Live life at five times the average speed, like I do.

2010, June 2nd

The first day of school my teacher said, “this is the hardest thing you'll do in your life.”

Winter '09/'10 tore me apart. The function of this summer is to heal. To heal from heartbreak, exhaustion, and 9 straight months of unending stress.

Stress has been my fuel for 15 years. Stress isn't helpful—actually it's harmful in this work—so I'm learning (slowly) to operate differently.

I choose to:

Be emotionally generous with myself
Use my powers for good
Start at the beginning
Be kind to myself
Honor truth
Have experience and let it flow through me
Find the form in my life
Always find the meaning in my life
Follow after that which has meaning

Dear Mom

October 15th, 2009

Today: Brilliant, messy, perfect, late, impeccably in-time...

Awoke at 10:55 for my 11:00 movement class. I live on 83rd st. Class is on 27th st. A lot of this work is really nuanced and builds off of it self moment-to-moment. If there is a type of study which requires good attendance, I think this is it. It's not stuff you can read in a book. It's all about your nervous system and experience.

Of course, as a hustled downtown I imagined myself just failing miserably in class...by failing I mean just “not getting it”. On the contrary, despite my being 30 minutes late, I had the most intense experience of my school year thus far! I'd try to explain it to you, but I wouldn't do it justice.

Then acting class. I was so sure of my crafting. So confident I'd prepared well. Maggie shot me down. Well, in a constructive and kind way, but shot still. She actually had some positive things to say, but not the things I expected. Perfectly upside-down. I really feel like I (and the whole class really) learned a lot today. I feel good about it...

I got some tools to start teaching myself about bike maintenance and repairs!

On the way home I decided to go to a play that Pat had seen last night and suggested I see. I jumped through the shower and was out the door again.

I rushed to the subway and who should I meet but two of my co-workers who had met there by “coincidence”! We had this really fast but satisfying conversation about education and such on the train, then I zipped out to the show.

The play was really expensive and my expectations were high...all dashed to the ground. The general premise was interesting enough, but most of the actors failed at their Irish accents, indicated the whole time, were poorly directed, and the writing was not mind-blowing.

So kind of a waste of money right? WRONG!!!

1.)I learned a lot. You learn from all things right and wrong. Part of being human!
2.)I met this phenomenally good fellow named Jonas! He's friends with the three good actors who were in the show, so I got to meet them and chat for a while after the show. Then we grabbed some pizza and chatted for a good hour till we parted ways at the subway station. Seriously, genuine good person. Totally perfect experience!

I stopped at the store on the way home and found my favorite kind of ice cream. Turkey Hill! Didn't even know they sold it here. I bought some, and some ice cream sandwiches.

Arriving home, the doorman, Fernando, was just getting off work. I congratulated him and gave him an ice cream sandwich.

When I finally reached the apartment dinner was waiting for me on the kitchen table.

Brilliant, messy, perfect, late, impeccably in-time...

I feel so stimulated at the moment I could stand on my head for an hour. Instead, I will stand on my back for an hour.

October 12th, 2009

I've been overwhelmingly pleased by my New York experience thus far, but I wish I could have spent the day in Nashville today. It's my brother Noah's birthday and I wish I could have spent it with him. Noah is my favorite person in the world. He will also probably always be embodiment of “home” for me. I don't much feel at home where I grew up and nowhere I've ever lived has truly felt like a home when he wasn't there.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This week has been otherwise AWESOME! Let's see...I met Richard Kind. He came into Peacefood and was ecstatic about the place. He was drenched in sweat from a jog and just found the place by “chance”. I said he was very kind, which he was, and he said I was very kind that he liked my name. I gave him a pizza.

I just saw Mary Poppins! How fun! If you're reading this, you probably know me well enough to know that I'm a sucker for feel-good performances, and this was definitely one! I think I cried more than a dozen times throughout the show.

It didn't hurt the experience that my seat was totally bad-ass and probably worth about $100. But I didn't even have to pay! I met one of the cast members last week and she was kind enough to get me into the show. Total sweetheart and a stellar performer!

October 5th, 2009

I hate feeling like a number. Like an anonymous dot in the sea that is humanity. I think that we all have this feeling, not because of an unbalanced world view, but because as the creatures we are we are biased to live in a community of no more that 120 people. Not 7 billion. Anyway, I always felt reluctant about moving to a place like NYC because there are so many people here it seems like you could just sink into oblivion among the masses. I've found a solution. Here it is:

If you are positive, loving, nurturing, and open to any interaction in any large group of people, you immediately place yourself in a select few. If you can maintain this focus for any extended period of time, you elevate yourself still more. I would say that simply by virtue of opening yourself to everyone (not usually a natural response to such a populated environment) you place yourself in the 5th percentile of notable folks.

