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Two weeks ago, in a week of Girl Group posts, I offered up what I said is one of my all-time favorite lines in the (my) rocked and rolled world – “Wish I could shimmy like my sister Kate,” a line that resonates like a struck bell through my childhood and forward. Nothing came of posting it (beyond my wild joy).

Yesterday I offered up another line, this from a bumper sticker which had clearly fetched me Sunday morning – “I do not think, therefore I do not am.” It generated a number of comments and a bunch of energy.

I get it and I do not get it. In fact, there’s no ‘me’ getting or not getting “I do not am.” There’s just the getting and not getting.

Bringing ‘me’ back into the picture, I’ll tell you that for me these two lines are exactly the same – not two. “I do not am – shimmy like Kate.” I feel a yearning, a planetary yearning, for something other than this this of today. And a same force urging my body into wild, selfless all-akimbo movement when “The Monkey Time” drops down on the spindle and begins spinning.

Spinning like the planet. Spinning like this you. Spinning like this me of not am. Shimmying fool.

Sunday morning usual stuff – meditations, readings, coffees, Pages, exercises, yummy brekkie foods, and off on a way long walk, upon which I was a walking host to four kitties and five racoons. Then back to 16th and hop in the Camry and directly to the coffee shop for coffee and vast Red Sox stories, then into Whole Foods for two unsweetened, crunchy, you-have-to-stir-it peanut butters and two cans of iron-rich Cannellini beans, then back to the car, stuff loaded into the bag, and I’m about to hop in and glance up at the amazingly blue sky and glorious white giant clouds, and – I can’t help myself – I close the door and lock it and head off on another walk, on which I haven’t traveled 50 yards when I come upon this…….

which immediately jumps up to the top of the pops of my all-time favorite bumper stickers on this planet, and here’s why:

I make genuine efforts not to talk about my ‘practice’ here in this blog or out there in the world for three reasons – 1) No one gives a crap; 2) It’s kind of a keep-it-a-secret thing as per the Ancestors; and 3) Every single time I talk about my practice anywhere at all I feel the teeniest of diminishment in it. And, if there was, in fact, both a good and a bad, that’s bad.

And yet, oola oola oola, I’m just dying to tell you that if I had 10,000 years in which to do it, I could never find any words to really, seriously, most importantly talk about my practice anywhere near as close as the bumper sticker that fetched me on a shiny, happy Sunday morning does.

My website “148curiousthings” — a most lovely expression of my writing and art — has expired. Twinkled out of existence.

A joy these last two years, more so because I was able to envision it and create that vision entirely on my own. Books, blog, paintings, drawing, doodles. A shiny old, “Look, Ma, what I found.”

This was an economic decision, then a further understanding that things come into my life and go out of my life. Like California. Like my second marriage. Like my 1967 Sunbeam Alpine. Like my favorite veggie burritos on Haight Street in San Francisco. Like Bob and Doug and Billy. And now, this website.

I’m thinking of taking a couple of my larger paintings and standing out on the sidewalk on NE Broadway – wildly waving my arms, cackling like a crazy, simply being my new website. Enacting the art and lyrics of it all.

There’s a dragon sitting on the newest bookcase (White – I see a bookcase and I want it painted white). I drove way over into Southeast a couple months back and paid and brought it back (the bookcase) just before everything five years old showed up from Idaho. The dragon looking rather serene, a when you wish upon a star twinkle, a look of satisfaction. A look, I’m thinking, of not so much knowing what it’s all about as the blankety blank wide permission of not knowing. The fallout of everlasting formal unemployment. Wings spread, all dragonish, just there, nothing like a job so much as a calling.You know, he’s just that guy. Or gal.

There’s a cool song by the Boston Group ‘The Nervous Eaters’ – “When I Talk To Loretta” – which I believe the rather androgynous dragon probably knows and probably digs a bunch. Me and Chuck Berry too.

Out from this wasteland of a bedraggled resume.

Eddie Grant – “Can’t get food for the kids, good God.”

Things are connected. Stuff’s connected. Probably everyone knows it, gets it.

This happened only because that happened, and that happened because that happened, which follows a previous this and that, and trace it backwards all the way to someone warming you (me) a bottle of milk in a sauce pan steaming boiling water on a stove. The saying, “It’s always darkest before the dawn (and coldest)”, falls out from why is this happening (to me) forward to if that hadn’t happened there wouldn’t have been flowers in your (my) hair.

And then shit happens. And then someone asks, “What’s it all about, Alfie?” And someone answers, “Not knowing is most intimate.”

So — Toes on the floor in the morning’s pretty much the golden lottery ticket.

Should I change my sobriety date?

My friend Lora – we’ve never met – sends an email about a podcast which leads to my retrieval of “Lightning Striking – Ten Transformative Moments in Rock and Roll” by Lenny Kaye – which arrives at the public library just in time for my weekend of silence, and by noon Saturday I’m staring out the windows at Oregon trickster sunlight, me bowing to a hummingbird fluttering over the 16th Ave Buddha’s head, me dancing in some math and anti-math woozy trance about how long I can “make it” without work before starvation, flying through Cleveland, Memphis, Philadelphia, and Detroit among others, and in love with The Talking Heads for the 10,000th time – “Road to Nowhere.”

