Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Day 15: Dream dalliance and the Gift of Gavra Lynn...





Status/Physiology: Hosanna!! (overt clap of hands!!!) Crashed for eleven hours straight after snorting a crushed-cocktail of melatonin, Loratadine and ersatz over the counter Benadryl. I have not slept for more than three consecutive hours since convening the fast fifteen days ago. Arrived home from work around 7:30am and woke up around six pm, the sky was the color of cheap Zinfandel staining the west in hazy splotches of dripping lavender and transitory velvet—the seasonal narrative that is spring dissipating in a pointillism-pirouette, succumbing to the elevating surge of temperature in graceful capitulation, exiting in breezy tendrils, a whispering portent of things still yet to come.
For some inexplicable reason I doffed my bedroom mattress from its skeletal hinges on the first day of the fast (???) so it feels like I’ve been crashing on a life raft buoyed in galactic nothingness at the end of time. While churning in sleep this afternoon I had a dream where I was married to a sexy highly successful playwright friend of mine and we were living in New York and all was right in the world and then we started having nuptial problems (Damn nuptial problems!!!)..


Upon waking up I was plum out of caffeine and smokes so I meandered over to Dunkin Donuts and got an extra large coffee with a turbo shot and then hung out with Sunshine at the liquor store to cloy my daily tobacco intake.  Upon leaving I walked past the dim clover sunken-eyelid interior of Champs West and saw that my friends Bill Kocher and Hollye Green were rockin’ out as a dulcet acoustic duet (they’re playing down at Rhythm Kitchen tonight) . Bill’s an ol’ drinkin’ bro and every beer we’ve ever pounded in succession is usually accompanied by uproarious amounts of bawdy humor followed in tequila tandem by fits of laughter. I actually met Bill over two decades ago when I was in junior high and he used to play in the Christian rock band 7th Angel a band  I used to (ironically) follow around when I was in 7th grade and the only metal my parents’’ would let me listen to was 7th Angel and Stryper…Good ol’ Stryper…NOTHING spreads the good news of our lord and savior Jesus Christ like mediocre musicians clad in black-n-yellow X-men oriented spandex flouncing around the stage in the fashion of amphetamine-addled Thundercats. I’m not sure if they spent more time with St. Thomas Aquanis or with the gospel of St. Aqua Net. If I ever get commissioned to write a pilot for a t.v. episode I’m featuring a middle-aged man who is in charge of getting the obligatory stripper for his best-friend’s bachelor party but instead of hiring a ‘stripper’ he inadvertently hires ‘Stryper,’ and the groom-to-be finds Jesus, calls his wedding off and joins monastery.   
 
Such is life.
 
I also had the privilege of meeting poet/ singer songwriter Hollye Green for the first time in person. I had known Hollye for long time via various social-medium conduits and we both share the same perspective that art (music/painting/literature) has both the promise and the potential to heal, to serve as a metaphysical gauze for the bleeding soul. Last week Hollye posted a really cool poem about the tryst of the chest between Georges Sand and Frederic Chopin. Hollye has a luminous voice which sounds like something caged and divine kicking in melodious flutters through the halo of her lips.  I’m blessed to call her my friend.
Bill and Holly did a really kick ass cover of this song.

Overall I hung out in two bars tonight and refrained from drinking. Being around alcohol and not drinking is kind of like succumbing to the unwritten yet highly anthologized ‘hands off-look-but-don’t-touch’ mandate convivially stipulated in gentleman  clubs located in the contiguous United States and in Guam. The desire just to get unabashedly bombed persists. At the height of my drinking (25 plus beers a day) I would (shit you not) walk home from work and comb outside the Owl's Nest to see if I could find any half-finished beers leftover from when patrons popped out to smoke the night before, combing the alleyway in search of a fix simply because I couldn’t wait the petty one hour from when I oet off from work to when the liquor store opens.
Pathetic

It’s getting better. It’s been fifteen days. But I still feel bored. I don’t feel relaxed and the bulk of the time I don’t feel creative.   
 
                                                                ***
...in the dream you were planning on leaving for europe and I was helping you pack your suitcase (your underwear was folded in little albino triangles in your suitcase and you kept lambasting me stating, "David, quit looking at my underwear!!!") Once the suitcase was packed we found ourselves at the airport which was this gargantuan labyrinth...in the dream we were both the same age (you were a really sexy 27 year old) and we held the suitcase t'gether and we couldn't find the gate and started arguing like a married couple and then we started laughing uncontrollably..you told me, "I guess we are just going to be lost together," and we continued to gambol and laugh all the while lost at the same time (it was nice bein' next to you and hearin' the succulent chimes of yer laughter in my dream)...when we finally located your gate I handed you the suitcase and you started crying, conveying that you did not wish to leave. I told you that you had to go. You grabbed my wrist (tight) and made me promise that I would be waiting for you at the gate when you returned home in three years' time. I told you that I would be waiting for you and the dream ended with the two of us embracing, as one for a long time.....we don't hug as much as we should baby....
 
                                                        ***
 

 
 Last Tues. while ambling around the arteries of West Peoria I sauntered into my dear friend Gavra Lynn.  Gavra is both a dilettante and a southern delight. Two years ago she was the cultural purveyor of ART SHOW which was just an artistic gem in downtown Peoria showcasing errupting talent, bringing a voice to burgeoning underground bands and hosting poetry readings. She’s an artist, an amazing singer/songwriter (long live Gavra Lynn and the Crop Dusters!!!) a raconteur and a beautiful soul. We spent one month being ‘artists’ and poetically partying all the time together— I had really long hair and ripped jeans and I remember being drunk and transporting art from the Peoria Public Library to Gavra’s gallery in the Civic center Plaza and just feeling like I was rockstar.