Am I that way all the time? No. But when I am, life works out a lot better for me and I seem to make connections with a lot more people. The thing is, if you're focused on love and on opening yourself to folks you already have so much in common with almost everyone! Nearly everyone wants love and wants to be embraced and opened up to!

Then I was talking to Chuck about how everything and everyone was so much more available here and he said, “It's not the city, it's you, but there are several million more people there so your powers are multiplied.” Then I thought about it and it seems that whatever a person is, they are more that when the surrounding population increases. I mean, we're social creatures and are generally defined by how we compare to others. So whatever you are, you will be more in a more densely populated area. New York city WILL expand your youness.

YOU x 12 Million = Crazy Shit.

Speaking of crazy, my day was all kinds of it.

AM:

Yoga Practice, Voice and Body Warm up

Unexpected Skype call from Anna in London...Relationship issues; it seems the ocean is a big hindrance to any relationship and mine is no exception.

20 minute bike sprint to my first movement class. 2 HOURS OF AWESOME CLASS.


PM:

Lunch

3 hours of stellar acting class.

Phone call from Anna. Continuation of relationship negotiations. Splitifacation. Semi-suck fest.

20 minute bike sprint uptown.

My first tap dance lesson ever! It was so awesome/fun/cheap and totally a breeze!

Stopped by Peacefood and said hi to everyone, super good vibes, healing times. Checked email...Mary Poppins emailed me! What fun!

Then I got paid. I always forget about payday. ...more than I expected. Perfect!

Text from my good Nashville friend Perry “I'm at the living room on ludlow in manhattan!”

Seriously? How could this explosion of a day fit any more anything into it? I took the subway. I usually bike. Hung out with perry and had a wonderful time. Perry is one of my best friends in this world.

Headed home. Subway from my stop was shut down so I had to go the wrong direction to go the right direction. Who do I run into on the subway? Chris from the band Barcelona and John from Relient K! These are both guys I know from my stint with Lovedrug. I had lunch with Chris and his bandmates in seattle the day after playing with them in 2006 and I stayed at Johns singers house a lot when I was in ohio between tours.

When they walked onto my car I thought, “I totally know these guys.” and it took me about 4 minutes to nail it down.

Life is, at once, fucked up, and nine kinds of wrong, and beautiful, and perfect, and completely elegant, and still a train wreck.

I love this shit. Goodnight.

Bath Time With Nine-Dimensional Beings

October 1st, 2009

George stood at the bathroom door and called for me. I said he could come in. He pushed the door open, stepped inside and looked around. I was taking a hot bath. Initially he seemed a bit uncomfortable about disturbing me, but then seemed to relax. He leaned over the edge of the bathtub and put his hand on my shoulder softly and with genuine sincerity said,

“Meow”.

George is a cat.

Cats have an eerie kind of way about them. Endearing and yet distant. Something about their demeanor seems very human. I have almost always imagined cats as being vastly intelligent creatures, as clever or even more clever than humans. An explanation of their apparent lack of sophistication? I think cats exist primarily in another plane of perception and are much larger and gifted than the parts that we witness. The “cats” we see are just appendages “leaking through” into our three-dimensional sphere. Conversely, I think it's possible that we leak through into other planes and appear much less impressive there. Or maybe is some planes we're much more impressive than in this one! I guess it that were the case you'd have to deduct that inter-planal consciousness is not possible, otherwise we would be aware of our bigger selves... but then, maybe some people are.

By this rationale it's feasible that we appear as cats in one of our alternate planes, and that cats appear as humans in one of their alternate planes. It would also be possible that all creatures take on all forms, given the proper alignment relative to the plane in which they're perceived. It would then also stand to reason that all creatures and objects could be exactly the same and only appear to be different because we witness a different “cross-section” of their being.

A mosquito, a cat, a dog, a human, a whale, a bird; all different cross-sections of identical creatures.

Different cross-sections of the same ONE creature? Or shan't I dare venture into mysticism?

Brain Trauma: A Working Hypothesis

September 29th, 2009

I'm not quite claiming that brain damage is a good thing in general, but here's how it seems to have been the one constant catalyst of my life for the last 20+ years.

Age 6: Spinal meningitis sends a fever through the roof exposing my brain to dangerously high temperatures.

- Developed interest in tap-dancing
- Developed interest in drumming
- Began harmonizing obsessively
- Began switching songs from minor to major and vice-versa

Age 12: Heat-sickness after all day at an air show sends fever sky-high again.

