Came for the Steak
Today is March 20th. First day of spring. Mercury is direct. Sun has entered Aries joining a waxing crescent moon. The Magician was pulled.
Last night I went to see Bullet Tooth at the Concourse.
It was a spectacular show.
Throughout the night I could feel the flow between the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere.
Seems so left hemisphere to be analyzing this and trying to put the feeling into words, but it becomes a hard thing to ignore once it’s brought to your attention.
The left hemisphere is so critical and analytical of everything. It’s as if it doesn’t want you to have any enjoyment whatsoever. It seeks to find its enjoyment in dissecting the moments whereas the right brain seems to just enjoy. It’s only when the left hemisphere chooses to explain the enjoyment, that you realize you were already enjoying yourself…
No words.
I took note of some things I wanted to touch on today before I went to sleep last night.
“Came for the steak but I left with the cow.”
A Mac Miller line from the song Clubhouse.
Midway through the second act last night, a woman approached me and put her hand out with an offering.
Thinking she was offering me a substance, I shook my head and sort of waved her off. I had been dancing very hard and was completely outside of myself, this little interruption had pulled me from that trance state. I wasn’t annoyed, I just sought to return to that place and I’m not one to necessarily take drugs from a stranger. Best practices.
I think she understood this all although it hadn’t been explained, but she persisted. She shook her head with a smile and emphasized her hand once more.
I reached out to receive whatever it was she planned to give me and she placed a small object into my hand. I could feel little pieces of it moving so I brought it up into the light so I could get a better view of it.
It was a very tiny cow figurine.
“You look like a very cool person, so I wanted to give you a gift!”
I stared at the cow in bewilderment, it was the last thing I was expecting but also something that made some sort of sense that I didn’t know I understood.
I thanked her and asked her name, Davianna.
I bowed and she faded back into the crowd.
The gentleman beside me inquired as to what I had been given and I showed him the cow, he shared the same bewilderment I had. We looked at one another, shrugged and then went back dancing into our own worlds.
I slipped the cow into my overall pocket and attempted to get back into that trance state, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the little heifer that was now accompanying me.
I wanted to make some sense of why I had been the one chosen to receive the cow, why it was what it was.
In my line of thinking, I caught myself getting further and further from the moment in an attempt to record and understand it and hard stopped myself understanding that I would only vandalize it in any further attempts to do so.
On the night went.
The crowd was positive, the energy was good, and the people were all truly enjoying themselves.
I caught a beautiful moment when a woman walked past a group of friends only to recognize one of them. It gave the feeling of childhood friends being reunited as the excitement poured over the group and they went off to find another friend to show them who was there. I had seen the group earlier in the evening and could tell they were all very close. One could imagine they’d reminisced on what it would be like to share a moment like this with the woman they then ended up spending the rest of the show with.
In another moment, I watched the tobacco gods do their work.
A group of friends walked by, one holding a pack of Marlboro Lights, the other a cigarette, and two others preoccupied with the music. The friend with the cigarette was clearly in search of a lighter and it seemed the friend holding the pack knew that friend would find a lighter as she allowed herself to slip into the music.
I observed as the lighter was found and the scent of tobacco smoke filled the area. The lighter was met with much gratitude, a hit of the cigarette offered, a kind decline followed by an embrace of one another. The friend danced back over with his lit cigarette to the friend holding the pack and offered her the cigarette. Excitedly she thanked him and proceeded to smoke.
Smelling the tobacco made me want a cigarette and I considered asking for a hit but also felt that someone may have wanted that hit more than I, and just as I thought that I watched a couple make their way over to the group of friends.
I watched as the woman turned to her boyfriend and told him that she was going to ask for a cigarette. They danced over and the friend who had found the light was able to bring the smoke she needed to her lungs.
It felt like it had brought her spirits up and I watched as the initial excitement from finding the lighter diffused over into a new connection.
I got to reap the benefits of secondhand smoke while all this occurred.
A room full of particles in motion that for some reason needed the burning of the tobacco plant to proceed on its natural highest course. The movement of energy.
It’s amazing how the scent of tobacco smoke is… appetizing enough to make someone want a cigarette themselves and then go on to procure one.
