Gettin’ Metaphysical, Ya’ll

Permit me to get a little spiritually trippy with this post, if I may.

Today is the first Friday of Lent and a gentleman friend and I were debating whether in true Catholic Lenten tradition, we can eat meat on Fridays or not.  I know that used to be the case, even after Vatican II blew the “no meat” Fridays out of the (Holy) water.    But I haven’t been a very good  Catholic in a very long time and while I knew this past Wednesday was Ash Wednesday, which kick starts Lent, I didn’t go to Mass, nor did I schlep around the house contemplating what to give up for the next 40 days.   I didn’t forget about is, as much as I just blew it off.

That makes me bad, right? 

Greetings Cerberus.  Guess I’ll pat all three of your heads on my way through the sulphuric gates of Hell!!!

The debate we had, for some reason, made me realize that I’m in one of those strange places mentally.   We hung up the phone and I  had to come to terms with the fact that I’m like everybody else most of the time:  there’s more going wrong in my life, then that which is going right, but I have this unshakable feeling that feeling that it’s supposed to be this way because very soon, the proverbial slate will be wiped clean.  I view my life, and again, I don’t know why, it’s as if any minute, it’s going to turn into one of those plastic paper savers known as Magic Slates. 

Remember these things from when we were kids?

You could write on it by pressing down the red plastic lead-less  “pencil” that came with it, and the pressure  applied to the gray plastic cover into the soft, black sheet below and it looked as though you were drawing on the sheet.   But you weren’t.  If you lifted the sheet, VOILA!!   The drawing disappeared.  The slate was clean.

I feel like I’m very written on these days.  And if I look at my life in terms of a Magic Slate, I have a helluva lot of different handwriting represented.   You can make it out in between scribblings in my own hand.    But just as it was when I was a kid, I have the power to lift the sheet to clean the slate.  

And soon, I will.

I have always been able to sense change and I feel it surging in the offing.   It’s waiting for the right time to come in and change my life from late summer to very early fall.   Ordinarily that prospect would make me cringe.  Now?  Not so much.  I’ve always loved the fall.    It’s my favorite time of the year.   The spring was always too delicate;  the summer was always too hard.  

The fall is like this delightful melding of both. 

Still,  what’s out there is brimming with the unknown.  While intriguing, confronting whatever that is can also be scary.    Very scary so, when I should have been at work promoting capitalism and free enterprise this afternoon,  I was on the Internet looking up things that might help me put a label on whatever it is I’m feeling.  I happened upon something called “Quantum Jumping”, a concept conceived by Burt Goldman, a self-described, ,”world-renowned meditation master, a spiritual coach and mind power expert.”

This was taken from the Quantum Jumping website. 

Every decision you make in life causes a “split” in reality…

Which in turn creates two alternate universes—one where the current version of you is today, and another with the version of you who made a different choice. Now think about your life.

Think about all the decisions you’ve made that led to who you are today. If all these decisions caused a split in your reality, each time creating a new version of yourself in a parallel universe who also goes on to make a certain set of choices thereby splitting their reality, you can begin to imagine the infinite versions of yourself that exist.   Now imagine what you could accomplish if you could somehow tap into these alternate universes to meet and learn from these alternate versions of yourself. Imagine the wisdom you’d learn. The opportunities you’d recognize, the skills you’d acquire, and the pitfalls you’d know to avoid.

By meeting these alternate selves, you’d essentially be tapping into an endless universal sea of knowledge and experience. But how, might you be asking, does one access these alternate realities?

 That’s where Quantum Jumping comes in.

Well, I didn’t read enough to even pretend to make a comment pro or con about Quantum Jumping, but I can tell you what I think it is that I believe and here’s where the Benedictine nuns who taught me catechism are rolling in their graves.

I believe that we have many versions of our life that we can choose to live but all of these are within the confines of whatever our personal reality happens to be.   It can be gauged by your energy…be it positive or negative.  It’s the vibe  you send out and what actually attracts the same energy back to you.   That has an incredible bearing on the kind of people who come into your life and how you’re treated.  That said, I truly believe there’s more to the laws of attraction than that which we learned in Freshman physical science class.  For humans, we have far more control over the laws of attraction and other aspects of our life, than we think. 

