You Can S.T.A.R.T. Me Up

I was up at 6 o' clock, otherwise known as "first thing, Monday morning."

I completed the "morning papers" as per the program laid out in The Artist's Way, by Julie Cameron. After the first page and a half out of the 3, I went and turned the shower on. 

I made a note to myself to find out if Julie's instructions to plow through the 3 pages, first thing in the morning as soon as your feet go in your slippers, in a stream of consciousness fashion, not caring about the "quality" of the writing, nor even if it makes sense, and to complete the 3 pages, written "longhand" with an ink pen and "paper," I need to ask Julie Cameron if it's OK to pause your writing to flip a vinyl album of Beethoven's 8th symphony in F major, for example, over before returning to the 3 pages. She would probably say that it's preferable to not interrupt the flow of ideas, perhaps even saying that it takes like 12 to 15 minutes to induce an alpha wave type brain state in which the words proceed from out of the subconscious, or God as you understand Her, and that even getting up to start the shower or flip the Colombia Records product over will disturb this state of mind and it will take another 13 minutes of writing in order to regain that creative advantage...

The whole "spiritual path to higher creativity" laid out in the book seemed to have an instant effect upon me. I felt better, and less stressed out, the same day that I did my first "morning paper." I guess it's the thoughts that persist in the mind that might be products of the Inner Critic, or the Inner Censor that are diffused or dispelled through the act of spitting them out, first thing in the morning. Maybe it's similar to how dreams fade from memory, if not written down in detail immediately upon waking.

Jumping into the morning papers might let you retain some of the dream state for longer after waking, than if you had gotten up and tried to start your day, hindered by unresolved issues that are low-key depressing you, but at the subconscious level. If you jump right into the shower after starting a pot of coffee, maybe the matter that your subconscious mind is trying to solve recedes so far into the background as to become irretrievable, even over the course of the 33 minutes or so that it takes to complete the non-negotiable 3 page lifelong assignment. (That's right, some of the anecdotes Julie mentions are of people who, after a year and a half of doing their morning papers religiously, just up and wrote an Oscar winning screenplay; and it had just "come out of them," as if they were just taking dictation from the Creative Spirit).

So, after just 2 days I witnessed the synchronicity of my friend's friends changing their minds and re-naming their newborn son "Cameron," I realize that it's borderline psychosis to glean any kind of meaning in coincidences. But, where else would the same kind of meaning found in one of Picasso's acrylic on canvas works, come from?

I once had a girlfriend named Crissa, whose palette of mental illnesses that she rendered her consciousness with, in conjunction with the volley of pills that her shrink was hurling at her in between her weekly visits to him, caused her to be able to see through the crack in the cosmic egg, in a sense, and she existed in a romanticized world, fraught with omens, symbols and double meanings.

But; in her defense; she was just "bat shit crazy."

I had met her at a record store, where my favorite artist at the time, Elvis Costello's vinyl albums were right next to her beloved Counting Crows albums, separated only by the ones from a band called: The Coors. 

So, naturally, there was some incidental physical contact between us, as we each flipped through albums, in such close quarters. That led to us leaving together in her car, and me eventually moving in with her, and her mother. 

Certain instances of synchronicity seemed to be all the fuel Crissa needed to keep the fire of her passion for me burning. 

Our first stop, after leaving the record store, was  Whole Foods, where, after locking a copy of Elvis Costello's "Trust" CD, and one of The Counting Crows' "Hard Candy" in her car, we went in and explored.

It's as if these rich mothers think that, in dropping $450 on a basket of food, they are buying a healthy baby...,

I told her that my personal nickname for Whole Foods was "The Healthy Baby," -a moniker that came to me after I noticed the preponderance of babies being pushed around that store in shopping carts, along with hundreds of dollars of Whole Foods stuff (maybe three quarters of a cart full, including the babies).

It's as if these rich mothers think that, in dropping $450 on a basket of food, they are buying a healthy baby..., I thought to myself, seeing so many of them (who were for the most part conspicuous in their ignoring of me; as if in dropping $450 on a basket of food they were hoping they were also buying a shopping experience that would include not seeing any homeless looking people like me, with my long hair tucked under a bandana, hiking boots and clothes more suited to the woods than the aisles of Whole Foods).

"I call this place: 'The Healthy Baby...'"

Crissa had been an unhealthy baby and had undergone surgeries as a toddler and so this comment was enough to sent her into a reverie during which she determined that the universe had spoken and that I was going to be her boyfriend, and she was going to start calling Whole Foods "The Healthy Baby." There was further confirmation in the fact that I had bought some great northern beans, to go along with the fact that I was from "up north" in New England. I think that, in her world of psychotropics, I became like The Great Northern Savior of unhealthy babies, or something.

But, just as being paranoid doesn't mean that nobody is really out to get you; being prone to hallucinate a cosmic significance where there really isn't any, doesn't mean that there isn't any....

Eventually Crissa had put a lot of the pieces of the puzzle of her life together, and she formulated the elaborate theory that I was a ghost writer for Elvis Costello.

She had gotten into the "Trust" CD that I played the hell out of when we were riding around in my Saturn and was trying to find one of the songs on her phone when she noticed that the writing of a lot of Elvis' songs was credited to a "D. McManus." My name being D. McKenna, and the fact that I was constantly pointing out certain lyrics and explaining their meaning to her, was when that serpent entered her garden.

I often talked about Diane Cushing, my college vocal instructor, and so, when Crissa read, upon further investigation, that Elvis was married to Diana Krall, it suddenly seemed odd that I would do so.

I had moved in with her mother and her where I slept in one of the two bedrooms upstairs, Crissa slept in the other room. Diana Krall soon released a CD entitled: "The Girl In The Other Room."

That was bad enough without the lyrics in the title track being about "the girl" laying on her bad in bed and watching the ceiling fan spin while lost in her thoughts -one of Crissa's pass times...

Top that off with the fact that, in her Atavan® haze, most of Elvis Costello's lyrics spoke directly to her, especially those in songs like "The Loved One's," which is about a girl who attempted suicide, while ruminating about what her "loved one's" were going to have to say, should she succeed. 

Apparently, Crissa's near-death experience during her own failed attempt, followed the script outlined in that song too closely to be able to be chalked up to mere coincidence, right down to the detail of her mother's having made some remark about the potentially permanent disfigurement she had done to her body.

"They bitched about your pretty face turning ugly on you. -D. McManus, from "The Loved Ones," off the "Trust" album ("Hard Candy," by The Counting Crows sold separately...).

I guess my point is that, once you start to pay attention to coincidences, they start to come in droves. Or I might be going bat shit crazy...that's basically it...

S.T.O.P!

The S.T.A.R.T. program people saw me on Monday morning and seemed disappointed that I wasn't on a ton of medications; hadn't been to a doctor since 2001, and it was as if they had no use for me.

The two black ladies working there both stared at me for a half second when I walked up to the window. They looked away, making me stand there a few seconds before one of them aksed (sic) me: "Can I help you?"

Their "assessor" couldn't diagnose me with anything, so they couldn't send me to any of their associates who are on the take from Big Pharma; they can't get me whacked out like Crissa on prescription meds in order to bilk the system, and so, "What can we do for you?" 

Good question...

Doctors make me sick, sometimes...