Eternity in a Moment

I once had a Peak Experience.

Abraham Maslow describes Peak Experiences as especially joyous and exciting moments in life, involving sudden feelings of intense happiness and well-being, wonder and awe, and possibly also involving an awareness of transcendental unity or knowledge of higher truth (as though perceiving the world from an altered, and often vastly profound and awe-inspiring perspective). They usually come on suddenly and are often inspired by deep meditation, intense feelings of love, exposure to great art or music, or the overwhelming beauty of nature. Yeah, that. I had one of those.

I mark my life as two separate stages: Pre-Badlands and Post-Badlands. The Badlands in South Dakota is where I came face to face with eternity and for an instant I was one with the Universe. (does that read as cheesy as it felt typing it?)

My incredible wife(who I don't spend nearly enough time talking about) and I decided we were going to take a big trip. The plan was to fly into Rapid City, SD stay in Historic Deadwood for a few days and then roadtrip it over to Yellowstone and stay in Jackson, WY for a week. Leading up to this trip I did quite a bit of research, mapping out routes, scheduling our hotels, planning stops, etc... I was REALLY excited.

When I was a boy my Grandparents took me on two roadtrips across the country. I had seen more of America as an elementary school age boy than most people twice my current age. I was excited to rejoin that path I had been taken on as a child.

We got in, got settled, and hit the road. the hour and half drive to Badlands from Deadwood was pretty nice. Big wide open prairies and grasslands for as far as the eye could see. Off in the distance were the Black Hills. A very special and sacred mountain range that is the home of Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse Monuments. Grey craggy mountains with tall majestic pines dotting the bald rocks. Breath takingly gorgeous. The Black Hills were very special and sacred to the Lakota tribe of which Crazy Horse is one of their most famous members. The Black Hills are also one of the oldest mountain ranges in the world.

We pull into Badlands National Park and follow the road to the first look out point. This is where everything changed.

First, your standing on top of a bluff that is several thousand feet high that looks out over the big, wide, sweeping prairie down below and all around you are the eroded half-mountains of soft rock and multi-colored soil. It probably looks almost exactly the same as it did several million years ago.

There are no guard rails so you could take a fast ride down to the bottom real quick if you weren't paying attention. No guard rails also meant you could get all the way out onto the edge, which is exactly what I did.

As I sat on the tall precipice and surveyed all that was before me I could feel a calm come over me. I felt like I was watching a movie that was moving in slow motion and reverse at the same time. I felt like time stood still and in those few moments I could sense eternity.Spread out before me was the entire timeline of the Universe. I could see history and the future unfolding. I felt like nothing else mattered except the ebb and flow of time. Time was flowing backwards and forwards but nothing was changing. I felt very small but yet extremely interconnected. Buddhists say that our conscientiousnesses are the Universes way of experiencing itself. That we exist solely so that Universe can see itself through our perceptions. At that moment I was an instrument of the Universe. I was the eyes and mirror of the Universe looking at itself. Time stopped.I sat there for many minutes soaking it all in. It was a powerful experience that literally changed my life. What I saw before me was so large and vast, not only the landscape but also time itself yet I felt as if I was an irreplaceable piece of the puzzle. I was supposed to be there. Everything I had done in life had lead me exactly to that moment, on that clifftop. I was sitting where countless Lakota Chiefs had stood. Looking out onto the prairie that gave them life. I was sitting where explorers and pioneers had stood in total and complete awe of the surroundings. I was sitting where Homesteaders had tried to carve out a home and living for their families and because of the rugged nature of the land had failed. I sat there with the spirits of all those men, women, and children that came before me and all the ones that would come in the future and sit there like me knowing my presence was there with them. All of Eternity felt in just a moments time.

I had that experience before I knew who Abraham Maslow was. He is the father of modern psychology and the creator of the Hierarchy of Needs. He says that once a person has a Peak Experience they will begin to chase that feeling. He wasn't kidding. I'd give up all my worldly possessions to feel that way again. I've tried meditation but it lacks the visual. My Peak Experience was a total sensory experience. Total immersion. I could see the very distant Black Hills about 60 miles away as well as the White River that carved the scenery in front of me. The sweet smell of the grass. It was like incense but you had to work to get the smell right and once you did it left a sweet taste in the mouth. My ears were full of the sounds of being on top of a bluff, that whistle when the wind has free range to go where ever it pleases. The sound of a wide open space, vast and wholly unknowable. The sweet grass rustled with the breeze. The murmur of people walking around talking about how beautiful it was.