- Self taught to play drums in a couple days
- Self taught to play basic guitar
- Began clogging lessons, skipped to second year classes in two weeks
- Quit school

Age 17: Massive concussion erases entire week of memory, slows speech semi-permanently, slows reading.

- Improved unnaturally fast at guitar over the span of a month (noted by several friends)
- Took GED test. Passed with honors with no junior high or high school education
- Absorbed massive amounts of information regarding recordings technology. Started engineering records professionally.

Age 26: Punched in the face by a mugger. Mild concussion. Forgot names of room mates temporarily.

- Quit band and enrolled in acting school
- Moved to New England
- Started writing essays
- Took SAT, Almost perfect scores in writing and reading sections
- Enrolled in writing class at Vanderbilt U. Straight A's

So maybe it's all in my head. Or maybe it's all in my head!

Always Love

September 28th, 2009

Always love. Hate will get you every time. Always love. Even when you want to fight.

Nice words, huh? Easier said than done. I've wanted to love for a long time, and honestly sometimes I do, and sometimes I don't I like to think I'm getting better at it, but not without thousands of hours of practice.

Honestly, I still haven't nailed down how to love in every environment. For example when I lived in New Brunswick, New Jersey for 3 months this year it was all I could do not to fight. It's a really oppressive place, see. Where I am right now it a very supportive and positive place, and my love generators are firing a lot anyway naturally, so it's easy to push them over the edge into constant yesness.

But I will say that in every phase of love I go through it seems to become easier and easier to embrace everything and say “perfect!”, so that's why I think practicing a lot really does help. So I'll keep doing this. It makes me really happy.

So keep practicing!

I love you.

Crazy, I'm Crazy for Feeling So Crazy

September 27th, 2009

Everyone has reasonable thoughts and unreasonable/absurd thoughts. Lets define “crazy” as the inability to identify the unreasonable thoughts as such. Furthermore, let's categorize different degrees of crazy according to different degrees of awareness of the absurdity of one's thoughts.

Now, on a scale of 1-10, how crazy are you?

That's right! 1! The only possible answer! See? It's all a trick to keep a brutha down! Ain't no such thing as crazy!

I biked to Brooklyn again tonight. It takes 45 minutes by bike. Pretty much the same as the subway.

Today was beautiful. In my mind and in my universe. Goodnight.

Wielding a Bicycle Chain...

September 24th, 2009

As children, my brother and I spent more time on bicycles than we spent doing anything else (besides sleeping). We rode obsessively for the better part of a decade. Many times my first thoughts upon waking would be looking forward to just being in motion on my bicycle. Hours a day, day after day, summer after sweltering summer, we rode (and crashed) our bikes with Christmas-morning-like enthusiasm.

Until I was 10 years old my bikes were all comprised of junked components welded together by my grandfather, a detail which seems much more special to me now than it ever did as a kid. The other detail I wasn't keen to was that the bikes were all extraordinarily heavy and ill-geared. I just knew they worked. Over the years they were thrown to the ground, launched off ramps, tumbled down hills, left in the rain and snow, and recycled through 4 children. And they just kept on working. I don't actually recall one structural failure of any kind.

Then I hit my mid-teens. I started driving and traveling longer distances for work and recreation. I still loved biking, but there are few towns in which it's really easy to cycle and mine was not one of them. In recent years, even when I had a nice bike and a nice day to ride, I'd use my car. It's “easy” and “fast”.

Although any experienced biker has passed hundreds of cars in stalled traffic, and knows the joy of parking-hastle-free travel, it wasn't until I moved to New York that I re-discovered the child-like joy of regular cycling and many of the true benefits of donning a helmet and wielding a bicycle.

I showed up in New York two weeks ago with a duffel-bag and a $130 bike and felt like a kid again. I actually always feel like a kid, but that's another story. I started small, biking down the designated safety-zone, the greenway for bikes and pedestrians. I live right by it so there's no hazardous transit to safety. After a few ventures down the length of Manhattan, I branched out onto the streets. That's when my long-forgotted instincts began to kick in. Over the following few days I became more than the cyclist I thought I was. The childhood decade of cycling muscle-memory came flooding back, and I found myself in moment after moment of speedy bliss! You've heard this sort of thing before, but there really is some kind of zen state I reach after a few minutes zipping around on a bike. It's not really calm, but very focused and alert, more balanced, and with a quicker reaction time.

It took me all of 10 days to muster up the courage to bike from the upper west side to Brooklyn. Not on the greenway; I've already become bored by it's safety. I've been barreling right down Broadway, it's the most direct shot from where I live and work, to where I go to school. Fortunately it's also the most fun.

I've been dreaming of some pretty intense cycling trips for next summer. Have you been on a long bike trip? How long? What should I know?


Big Brother Noah