Last night, I asked my "higher self" a series of questions about my life direction. I actually feel fairly stable and confident in my current direction, but we have been working on tapping into the intuition of our higher self in my meditation class. So, I asked some questions on Saturday night when it was very quiet and my mind was settled and focused.

There are some questions I asked that gave me surprising answers, or answers that I do not necessarily like. For example, when I asked whether I was a facilitator for other people's dreams, a healer, or a teacher, the answer came back as healer. I am not a teacher and not a facilitator. When I asked whether to continue trying to learn music (guitar), the answer came back, "no." When I asked about continuing the teach and practice Japanese sword, the answer was "no" to both questions. When I asked whether I would be going back to Japan, the answer was "yes", which is not necessarily what I want anymore. When I asked whether there would be another disaster (earthquake) which I must participate in, the answer was "yes."

The last question that I "asked" my higher self was more of a request. I said, "please show in my dreams tonight what my purpose is for the rest of this year."

I had a dream, but I don't understand it at all, and it seems removed from what I am doing now. It seemed that I was part of some government team working on some kind of land reform or repair. There was a drab green building that was like a military building. I was working on the second floor, because I vaguely remember going up and down stairs. The building was small, and there were wooden bleachers or something similar outside on both sides of the building. Everything had a drab green color too it, so it seemed military in nature. However, I kept on seeing images of land being managed or reformed, as if by civil engineering. I saw satellite maps of lands from afar, and there was talk with someone that they couldn't exactly see Florida from the satellite map. It seemed that we were on the other side of the world, perhaps Afghanistan or Japan. The land was green, not tan, and there was abundant water. The office headquarters seemed to be small, although there were many people working off site. I had occasional images of Japan landscape, but I couldn't identify it. There were people I know that stopped by. There was a Memphis elementary school teacher that stopped by with children. Others were Chinese people and perhaps Japanese people. Everybody seemed to bring children with them, but the job itself was not necessarily child-focused.

There were many images, but the overall story line is unclear. If I had to guess, I would say that I was in some kind of American military building on a base in Japan or at least in Asia somewhere. I was working to support some kind of cleanup effort. Perhaps some kind of devastation from another tsunami or a nuclear disaster of some kind?

Hmm. This is not in my current plan for the rest of this year. I have a good job here in Memphis, I'm trying to learn guitar and hoping to start up martial arts again. If it were true, it would be a huge shift. Supposedly, according to those who are connected to higher powers, there is supposed to be something "big" happening on December 21, 2012. Related? I dunno. In truth, I have always felt that it is my fate to have to go back into an earthquake recovery zone and work on the relief effort. That has always been in my plan. It's true. I just don't see how it connects to my current life that I live today. Everything has finally stabilized here.

There is nothing more wicked, more treacherous, than a betrayed woman. There is nothing more terrible and wrathful than a scorned woman. When I listen to this song, I am reminded of the potential for darkness that lies in every woman. They give up their names, their family, their body, and devote their lives to the object of their affection. They bear your children.

It is a foolish man to betray that trust.



This song gives me the shivers. Disturbing.

As much as I put in the back of my mind, ignoring a problem does not make it go away. I must confess, I used to be a "coke" addict. Yes, from way back. When I woke up in the morning, the first thing I did was go to the fridge and pop a can of that magical stuff, Coca-cola! The combination of unique taste and the "shwtcch!!" from the bubbles on the roof of my mouth did it for me. I was totally hooked.

I had eliminated coke from my diet, because of the phosphorus, the sugar, and overall ill effects it has on my digestion and health. I've been clean for nearly 10 years! But since I've been working as a school teacher, I find occasionally find myself in social situations where there is pepperoni pizzas, soft drinks, and water. After hours, I can usually substitute a lesser fizz drink like beer, instead of coke (yes, coke beats beer). But at the elementary school in the teachers lounge or at a student party, beer is not an option. Water is my other tea, but it just tastes like...water! So, I find myself falling off the wagon, again and again, reaching for my old addiction.