It's been nearly five years since that moment on top of the bluff. Several times since then I have tried to reclaim that feeling. Its a bit like crack. I was lost. And not the kind of lost where I don't have a map. I mean "I" was lost, "me"=gone. "I" was no longer relevant. I was there but "I" wasn't. My ego was gone. My painful memories of childhood evaporated. The failed experiment of High School vanished without of a trace. Gone with the bad was all the good stuff too. It was NOTHING. The most beautiful, mind-shaking nothing I've ever experienced. I WANT IT BACK. I've stood on top of mountains and the edges of cliffs. I've been to a place so quiet and serene that a whisper could be heard from 100 yards away. None of those places produced that same feeling. That feeling of being A PART. A part of something so big and vast that you can never quite wrap your head all the way around it. I have reflected on that moment everyday since. EVERYDAY.

I would imagine that holy men/women of the world's religions go through a similar search. For lack of a better way to describe it, I'd say it was a MAJOR spiritual experience. I was looking into the face of God. God had annointed me and said "My child, this moment belongs to you and nobody else." I WANT IT BACK! I want to sit there with God, Gaia, Mother Nature, with the Lakota's Old Man and just sit. Sit and watch eternity unfold and take me along for the ride.

I long for the day that I can slough off responsibilities, pack the car with the necessities, grab my partner, my lover, my best friend, my wife, and get back to that place. That place of quiet, of beauty, of here-and-now-edness. I came away from that moment and that trip a different person. There was no second guessing what my joys in life were. There were no doubts on what I held sacred. I wish to be like Thoreau and "Live my life deliberately". There have been too many days from that moment to this that I feel weren't mine. How many more days to I have left? How many more do I have to spend doing something that isn't what I'd choose to do? Granted, I did make the choice. I can't and won't blame anybody other than me for where I am. But how much longer do I continue down this road? I want to put down the crown and scepter of responsibility. Hand them to someone else that deserves them, wants them. How much longer until I can sit on the edge of a cliff and feel the weightlessness of Nothing again?

Toad Appreciation and Other Fatherly Instructions for Life

I started this blog to help me unload some of these really heavy bags I've been carrying for most of my adult life. I figure if I get these thoughts out of my head they won't keep bouncing around in there.

My heaviest baggage are the ones I carry for my father.

I am an only child. I was raised by my single mother with some tremendous assistance from my grandparents, aunts, one step-father(more baggage to drop on him later), and various other adults in accompanied roles.

My mom left my dad when I was still an infant. She left him because he was physically and verbally abusive, adulterous, and an all around schitzo Vietnam Vet straight from the war. She fell in love with him because he seemed like a "wounded baby bird". She felt bad for him and wanted to nurse him back to health. The only issue was... he was fucked up before Vietnam EVER got a hold of him.

My abusive father was the son of an abusive father. I've been told stories that when my dad was just boy his father would beat him mercilessly while shouting that my dad wasn't his son, that he was a worthless piece of trash, and that he was the bastard child of the "mail-man". whoa...

Most of who we become as adults is informed by our parents. My dad was FUCKED from the get go.

My dad went to Vietnam to escape. He went to war to escape from home. He had pictures of John Wayne in his head. He wanted to come home the hero. That didn't happen. Instead Vietnam pushed him further into his own personal little Hell that he carried with him until he died. He told me stories of the fights and scuffles he got into while he was there but the weird thing is none of the fights or scuffles ever happened with the enemy. They were always with his fellow soldiers.

I never "KNEW" my Dad. Total amount of time spent with or around my father from my birth to his death= less than a calendar year. I stayed with him for a few weeks as a small boy, several months in fourth grade, and a couple of months when I was 18. Yeah, much less than a calendar year.

The time I spent with him when I was very young, I'm guessing I was four-ish. I was with him when I first learned of the concept of death. My mom and I had a cat that got run over when I was visiting him and my mom called to let me know about it. I started crying and my dad told me to stop crying, don't be a pussy! That was probably the first of MANY references my father would make about how my mom was raising a "Faggot" or a "Pussy". HEY ASSHOLE! I'M A FUCKING LITTLE KID! MY CAT DIED! I'M ALLOWED TO FUCKING CRY ABOUT IT! FUCK OFF!!! That particular event had major ramifications as I got older. I can remember as I child crying myself to sleep repeating over and over "I dont want to die. I don't want to die." I started having panic attacks in my late 20's about my eventual demise. I still have them occasionally.

