Oh, I miss Warren Zevon. Never knew him, but I've always thought he was one of the greatest songwriters. I didn't even know he was dead (I knew he was fatally ill, though) until I saw the special on VH1 where they're making his last album as he is literally in his last dying days. Bruce Springsteen, a bunch of other stars are on the record with him. It's fucking rough. He's still smoking (died of cancer) to the very end, sneaking cigarettes in the alley. And hey, let people live and die how they want to. Life is so short. My fav Zevon songs:

Excitable Boy
Play It All Night Long
Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner
Johnny Strikes Up The Band
Lawyer's Guns and Money
Ain't That Pretty At All
Poor Poor Pitiful Me
Accidentally, Like A Martyr
Boom Boom Mancini
The Factory
Reconsider Me
Detox Mansion
Keep Me In Your Heart
Networking
I'll Sleep When I'm Dead

Today I was thinking I should make this year the year that I forgive every one for everything. Radical forgiveness. Not just people that (I think) did shit that hurt me, etc, but every one who did everything to anyone. I'm not saying getting rid of the power to discriminate. It doesn't mean condoning or endorsing hurtful action or intention. Just forgiving. Radical forgiveness. I think I need to adopt this as a daily, on-going lifelong practice. I can be one judgemental mother fucker.

Why did I remember this listening to Warren Zevon? I just remember watching him die, and how it SUNK IN that 99.99% of all the shit we get so worked up about is just NOTHING. It's vapor. Because WE'RE VAPOR. Each of us is a wispy mirage, a miraculous phantom passing in and out of being. It's impossibly brief. (warren's last album was called "the wind", funny, huh?)

I had this thing pop into my head when I was a kid. I was laying on my back, looking at the sky, stunned at the beauty of the World, thinking how I did not want to die young, because I wanted to play on this planet as long as I could. Then a thought popped into my head "all lives are the same length." I did not even know what that meant, but it made sense. Later I had similar eurekas like "there's no such thing as 'two times'" and "there's no such thing as 'two places'" and that made sense too, but i did not know why.

What eventually sinks into our being -as directly felt experience- is that we are already dead. That is to say, the awareness that is here, right now, reading these words, is the very same awareness that was there when I was a kid, is the same awareness that was there before I was born, is the awareness that will be there after I'm dead. That awareness is not in time. It isn't born, made, located anywhere. It doesn't pass in or out of existence. It will be there after you're dead. See? That part is already dead, because it isn't born, doesn't die. So so simple. Don't worry if it doesn't make sense, it won't matter. We suffer simple cases of mis-taken identity in the most literally sense. We "miss-take" passing qualities for our identity. Like human, boy, girl, living, dead, awake, asleep, healthy, sick, moral, immoral. But Reality -the awareness that does not come or go- has no qualities or characteristics. It's an honest mistake on our part.

I am abiding in that awareness as I listen to Warren Zevon today. Right now he's singing "If I leave you, it doesn't mean I love you any less, keep me in your heart for a while."

I have you in my Heart, Warren. Thank you for your beautiful music and sharing your love with us, as beauty, as passion, as shadow and light.