Friends, you can vote for whoever you like, or even not vote, so long as you believe in it. I’m cool with that. And though I know this will seem like I am trying to tell you how to vote, you’re just going to have to believe me when I say that I’m really not. Please, vote for whoever you believe will take care of you and the issues you care about.

But I think Mitt Romney is a poor human being.

It’s all there in his “apology.”

“They talk about the fact that I played a lot of pranks in high school,” Romney said. “And they describe some that you just say to yourself, back in high school I just did some dumb things and if anybody was hurt by that or offended by it, obviously I apologize … The people involved didn’t come out of the closet until years later. The idea that this is something that was known by me … is obviously absurd. I had no idea that this person might have been gay.”

I think he is a bully. The truest kind of bully. The kind who is incapable of even understanding he is one, proudly defiant in his refusal to even entertain the notion. He “just did some dumb things.” Gosh, if some of the victims of those “hijinks and pranks” that “might have gone too far” were somehow hurt or offended by them, well, of course he’s sorry. That they were hurt or offended. Not that he did them, of course, because he was just joking around, after all. He was like the class clown, you know? Always cutting up, making people laugh, he didn’t mean anything by it, hell, after all, “as to pranks that were played back then, I don’t remember them all.” And it certainly wasn’t homophobic, because he “had no idea that this person might have been gay.”

As if, had the victim NOT been gay, well, that’d be okay.

For bullies they’re always just “pranks.” They call it a prank because they’re incapable of empathy for others, which is why Romney STILL just calls them pranks. He uses that word repeatedly in his statement. He’s oblivious to the idea that if something doesn’t make HIM suffer then no one else could possibly be suffering. And that mentality shows in nearly every public example we have of the man, from tying his dog to the top of his car, to his career at Bain Capital, to “I’m not concerned with the very poor. We have a safety net there.”

He’s not feeling any pain, therefore pain does not exist.

I am trying to be a better person. I am trying to not be someone who judges others. But I don’t always succeed. And I think Mitt Romney is a poor human being.

And I will be glad to see him lose.

Therefore, statistics show that it will be the best thing to do in Chattanooga that night unless it’s your birthday. And it’ll be MY birthday, which is close enough.

Then, hold on to your hats (because the club has upgraded their A/C unit), I’ll be opening for the supremely talented Hannah Thomas at the supremely fabulous Eddie’s Attic in Atlanta, GA with supremely special guests A Fragile Tomorrow. It all starts THIS SUNDAY at 7pm! Buy tickets online now!

Sidenote: Eddie’s Attic probably has not upgraded their A/C unit. It has been doing an excellent job for years now. Let me stress, there is nothing wrong with their A/C unit (also not as dirty as it sounds).

Honestly, I wasn’t really thinking much. Someone on Facebook I don’t even know mentioned the auditions were about to happen, and for some reason I thought, well, why not? I’ve never seen The Voice or American Idol or America’s Happy-Fun Talent Show Good Time Factory but I know enough about them from cultural osmosis to know what they’re about. I figured I could sing well enough to not make a fool of myself; I’ll go, wait in some lines for five hours, sing a song a capella in an extremely awkward set up, get turned down, and come home with the ability to say, “Hey, I did that once,” and maybe even some funny stories.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get any funny stories. Really, the only remotely funny thing is that I managed to trick Juliana Finch into going with me, which is a cogent reminder that I must learn to use my powers for good and not evil. In the end, all I can really say is that the people at The Voice were almost uniformly nice, I only had to wait in various lines for three hours, and the group of ten people I eventually auditioned with all sang quite well. I sang Squeeze’s “Tempted” and I sang it as well as I ever have. No one in my group was chosen, no one in Juliana’s group was chosen.

I want to think that one lasting result of my experience in Peru (and yes, I swear, I will be getting back to that soon) is that I will continue to take opportunities wherever they happen to appear, for no reason other than that they exist. I didn’t go ironically and while I was there I knew I was no different than any of the other thousands who went. I had a good time hanging out with Juliana (’til we were separated in some of the many lines), I talked to strangers, and felt badly for people when they didn’t get chosen. I sang my song and I nailed it and I knew going in that would probably not be enough to be chosen, and that’d be fine. I went because, well, why the hell not?