My mom would always try to use my father to manage my behavior. My dad was the evil specter I should NEVER want to become like. If I was being lippy: "You're acting just like your Father!" What the fuck does that mean? She built this image in my head of all the horror stories of when they were together and these commandments not to "be like him" that the fear and wonder of him was really all I knew of him until later in life. My mom had taught me to be scared of him before I ever even knew him. The story she told me the most often was the one where she made the decision to leave him. She has told me this specific story very early in my childhood and repeated it many more times throughout my life. Its pretty pivotal to her story and to mine.

My mom had caught my dad red-handed with other women several times. This fateful evening while my dad was driving they passed the house of one of his "girlfriends" and my mom, sitting in the passenger seat holding my infant body in her arms, made a snide comment about his "bitches". My father unleashed hell and started back-handing my mom, punching her in the face. She used her arms and shoulders to protect me and it left her face exposed and he beat her until her nose broke and her eyes were blackened. She decided then and there that that was not an environment suitable for the up-bringing of a child.

I think she still uses it as "Do you see what I went through for you?" leverage. I know that sounds way muffed up but you'd have to know my mom to get the full appreciation. My mom "keeps score."

During fourth grade my mom had met a fella. She really liked this guy. She was also in the process of opening a business. I was 7 or 8 and wholly in the way of both the fella and the bidness. I was sent to spend some time with The Evil Specter! She wanted some alone time to get her shit together and she felt it was time for me to get to know my father.

Most of my memories of this time are still pretty vivid. We lived in a trailer in the woods by a lake. We had a dog and a cat. My household responsibilities were to put trash in the compost pile where we picked worms for fishing and to feed the cat by fishing using the worms from the compost pile. My dad was industriously lazy and cheap.We would go squirrel hunting a couple times per month for dinner. We went fishing in the lake not only for the cat but for ourselves. There were some neighbor kids but most were either several years older or younger than me so for the most part I was alone. Alone in the trailer, in the woods, by the lake, with my dad and his girlfriend.

My dad had pornography EVERYWHERE! It was on the bookshelves, in the bedroom, in the bathroom, in piles and stacks, posters on the backs of doors, EVERYWHERE! I had free range to look to and peruse at my leisure. I saw and knew more about the female anatomy than most 4 graders. Yep! Boobs and vajayjays everwhere! Most of the hardcore stuff he kept in his bathroom.

We didn't have TV so we would play Rummy, Crazy 8's, Go Fish!, or Poker to pass the time after dinner. During gameplay if I had an especially good hand laid down my dad would respond by saying: "You little cocksucker!" Again, I'm in FOURTH GRADE! I don't have the slightest idea what a "cock" is or what a "cocksucker" could even be. I just thought it was something my dad said in fun. I learned quickly that it was not something to say in mixed company when over at a neighbor's party I was chasing one of the other kids around calling them a "cocksucker" at the top of my lungs. Monkey see, monkey do, Dad!

Those are what I would consider the pleasant memories. These are the not so pleasant...

I had to go fishing every other day to feed the cat. Feeding a cat a live fish is definitely something everyone and every cat should get to experience once in their lives. ITS FUNNY AS HELL! At first the cat has NO IDEA what the hell they are supposed to do with the wet, flopping animal that has been presented to them. They figure it out eventually. Especially when there is no other food source.

On one of my fishing expeditions some of the older neighbor kids told me that if I used toads that I would catch bigger fish. This made sense because I had seen the rubber frogs sold at bait & tackle stores. They instructed me that I had to hook the toad in through the belly and out through the chest so that the toad would look like its "swimming" across the water. After collecting a bucket of toads (I lived in a trailer, in the woods, by a lake, with no television. I had already accomplished this activity out of boredom several times before) I set to fishing. I didn't catch a goddamned thing! NUTHIN'! SQUAT! ZILCH! ZERO! I tried more than one toad to see if there was a problem with the toads. I used small ones and big ones. The big kids swore to me that this worked. I saw the rubber frogs in the store. The story had a grain of truth. NONE OF THE TOADS CAUGHT ANY FISH! I wasted and entire afternoon using these toads, that would quickly die once pierced in this manner, trying to catch fish to feed the fucking cat! I came home empty handed and the cat went hungry.

Somehow my dad caught wind of this experiment. He was NOT happy about my afternoon of toad torture, maiming, and killing. I had spent many hours "collecting" hundreds of toads before this failed fishing adventure. I could go out into the woods and collect several dozen toads at any given moment of the night or day. I guess I'm trying to say that I didn't really fully appreciate or value the "Life" of a toad. My dad was here to put me on the straight and narrow path of Toad Appreciation.

