Coming Down Soon..

This site will deconstruct itself quite soon.

Make sure you drop over to see the new diggs at:

Creative Deconstruction

I look forward to seeing all of you soon.

Love, wildness, joy..

-GTD

PS: I’d rather have an erection than an election.

Tis done…..about to abandon this ship for the new one…

Hey y’all, I am gonna make you change your bookmarks for me now. I just got my new wordpress.org site going on my own webhost. You can find me there at:

Escape Plans

Now I can host my own blog, expand my options, and use a whole new theme!

See you there…

I still have some transfer work to do, but tonight I learned how to use FTP to upload files to my website, and I learned how to manage my own blog. That was the challenge of the evening.

See y’all tomorrow!

-GTD

What will it be tonight?

Perhaps tonight I will make the leap by switching the location of this blog over to its own website on my hosting program…

Time will Tell. Check back later on for updates.

Love, wildness, chaos, joy….

-GTD

In an empty bathtub all alone…

Done. I made it just before sunrise. By the way, around these parts, I measure my day as the distance between two sunrises, not the arbitrary and illusionary “midnight” date change operations at play around me.

I just got done sitting in the bathtub, with not water, with my clothes on….for one full hour. I dozde off a couple of times, but mainy I just asked myself the questions over and over.

1. What is going on here?

2. How did I end up here?

3. Why am I doing this?

Number one yielded sensory data, and told me that I could grow aware of more and more and more. An exercise in stepping outside of the realm of normal use values of the matter around me… I enjoy such things. A friend of mine, John Juan Matus I call him, called these little deliberate acts of illusion-breaking Not-Doings. They give a sorcerer an expanded perception and a broadended field of experience.

I started thinking that every house is already an abandoned house, and that living in houses is some kind of repeated patter, and that humans love their patterns oh so dearly. The bathtub could have been a basin, or a tank, or something else, to other occupants.

Question 2 yielded a trip in my mind, back through hearing about the book, buying it, the circumstances of being on an email group where the website for the book first appeared on my radar….Then, it amounted to everything that I had ever done in my life had led me to this experiment in the “bathtub.”

Question 3 made my mind wander and wander and wander. Why in the hell would I be doing this exercise, this not doing?

Then it hit me.

Just Because.

-GTD

Sit in an empty bathtub…

Ok, tonight, no matter what time I finish my work for the evening, I will be doing a Just Because Club experiment. What will it be? I will sit in the bathtub for one full hour, with no water in it. I have typed in the full text of the experiment below.

Just Because Club is one of the best books I have ever picked up on the subject of getting a whole new perspective on how I perceive supposedly common aspects of life.

This gets me thinking, how many of you readers out there have thought through all the things that you take for granted every single day? Take words, for example. We have a conceptual agreement to accept these little black marks as letters. Then, we accept various combinations of the familiar marks as words. On top of that, we accept a string of these words as a sentence, and then we imbue the whole thing with meaning. Doesn’t it feel strange to read words and sentences that describe sentences and words as just collections of little familiar black markings? I’m telling you, words don’t really exist. Concepts and ideas and agreements exist.

Enough of that for now.

Ask yourself about all the other things that you take for granted. A table, a bed, or a rug. Sure, they have common and familiar uses, but they are not what they seem. What if the common ways of using the things around us also serves to keep us in a kind of bondage?

Have you ever heard someone say, “You don’t use Object A that way, you use it this way!” as if each collection of matter with a linguistic label had a preordained and solitary function?

The situationists of 1960s France, inspired by the earlier Surrealist art movement, enjoyed a practice of removing objects from common usage and using them for something different. What if that piece of trash could be used for something else? What if the ways we define the objects and people around us keep us programmed and dutifully bound to the status quo? What the hell IS the status quo, anyway? Who turned out the lights?

Anyhow, here is the text of the Just Because Club experiment,

“BE IN AN EMPTY BATHTUB

Yep, that’s the experiment. Be in an empty bathtub for one hour. You read correctly, sit or lay in an empty bathtub (sans water) for one hour. You may choose to do this with or without clothing. I find a bathtub can be quite chilly without the benefit of hot water. The choice is yours.

