Perty Morning

Hello world.
It's 10 in the morning, and I'm sitting in front of a little black and white screen in Mama's sweet-smelling abode in Placerville. The weather is warm, the sun shining, the streets empty, the cat asleep, and it's just fine. "Sure feels good" says the song that's playing over her little stereo. True, it does feel good. Kind of like a good night's sleep. Well, it was a good night's sleep.
I've been working a lot lately, and working is fun. I like my job a lot. I make good money, get to eat good food and work with some pretty fun people. This is new, since I used to do everything in my power to not have a job because I refused to acknowledge that a "job" job is even necessary. But we have to do something with our time, and since luck needs to be personally navigated 98% of the time, I found myself seeking out a job that I actually like and want to do.

So it's a beautiful day here in Placerville.

Meanwhile in Santa Cruz, I've decided to take a lot of pictures of stuff. Nice thing about picture-taking: it forces you on some incredible adventures. And I've been on some pretty sweet adventures as of late. It's been cold and dismal, but that isn't stoppin me from seeking out the fun and new, even if it hurts. So, it's been adventures for the sake of adventures, and to capture photographs of the world around me that nobody else gets to see.
Now here's some pictures.
I want to go to Mel's ASAP and get breakfast with Candice and Mom. Yum!










I want to go to Arizona. It smells like Arizona outside.










Pointless blog, I know. But I just wanted to do something. Hopefull it looks decent.
Ciao

welcome back, lovely hope

Last year I got to live in LA for a few months. Now, it's May and chilly in our lovely foggy beachside town, and I'm more excited than ever before to go back.
I guess the way I see Los Angeles is less a place to "go" and moreso a place to "lead". I don't want to live there, or anywhere for that matter, for any great period of time. I know that the time in my life will come when I do want to stay in one place, see the same things, enjoy the luxuries of relaxing and coming home to the country after a long day of working in the outdoors or in society. But right now in my life, I haven't gotten there yet. I'm not sure how to get there really either, except to just live.
Last year I left LA without any real plans except to show some people how much I loved them. While living between then and now, I have learned finally the great value of loving other people and speaking and listening more respectfully. Now I'm able to see balance, to respect the judgments of others and love all kinds of creations. It's funny that this basic lesson wasn't something I could have learned anywhere else but back here at home (Placerville and Santa Cruz), with the people I loved the most. It was easy for me to listen to strangers, but impossible to listen to those closest to me.
LA is a wonderful place, because it is a stepping stone. It's beautiful like a foreign country, filled with diverse culture and art and hopes of all kinds. And it is a place that teaches you that there are so many more places. I lied a few times over the past year by putting down this place, because I needed to lie to myself for a little while. But I remember some of the better nights of my life, wearing pajamas and driving through the empty streets of Hollywood and Burbank at 2 or 3 am, seeing glistening stars, hearing no noise but the hum of the road and the wind in the hills. I fell in love with it place then, just like I fell in love with UC Santa Cruz as I walked through that foresty campus in amazement.
I'm ready to be taught again. The streets teach us, as we walk down them or ride by on our bikes. The nights teach us, in their distance and twinkling. The crowds teach us, in fashion and noise and laughter. The smells teach us, in rank and floral pleasures. The clouds teach us, whether vacant or pluming. The hills teach us, in their nooks and old houses. And the world teaches us, with its society and jobs and show and uncertain futures. The world, and I am ready to learn. I'm ready to be put in the face of danger and laugh again, hold my chest bare and beat my fists against it, photograph every nuance and dirt-speck, fill my nostrils with the fresh flowers and the spring and dirty summer airs; colors and sights and sounds and wonder. There's something out there, humming in the night. It's not the wind, the ocean, or the birds in flight. It's the humming of future roads, empty, humming to me behind some horizon in morning dew. I can smell flowers again, and it gives me hope. It's in the air.

Nine Inch Nails

The band is fantastic. Their music hits hard on my darker heart, reinvigorating a desire to wander empty streets of virtual cities or cross landscapes painted in gold and purple hues. My imagination smiles in release with the a black glee that I feel any time some solid 80's-style rock or techno lights up the airwaves.
I have some kind of affinity for pulse-driven dark beats and melodic rock voices. What is that? Why do I like it so much? I don't know, but I just want to punch my freaking fist into the sky and fly down a mountain or around a bend or tear apart white waves grinning in the freedom that this unnaturally beautiful music delivers.
Music is godly. It's incredible how much power it has over my spirit. I woke up feeling like a totally different person than I do now, thanks wholly to Nine Inch Nails (and Candice's greatness).
Done. Think about it. Rock it out and stare at the open sky.

