Author: buddycushman

Long ago, when “couch surfing at 70” was still a thing, I offered a post about how grateful I was to live in a world that included Stevie Wonder. Yesterday I heard The Beach Boys cover of “I Was Made to Love Her,” and was instantly filled with all those big, grateful, joyful feelings again.

Stevie’s mom, Lula Mae Hardaway, was one of the writers of ‘Made to Love Her.’ How totally cool is that! I had a flash of sitting at the kitchen table back in Wareham, MA with my mom, Irene, both of us with typewriters, banging out words and music filled with back-then soul, maybe to be recorded by Martha and The Vandellas. Or The Pet Shop Boys. Like, totally, oh my head!!

‘Made to Love Her’ flew all the way to number two on the Billboard charts – which I’d rather be reading a lot more than the DSM-IV any day. The number one song blocking its path? – “Light My Fire” by The Doors. All of this when I was in high school.

I’ll tell you, my memories can be so far out. Even the ones that never happened.

There is a clubhouse here at the trailer park, and joyfully two of its walls are filled with hardcover and paperback books and DVD’s – there for the taking with the pinky-swear unspoken agreement they will be borrowed, enjoyed, and returned. In my three-plus weeks here I’ve borrowed, read, and returned four paperbacks. The DVD “Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist” sits ready on the small, blue table I scarfed off the sidewalk when I moved to San Diego almost four years ago.

I guess this is my life today in a northern town – north of San Diego. Along with tons of walking; oxygen-debt breathing my way up two mountains, and considering benches on each ‘home;’ somehow finding myself at the front desk of the local YMCA; lounging in perhaps too many of ‘those meetings;’ and all the while exploring the psychic and sensual realms of aloneness.

Meanwhile, as the song goes, “The Red Sox Are Winning.”

I’ve been wondering about my mind. Not a lot, no obsession or angsty internal drama. And yet, every once in a while, maybe four or five days pass, and the thought comes, in the shape of a wonder, regarding losing it. Like, totally. Something within the broad arms of insanity – the clinical style, DSM-IV stuff.

In the Zen group last night I described the experience as my mind emptying out. Not like the way-cool Zen awakening of the bottom falling out of the bucket. Though, maybe it is like that. I’ve been having, all over the place, this opposite, don’t agree at all, contrarian experience with much of what I hear. And think. And feel. How I experience sobriety. How I experience life in the big city.

I’m not worried about any of this. It’s sort of interesting. Is this what happens? Is this what it feels like? Is this, maybe hopefully, my practice. Or is this crossing the street to bat-shit crazy?

I’m dancing a lot. Last Friday I was dancing as loose as I’ve ever been making my way along the Bob Jones Trail. Sunday morning on the mountain, right at the very bench you see in the picture accompanying this post, I was dancing so high above it all, a “They can’t take away our music” celebration. This is me here now – dancing. Rejoicing.

I was dancing before this blog got built and after it got built. The Isley Brothers sang, “This old heart of mine been broke a thousand times.” It’s like that, the sense my mind is breaking, and for all I know I may find myself in a ‘Looney Tune’ cartoon sooner than later. Or ‘Mad Magazine.’ Or with 5150 paperwork stuffed into my back pocket. Or, just a peaceful, easy feeling.

Pictures telling stories.

Yesterday I shelled out $948 for suddenly necessary repairs to my car. Happily, by Sunday night, I had settled into a que sera sera place for whatever expense was coming, and when I was told the cost yesterday it was okay. It’s just this. The sky is blue. It cost to own a car.

I love my 2002 Camry with its nearly paint-less hood and sweet sound system, its six-CD changer when dropped at the garage Monday morning loaded with two Beach Boys, two Sonic Youth, The Clash, and The Jeff Beck group. I love having a driver’s license — it’s delivered me from Cape Cod in 2008 to Portland, Oregon and on to San Diego and now here in San Luis Obispo in California. And that’s just the last 17 years. I love California.

My mechanically spiffed-up Camry will in a few hours magical-pumpkin me to a four-and-a-half hour shift at the YMCA and – the creek don’t rise – back to the trailer for my Tuesday night Zen Koan group via Zoom.

Zen on Zoom. New ignition in the Camry. Not two.

I think my mind broke the other day. All by itself.

I was on the Bob Jones Trail in Avila Beach on the central coast of California. I was much of the way back from one end to the other. Out of the woods, which is most of it and includes a vast area of Coast Live Oaks, big and gnarly and curvy and which I’ve been convinced from the beginning dance wildly in the middle of the night when no humans are around and end up back where they started by dawn, though maybe moved a fifteenth of an inch or so – if anyone bothered to check.

So I’m out of the woods in the area that runs alongside the San Luis Obispo Creek, the section that has reeds like cat ‘n nine tails. I happen to glance to my left and a tall piece of grass on the bank closest is slowly swaying in the breeze, and – bang! – I see it completely. There’s nothing else. That’s when my mind broke. Every single thing in the world was exactly in tune with everything else, working exactly perfectly.

I haven’t been able to shake it. I haven’t wanted to. My teacher says, “Move on.”

A rare Saturday post:

Welcome, welcome to the blog. Like I get to say from the front desk at the Y to each member walking through the door. Like the baristas say at my Starbuck’s on Broad Street, maybe not exactly like that. Anyway, you are seen. You are appreciated. Like that.

I hope to carry on here what I started beginning back in August 2018, when I promised ‘couch surfing at 70’ would be a space to share something like my “daily weather.” Here now, ‘from a mountain bench’ will be like that – no longer married, more cows.

I feel my mind which will be reporting on this weather is more spacy here in 2025 – spacious and loose. It’s all I have to play with. And share.

Hopefully someone, somewhere, will take a minute and poke around and see if ‘from a mountain bench’ actually sends this post to you on a mountain breeze.