Grateful Dead and the Traveling Soul

I told Althea I was feeling lost
Lacking in some direction
Althea told me upon scrutiny
That my back might need protection

There are many tales as to how the Grateful Dead arrived at their name, but the best is rooted in pre-modern Britain, and can still be of help to any traveler looking to juice some new town karma.

So it goes that among the horse-pie ridden roads of ye ole England, among the daily melee of human, animal, and the yet to be discovered universe of microbial traffic, a passing traveler might spot a human corpse or two who’d been  propped up in their wooden eternal home, on display at the front of certain institutional buildings. The intrepid traveler would know that these unfortunate souls hadn’t been so good at balancing their pre-modern budget. Having failed to pay off their worldly debts, their posthumous punishment would be rights to a proper burial, until somehow their deeds on earth coaxed some willing witness to satisfy the debtors.

Often the families of the deceased would gather their meager feudal bits together to put their tap-dancing Uncle Jack six feet under. Or perhaps Jack’s old buddies would send out ye ole collection plate and hope to let the essence of Jack get on its way.

Another option however presented an ethereal opportunity for the fresh newcomer. In order to get into the good graces of the gods of debt, Jack’s soul, and massage the town’s collective gestalt abit, a mindful traveler could take it upon themselves to void that debt. No doubt a bit of a financial setback, the eager to please traveler would toss their coin purse onto the block still, and with Jack finally liberated into the spirit world he could show his gratitude by helping ease the traveler’s way into town, helping to fulfill whatever might be their intentions.

Now, if you see corpses lining a modern town’s streets, I wouldn’t suggest sticking around too long (unless you’re in Tana Toraja). The moral of my reminder here is to help out my fellow travelers abit. So when riding into some new spot try and locate similarly unique ways to be charitable.  You don’t believe in god? The afterlife? Karma? Or even a higher force? That’s A-Okay. But helping out a family or friend of the recently deceased is still something wonderful, that is looked kindly upon, and helps to lift us all not to mention your own spirit. and might help keep the existential travel devils at bay along your journey.

(For Jen Sotham, you will always remain in our wayward hearts)

 

Buddha has long been evicted

….long banished by the newest people of the peninsula. He was slowly inched into his final refuge in tiny cordoned off mountain asylums without any say in the new country’s day-to-day operations. His polyvalent homes, spotted throughout the façade of meaningful mountains live in a parallel universe that is only allowed a whisper, a peep, and a peak into ours, every now and again. Things, things upon things consciously constructed, unconsciously deconstructing. Where once silence sat supreme, there is now the unbroken sound of modern man’s noon-day panic. A pacing implacable existential ennui awaiting us in the space just past the day’s finish line and before the next’s beginning. We lay awake mapping out our careful tip toe through life unto death, averting every corner of modern uncertainties, as we descend deeper into the trick maze. Buddha’s gong still rings in from the Korean mountains, reminding the ears walking the perimeter of their accessory to this mindfully mindless crime, while the pedestrians on the interior have become too far gone, out of reach to hear this millennia old call.

Confucius’s fate even worse…having been relegated to a subterranean apartment beneath the grid and far away off any subway line, he’s the great grandfather with pee stains in his PJs. He’s the old man fading away and buried beneath megalithic new apartment complexes with shiny TRUMP signs on their mast.  He rides the subway but is ignored. Walks the streets buts is shoved out of the way. All but considered completely senile, he’s not taken at all that seriously anymore, really, yet is paraded about every so often on certain days as to feign some respect for something that’s perhaps never been quite understood.

It’s the technicolor Jesus that’s filling the suede spiritual seat of modern Korea. The Jesus that facilitates business networkings, plastic enterprises of all sorts, and dreams of redemption from  holy folly around exciting, semented, elbowy corners under the keeeeeeeen little neons of back alley-way warmgasms. His concrete & glass palaces right off the transit lines, spreading like an urban herpes, sprouting between gas stations and faster food. The golf loving  messiah and bearer of the 401k…better get in line…the job forecast looks like a scorcher for eternity.