For anyone who somehow doesn’t know, the Susi French Connection plays the finest in 1970′s AM Gold hits for your enjoyment, for which I love them. They also happen to frequently let me sing at least one of them, for which I love them even more. They’ll be at Eddie’s Attic in Atlanta this Saturday for two shows: an all-ages 7pm show and all-adult 9pm show (which should not be construed as meaning anyone will be naked). If you don’t make it out, it will only go to show that you just don’t like yourself very much and it will also make me a very lonely boy, indeed…

Advance tickets can be purchased here:
Early show: http://t.co/ROZGNixP
Late show: http://tfus.co/1AZUOii

This is the best representation of an ayahuasca experience I have found, so I thought I’d share it with you.

Like the icaros I mentioned last time, I have no idea what watching this video will be like for someone who hasn’t experienced the actual ceremony. I’ve seen videos that were supposed to ‘simulate’ LSD visions and they tend to not come across to me as anything more than, wow, that was a weird little video. I expect you may feel the same about the above. What I can tell you is that when I watched it the first time it really resonated with me. In actuality, the visions I had during the ceremonies weren’t especially like these at all, as far as I can recall. But there is something about the way this is presented (and it’s not just the graphics, it’s the whole mix of the music and the silences and the movement in the video) that feels very right to me. The first time I saw it there was actually a point (starting about 2:30 in, in case you’re curious) at which I could feel the mareación again, just out of reach.

Anyway, I’m sharing it here just on the off chance that it’s helpful, in any way, in understanding what I’m about to try and describe.

The brew for the second ceremony was the first of the batch we had helped to make that morning. I only drank about half as much as I did the first night. I was still operating under the idea that this really wasn’t much more than an extremely strong acid trip, and when I made the snap decision to go ahead and participate in the second night I figured a lesser dose would mean less nausea and I’d still probably have some interesting visions. What I didn’t really understand at the time was that for many people ayahuasca, once it’s in their system, affects them cumulatively. Another thing I didn’t know was that the batch we’d made turned out to be especially potent.

Initially, the second night was a continuation of the first. The room and everyone in it seemed connected in a very real and deep way. The visions were filled with brightest colors, psychedelic in the truest sense of the word. The room ebbed and flowed much as it had the night before, the noise of people purging swelling and fading in time with the icaros. But these things were only the earliest stages and if that had been all there was there wouldn’t really be much point in me having written all this. Very quickly, things got much more powerful.

For some, the night was rough. Behind me, the girl who’d asked if she needed to participate in another ceremony went through an absolutely awful experience. She spent most of the night crying and begging for it to stop, as Malcolm and the woman with the friendly face tried to calm her and lead her through it. I know one person who felt the night got away from Hamilton, that he wasn’t dealing seriously enough with what they felt was a palpable darkness in the room. Elsewhere, one of the Russian guests called out repeatedly to his friends (in Russian, I only found out later what it was about), who giggled around him, because he didn’t know where he was. Apparently, back where the bathrooms were the scene was especially grim, with people strewn all around the floor, lost in their own particular vision.

For others, though, the night was incredibly positive. I was one of them. The oddity of it is that I was still aware of what was negative around me, but processed through what was going on in my mind the tone was completely different. For those that I could hear clearly suffering I tried to extend myself towards them, tried to share the feelings I was having. The volume of purging that seemed to be going on in the back sounded almost comical at times, and the laughter that would move through the room after an especially loud burst of it said I wasn’t alone in thinking so. Hamilton’s icaros did seem to verge on being outright flippant, but in the end it was Don Alberto’s voice I was really following. I began to travel, and his icaros became like a rope to hold onto while walking, to remind myself which direction to go.

I read a description recently by someone comparing the LSD experience to the ayahuasca experience, and something they said really struck me. They talked about how LSD, peyote, and other psychedelics were still close to reality, that they embellish reality with their peculiarities. But ayahuasca takes you to another reality completely.

In other words, we’ve reached the point at which you’ll keep walking with me through this or else be unable to suspend disbelief.

