Mark Mathew Braunstein's writer rap sheet includes six books, one praised by the Washington Post as “remarkably intelligent.” The diverse topics of his books and more than 100 ephemeral articles in glossy magazines include art, literature, holistic health, vegan vegetarianism, wildlife conservation, mobility disability, indoor gardening, cannabis culture, and drug law reform. His reader rap sheet includes the nearly entire oeuvres of way too many dead white males such as Melville and Thoreau, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Rilke and Kafka, Blake and Beckett, Plato and Epictetus, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, and his guru and mentor and doctor Seuss, to name some whose rhymes and rants he somehow survived while neither going crazy nor growing wise.
Painting himself into a corner as an abstract artist, he did time in Manhattan until he bartered his brush for a pen. For the next quarter of a century, he holed up in a hideout in a wildlife refuge in Connecticut where deer did not flee him, where chickadees perched upon him, and where nocturnal wildlife parked themselves on his long driveway. That nocturnal species of youthful female hominids engaged in mating rituals with random older males. The females inspired Braunstein to write a field guide about them, titled Good Girls on Bad Drugs.
As a paraplegic since 1990 and a Bad Boy on Good Drugs, his use of cannabis is medicinal for below the waist and recreational for above. He has never drank Classic Coke or Coors or Starbucks, but has fasted on water for many days, seeking either enlightenment or health. Does his photo present the picture of health? If you think he looks 10 years younger than his age 60 in the photo, then you join his mother who told him that at his age of 9 he looked 10 years younger than his age. He was a Cub SProut who grew into a Boy SProut and backpacker, mountain biker, half-marathon runner, and mile swimmer. But now as a Man SProut, he is crippled by a sports injury, and probably pickled by nearby nuke plant radioactivity, to which might be attributed his misshapen body and his misconceived thoughts, thoughts influenced by the writings of Peter Matthiessen, Farley Mowat, and Edward Abbey, especially Abbey's Fool's Progress and Desert Solitaire, both which he read twice over, those second times backwards, because according to Kierkegaard, Life is Lived Forwards but Understood Backwards.
In defense of Mother Earth, he has never wanted to father a child, nor has he ever fathered an unwanted child. And though he likes cats and dogs, he can't bring himself to bring home dead animals from the slaughterhouse to feed to live ones in the doghouse. Calves and lambs and kids and piglets are cuddly animals too, which is why since age 15 he has not eaten them, nor since age 19 drank the milk their mothers intended for them. He wonders what do people mean when they espouse their love for animals, yet they love them also for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. While he does not consume white flour or white sugar or drink alcohol or smoke tobacco, he does unabashedly consume cannabis, evidence that he is merely human, so certainly not a god.
He believes in all of the gods, but none of the religions, especially not Western religions, whose pages of history are stained with the blood of infidels and animals. He is not religious, but if he were religious, he would be a Carthusian or Zen monk, except for his being incurably and heretically heterosexual, and except for his being more zany than holy. He was a nutcase, until he outgrew his ego-driven ambition to earn a livelihood as a painter, for which his only regret is not having renounced art sooner. As primary collector of his own art and primary caretaker of his own health, he has resided as an ape man in a nature preserve, and where he continued living his entire life without a tranquilizing tv, metastasizing microwave, alarming alarm clock, or handcuffing wristwatch. He has never shopped at WalMart nor on eBay, but has browsed the stalls of the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul. He has never set foot in nearby Foxwoods Casino, but has hiked the faraway Grand Canyon from rim to river to rim. And right now he must take leave of you because it is time for him to take a long walk and then to write about that journey of 1000 steps that begins with 999 steps.
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