Exocoetidae

Simple Machines describes his experience awaking from a dream. He discovers he can go to places in his subconscious that induce a childlike euphoria. The experiment has a surprise twist:

And then I "went" to one of these places (in my subconscious state, mind you) and it caused what I sensed as such an intense feeling of elation that it was too much, too intense, and not pleasurable -- so disturbingly so that it was enough to wake me up!

What is there about my mind that it allows me to experience a sense of well-being so intense that it was excruciating?

I wonder if our wiring maps our feelings in a continuous loop.

I once looked out from a 90 passenger tour boat scooting across the Caribbean where turquoise sun and flying fish are no surprise. My smile was nearly big enough to shade my eyes, impossible but not at all unlikely. When my brain arrived at Aphrodite overload, I realized later, I skulked away to our thrifty cabin by the engine room to ground myself in words on paper as paradise sped by.

Words on paper through the years have told me stories of tortured prisoners who reach a certain painless state beyond the agony. A woman told me once of running out her front door to a bleeding child who'd been hit by a truck. While she soothed and whispered him from this life to the next, he said it didn't hurt -- she saw a beautiful place reflected in his face.

I've written here before about the symphony conductor who suffered brain injury. Music that once charmed him was excruciating to his altered wiring.

Controlled euphoria, now there's a buzzword for the marketeers. Package a sound, a look, a taste, a feel, a scent that takes consumers to the crest of the wave but holds them back from Hades. Extravaganza makers accept the challenge. Arena rock shows take aim at the wonder bird, kick up the decibels, lay on the spectacle, song after song. Even after all that, the kids are OK, euphoria aroused and contained.

If you think elation's worth the gamble, race your wheels along the coast road, windows down, radio up. Belt the songs into fourth gear. The world is round, the ocean's wide, and even fish can fly.

Disambiguation

Vivid threads brush my thoughts since reading Memoirs of a Geisha. It's not her untamable yearning for a certain man that visits me, it is Sayuri herself, and the eyes through which her geisha culture asks me to see my world.

A geisha studies the art of filling the emptiness that haunts a man's unexamined impulses. She draws her clients out of their functionary minds with dance, music, ceremony, kimono, conversation, laughter and sometimes, if a man is worthy, the intimate touch.

Rock artist would seem as far from geisha as slug from silkworm, but look again. Performance rock elevates the listener to the region of complicit passion woven into existence, invisible to many. In the hands of the diva, her tools -- lyric, rhythm, sound, musicianship, choreography, costume -- dissolve into the audience's palpable pleasure. Like businessmen at a tea ceremony, listeners sip their own thoughts in the presence of the diva whose deference, like the geisha's, is to unquestionable beauty.

Peer review

Coldplay. Impeccable musicianship. Stunning visuals. Lush sounds. Infatigable energy. Flawless choreography. Expert production. Winning message (what was it again? -- oh -- right -- 'emotion - it's all good'). Friendly personas. 'What's not to like?' as I told the tipsy dancer to my right.

I liked it well enough. I liked my concert companion. I liked the spectacle. This morning when I went for the paper, I did a little Chris Martin scamper in the grass, so I guess it changed me. Got me lighter on my toes. What if Chris sprained himself doing one of his leaping knee slides? Ouch -- tour hiatus for sure. See how the show awakened my compassion? What if the fan behind us, beer in one hand, cocktail in the other, lost his equilibrium, or his dinner, in our laps? See -- Coldplay really got me thinking about intimacy and trust.

Quicken Loans Arena, the Q, is a well oiled pleasure engine. The rafters groan with techno borg enhancements, the cavernous UFO scoops up humans, snaps us into numbered pods, tranquilizes cerebellums with massive waves of light and sound until we're synchronizing nicely. Community. That's a good thing, no? So why do I feel like I just woke up from a funky dream?

The Coldplay boys are not to blame, they've earned their fame, the humanoids adore them. I'm the one who bucks the norm, likes a little warmth in all that playfulness. But hey, I'm an alien myself, guitar enamored troubadour who'd rather be the purple cow than see one.

Silver palaces

He eulogized the bad boys,
James and Jack,
but Marilyn was sacred.
Her sultry innocence
regarded him through tilted windows
hung on tacks
that pocked
the adolescent's lair.
A girl who breathed his air
and hoped for more
desired in vain.
She came no closer to his pen
than moistened hands
to sighs of platinum
in velvet seated night.
Mortality denuded him,
he burrowed in
delusions of the screen.

Every girl on earth
can bow to Marilyn,
her rival from beyond,
a feminist unblemished.
Once a daughter walks the halls
of headless boys
enamored of the goddess,
she is free.

To love the holy rites
of imperfection.

To offer them
unblinking
to a man.

Egret's brood

The furrows in her father's brow
who held the plow?
Botox he never knew ye.

