I had agreed to meet Dr. Michael Picucci to discuss his new book at his place at 10, and got totally lost as never before. Like Bush, I was going in the wrong direction most of the time. At least I’m man enough to admit it. I still am trying to understand what hit me. I was still distracted by the situation with the loss of funding for CAC for next year. NYSCA is obviously going in the wrong direction as well, and it was contagious.
I got there at 11 (almost two hours on back roads) and since Michael and I had not worked together as a writing team for a while, we had a few humps and messy spots to get over before finding our groove again. Once we got into the groove, we were awesome as in days of yore when we wrote the award-winning Journey To Complete Recovery, and went over the whole book outline with bang-bang efficiency and lots of creative brain-busting, grasping for words that would connect to the heart of the reader. In two hours we had gone through the book once over lightly. We had found the right direction where it really counted. The rest was trivial. What I call “non-violent intervention” he calls “compassionate communication.” It’ not exactly the same, but in practice, it can be. One is a problem-solving mode of the other.
We commented on how it was an important life skill to be tolerant of the messy parts of life to get to the clear and shining parts. We also talked about connectivity and how it is made possible by “increasing our band width” a wonderful phrase Michael uses a lot in his seminars. In Native talk it is “walking in many worlds.” We parted with a long hug and I was soon back home.
Again as I turned on the Mets game on the radio at random, two consecutive men got on base and then Floyd hit a three run homer, exactly as it had happened a few days ago. As Yogi Berra said, “It was Déjà vu all over again.” I say, “It’s connectivity all over again.” It was like a scene out of Frequency. (Highly recommended sci-fi about the Mets, murder and mayhem!) I was increasing my band width, while still tuned to 660 AM. As they say, you gotta believe.
I ended up taking a Republican friend to see Fahrenheit 9-11. Okay, so she wasn’t exactly a Republican, but probably voted for Dole in 98 and Bush in 02. Anyway, she was very open minded about it, and we had a talk afterwards in a parking lot about politics.
There in the theater I was greeted by Ione, a good friend, always serene, (a Powhatan descendant) who helped stage my first 11,000 Year Old Man monologue at the Deep Listening Space, and sitting next to her was Pauline Oliveros, the famous experimental composer. We had a chat and I said that my kid had already seen it twice so I had to see it again, to give the parental advice implied by that R rating. I said I’d asked him what he’d thought. He said, “It was all the same stuff you told me about right after 9-11 and I thought you were crazy. Now there’s a movie about it, and it grossed 26 million bucks.” Pauline chuckled. This was her first time. Then an old friend Regina came up to chat at my aisle seat. She was mentioned in my book No Word For Time, but not by name. She was one of the first people to attend one of Grandfather Turtle’s sweat lodges in New York. She is a German healing practitioner, from the Linden Tree Center. It was good to see her again after so long. Then the woman stood up in front and told us not to talk too much about the movie during the movie, but to talk about it to our friends afterwards. One trailer was for The Corporation, an interesting looking movie involving Michael Moore and others. Another which I think is called Silver City about a candidate called Richard Pilagar who is a front for a big investment firm involved in all kinds of corruption, similar to Carlyle. Then came Fahrenheit 9-11, which in its own way is a heart-warming film. It’s a film you can fall in love with, a film that for some restores faith in America, in its people. It reminded us that Bush’s popularity was below 45 % in September of 2001, that Carlyle made $237 million in one day when United Defense went public after 9-11, and that Duvall County Florida had 16000 black voters disqualified, and that it was Bush’s first cousin who made the decision to announce Bush the winner in Florida on the Fox news channel. The interviews with the author of The Halliburton Agenda were most interesting. It was a form of shock therapy that jolted viewers into pointing their lives in the right direction again.
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