The Days of Awe, The Punk Rock Avengers and The End of the World

(I wrote this a few years ago around Rosh Hashana, on a Sunday night before work at the Psychiatric Institute. It’s pretty raw but captures something intense about the times.)

Someone wise once told me that the mystics will always live on the margins, they have a big effect on the culture but they have to stay underground because they are so sensitive. The mystics understand something about the unity of all things in the way that the mainstream religions forget because the mainstream is all caught up in the profane symbols of culture and maintaining traditions that keep society functioning. But there is a core to reality underneath all the social layers, even if it's illusive, and sometimes, if we're lucky enough, we can momentarily grasp a hold of it, and let it warm us during the cold times.

Now I'm not a practicing Jew, but just in case you're not hip to it, for practicing Jews we are now in the middle of the "Days of Awe" between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. It's a holy time of reflection. In recent years I haven't stepped foot in a Temple, but these are the days when if you're a believer you stand before God and beg to be rewritten into the Book of Life for another year.

That story had never really struck me as making a lot of sense and seemed more like some kind of old-school social control meant to keep people in line, but at 43 years old I stand before the public on social media (because that's about as close to an audience with God as I can get these days) and I declare that I'm in total fucking Awe of the Mysteries of the Universe and I am so grateful to be alive. I believe there are so many layers of reality that we are not seeing, we are so tiny and insignificant that the only way to grab a hold of life -- like grasping onto the tail of an enormous flying dragon -- is by being as Present as we possibly can with our breath and our bodies and our sight and our sound and our taste and our touch and the blessed people around us.

I stand before you, Adonai, friends, strangers, all of us tied together through some wild mystery of technology and fate, and I'm humbled by all of the gifts before us, all of the mysteries inside of us, all of unraveling delights of consciousness that wait for us inside our dreams to find them and awaken.

This is a true story:

When I was 20 years old I'd already spent a bunch of time locked up in a psychiatric hospital but even worse I'd been in school for 15 years straight and I so badly wanted to be free. I was so trapped by all the pressures I had on me to perform and succeed, to live up to some kind of image that had been put on me by society and the people that raised me, especially my dad who died the night before my Bar Mitzvah and had such high hopes that I would be able to intertwine with his desires and live out his dreams for him. The best thing I ever did for myself was drop out of college and start hitchhiking and keeping a journal. I ended up out in the desert in Arizona and the sky was so much bigger than I ever realized the sky could be growing up in Manhattan. It was the first time I experienced pure, unadulterated Wonder at the universe, staring up at the layers and layers of stars in the night sky. It was the first time in my life I really remember consciously feeling free.

I Believe in Me: I Make My Dreams Real

One day I met these punk kids on the streets in Albuquerque and crashed on their couch for a few nights and one of them had a really good record collection. I spent a whole afternoon listening to his records and recording three audio tapes of music that I traveled with. One of the albums I recorded was The Avengers, an original San Francisco punk band from 1977. The singer, Penelope Houston, was a teenager when she wrote all those songs, and it was like she was a punk rock mystic: she was channeling her own kind of Raw Power, like a female Iggy Pop, but more political and pointed and actually I probably shouldn't even be comparing them but I want you to grasp the intensity. My friend Aaron Cometbus, who's almost a decade older than me and grew up in the Bay Area punk scene, talked about how when he was a young punk all the girls wanted to be like Penelope Houston, she was the archetypal badass punk rocker. And you can hear it in those songs, each one of them resonates in my soul in the way I imagine a religious Jew being ecstatic singing along to the prayers in Synagogue. You know how sometimes a song will capture a moment in time for you? I hear those songs and I can viscerally feel my teenage desperation and the enormity of the desert sky.

The Sixth Extinction

Last week I ended up borrowing my mom and step-dad's car so I could drive up to a mental health conference and lead some workshops and give a keynote talk. It was late when I borrowed the car and I was pretty exhausted and I couldn't find anything on the radio but there was this audio book CD already in the sound system of a book called "The Sixth Extinction" and I listened to about 4 chapters of it driving up the Palisades parkway. It was a book about climate change written by a scientist and how humans are destroying the planet at an unprecedented rate: spewing carbon dioxide into the air, acidifying the oceans, clearcutting the forests, spreading nuclear waste, decimating wildlife populations, and in general speeding up the process of making this planet uninhabitable for all but the roaches and the rats. It was a pretty gloomy audio book, and left me grappling with the realization that in the end, in the material realm, all that's going to be left of our civilization is a thin dark line in some rock that some future civilization will discover. There is nothing material to hold onto, nothing. It will all be gone and it's not going to be pretty as it goes.

