The Dancer's Missing Chakra

I'd never been to a strip club and made the mistake of letting everyone on tour know this. They swore up and down that before the end they'd take me to one and on our second to last night of the trip, they made good on their promise in Reno, Nevada. When we first walked in they asked which girl I thought was the hottest. I honestly found the question awkward and sort of felt like a douche bag. I said I wasn't sure yet and just kind of sat there in this comfortable chair with my $9 Corona. Not even two minutes went by before one of the women came and sat on my lap. She asked if I'd like a dance and I basically said yes because I felt obligated.

As this beautiful woman was grinding her half naked body on me I noticed that the tattoos on her back were of the chakras. The perplexing part to me though was that she only had six when there are supposed to be seven. She was missing the crown. I don't know if this next part reveals how much of a square I actually am but I went ahead and asked her about it. "What are the tattoos on your back?" "They're the chakras!" "Yeah but you only have six, where's the seventh?!"

"I'm still saving up" she said with a smile. "Aren't we all" I thought to myself silently. I cast typed her as a broken woman who desired peace. In another way I found myself judging her because it seemed silly to spend so much time and money on these tattoos yet remain in an environment that seemed so toxic. Those thoughts went unchallenged for at least a week until I'd made it back to Houston. My intentions were to hit the ground running and immediately start writing for my next album. The vision was to wake up at 7:00AM, make breakfast, and write for several hours. I thought maybe in my downtime I'd meditate for a bit or head up to the gym. Instead what I did though was write for maybe two hours. The words weren't coming to me as easily as I'd hoped they would so I binge watched skatevideos on YouTube and shopped for books online. By eleven o'clock that morning I was tired and went back to sleep, only to get up again at three. Since I’d accomplished nothing up to this point it was basically like I’d woken up extremely late.

After rolling out of bed and stumbling back to my laptop I was hit with the reality of 14 open tabs. Each of them containing a different esoteric, spiritual type of book written by a distinguished mystic over half a century ago. I wanted to buy them. My brain immediately went to the dancer in Reno and I realized we weren't so different. Maybe none of us are. It's why people decorate their walls with extravagant crosses and carefully place statues of the Buddha around their home. It's so much easier to wear the garments than it is to walk the path. It was shitty of me to judge that girl. I hope that she gets her tattoo and that my books come in.