Tag Archives: memoir

Holy Lotus Breakdown

Tom Catton, “Dharma Opening of the Heart,” and Bea Austin. August 2009; meditation retreat in Estes Park, Colorado.

In 1986, I was a confused 14 year old boy, fucked up like a soup sandwich. Two events merged into one in my then trembling field of being. Through a mediocre Jim Morrison biography I had discovered the Beat Consciousness – Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, etc… They were part and parcel of my simultaneous awakening and corruption. They in turn introduced me to Buddhism (and the romanticizing of drugs). I spent many teen nights trying to decipher the Tibetan Book of the Dead (the only book I ever stole – catch that Karmic irony!) and the Diamond Sutra with burning pot smoke curling up into my eye. The Beats took Buddha off of the takeout menu and centered him into my psyche. Kerouac made Christ sound like the original beat, assuring me that “Walking on water wasn’t built in a day.” Buddha spoke of suffering, but as a young teen I simply took this as this: “all life is shit.” Fair enough. At one point I even had the grandiose plan of one day going to the Naropa School in Boulder, CO., to study at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, whatever the hell that was. I went as far as to order the Course Catalog, excitedly showing my Dad as he nodded and tried to look interested as the UK Wildcats played on the TV.

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A Hateful Child on a Night Watch Spree

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1987; aged 15. At one point, I was prescribed so much Lithium that I referred to myself as the “Human Salt-Lick.”

(This is an edited memoir excerpt that I had originally posted as a note some time ago on FB and had also been previously posted on a website devoted to spirituality and recovery. I wrote this four and half years ago in an attempt to summon my precise mindset during my 14^th and 15^th years, after being diagnosed with having Bipolar Disorder. At that time in my life, I was prone to these nightly walks that were as senseless as they were somehow mandatory. Looking back, I think I was simply in a manic state and maybe that constant motion helped me keep one step ahead of the pain I could never seem to elude. If the writing or sentiment seems like that of an adolescent, then I have succeeded, for that is the very voice I was trying to both resurrect and reconcile in this piece.)

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Kissing the Goat

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Ouija Boards, Acid and Retinol Cream

Baphomet Pentagram

(What follows is my first memoir piece for STAREHOUSE, chronicling some of the highs and lows of my spiritual and mental journey of the past 25+ years, however real or imagined. I had previously published parts of this as a note on Facebook. I have changed the names of all parties involved; the rest is all true – or at least what I believed to have happened to me.)

A spiritual awakening implies that previously in my life, I was not awake. I had fallen asleep, gradually at first through detached, selfish behavior and then more directly through a series of increasingly expensive, self-induced chemically tuned lullabies. I had removed myself from all of the work and all of the play, having little time or patience for other people and even less for a positive, spiritual life. God became a vacancy sign, and then gradually read “Closed for Business”.

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