Forced Meditations

In accordance with Christian Filardo's prompt, "i found it in a ziploc bag"

Today, I listened to Duncan Trussell speak about the Buddhist teachings of Tilopa, who sent his student, Naropa, to do foolish things and be beaten, and in response, Tilopa then beat Naropa further. Christian's prompt makes no sense to me. I don't use ziploc bags. How would I find something there? It is not there. Vincent Gallo was beaten extensively by his father. How hard it is to overcome the effects of multi-generational family trauma, and even then, we are often doomed to have sex with our mothers and slay our fathers, men who were mercilessly whipped with broomsticks and made to deliver groceries in the rain all winter while their peers played stickball and gave each other hand jobs. This is what I find in the "ziplock bag" of my mind this morning, forced to attempt to synthesize them into a meaningful narrative thread, or else abandon narrative altogether. 

Last night, I had the great privilege to see Meredith Monk perform at Reed College. Her independence and whimsy were inspirational. She seems like the sort of person who would refuse to accept daily beatings. She performed a piece titled "The Tale" towards the end of the program, about a woman bargaining with death. Here is a video of her performing this piece in in 70s: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZM-I53yUoTU

-Greg

In accordance with Gregory's prompt, "a quick jaunt out of Baltimore"

From Baltimore you can basically go anywhere on the east coast with relative ease. Virginia is probably the most interesting place I have been too since I began my time here on the east coast. While I have been to New York, Washington DC, and a few other places Virginia has been my favorite and probably the oddest. For starters, it’s a small relatively conservative state, and from what I understand a lot of Virginia’s residents commute into DC for work. I was heading out there to play a show in a small town called Fredericksburg, which is forty-five minutes from Richmond, which is a big town or small city, I don’t know. We started our trip off by hitting up Caroline’s brother’s wine store in a posh Virginia suburb called Vienna, to get there we had to drive through part of Northern Virginia. Northern Virginia looks how the moon would look if humans were to put a giant bubble on its surface and start trying to colonize it. The sky was grey and there were huge slabs of concrete destined to become highways. There is this pretty strange looking shopping mall called Tyson’s corner out there too, it seems like it is in the middle of nowhere and that there aren’t people around for miles. Virginia is also remarkably green. It’s green to the point where you get the feeling that there are people living in the woods completely off the grid. Having grown up overseas and in a place relatively west of middle America I haven’t had much experience with places were the Civil War was a super huge deal. In Virginia there are some people still living in Civil War times and it is pretty apparent. When we pulled into Fredericksburg’s downtown we got out to walk around. The area seemed to be doing well economically, there were tons of young families around and people seemed to be hitting up local businesses. We ended up walking to this place called “Soup & Taco” which turned out to be the best Mexican Food I have had since leaving Arizona. Downtown Fredericksburg is pretty strange because there are restaurants, shops, and businesses but scattered amongst them are all these closed civil war museums. Some of them were just empty storefronts and you can see the occasional confederate flag here and there. I guess that is relatively normal for the area though. Another weird thing is that I was in Fredericksburg to play an experimental noise show and there were about 10 other projects on the bill. I couldn’t list ten experimental projects that play frequently where I used to live so I thought that was pretty gnarly. We even got paid! We drove back to Silver Spring to crash at Caroline’s parent’s place and it was so rainy that we almost got run off of the road a few times. Drivers out here are just as wild as drivers in Los Angeles.

-Christian