This is it!

Not quite 5 months ago I had a daunting dream of Kali and her minions taking me apart and putting me back together. I wrote about it here.

I've been living with that dream and with that image ever since... Really... I've been living with Kali since I first met her in Calcutta as she was climbing through my bedroom window on a dark night of the soul in 1985.

It all comes down to one thing... As Joseph Campbell once put it rather succinctly, "There must be Destuction before there is Creation."

I've been destroying some or all of my life for the better part of the last 20 years.

The most pressing fact for me, with regard to the economic catastrophe that we are presently living in, is an awakening to the reality that often I have been consistently engaged in activities and enterprises that I not only don't find fulfilling, they also don't support me in the way I am hoping and expecting them to. Too often they have been activities and circumstances that have stolen the joy from my life, my time with my children and family, and any sense of heart I struggle to maintain despite the ugly, sad, frustrating mess that so often passes for every day life.

What I know now is that it absolutely must stop!

I keep trying to figure out how to save my present circumstances without undergoing the destruction that is of necessity that precursor of rebuilding.

Yesterday I applied for a job here in Petaluma that could possibly be the "job I was created for." I have another job that I've been waiting to hear about, a job that harkens back to my spiritual and political roots; both are the kind of thing that I would LOVE doing, but who knows whether those who make such decisions will see things in that way.

What Kali says is that it all must go into the fire. If I've learned anything in my life as a temporal lobe epileptic religious freak with desperate entrepeneurial socialistic tendencies, it's that Easter Sunday can't come until you suffer through Good Friday.

The last five years have been a very excellent example of a LONG Good Friday; a friday that I have exposed and expressed on these posts (along with no small amount of good times as well, I really must add).

In any case... it feels like it's time to move on. Move on to what is not as clear as I would like it to be at the moment, but moving on into the dark will have to be my present mode.

So this is the last post at Quicksilver Amusements... As for what I said yesterday, I can't decide if I'll keep up on the other blogs or not. The simple fact is that what comes up on the other side of the hill is anybody's guess. All I really know is that I will never find true baptism and rebirth if I don't stop treading water.

Time to kill things off.

Nothing to see here... please move along.

Looking For The Next Best Thing

I began blogging 4 years and eight months ago on July 29, 2005 just before I made the strange and fateful decision to move to New Orleans after nearly 30 years in the Bay Area, and three weeks before Katrina.

With my engagement with Katrina (and a few other storms) that blog, which was intended as a sort of exploration of my new life, became a two year long exploration of what it was like to live in the aftermath of catastrophe (physical, emotional, and relational) in the new world order of George Dubya Bush's Amerikkka. I also stated a couple of other sort of specialty blogs for the purpose of branching out with the things I had to say: Butting Heads for long form, usually contentious, rants. George Washington's Cousin for political and religious pontification.

After two years of writing at SpeakLo I closed out that blog and began Quicksilver Amusements (by the way... some of those first pieces at QA are really good, and you should go read them, or even read them again.

It's now been two and a half years since I started this blog and lately (as most of you have noticed and noted) I seem to have lost momentum. With SpeakLo I had a drive that developed of its own accord and gave me something to relate to. In the early days of QA, I had new life and love to write about and I was experiencing things with whole new vibrant eyes; a way of seeing that I had not experienced for quite some time. Now, I simply find it difficult to grab hold of something in the general sphere of things to snag my hand on and wrestle with til dawn. It seems that when I do find those things, I have reason to put them in other places, instead of putting them here. I've even re-started SpeakLo with some pieces on sound and music that interest me and that seem to be appropriately in residence at that location instead of here.

So I've decided to start again... again.

For the next few months I'll be winding down this blog and winding up on some other formats, with the intention of making a full out relaunch in some completely new format on the fifth anniversary of my original blog. I haven't exactly figured out how I'm going to do it, or what I'm going to focus on, but I expect it to have a certain level of continuity that these other blogs have not had for quite some time.

In particular, I'm going to be writing on "spiritual matters" at the Bleeding Daylight, political thoughts and pontfications at Washington's Cousin and business, aesthetic, and practical concerns back at the renewed SpeakLo. Between now and summertime, I hope to find a voice and a process that can bring a bit more cohesion to these ramblings, but considering the fact that I have spent the better part of 55 years trying to accomplish something along those lines would indicate that I may be reaching for something that is truly beyond my grasp... We'll see.

I'll keep you posted here, on facebook and on Twitter and I hope you'll either contact me there, or leave comments here (and at the other blogs) to perhaps help guide my direction as I struggle to find the voice that speaks what I really want to communicate from my soul.