While you are lying in the tub ask yourself the following questions:

What is going on here?

How did I get here?

What am I doing?

Keep asking these questions throughout the hour. At the end of the hour, get out of the tub, make yourself a nice cup of tea, sit and drink the tea. Maybe have a nice faerie-cake or cookie. …”

So, that’s it. It is about 2:41 am now, so I have awhile before the sun rises, meaning I can still challenge myself to this experiment before tomorrow comes. Ahhhhhh.

Love, wildness, chaos, and joy.

Pictures and a report as soon as I finish. Anyone up checking this out right now? Send me shout!

Santa Monica Adventures…

Today, as mentioned, my girlfriend Sheila and I wandered around a canyon and up a mountaintop. We drove into Brentwood and found the road mentioned in the “Weird California” book. Just an hour ago, I found more websites with pictures of the ruins I had hoped to explore, but the Weird California book gave an incorrect address for the trailhead we needed.

Oh yeah, I forgot. I had originally planned on going to the hollywood cemetery, but remembered the story of the ruins in Rustic Canyon. So Sheila and I decided to check it out. There were “No Trespassing” signs in the direction of Rustic Canyon, as soon as we reached the bottom of the fire road. We went over them and down along a huge concrete basin structure, and down to another fenced area that said, “No Trespassing: Police Dogs..” Some chickens made noises as we got closer to the fenced area, and it seemed like it held structures and occupants, so we turned back.

In the other direction, the forest road continues into Sullivan Canyon for quite a long way. I don’t know how far, as we only walked a mile or so down it. Off into the woods on the right of the trail, we found a swing, hanging from the trees with thick rope. Check out the eerie videos of it:

The ruins we totally missed were on a road just a half mile or so away from us, but as I said, the Weird California book had successfully sent us on a goose chase.

Later, after swinging and hiking around a bit, a dude on his bicycle told about a drive up another road to a place that overlooks all of L.A. We drove there after dark, climbed up the drainage cement, and looked out over the millions of city lights. Helicopters and planes flew over the city. A giant, near-full moon hovered above the mountains to the southeast. What a beautiful night. More pictures for tomorrow. Too bad we missed the ruins…

It was fascinating to notice how wild it felt, even so close to the giant city.

Check out these sites about the place we tried to find. Another time perhaps.

Rustic Canyon
More on Herr Schmidt and the Murphy Ranch Ruins in Rustic Canyon

-GTD

Somebody in the city loves me…

But I am not sure who yet. Today, I will make a pilgrimage with my girlfriend to L.A., to visit her mother in the hospital. The adventure for today is two-fold. First, I went over to Search Engine Fiction to check out their prompt for the week…

I used it here in my title. Funny, I don’t travel to the city often, and today, when I check back at their site, I have a trip to the city planned.

After the hospital visit, today’s adventure will take me to the Forestlawn Gardens cemetery. Later on this evening, I will share pictures, stories, and whatever else I decide to put up here.

Will I find out who loves me in the city? Time will tell.

Oh yeah, Jim, to answer your business card question….The card I found belonged to an esoteric freemason. That was before I ever even visited a lodge…

More on that later.

I’ll get back on here later on with news, updates, and pics.

Enjoy!

Late to bed, early to rise…

I put myself into bed by 3am. Then, got myself awake at 8am. Off to the library to seed business cards into relevant texts. Once, I followed a business card from the lobby of the rec. center at my University. It led me into friendships and a fascinating development of human potential and evolution.

I went to the beach again. Stopped at prayer point. Also, today confirmed an appointment for an upcoming experiment in meditation and consciousness. More on all of this as it develops.

For now, I’ll post for you an old piece of writing. Enjoy…

gambling

It gives me only a tiny bit of discomfort to post some old writing here. Words have value if they can make someone move. Words have a potential to create, enhance, and increase value.

