With so much strife going on in the world around us, I'm trying to practice thankfulness on a regular basis...especially on those days that just seem to float along peacefully.
As a matter of fact, I'm attempting to appreciate every day, whether I think it sucked or not 😎 Know what I mean dudes and dudess'???
It's not as if I'm a Zen freak or anything like that, but I have been known to explore various Eastern philosophies from time to time throughout my 70 plus years.
Well...I guess I didn't explore much Eastern wisdom while I was a young boy; other than anxiously cracking open some fortune cookies here and there...so, you can knock off about 12 years from the total😇till I got my hands on Comic Books.
As a matter of fact, it was Comic books which sparked my interest and imagination in not only Asian belief systems, but Greek and Nordic tales of Gods and demi-gods as well.
There was a time I yearned to be as strong as Hercules, so that I could pull down pillars of a Temple I might be chained to...
Thor, the God of thunder was another childhood hero of mine... I would have many daydreams about being him and visiting Asgard where my father Odin would bless me with infinite wisdom and praise for important deeds I performed.
Somehow, in those days, I sensed that I was a chosen one of sorts, by an unseen, powerful entity who looked down upon me with a smile. He was waiting for me to be ready for some type of anointing upon appearing.
I'm still waiting...
I think I screwed up somewhere along the way, bringing displeasure to the ruler of the Universe...???
Maybe it was smoking a joint with my friend Mike at sixteen years of age? We had heard about this stuff that made you feel like a happy drunk, without having to gag on harsh, throat burning alcohol.
It didn't make you throw up either...
So, we somehow got an older friend Vinny from the neighborhood to bring us a joint. Since neither one of us smoked cigarettes at the time, we choked and coughed with every puff we took.
After the joint was finished, we sat on the steps of the New York City tenement building, near the roof's, bulkhead door (where we had hid away) and waited...and waited...waited some more; for whatever we were supposed to feel...
Mike and I kept asking each other, "Do you feel anything yet?" To which our answers were always the same...NO…
"Are you hungry?" I finally asked.
Mike said, "Yeah... Let's go get some pizza..."
Sounded like a great idea to me too, so we walked the three blocks to the Pizzeria. This was long before we had ever heard of pot giving you the munchies, but obviously, we had a severe case of it.
By the time we reached the Pizzeria, we must have been slightly hallucinating, because neither one of us could make the old, fat Italian owner of the place understand what the hell we wanted to order.
Then we got the giggles...and couldn't stop laughing...
The old guy looked perplexed. I kind of felt sorry for him, but couldn't stop laughing no matter how hard I tried.
Somehow I managed to make him understand we wanted two slices by holding up two fingers. He slapped them on a paper plate and we were off to a table in the back, by a jukebox.
"You wanna hear something?" I asked Mike, as I wandered over to the machine. He nodded...
By the time I got to the box, my eyes couldn't focus clearly on the little tags under the glass with the names of the tunes on them. They seemed all jumbled up.
"WTF..."?!?!?!?
My friend couldn't stop laughing as I spouted out the names of songs he had never heard, like 'I Wanna Hold Your Ham' by the Beatles or 'Did You Ever Have to Wake up Your Rind' by The Lovin' Spoonful…
Of course I don't really remember exactly what my head was seeing and mouth spouting at the time...but, you can imagine from the samples above.
ANYWAY… Mike and I couldn't even finish eating our slices, laughing so hard... The owner finally threw us out and halfway down the street, the high had begun to already fade.
We made it back to our block and sat on the stoop, bewildered till it was time to go home. It was late by then, and we probably were burnt out from the weed without knowing...
I don't know if that was serious enough to have Odin or Zeus frowning down upon me from the Heavens and take my special powers away from me or not? Maybe I lost favor from one of them for having sex out of wedlock or something...???
By most standards of the day, I think I was a pretty good kid, but maybe not quite good enough to become a mythical God, of which I didn't believe was just mythical...
I FAILED in my quest...and I'm forever destined to suffer as a mere mortal, so it seems for such transgressions...
Oh well... Maybe I'll get a second chance at it, next time around?
Till then my friends, stay well and be thankful you never let Zeus or Odin see you smoke weed as a kid; otherwise your life might be even worse than it has been...?!?!?!!?
Ciao