Love migs

The Reason

I didn't forget the reason, I just felt so hopeless after a while that I began to believe that any effort made was without purpose since the situation is too big to face. But that's like saying the mountain before us is too tall to climb, so instead let's sit down and stare at it ignorantly smug. You never know how far you can ride your bike until you justget out and go. The incredible, inexplicable part about being alive is serendipity, and the odd coincidences that dance their way into our lives. But those coincidences, also known as opportunities, will only exist if we put ourselves out there in the first place, in the crossfire of mystery bullets. No, the reason has never gone away. It's actually gotten bigger. You know what I did? I gave up. I looked at it, cried, shrugged my sad shoulders not knowing what to do and sat down to stare at the impossible mountain, stare at the obvious trailheads right in front of my face. Glaringly obvious, in the afternoon sun. How many nights have I camped in front of these trails, not an inch closer to the mountain nor his summit. The reason is there, and more beautiful than ever. It's in trickster tales, Terminator Salvation, in every pair of Chacos I've tried on, every buck I've pocketed from work, every friend I see online, every time youve been in love, every picture youve taken, every time a song gives you chills or a movie makes you cry. The reason is filling my heart and is not cold or stale. It's the reason we all have, and its more beautiful than ever before.
Don't convice yourself that you are alone or that there is no reason for why you are here. There is a reason and you are the bringer of light for your fellow people. You are not alone because I too am a bringer of light. And so is she, and so is he, and everything that we do brings light. Don't ask yourself any more questions, just let it lie and bring us all light as you climb that beautiful mountain before you.
Goodnight
Migs

I've decided that it is time

Time for a change, and maybe even a change in blog.
Hello blank white page, it's Mikie here. I've been rounding around the prospect of leaving you, page, but of course find myself heartily on the return.
What time is it? It's May time. Some planet somewhere is in retrograde.
It's time for a change, at least for him. I'm sick of waiting, and hoping, and wishing and praying that sometime, someday I'll do something worthwhile with the extraneous amounts of time that I currently piddle away on a daily basis. There's moments of the day when I am nothing, have nothing, think about nothing, feel as if I know nothing and therefore represent Nothing. And if any of you already know me (which likely is a thing that you do do) then you know too that Mikie Beatty is not nothing. So when those moments arise and I think "Wow I am nothing" I am now initiating a change, for those moments. A counter, so you might say.
See, when this happened (twice now, in time, over the past decade) I made a geographical change and that just plum did it. Is this the answer? Is geography my only horoscopal distinction between meaning and non-meaning? I mean, when I was Friendly Financial-Aider I definitely was stuck between geographies. Only then I had goals to strive for, challenges to achieve. er, or overcome. However you might say that. Then in the time following, it wasn't that I was bored but too busy, and definitely found myself "stuck" between the confines of Hwy 1 and Hwy 17, within the smug smutty 6-mile-radius of Santa Cruz. This was dead-center college, when some had gone and others had stayed and I had awoken from a long winters' nap realizing I had become nothing, was doing nothing and cared about nothing.
Now, for my third great exodus in the history of my life it is finally bloody time for a change. Because I've reached the same strange barricades that once held me in chains with my fat oozing between links and shackles. only now these binds are far less intimate and very strange indeed - because I cannot see them. Sometimes I diagnose the pains as health-related issues, finding myself suffering from this ailment or that. But isn't it interesting that as soon as I get heartily distracted enough all of my health problems seem to melt away like oil-based butter on hot bread, seeping into the wheaty sweetness creating more of a delicious meal than any hard, cold, solid problem that once butter and health issues proved to be.
So here I am, on the brink of change. But by f-ing Golly-G, I've yet to pick what that change shall be.
The easy thing before was college..I guess. Easy ways out. But even still I felt the chill of slashing sharp uncertainties quill back then etching fatal doom to my script, saying Fin Mikie Fin Mikie finish it quick.
Not today, no siree, no this Mikie has hatched
from a taciturn Nocturn
to a full-fledged rattatat Scatter-Bat,
cawing and scraping at my inner-egg
there's a future outside I can taste it
in segments and fractures the shell is a crackin'
but not too soon yet, for I fear of the dragon
that looms o'er me still, like a wild
red demon, I'll wait a bit longer
to dodge the behemoth.
So inside my shell, like a sour red pup
I wait patiently
with my cheeks pointed up.

a new myth

I need to create a myth again.
There was a time when I would look at tall mountains and smile because of the flood that drowned my heart
There was a time I would stare at a horizon with expectation
There was a time I would worship heros that I didn't even know were there.
If something is missing in my life, it is my myths. And I can find them again, because they never left

Observatories

They serve a valuable purpose in our web-driven, photo-obsessed world, and make me giddy as a schoolboy. What is it about any massive man-made structures that just takes my breath away? Especially bright white solemn domes, hanging in the sky like a mountain's cap watching over long stretches of landscape while gazing at the stars.If I could be a piece of architecture, it might be an observatory.

