tallsamjones-blog

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Spent 12 hours in this town on my last trip south. This video is pretty accurate.

Arcrazy: A Street Documentary

This is the best fucking video ever for anyone who’s blown thru Arcata before. The unique Arcata bum scene in a nutshell. Crazy seeing all these familiar faces on the internet…

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A Dream With Dirty Friends

I was alone at first, as I often am on the road. The behemoth cars rolling through my invinted world were a great force to be accepted and understood and used. The Trains were the very earth and wind and great rushing tide. It was known that they harbored fire. This was lusty information, for it was cold in this dream. I met my intrepid friends and they were beautiful. A set of twins and a grumpy alcoholic and a beautiful girl who had just recently had enough of everyone's shit. She liked me. We took disposable camera pictures together. The hard, shining exterior of a woman who battles grease and gravel and rail dust is a fecade which is so necessarily strong and deep that it fuses with the true heart and soul on some level. It took time, but eventually we knew each other's inner softness. We ended up rubber tramping. Joyous crust punks in a rediculous white van. A beat-up spaceship taking us on further into the jade valleys and white styrofoam office building wasteland. We rounded corners and bounded obsticles with just a little bit of help from my own Lucid awareness. I know I'm dreaming, yes, but I choose to put that information aside most of the time so that I can more honestly enjoy the ride. I only pull out the super powers when things are about to go wrong. Sometimes I don't remember I'm dreaming soon enough, and I have to take full control and turn back time within the dream. I let my friends go. I got a job moving dirt. I was helping someone heal the earth. I ended with a long and frantic search for water.

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Page 3

JD made it off first. He booked it back toward the DPU at the rear of the train. Jeff's makeshift glasses broke as soon as he stood up. He blindly made his way taward the cold ladderr. I was the last one off, controling my breathing, fighting panic as I fumbled to get my sleeping bag in my backpack and get the thing snapped so that I could run. Jeff called out for help finding the way down. He couldn't see the ground in the dark. I pulled out my dinky two-dollar flash light and held it for him. "Is the ladder below me?" "Yeah, it should be right there." "Dude, I don't see it." "It's below you, just trust it." He thrust his foot down but found no metal rung. I was still distracted with my gear. He cursed loudly. "Oh sorry, yeah I guess it's there next to you. A little further forward. Yeah there you go, sorry." The sound of JD's footsteps crunching on the gravel had dissappeared behind us. I heafted my pack onto my right shoulder with my flashlight still in my left hand. Jeff was already a car-and-a-half aft of me when I went to grab on and climb down. hhhhhHiisssssssssssss Adrenaline. Stumbling. Choking on my words. "DUDE, we're gonna leave, you need to hop back on." "There's no porch on this one! It's a suicide!" I was hanging off the ladder with one foot. The car lurched violenty. The train was huge and steady. The ground moved away with my two companions standing on it. "I'm stuck!" "DUDE HOP N-NOW" "I'm stuuuuuck" I dropped my flashlight over the edge so he would have a light, and it instantly snapped into a dozen pieces on the ground. We had found a stray sweater on the porch when we hopped back in California. I threw that over too, hoping he would find it in the dark. Jeff didn't have a sleeping bag. Train noise. A flat spot on one of the wheels keeping time by whacking the rail in quick constant thrum. Now the grey morning has broken pink and I've ridden across desert giving way to corn field. We have finally stopped in the sun, the train and I, far from my destination or my friends.

