Born Under Punches: Secret Chiefs, Ruined Moose, and Even More Stories About Buildings and Food

Yes, I've stolen this most hallowed of titles, my coming-of-age bullshit, straight from the gatefolds of some other mouths. But who are we kidding, really? Besides being brilliant plagiarists, scientists of The Plainly Obvious, and God's Prized Poster Children for Chaos, we as humans are, at our best, Talking Heads. We've been nothing but, and will always seem like nothing since. We give supreme meaning to our meat. And, as much as I live and breathe that definition, I will always have to keep reminding myself, lest I forget, as the highways I build to take me away merge and unfurl, the jams bifurcating, becoming elemental in their formulation of just what it is I'm seeing, doing, and being, here.

Imagine: you're walking too fast and too slowly, through the harrowing grey nervousness preceding a mid-afternoon shower, as women in tight capris scamper, cowering beneath fragile hairdos. The locale: Bryant Park, that eerily humble cavern of stone and tree, on the East Side of Midtown Manhattan. There are skyscrapers cradling the experiences there, a silent Jazzfest stage sits simmering...I'd seen shows there in times past, I foggily recalled, feeling the crowd hummering, and the squabbling sax of some Max Roach trio, squawking and ringing from the altitudes.

"You're *always* late, so what does it matter anyway..." your friend Tina says blandly, inhaling, bored as sheetrock, from her rolled DRUM cigarette. You know she doesn't mean to be mean. You know she's just seen it all, too, even though she *wasn't* at 12/31/99. And here, it doesn't really matter where you were. Time marches on.

I never seem to have any time anymore, it seems. In moments when the clock ticks the same moments repeatedly, I float in midair, a million places at once. The next thing I know, the pressure is huge, like an internal balloon inflating a clogged viaduct. I'll try, occasionally, to exit my apartment, where I live alone in Brooklyn, a in a seething, veritable landscape of "me" (for whatever good, and "that bad"). Still largely undecorated, it is sometimes fortress-like, reminding me of the poverty I endure out of a chronically scattered inability to consolidate my efforts, the resulting belligerent laziness, but a richly experienced avoidance of "selling out" (to them high-paying temp agent pimps). I guess it could be all mine, a crumpled ruse I present to slide by deadlines, vainly fronting like I spend all my moments as do the mystical Indian serpent goddesses, The Naga Women, who glibly weave the constituents of reality atop the mystical Mount Meru.

But I mean, really. I'm not sure anymore who people think I am, especially me. More than one month has passed since last week's Dread Tenth, that day that our fearless leader, Dean Budnick, so loves and loathes. He endures my whining more forgivingly than others, I think to myself in such times. But what do we really know of each other, any of us? Of our secret languages My mind does a swan-curved backflip over time, and realizes that, at points, I draw the spare lines of my life around music, scribbled amidst shows, rooms full of stereos, DJs spinning and eyes glowing, blinking at one another like traffic lights and swerving like curtains across the blackness of space. If you were here last month, you'd have seen me hurtling through a month of shows, barely differentiated sometimes, save a shift in tempos and the swift retreat of the beat. Hair Death and Free Jazz became one and the same, and lines already blurred became blurrier. And in times like this, I pause, and regard the architecture.

Irving Plaza bore my first Pavement show in 1993, a bit after I began to know a bit of this thing called Phish, and, as yet, nothing of another thing called moe.. I was pressed and pulpitted, inches nearer opulent molded overhangs, dark ledges of serenely austere layers of paint, the thickness and shine of a human sclera, the thing that gives an eye its "white." It is the part of the eye that, as depicted in Tibetan thang-kas (those beautiful tapestries a-glitter with fringe), makes one cringe with tension and blanch with disbelief; orbs emit wild stares, either flaming protrusive from the sockets of acid-slobbering protective deities, or are dangled in hand by the most fearsome, like Vajrabhairava, who swings clusters of the objects for mere recreation, squashing human ignorance underfoot.

Bodies swooned and launched away then, as I wearily mouthed Arthurian lyrics to my fave Pave offerings. The next show I'd see at Irving was Superchunk, in 1995, when a similar tsunami of endless shoving, and the catapulting of disaffected youth cast shadows against the walls of the damply regal, swingin' hot-spot at 15 Irving Place.