Gott sei dank
with his beloved Jane to care for
doctors found recalcitrance's boney shadow
strangling his heart.
Just in time they told him
just in time
their science and the blade
would save him from arrest
and certain death --

Arrest for what
this Christian man
and why?

The temptress was cholesterol
his appetite desired her
Delilah to his samsonite
her time bomb peaceably begrudging him his days.

Good the surgeons pacified the terrorist.
Good the husband lived to tend his sweetheart to her grave.
Good the father's hand
implanted rows like wings
across the brow
as herons glide
from tree to tree
remembering
their path.

Emily

Wren of a girl in a gauze dress
tramps the wilderness
in the wry company of words

Beauty queens of boiler plated armor
serve her up on beds of ridicule

They ache and dine
on emptiness
to party out their feigned desire

In this age
a poet swathed in muslin
could be hallowed
but the paparazzi shutters
find her not

Diminutive Ms Dickinson
slips between
the misted evergreens

Boys with bras

Put a guitar in a woman's hands and let her play. If she gets good, damn her with feigned praise à la Patty Larkin's ditty, Not Bad for a Broad.

'Girls with guitars' sounds like 'bros with bras' -- not what you'd expect but, hey, kinky's cool, it's still a free country, man. Let 'er play -- she's not hurting anybody and it looks kinda sexy, no?

Pop culture says there's no such thing as bad press. Janet Jackson's name recognition got a respectable jolt when her body amour faltered on the football field. OK, maybe not so respectable, but the jolt was real, ask a zillion bug eye witnesses.

So, is the female guitarist blessed or cursed by the music writer's ubiquitous chant: gee, the dame's got a strat strapped around her gilded frame so what the heck, let's write an article about THAT!

More pop wisdom: sex sells. My elderly dad expressed amazement that a mini skirted glamour girl at the auto show knew all about transmissions and fuel efficiency. Huge convention hall, car lovers agog over white wall tires and shapely legs in good working order. Sexy makes the world go round, that's show biz baby.

Maybe.

Then there is art, and tools that fuel the art, hands and minds and guts that use the tools well. Listeners who respond to the depth of a performer's skill honed over decades thank the writer who plucks the genderless nerve with imagination and skill.

Last night at band practice I fumed, 'if I see one more 'chick with guitar' article I'm gonna puke! When you see a woman player, do you think Oh my God, I can't believe she's got a guitar in her hands?'

'It's just an angle for a story,' says the elegant bassist. 'It's a stupid angle.'

'When I see a female guitar player,' says the eloquent drummer, 'I prob'ly think I want that guitar.'

Thanks, amigos. I needed that.

Groundswell

A spine doctor's personal alternative to work induced stress is running.

The solitude creates an environment for quality thinking. I can't do anything else when I run.

The president of a design firm who works 70 travel heavy hours a week, turns to high speed biking for release.

Some people drink, some smoke, some carouse -- I keep myself active.

A musician I know has lost 30 pounds in 2 months keeping himself active with weight training, biking, swimming. He packs it in around a full course load, household duties and art projects, the latest involving digital photography, photoshop and paint on fabric.

When I work on something with my hands, I think about things differently.

I swim in water or in air. The air swim happens in performance when listeners have brought their solitude to bare. They come for the music, nothing less. Composition, practice, recording, marketing -- all this informs a moment of release that may last an hour or more. Intimacy gathers in a hall of strangers wrapped in the sweet sweat of a song, unwinding.

Fife n berry

Andy Griffith told The Associated Press on Saturday,

Don was a small man ... but everything else about him was large: his mind, his expressions. Don was special. There's nobody like him. I loved him very much. We had a long and wonderful life together.

I call her my giant begonia. Wing span one meter plus. Jolly green leaves veined in deep salmon. Every time I get near her with pruning implements, I see she's given birth to more pale bloom babies at the furthest reaches of her solar plexus; I leave her to nurse her young.

It started out innocent enough one spring when Barbara, my botanically gifted neighbor, plunked a pot stand of flagrant foliage on my porch like so much ripe squash. I carted the monstrosity up to my tree house, left it for dead. Goddess knows, the tooth fairy must have shed some star dust on the grand dame. She thrived in my abandon, thrust her downy petals into summer's watch. A wistful Barbara told me the lady had never blessed her former mistress thus in all the years they'd lived together. I began to understand the allure of the unlikely lover.

Don Knotts died last week. He was the hyper inflated underling, least likely to thrive, late bloomer cast on the shores of a sit com unaware of its destiny: to unfurl the pink extravagance of this comedic hero. Barney Fife transformed Mayberry into the best vaudeville stage TV itself might conjure. Perfect chemistry on a summer's night, fans held a flutter, laughter caught high in the rafters of somebody's chicken barn eight miles south.

My parents, especially Mom, loved the Andy Griffith Show. When I was too little for sit coms, I drifted off to the sound of laughter downstairs. Deputy Fife, blustery, insecure, homely, endearing fool that he was, held my mother spellbound and neighing in the palms of his gigantically scrawny hands.