Sister, Do You Know My Name?

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Artist: The White Stripes

Album: De Stijl

Jack White writes and sings about what it feels like to be a boy better than just about anyone else I can think of. In fact, I’m drawing a complete blank trying to come up with the name of anyone who mines the same territory, let alone does it so well. (If you’ve got someone in mind, post in the comments!)

The thing about songs like this one and (probably my all-time favorite White Stripes song) We Are Going to Be Friends is that he’s not writing nostalgically. He’s not looking back and trying to recapture the beauty and innocence of childhood. He – or whoever the narrator is in these songs – is a child. Continue reading →

On my walk today…

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What I’m Thinking about When I’m Walking

I do a lot of meditating in motion nowadays. I thought it might be interesting to record my stream of consciousness on my daily walk. The results reminded me of a period when I was crashing at April and Chad’s pad in Berkeley and had just read one of Castaneda’s Don Juan books. I forget which one – I’ve read several of them more than once. But I seized on Don Juan’s statement that if a person would just write down their entire stream of consciousness for (a week? 10 days?) they would overcome the egoic mind and enter a permanent state of nonordinary consciousness.  Continue reading →

New Album – Ten Year Bender

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Ten Year Bender: Listen, song lyrics, writing and recording the album, song lyrics and more

I’ll upload more songs as I blog about them. You can listen to the song ‘Ten Year Bender’ on SoundCloud or YouTube here.

The Stories Behind the Songs

Follow along as I look back at the creation of a record that documents a watershed moment in this incarnation for yours truly. From Flint, Michigan to Paris, France, through Atlanta, Detroit, and New Orleans. Sheeit – I’ll even take you to Romania! Drunk, Buddhist, sober, blissed out, bombed out…well, just read the posts. You’ll find them on the Behind the Songs page.

Signed CDs and Digital Downloads

You can buy the CD or download it from CD Baby for $9.99 or get it on iTunes for $9.90. Or, support my music-making by sending me $20 in exchange for a signed copy of the record. This is an old-fashioned, hard copy CD, delivered by the postman in a plastic-free eco-wallet made from recycled paper and featuring three original paintings by my old friend (and noted Detroit artist) Kyle M. Stone Illustration….hit the Buy Now button below and I’ll personally mail you one of the brand new CDs. (I’ll even sign the treasure map if you want me to – just let me know.)

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Ulysses returned / To find a world in flames / They dance while the cities burn /  They auction off the blame  Image (c) 2002 Kyle M. Stone.

I’m really proud of this record, which was originally recorded in 2002-2003 (!). But it took me a good ten years to be able to see what a wonderful little creation it is. The singing is good, the lyrics are great and, as a musician friend of mine said after hearing one of the 60 original copies I burned myself onto CD-Rs back in 2003:

“There’s this Fuel album titled ‘File Under Easy Listening’ – that’s what your record should be called. It’s one of the few records I own that I can just pop it into the CD player and let it play all the way through to the end without ever wanting to turn it off or skip a song.“

Video: The Astrology of 2015 & Beyond

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My talk in Stowe, Vermont started a half hour after Mercury’s exact direct station on June 11. I was curious about what I would say. Not only because I seemed to have ‘verbal dyslexia’ during the Mercury Rx, but also because the planets insisted beforehand that I follow the advice of the great Hawaiian healer Dr. Hew Len in preparing for the talk.

When asked by Joe Vitale (his co-author of the book Zero Limits) how to plan a dinner talk they were giving together, Dr. Hew Len replied, “Don’t plan.” Continue reading →

Nessus: The Ultimate Anti-Hero

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Lust for Life

Nessus has been transiting my Pisces Sun over the last couple months (and will be back again in the fall of 2015). Nessus is one of the Centaurs, a group of recently discovered planetoids with very irregular orbits that extend from as far in as Jupiter to as far out as Pluto. Nessus’ orbit connects the orbits of Saturn (authority, fear, responsibility) and Pluto (repressed energies, obsessive fears and desires, regeneration).

Astrologically, all of the Centaurs activate and illuminate the psychological Shadow, bringing repressed feelings and drives to the forefront of consciousness so they can be assimilated and integrated. Centaur transits can be quite painful precisely because they force us to pay attention to the energies within the soul that we don’t want to have to see or feel. Continue reading →

Sun + Saturn = Owning Who I Am??

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Retro-Analysis of Sun-Saturn Opposition

So, the Gemini Sun made an exact opposition to Saturn in Sagittarius on Friday night (May 22, 2015). Both planets were between 1 1/2 and 2 degrees of their respective signs. My natal Sun is at two degrees Pisces – meaning both transiting Sun and transiting Saturn were square my natal Sun.

Sun-Saturn aspects are not typically “fun times”. Continue reading →