Why do birds suddenly appear, every time you are near?

Great question for me, from the talented Rob Dario via the facebook:

You know, it’s funny, one time I was to play tennis with Roger Federer, who had hired me to calm his mental state before a tournament. As I got into my tennis whites and took the court for our therapeutic match, tossed a ball up for my first service, a great Bald Eagle swooped down and engulfed the ball into its guts and rested upon my shoulder, peacefully nudging my chin with drool.

Another time I was home in Estonia for the holidays, baking fruit cakes made of macerated prune, suett, and whiskey, when slap! against the window a Blue Jay flies. Its eyes trained upon me.

I admit I myself have puzzled why birds appear every time I am near! Just this morning in New York I was mobbed by a morass of pigeons as I ducked into a Starbucks with Martha Stewart who consults me to know which colors go with ecru.

I have always found in my life that the best way to get answers is to ask. So this morning I turned to the oldest pigeon. A grizzled he-bird with one red leg and feathers slicker than Donald Rumsfeld. He said, in his tongue, ” Go suck it! I’m hungry here!” So I halved my Twinkie and this made him open up his thoughts to me. He says to me this: “we sense you are free, Zamboni, like us, so we are drawn to you. Like is drawn to like.” Then he jabbed his germy craw at the last bit of icing and hobbled away into a pee-ridden alley.

And so birds appear when I am near because true wisdom is not to seek out your opposite. It is to seek out your kin, to seek those who you can admire as you admire and inspire yourself. Birds are drawn to Zamboni because my soul is in the sky, like theirs.

A thing with wings understands best another thing that can fly. So Zamboni says to you, if you wish the company of the wild, free, rich, or hysterical- then Be.

Zamboni, should I do Tarot Cards?

Many people have wondered this, should they believe in things like Tarot, Astronomy, or Dry Cleaning.

I cannot vouch for the last two, but I can say my answer is this: Tarot can be very profound indeed and if the interpreter is good, then I can assure you it is a most very interesting use of your time..In moderation of course and with grains of salt.

But did you know that Zamboni himself is working on resurrecting a very ancient and prophetically modern Estonian fortune telling deck of cards called The Zamboni Shuffle? Yes it’s true. In this deck (Always stacked against The Devil!) here are some of the cards that come up after you shuffle them and a Licensed Zamboni Card Reader turns them over:

-The Young Sinatra; this card signifies you are lean and hungry and may have to break a mold to succeed.

-Trisha the Goat; this card, named after my childhood playmate, signifies you to get in touch with your playful nature and eat more vegetables.

-Maria Conchita Alonzo; this card prompts you to either to have a fling with a hot Latina or get in touch with your sassy inner hispanica or both.

Knowing me and my intense dedication to leisure, I wouldn’t hold my breath for this deck to be on Amazon tonight- translating from the ancient Estonian is a bitch- but I promise to work as fast as I can and when I am done, private consultations of The Zamboni Shuffle start at only 4,000 Drachmas.

Until then, I offer this advice. Wisdom can come from anywhere, a bearded Tarot reader on Telegraph Ave, a Ted talk, Bazooka wrappers- but the best comes from your own mind, when you think.

Balm

“Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then has not the health of the daughter of my people been restored?”

Hello friends- there is an old story once told me by a mushroom forager from the Purple Forests of Estonia. He had owned a dog names Procrus, a faithful mutt who accompanied him on his fungus hunts for almost 20 years..One day, accidentally, the mutt ate just a crumb of a very potent poisonous cap of Fungicidus Orientalis Cryptus- a mushroom so powerfully virile and petulant that Hannibal used one of them to slay an army. The dog became very ill, while having strange hallucinations, speaking in fluent Latin, and spinning its head in circles while the paws tapped out in Morse code, “holy sheepshit” over and over again… Then, my forager friend -who became misty eyed at the telling of this- let his dog go free in the forest, and that was the last he saw of him.

“How could you do that? ” I, Zamboni asked of this wandering micologist.. His answer was cryptic.

“Sometimes the best way to cure someone is to let them go.”

Now the moral of the story is this my friends. Zamboni is no old mushroom hunter, but I am wise enough to tell shit from Shitake. This old idiot let his dog get torn up by wild boar in the middle of a very bad trip. And karma is a bitch because a week later, the man himself mistook a shroom and became stiff dead.

He did the wrong thing. Don’t give up, never give up.

“where-what-when does/did the word ‘question’ derive from?”

Thank you Kirk from Hollywoodland and here is your answer from the depths of an Estonian tornado that I call myself, zamboni:

This comes to me by the pool of Bellagio (zamboni not stays there, too $$$, but my 3rd cousin Grimlanski is jacuzzi cleaner there so he sneak me in) .

The end of a question is not the answer, anymore than the summit of the mountain is the end of the climb. It is a “quest”, a journey.

Zamb?oni is himself more a question than an answer; this is one of the things that make me magnet to fine womens and keeping me youthful, this in addition to repeated injections of African Ginger. Mostly every time, I am able to supply an answer that is not only mind-bogglingly obtuse and circuitous, but also 100% correct- Hee! Remember, even a broken clock is flat wrong pretty much all day long-but what is time?