Here's the thing: I believe we are flesh and blood but I also believe that we are spirit. I believe that our spirits live on long after we're gone and even after all the books burn and the last record melts. It doesn't make any sense to me that it's just meaningless, I just refuse to believe it. I think we're put here for a reason and we're meant to make some meaning of things and do good while we're here. I think we're supposed to be looking out for each other, I think we need to remember we are interdependent, we need to cultivate that interdependence, and we need to remember that the stories we tell ourselves are really important. One story I tell myself is that we are made of stories, and that all the laws of physics and everything we know about organic chemistry is really important for understanding the world, but literature and philosophy and art and music are just as important because we are made of these things just as much as molecules and DNA strands and the matter from the bellies of stars. We can create new worlds with our imaginations.

Thus I will speak in the royal we of personal manfestos:

We need to practice: we need to practice being present, we need to practice feeling awe, we need to practice love as an active verb. And, to go back to the first person tense, a couple months ago when I was struggling with my depression and disconnection, staring at my computer screen at the Psychiatric Institute office, I saw that the Avengers were playing at a little club in Brooklyn and I bought a ticket online.

I see the way culture formulates and reformulates itself and how the cultures we create replicate themselves through the world, through the internet, in the streets. There's a lot of bad culture out there these days, but there's also a lot of fucking magic too, a lot of amazing people connecting with each other, and it's a practice to notice it, to speak it, to tell the story of our present day with reverence and awe. It could be mundane and cliche or it could be bursting at the seams with uncapturable brilliance, it's all how you're looking at it.

I never go to Brooklyn these days, especially to the parts filled with young people in Bushwick and Williamsburg. I have an adult job and I live uptown and most of friends have kids and I rarely see any of them. I go to sleep early. I fucking hate how I've been living in New York for the past 5 years, I wouldn't take it back but I definitely won't be repeating it. Anyway, on Friday night I went to a little club in Bushwick and saw The Avengers.

What's fucking wild: Penelope Houston is 59 years old, and she's a librarian in San Francisco. What's fucking wild: before they went on I was checking out their merch in the back of the club on a little table and I realized Penelope Houston was the one sitting there at the table selling me an Avengers t-shirt. We couldn't hear each other over the band playing but I said something stupid like: "Holy shit, it's you! You're a fucking legend!" And she looked at me and mumbled something and made a face as if to say: "Cool man, whatever. The shirt's 20 bucks."

The Avengers feel like hidden treasure to me: just to even find them on the Internet you have to go through many layers of Marvel comic Hollywood film websites and then you get to the youtube links where old fans have posted their records. I highly recommend listening to all of it and listening to it really closely.

So yeah, that's it really. I danced and sang along to every song up at the front, if you know me in real life then you already know that part. The kids seem to be scared of dancing in 2018, whatever. I've never cared if anyone else was dancing, I will always dance at a show. When they played "The End of the World" I had this revelation: when I was 18 years old and I was convinced the world was ending I wasn't wrong, I was reading the signs correctly, I just got the timing off. We're still here. The cool punk singers grow up to be librarians, we have to take care of our teeth so they don't fall out too quickly, some people die and some people live and eventually we all die. Meanwhile, amidst these Days of Awe there is some part of me that takes solace in the many ways we are living the same stories over and over again at different frequencies. The best we can do is find the light in ourselves and then join with others and fight the good fight and tell some good stories about it. Me, I'm just really small and trying to make sense of things. I'm working with what I've got.

The End of the World by The Avengers

When I wake up in the morning

from this dream I'm having

going to give everybody the warning

I can feel it, I can taste it

yeah, the end is near

I watch as cities will tumble

I smell your rivers burn

old men, kneeling and humble

nothing left for you to learn, to yearn

the end is here

And you all hold your breath

as you watch the last sun set

and your dreams will finally come

at the end of the world

look down, your shadow's on fire

this day will blot out your past

no man can hold himself higher

with bones of dust to dust

I can taste it, now, it's here

And you all hold your breath

as you watch the last sun set

and your dreams will finally come

at the end, the end of the world

And we all hold our breath

as we're standing at the edge

and our dreams will finally come

at the end, the end of the world