He picked me up from school. Now this in and of itself is a truly heroic feat. I'm not sure if I've fully drawn the picture of exactly how remote this Kaczynski-esque "cabin in the woods" really was. We were part of what could be considered a neighborhood in the fact that we DID have neighbors. But each trailer was on several acre lots many hundreds of yards away from each other. One of the main roads into the the neighborhood was a dirt road that I've driven as an adult that took at least 20 minutes to drive down. All the internal roads were dirt and I had to walk at least 30+ minutes to get to the school-bus stop. The bus ride to school was an hour. This place was R.E.M.O.T.E!

Soooo...Like I said, he picked me up from school, EARLY! The ride back to the trailer was a quiet one. But once we got inside... I don't remember much if any of what he said but I remember very vividly what he did. He grabbed me by the back of the head, shouting something about "How does this feel!?!" and shoved his hand into my stomach and curled his fingers under my ribcage to simulate what I had been doing to the frogs. I was in fourth grade. Maybe 8 years old at the time. It knocked the wind out of me and hurt like hell.

I once asked my wife if she had ever been spanked. She had to think about it. Nope! You've never been spanked! If you have to think about whether or not you've been spanked... you never got spanked. You remember every lick. You remember like it was five minutes ago. The burn of your skin. The salt of tears as you sob uncontrollably for mercy and apologize for things that you had nothing to do with. The first lick was never the worst lick. That one would be buried under the sear of the ones put on top of it. And God save you, if ever their aim was off and they caught a piece of your thigh. Those cut to the bone.

I don't remember what I did but the worst beatings I took from him was when he beat me with the sticks that come with novelty flags. The little knobby tip of that fucking flag left the BIGGEST welts. I fucking hated that flagstick. I would conspire at night on how to get and destroy that flagstick. But I knew deep down inside that he would just replace that stick with something that had a deeper bite.

We had a big live oak tree in the front yard that had big sprawling arms of branches. I tried climbing them on several occasions but the angle of incline and height would unnerve me. My dad, who was 6'4" with long arms and legs had no issue climbing this tree. He once chastised me in front of the neighbor kids for being to much of "faggot, pussy" in not trying to conquer this tree. He sat on top of the arch shouting down at me: "JUST CLIMBING THE FUCKING TREE, YOU PUSSY! IS YOUR MOM RAISING A QUEER!?! CLIMB THE MOTHERFUCKING TREE! GET YOUR LAZY FAGGOT ASS ON THE BRANCH, PUT ONE FOOT IN FRONT OF THE OTHER, AND CLIMB THE FUCKING TREE!WHAT THE FUCK IS THE MATTER WITH YOU!?! ARE YOU FAGGOT COWARD THAT'S AFRAID OF CLIMBING A FUCKING TREE!?!" This went on for what seemed like an eternity in front of his girlfriend and the neighbor kids. I of course being overwhelmed with embarrassment and humiliation left crying just like the pussy my momma raised me to be. That was the last time I attempted to climb that tree.

One eventful night I got to witness a fight of epic proportions when my dad and his girlfriend got into a huge skirmish. He chased her around the trailer(it was a double wide) while she threatened to mace him. "I'VE HAD A BAZOOKA SHOT AT ME! YOUR FUCKING MACE ISN'T GOING TO SLOW ME DOWN!" They chased each other around in this manner for a good long while. Scary shit.

He always talked shit about my mom. He would call her a "miserable cunt" and talk about how he could feel it in the air when ever she was close. Cunt was just one of several colorful terms my father would use in reference to women. He would also employ: "Gash", "Slit", "Whore", "Bitch", "Slut", "Cum-Bucket". Most of these were made in reference towards my mom but, she didn't have the patent on them. Any woman was a target for these terms.

I watched my dad beat the hell out of some dude that was defending his girl's honor when my dad had tried making moves on her. It was like watching a rabid gorilla just wail on a dead rival. The guy he beat the shit out of was just as big as he was and went down like someone just turned his switch off.

My dad would fly into a rage at anytime. His face would scrunch up, his eyes would darken, his shoulders rose and came forward, his elbows would rise up and out like a swing would be taken. He was like one of those lizards that puffs up to defend itself. Except, imagine that lizard as a 6'4", PTSD, alcoholic, with rage issues. Egg shells don't even explain the half of it. You never knew if something you said, an expression you made, a response to a question, an error in judgement, or just the stars and clouds in the sky were going to push him off the plane of sanity and send him into a rage black-out. Those black-outs were bad. He would scream. He would profess how he could destroy buildings with a single touch. He would name-call. He would chastise relentlessly until you either made right or whimpered away. He was the kind of guy that would scream at you for asking questions or directions on how to do something. Then when you learned the lesson not to ask questions on stuff you had no ideas on and would then jump head first into it and try figure it out and when the inevitable fuck-up occurred he would scream at you for not asking questions. DAMNED IF YA DO, DAMNED IF YA DON'T!