Intuition Working Draft Blog

I actually want to reword this and make it perfect, so I'm gonna publish this and come back to it:

sometimes the answers are right in front of our faces, and we just keep putting off looking at them until its too late and somebody calls us on not knowing.
At least that seems to happen to me on occasion, sometimes with major things, sometimes with the littlest stuff. I mean, how many times did you pass by that envelope on the kitchen table wondering what was in it only to find out when it was too late that you had a bill due yesterday, and now you're $80 extra in the hole? Or heard a funny sound in your car and kept saying "I'll look into that" until one day your engine warps because it was bone-dry with no oil, and you simply forgot to look.
It's too bad, when the smallest missed moments dictate the biggest changes in our lives. One little word you didn't speak, one tiny second of checking your bills, one ounce of energy spent turning off your tunnel-driven path to investigate something that your intuition is affected by.
So much happens when we miss moments. The ripples start small, then expound into waves, then tsunamis crashing on-shore in a tidal of terror, tearing apart the trees and beaches we meant to preserve to soundly, all because of one little rock we let drop into the lake, that we thought about catching but didn't.
Maybe the process is natural. Maybe there's some kind of evolutionary purpose or advantage to these things. I mean, there is usually a force of some kind making balance out of chaos, and we're part of that force. So maybe our actions are the governors of change, bringing balance in the long-term.
I don't know. It reminds me of that phrase, "kicking against the pricks". There is the occasion that when I do something, I feel so wrong and out-of-balance about it that no matter how much I justify it logically in my mind, it still doesn't seem right. Sometimes though, when you do enough stuff and eventually nothing feels right, you don't know whether its your total misperception of pretty much everything, or that you're just plainly not doing anything right.
This is that weird thing about intuition: when your body tells you to do something and you don't do it, you're not listening to your intuition. Right?
I'm not sure. Because I get in big trouble sometimes when I do what my body it telling me is best to do. We live in this world that tells us to "sometimes listen to our bodies". Sometimes? Hmm. This gets really really complicated then, because what that means is that the "other times" when we choose to not listen to our bodies, we're fully using our imaginations to conceptualize an experience that will ultimately provide an outcome more valuable and greater for our personal well-being than what our body originally wanted us to do. It's like an override. A veto. Let's say your body was the body of the people, a democratic body comprised of your whole living organism, and your Logic (your brain, I suppose) was the President of that body, overseeing the greater version of you and making sure everything is going OK. Well imagine your body starts to experience something. It hurts, or something. Your foot hurts. And your President recognizes a conflict, looks down at the foot, and sees nothing. There's no cut, no bruise..nothing. So your President is faced with a decision: He can either acknowledge the body's strange invisible pain and do something about it, or he can Veto the call of pain, telling the rest of the body "There is nothing wrong with you, I won't listen to you anymore about this". (works a lot like our actual presidential system, really)
So the democratic body is in pain, but the Presidential logic has overridden the call with a "suck it up" veto.
Intuition. Who's more correct? The President's all-seeing eye, or the Democratic body's sense of touch? Reason versus Feeling. Here's what I think I'm trying to say: I don't want to differentiate between what I'm feeling and what I should feel in a given situation. I think in nature there is no differentiation, and we've only created it because our intelligence has become so far-removed from reality. We've invented these social, political and popular worlds that we have completely subscribed to, so that when we have an intuition to do something we are convinced by those worlds' forces to immediately reject the intuition as, "crazy" "insane" "dorky" "rude" "mean" "disrespectul" "ugly" "annoying" "politically incorrect" "too ________" fill in the blank, because you know you've said it or heard it about yourself.
I believe that we all have a built-in safety monitor that makes valid, unquestionable decisions for us before we even think. It's the same mechanism that helps us catch ourselves when we stumble, or duck from something flying at our faces. In our imagined society that we love to live in so much, there's sh*t flying at our heads in all directions, and for some reason we only duck some of the time. The rest of the time is spent getting beaten like stuffed duffel bag. Why is this? Why do we put up with it? Because we're all trying to get along? I'm not sure. I'll come back to this.