Zamboni (and yes my Kirk friend I getting to answer, don’t sleep!) is also broken. Being raised by poor cheese farmers who fed me on a diet of grubs and pig hair sandwiches goes far to damage a mind, yet here is my point. A question is something broken and incomplete (notice the little break in this hooky thing- ?) and when you find an answer you are healing this break.

The Jewish peoples see life as a mending. We come into this life and see things out of wack, and our task “tikkun olam” is to heal broken things.

But see, an “!” is also broken. That is enthusiasm. What I am saying here is that beauty and excitemnt, life actually is about the broken, the incomplete, the imperfect. Think about it. I see of litter of 11 puppies, but the one I am drawn to is the spotted little runt with one ear and a funny squeak, awwwwwwww (:

And the word “question”? Well it was the year 1241 when I said to my homie Zarathustra over a cup of Bubonic Plague Vaccine I developed to save our villages, “hey Zarathustra, where do you think the world ends? That would be really fun to bungee jump off.”

And he replies to me, “I don’t know Z-man, I guess that quest’s on you.”

zarathustra2 — He was fun to hang out with mostly, but when he got really drunk on fermented wheat sludge he'd start yelling at me that he was the original "Z-man" etc..

“What’s a ‘question'” I ask.

He say, “Huh?, no I said that quest is on you to do. Good luck, and this time remember to tie one end to something before you jump.”

And it was that moment that it dawned on me, a question is a search, and it should always have an element of fun in it or it is not a real one. It is desire and when you stop having them my friend, you better get some viagra for the soul.

So, long story short, I invented the word question, and there it is. It’s funny, great zamboni only exists when he has a question. So feed me Seymour!

Moonshine #9

“People are the way they are”

This the spirit of Chief Pontiac

indian head — if his rebellion against the brits had spread and succeeded.. we would all have this proud profile?

says to me, great zamboni!

Nature hath framed strange fellows in her time:
Some that will evermore peep through their eyes
And laugh like parrots at a bag-piper,
And other of such vinegar aspect
That they’ll not show their teeth in way of smile,
Though Nestor swear the jest be laughable.

Another great spirit, a man I knew well, Shakespeare, say a similar thing here above, which I Zamboni translate as to mean, “sad people will be sad, happy people will be chipper, despite the weather”.

I understand the chief very readily with this 9th Revelation. I know one guy, Shadrack, who owns three fishing boats in Gallilee. This man is always complaining to me about the same thing over our mint tea drinking sessions for the last 25 years: his job and his kids. Every time!

My nanny Consuelo (after I was rescued from poverty by the kind Baron and experienced an easier life) was always so serious and complaining about never finding good love- this despite her great beauty and patience. She always was with the wrong cruel man after man, and though she kvetched until the goats were asleep, she never changed or tried to.

People don’t change. They mature a little, they can grow up. Those of greatness can even learn to let go. But largely we don’t change. Zamboni’s brother, the youngest of the eight, quit school and ran off with the circus that came through our four goat village when we were children and we never heard from him again.

This was 70 years ago- and just last tuesday I run into him in Brooklyn! He was drinking organic chai at a Hipster cafe called the Red Bandanna.

“Shmelkie! My long lost brother who as children I fight with for crumbs on the dirt floor! What are you doing here?”

Though he was a toddler the last time I see him, he has unmistakable third ear.

“Zamboni, the brother who we tirelessly made fun of because you were the only non-blood adopted one, I am still traveling with my circus but we are much famous and appearing at P.S. 122 Avant Garde Arts Festival… I am now too old for acrobatics, but I amaze them with mind bending a spoon and hypnotizing a duck.”

My point is this:Shmelkie was a happy child. He would juggle five crumbs at once. He had a fully trained flea circus, he loved to laugh. And he is still this way after a hard life of circus roaving. He is as he is.

What about you? Do you find a journal that is ten years old, open it up, and find those same words still fit you today? Then why write them?

Listen to the Indian. Either accept, or don’t, but it’s true. A tree stays a tree. On the birch outside my window, there are almost no leaves and the black branches hang down like wet hair. A month ago there were reds and golds. But do these changes affect the inside of the tree. No!

Listen to the Indian. You can’t change ’em.

Nerves

1 am and the neighbor is watching something very loud that sounds like Korean Sci-Fi Opera and I can’t sleep. I put in those industrial orange earplugs but that just makes it loud Korean Sci-Fi opera heard through socks. Who does that? They deserve a page in that book: People Who Deserve It

The girl is jittery too, first Freshman Friday where hazing of the young ones equals seniors throwing eggs at them and I am nervous for her.

Tonite the first friday of the high school/college football season and imagine all those nerves, all those actual friday night lights and all those dreams of winning state.

I received 12o new clients in one day and had initial meetings with all of them. It’s called “teaching.”

In the east at least you begin to get the beauty of the fall colors to ease you into the season of nerves. In California it actually gets hotter now.

Sweat and Nerves.

Fall.