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love. if you don't they will not heal.

be positive and friendly. they experience enough suffering.

don't listen to me. listen to your heart.

with the love and passion of lions,
Anthony

Barcelona

I went to Barcelona after graduating high school in 1995. Going to college in the U.S. wasn't going to be far enough away. The first couple of months went well. I was 17 and turned 18 while I was there. I played a lot of soccer. There was this bar called La Bolsa. Drinks were all listed on a computer screens. The prices of the drinks went up and down over the course of the night. It was like the stock market and every night the market would crash and the prices of drinks would all drop. It was fun.

In the beginning of December, I got what felt like a cold. I stopped attending classes at the language school I was enrolled in. Dorotea Blanco, the older woman whose flat I lived in kept trying to get me out of the house. She didn't like having her boarders in the house during the day. After a couple days of feeling mildly sick, I started to feel worse. It had been a week and horrible thoughts were inhabiting my brain. It didn't help that during this time I was reading For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway, which is all about a man, death, and Spain.

At sunset I would become terrified. As the day ended and night began, I would often attempt to call my parents from the one telephone in the flat, a flat shared by four boarders including myself, Dorotea Blanco and her thirty-something son. I would call my parents wanting to start balling, just let the fear and terror transform into tears. But the placement of the phone in the living room didn't allow for the space to do that.

I went to a doctor and attempted to explain my situation in Spanish. If memory serves, he said that something was wrong with my head and I was homesick but not sick in the "you have the flu" sense. I was sure I had mono or AIDS. I was sure I was going to die. I would lie in bed and visualize a planet billions and billions and billions of light years from Earth. A planet all alone in black space. Only I lived on this planet.

These were the first panic attacks I experienced in my life. I didn't know it then. Sadly, they wouldn't be the last. My mom had to come and rescue me. She stayed in a hotel not far from my flat. I went to her room and cried until I couldn't breathe. We went out where she loved the city all decorated for Christmas. It was hard for me to pay attention, I stared off into space a lot during those few days. They call that disaffectation or severe lack of emotional awareness. I hurt everywhere but felt numb.

I decided to go home with my mom, spend a few weeks with my family, and then come back. The day before I was to return I was filled with such fear, such poignant and precise fear, I couldn't go back. It felt too sickening. This was a difficult time in my life. But I learned. I learned what a panic attack is. I learned that they suck. That's all. Panic attacks suck.

With so much love,
Anthony

jesus on the modern cross

the cross is made of sleek, black steel. the rectangular posts, both vertical and horizontal, are perfect in 90 degree angles and geometric precision. the fullness of the black steel posts is also perfect (though they are empty). jesus is missing from the cross. the cross stands at the top of an Edward Hopper hill. the hill is angular. far in the distance stands a tower, grey, a shape, archetypal.

a man of art climbs the hill in search of the modern cross. he is a sharp man and he carries a knife. a shepherd herding mechanical sheep blindly ascends the hill along its path. the man of art pulls his knife and cuts up through the shepherd's belly. out fly the butterflies, they sing as they fly away "and if i only could, i'd make a deal with god, and I'd get him to swap our places, be running up that road, be running up that hill"

the man of art watches as the joy fills the shepherd, the ecstasy, the freedom from bondage.

if god is love, then the butterflys' departure is an allegory or an algorithm in the computer, the brain, aggregating human happiness and pouring it into the shepherd's soul.

i love with heat. i love with the passion of the fabled christ. i love with the spirit of the animal. i love with the servitude of the maggot. i love with the bravery of the black town. i love with insanity of white racial structural violence. i love with delicate wings, tiny wings, the wings of a common fly. i love with a hermeneutic zeal, examining the text for oppositions. i love with contradiction. bolted to a black cross.

if i only could, (let him be razed),
Anthony

by grace we enter transformation

"Up, down, turn around; Please don't let me hit the ground; Tonight I think I'll walk alone; I'll find my soul as I go home"

Trainspotting was released in 1996, almost 20 years ago. I watched it alone at the Elmwood Theater on College Ave. in Berkeley when I was 19. Before the film I was driving around alone in a blue 1989 Nissan Sentra, crawling out my skin, desperately craving something different. In the film I found what I was looking for. A bizarre European indie film about heroin addiction, sex, teenage angst, violence, being Scottish--all things I strangely/not strangely related to. I loved the music. Songs from New Order, Underworld, Brian Eno, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop. I wanted to live in this music, foreign to me.

