Surrender (Happy Joyful Piece for a Friday Afternoon)

I look at the world and wonder when we are going to decide to move beyond this cycle of destruction and begin to create again.

We will, I'm sure of it. Creation is our heart's blood.

And yet, this tiresome worship of destruction. Death cults sweep across the Middle East. Our rapacious hunger for resources consumes the planet like a cancer destroys its host. Even simple solutions appear to be beyond us: here at home, we're witnessing the inexorable and increasingly exponential meltdown of not just our government but our whole governmental system.

And we worship false gods. The gatepeople to our culture sell us stories of how we reward creativity. It's a golden age of innovation, they say. But what gets rewarded? Facebook paid $19 billion for WhatsApp. Meanwhile we have the most disparate concentration of wealth the world has ever seen.

My friend Anastacia has the ability to be an open channel for love-energy. But she's no star-eyed dreamer. She and I share a similar geopolitical awareness, and when we look outward at the world we both experience a deep fear as we're forced to ask, How bad will it get?

But Anastacia and I share, too, an optimism, born not of what we see (so much darkness out there right now) but of what each of us is increasingly able to feel: that the first seeds of a great awakening have been planted, are beginning to sprout. She texted me the other day of a download of energy that swept through her. "Whatever we want--LET IT BE SO--like it's up to us to surrender into receiving what the universe is conspiring to provide for us. WOW!"

And does this match my own lived experience? I can only say this: the only thing that I can do these days to stop myself from writing is to fight or try to control what comes to me and asks to be written. Should I surrender? I ask myself: the flow that I am trying to tap into: which is bigger, it or me?

Ideas

I sometimes get asked about ideas--where they come from, how I generate them--and I usually say they just come. Stay open, and they come. (Furthermore, I say, ideas aren't really the important part. They're a dime a dozen. The important part is what you do with them.)

Ironically, I've recently had a bear of a time coming up with ideas for these pieces. Pretty much every day I've been on the sheer cliff-edge of disaster, and it's getting a little old.

Something isn't working. What am I not seeing that I need to see?

Ima Radster’s Annoyingly Prophetic Discourse on My Road Trip-Related Decision Making

HEY MAN ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO GET THE LARGE COFFEE, I KNOW YOU HAVEN'T REALLY SLEPT AND ALL BUT IT'S A LONG DRIVE AND YOU HATE TO STOP. HEY REMEMBER THAT TIME YOU GOT THE COFFEE AND THEN INSISTED YOU COULD MAKE IT TO WHATEVER THAT TOWN WAS FOR GAS SO YOU BLEW BY THE REST STOP BUT THEN LIKE FIVE MINUTES LATER YOU HAD TO PEE SO BAD YOU PRACTICALLY SWERVED OFF THE HIGHWAY AND THEN AT THE GAS STATION THERE WAS SOMEONE IN THE MEN'S ROOM AND IN THE WOMEN'S ROOM TOO, REMEMBER HOW YOU WHIMPERED WHEN YOU TRIED THE DOOR, AND YOU RAN OUTSIDE TO PEE BEHIND THE BUILDING BUT YOU DIDN'T GET YOUR PANTS DOWN IN TIME SO YOU PISSED YOURSELF? THAT WAS PRETTY FUNNY, IT'S A GOOD THING YOU HAD THAT OTHER PAIR OF PANTS.

How to Win the Love of Your Barista, Part 3

Pumpkin chocolate-chip scone OMG! My eyes could well have popped straight out of my head, but I wanted to play it cool.

"Is the pumpkin chocolate-chip scone as good as it looks?" I asked.

"Definitely. And it's high in protein and fat-free and low in sugar and is actually good for you, just as long as you are gullible and don't ask any questions," she replied.

Dear sweet Jesus she is joking with me. How do I possibly respond?

I bought a scone, and thanked her, and then I ate it. It was really good.

Items of Great Importance

I am in New Mexico right now. It's my mom's birthday today.

Now, perhaps you are selfish and so you are saying, "Yes yes happy birthday Ben's mom now please tell me about the green chile."

You could stand to be more polite, O Selfish One--sing "Happy Birthday" now!--but: I have an empty cooler in the car. When I return to Colorado that cooler will be full with a full sack of this year's Limitar chile.

If you work very hard to get into my good graces, perhaps I can be persuaded to share some.

Sabbatical

As you read this, I'm on a little road trip. I spent the first couple of days in Moab, UT, with plans to move next into southwest Colorado. Perhaps I'm there right now. Tomorrow I'll be heading into New Mexico to spend a few days with friends and family.