I moved back and forth between several different vignettes, they seemed almost like different rooms and later that’s how I would come to refer to them. Actually, I say I was moving but I think it’s more accurate to say that I was still laying there on the mat and these different rooms moved through me. It’s also important to know that these rooms were real. They did not feel like hallucinations at all, there was solidity and atmosphere to them. Unfortunately, these days I have only the vaguest sense of most of them, faint flashes of memory I sometimes still get that I have no hope of trying to describe, but two of them still stand in my mind.

One was peaceful and quiet. It was lit by a late summer dusk light that filtered through windows I couldn’t see and diffused the room with an ashy, colorless glow. My viewpoint of the room was from the floor, a floor that was made up of pillows. In a far corner of the room these pillows, which were also somehow burlap sacks, gathered together and formed a large chair that rose from floor to ceiling. The chair was shaped like an open lotus, if a lotus were a chair, each petal made of one of the plain, off-white burlap pillows. At the crown of it was a symbol I didn’t recognize, lines and shapes that placed together formed something like a spade or an upside down heart. The chair looked like a throne merely waiting for a Buddha. I loved it there. Of all the rooms that shifted before me, it was the one I most longed to return to again and again, though it never came when I tried to get there. Instead it seemed to arrive in those moments when the ceremony would peak and then begin to slowly subside into a brief rest. The sounds around me would begin to grow quiet and I would find myself laying there again before the lotus in “the waiting room” (the name I gave it later in trying to describe it to Sarah), happy and surprised each time, as Don Alberto’s soft whisper-whistle slithered its way around me.

I called it “the waiting room” because it stood in contrast to the other room I remember, one I will never be a good enough writer to describe effectively. I knew intuitively it was a kind of operating room. I floated in stasis, hovering but prone. Just now I started to say the room was dark, but realized that sentence would have several things wrong with it. The room was black, but not dark, I could see perfectly, well enough to tell that I couldn’t make out the outer edge of the “room.” Lines of light circled around me constantly, crisscrossing and shifting directions in angles and circles, a kind of living geometric display. I understood them to be living because they were the ones operating on me. They were beings I could barely comprehend, making up a sort of sacred mathematical sphere that surrounded me, made up of a multitude of beings I couldn’t distinguish one from another. The sensation of their presence was at once overwhelming and soothing.

I know that’s one of those annoying contradictions you often see in spiritual writings, but as they operated on me I felt sadness and joy in equal amounts. It was a painful discomfort that was overpowered by the immense sense of wonder at watching them work.

There was a sort of distance to their attention towards me, created, I think, by the fact that their consciousness was so far above mine. It was as if you, as a three-dimensional being, somehow felt compassion for a one-dimensional point, and had found a way to express that compassion to it. There would be a kind of necessary remoteness to the compassion that ‘point’ felt coming from you, separated as it would be from you by barriers it couldn’t even perceive.

They were aware of this distance between us from my perspective and tried, at one point, to reassure me. One of the shapes split off from the whole and moved towards me, a circle forming near my head. It “looked” at my face for a moment and a line formed across its surface, mimicking a smile. I couldn’t help but laugh at the sight of it, and somehow I knew that it scarcely understood what a “smile” was, only that it would comfort me. I was full of the inescapable knowledge that they loved me and wanted me to be better.

I would shift between these various rooms seemingly in time with the icaros, sometimes settling back into myself there in the ceremony hut, attempting to empathetically reach out to those around me who seemed to be struggling. At times my thoughts would begin to turn, my cynical mind would attempt to assert itself weakly, and outside in the jungle the same nocturnal bird from the night before would laugh its gently mocking laugh. Next to me, Sarah would laugh in response, the exact same laugh, and then it would ripple through the mass of people laying around me.

Cynicism, self-importance, they had no place there. We were all of us connected, the mass of us connected to the jungle, the jungle to the universe. Far above, the godhead looked down upon me and I was naked before it, aging, sad and overweight. But I saw my tiny body through its eyes and realized everything I hated about myself, it loved because it had made it so. It loved us all, because how could it do anything else?

The godhead stretched out a finger towards me, its tiny child, and poked me in the belly to make me laugh.

Next: I talk about a high school book report, the man who wrote Blade Runner, and possibly the happiest day of my life.

As you’ve probably realized, I’ve started playing music again. When I more or less stopped playing a few years ago, email was still the best method for communicating with fans. I feel like, at this point, that’s no longer the case.