Yeah, I think it's been a week. Hasn't it? Has it been longer than I week?
I don't know. I can't really keep track of my own life any more. There's not really rhyme and reason that I'm creating that I can really see. It used to be that when I did stuff, I had structure, and purpose, and "ultimate goals". I remember being in the 8th grade and first coming up with this intention of ultimate goals. Now I'm something like 27 and literally no different than then: minus the goals. I feel like I might have even regressed, really. So now I'm sitting in front of this computer after maybe 11 hours of work, seriously void of any ultimate goals other than the pretentious plans to make money at my jobs. Sure, that's fun. And sure, I enjoy thinking about other things...but none of it feel like it's worth as much as it used to.
I remember a day when I'd walk out onto the sands of a nearby hill, scraping my toes in the silence as a breeze flew by, listening to the quailing of a bird chirp, the waves of fog down the slope weaving nothingness into somethingness, and my vision extending past all horizons to the not-so-interesting Monterey Peaks stabbing thoughtlessly into my deep horizonline. But then, there was Eternity in it. There was habitual foreverness living and breathing between my eyes. I could feel it on the wind. I could taste it with every fresh breath of coffee I swallowed before seven AM on those distant mornings past. I remember scraping my toes against a white and rocky hilltop at the base of College 8 in May. I looked out at the horizon, like I always had, and bent down to the earth's crest just beneath that scraping toe. With outstretched fingers I gripped the sand, pulling dust and rocks between my left hand in a gesture of welcome to the warm ground. The crumble of rocks and dry dirt between my fingers felt foreign, and I remember remembering...I remembered then that I was alive, and that nothing preceded or proceeded, it was all temporary and I had forgotten completely until that moment (when I remembered) that I was bloody alive.
I remembered tonight. As my bloody right wrist oozed speckled bits of red, and in the chill of a 2:30am keg-room twisting lengths of tape around a hissing missing co2 tube against the head of several looming kegs, I felt something. It was somewhat moving, somewhat breathy. It heaved inside of me, in that great incredible 'I lost myself' sort of way. I used to feel this after coming off from standing on a stage, realizing I had just performed in front of hundreds of strangers something I'd been practicing and believing for months. And tonight, for some reason, I felt that same reality strike me evenly between the forearms sometime around 2am in a kegroom.

I don't intend to work at a bar, or a restaurant, for my entire career of life. But I do so love the intensity and authenticity of desperate eyes darting between your hands and full plates, your eyes and their empty glasses, the strange "can you help me?" glances you get while running between duties..I don't know why but it's as mysterious and inviting as any stage or cathedral, but on this minute and miniature extreme.

There's three torns I face every morning when I wake up. Are you ready? Could you care? I don't even care if you care, since I've never cared what anybody else thought...and if I did it was for an artificial minute. Here's my three torns, every morning:

1- I want to live in a mountain, utterly and completely excluded and separate from Americanism, off the land without the hazards of health and diet, with the select few people who wish to do the same. In this life I want to explore and observe nature, enjoy the cool and fresh outdoors, swim in rivers, hike to high mountaintops and breath without bounds or binds forever contractless and exhaustingly pleased.

2 - I want to live in the thickest heart of the deepest city's mould. I want to churn with the butter of other men, working labor and listening to the woeful tunes of fellow miserables. I want to eat the bread of the poor and salivate over riches and rewards. I want to watch the dirt collect on city streets, listen to the stories of healthy men with their noses in Budweisers. I want to work and work and deliver my meaning to thousands, climbing the ladders that are set before me and ambitiously dissolving the mysteries of Americanism before all our very eyes. I want to enjoy the truth of difference, knowing that I have edgy validation and an eye for authenticity that few can acknowledge. I want to work my way heartily into the ranks of high-caliber social movers and shakers, infiltrating and reorganizing and revitalizing my parts of society in such efficient and variable ways that everybody will be excited for the new dawn that we will all present.

3 - I've forgotten the third. Maybe it'll come to me. For a long time I've remembered these first two, being between the mountains and the city. I know I have a knack for living outside the realm of humanity, and nothing is more tantalizing I assure you. But I also know I have a knack for respecting and dealing with humanity in a way that is referential and respectful. I don't want to be stuck in either for too long.
That's my problem. I'm stuck in a temporary mindset for the time being. Everything I think about is temporary, to the point of worry about my own health in a temporary state of dissatisfaction. I catch myself occasionally unhappy with a specific part of my life, and I try to solve the situation. But then a night like tonight rolls on along, when you have those moments in the kegroom or you're standing at the bar and suddenly a jerk of utter reality removes you completely from your brain and in a second you are standing naked before the truths you once subscribed so vividly and actually completely for...it shakes you. I'm shaken tonight. And my temporary mindset makes me angry, that I can even conceieve of my life in this odd, off, unreal and temporary existence.

No. No. There is a right answer. And it lies between your toes within the gravel. Go barefoot to a hill nearby and smell that fresh salty ocean air, or that clean mountain breeze, or even that nasty dump stench or chlorinated aroma filling your nose-hairs...regardless, that's where the only truth lies. And there's a secret in that truth. It tells you about everything you ever once felt, and how you can feel it again. And again. And again. All over again for the rest of your life if you choose to let it.

That's all that matters then really. That feeling. Because you knew it then, when you were giddy and running around the hallways of the Beach Boardwalk like a 12-year-old, and you will know it again whether you ever wanted to or not. So embrace, love, and live it up.

adios.