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Page 2

I'm Playing Hide and Seek with the Sun. Right now I'm on the second-to-last car, staring at a friendly double stack. He's playing caboose as we shuffle and roll down the line, blocking the last fading rays of Sun and then moving with a goan to let me get warm light one last time. Tonight may be cold, but it won't be as bad as Last's. We shivered over Donner pass about one-in-the-morning and then came down into the frozen flats outside of Reno. We were riding dirty face, and wearing every stitch of clothing we had, wishing we could keep out the wind. The three of us huddled deep in our bags, exhausted from the stress and triuph of finally catching out of Roseville. No one slept, no one moved, no one ventured to talk over the clamor of the train. The point of misery comes where one desires an escape. The pain and constant fridged nose of the wind as it sniffs out every patch of exposed skin, that with the noise and the darkness, the muscles cramped and sore from shivering and huddling up into such a tight space. Laying on the steel porch unable to sleep and escape it all, trying to wake up from this bad dream into some other scene, and then failing all that until we each just resolved to lay there and think. Thoughts of home, of Kaylee, of Kaylee's dogs. Sunny beaches in Southern California. Exotic Southern States with their Gem called New Orleans: a place I had yet to see. Coming all the way back around in my mind. Back again and again to this moment. Shift my weight a little, pull the tarp closer around my bag. Think about how to get out of this. We looked back when the train was taking a long, wide turn. We counted 13 cars and then the DPU. The conductor's compartment on the engine would be unlocked, and we could pile in through the narrow door and get out of the wind. There would be a heater in there, and comfy chairs, and little bottles of water from the railroad. The glowing control pannels would tell us how fast this impossible stream of metal was going. 13 cars back.

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Snow Pock Red Rock Sunshine grazing Cow Eastbound Grit Valve Trains are talking now Canned Food Rations Dental Floss Fashion Lubricate enough or not at all Brown Box Elder Take Sh-Sh-Shelter Hop, or Hitch, or Walk, just Move! don’t stall.

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I see People running circles That I have run before I see Lovers stuck and clustered Sticky clumps behind closed doors I feel Free Spirits born to drift Held down and counting days I have lived in that same fish bowl And that is why I play

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The Lucid List: Signs I Might Be Dreaming

-sex -childhood friends -peeing forever -no mirrors -inhabiting a female body -armed combat/presence of weapons -giant/tiny people -amazing, original, crushingly beautiful music -strange creatures -the holocaust/slavery/memories from past lives -weird hands/can't count fingers -unreliable signs/books/maps -famous people -dead people -"what time is it?" -minecraft/watching the world build itsself -bird's-eye-view -heavy emotions -primitive survival -time travel -space travel -the moon -cant hold your breath -cant close your eyes -trying to find a place to sleep -"waking up" -Jesus, Krisna, The Buddah, Satan, Zeus, Great Eagle Spirit, etc. -dogs -overheard conversations -faulty tools/weapons -ex girlfriends -pregnancy -running on all fours/running super fast -jumping super high/flying -mom, dad, siblings, cousins -masturbation -shifting patterns/random textures/false repetitions -"Dream Camp" or "The Castle Dorms" -haunted places/ghosts/ex girlfriends -presidential canidits -running from the law -hiding in small spaces -government oppression/ex girlfriends -tangential plotlines -losing my saxophone -taking forever to get ready to go/getting left behind -major revelations -massive weather events -trees -talking animals -spanish -human flesh eggs -breasts with no nipples -Kara or Piper -high school or college -lack of hunger or thirst -ego death -death

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I went marauding through the dark On a weeknight Searching for a sign Telling myself "A quest for good." Sometimes when you ask God for guidance, Someone else hears you and answers first. Luck can be a curse. It was so unlikely That I would happen To stumble upon you. So of course here I am Sitting outside the barn Writing this Instead of coming inside Uninvited Or playing my saxophone Until you guys come out. Tonight Love is abstainance. The wisest use of freedom Is a lonely trek Back to the confinement That I chose. Goodnight, Aquarius.

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I heard a man get shot in Dallas We had played the show I was out for a stroll Barefoot, I felt a man die in Dallas I sat down in a chair And ate my casserole People runnin' down the street in Dallas Starin' wide-eyed Screamin' into their phones I pray for Peace most nights since Dallas Some things you just can't control.

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Balance is a journey inward. 

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I’m getting better at distinguishing the real ones from the projections. 

Inside the dream world, you can never fully, truly know. The mind is so good at tricking its self. The subconscious, one hand on the reins when we’re awake, pulls in so much detail from our hundreds of senses. If, for whatever reason, that information isn’t dumped immediately as normal, the resulting “dream person” can be fully realized replica. The illusion of being stuck inside our own bodies during the day actually increases the effectiveness of this phenomena; the person we’re observing is filtered by our thalami on the way in. That multi-sensory “image” is then intensified to make up for missing information upon reprojection in the dream. This leads to slumber encounter with a version of a person we’ve met in waking life that looks and feels and smells and behaves more like how we perceive the person than how they objectively are “in real life.” 