Today, I'm struggling in my professional life. I'm 37. I started a music business by myself two years ago. But lately I've become lost in relation to this work. I work three days a week at a nonprofit with first generation college students. I'm a career coach. I love this work, I love the students I work with, I'm grateful for the opportunity, humbled, and constantly learning from the students. But when you add up the pieces of my professional life, you get a number below 10, a number that is fuzzy, incomprehensible at the moment.

There are so many wonderful people and things in my life. I'm profoundly lucky to be married to a woman who is luminous, serene and grounded. We have a little boy. What a joy to have this little boy and his waves of feeling.

But in relation to my professional life I'm still that 19 year old crawling out his skin, confused. I dive back into New Order's "Temptation" and am transported.

I'm reminded that what's important is not what I've accomplished professionally. The goal is to simply live and let the judgements of good person/bad person, successful person/unsuccessful person dissolve. I'm alive, in this moment, living out energy, and soaking in energy.

If by grace we enter transformation, then the grace is the music, friends and family that allow me to transform my perspective. In this moment, just this moment, I'm no longer a slave to the ego concept, self-judgements of good/bad, successful/unsuccessful.

"oh you've got green eyes, oh you've got blue eyes, oh you've got grey eyes"

and they are all beautiful, so said the Lord,
Anthony

opera

i read an article that showed up on my facebook feed. it argued that we should accept being average, mediocre, and not special because so few of us are actually exceptional. it's better to accept than delude. the author argues that doesn't mean to stop trying to be special, just let it go if you find out that you are not special, one evening, sitting at your computer, typing a blog post, about an article you read from your facebook feed.

what if i have deluded myself? what if my life, what i contribute to humanity is average or below average? i find pathways in my mind that lead to a place of self-exceptionalism. what if i have been tricked? what if the evidence is clear?

and then there is Maria Callas and her performance of O Mio Babbino Caro, the aria from Puccini's Gianni Schicchi. I assume you are familiar. Is this not exceptional? The beginning, gently uncovering the melody and ending down, setting up Callas' rise. and the end, with the substance of the strings. it would have been enough to end with her voice, but it is not enough.

am i not exceptional because i listen to this musical rendering, this happening, this vocal emotional subtle touching, this gorgeous life. it blisters and heals. i explode with genius because i listen. again and again. in other words: i love therefore i am exceptional.

alas, no. the crestfallen boy lowers his head.

brokaenhearted and h(e)ated, a paean, a pence, a pauper.
Anthony

traditional/unenlightened masculinity

At its core, traditional/unenlightened masculinity is a willingness to kill a threatening other man. Do you have the balls? Do you have the cock? If challenged by a rival will you step up and be willing to kill. There are a multitude of other layers to this normalized masculinity. However, it comes down to this question. 

In the year 2015, our time, our era, in order to kill a man all you need is the psychological capacity, in an instant, to pull a trigger with your pointer finger. You need not lift weights, get buff, train for years in a given martial art. All you need to do is squeeze a trigger. Technology and advanced weaponry have made the passage into traditional/unenlightened masculinity so slight and simple.

We still play games on the gridiron and fight in octagons broadcast on cable television. But this is entertainment, not the heart of masculinity. Yes, it takes bravery and courage to step into the MMA octagon. But the game is controlled, and men have a certain degree of choice. (Men who fight in the octagon seem to be driven, enslaved possibly, by a quest for a quenching chaos, and in the octagon they are quenched.) But again this isn't about masculinity. It is about the visual performance of masculinity. It sells beers. 