Let me expound upon that.  

A few years ago, I had the pleasure of interviewing Doreen Virtue on a Saturday night radio show I hosted that focused on the metaphysical and supernatural.   Virtue  contends that at any one given time, we have movies of our lives playing at the in the theaters in our minds all at the same time and like Sybil got to pick and choose which personalities she could retain when Dr.Wilbur introduced them to her, we can do the same thing.  We get to (and often without our even knowing it)  choose the movie we want to watch/appear in and that which we want the world to view.   There’s the  happy movie, the sad, tragic one…the adventure…the romantic comedy…even a decent who done it.    We get to star in each one but  we have to align ourselves with the movie we choose as our vehicle.   If we align ourselves to a  ‘better’ movie (READ:   a better plot, outstanding performances, more likeable characters) the more elevated and positive our consciousness will be.

As much as I’d like to believe we could all follow Scott Bakula on to an NBC soundstage and then run into the middle of this big  Accelerating Chamber and be surrounded by trippy squiggly  lines and snazzy mini lightning bolts surging in and out of our armpits before going back in time,  that’s not possible.     We can’t jump back in time or through the universe, parallel or otherwise, leaping into other people’s bodies, in order to “put right what once went wrong”.   As humans, we simply aren’t afforded that luxury.

Look at the evolution of  your own life and all that you had to endure to get from Point A to Point C.    Perhaps you were on drugs at one time…maybe you were at one time, broke as hell or worse, broken in spirit and very depressed.  Perhaps you had a horrible marriage and the break up left you broken.  Maybe you ate your way to contentment and became obese and homebound.   Whatever the obstacle was, you overcame it.   And as as result, you can now look at your life in a that was then, this is now scenario.   That means,  life can be placed in two separate still frames.   You can see the differences.  Your life was very different then, and so are you…but to a degree, you’re still the same person— just better; more together.   You endured two realities in the same lifetime, the same reality.  As Virtue says, you did the work to change the starring role in a different movie. 

Now, THAT’S a real quantum leap, if you ask me./;

Life’s Odd Little Moments

In terms of my career, I learned more about my chosen profession at one address:   510 Lovett in beautiful crime free Montrose, in the shadow of downtown Houston.

At one time, the address was actually that of an insidiously dirty building; a two-story petri dish with carpet, an elevator, and no ventilation.    It was ugly and crowded and there wasn’t anything positive about it…other than the fact that it housed some of the most talented radio people who ever graced a microphone.  And I mean that sincerely.

It was gutted a few years ago and has since been made into high-end apartments; the only apartment building in Houston with a foundation that has a street value, IF you know what I mean. 

You know, rock and roll and all.

During its hey day, the building  was home to KTRH-AM, a once powerful all news/talk radio station that at its height ran 24/7 with a full-time on air staff of more than 30 people.   Behind the scenes?  Double the figure, and in a post Telecom Act world today, that’s unheard of.   KTRH and it’s news nerds housed the north side of the building; the cool rock and rollers who manned the studios at the mighty, mighty Rock KLOL; a  powerhouse of an FM  station that believed in BIG on-air personalities who took home BIG paychecks which helped them talk up the BIG on-air promotions, lived on the building’s south side.  KLOL, particularly in the mid 80′s and through the mid 90′s, defined major market rock radio.  

I began my broadcasting career in Houston at KTRH.  I started in April of 1990, if memory serves. I was a Producer and a Reporter.  Then, I became a full-time reporter when management realized that I was a little different.  My writing style was unusual.  I viewed my assignments like art pieces andwrote them up accordingly, usually with humor adn all kinds of effects.   No, almost always with humor and all kinds of effects.  I was different.  My stories were different.   People noticed this as did my handlers.  I guess they liked what they heard because within months of starting the gig,  I was given a very healthy raise and promoted to  Features Reporter and soon, pursued my own stories with little or no input from the Assignment Editor or anyone else for that matter.   I did that for just over three  long, arduous years.   Then, it was time to move on. 

