Tag: Prose

Unsolicited Spiritual Advice: God Crack

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

“…the place of mind in nature and the relationship between brain and consciousness.” -Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

I’ll tell you what: Right now my brain is starting a headache looking at this quote while my consciousness is in Aldous Huxley’s pants. Such a spiritual hottie. Great big juicy brain. Big glasses. All the vision. Sexy. Delicious.

A friend asked me if, spiritually, there was a “ghost in the machine” and I think there is some big philosophical principle there, but I took it as: Is there a ghost in this human flesh machine that’s running the show? And my answer is, of course! Who else would be running the show but a ghost? Dead humans are the geneses of ghosts, are we not, so surely we each have to be full up with at least one ghost to begin with. In there, pulling the levers. The consciousness operating on the brain.

There are psychiatrists out there who say they can reproduce the god feeling artificially with some sort of electronic doodad plugged into your brain. They take this to mean that the god feeling is a product of brain function and not at all inspired by something outside, like an actual god. But then, how do they think a god operates except by affecting the physical brain through the consciousness? The god-consciousness goes conscious and pulls on the god-conscious-feeling brain levers because it says, “Hey flesh machine! You have GOT to feel this!” So yes, nasty psychiatrists. The god feeling can be reproduced in the brain, but the gods do it by one little lift of a divine eyebrow where it takes you a room full of overpriced equipment and millions in grant money.

But let me not come out of my hair about it…

My hottie Aldous used peyote to try to get there. High, he got the god feeling by looking at a painting of a chair, looking at flowers in a vase, counting the pleats in has pants. (Him and those pleats, man. He goes on and on. But he was high at the time, so we forgive him, and his sheets of pleats.) He was a visionary, but on his trip, he didn’t see visions. He saw life pulsating in everything, which is to say the divine radiating out of everything, which is to say the omnipresent face of the divine. Can we say he saw gods everywhere? Each pleat having its own divine ghost the way each human has its own divine ghost?

I think we can. I think we can see it too.

Unsolicited Spiritual Advice:

If you have millions of dollars in grant money and a stash of peyote to get you to the god feeling, by all means use it (and invite me), but if you don’t, the door is not closed to you. Pray. Meditate. Commune. Dare I say, make a habit of it? The gods are vast, but the the vastness of their feeling can slip in through even the tiniest conscious crack.

-M. Ashley

Learning to Be Alone (creative nonfiction)

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

Not the first time I was alone, but the time I learned to love being alone. Art school. Summer arts school between my junior and senior years of high school. I went for writing. I had two writer roommates. They put the writers together because they said we had a tendency to keep odd hours and they didn’t want us keeping the dancers or singers awake all night because they had to wake up early and actually work for their muse. Lazy cusses that we were, our first class wasn’t until nine and we only had two classes and one group activity a day. The rest of the time we were supposed to be typing away at our keyboards making Shakespeare or whatever. We were supposed to be getting inspired. We were supposed to be collaborating. We were supposed to be bouncing off the walls with creative energy.

Mostly I remember wandering through the halls exploring myself.

That sounds unnecessarily sexual. If I were to say exploring myself from the inside, that doesn’t make it any better. Feeling myself from the inside? No.

Understanding my own soul better. There we go. Expanding. Spreading my arms into the empty space.

The halls were white painted brick and white tile, fluorescent lights. Someone in my class, more brilliant than I in that moment, said the halls looked like Communism. I just about fell out of my tree laughing at that at the time. I’ve used that joke several times since. I’ve probably used it more than the person who cracked it in the first place. I wonder if they even remember. I wonder if their own humor followed them the way it did me.

The halls of the funky math and science building at Vanderbilt looked like Communism. The mental hospital I was in on a hold that one time—that looked like Communism too. Math and mental health and art school. There should be a connection there. Art led to math led to the nuthouse. Maybe the more talented writer who cracked the joke in the first place could do more with that than I can in this moment. Don’t expect much of me. I was great in art school, I did marginally at math, and I was not one of the popular kids at the nuthouse. It was hard to be alone there. I made myself lonely in math when I didn’t need to be and at art school I was alone, but damn I was never lonely. Damn I loved being with myself then.

There was a smell in those halls. It was the smell of freedom. I had been to summer camp before—lifetimes of summer camp—but here I had all this time to do with as I pleased, to be plying my art, and no one was up my butt to be cheery or play Red Rover. Our meal times were even flexible.

