Song Of The Day: Naive Melody / Talking Heads
Word Of The Day: Pantagamy / Married to everyone

Yes, yes, I've not been blogging. You're right to judge me. We get a nice pace rolling with this Big Mind blog, and then voila', I'm gone. WTF?

That's what happens when you fall in love with a spy.

Well, my time has not been idle, if that's your concern. This very, very (V2) week we're finishing up my new two-volume DVD set (Between The Music). It also looks like I'll be doing a book this year (some filth, some love, a thrust from below, a kiss from above). Of course you already know the new album is finished, but it's being "shopped". That means my representatives (Rupert Hine and David Robinson) are in conversations with record labels about it. But it's done, and in the mortal words of Blondie, one way or another it's coming out in 2006. Additionally, I've been working on TV and movie projects with my new Earth friend Steve Brill. We spent last weekend at Ken Wilber's loft blushing from the crushing rush of killer ideas. I finished my last show in San Francisco last week and then headed home, and now I'm on a break for a few weeks, and honest to God I thought I was starting to lose my mind. In the last few months I have been every where from LA to San Fran, Seattle, Des Moines, Chicago, New York, Europe, and on and on. I feel like I haven't been home for more than two days at a time since I don't know when.

But it's not travel that makes me crazy. I'm crazy, and I travel.

That's what I figured out yesterday when I went to a Christmas party. My point: There's no getting around it, I have some kind of social disorder. I'm not joking, but feel free to laugh as I unzip my personality for you and exhibit the soul-shaped crater where most people have a capacity called "SMALL TALK".

Last night my wife took me to a christmas party. Ever since I was about 8 or 9, I have been allergic to certain kinds of social settings. I am dead fucking serious, ALLERGIC. But it's a very particular kind of social conditions. For instance, if you put me on stage in front of a bunch of people, I will frolic like a sprite as long as they remain. If you put me in a room with a bunch of hot girls, I somehow summon the constitution to endure. Hell, put me in a room with a bunch of hot guys, and I'll flirt for the fun of it. I'm not sucking anyone's cock, but if you think I'm cute I'll toss the inuendo back and forth for a while with you. Before I tell you what's actually wrong with me, here are some other social conditions which do NOT evoke my social malady:

*Meditation retreats, when no one can talk, and I am free to wholly invent and project complete personalities and stories onto everyone in attendance, incrementally manufacturing my own utopia day by day and foisting it onto an unsuspecting collective. This works until it's over, and people are allowed to...speak. It's the same sort of thing you find when you see someone you think is totally hot -from an emotional distance-and then you go on a date, and three minutes into dinner they say something like "I hated I Heart Huckabees" and you quietly struggle to keep the red curry rising in your throat from spraying all over their suddenly revolting face.

*Gatherings of weirdos. Especially post-conventional creative types. For instance, I also went to a christmas party this week for all the Integral Institute staff, and I shit you not, I relaxed and respirated in the pure oxygen of their imaginative, effulgent beings. No anxiety, just a night of levity and easy joy. And generally, I find it pleasurable to hang with artists, theologians, philosophers, mystics, and people with some kind of twist to their gist.

*My nuclear family. I'm all good and cool around my mom, dad, and brothers.

*After concerts, hanging with strangers, meeting people for the first time. Love it.

Here's where I'm NOT so good, conventional ritual events. And allow me to make one more important distinction: This dis-ease is not an indcication of my LOVE for humanity. I LOVE human beings. This is an instance of a social disorder on my part, inherent in my typology. It's not something wrong with other people, and last night was the perfect illustration of this fact.

Last night we went to this party, and it was full of warm, wonderful people. But I fucking shit you not, I had an existential crisis, a dark night of the soul compressed into a three hour period. Why? I have no idea, but for as long as I can remember, I am literally allergic to these kinds of things, and it has played hell on every relationship I've been in. Put me in the suburbs in a well-kept upper middle class home carefully adorned with christmas ornaments, new carpeting, standard furnishings, stock cabinetry, a small dog or two, and hours of conversation about food, family, and current events, and I acquire an acute combination of vertigo and claustrophobia. People holding paper plates, eating lasagna, talking about other foods they like, under the white lights of 100 watt Sylvania bulbs - I swear to God my BODY begins to distort on a cellular level. I simply feel like I am Munch's SCREAM. Frequent trips to the bathroom, a dozen small escapes to play with the dog, or my daughter off in some room- they are drops of water shot into the Sun of my mad, irrational craving to flee, literally RUN out of the house and jump into my car and speed speed speed my way to some freak hospital where fucking freaks can freak out and heal their freakish, non-sensicle freak-afflictions.

My wife, of course, is tempted to chalk all this up to my being an asshole. I am an asshole, I readily admit, but not for this reason. This is a legitimate, unidentified feature of my pre-given typology. I felt this way when I was nine years old, for God's sake. It has consistently characterized my life for 30 fucking years, and whatever it is, it can't be attributed to the vicissitudes of my moods. It is not a mood. I PHYSICALLY feel like I'm going to disintegrate when I'm in those situations, but I have always tried to muddle through them, in order to accomodate and appease the relationships of my life -girlfriends, family, friends- but the fact is I think I'm really, really working against the grain on this one. Why do I consent to participate in this torture, why do I submit to such excruciating, bizarre episodes in order to support some arbitrary amalgam of social conventions (christmas parties, birthday parties, fucking baby showers)? Because these ancient rituals cohere and sustain something we've come to know as "civilization"? Oh, that's why. I guess I'll keep trying.