David Bronson

I am in the middle of an attempt to maintain a peaceful, easy feeling.
I kind of drifted over to the subway. Ate an apple that I knew was good for me but didn’t actually enjoy that much.
This day has been full so far and it’s still morning.
Predicting a heavy continuation, as I’ll do my best to remain light of feeling.

Can we maintain a light and easy feeling while burning with intention underneath?

There’s a lot of talk lately about existence.
A lot of talking, a lot of thinking.
I’m basically of the mind that there’s the talking, the thinking,
and then there’s the doing, the living.
I very strongly prefer this latter way.
I’m very tired of, and think have been pretty successful at starting to get away from thinking too much. It starts to sicken me.
I’d like to believe that one of, if not the single most valuable thing I’ve learned (in a certain way), is to realize the point at which there has been enough thinking – could be about any thing or situation – and the time has arrived for the appropriate action (which could consist of anything, including moving on and/or doing nothing).

As I write this, there just happen to be these two guys across from me, pretty young guys – probably early twenties – they look and sound very educated, talking very interestedly to each other. Back and forth. About their opinions, their positions, their thoughts, politics, society, etc. And it just sounds incredibly tired to me.

I wonder why so many have a difficult time living and letting live.
What is it that causes a person to be so preoccupied with another’s life, situation, money, choices, etc. that they actually forego their own living?
(Which is really what gossip, judgement, excessive attention all amount to).
And, if there’s no truly worthwhile reason (such as an emergency, for example) then what degree and sort of pain, insecurity, inadequacy, yearning, emotional / mental / spiritual non-health must reside in one to agree to forfeit time from their own life, which of course can never be gotten back, in order to expend it so wastefully, or, even worse, harmfully, on another’s?

Penn Station often makes me think of taking the train in from suburban New Jersey in high school to see Grateful Dead or Phish shows at Madison Square Garden. It’s strange because I’ve taken New Jersey Transit hundreds, if not thousands, of times in and out of the city for every imaginable reason. But I guess that’s the funny thing about nostalgia – there’s a magic to it. Like maybe it’s the core of things attempting (managing) to poke through amidst the din of the everyday, in spite of the predominant mundaneness of our general mindset.

The first encore I ever saw the Dead play was “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” Was it corny that the entire arena was bathed in glowing, blue, beautiful light that somehow felt warm and completely inviting to my early teenage mind? Of course it wasn’t.

This was about a year before Jerry Garcia died, the final era of the real Dead, where every show contained a minimum of one Dylan cover (earlier in the night, Bob Weir had fronted “When I Paint My Masterpiece”). Later on, when listening to the bootleg of the show, I couldn’t understand how Garcia could deliver this vocal such that it was completely casual, utterly flawed from a technical standpoint, and yet completely human, moving, and fittingly, beautiful.

During that show I was completely transfixed. There was magic in the room, and I bit totally. The mind, feeling, and fascination of my young teenage self were opened, and for the next four years or so, even after Jerry sadly died, I was as hard core a ‘dead head’ as existed anywhere, at any time. (It bothers me to this day that Garcia/Hunter aren’t routinely acknowledged in among the canon of all time greatest American songwriters, where they certainly belong. But then again, I guess it was exactly that separateness from the general mainstream of American culture that was part and parcel of the greatness of the whole Dead enterprise).

And so here I am, this time reminiscing about the Dead, as I once again ride the train easily through backyards, in quiet, filthy, hodgepodge, manicured, warm, inviting suburbia, like I’ve done my whole life. Always heading toward home.

Sometimes the constant harping on death seems, while valid, also maybe not entirely accurate (and therefore potentially wasteful and unfortunate). I wonder if it occurs to any or many as much as it does to me that, just as we’re in a nonstop cycle of dying, we’re simultaneously in the same unending cycle of living?

I’ve heard it boiled down numerous times that the only real fear is the fear of death, and that this is actually the root cause of all anxieties. This makes sense to me in some ways and in others not really.

As a logic problem it seems to work. That is, if there were no death, why would we logically worry about anything? Although once this apparency (apparence? appearance?) is moved past, it is easily seen how no death, i.e. no time limit, would become horribly, even horrifically oppressive. Maybe it just seems like that to me – when I actually try to picture what it would be like to reach the age of 200, 1,000, 1,000,000 and finally never-ending years old (this is all taking for granted, of course, that the issue of physical & mental deterioration could be overcome, which I know of more than a few very intelligent people who think this is inevitable), it really doesn’t seem like it would be that fun.

How long would it take before our accepted dynamics of the parent/child relationship completely deteriorate? Or those of a married couple. Of course I’m well aware that many would maintain these accepted dynamics are constantly shifting and un-becoming even now, in our version of existence, i.e. the finite kind.

But I don’t know how exciting it would be to outgrow everything. Would all communication stop? Would all attempts at anything, for that matter, cease completely, as we all turn into discrete universes unto ourselves?

Or would things end up remaining much as they are now, a ceaseless attempt at moving forward, only on an infinitely longer scale?

I was invited to submit a story of the album to this wonderful life & growth website.

Read the article here

We ask a lot of those we love
Sometimes we need to
There are moments (we all know this)
that are so jammed up, so knotted, tense, hell
that the only choice is to lean on someone else or break open
But sometimes the leaning shows itself in another form than you would think,
indirectly

It seems to me that there is very rarely, if ever, a one-to-one, tit-for-tat kind of
correspondence in terms of the exchange of energy
(even though this is what most of us, hopefully, strive for – no one likes to be in debt, for example, and it’s a kind of sickness or weakness to enjoy having others indebted to you)
So the rebound always gets hurt
the secretary gets yelled at for the boss’s oversight
they shoot the messenger, etc. etc.

But sometimes it’s our duty as a spouse, a friend, a parent, a sibling, a teammate or partner
to absorb it
And we do (to let another vent, to stem the flow of vitriol, possibly even out of self-preservation),
and the one who keeps it in gets angry
and it’s easy, in calmer moments, to say to yourself
“well, they have it much worse than I do,
are hurting more than I am, and for longer and more deeply”
and this may very well be true
But it all comes out somewhere, in some way

And always, one of the hardest things to absorb is the fact that you can’t take away someone else’s pain

I want this I want that
I want to stay at the nicer hotel
I want the good food
I want to never need to worry
never even think about it
and I’m the kind of person who can get there from time to time
I’ve done it, been completely free
free and easy
And I want that
I want all of it
Why the hell wouldn’t I?
I want to enjoy my life
I want only to enjoy my life
Why would you even talk about anything else?
(I know why)
But then, I’m forced to think just a little deeper
just below the surface of things
which is what we live on top of
In our face every damn day
But just below
the real place of existence
Where I know I’ve chosen well
maybe the best
Not compared to others, but compared to what I could have chosen
And I really do hope that
down there
everyone has that
meaning

On this train again.
But I don’t dread it, not at all
Often times I’m on here during the morning rush hour
Just as often not
I think my life is a very reasonable one,
meaning I don’t find it painfully miserable or absurd,
or meaningless
the way many lives seem to me.
But then, I’m not in them

I’m gonna get out everything I can
I’ve given myself a limit
A very specified boundary
within which I will do everything I possibly can
to try and get you to feel
me
I’ll have almost no way of knowing
if I am successful
Except
if I like it
This has become the story of my life
A young boy across from me has announced
that we’re here