HTML / My Life: part II / Mental Chatter

Spent the entire morning screwing around with HTML, to see what will and won't work with Blogger and then deleted the post. There's no sense in me clogging this blog with images and tables. You can view the posting and editing tips here. I'm going to keep this blog litter-free as much as possible.

Just to clarify a few things about my family from the first post: I have one brother and one sister, both older. My mother hasn't drank in twenty years and all have recovered from the mess that was our childhood - as much as possible. I only mention my childhood for context. What's past is prologue and there is no escaping it. It makes us who we are as much as genetics. You can deny where you come from, but it only adds to the emotional baggage that clutters up your personality.

So much mental clutter. Not even sleep seems to quiet it down. When I awake, It's with the cacophony of thoughts, ideas, fears, and illogical relationships that collide in my brain. That must be what yoga is for - to shut that debris storm down. I heard on NPR (I'm a public radio junkie - in good standing) that research has shown that the older you get, the less your brain is able to filter out all that mental chatter. Which is why it is so important to train your mind - because you never know what it will come up with next.

The older I get the less tolerant I am of advertising. It's forced its way into every orifice of our cultural body. I know it's the engine of the economy, but there seem to be fewer and fewer quiet spaces where you can take a breather from it.

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Welcome / My Life Part I / Dilettante Writer

Welcome to The Non-Adventurous Life of sudrakarma. From now on this will be the place where I post comments on the news of the day, bitch about life & people, or just to dispose of mental debris that would otherwise clog my mind.

Here's a quick synopsis of my life to date: I was born youngest of three to a working-class family that had major issues with alcoholism and drug abuse: Alcoholic, pill-popping mother with artistic inclinations and a passive-aggressive father with no ambitions other than keeping his alcoholic wife relatively quiet. At fourteen I picked up the guitar. At fifteen I followed my brother to a Hare krsna temple to work for a summer (It shaped my worldview - more about this later). At sixteen I discovered peer pressure and various types of intoxication (including sex). I worked as club musician from my late teens and throughout my twenties. I gave up the exitement and glitz of bowling-alley celebrity when I turned thirty and started a family. Since I had little or no job training up to that point other than some dead-end jobs (basically I drank, smoked, screwed around when I should have been finishing college - I dropped out after the second year with an A- average due to depression), I took whatever steady work I could find - it turned out to be maintenance. I've been a maintenance man for eight years now and, though it pays the bills and I've learned so many wonderful and useful things like, how to burn the first three layers of skin off your scalp while attempting to solder a 3/4" copper pipe over your head, behind a water heater and pinned against a wall. That pretty much sums up my joy in becoming a maintenance man instead of, say, a writer.

But I do write. In fact, I'm writing now. I write music reviews for a Michigan-based indie website that an acquaintence and I started three years ago - so you'll be hearing about that too from time to time. Of course, I don't make any money at it. Actually, I never really tried but that gets into fear psychology, self-image, confidence and other issues that may take years and thousands of dollars of therapy to address (or perhaps, just one little 'blog ).

So there it is and here I am and welcome to my non-adventurous, yet highly-analyzed life and pastimes. - Sudrakarma