The question becomes where do we find the true bravery and courage that defines true/enlightened masculinity. No more a conception of masculinity driven by advertising, enslaved by an unconscious desire to "defend one's country" -- no longer do we uphold a masculinity that conveniently shepherds our poor men of color onto the new age battlefield, wherever that is. 

In the age of the Glock, where do we find the courage of men?

I am carbon; I am love.

Anthony

God

What does it look like 10 minutes before the Big Bang? Is there sharp, eye-scorching white light? Is there serene blackness? What is the pace? Is it slow? Do the glow fish with hallowed shadows still swim about in the beyond?

I think this is my conception of God. Not metaphysical. Physical, unknown. So many unknowns. But why God? Why that word? Filled with so many connotations, an old white man with a white beard. Not that I believe that story. But why use the word? The modernists attempted to escape the meaning injected into words of the language/culture they were born into. The post-modernists attempted to use the word but put a strike through it. God. Simultaneously posting the word with it's bucket of meaning and emptying the bucket. Does that work?

The question for me is why God. I don't have the power to re-create a concept. As I write these words, I feel trapped, as the modernists and so many writers before me have. But one must trudge on, yes? Through the scrambled field, call it the wasteland, of language injected with prior meaning.

For me God is in music, God is music. God is death. Real death. Like the kind you don't come back from and the kind you don't go somewhere else from. Finality, the end, but again the unknown. Am I still an atheist? I don't believe in God. In this moment, I'm simply accepting the unknowable. Any scientist will tell you that the unknown dwarfs the known. What we know is a grain of sand in a universe of unknown. What's inside the sun? Why haven't the Oakland A's won a World Series when they have all the data? What is emotion? Where do the unicorns live, and are there huge monsters that collect unicorns in jars, smiling vividly when a new unicorn is captured and placed into the jar with other sad unicorns.

How can you listen to Brian Eno's "Discreet Music" and not believe in God? How can you not believe in the serenity and beauty of the music? Of course, musical serenity and beauty do not have to formulate God. But what is the alternative? That Brian Eno's "Discreet Music" is just a song. I notice all these words: "How" "believe" "just". Trapped again in language.

I would never push my God that is not really God onto you. I can't even clarify the conception, by definition, for my definition includes the unknown. I can't say my God is better than your God or your/my worldview that does not include God. I can't even come to know. However, I can feel. I can feel, and believe/know that the feelings are neurons firing in my brain, physical, biological, certainly not metaphysical. Transcendent, maybe, but a physical transcendence. Maybe that should be the name of my band. But it's already the name of someone else's band. I googled it (no I didn't).

Let me be clear on one point: science is superior to religion because it demands proof.

It's most likely a yearning. Yeah, it's probably just that: a yearning for something more, something transcendent. But more importantly a yearning. To yearn. To want on faith, to want so badly and so profoundly that it strikes your soul like an American Indian arrowhead made of flint; the strike creating friction creating fire creating warmth and wrath, the power to propel or destroy life.

A yearning for God, for meaning, for that which is beautiful and calm, for myself, for all folks, flora and fauna. Maybe it is because this desire, for that which is beautiful and calm, is so far from our shared social reality, so far from the known, so far from what seems possible, we must call it God. It must be something, something shared, text on a screen, something that stands upright for something, because the idea of its absence is so sad, so unbearable. (and the tears flow individually like clowns, so many clowns bursting out of that tiny car). Helplessness, happiness, profundity, excellence, tragedy, humanity, genocide, tactile domes, emptiness, completion, creation, singularity, opposition, human freedom, switch blades, bondage, children, hope.

oh the places you will go.

with the love of a God I accept but do not believe in (or maybe i do?),
Anthony