Flash forward. I love doing that. With the planet moving at something like 28,000 miles a second, how can one *not*? Here and now, in the (supposed) first quarter of my life, I hang like a turgid moon above my own landscape. It is early evening. I am a town like my college domain, Oswego, New York...juxtaposed, jerry-built, reckless and reveling, right near the water. In these times, which turn out to be all times, so seamless, we do flash backwards. Therein, we find a semblance of continuity. In August 1998, a time for me that was proving both vulnerable and wearily vapid, Dean Budnick, a relative stranger (but known man-about-the-scene) approached me to write for his new upstart, JamBands.com, on having seen many of the novellas I'd posted to various Internet mailing lists about the burgeoning grassroots improv music scene. As time passed, we, and others, our own foundation: the simple moniker, "jamband." But, through our debates and recounting of life in buildings created for no other purpose but an ageless spirit of performance, we became not only sonic gourmands, but vibratory connoisseurs. And here we are, to completely re-invent this art, this weather.

Those unfamiliar with the territory have now sniffed the perimeters and smiled, choosing to run inside, past a cheerily laid-back watchman. It now goes beyond shows, beyond venues with their oft off-putting vagaries, mysteries surrounding decades-old "hippie" assumptions, slippery promoters and management with their cuneiformic abstractions, rabid, curious presspeople waiting at the wings to exploit and wring the Next Big Thing out of our tightly woven knot of experience...even in my tardiness, I feel we have endured. Perhaps its fine for me to say, running in with curlers streaming and the sleep of demons in my eyes.

But I feel I've been here from the day in 1991, humbuckering down Jericho Turnpike in my notorious homeland of Long Island with my big brother, Dave, towards destiny. It lay, quixotically, closeby in a box marked "Caution: Fresh Shrimp". It was a bass guitar, blood-red and $50 cheap. It was a four-string, gloriously basic, the brand Premier (I thought they only made drums!). I went home, sat down, feeling awkward and oddly poised, after nine years of classical violin training, and learned some songs by Teenage Fanclub. Soon, I was dithering along Led Zeppelin tabs, Black Sabbath snowdrifts, and a rancid little ditty called "Those Damned Blue-Collar Tweekers," by a weird, bass-heavy little fishin' threesome from California called Primus.

So, what, then, is this misery we subject ourselves to, called "time"? Yet again, we've come forward, and managed to go back, all at once. In my CD player at this time (taking care of my "Monthly Spins" in a fashion as yet unseen this year), I have a CD beginning with a personal anthem called "Stereo" (from 1997's "Brighten the Corners," by Pavement). There is a compilation of ancient, obscure Hindi devotional chants and songs, called "Shree Vishnu Sutee" (or, "The Subtle Art of Inflaming Oneself For the Sake of the Enjoyment Of The Four-Armed Preserver"). Following closely is 1993's landmark studio album by the ever-more ubiquitous jamlords, Phish ("Rift," the CD which provided the exact soundtrack to a tiny mouse dying in my left hand, moments before my 25th birthday, back in November, 1999). There is a CD-R of a show by The Disco Biscuits, from Boston's basement, The Middle East, 4/21/2000, with the newly-configured trio which opens with a searing, sentimental, glowing version of "Mr. Don." (I, however, couldn't listen to it right now, for the sheer lack of bassist, Marc Brownstein...honestly) Finally, there is the 1979 punk-rock, electro-freak classic, "Q: Are We Not Men? A: We are DEVO!", by the so-named philosophical underground revolutionaries of the last century.

Even though I thought I'd get Pavement, I've been caught listening to "Rift" instead. Part of me fears something awesome will happen again, like the weeping of salmon from the heavens, or perhaps the sudden, explosive rage of one Punky Brewster, now a neurotic twenty-something Soleil Moon Frye, in a bar somewhere on the other side of the Mississippi (apologies to Ms. Frye if I'm slandering...your name is just truly sonorous). The hectic pulse of "Maze" is closing in around me; I don't know at all why. In some ways, I wonder why I subject myself to this Devil Music. The cymbals are driving my out of my tree.

Flash back. It's about 4:40 AM, the morning of 5/22/2000. I'm wearing a baggy hooded sweatshirt and jumbled cargo pants. It's damp, crappy, and ornery on the corner of 52nd Street, near Roseland Ballroom. Somewhere in my head registers when it was twelve hours earlier, as I painted my toenails in my bedroom, in "an arrogant gesture to what the best of the Twentieth Century [had] to offer" (a-la Frank Zappa's "Mud Club," from 1981's "You Are What You Is"). I was gearing up to head down to the cleanest version of the Mud Club the Phish scene has ever seen, the hardest-boiled white-trash, blue-collar, homo-rainbow, new-age flipout Radio City Music Hall has (and may never again) see.