This stuff is good! I could bathe in it! Ok, no I won't bathe in it. But really, I'm starting to become addicted again. I find myself thinking about it again and again throughout the day -- telling myself that I can control it and that I can stop whenever I want. I have control. But really, I can't stop thinking about it! I'm sure it shows on my face. I'm sure, other people are becoming concerned. I wonder, will I be found out? Do I need to just be more discrete about my habit. Maybe I can hide behind the copy machine in the break room. Just me and my addiciton. NO!! I will not give in. I must fight the urge! If I need to, I will check into a facility that knows how to help. Maybe I need to join a 12 step plan some kind. CA? Cocaholics Anonymous! "Hi, I'm Dave and I've been dealing with this for 15 years. Recently, I just started giving into my urges again...."

In the meantime, I alienate my friends and family as I give into my urges and begin this tail spin into the depths of addiction! Gods save me!

Racquet is the new sword. And the swing is my meditation. It's a blade all over again. In this case, the opponent comes at me in real time. I wield my weapon in two hands and cut right through the center. The ball, in my mind, does not rebound; it falls into halves on the floor. The racquet ball court is silent, except for the squeaks from the pivoting of my shoes, and the reverberating sound of the ball against the walls. The silence mocks me, and I bounce the ball against the hard wood floor to regain my center. The wood floor, much like any dojo floor, is worn smooth from many years of traveling feet.

I am all focus. My intent is a single shot -- penetrate the opponent court while she stands paralyzed. Penetrate her heart. One strike, one kill. That's all it's ever been. (I bounce the ball several times). One well-timed, focused killing blow. (bounce, bounce). I close my eyes to focus, pull my weapon back in my sword hand in the manner of hidari-waki-gamae, raise above my head, and strike. A quick flash. And it is over. (bounce, bounce). Of course, the wall is invincible. I fold my arms and slowly walk away. Back to the beginning, I think, and then my mind drifts...

"This is how the story went. I met someone by accident. Who blew me away, blew me away. And it was in the darkest of my days when you took my sorrow and you took my pain and buried them away; buried them away. I wish I could lay down beside you when the day is done...and wake up to your face in the morning sun...."

(bounce, bounce). I strike the imaginary dirt off the bottom of my shoes with my racquet. I need to dig my feet in. Four white walls and a towering white ceiling. At a distance, she is pristine and white. Even my racquet appears in hyper-color against the her backdrop. But when I get closer, I see that her skin is ravaged and scarred from many confrontations. She is battle worn. But she still towers above me. (bounce, bounce). I raise my weapon to strike. A flash and it is over. I fold my arms and slowly walk away....

"Got up this mornin', just about the break of day. A-huggin' the pillow where she used to lay. Got up this mornin', just about the break of day. A-huggin' the pillow where my good gal used to lay"

(bounce, bounce). Focus and strike. (bounce bounce). Turn my head and slowly walk away. (tap, tap) Need to dig my feet in. Roll back with my sword arm and strike! (bounce, bounce). The more I strike, the more she returns. Our rhythm is what binds us and makes us one. (tap, tap) (bounce, bounce). Only the sound of my heavy breathing, and my grunts. I close my eyes to focus. The silence of the white walls is deafening. She is still here inside my mind, but we are alone.

"Whenever I'm alone with you. You make feel like I am young again. Whenever I'm alone with you. You make me feel like I am fun again. How ever far away....However long I stay....What ever words I say...."

This battle cannot be won. My opponent is too strong. Too resolute. (bounce, bounce). Too quiet. Focus, I say, as I raise my weapon to strike, one last time. (tap, tap) I dig in. Strike! Flash! and it is done. I exhale, looking towards the ceiling. Her walls envelope me as I close my eyes.

