God help me I swore I wouldn't Blog

R.I.P. Alton Kelley

mikio — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 01:26:51 GMT

"Our dearest Kelley passed early this morning, peacefully at home. He returned home last Wednesday, so very happy to be out of the hospital and back home. Marguerite was by his side, as she has been from the beginning. The family asks for solitude and will announce a memorial to celebrate Kelley at a later date. In lieu of flowers, an account will be set up at the Western St. branch of Washington Mutual to raise funds for a bench in a Sonoma County park. Peace and much love to Kelley's immediate family and wide group of friends and fellow artists. Your caring thoughts and words sustained Kelley throughout his illness." (from his caring bridge page) Kelley was a gentleman, progenitor and innovator to event posters as an art form and a consummate artist. Had one of the best 4 hours of my life listening to his and Wavy Gravy's war stories while we signed a huge stack of Seva Foundation 25th anniversary concert posters that Kelley and I had worked on. Happy trails Kelley and thanks for paving the way for all of us young upstarts.

Premature rumours & perils of minor celebrity

mikio — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 17:50:52 GMT

Got this in email this morning: "Dear Mikio, To make a long story short, i was at earth day in golden gate park today, saw one of your T-shirts, and heard you were no longer with us, but I'm hoping you are, having heard nothing of the sort, I think it's a wild rumor, and, please correct me! missing you, hope you're well, steve enzer (from Stephen and Robin's way back when)" Now strangely enough if this is actually a rumour with legs on it it will have been the third such ghost story. For those of you who know me through DJ, Freek, Burner. Pagan, etc worlds much of the attention I've gotten in life has come from the album art & images on tie-dye t-shirts that I contributed to the GrateFul Dead scene back in the day. In the early eighties a friend who created deadhead sticker art Mikel, passed away from stomach cancer. Because of our similar names and because news was communicated between hundeds of thousands of stoner hippies verbal "telephone game" style, confusion ensued. When I got off the plane in SF to attend a presentation by Joseph Campbell, Mickey hart & Jerry Garcia at Palace of Fine Arts a group of friends raced up and embraced me with cries of "You're alive!" This was the latest of many sureal views of reality minor celebrity offered. I was always involved in conversations with folks about myself who didn't realise that I whuz me. "It's a shame that Mikio has sold out." "Totally Dude, if he was still for real he'd be out here in the lot with the people." My friend Glenn who was one of the two largest vendors of my shirt product started to milk the "get them while you still can" memorabilia angle. Well he didn't actually tell anyone that i was dead, he just never set anyone straight. I must admit that death was a highly profitable state of existance. If Haj is reading this he's probably drafting a CD marketing stragegy.

ghost in the machine

mikio — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 09:08:12 GMT

This may sound strange In the past few months I've been noting the synchronicities instigated by tribes "random friends photos on your home page" feature and the random 10 friends icons that pop up in your "friends" module. I've always assumed that most of the near oracular behavior had to do with algorithms that weighed & balanced how recent photo's were posted and who was logged in at what time, etc. I have been pleasently amused and quite gratified at the deepening of frioendships based on my spontaneously contacting a friend or spontaneously opening a discussion about a friends photo. Today a friends icon popped up in my little row of freeks who hadn't logged in (or been able to log in) for a couple of years. It was my friend Jorelle who had suffered a terrible car accident over 2 years ago a mere day after dancing joyously with the freek family. Crippling injuries to both her body and brain resulted. She lives in a decidedly different world today, one that does not include logging in and chatting on tribe. Yesterday Tiggrrr reminded me that was around the time of our Picies sister's birthday. This was on my mind and in my heart when Jorelle appeared on my homepage. Maybe when as much love and connection as these pages have channeled hits a certain level some of it bleeds into the code.

