I was sitting on a sofa in a first floor room, next to the kitchen of “the house.” The room was bright and cheerful, and yellowish colour with some sort of floral pattern on the wall. I’m not sure what the room was. It seemed that it could have been a dining room because it was next to the kitchen, but it wasn’t done up so. I was going to read some to Kevin but there was a lot of noise coming from the stairwell because there were workers doing some sort of restructuring to the stairs between the first and third floors.
I walked into the stairwell to close the door in the ceiling and ran into one of the workers. He told me that he wouldn’t be able to leave it closed for long because he was going to need to do work there soon. I told Kevin the situation and were discussed going to another part of the house to escape the noise. We talked about the fourth floor. I still had a little bit of a lingering odd feeling about the fourth floor because that’s where the ghosts used to be. I had now been all renovated, painted yellow and white, and the ghosts were no longer there, but there was still a memory of what it used to be liked which I was not quite comfortable with. Regardless, it was still unfurnished so there wouldn’t be anywhere to sit. We talked about the third floor which was still dark because people hardly went up there, but it was nice and quiet in the far corner of the house and we looked at each other agreement that it would be a good place to go.
I was from the eastern part of the US, travelling westward with my wife and son. I was an musical instrument maker, mostly wooden flutes and guitars. I had a practice of using very substantial wood when carving the flutes and the necks of guitars and mandolins. When we reached the west coast, my son was studying with another instrument maker and showed me a technique he learned about carving out the flutes and the guitars and mandolin necks where he made the walls very thin. Next, he would create a very thin and long piece of wood like a very long tooth pick that he called the heart string and attached it inside of the neck or inside the flute. This created a vibrating counterpoint to the instrument that increased it’s harmonic potential.
I was in a parking lot on a street corner surrounded by junipers, inside a copper coloured Vanagon. Mel and I were going thru boxes of clothes and we were intending on selling. The clothes were very colourful and I was wondering whether I truly wanted to get rid of them. I remember seeing shirts in yellow, bright green, and orange. I recognized some of the clothes and was thinking that I liked them, yet still felt compelled to divest of them. Mel was in a similar situation with his clothing, and there was a lot of it. We finished going thru the boxes and closed up the Vanagon and walked across the street where we met my Mom and Brad in a type of bed and breakfast. We were chatting and packing I believe. I was thinking that I may have left something in the Vanagon and walked outside to the corner and noticed that the Vanagon was not where I parked it. At first I thought that maybe I’d forgotten moving it but then I realized that someone had stolen it. I was shocked. I ran back in to tell Brad.
I awoke in jail but didn’t at first know where I was. There was a very skinny black woman next to me. She had that “I’ve been doing crack for 20 years” look about her so I couldn’t honestly tell how old she was. I asked her where I was and she told me that I was on Death Row. I couldn’t even fathom what I could’ve done to end up here and was a bit panicked. All I had was a cardboard box with some junk in it and I wasn’t sure where it came from.
Suddenly there was a horn blowing. I asked the woman what it was for and she told me it was the call for lunch. I picked up my box and followed her into a small cafeteria where there were others congregating for food. I look for someone who worked there to help me figure out why I was on Death Row and see if there was anyone from the outside I could talk to. I found and authority who presented me with some paperwork that defined my incarceration. Apparently I was going to be executed because I had accrued $63,000+ in parking tickets. I was astonished that someone could be murdered for parking violations, not to mention the fact that I can’t remember receiving a parking ticket in years. I was paranoid. What could I do about this?
I kept asking to talk with someone but I wasn’t getting much help. Somehow, my consciousness went outside the walls of the prison where I came across Marcel standing there. He had grown his hair out really long and bleached it. He looked quite odd but I told him what was going on and asked him if he could help me.
I was standing around an enormous piece of red cloth. It was probably 15+ feet in diameter and there were people underneath it. I was being trained how to work with a lion that was on the other side of the cloth. My goal was to keep it at bay so that it wouldn’t harm anyone. I was asking how to do this but the answer was that it could only be taught in practice. I was basically trying to keep it opposite me across the distance of the cloth and keep it distracted while the people underneath could keep safe. It seemed that I was called to leave thru a hole on one side of the cloth which meant that I needed to give up staying opposite that lion and give into having to approach it. I went over to the hole and laid down at the face of it and curled up to get ready for the lion to approach me. I laid there as still as I could. I could sense the lion approach me. Then I felt it sniffing me and could feel it’s hot breath on me. I waited and it started to walk away. I proceeded to crawl thru the hole and as I did, I heard a loud echoing voice bellow, “Kumara.”
I was in a back yard of a small house. Lauri was standing in front of a dark plastic trash can. My hair was really long, probably almost two feet in length. I grabbed a hand-full of it and in a stroke, cut it off and dropped it into the trash can as a sacrifice, tho to what I wasn’t sure. As I did so, it thickened into an almost spaghetti-like wad. Lauri turned and dragged the trash can away around the house toward a back door to the garage. I asked her what she was going to do with it but her response wasn’t clear.
Next, I’m standing in a very dimly lit bathroom of slate and gold. It was beautiful of what I could see of it, but it was only illuminated by a small led light standing in a power outlet. I was holding a hair dryer in my hand and immediately wondered what I was doing here. The bathroom was opulent and very large and I was standing in front of the mirror with the door to my left. I felt out of place and walked thru the door into a large foyer near the front door of an enormous house. Standing around and sitting were a group of men that seemed to be in a sort of trance. Mel was there near the front door. I had a sinking, uneasy feeling about being there and realized that I need to leave immediately. I walked over to Mel to coax him to leave with me but he sat there with a blank look about him. The other men started to descend upon me as if to prevent me from leaving so I rushed out the front door to a sidewalk and proceeded to turn right away from the house. A young man that looked of East Indian descent with long, black hair came out to persuade me not to leave. He told me that I was very important to them. I told him that I was not returning. He became even more persuasive, telling me that they would give me anything I wanted. I told him that the only thing I wanted was the only thing he could not give me… freedom.
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If you’re interested, I’ll be playing an hour set, probably starting around 7:30-8ish at Blair Lair in Sunnyvale. There will be some really great poetry and other performers that do cameos as well. It’s going to be a great evening. If you’re interested in attending, email me back at news@rhythma.com for the address.
Rhythma Music | Comments Off on I’m Playing Friday Night @ Blair Lair House Concert
I got asked today to fill a spot at the Farmer’s Market in Campbell tomorrow, the first day of May. I’ll be performing from 9am -1pm. Lord help me. I’m going to bring out my keyboard and computer, and looper and create some ambient textures. I wasn’t sure I was ready to play out with this equipment and style but I’ll give it a go, probably earlier in the day and see how it feels. It’ll be a live experiment and I should be partially asleep and probably still dreaming so that should add to the whole design. Come out and say hi.
Downtown Campbell. Can’t miss it.
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I was in a very large Victorian house that had been converted to a hotel with a meeting hall. I was chatting with a young lady who was sitting behind a desk checking in the visitors to an event that was being held in the hall. In between check-ins, she was telling me about winning the lottery. She was only work this desk because it interested her to participate in this activity and not because of any monetary compensation. She asked me if I wanted to know how she won. Well, of course I did… duh! She told me to invest $10,000 in lottery tickets, spread out over the course of a year. That was how I’d be able to win, as that’s how she did it, and she’d won millions. I needed to get more details on this procedure so she got up to go for a walk with me, but every time we’d rekindle the conversation, someone would walk up and start talking with us about something. It took so long that I eventually woke up without ever getting the change to hear her whole story.
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