song of the day: downtown / frank sinatra
word of the day: flosculation / an embellishment or ornament in speech

drove twelve hours yesterday, straight through from iowa city back to boulder. did the same thing on the way out, so i logged about 25 hours in the car in a thre day period, spent almost all of it listening to Genpo Roshi's talks on CD. very cool. these last few years i almost exclusively drive in silence or listen to books on CD, but i'm very picky about books, so it's hard to find something. i've really enjoyed The Daily Show's America The Book, and Ken Wilber's Kosmic Consciousness, and Wigfield

show in iowa city was great, but it took me a little while to settle into the zone, so to speak, mostly because i've been in the studio, and hadn't done a show in a week and half, i think. my body takes about 45 minutes to remember and get back into it. it was a great audience, as always at the mill, and they very kindly sat through a first hour that was almost exclusively new material, including Good Weird (i think i'm changing it back from "God Weird" to "Good Weird", kind of a go-with-your-first-thought approach?), Wand, Voodoo Dolls, Murder Suicide, Glass, Easter, What, Innocent 3-Way, Parker Posey, Rape Game, Miracle, Dirty Purity, and brand-brand new one called White Plum, which i royally fucked up. White Plum is only a few days old, and i tried it on a whim. oh well. it's gotta be broken in sometime.

much of the time while driving out and back to iowa city i was very much feeling just how unbelievably brief and passing life is. not in a morbid or somber way, necessarily, just bitter sweet, sensing how it's just an instant, and we've come and gone. it's hard to describe, but i have this experience all the time that i'm already dead. i really don't have a good way of relating what it is, it's not scary, or dark, it's just this odd recognition i have from my soul, basically the soul watching everything come and go. the experience itself is direct and immediate, and doesn't really have any "content". the content is just whatever is going on in the body, the world, emotion, etc, the soul is just watching it. but the weird thing about it is, it's not a recognition that's like "oh my gosh, i'm gonna die someday." it's like "i'm ALREADY DEAD." the soul, or whatever that awareness is, was there before the body, was there at birth, has watched the body, emotions, mind change and grow, and it will be there when they drop off and fall away, and it will still be there. the soul has a life-span that goes far beyond particular bodies and historical periods. but the cool thing is, even the soul knows it will die. if you take one step backward, out of the head, you land in the soul, and from the soul, you can watch your life, your body, your experiences, the sweet lovable persona that is body-identity. this witnessing happens in the subtle body, or soul, or whatever you wanna call it. but if you take one step back from that, you fall into the edge of the Causal, and that space is one that actually watches your soul in the same way your soul watches your body. you fall back one more step, and you fall into God watching the causal body and the soul and the body-mind of your physical persona. they're all right there, easy as pie to access when your start taking backward steps, and Genpo's talks on CDs had me falling back into them the whole ride out and back. it's bitter sweet just because it's so easy to feel all at once how all these lifetimes of billions and billions of people have popped in and out of existence in an instant. for millions or billions of years, life has popped into existence, whether it's a microbe or a mastadon, each of these infinite number of beings has had their experiences, and each and every experience, they physical sensations, the emotional histories, the entire inner life of each one was totally, completely real and personal. every bit as immediate and personal as all the experiences in my story have been. and then it's so clear to see how that's also what they all have in common, in way, how the personal is what's Universal to these trillions on entities (that's just on THIS planet). when you fall back out of the body and watch from the soul, then fall back from the soul and watch from the impersonal, then fall back from the impersonal and watch from God, you see how you have thrown yourself into every one of these, they've all been your body, each physical sensation, emotion, thought, insight, delusion has been the body-mind of god. the grass under your foot, the rocks on the moon, all the dark matter in space. and it's not some grand insight to feel it, it's just there you are. and you will spend some time having the eyes and ears of this human, stuart davis or anyone else, and then in an instant that bubble will pop like a trillion billion before and after it. none of this bothers the small self of me, the little stuart davis part, except that i love my wife and daughter, and i feel a sharp ache at the thought of ever separating from them. that's the only deep "fear" i have, is saying goodbye to them. even though i experience how it's all God, how it's all perfect, how it's all already there, i still feel a resistance to letting that go. everything else i feel like i can release more easily and allow. i told this to Genpo, and he said he feels the same thing. i guess that's human love.

i've arranged for my photo session for the new album while i'm in Minnesota this month. i'm using the most kick ass photographer in the Biz, Sheila Ryan. She did the photos for Kid Mystic, Self-Titled (silver album), and Late Stuart Davis. this time around i'm using another concept-shoot that it's in the keeping with a previously established visual theme in my work, but that's all i can say. i'm really keyed about it.