All manner of injustices committed upon the Old Guard went appealingly unnoticed and unseen. I myself petitioned two unsuspecting young Virginians sitting in front of me (hilariously named "Dicky" and "Barrett," in some incredible and unbelievable salute to Dicky Barrett, the lead singer of Boston power-ska all-stars, The Mighty Mighty Bosstones). Yet earlier, I poured from a cab and swept through the streets in a $50 (cheap!), floor-length black satin orchestra gown, twirling, amnesiac and glittering with a furry bag towards a new twist on the fantastic revelry I'd come to know as the Phish "rock and roll show."

I'd raced into said cab, bolting past an oblivious and ever-productive Jeff Waful (JamBands.com's tireless news agent) on the in-and-out-ramp of Wetlands. I'd soon discovered, toenails painted but demurely disguised under black satin, and blue Adidas cross-trainers, that I'd mysteriously appeared on that night's schedule to work. "My Friend, My Friend, He's Got a Knife." Hot with lateness (of course!), showy and glorious for one night, I left slippery with discontent, squeaking out the front door for another Night In Tunisia. How and why it could be possible that, after an aeon of absence, I should show up on the roster bewildered me. Later, though, I tirelessly returned to the Old Home Place, to indulge in an all-night aftershock of Uncle Sammy. "Wading in the Velvet Sea" had never meant more to me, as the arched walls of that Epicurean bon-bon of Art Deco delight vibrated in exquisite innocence, me and Mike, and Dicky and Barrett, and bosstones and skyballs bounced about the ruined remains of some I coil I knew was squirming, somewhere.

Again, it is later in the morning. Uncle Sammy told us where to go: "take me back to the rock and roll show," they wailed, into a squall of dubby reggae wandering. I stumbled out onto the damp concrete in the warbling dim of dawn. At minutes to five, a thousand crusties, the likes of which the widened eye could barely behold, bolted up the corner near the venue, into the yawning maw of their apparent salvation. A straw hanging from my lips, orange juice a tang on the way down to the Beneath of Me, my legs thought nothing but to mutely begin to dash. I saw arms flailing, buildings moving in a blur past my peripheries. Cars honked and danger boasted, but I, like Jesse Owens on the run towards the finish under the scrutiny of several thousand Nazis, ran from some thirsting and colorful, yet wrecked and ruined semblance of My Soul, which I saw being threatened by a mob of angry joggers on a Monday morning in Midtown, in the Year 2000.

I saw two of my closest friends, pals whom I'd seen at show after show, from here to Californ-IA, tearing through the streets like Mad Max hobos, clutching their most mortal belongings, shoes, money, and sleeping bags, hours after all their things were lifted out of a friends car, parked near Radio City. Pressed into the teeming fray, I glanced over a shoulder impulsively to mark the time. The digital clock back in Times Square boinked onto "5:00" almost as I whipped my head around to find my friends within a foot's breathing distance from my nose. They reminded me that all their crap had been stolen the night before, as I marveled in awe at the anger simmering up in waves around me, the thousand bodies pushing in mad anguish, blinking intrepid slumber and growing rage from their eyes. The once well-oiled and gussied-up civilians were the same who swayed and boogied to the strains of "Gotta Jiboo" just a few hours before.

We discussed the situation, as bewildered line-zombies crawled from the torn wreckage of platoons formed up around the bases of office buildings within five blocks of the Roseland Ballroom, in the middle of my nexus, New York City. The following Tuesday, Phish would accomplish an unprecedented limited-capacity show, on the cool heels of their most successful and radio-ready studio outing to date, the tidily alluring, measured, and entrancingly danceable "Farmhouse."