I know a lot of people follow both my personal Facebook page as well as my Facebook music page. Some of those people also follow me on Twitter, possibly even Google+. I try to vary what I post on any given service, so people don’t end up seeing the same thing in fifty different places, but at the same time I’m aware of how much ‘noise’ there is on these services and I want to make sure that people who want to know about things like shows, or new music, or whatever are able to find out.

I try to make sure I post the more important stuff to my Facebook music page and Twitter, while trying to walk that fine line between making sure it’s seen and annoyingly repeating myself over and over. But I’ve been terrible so far with updating Google+ and I haven’t updated MySpace in god knows how long. I suspect there are other places I ought to use that I don’t even know about. It’s a little unnerving to admit to being so un-hip, but there you have it.

Most importantly, while trying to get information out, I’d really prefer that we all felt there was some sense of actual communication going on, rather than it just being a glorified internet telephone pole with show posters all over it.

What I’m trying to ask is, well, I don’t even know… If you’re a musician, writer, artist, fan, friend, or someone who’s simply stumbled on this post but finds the background colors of this site somehow hypnotic, what’s your advice? What’s your opinion?

A few weeks ago I went and did some backing vocals for another musician in the studio. While we were all talking, the topic of this trip (no pun intended) came up. It was the first time I tried to describe much of it to anyone. Until then I’d usually let Sarah tell her story because it covered most of the details people wanted and was also much funnier and, you know, story-like. Most importantly, it existed, unlike my story which I hadn’t really managed to work through at all. So as I sat there in the studio I tried to explain some things, and was talking about the icaros when I realized I had recordings of some on my iPad (not the ones from our ceremonies, just some I’d found online, and why I had them is something I’ll try to explain before I’m done with all this). Before I played a little of them, I said, “Look, I don’t have any idea what these will sound like for you. When I listen to them I don’t just hear them, there’s a lot of other stuff attached to them that I feel, so when you hear them they may just sound like a random guy singing native songs pulled from a PBS documentary.”

That’s how I feel about trying to explain all of this, in particular the second ceremony. These are just words describing something that happened to me, possibly they’re funny and interesting, but do they convey what it felt like? Because that’s really the crucial part. That’s what made it all matter, that’s what made me so fucked up as the time passed after I came back home and I couldn’t feel it any more, and that’s what has made such a huge difference over the past couple of months as I’ve reconnected to that feeling and processed more and more of what I learned. Without that, this is just a wacky drug story, which is fine, I suppose, but not really what I’m hoping to get across.

Nothing to do, really, but try and write.

**********

I wrote the above a month ago.

I think what stalls me over and over is the idea that trying to put that second night into words ends up belittling it. That no description I can give it will contain any part of the experience I had. Last night, I was reading “The Doors of Perception” by Aldous Huxley before I fell asleep, because I’m still trying to process, still trying to learn, still trying to get perspective and create permanence for the whole thing. I was struck by this passage…

“By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies–all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.”

…and later by this…

“However expressive, symbols can never be the things they stand for.”

In the end, what I want is to GIVE MY EXPERIENCE IN PERU TO YOU, and I can’t. It can’t be anything other than just a story for you. I don’t know why that should be so important to me, or maybe it’s more accurate to say I do know but feel as if it’s been foolish to expect I could.

So, why keep writing? That seems like a fair question. The answer, really, is that part of processing this has been finally writing about it and trying to convey it to myself as much as to anyone reading. I re-read all of these posts tonight in an attempt to jumpstart writing about it and it seemed, at least to me, that I could see my tone change over the course of writing. Those first few posts don’t read with the same “voice” to me that seems to be speaking in the more recent ones, something that seems even funnier to me now as I notice that they’re only two months old. The cynic in me says I’m imagining it, but of course he rarely shuts up about this sort of thing and, anyway, I’ve learned a lot of valuable things about the cynic in me over the past year, which I’ll come to eventually in the course of all this nonsense you’re reading.

Somewhere along the way I forgot, if I ever knew, how to just write for myself, with no purpose other than to express something to myself, and to count managing to express it to anyone else as an unexpected bonus. So, like I said a month ago, nothing to do, really, but try and write. If you’re still reading: thanks, sorry for the delay, and more soon, I promise.

Next: The second ceremony.