My gig at KTRH might have been deemed as “cushy” by some.  While  I had more freedom than most reporters, I can assure you,  I earned every dime I made.  It was nothing for me to put in 12 to 13 hours a day…consecutive days… at KTRH/the station.  I personified that old adage: to whom much is given, much is expected.   I was  34  in the summer of 1993 and I was exhausted.    I walked away  too tired and too overworked to care that my departure left some very angry people in its wake.   I think I made some enemies.  I remember hearing the words “disloyal” and “ingrate” lobbed in my direction.  Yeah and from the cabal that was management.   They took my leaving personally for some reason.  Then again, they didn’t like it when anyone left.

Be that as it may, I did what I had to do.  I needed to leave for my sanity, in more ways than one.   I walked out of that station with a real understanding how emancipation must have felt to a select disenfranchised demographic of the Old South 148 years ago. 

After that,  I made a vow that I would never work that hard, ever again.  

But the reality is, when I was younger, working my fingers to the bone seemed easier.  Twenty one years ago, I was ambitious with a point to prove and I felt I had allthe time in the world to prove it.   I came in to my own at KTRH though I’m not sure why exactly.  I suppose there were  times that my being there felt surreal..almost cosmic.  It was like life had me as part of this huge flow chart;  Laurie and career all came together at a common point in the midst of this very specific data flow.   In truth, everything just sort of meshed.  I guess it was the right person at the right time in the  right location under the auspices of  one Laurie lovin’ celestial alignment. 

But I digress…

As I said, the two stations may have shared a building, but that was about the only commonality.  The FM side was hip and cool.  The AM side was…well, AM.  There wasn’t a lot of mingling.     But I was lucky enough in my career under the Rusk Corporation umbrella to do what few have:  I  ‘crossed the hall’.   I worked in on air positions at both stations and learned a great deal from both schools of thought. 

At KLOL, I was an on air personality on the Stevens and Pruett Show, a talented duo who for years dominated morning radio in Houston.   The show’s elder statesman, Mark Stevens died this past October.  He was in his mid 70′s, but tragically, Alzhiemer’s made him old before his time.  I admired Mark very much and mourned his loss, personally and professionally.   I put all those feelings in an emotional vault and haven’t addressed them since news of his passing.   But tonight, I did something I didn’t want to do, but made myself. I went to various blog posts and newspaper articles that covered Mark’s demise and read all the comments.  For some reason, I avoided doing this;  I don’t know why, especially since reading them tonight made me realize that Mark was as revered as he was.   I decided to take a break from reading the Stevens tributes.  I absent-mindedly picked up the remote and started going through the satellite channels on my dying 32-inch Toshiba.   I stopped on the last few minutes of the Tina Turner biopic, What’s Love Got To Do With It.   And that’s when one particular  memory came back to me.

I can’t remember the exact year–possibly 1996–and I can’t recall the day or month, but I remember the show and it promised to be an  S&P classic.  Shows were always great when the guests and the topics we’d cover were varied.    It was 9 am, the last hour of the show which was usually reserved for musicians.   I was asked to bring the last guest up to the studio and went down to the  lobby both stations shared.   

I exited the elevator and was dumbstruck by what I saw.   In the lobby, sitting on one couch was our guest… music legend and southpaw, the late Ike Turner.   Beside him on another couch, separated by a small coffee table was a woman waiting to appear on a show on KTRH.   She was someone I’d interviewed many times.   She was the president of the Houston Area Women’s Center,  a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting survivors of domestic and sexual violence.

They sat there  three feet from each other–two very different people from two very divergent walks of life, yet oddly connected in that one particular way–he lived in a world of perpetrating violence; she worked with its victims.  Both were blithely unaware of who the other person was.  I had to smile at the irony.

Sometimes, life’s like that.

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