That morning, I looked around me, my legs quivering from dancing all night long, first to Phish, the old-school papas, then to Uncle Sammy, the youngest band around, whippersnappin' Jaco Pastorius and self-made stories of meditative ecstasy. I listened, as my "kind hippie brothers and sisters" sneered the worst imaginable garbage vulgarity at one another, in the name of a small plastic wristband which would mark their Tuesday night fate. My brain helplessly launched into a kind of fugue, the oppressive situation around me harkening back to darker days, not those myriad illumined halls of airy, musical liberation. Perhaps my eyes were screwed in different that morning, but after having rarely been shut out of the multi-dozens of Phish shows I've decided I wanted to see, at exactly 7:00 AM, I glanced over a shoulder at the clock. I shook my friends' hands, bade farewell another nearby Wetlands constant (who stood valiantly among the mad hordes, blasting Grateful Dead tunes from a boom box, in vain hope of congealing the "love" which was almost nonexistent that grim morning). As my friend informed me that my karma would be richly rewarded for leaving a line on which I was most assuredly regarded a scab, the emptiness of the sentiment hovered in my mind for a moment, and I walked off the line, defeated, sulking and squirming, some frozen mouse quivering in my far away insides.

Our heads talk and scheme. Last month, I saw the rattling heads and arms of Ween, in both the shellacked splendor of a Thursday at Irving Plaza, and the huge, forbidding, yet cozy barn of a Saturday night at the Electric Factory in Philadelphia. There seems to be one thing several jamband-savvy people point out to me, on realizing the extent of the (completely paltry) two-hour road trip I undertook on Memorial Day Weekend, for a little possible ride on the Poop-Ship Destroyer. "They played basically the same set as the Thursday show," naysayers whinny.

Okay, so I haven't gotten around to believing in my misty "journalistic status" enough to actually slap my bitch up to the Powers-That-Be, for the comps that I (might?) deserve. So, I missed the Friday Ween show, and hung out instead with old high school friends on the 22nd floor of an East Side condo, looking over all of Lower New York. For the sheer hell of it. For keeping my eyes open through all this incredible beauty and inquiry. For managing to stay in love with a thing, be it a jam or a deeply angry mother, until its very infolding, to endure shaky sorties made outside this ever-fertile greenhouse of experimental collaboration, between "what is" and "what will be." And still, I persist in blithering about events, bands, strains and soundings that do not "fit together," the contrasts too angular to comprehend, the confusion more Slick than Jefferson Airplane lacking just that, on a Sunday night full of high-priced beer at the Bottom Line.

But that's (sorta) why I work at Wetlands, and still do, and also remain a life-member of the JamBands.com Gravy Train Straphangers. Although my inquiring mind forces me to confront the absolutely unfathomable dichotomy of everything I have grown to adore, and construct the Architecture of Myself around, I get privileges incalculable, and probably over-used. So too, since the beginning, and Dean Budnick's announcement, people said The Jammys were nothing but The Shammys, whacked up around money, vanity, ego-waving and snobbery. But suddenly, here it all is. Tickets on sale for $20 at the Box Office, and a half-page ad in the Village Voice. History is repeating itself in the form of the perpetual Youth of the Moment. That youth is real, that reinvention more shrouded in mystery than most things we can really take in and hold. From beginningless time, we've encountered one another, trying to make sense of the perceived dualities we've scampered across since the cave days.

Who is who and what is what? Why are we in these bodies, and why do they soar, as well as ache, so easily? Who said they could put that thing over there, and why am I surrounded by strangers who sweat on me, shore me up while dancing, and make me sick with joy and sorrow, at their eternal closeness? Who holds the sacred elixir to both ease the pain, and to lead the people into That Real Fuckin' Salvation? Up until this point in musical history, no aural art form has come as close to seeing without touching, the Big Divine thing which can move so many and bridge so many gaps. Wetlands is the veritable East Coast home of the jamband, for all that means, and still doesn't actually compute. Like the Ocean of Existence in Buddhist lore, it is a place I find myself tethered to like a schooner, as I execute the trade of my unbidden surname, wallowing through all this kaleidoscopy.

The night after the first Ween show at Irving Plaza, I made my way back to Wetlands. There, I met the so-called guitar heathen and physical reactor of the band, Dean Ween. he was leaning by the right-side pole near the main stage, looking a little wilted, but protean and incredible, in that way that "stars" tend to. He was watching his bandmate, drummer Claude Coleman's band, Amandala, laying out some dense, jumpy funk anthems of sweet alienation. Somewhere in the course of the conversation, we stumbled upon the odd similarity of having both contracted the same high-level infectious diseases at the same time. Hepatitis (the "good" kind), and Mononucleosis, were the absurd order of business. Later, I marveled at whatever unforeseen force guided me and Deaner, alive through the wilderness of "The Pod," the scary, subliminal, and deliciously dark 1991 Ween album produced during which Deaner was struck ill. My own illness hit two years later, in time for the disjointed ecstacy of Ween's "Pure Guava."