Gavra also gave me a gift. One night after three days of hedonism I passed out in her apartment above the gallery and Gavra told me she was gonna practice. Gavra started playing a song she composed entitled CALL ME WHEN THE WHISKEY STARTS TO POUR and while she was strumming the chords on her acoustic guitar like frets on a freight train leading  to Ashville I have this out of body experience (I shit you not) where I’m literally hovering above the room, levitating, I can see my body conked out on the couch and I can hear Gavra  strumming her guitar and singing, her voice reverberating into echoes and bouquets of what can best be described as molecules of light, ricocheting in distilled butterfly orbs as the August sun collapsed in the far lazy river west as if in surrender.     

Call me when the whiskey starts to pour

Darkness doesn’t scare me anymore,

Found my lucky charms it was hangin’ around my neck

Between my pot of gold and last week pay check.


You can listen to the song here, although I gracefully beseech you to go to Champs West on a Monday or Thurs when she is working and hear her play it live.   

Art is multifaceted and harvests many scholarly and poetic purposes. It heals as my friend Hollye alluded to earlier in the evening, but it also serves as a confidant, a best friend, a fuck-buddy, a soul mate, and a place to go as a spiritual solace when you are naked and drunk and you need someone to hold you baby.

In the past year more than any other artistic medium (ie, short stories, movies, lyrics) Gavra’s song has been my best friend. It’s been there for me when I’ve felt like the ugliest human being adorning the scalp of the planet because the person I wanted to spend my life with didn’t feel the same way (honestly, who doesn’t feel that way from time to time). It’s been there for me when I’ve been broke or felt that I’ve been used by people I care about. It’s granted me hope and peace through many a late night writin’ sessions when I feel that I have wasted my life writing stories nobody wants to read.

More than anything else the song (for me anyway) is germane to what I am trying to achieve with Succulent sobriety. It’s about going inside the mystery of your own being, conquering fears (‘darkness doesn’t scare me anymore’) finding the innate wonder of the unique individual you are and will become that is already inside of you, (‘found my lucky charm, it was hangin’ around my neck’) and then literally ‘pouring’ out your talents for all to get drunk off of , creatively quaff and to inspire.

..and that's why I'm doing this fast. To be the protagonist of my own narrative, to find 'the lucky charm' hanging around my neck that has always been there and that I have somehow forgotten about by supplanting it with copious amounts of booze, to conquer the darkness and quash my demons with a stipple of dawn, to crack open everything that is inside the keg of my chest and them quite simply, to pour.

 
                                                                 ***
In the dream I was chasing a flighty airheaded college girl past the house I grew up in, through the university that fired me and found myself on the steps of the House of Worship in Wilmette. When I ended up on the ivory steps of the house of worship they were hosting a famous oriental psychic (she was old/clad in a kimono) and lots of prestigious weird almost cult like psychics were in attendance. It was a very important affair and it was guarded and several conspicuous ‘celebrities’ were in attendance and had to wait in line. The convention was in the basement of the House of Worship and I learned that it was expensive to attend but for some reason I was allowed in for free. There was this famous blonde headed ‘celebrity/pyschic’ that people were also following around and when I was allowed into the basement of the House of worship people were having ‘energy’ work done with chakra orbs (you could see the orbs and they were also having their palms “worked on and read” in these silhouette-library carrels. I found you with yer sister in the back of the convention and we casually said hello. The psychics who kept on coming in kept in getting weirder in a non-spiritual esoteric –séance-cult like fashion. You seemed glum-eyed and sad and I told you I had something I wanted to give you. I reached into my pocket and unearthed the copper you gave me all those years ago but the moment it left my pocket it was pure gold RESPLENDENT and it shone BRIGHT…like chipped dry wall from heaven or GOLDEN coals from a mint barbecue, It was pure gold and it was hold and honestly (in the dream) I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything brighter. I handed the copper back to you and you turned to a nearby freakish psychic and said, “This copper has spent a lot of time on the cornerstone of God. This is where the true power is at.”





We then began to get uncomfortable with all the freakish psychics and tried to find a way out. Your sister followed behind us (phucking Fred, always trying to be a third wheel). In typical Diggory and Polly fashion we unearthed a “hidden passage trap door” in the bottom of the basement” with a spiral sylvan staircase stowed inside only we opted not to go in. Instead we continued to walk around the bottom circumference of the basement. We found a black and white poster a house of worship (it was a cross between the first house of worship in Russia and this cool picture I have a home) only the poster was TILTED. I then grabbed your wrist and pulled and fell to the ground under the picture of the TILTED house of WORSHIP . You were on top of my body in dry humping fashion and I started cryin, sobbing irrevocably/uncontrollably pressing my teary sockets into the gentle whiteness of your cheekbones. I then addressed you as “My dearest and eternal A____” and then I started crying more and apologized and asked for forgiveness for yelling and emotionally erupting at you last autumn. Like that blissfull day on the parkbench (or in the hookah lounge. Or in the park here in P-town) we held each other for a long time and it was pure. You then told me that I was forgiven and we started breezing gentle kisses on the others cheekbones and forehead and smiling at each other. The moment you said the word forgive good ol’ anisa FRED jumped on to of us (think of a sports victory celebration) and we kissed her forehead (frontal lobe) as well. We then got up and decided to leave (we were all smiling—miss that smile of yers angelface) and as we left a weird gray-eyes guard psychic told us to hurry up cause the conference would be starting soon. I don’t think we were in a hurry to get back.

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