It’s the allure.
How much of what we do is us being allured to things?
The allure of enjoyment.
Allure is all enjoyment.
The smell of a peach when it’s perfectly ripe is alluring. It appeals not only to one’s appetite but there’s also some sense of eroticism to it.
Knowing the feeling that will come along with consuming that peach. It isn’t so much about satisfying one’s hunger as it is about fulfilling a much more complex feeling.
If it was about satisfying hunger, you’d eat a peach as long as it was edible.
It’s the same with a cigarette.
When you come down to the end of a pack and you realize there may be a better point in the day to smoke that last lucky.
Even flipping a lucky in general is capturing the allure of life.
There’s 19 other cigarettes but that one whether done only by unconscious habit is being set aside for a better moment.
The allure.
“Came for the steak but I left with the cow.”
Bringing it back in.
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Earlier in the evening a woman had brushed past me with her boyfriend and she looked just like Gloria in the manner which I remember her most. When she got her hair cut short for the first time and it perfectly framed her face, the very pretty traditional Germanic Mexican dress. I say Germanic Mexican because this dress cut exists in both cultures and there’s some obvious connection there.
For all I know it could have legitimately been Gloria. It’s been 13 years since I’ve seen her last and everything about this woman seemed to be Gloria.
I never considered that I’d see her again in my life and mind that I’m not certain this physical entity was her but it was enough essence and spirit, enough energy for me to understand that it was her.
In a Jungian sense, anima.
It felt as if I was undergoing some sort of individuation, shadow work, sitting in my mind to get a better understanding of a formative chapter that had tremendous effect on my being.
On one hand, I wanted to take the offense and project this energy of dominance. “In the animal kingdom, they call it presenting.”
In setting out to do so, I realized how animal-like it was to do such a thing. There wasn’t any need for me to do so.
I’d be no happier now with Gloria in my life however I can’t discredit what she brought to my life.
Anima.
I shifted to a space of “if that is Gloria, I’m glad she’s well, I’m proud of her and I think she’d be proud of me as well.”
Anima.
Thinking of it that way really seemed to drive Jung’s thinking home for me and this was I think the first time I experienced the thinking outside of my dreams.
But it makes sense that the more you keep with the practice the more you integrate it into your life outside of the dream realm.
It makes things make a little more sense for some odd reason, a map to the characters in your reality.
If we all share the same hardware our brains, they all must share the same operating system for the most part. There’s a base code at which things operate and our perspectives are just wrappers of sorts.
There’s a very base level at which we all understand things and when we find the best way to describe it, a universal language of sorts, we unlock greater universal understanding. That’s why Jung’s work is important. Same with any of the thinkers who have found a way to describe these things that makes us say “well, I feel like I always knew this, but never has it been said.”
The song Words – Higgo Remix by Piri is playing as I type this.
“Came for the steak but I left with the cow.”
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The night came to an end, I ordered an Uber.
A Chevy Equinox picks me up after I danced into Spring from Winter, into Aries from Pisces.
I get in and the driver Kareem has a song queued up. Lyrics Deity.
I thought about how great it would be to listen to some reggae after the evening I had and was glad that’s the direction he’d be taking me in. I never heard the song before, I ended up saving it to my Spotify.
As Lyrics Deity came to an end we’re driving down 183 with the windows open, the air feels spectacular and I feel refreshed, renewed.
Roughly, abruptly even, Spotify transitions into Clubhouse by Mac Miller.
GOOD AM is probably one of my favorite albums of all time so I was excited and it added even more to my feeling of refreshment.
I rapped along but throughout the song, the driver kept getting hailed on Uber so the audio would fade underneath the notification every couple of seconds until he declined the hail. I thought about how the money was just effortlessly flowing, moving towards the both of us. As I thought this, another hail came in, the driver let the notification play a little longer than I would have liked to hear it, and just as I began to feel myself get a little irritated, he swiped.
Right as the notification sound ended, Mac raps as the beat cuts slightly “Came for the steak but I left with the cow.”
I sat there bewildered and reached to feel the little heifer in my overall pocket.