"Ah, hush, thought I heard her call my name
If it wasn't so loud and so nice and plain

Well, I folded up my arms and I slowly walked away
I said, "Farewell honey, I'll see you on Judgment Day"

Although I am generally sleep-deprived due to the circumstances in my job, school, and family obligations, last week was unusually bad. This is in spite of the fact that I finished the college courses last Sunday, and my school is getting ready to go on summer vacation. I'm having difficulty getting to sleep and waking up early, regardless of when I got to sleep. It's annoying. Some of it is the weather. It's hot at night, and I toss and turn for quite a while.

Sunday morning (today), I woke up at 6:45 AM, in spite of getting to bed past 1 AM. I decided to do some self-acupuncture and meditate. I have many random thoughts -- not all as a result of the meditation, but just stuff that is stirring in my head recently.

I'm thinking about taking the summer off. I mean, I'm signed up for summer grad classes and I was going to try to push may way through hard so that I could get done quicker. However, I think the lack of personal time has been become a kind of mental illness for me. I have kept busy most of my life, and when I look back at my time since graduating from college in 1991, I've managed to fill up most of the evenings with martial arts practice, cultural classes of some kind, grad school, acupuncture business, my own dojo, etc. I've never had my evenings free in 20 years. 

This is a mental illness of sorts. I am unable to relax. I feel unworthy and under-performing as a person, so I feel that I have to constantly learn new skills to add value. Always desiring to learn and grow is one thing, but being uncomfortable with who you are is not good. Even at home (or especially at home), I am unable to take time for myself to just relax -- play guitar, read a book, watch a movie on the couch. I feel guilty when I do it. I watch the clock. I can't enjoy myself. Some of this is my family situation, of course. But some of it existed before.

My family will be gone in a few weeks. I will have the place to myself. I wonder if I need to just practice doing nothing. Allow myself time and not feel guilty about taking it.

I am learning some tennis now. Well, not really learning, but just picking it up. My son is taking lessons, and I look at instructional videos online in order to comprehend it and connect the dots with my martial experiences. There are many lines that connection -- the weapon, the swings, the stances, the focus on a single point. It's not sword, but I can relate. However, what it lacks is a "way."  There doesn't seem to be a higher goal other than just becoming good at tennis. There is a general focus towards exercise and good food, and tennis people tend to be generally good, honest people from a variety of backgrounds who are not overly class-conscious. But there is no larger path. I guess, I miss the path. 

Last night before I went to bed, I was researching martial arts in Memphis. There's not really that much here -- even less than Tampabay. I don't really want to commit to anything, and I'm not ready to start teaching again. However, I do feel like I need to do something. Yeah, I know, it counters what I just said above. That's why I said these are random thoughts. I'm complex, like an onion. ;)

I went to bed with a bokuto in my hand; it's my teddy bear. I had a dream about arriving at an arranged demonstration in Philly. Paul was gone for some reason, and there was a large crowd waiting to see something happen. Spontaneously, I decided that I needed to cover for him. And instantly, I was in my uniform, with sword at my hand. There were targets ready for me to cut. I vaguely remember talking to the crowd. However, I never got to do my demonstration, because I woke up.

Zen. Doing something routine in order to think nothing. I think that might be part of what I'm craving. I need to find a physical meditation of some sort. Building instruments -- that's what I was going to do with Bob last year, before the job change happened. I could still do that, I suppose, although it requires some guidance. Music is good too, but it requires a lot of thinking at my level, because I'm not good at it. But it still might be alright. Tennis -- I'll probably do some while my son is away so that I can get up to his level. He's so amazingly good.

I need a partner. I mean...I'm married and all, but I need an activities partner. Someone who wants to explore new things and work on projects together. Someone who wants to collaborate on writing a song or will do push hands together or will travel with me to go see Robert Johnson's gravesite. Someone who wants to do stuff. I miss having a partner. Maybe that's what I need to do this summer; find someone. Not necessarily a lady -- and certainly not for that kind of relationship -- but someone who thinks on the same wavelength. An equal.