I've been planning the trip for a little while now. "Planning" being kind of a euphemism in this case--I knew which day I'd leave and that my first destination would be Moab. Beyond that, things were kind of ephemeral. I usually like it that way. It works for me.

Last week, as the trip impended, I was writing on my whiteboard things that absolutely had to happen before I left and one of them was "backup my laptop," and it hit me for the first time that instead of bringing my computer with me, perhaps I could completely take a sabbatical from the thing for the duration of the trip. No email, no writing, nothing. I'd just leave it at home. (Not that I would disconnect completely. I'd still bring my smartphone. Because I don't much plan ahead of time, Google's magic proves pretty invaluable.)

I spend hours a day in front of the computer. A week or so completely away from it sounded really delightful.

So I wrote on my whiteboard all the pieces I would need to write and schedule for publication to make it work. I tried to pull it off, but I didn't even come close. I'd have needed to hatch the plan a lot earlier in the process to have succeeded.

But no matter. The seed's been planted. A sabbatical from the computer. It sounds luxurious. I'm going to pick a time when doing so would feel delightful, relaxing, expansive. And I'm going to make it happen.

What the Marching Band Got Me Thinking

This past weekend I had occasion to go to a college football game, which I do about never. I find big-time college football--meaning the whole complex of sport, media and advertisers--pretty much immoral. It's a billion-dollar industry, and the one actually indispensable part--the players--doesn't get paid. And don't give me any bullshit about traditions of amateurism, or how a college scholarship is value enough. These kids are putting their health--literally, their futures--on the line, and everyone in the game makes a shit ton of money except them. It's disgusting.

But last weekend was Family Weekend at Colorado State, and my mom and my sister and her husband came up to visit my nephew. They decided to check out the CSU-Air Force football game and invited me along. I said sure. I'm willing to put principle aside to spend time with my family.

At halftime, the marching band took to the field. They were dressed exactly how you'd expect a marching band to be dressed, and they got into indecipherable formations (maybe Space Invaders or Galaxians?) and they did a medley of 70s disco-funk. It was fun and it made me laugh.

I had planned on watching the band and then going to get a bite to eat, but when I stood up to head down the stairs, my sister pointed out that perhaps it wasn't the best time--the aisles were full of people doing the very same thing. I had assumed that most people had no interest in the band and would head to the snackbars as soon as halftime started. My assumption was wrong.

Given the seriousness of the tailgaters we'd seen as we'd walked in, and given the multitudes in CSU green, it was clear that most people in the stands took their college football pretty seriously. If they weren't hitting the snackbars until the band was done, that meant they saw watching the band as part of the entertainment of college football, not something divorced from it. You watch the marching band at halftime because that's what you do.

It's an interesting moment when you realize you are intersecting with a subculture that you are completely disconnected from. The marching band halftime performance is pretty much a tradition in amateur football. On Saturdays across the country, bands of snappily dressed young people carrying march-specific musical instruments (all hail the sousaphone!) get into careful formations and play jaunty marching band music for the entertainment of the crowds. And if you don't attend these games, you would never, ever see it.

My imagination began to play. Given the energy put into the endeavor, there really ought to be people who are obsessed with marching bands. People who travel the country attending football games, who watch with only passing interest while waiting expectantly for the clock to count down to the end of the first half when the real entertainment begins.

And among those obsessives, there should be one who takes it so seriously that he blogs about it. Who writes reviews. Who totally fails to see anything ridiculous about either the object of his obsession or the obsession itself. When faced with a performance inferior to his lofty standards, his reviews take on that strangely aggrieved tone you sometimes hear from critics, as though a perceived lack of quality is an insult aimed at him personally.

I imagined him sitting in a seat not far away from me, literally shaking with rage and contempt at all the philistines nearby. How can all these idiots actually be enjoying this? The formation doesn't even appear to be anything, and some of the euphoniums are sharp, and you call that an arrangement of "Staying Alive?"

It's okay, Marching Band Critic Guy. Here, talk to this person in the next section. He critiques stadium food, and he's simply outraged by the nachos.

The King in the Desert

We sought parley with the King in the Desert and so I was sent to Moab, to the land where the sweeping rocks themselves are the jewels of his crown.

"When the Last Quarter moon reaches its zenith, we shall meet under the Arch. You know the one," came His Highness's message.

"Oh goddammit but what about all the goddamn tourists," I said, but not to him. Our return message said only, "Thus it shall be, Sire."