you are complete with this step, add the greens. You soon will enjoy the sight of a most vivid shade of green come alive in your pot. Turn off the stove because the color starts to become a more realistic shade of green rather quickly. They wilt. Now add the egg, scrambled and seasoned, and stir.

Pour the soup into your favorite bowl or mug. Use one of those big Asian cuppy spoons in the back of your drawer. Have some patience to tend to its neglect, washing the dust off with soap and water before you use it. Serve. Put a little more soy sauce on top. If you have any fancy salt that you once were gifted and always forget to use, get that instead. Pour a cool glass of water. The cooler the better. 

Now a moderate squeeze of lemon into your soup if you have it. 

a) If you don't have lemon

Practice not worrying about it if you don't. There is no substitute for having an opportunity to practice not worrying about something. Make a confident move in life, and gain the resolve to keep lemons on hand more regularly. Then you can try this exercise again in the near future. But if you must know a splash of cloudy apple cider vinegar works I guess.

b) If you do have lemon

You'll notice that the egg, broth, and lemon flavor is divine. But be careful not to do too much. If you squeezed in too much lemon, you will probably have to try again next time to experience the balance of flavor in its proper form.

Now for everyone, take a nice deep smell if by chance that sensation fires a memory. Give yourself a chance to be transported to another time and place that comes with the sensation of the soup's steam, or the aroma of the egg or lemon. Open yourself up. Now go outside. 

Hopefully it's cool outside, and I'm assuming it's night. Hopefully the sky is clear of clouds. Don’t look at your phone too much or anything. Drink all the soup you need. Swallow the greens whole. You might be able to hear bugs singing their song, or maybe a wind kicks the trees and yard ornaments around. The chimes and whooshes and clacks playing a comforting and hardly noticeable background music to eat your soup to.  

You don’t have to eat it all if you don’t want. Or, like me, you could get seconds. But listen to how you feel. When finished, if your spirit still needs some unthawing, you can go ahead and pop that hunk of ginger.

I am a bruised vegetable

My line for the next time i get real vulnerable around a girl.

Pitch #3

Maybe this guy is online looking for information on coconut oil, and he is on this health forum, and one of the comments is talking about how much coconut oil changes your life. He’s going on and on about how it can have an impact on your day and then we transition into a story he tells in the post, which the film follows.

This couple inexplicably dressed in chimpanzee suits. She says, “I should go change.”

The man is watching his girlfriend get ready in the bathroom for a night out on the town and he has only lost his mask, not the suit. He is insecure about something, and he is confronting her about it. She tells him what wonders this coconut oil is doing for her hair. It’s changing her life.

She kisses him goodbye and leaves, and he immediately takes the coconut oil to masturbate with. And then he uses the same jar of oil to make popcorn with, on the stove. He calls his friend while he’s eating some and watching a movie — let’s say, Network or maybe The French Connection -- and he figures out that good ol’ regular movie theater popcorn since they were kids was made with coconut oil. then his friend on the other end tries some on his stove with him over the phone. His friend takes a bite and says, y’know, you’re totally fucking right! And they cheer and after an awkward few seconds post-cheering, and then they hang up the phone.

And she has the best hair night of her life and gets flirted with by everybody. She feels like a total boss and even though is attracted to other people and really asserting how goddamn sexy she is, feeling a palpable amount of self control and valuing her time away from her bf to bolster some self esteem, but appreciating the value of his security and his simple care for her day tp day life.

And she gets home and they both go to bed together, and he’s satisfied and relaxed and she’s going to bed confident that she’s a real catch.

In the morning they wake up at Sunrise and drive out to the lands of dry cracked earth and so drunk on the coconut oil craze, that they attempt to levitate together. They both woke up early because of a thunderstorm, and one thing led to another. Basically, a dare about levitation. So they agreed to try not because they thought they would they were just feeling so connected. And so playful and sarcastic. They were going to be in nature, alone. They got there and took off their clothes and really tried to concentrate together.

Was it the eyes, the hips, the hearts that had to connect? All of it? They were trying all options with big laughter in their glottals and a slightly ambivalent sex vibe going on, when there was a small earthquake and a rapid shifting of the earth’s tectonic plates in this general area they were atempting to use their mental powers to defy the physical world. And so at the exact time too, just as he was rolling over and he was getting more than a glimpse of her sweet naked facade, the ground jolted the couple upward eight to sixteen inches, and before he could land the fucking earth had rotated about 6%.  Holy Mother of a bitch!! She was just trying to adjust her body for the sarcastic levitation attempt when she started fucking levitating! Her naked torso absolutely daring the cracked land to hydrate by lording over it with her goodness and her exposed breasts. Mother of Land. All she could think of was eroding mountains and high tides and solar eclipses all picking up the pace because of her ecstasy.

A pet theory of hers had always been there were people that saw the stars, and then there were the type of people that preferred to know the name of stars. She had always been the latter, but all of a sudden, she could see stars. And it was only 10:30 in the morning. Holy mother of Coconut oil.

The sheer fucking force of the sudden shift in magnetic pulls or actual land shift or some mind breaking shit that had just happened kept holding this sarcastically-paralysed and highly enthusiastic naked woman about eight to sixteen inches over the earth just shoutin' out yeeeeehawwww. We all forget what she shouted, but she hovered for about twenty seconds. He thought it was possible that there were major earthquakes happening all over the world and tsunamis were destroying many of western civilizations' most important sea coasts. Big changes were on the way, and that meant thousands of people were dying at the very moment he and his woman were vaulted into this knew kind of empirical knowledge -- levitating. She had every reason to think that her and her boyfriend were levitating above the earth out of sheer love. And they were. Every reason.

But they weren’t.

The way they saw it though, they were. This experience convinced these two reasonable and thoroughly educated people to spend an hour each week rubbing coconut oil all over each other’s bodies and driving out the dry cracked earth and trying to fucking suspend themselves slightly above the ground by pure love alone. They did it once and they will stop at nothing to do it again.

They don’t levitate again, but they end up with really nice skin, and loving the dickens out of each other.

“You should really try it,” he ends the forum post. Which is what the movie will be called.