My son, the more assets you have, the more energy it requires to maintain them. It's the indisputable truth of the world. For example, if you have one car, you have to pay for gas and maintenance for one car. It also takes time to take cars for maintenance. If you have two cars, the gas doubles, the maintenance doubles, and the you have to invest doubles. However, the number of waking hours you have in the day remains constant. If you own larger property such as a house, the impact to resources is even greater, because there will be house repairs due to leaky pipes, rot, pests, broken appliances, landscaping, etc. Imagine owning two or even three houses.

Even smaller items require time, money and resources. If you have a lot of electronic devices like cameras, phones, iPods, and video games systems, they will all require batteries to be charged constantly. Cameras will require memory cards to be copied over to hard drives, and troubleshooting may be required when connections to the PC doesn't work. Of course, all these things break and require attention in the form of reading the manuals, checking online support, and/or sending them in for warranty repair. Although they're small items, they can eat up a lot of time. Even your Babolat tennis shoes, when they get holes in them prematurely, require time and effort to resolve.

There are things that we need and things we can live without. And there are things we only need one or two of, yet we own many more. Americans have a consumer mindset and are very competitive; we are quick to upgrade to the newer, better object that will somehow give us the edge in our tennis, our picture taking, our gas mileage, etc. Besides the obvious wastefulness of constantly upgrading, we need to be careful in our own personal lives that we don't take ownership of more than we can care for. Everything you own requires time and effort to maintain. Our waking hours do not increase and we cannot buy more. Do you want to spend all your time as a caretaker of ordinary physical objects? Or do you want to spend your time doing great things? We must always be sure that when we buy one new thing, we eliminate one old thing (preferably through recycling). Guard your time, space, and resources with your life, so that it doesn't be come your life.

This is such an obvious truth, yet none of this in this family acknowledge this truth. When you go off in the world, try to do better than we did as a family. I am trying my best to become a good role model for you. I do not always succeed, but I do some of the time. I hope you will see my efforts, my successes and failures. Learn from them.

I know some of it is my age. I'm more sensitive to fragility of life. I am coming to terms with my own vulnerability and learning to manage my own expectations for happiness through accomplishment, due to my dwindling timeline. Whatever the reason, it seems like there is more death now, more than ever. Today, I got news that an acquaintance just committed suicide. This really took me into a state of shock. I called to make an appointment to have a tennis racquet restrung and I was told that the service was no longer being offered because the guy that offered it was dead, through his own hand. The wake is on Thursday, it seems.

It was not somebody I was close to; however, he was one of the very first people we met when we moved to Memphis and he made a quietly positive impression. In fact, I might say that he really helped me form an overall positive impression of the city. Additionally, he was someone I was hoping to connect with in the future. He was always polite and friendly, kept words to a minimum, and treated everyone with respect. A quiet, older guy in his early 60's with a deep knowledge of strings and racquet weights and other technical stuff that he hid behind a smile. Tennis is not my thing, of course, but I could make the obvious connections between his mastery of his craft with that of a swordsmans, a potter, or a luthier. I guess he kind of reminded me of Bob, my Tai Chi teacher, in a different guise.

I was looking forward to meeting him in the next couple of days to talk shop and get to know him. Bummer. Now all I can do is go to his funeral. :(

It's 12:30 AM. I am in a hotel in Atlanta. Long story, which I won't go into. Anyway, I've been doing what I do every single weekend recently, which is create documents and lesson plans for a graduate class that I am taking. The deadline is 10 PM on Saturday night. That actually works out well for me, because I don't feel like I have to rush to get it in. Much better than a weeknight. Still, it kills my Saturday.