I was planning a good roam one afternoon and went to the cafeteria first to get a sandwich. I was in the middle of a bad attempt to wrap it in a yellow napkin that was too small for the job, when a handsome man who worked there, I’m sure one of the regular students, so maybe all of 20 years old, came over to me and offered to wrap it up for me. That was the kindest thing.

I thought I was being so sly. I wasn’t even sure we were allowed to take food out. I was being on the down low and he busted me—busted me, then helped me out and in such a sweet tone. I wonder if he was a writer too or if he had found his personal space there—had explored his own self from the inside wandering down those halls, so he understood the lure and understood the need to have portable sandwiches for the journey.

-M. Ashley

Hairy Larry (creative nonfiction)

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Hairy Larry gave me the worst haircut I have ever had. I think he was drunk at the time. It was only 6:00pm and he was in the kitchen with the rest of us, all bar friends, but also all sober. He was drunk I think, but I let him cut my hair anyway. My hair was a mess and needed some kind of attention. He was drunk, I figured, but he was always drunk, so I also figured, at least drunk, his hands wouldn’t shake.

He, himself, had ALL the hair. Pompadour and chest hair that would make a pectoral toupee jealous. He had a beard, well kept, but still mountain man worthy. His eyebrows, also well kept, but awnings enough that he never had to worry about the sun in his eyes.

He was a hairdresser by trade, or so I was told. Doing me in the kitchen was a special kindness, a special concession for bar friends. Also, doing me in the kitchen meant he didn’t have to pay a kick to his salon owner. He needed that money for booze.

He asked me what I wanted. I never know the answer to that when hairdressers ask me that question. I usually go months and months between haircuts and I never have learned to speak the language. By the time I gave myself to Hairy Larry, it had been more than a year—longer than the time I had moved into that house.

I told him I didn’t know how to describe what I wanted. It went something like medium length and, you know, not poofy. The not poofy thing is the hard part as my hair is thick and naturally curly. When I was a teenager in the nineties, I would always leave the hairdresser looking like some kind of hybrid poodle/Dolly Parton creature as my hair is as naturally platinum as it is curly and the hairdressers could never resist exercising their mad engineering skills and making it reach the rafters.

I always went home after hair appointments and washed the height out. I didn’t mind if the hair on the top of my head had no volume and the curls throughout weren’t quite as curly as they could have been. I wanted to look something like me and not something like poodle/Parton/other.

So, for Hairy Larry, the not poofy part was the challenge. I was in my late twenties by this point and although I knew very little about what I wanted for my hair, for my life, for this very moment, I knew at least one thing I didn’t want. I knew at least several things I didn’t want. At that time, I think I defined what I did want almost exclusively by what I didn’t want. I didn’t want poofy hair. Anything but poofy hair. No matter how you get there, Hairy Larry, anything but poofy hair.

Anything but the life I had been leaving before I moved into this house with three housemates, four cats, and three dogs between us. Anything but that. Kitchen haircuts and all. Anything but going back. Anything but the poodle of my teens. Anything but the you-are-not-who-you-are poof of someone else’s engineering.

-M. Ashley

The Satanic Office (creative nonfiction)

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In my dream, Satan was a thin, black-haired man wearing a pinstripe suit with a white shirt and ecclesiastical purple tie. His eyes were so dark brown they were almost, but not quite, black. He sat cross-legged on the floor between his rumpled camel-colored couch and Ikea glass-topped coffee table. There were stacks of files and towering reams of paperwork everywhere.

He was insistent he was not Lucifer, nor Beelzebub, nor the Devil, nor anything like that. His singular identity as Satan, he said, was very important to him.

He was flustered in that space with the great peaks of paperwork surrounding him—all the boxes that needed to be checked, all the signatures that needed to be signed just-so by the little yellow tabs poking out diabolically here and there and everywhere.

So when I hear of someone, some ghost hunter or erstwhile exorcist, being touched by Satan and being shaken to their very core, I think of Satan this way and wonder if all he really wanted was an audit of the last twenty years which, let’s face it, would scare the hell out of anyone.

-M. Ashley

Lame Zebra (creative nonfiction)

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Something as mundane as I found out he was courting other women, and yet I went on, enmeshed, with him anyway.

Courting is a nice word for manipulating. Affairs of the imagination, choosing which flesh to realize.

I sat in the car with a friend after finding out. Devastated. She told me it isn’t the lame zebra’s fault for being lame. It’s the asshole lion’s fault for going after lame zebras. I didn’t mind her calling me lame. I was lamer than that. Lame was an understatement. I was more like hobbled. The asshole lion the kind of asshole that hobbles the naive zebra then chases after her. He made her an easy catch.