But "The Pod," oh...that was the stuff. Gave me the nightmares. It was playing when, truly out of it from some shredded college gym-sock affair, an unsheathed fan fell on my face, while still turned on, in Freshman year of college. "The Pod" spoke to me then, a shrouded glory from Deaner, his so-called "brother" and sub-dwelling accomplice, Gene Ween, and the mysterious instrumentalist pictured on the album's cover in full Leonard Cohen mockery, one disembodied androgyne known only as Mean Ween, scowling numbly out from under a gas mask. The power trio survives, casting an odd triangularity on a barely noticed, missing fourth.

Speaking of which, the CD player has cycled through the brightened corners, and into that modern version of the "basement tape" from late April, which I missed in real-time, mired in a rainstorm back home. The reconfigured Disco Biscuits mightn't have seen a quartet with my aforementioned low-end idol, Les Claypool, had old bassman Brownstein never left. These are the enigmas that comprise the often lopsided angles of our lives' construction. "The Unspoken Rhyme," the tri-form Biscuits' formidable and undeniably DEVO bastard child of Styx, Yes and Rush, forges into the jam already still in my ears. The strings iterate, as Aron Magner's keyboard fuse into split identity, expounding upon the elegantly wasted adrenaline of hidden drives, shadow-tossed results, that which morphs out of an existing thing, gone aimless, unwatched, and adrift on seas devoid of definition. "Story of the World" meanders like a happy, funky chicken without a head. I sit and wonder: what happens when a society of the gloriously, brilliantly headless comes to the forefront of human life? Heads full of concepts like balloons, drifting above the slur and murk of what dangles down below.

Back on 6/6/2000, I had the pleasure of witnessing a show at Wetlands I had, perhaps, some 2% responsibility for. I simply gave a nod of extreme approval at just the right time, in the office, as the new breed of Power-That-Is, Jake Szufnarowski (talent buyer of the club) spoke to who I assume were management of the Mr. Bungle side-project band, Secret Chiefs 3.

Secret Chiefs 3 first came to my knowledge in some shady chat-room conversation somewhere, with someone from a few years back on the Internet, about one Mr. Bungle. Back in the days when I'd frequent the weird, fringe, art-jazz scene, I'd heard twitterings of some kinda off-kilter side thing of the infamous SoCal nausea-funk band, which was not to be ignored or missed. Something about Secrets. Something about Chiefs. It sounded right up my alley, but, chronically harebrained about my musical obsessions, I must have passed it all up for the next Phish show.

That is, until early this June, when a hearty nod made 3 (+ 2) guys appear on a stage that alarms me nightly with its very diversity. The Chiefs (comprised of guitarist Trey Spruance, bassist Trevor Dunn, and drummer Danny Heifetz, from Bungle) emerged in a haunting frenzy of surf-rock insanity, for one assaultive forty-minute set. They disappeared, to the howls of obscurity-thirsting fans of satellite bands, Mr. Bungle, and bently baroque jokester Mike Patton's other weird band, Faith No More. Again, Three Chiefs of secret connections emerged, to perform some of the most random, cleansing, powerful music I've heard, inside jambands, and outside the completely ridiculous and increasingly perfunctory, merely honorific term. The Chiefs dragged me kicking and screaming near moons of the past, buried under their own dust and hovering blandly mesmerizing, like La Luna Loca at her fullest.

Men and apes coalesced, mad Arabian jams pushed Pakistani envelopes of eye-bleedingly spice-filled and folded banana leaves, concealing sultry fringes and hard, colonial deadpans masking some kind of caged, elemental frenzy. Cathedrals, abbeys and geodesic domes swirled from tones, built to the spirit of willed, choice-driven creation and destruction, something shunned and exiled to the back rooms of schools and imperial homes everywhere, even today. Wild, winged beasts forced fleeing from gilded captivity, loom over sleeping sentinels, who breathe dark, unchosen information onto the slumbering brow of the daytime prisoner.

It amazed me what efficacy can be achieved with a few amps, a fringey scarf, some stringed instruments, suits, sunglasses, a sheet, and a slide projector, even today, in this, the advent of The Future. Now, I listen to how DEVO can't get any satisfaction, back in '79, in a tone so robotic, you'd think it came from 2002.