Eating against the grain of the housemates serves to enhance my awareness of how I interact with food. Auto-pilot in this case would drive me to eat cakes, sugar, ice cream, and other foods I have chosen to omit from my diet for a month. Instead of succombing to the longing to eat the foods I chose not to eat, I pay attention to the motivations behind my desires for specific foods. Today, this has come into a much more clear focus. Much time have I wasted in restaurants. Ah well.

Love, wildness, joy…

GTD

Reversal of…

…Fortune..

Pictures and short videos of today’s exercise…

ahh.

giggling walking backward.

La Luna

Columbus Day

The destination of the backward walk

Today, I had a few micro-adventure plans to shake myself up a bit. I decided to walk backward from my house to the library. At the library, I wanted to do a business card synchronicity experiment. I’ll save that for tomorrow’s blog. Today, something different happened.

As I left the house, Sheila handed me the mp3 player, and I noticed a stylized-patterned response about to emerge from my mouth. The moment I caught the fake self about to speak, it killed itself. The thought went something like this, “I don’t listen to headphones when I walk. I listen to my surroundings instead.” All of this with an air of superiority over those idiotic heaphone-walkers. So I caught the fake self, it killed itself, and I listened to Ratatat, Explosions in the Sky, and Cee-Lo Green.

It felt great to feel the landscape dancing with the music in my brain. Their dance made both feel more alive. A mother and her child came scootering and running toward me on the sidewalk. I could see the little boy talking to me, so I took off a headphone. “What’s your name?” “My name is Garrett. What’s your name?” “Ethan. Me and my mommy are going on a walk.” “Have fun Ethan!” They passed me and ran off toward the middle school. I wondered if poor little Ethan knew that the building he scootered past would serve as his prison in a few short years…

I walked the rest of the way seeing no other humans except the ones in cars.

When I got to the library, I encountered an empty parking lot. A picture of Columbus (see picture below) sat in the window on a sign that read, “Library Closed Oct. 13 for Columbus Day.” Today would ot allow the incursion of the exercise I had planned.

Instead, I felt forced to celebrate Columbus day. In a way, I had imitated Columbus today. I pioneered the first backward walk from my house to the library. I did so on land that used to embrace the Luiseno, Cahuilla, Cupeno, Kumeyaay, and Northern Diegueño people before the first Spanish contact in 1542.

I walked to ye olde coffee shop to write this blog. The backward walk went well, and when I walked forward again, it felt new and different. Not only did I get to have a new experience, that of walking backward to the library, but I also got to experience something I had taken for granted in a new way, walking forward again. All of that while listening to epic and sweeping sound layers from the mp3 player….All under a bright and full moon over the orange Southern California glow.

There will be pictures and videos inserted into this entry as soon as I get home to upload them.

Do something out of the ordinary today. Become out of the ordinary to yourself. Be weird and kind to yourself.

Love, wildness, chaos, and joy….

GTD

“You gotta master the walkaway, dude…”

Enjoy Yourself…no matter what.

“Just what the hell IS Escape Pla…

Escape Plans Unlimited….?” someone asked me today on my facebook.

I responded thus,

“Ahh. One concept is to Escape from all the ideas you have about yourself. Both positive and negative. Another concept is to establish a space in your brain….literally carve out, by certain practices, a space in which you can breathe, and get away from all the programming, advertising, and conceptualizing against the flow of experience….Then, in that FREE space, you set up a lab, and begin testing, experimenting, on whatever brings you enthusiasm and joy.

Some might call this discovering your life’s work, others may call it finding your genius, I call it Escaping from your fake ass selves.

Thus, Escape Plans. One angle I am very keen on right now is the luxury travel and life coaching market…..I am aiming for $10,000/hour liberation consulting. Think I Heart Huckabees existential detectives crossed with Indiana Jones, and add in a little Big Lebowski, Matrix and Fight Club for extra measure….

There you have it.

Thanks for writing.”

Love, wildness, chaos, joy…

-GTD