Not long after the Mega-Fight between my dad and his girlfriend my mom came and got me. My dad's girlfriend had called to warn my mom the the atmosphere had soured and that it was a good time to get me out. My mom and her fella came and got me. That fella eventually became my step-father and adopted me. I have his last name.

TO BE CONTINUED... My Father and My Teen Years

That hollow liquidy sound that you hear when you vomit inside some else's mouth

Howdy! Bet that title got yer attenchun!

When I turned 30 I felt the weight of responsibility bearing down on my shoulders. "I am a MAN now!" I said to myself, not knowing exactly what the fuck that meant. I never had a steady model of what a "man" was, what a "man" acted like, or even how a "man" conducted himself in polite society. 30 felt like opening a gift from your deranged Aunt Bertha. "What the hell am I supposed to do with this!?!"

I just woke up one day feeling a societal pressure to participate. An awareness that I was a cog of a greater whole and that I should be a productive member of the group. Nobody came to me and said "Hey! Jackass! You're not doing enough!" It was that whisper of a voice inside my own head that said that.

By 30 I was running six restaurants for the same company I had been working for since 19. I was a very productive member of my company. I had received awards and recognition for the shit I had accomplished. But deep inside it wasn't enough. I was bored. I felt like I had climbed that mountain and stuck my flag in it so what else was there to do? Beat my previous best, you say? YAWN! I have always been the type that unless I REEEEAAALLLY enjoyed the movie/book/game/puzzle/tv show/whathaveyou, once I finished it, I was D.U.N.= done!

Now almost 7 years have past since my "awakening". I left that company that raised me from a insolent pup. My wife and I ran our own franchised hippie-dippie icecream shop for 3-4 years. That closed(expect a whole lot more on that later). And I find myself working for the same company that hired me and trained me at 19. OH! And I filed for and was discharged from a bankruptcy(think icecream) and I moved the other side of the country and back in six months! WHEEEE!!!

HOLY HELL! I'M CONFLICTED AND FEELIN' LIKE A WHINEY LITTLE BITCH!

I have discovered in the process of all this shit going on that I'm not really a big fan of ME! Yeah, I said it. I'm an asshole. Not the cool "Dennis Leary" kind either. I'm the self-centered, self-loathing, egotistical kind. The kind where I know better than to be doing the shit that I've done but for some self-sabotaging reason I can't GET THE FUCK OUTTA MY OWN WAY! I would like to care more about what happens in other people's lives but... I just don't have time for all that. People have to make an effort to get to know me. Sucks to be them. I have always just compartmentalized the loneliness. I figure I'll have more than enough tumors to keep me company in the coming years. Yep... just me and my tumors... sitting there... acting like: "Naw, man. We're cool. Yeah, I understand I was kinda a dick to you and that's the reason why you're not visiting me on my death-bed. I got it. S'ok." (FACESLAP) I seriously can't be that retarded!?! Oh no... I'm even more so.

So almost 7 years and here I sit. Thinking the same thoughts and feeling the same feelings I did when I became a "man". I thought I was on the right path with our icecream shop. It felt "right". It just didn't make money. I LOOOOVED that place. Of course there were days where I just didn't want to be there. Those were usually Mondays and Tuesdays. Not a whole lotta 'scream getting sold on Monday's and Tuesday's.

I felt like I was contributing. I started earning recognition from my community and hearing comments about how that was such a wonderful thing we did for SoandSo Elementary. It was fun work too. It was fuckin' icecream! What kind of cranky, sourpuss, fucker isn't happy eating icecream!?! But! Bad projections mixed with bad lease added to the bottom falling out of the housing market/economy and not to even mention gas hitting $4 a gallon= Bye-Bye Icecream Shop!

I left that original company because I wanted to OWN my own business. I did. It was great. Now I'm back in some middle-management position struggling to do the things I was an expert at 10 years ago and embarrassed as hell at my own performance of a job I used to be able to do in my sleep. I'm struggling and its pissing me off!

The name of my Blog is called Maelstrom. Its a badge of honor that's been earned. I am Jack's existential chemical burn.