the wheels of my feet, the wires of my mouth

mikio — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 07:40:46 GMT

I just had the oddest and (in retrospect humorous) experience in self observation. My cell is caput, lost somewhere is last weekend's Soul Fire. As it happens next month where we're switching to broadband phone and for package timing reasons we'd decided to go a month on the cells and not have a long distance service. I toasted another clutch treating my Subaru like a truck hauling gear so my cars in the shop. ........well just an hour ago my cable modem stopped working. Here I am with no communication channels at all, my techy tools all toast. Mr. nature boy, woodsy, pagan, pan-horned, "I live in the mountains 'cuz I need to stay in tune with the Mother", starts having a meltdown. At this point the internet has kicked back on obviously and I have regained my perspective on the very temporary state of my mechanical disempowerment so all I'm left with is this emotional snapshot. ....hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm..... You know I don't really hang out with anybody in my home town of Rifton. This online forum, and the gatherings that take place sometimes thousands of miles from my home and 2 sentence text message love notes to my freeks have taken the place of a town center or village tavern. I have deep connections with folks here who's actually presence I've been in only briefly or not at alI. Just as my contact lenses and my dental fillings have become a seamless part of my personal experience, y'all are literally now my tribe through gates, doors, paths and voices unimaginable a mere generation ago. I love you all VERY much.

The Spider Bite and it's implications if any

mikio — Sun, 16 Jul 2006 20:00:54 GMT

I dragged myself over to the computer and I'm sitting here in a reasonable state of delerium with a fever and a big ugly redish purple blotch on my thigh from a necrotic spider bite of some sort. My niece and I were clearing a sizeable pile of debris I had accumulated and neglected in my yard when an irrate evicted brown tenant scuttled off the scraps I was holding. I didn't notice a bite at first but almost a day later a red burning itchy welt began to grow on my thigh. I'm about 5 days in on this toxic adventure. Now one of the questions we as a species and myself in particular focus a lot of attention on is "what does this all mean?" And the reply from varous parts of my neatly compartmentalized yet usually mutually respectful and cooperative fragmented being is alternately: "It means absolutely nothing in the "real" world. A Rorschach ink blot is not a butterfly, the Virgin Mary or a zebra's erection, it is merely an ink blot and the rest is in your head." or "Everything means something. Your consciousness and the universe outside are holographic representations of one another. The more you pay attention and give respect to the patterns in the sand, the tea leaves, your life, the more they will open up and reveal their mysteries to you." I find both of these points of view useful at different times and under different circumstances. So to answer one voice in my head the debris I was cleaning in my yard represented the vast piles of past emotional and physical baggage I accumulate in my life. The process of accumulation comes easy to me, the process of putting things back in their proper place and letting things go before I move on is difficult for me. Sometimes past debris can become toxic or venomous when not properly dealt with. If I traveled lighter there would be alot less junk for little poisonous critter to take up residence in. I've had severe lymes disease in the past (another insect borne malady) and I'd have to say the "needs better boundaries" metaphor has been up in my face more than once. On the other hand, sometimes a spider bite is just a spider bite and this one burns like hell, yo. :-(

