Monday, June 17, 2013

Continental Coffee, Commercial Drive, Vancouver

Photo on 2013 06 17 at 12 11 PM
I'm sitting outside the Continental Coffee Shop on Commercial Drive.  The ham and cheese I ordered is delicious.  The regular coffee is even better, distinctive and robust. The atmosphere of the place is decidedly commercial drive, intellectuals conversings at tables beside beautiful people probably hooking up through on line services with the occasional computer geek working on something, or blogging like me.  The young and pretty blond is journalling. I wonder if she's in recovery or just a budding writer.  There's all manner of middle class on Commercial Drive.  Three decidedly gay men walked by with affected speech. An angry lesbian looked at me and smiled blowing all stereotypes. The ethnic Mediterraneans look like retired crime bosses but probably are just grandfathers.  Across the street the Italian Bakery is doing brisk business.  There's Wonderbucks trading company too. I've shopped there when I was furnishing apartments.
Right now I'm thinking of God.  Gilbert is lying on the sidewalk beside me hoping to smell ass.  A particularly attractive young woman just walked down the street with 30's style clothing and bright red lipstick.  I don't suppose she's horrny.  That's a pornography Hollywood myth in my experience.  Old guys sitting with MacBook Air computers at coffeeshops aren't at high risk of being molested even in Vancouver.
In the 60's and 70's the drug scene was more about awakening while today it's more about numbing.  The slogan then was 'Turn On'. Now it could be 'Turn Off".
There is a preponderance of tattoos on the street.  Even Gilbert has one for identification.
God either is or isn't.  The very question implies existence. You don't deny the Holocaust if it didn't exist. There's not a whole lot of folk invested politically in excluding Santa Claus from schools and court rooms.
It's called 'secular religion'.  A polytheism for sure.  Not a monotheism by any means. Rather 'man as the measure of all things' or to be politically correct and decidedly hip, 'woman as a measure of all things'.  All the promises of feminism seem not to have benefitted me and yet like so many causes I supported them.  Now I'm looking for the old dying white guy movement. I feel and think about death a lot these days.  Sickness does that to one.  Mysterious pains and aches and chronic stress combine to make for cracks where fear will enter.  Prayer and meditation stay hysteria.  A problem shared is a problem halved.
My friend George reassured me recently I was still insane.  I was concerned.  If I was sane I'd believe what the media was telling me.  The planet is dying. The world is overpopulated. The government is all thieves. The banks are criminal and lawyers are all nazis.  Communists and atheists are taking over the country and China is spying on bowel movements with nano cameras built into see through bum lulu lemon yoga pants.  The possibilities for fear are endless.
A beautiful long haired summer dressed woman is walking her leash pulling hound.  Gilbert is watching the dog.
God is an idea.  God is also an experience.  I've known spiritual awakenings and experienced the interconnectedness of all creation. I have seen the whole of the periodic table dancing in a whirling matrix about me with all the hidden names of chemistry labelling existence. The greatest of visions and beatific realities predated hallucinogens. Closed materialist psychiatrists attribute all this to early childhood sexual abuse, misfiring of synapses, or any number of explanations suitable for themselves. They're pseudoscientists at best, never appreciating the limits of our knowledge of even gravity. They're more afraid than I am.  That's what 'uptight' is all about. I prefer my friends praying to raise the dead. Why not.  Beats blowing up people with bombs.
An oriental man with red shoes and diamond earrings is talking on his cellular.  The mundane is so deprived of the sacred as to make science anything but holy.  I , like millions before me, have known telepathy. I know twins who knew each others thinking and anticipated calls half a world away. All such phenomena is disregarded by the main stream monetarists.  To even imagine a connection without an 'airway plan for profit' is a threat to the status quo.
God is the central exchange.
God is that hub in which all souls are connected, time is one, and all things impossible are possible.
To me it's called home and I've been too far away learning the things of this world and proving my competence with the heavy manipulations of this lower zone made lighter by the love of man and woman, man and man, woman and woman, children and dogs.  I feel as if I'm in a reality invented by a cat. It's serious that way.  Mario de Beauregaard's "Spiritual Brain', was only necessitated by the lies foisted on us all.  These days they deny the mind and say everything is the brain.  Why not deny God, in time we can deny man and return to pure aggression.
I envied the woman who passed with the long and healthy body moving in a single form fitting fabric like a futuristic dancer having landed in this world for a day of sight seeing. I'd love to John Malkowitch her body and mind and experience reality from a different locus.
God is in all the eyes of the world. We are his and her hands and feet.  God is one and many and , the one many and the many one. There are no words for the paradox.
Talking of God gets one locked up or crucified.  There are too many Christians these days without scars.  All one has to do is tell the truth and all manner of authorities will descend upon you.  The story of Paul is today.