I told my friend I was done. We arrived at my house and, in the dark, in my driveway, before opening the car door to let myself out, I told her I was done with him. That was it and it was over and I was done.

She patted my head and said sympathetically, “No you’re not.” A sentence of death and destruction and many, many more months of eating my heart out.

It sounds stupid, but time was the only thing that healed it. Time and he got married to one of his other lame zebras. He said she made him feel like a teenager again. That’s likely because she was the worst hobbled amongst us and, compared to her, he could run like the wind.

He wrote to me, “Since I’ve been with her, I’ve been running. Can you imagine? Me? At my age? Running?”

I wonder how long that lasted before she gave up and he, at his age, convinced her life was easier sitting, limp and licking his chops as she puts on weight and wonders what happened to her legs that used to run so swiftly, kick so high.

I took up running myself a few years later and I’m faster now than I ever was. I have no hurt for him anymore. I hurt for her. I’m sure I won’t be seeing her at any local, smalltime races anytime soon. The LA Marathon is bound to miss her as well. She might have wanted to do that before she was forty only a little less than she was terrified she wouldn’t be married by then.

Better wed and walking then a spinster fleet of foot.

I feel you sister. I do.

-M. Ashley

Lemon Mystery (creative nonfiction)

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“How often have you sailed in my dreams. And now you come in my awakening, which is my deeper dream.”
-Khalil Gibran, “The Prophet”

In my dream, I walked with my god through his sacred orange grove. The trees all had white bark. That was important somehow, the white bark coming off like ash, but healthy healthy. The trees were all so healthy.

Today, walking my puppy, I came across two lemons on the sidewalk. It was around the side of someone’s house, not near any trash cans. No wind had been blowing so they hadn’t come on the wind. There was no lemon tree leaning over the fence or anywhere nearby. It was as if someone had been walking that way and dropped these two lemons for me to see and follow like breadcrumbs, but sour and more vividly colored.

I thought of my god’s white barked orange grove and could this have been my god walking this corner, dropping these citrus fruits for me? Do oranges in the dream orchard become lemons on the waking dirty street? Dreams communicate this way in the sleeping and waking dream. Color color, symbol symbol, the promise of a taste. A god that walked that way before you. Mystery.

-M. Ashley

Natively Unquiet (creative nonfiction)

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If you threw the Empire State Building into a raging sea, no one would know the difference. Deepak Chopra said something like that, advocating for meditation. I bet the people of New York would know the difference–their skyline sadly quieter again.

But not silent.

There is no such thing. Like time and god, it’s something we conceptualize, track our lives by, aspire to. But there is always some sound. There is always some imperfection. Our own breath. Our own heartbeat. The mortal body regulating itself as it slowly, calmly perishes.

And that’s not a bad thing. Humans will never be gods and humans will also never know silence or be silent. We are the creatures we are, natively, and we are an unsubtle, noisy lot.

When I try to be silent, movies related to the logistics of eternity flicker across the insides of my eyelids. I’ve learned (sometimes) to watch and not participate, like seekers of silence and stillness are supposed to do, but even when the films are silent films, there is still the sound of the flickering, still the hum of electricity to projector that bolts through the physical brain. The slapstick of memory and trauma and dream and inspiration plays itself out and I laugh. As silent as I am, as unmoving as my belly and throat are–still there is the laugh.

That’s probably the foundational sound of the universe–the breath and heartbeat sound even She can’t get away from when She curves back into herself to resettle before birthing herself, from herself, again.

-M. Ashley

Talk About Disease (creative nonfiction)

~ M. Ashley ~ 1 Comment

It puts me ill at ease when my mom starts talking about my grandparents’ cancer—how they were dying at the same time, in hospital rooms next to each other. Lung cancer.

They smoked together. I’m sure he lit her cigarettes when they were dating. A sexy gesture. A sexy pull. Firsthand smoke to firsthand smoke. Breathing in each other’s breaths. Secondhand to secondhand. Thirdhand smoke in each other’s clothes. They breathed it in when they were dancing close.

Thirdhand smoke in their clothes still, even their clean clothes that my mother had to divvy up amongst relatives or donate after they passed. You never really can get rid of the smoke, the breath, the illness, the cancer. It grows and grows.

My mother’s marriage was falling apart as her parents were dying. My father was useless.

One day, after having worked a full day and spending most of the evening sitting at her parents’ bedsides, my mom came home to find that my father had put my sister and I to bed in our day clothes. She tells me he didn’t even bother to take our shoes off. That’s the part she couldn’t get over.

Unemployed and couldn’t be bothered to take our shoes off.