tagged pt 3

mikio — Mon, 26 Jun 2006 08:47:07 GMT

it continues further: 7. K8's ruminations in her blog on truth, personal integrity and consensis un-reality drew this one out of me: I was wintering in Santa Cruz back in the mid-Eighties, fleeing the snow and heating bills of my usual home in NYC. I was at a big hippie party at a beach house and had consumed a fistful of friendly fungi to sparklize my evening. Just as the elves were beginning their interior re-decoration a crew of crashers arrived. They were a group of young men with a San Jose gang vibe on them and they almost imediatley began to behave inapropriately and disrespectfully to the ladies present. My male-protective hormonal alarms began climbing into the red and i went around to see if I could raise a crew of bruthaz to have talk to the uninvited guests. Now, I wasn't looking to get all confrontational, I'm just a skinny peaceful freek. I just wanted to walk over to them with the other men of the tribe and say "We know you're here and weren't invited, and that's all kewl. Have yourselves a drink and a puff on us. You are not however going to walk in here and dis our sistaz, we're all about peace but you run that sh*t and we're showing you the door." My friends did not want to hear what I was saying or even notice that there was a glitch in the matrix. They began to go to almost comical extremes to avoid hearing out my assessment of the situation. Seemed to me that the Santa Cruz hippie boy (circa 1985) way of coping with this kind of issue was to not see it. My New York conditioning and the fungus amoung-us started to cook my biology into a good head of steam. I eventually began to perceive everything anyone would say as a social lie designed to keep the collective reality from dropping to a deeper, more uncomfortable level of truth. i began to perceive anything I myself could say other than "Yo, the Emperor is buck azz nekid and y'all are staring his exposed rump and waxing eloquent about how phly his gear iz. Wuzup wit dat?" as a painful and hypocritical lie in itself. I fell into a morally self-imposed mute state for several hours. My friends who had never seen my chatter-box face be silent for more than 5 minutes began in turn to freak. While in this state it seemed to me I had developed a hyper-aware sensitivity that allowed me to read a persons every feeling and thought clearly in their expressions. Everywhere I looked I saw fear on my friends faces. Fear that because i was not speaking to them that there was something wrong with THEM, that I had seen weakness in them and had judged them unworthy of love. Slowly as the hours rolled by I began to perceive another purpose to the small talk we all use to maintain our consensis reality and a reason behind the 'little lies'. When we say "Great weather we're having." or "How about those Yankee's?" we're really saying "I'm feeling lost, lonely and depressed and i desperately need to have you see me and touch me." or "You are beautiful, mysterious and distant to me. If we were the last human beings on earth together perhaps we would really come to know each other and fall madly in love and entwine our bodies passionately together in one last romance in the ruins of the world but instead I'm afraid to look deeply into you because if you could see the darkness that lurks at the bottom of my heart you would shrink from me in horror so please just say:" "yeah, swell weather" or 'The Yanks are kicking ass dude!" Slowly I began to have compassion for my friends and for myself and agreed in my heart to begin to lie again. I saw the relief on their faces as i said small nothings once again and became for a while warmly and deeply ecstatic at again being in a world with other humans. I have since that day made slow small changes in my relationship to the truth. As I began to let more of my real insides show on the outside the new friends I've atracted into my life have themselves a greater tolerance or even hunger for truth. Some of my old friends have taken their own paths torward the exit of the maze of lies and it's a true gift to share this bitter sacrament with them. In my heart though I know that every day in order to live in the world i praise the emperor's new clothes and every day I hide parts of myself because I'm afraid if you could see them you wouldn't love me any more.