On the other side, people who legitimately come to you in the dream world don’t always look like themselves. If the person is lucid dreaming and chooses to try to come find you, the half-compromised state of their dream will affect how they interact with your dream. Being aware means bringing the couscous mind from ground-level reaction to whatever is happening, to an equal role side-by-side creating the dream space as it is experienced. The person who finds you might be an idealized version of that person, full of fixated-upon traits that the person is conscious about. One might encounter a familiar individual appearing as they “want” to look or having powers or traits that they deeply wish they had in waking life. One might simply manifest oneself left-right swapped as they draw on stored images from their own form in the mirror. 

Often, it’s not that literal at all. Anything experienced within the dream world comes through layers of consciousness and is reproduced by the brain’s own internal mechanisms. We reduce as much stimuli as possible in order to induce the dream state but there is still plenty of perceptible information reaching the brain inside of a dark, quiet room. The brain has energetic antibodies; a spiritual filter that recognizes and accepts or rejects vibrations from the outside world. If a vibration is recognized positively (or deemed useful for whatever drama the brain is trying to create in there) it will be allowed in and transferred into some detail or feeling or color or idea inside the dream. If the vibration is unfamiliar it may be rejected and if it’s too unfamiliar or intense enough to represent a waking life event that we ought to be awake for (some danger or the chance at food or sex, for instance) the brain will start to pull us out of the dream and depending on how intense the vibration, we may wake up.

So yes, dream teleportation and telepathy are doable. Continue to write down your dreams every day if you can. Remember that, among others, fluoride inhibits the complex brain interconnectivity that is required and trained by meditation and active dreaming. If you must brush your teeth before bed, do it an hour before, drink a bunch of water, stretch or do light exercise, and then pee before sleeping. When you wake up in the morning, take the time to ease into the day by writing down your dream. I find this to be easiest if it’s done before brushing and before consuming caffeine. 

It may seem silly or impossible, but just opening your mind and putting your pen to paper very soon after waking up usually produces a fuller picture than you think you can remember. Mentally solidifying details enough to describe them in writing serves to give context and kind of reminds the conscious mind about the plot it just witnessed.  

 If you find yourself guiding your own dream, and you’ve worked through whatever you find in there, or if you just need a place to come and hide, I invite you to seek out Tall Sam Jones in the other world. I’m often accompanied by music so use your ears. If you know you’re walking the right way but your legs stop working for you, pull yourself forward with your arms. You can even work up a kind of four-legged gallop this way like a dog or a horse which can be surprisingly fast. 

Good luck in there, everybody.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZXo_TMW7XM

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The last recovered Manuscript

I received a letter from the future 
a young poet asking for advice 
what could I reply 
poetry isn’t about poetry

a cage suspended over monetization of desire

an inconceivable woman spreading her branches over your brain

a gold vein revealed by cuts

imagination against conclusion, a phantom nonchalantly radiating unknown

being soothed by mysterious hands

the unborn replacing presence another touch surrogating words the chisel suggesting the touch of another

scalpels sealed, pure marble

atoms from the first to the unique remember this from the first to the unique rehearsing between the fist and the gauntlet a smile from an artificial skull 

tremble through metal magnetism 

thousands of traces forged for her strangest falls

a repertoire for love a repertoire for our synthetic machines a repertoire for smoke one for the occult one for the absent one for the enemy one for clairvoyance

I feel like I’m dying disengaged watch me die

I see forests below fingerprints moist the seance table the door drivers driving another door

and what disappeared and what was left

take my paper hand I said I’ll dance you to the irrevocable  my feet already sinking in concrete

don’t look down

young poet 
buy a motorcycle instead

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Poop

Gotcha

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wHY ARE YOU SO TALL?

Because I’m from The Moon.

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Where are your shoes? Aren't you cold? Do you ever step on broken glass?

I don’t wear shoes. The trick is to warm the ground with your feet. I do step on broken glass sometimes, yes. It melts into sand beneath my calloused soles.