The sun is out and  still I descend into the gloom of yesterdays.  Resentments and fears make up so much of the thoughts that circle the amygdalla like warriors about a wagon train.
She is passing with red hair and dark glasses, a slim but busty body and no need to wear black on this day.
Men used to wear cod pieces that brought one's attention to their genitals.  It is only when their penis is exposed that they become objects of sexuality. Women have done well to clothe men everywhere so that at least they can think in late spring without hormones distracting them any more than they already are.
Men's clothing conceals, mostly sloppy and loose fitting.  At least gay men celebrate their bodies.  The male suit jacket was developed from the design of British war uniforms.  As a man I've felt at war most of my life, competing with others daily, defending rights that are only rights if defended, begging resources promised but not given, refusing to accept the status quo which would have those I care for marginalized and why.  I was little once and fear that when I am old there will be no one there to help me.
But God.
I was in a hospital with a dangerous sadistic nurse.  She is memorable and yet all the others I have known so much more positively cannot erase the experience of her abuse of power.  But abuse of power is ubiquitous.  It's a subjective state in a greater whole and what Job was written about in the Bible.
My relationship with God is sadomaschistic.  The story of Jesus is one of faith and denial.  I have more faith in God than I do in myself.  I'm a regular Jonah refusing to go to Ninevah.  I'd rather be in Yaffa.  How many whales have I been swallowed by and how many times have companions felt threatened in my presence.
IA young girl walked by wearing a pink shirt "Love who you are."
My seat is bouncing for Gilbert is meeting another dog behind me and his leash is attached to the chair.  Now passing I see this was a pug.
There is a book of biblical Hebrew I need to study for this evening. I've a lesson to prepare and yet would rather look at  two pretty women scantily dressed walking proudly down the street.  "People watching" in Arabian countries must be boring in the extreme. Feminists loved to flaunt themselves in the day and then blame men for looking, before the lipstick feminist set made mockery of the their older dirty silly sisters.
I'd like to be at a nudist colony. I could go to wreck beach and see the phallus as privileged as the breasts of the city are.  The breast prominence is accentuated by all manner of wire and engineering. Stanfields offer me no such assistance.  No wonder men ride Harleys, yet women seem only interested in the cost of such machines and sociobiology prevails.  The egg is more dominant in behaviour.  I am reduced to the behaviour of my sperm.  Sociobiology is so much richer than the mythology of Marx.
A Harley has just driven by and I am aware I could be driving mine on a country road right now.
Instead I am here talking to God, thinking about God, conjuring God, praying for God, meditating on God.
Sexual orgasm is a sensation.  In my material world scale it's more exciting than a bowel movement or a pee but to one who has suffered limitation of either sex holds no comparison.  Sex can't compare with making money for the financially insecure or for someone who has been poor and equated poverty with powerlessness.
I've had ample opportunities and been blessed again and again by Grace. Luck is said to be God acting anonymously.
The sins represent excesseses.  Amorality revolves around sins.  Our laws speak most to sins.
There is the sin of gluttony.  All over the rich are obese and yet so are the poor.  Not perhaps in times of famine.  Historically some meat, like the physique of Marilyn Munroe has been preferred to anorexic Twiggy as defines against disease and famine.  Now our western world dies of excess. The narcissism about food acts out in all manner of variations, cook books, epicurean delights, restaurants, vegetarianism.  There's a regular pornography of culinary indulgence.
Yet, Jesus said, "man does not live by bread alone".  And so few fast when fasting was as sure a route to knowing God as prayer and meditation.  "Could I have a latte and a cucumber sandwich on whole wheat and flax bread, if I fast?"
Sex is dirty to the glutonnously filthy who have lost the feeling below their mouth and insist their daily involvement to all else in their 'taste' and 'gut sensation' is 'necessary'.
Crap.
But yes, the experience of a good bowel movement is increasingly appealing to the aging population whose daily ritual is to look forward to meals. Not so much for social conviviality as the respite from thoughts and memories.
Sloth is another favourite sin these days with unemployment, welfare, rest, vacation, leisure, and sleep and all manner of industry related to the bed and couch and lazy boy.  Disability is another industry which revolves around late night preoccupation and late day rising.  Inefficiency is disregarded and whole government agencies are devoted to promoting a lethargy of sloth that all insist is necessary. And may even induced or coerced. As some who really would do other are obligated to join this 'state' of affairs for political gain ultimately of others, not themselves.  They have their reward in sloth.
And there my mind slips into criticism and negativity.
I turn to God to lift me from the malaise of thought which begs for something to gnaw on as many seek 'no mind'.
Gilbert has been petted quite a bit by passers by. He's enjoyed his time. I just realized my meter must have run out
But my meter calls to me.  It measures time.
God may I know you better today and be more with you.

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