I had a glass of wine after the work was done. Then instead of going to bed, which is what I should have done, I found myself surfing photojojo.com for new toys, and dpreview.com for new toys. There are some really cool products on both of those sites. I am proud to say, however, that I have talked myself out of buying anything I don't need. Basically, I'm already in huge debt, and I have found that a new sword, a new camera, a new whatever, doesn't solve any of my long term problems. Also, I listened to an interview many months ago with Jian Ghomeshi about "true prep", before it became fashionable, then fell out of fashion and was forgotten. Originally it seems, preps were off-beat college professor types who didn't mind if their clothes were old and well-worn, as long as it was comfortable and reliable. They relish the faded and the quirky. They respect things that were once beautiful. They choose to move to their own drum and not worry what the rest of the world is doing. At the same time, they are earth-conscious and intelligent. Kind of like hippies that grew up. I dunno...I didn't read the book, but I was thinking that I have lots of old stuff, like my 2001 Subaru Forrester, which is so ugly that it's pretty, and my old cameras which I actually use and my army timex watch which I have to wind twice a day. Nothing valuable, but they have a certain flavor, and maybe they make me who I am. And probably, they have my "Ki" on them. Therefore, they are better than shiny new things.

So I will buy nothing and like it! And tomorrow, I will clean the lens of my new old Argus camera and put film in it. I need to start shooting again.

Here is a picture of what my desk looks like tonight in the hotel.

I write down my New Year's Resolutions at the beginning of the year, and I frequently think about my career goals and life goals frequently throughout the year. Am I on the path to where I want to go? What is my ultimate purpose?

For a number of years now, I have waffled on career and life goals. Just when I get started on a path, it seems like my destiny gets scrambled by external forces, and I find that my own resolve alone is not enough for me to weather the storm and stay on a path. I make corrections and set sail for a new destination. Of course, with all the false starts, I never really arrive anywhere. I think that ultimately...I'm not resolute in my desires. Probably, I don't want any one thing that much. Or at least, the not the things that seem attainable.

Recently, I'm thinking about my unhappiness or happiness in terms of a single day. There's probably a number of realities that I'd be happy with in terms of long term destination. More than the long term end goal, I want to have a perfect day. Every day. I want to get up and feel like I'm in control of what happens to me, take time for exercise, take time for good food, time for study, time for meditation, and time for friends. Live with resolve and harmony, but also with laughter, and measured abandon. I want to sculpt a perfect day, every single day. More than becoming a this or a that, perhaps, this is what I really want.

Every day, perfectly.

Normalcy. That's a word, right!?! I dunno. Anywhoo....Budweiser came out with this new beer called Bud Light Platinum, which is probably just another crap beer, because it's called Bud Light, but it's in a blue bottle and peeked my interest. So, I secretly purchased a six pack, because we don't have a budget for alcohol and I didn't want to get an earful from my fakely frugal wife, who doesn't manage the budget anyway but who will use the purchase as an example of my fiscal irresponsibility and use it to persecute me for a variety of unrelated mishaps for years to come. Anyway, I waited a couple of days, because things in my house become invisible after a couple of days of sitting in plain view. Then, I cracked open a chilled bottle of the crap beer and drank it while eating spicy pistachios, which we received from Pakistani friends who are gastroenterologists and...well, it's a long story.

So, I poured myself a glass of beer and munched on spicy pistachio nuts, while gazing into space. My Japanese wife was washing dishes, and my son was playing the violin in preparation for his music class. I had this feeling, this feeling, of normalcy.

I haven't felt normal in so long, so it really stood out. I mean, I've had moments of feeling special and unique because I speak Japanese, moments of feeling lucky to be employed and have a roof over my head, and moments of awe at the state of things and my luck in surviving them. I've had frequent feelings of exhaustion and fatigue and anger and all sorts of things. But normalcy. It's not normal for me. It was as if I was just with friends and we were in a bar, not looking for women and not trying hard to get drunk, but just eating nuts because they were put on the table by the waiter and just drinking beer because that's what you drink with nuts, and just talking about whatever, which is usually stuff that is close to your heart that you can't say during the day with your co-workers but it's ok to say when you're drinking beer and eating nuts in a bar with friends. I can't remember the last time I felt it. Maybe Japan? 1997ish. 1993 in Osaka? Not sure.

It was just an instant in time, but it felt good. It's fading fast now, even as I write and think about the things I have to do tomorrow. But there are 5 more bottles of cheap beer and plenty more nuts. Maybe this is a strange kind of therapy?