Should I change my sobriety date?

“This would be a good night for ice cream,” I tell myself Sunday afternoon, knowing I’d have to get back in the Camry – which I’ve driven two miles in these last three days – and drive to Trader Joe’s and buy a pint of Mint Chip, which would break an ice cream-less spell since my birthday last January, when I went wild with sugar and a laughing birth certificate. This on a weekend without spoken words, beyond a few disclaimers whispered to my alone-self – perhaps a grand total of two minutes worth in the past 60 hours – and here’s me ready to break the wordy fast, and yet, hesitant enough that I stand earlier at the counter in Starbucks hoping the barista will just know what I want, before finally uttering, “Grande 1971,” a veritable Gettysburg Address of blathering, when Thursday night through Sunday noon’s vow of not a word spoken was pretty much that very thing.

Still, ice cream…….mint chip. The Beatles’ “I Call Your Name” says it – “Don’t you know I can’t sleep at night, but just the same. I never weep at night, I call your name.” There’s me calling, lips quiet, tongue still.

Sitting here, borrowed-recliner, early afternoon late July. There’s an upswell of magic about. Because you subscribe, you hear.

The summer of ’67, sultry, Summer of Love, war raging, the Red Sox are winning, there’s me behind the music counter in Star Jewelers, pretty much full-time, something of a handle on necklesses and earrings and greeting cards and gift wrapping, way more as the main music cat.

I’d started part-time after school my junior year, then on full, and through my first year at Cape Cod Community home on weekends. But now, today, it’s summer in Wareham and maybe the greatest perk of working for the owner and my boss Morty is that there’s a turntable up against the wall, the end of the counter, and it’s wired to a speaker above the window outside, so when I place a 45, with the little plastic adaptor, or an album on the turntable and carefully drop the needing down to the turning plastic, I’m a disk jockey spinning tunes out into the A & P parking lot.

And this day Morty’s gone home to have lunch with his wife, and I’m free to rave on sharing the music, and girl groups are a way of life for me in 1967, and for the benefit of all I set up and begin sharing these — It’s a listening pleasure thing:

Spin, spin, spin

Spin, spin, spin

Spin, spin, spin

Spin, spin, spin

I’m getting paid for this…..

Lately I’ve been daydreaming about driving a stick shift – four on the floor. It’s been a thing. The other day I tried to remember the last time I did, even a three speed – first, second, third, reverse, the magic clutch – and while I’m certain there were times after this, the picture which has come to mind is driving Frannie Cavaretta’s tan-yellow Volkswagon standard shift from Lexington, Massachusetts to Tuftonboro Neck in New Hampshire, both of us wildly whacked on THC in the pill form. 114 miles each way….

That probably wasn’t my most memorable turn shifting through the gears, though maybe it was since I’m still here to type this. Sadly, Frannie, who I was crazy about in those years of in-and-out of college (though too stupid and self-centered to always remember that)passed away back in the nineties. I heard it was a drug thing, but I wouldn’t swear on it. She was long gone and across the country by then.

Anyway, Frannie was kind enough to place me in the driver’s seat that day, engine in the back, four on the floor, and it’s a sweet memory. I will tell you, Frannie and I did a lot of dancing together. She was the best. I’m sure we danced to this one:

In the late winter of 1983 I was hired for a brand new adolescent program – The Drug and Alcohol Resouce Program – as a counselor and referral information gatherer. I was about six weeks from having something of a spiritual experience and getting sober myself. Which is only peripherably connected to girl groups. I guess, me still here to offer all this gushing reverance.

My second year in the program I found myself two days a week in a small office in the guidance department at North Reading High School as an outreach, drop-in, resource, you can even get out of class this way counselor. Referrals from guidance, referrals from teachers, mostly word of mouth gathered a crew of regulars, and one of them was a young lady named Sandra Jeanne. I was there at NRHS more than a school year, and most of the administrators, counselors, teachers, and kids I got to know a lot loved me.

I don’t remember the why and how come of it, but at some point I spent a night or two creating a mix-tape (cassette) for Sandra Jean, and one of the songs on board – the only one I remember today – was “Be My Baby” by The Ronettes. That particular girl group song kind of went to SJ’s head, and she got a little woozy around me. Somewhere, in some box or envelope I have the senior class picture she gave me, which referenced that song and her thinking it would kind of be a cool idea. To be my baby. She never was, and I haven’t seen Sandra Jean since, some 41 years on.

Brian Wilson, genius Beach Boy, has two daughters, Wendy and Carnie, and I’ve read many, many times their accounts of growing up with this — the very first thing they heard upon waking each morning, their dad blasting – “Dum dum dum, Da, Dum Dum Dum, Da………..”

“And if I had a chance I’d never let you go.” Like so many of these girl group anthems.