tagged pt 2

mikio — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 09:02:59 GMT

It continues: 4. I grew up in the cultural dead end of Yonkers. I was a pretty shy kid and had my nose in a book more often than not. I entered first grade with a fifth grade reading average already chugging through Narnia, The Hobbit, Madeline L'engle, EarthSea, etc myself. School bored me and the teacher would often catch me gazing out the window, daydreaming. "Alright Mr Kennedy, please read us page 7." she'd demand. "See Spot run. Run Spot, run." I'd dutifully rattle off before drifting away again. My best friend in First Grade was a kid named Freddy Melchar who had the worst reading average in the school. He was branded as what they were calling "retarded" in those days. We bonded as square pegs stuck in the round hole club. They didn't know what to do with either of us. 5. Spent all the years when little boys were supposed to find little girls "yucky" always with little girls as my best friends. When puberty hit and you were now supposed to "like" girls, I fled in terror back to my books. High School saw me hiding behind coke bottle glasses and really bad clothes bought for me by Mom. We had a small, tight, isolated band of freaks that hung out in the art room consisting of 1 girl and about 10 guys. She was going out with my best friend and all of us guys had a crush on her. The energetic gap between my headspace and the rest of the school's suburban female population was too vast to cross. 6. In my senior year while we were *ahem* sampling some of Dr Albert Hoffman's molocule, my best friends older sister popped my cherry, simultaneusly introducing me to belly dancing, Fairport Convention, Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane and what said molocule and Jimi Hendrix could do for sex. Must have made a big impression on me because 28 years later we're still lovers and in love. We moved downtown to a loft in the lower East Side of NYC (of course) at our earliest opportunity. Any attempt at monogamy lasted a little over 2 years. I was off in Boulder Colorado on Dead Tour while my lady waitressed in the loft jazz scene in NYC. My rising rep as a psychedelic artist was translating into female attention and unlike in the last bastion of the fifties Yonkers, being a long haired asian freek was a big plus in tie-dye world. I was nobley upholding the standard of monogamy when my crew crashed into a bevy of hippie chix from Santa Cruz. Now New York Hippies were not Cali Hippies ergo: 1979 NY hippie boyz = skate boards, kung fu, frisbies, graffitti, pizza, loud music, drugs and hair, while 1979 Santa Cruz hippie sistaz = Sweat Lodges, macrobiotics, past life experiences, crystals, soft music, drugs and hair. We proceed to culturally cross polinate. I hit it off immediatly with a wonderful young woman and proceeded to frustrate us both for a week by being a good boy and keeping my physical expressions of affection to cuddling. In one of my calls home I naively expressed my great appreciation for this new friend to my also still somewhat young and naive partner. As I found out upon returning home she had immediatley gone off and done her old boyfriend. Now the interesting thing for me was my reaction to this news. Sure I was pissed, but not "kill him. kill her, break up with her, punch him, stop being his friend, contemplate suicide" pissed. I was fairly shocked at how the great cultural boogie man of cuckholding had kind of blunt teeth when it came to causing me emotional pain. So 28 years later we're still working out a more open model of relationship than is generally practised by most Americans. We make lots of mistakes and have really interesting therapists but of the couple of dozen couples we ran with back then we're the only ones still together. Which may mean amongst other things in my little world (please don't hate on me for this) - Drugs are highly underated and monogamy is highly overated. Love rocks either way. More dirt later...

tagged

mikio — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 12:21:45 GMT

Okay, I wuz tagged by Tiggrrr and too be real I've shunned the obligations of ALL prior chain letters, emails, phone texts, etc. This one however DID come from Tiggrrr and she's SO for real and militantly anti-bullshit that i had to take this as WORD and respond. This is my first and possibly my last blog as well BTW. "RULES - Once you've been tagged, you have to write a blog with 8 facts/things/habits about yourself, saying who tagged you. In the end you need to choose 6 people to be tagged and list their names. No tag backs." 1. When I was pre-school age i developed an obsession with Pocahontas. I wanted to BE her. I insisted on being addressed as "she" much to my generally open minded parents concern. This lasted almost a year. 2. Except for dental work I've never been cut by the surgeon's knife. Tonsils, apendix, foreskin, I gotz it all. Mom was a Natralist. Thanks Mom. 3. Mom was also a pacifist. Having spent time as a young woman in the camps for Japanese Americans during WW2 she walked away with some serious concerns about armed males running the planet. This didn't always play out well in certain mothering skillz for a growing boy out in "Lord of the Flies" culture. I'd get my ass kicked in school and come home crying and she'd praise me for not fighting back and lay some "blessed are the peace-makers" rap on me. Finally one of the kids who's been tormenting me as an easy target came for me one to many times and i took one of the large heavy wooden blocks that were then comman in kindergarten's and proceeded to lay into him. As he was taking the brunt for all the sh*t I'd stuffed down for years I guess I was pretty brutal. When they carted him off to the doctor and me off to the principal I did not at 6 years have the means to communcate my moral conumdrum to them. They told my folks "your kid's got real problems". My folks sent me once a week thereafter to a child psychologist. This guy was awesome. He really listened to me and became a great friend. After a few months he told my folks: "Your kid is fine. Send him to Judo lessons." They did and I started developing some better boundaries. More revealing tidbits later......