Unemployed and he would do the laundry at three in the morning with all the lights on in the house and Hank Williams roaring from the record player.

She wasn’t spending her evenings with him. He couldn’t throw a toddler’s tantrum, so he chose Hank Williams instead and, “You did say you wanted me to do the laundry, didn’t you?”

The cancer grew and grew.

My grandparents died and my mom got a divorce in the same year.

I once asked my mom if she was glad my grandparents weren’t around to see her get divorced. I asked her if there was some relief in it for her—in their passing. I don’t remember how she answered. I know she spoke, but all I really remember is the silence while she thought about it.

The hospital was in a rough neighborhood. My mom had to go into the parking garage each night wielding mace. She had a full time job, two kids, one of them (me) disabled, and, as I have mentioned, a useless husband. She is a badass. That’s the her in her I hope to breathe in.

-M. Ashley

Noisy (creative nonfiction)

~ M. Ashley ~ 2 Comments

“Feel the delight of walking in the noisy street,
And being the noise.”
-Rumi, “A Community of the Spirit”

I bet the world would take Gen Z a lot more seriously if they knew the difference between “everyday” and “every day..” There is, at least I think there is, a correct way to make noise in this math we call writing.

Words mean things.

I once got in an almost fight with a therapist because she thought “heigth” was a word. That would have been an unholy kind of noise. A rumbling fist fight behind the closed doors of confidentiality. I may have come out bloody, she looked like she could have been a scrapper, but dammit, I would have been right. I am right. There is no h at the end of the word.

A lady in my group therapy had an albino husband. There was some drama with him at the behavioral health clinic. The therapist leading the group said she heard about him coming in and “acting a fool.” Part of his foolishness being that he whizzed in the corner of one of the therapists’ offices and had to be carted out of there by the po po. He was making all kinds of noise—shouts, grunts, tinkles.

I was embarrassed for my people. When the secretaries for the crazy house see me, do they now think, there’s another noisy albino ready to piss in the corner. Somebody get the gloves on. Somebody get that powder that sucks up hazardous liquids. Somebody get a mop.

I speak quietly, still embarrassed for my people. Lack of pigment doesn’t mean lack of decency man, be a human for fuck’s sake. Be a little quieter, in a dignified way. You are not the kind of spiritual noise Rumi was talking about.

That same lady, married to the peeing albino, in my therapy group, looked ratty all the time. Not throwing stones. I can rat it up in fine style myself. Just a matter of fact she looked ratty all the time. And once she said she didn’t take care of herself because her albino husband couldn’t see her anyway and I didn’t disabuse her of her excuse to look ratty, but unless there was something extra wrong with his eyes that isn’t wrong with mine, yes… yes he can see her in all her ratty inglory..

I’m sure that’s not what made him make the loathsome noise and piss in the corner, but it’s just one more stressor, or an indication of a relationship already stressed because the woman cares more about what he can’t see than what she sees in herself.

I wanted to shout in the street that she should be un-ratty for herself, and damn the pissing albino with his not that bad eyes. Be your own woman. Be you for you. Be beautiful for your own liking. But then I realize, shouting at her in the street would be me making the noise at myself mostly because I too, as I said, can rat it up a lot of the time and don’t like looking at myself in the mirror and I don’t look and the internal noise is something like well, if I can’t see the rat tunes that well, I can’t blame myself for being ratty, which is the same argument this lady had but at her other, which is infinitely better than me having this discussion and blaming my quiet rattiness on myself.

-M. Ashley

A Hill I Once Knew (creative nonfiction)

~ M. Ashley ~ 4 Comments

My Uncle Chuck’s house backed up against one of the humps of Little Mountain. As far as I know, Little Mountain has two major humps separated by two apartment complexes, two tracts of homes, two schools, and, lately, a strip mall, an iHop, a McDonals’s and a Starbucks always bustling with CalState Berdoo students.

My Uncle Chuck’s house butted up against the back of it and there was a small piece of it in his yard. I knew it intimately. He landscaped the crap out of it. He not only planted gorgeous plants everywhere, but he dug great paths and steps into the dirt so my sister, my cousins, and I could go run and chase all over it, minding the ankle-eating gofer holes of course.

We used to love to dig holes in that hill ourselves. My uncle had shovels for us all and, wherever he was working on some worthy project on the hill, there were my two boy cousins and I also working, digging holes to China or, if we were really ambitious, digging a hole large enough for us to sit it. Sometimes that took days, but the prestige that came with climbing into your own hole was well worth it.

-M. Ashley