Finally, and most recently on my travails of a life that is as much a jamband as anything you'll see at the Jammys, I plunged into an ice-water-cold retread of all my damn jamband life, this past weekend at that place that is, these days, just as hot as it is wet. The unprecedented Al Schnier-less side band of hard-jammin' old-schoolers, moe., is called Ha Ha the Moose. They were three. They were masked, as bands of three sometimes are, the two buddy rovers and the third, unknown daemon, forming some bizarro link from the whole, to the X-Factor. Mexican wrestling masks, the sort so garishly adorned and arrayed that it distracts from the pinched, smoldering humanity that presses through every seam. But this is no issue, as long as the cling of the thing remains close, the curtain which hangs between this world and that snugly packed against the face of the universe, in all its unfairness, limitless abundance, and void, healing hum. When we recall that it is art and hunger which make us suffer, as well as art and hunger which make us shine, it is then that we capture the diamond which defeats time...always one step ahead of pain, longing, artifice, graft, and discomfort.

Ha Ha the Moose, a bruised-up quadruped, moved pretty fast for something that trashed. There were speedy and scintillating re-dos of REALLY old-school moe. tunes, such as the raunchy, pedophiliac scandal shout, "Long Island Girls Rule" (performed in strict defiance to Rob Derhak's pronouncement that moe. would never do the song again). There was driving classic cock-rock, song fake-outs, and lots of alcohol splashing about. Shell-shocked, spared-down rock has never looked so appealing.

But in the end, it's all about permutations. It's not about the right place at the right time. It's more about being in the right time, and the right place, standing sort of besides yourself, in all the good and terrible bad that can come to mean. It's about, somehow, having the courage to sit down after feeling war-torn and shrapnel-shorn, after merely walking four blocks in some city, somewhere, and turning the Walkman up louder to drown out the screams. For years and years, we've watched as the unassuming among our ancestry waved glory to the most incredible gore, uplifted and revered criminals and scoundrels, and fought to the veins to support that which keeps moving human evolution in a sick, lateral drift downwards.

As a writer, though, who grew literally out of necessity, in relation to the helpless, daily expansion of a dissolving identity, I can say that I know a thing or two about improvisation. I recall an icon of my youth, the creamy pages of an Orwellian anithero's forbidden journal, one William Smith's unsuccessful last key to survival in the terse, totalitarian tome, "1984." I've traced the outlines of creation which comes from destruction, of ideas razing everything from gender, to the very magnetic attraction which keeps me anchored to this particularly insane, and rather amazing planet.

As DEVO withers, the last CD fading into the night, the song "Shrivel Up" extols some key false realities about the future-past of Life on Earth. "Dying under Daddy's cap, now." The oppressive joke of "Patriarchy." The lie of male-dominated everything. The sham of "this-is-this, and that-is-that, and this will someday run out and cease to be." The likeness of chanted prayers of survival uttered by Chinese-tortured Tibetan monks and nuns, to the random, burned out chattering of children exiled, abused and fragmented in the Post-War suburbs all across America.

As a kind-of-a-guy, kind-of-a-girl-thing, bumbling through the shabby remains of Late Capitalist indulgence, the lines blur for the millionth time, this time maybe for good. I pore blindly through aged, pioneering works of ancient Buddhism, and newly stunning pieces of modern psychology. I look back on my life, and all the bright and desolate places I forget having seen. But most integrally, I listen, as yet-uncreated jewels of strangers-become-friends, fall blithely from the cool, fiery, cosmic mouths of beings I know are always watching, protecting.

Because of something I do, and often struggle to bear each month, the kindness of a watching bystander, and the support of countless kindly beings, I am still alive to write this spiraling Story of Me. If all goes well, it'll also tell of you, and of us, now, and for some more moments of eternity. The legacy, work, and scope of the Jam Band is just beginning. Out of unexpected correlations between seemingly randomly-borne arrangements, I have come to find family which comes rambling in, out of every corner of this life, both bright and dim. Sometimes, they are real people, showgoers and music makers. Others, fabrications I create to traverse the sometimes choppy ocean of a day. I know, in those moments that I'm Pulling It Off again, shedding the mask, and also retaiing the playful concealment of Mother Moon and Father Sun, making love and illusion, and nothing at all, forever. Amazed I even made it through, when sometimes I never thought I'd make it this far, I realize for an instant that I am full, and sheltered by some enduring, nonsensical dome of wisdom, and completion. I am, for one second, totally satisfied, and I have surely found the Light...just in time.