Synesthesia

"Anger he smiles tow'ring shiny metallic purple armour. 
Queen jealousy, envy waits behind him. 
Her fiery green gown sneers at the grassy ground. 
Blue are the life giving waters taking for granted, 
They quietly understand. 

Once happy turquoise armies lay opposite ready, 
But wonder why the fight is on. 
But they're all, bold as love. 
Yeah, they're all bold as love. 
Yeah, they're all bold as love. 
Just ask the Axis. 

My red is so confident he flashes trophies of war 
And ribbons of euphoria. 
Orange is young, full of daring but very unsteady for the first go 'round. 
My yellow in this case is no so mellow. 
In fact I'm trying to say it's frightened like me. 
And all of these emotions of mine keep holding me 
From giving my life to a rainbow like you. 
But I'm a yeah, I'm bold as love, 
Yeah yeah. 

Well, I'm bold, bold as love. 
Hear me talkin', girl. 
I'm bold as love. 
Just ask the Axis. 
He knows everything. Yeah, yeah."

Thanks Jimi Hendrix.  Thanks for giving us your poetic synesthesia and your hints at words that fit together so nicely and uniquely.  

Outside the media cloud the distractions of techno apocalypse
Freedom is the air of emotions running silent and deep
Through the veil of my perception
Heated by argument
I am convinced that my reaction is just
If not always logical
Violence is bad, not anger
Nor fear of the unknown
It highlights the distinction between
Body and mind proactive reactive
Who is in the drivers seat, the emotion
Or the organism when fight or flight
Triggers that surge of adrenaline
And the irresistible force impacts
That immovable object over and again
Until the bones shatter and the blood rushes
From the brain and exits the wound flesh
Which anger triggered and adrenaline set in motion
Out of frustration and unfamiliarity with the
Perceptions of ones own mind.

Oak tree bark is harder than your fist.
And your mind is a little universe
Of your own charge and creation.

Reading Mind Deep and finding a rich source of inspiration about my ideas on topics like emotion good v evil and things I think I know a lot about.  How to manage troublesome emotions.  Yes, I recognize a distinction between mind and body and therefore I propose letting the emotions wash over the mind like a waking dream rather than declaring them evil and trying to "shut them off"  But that's my opinion perhaps better tucked away for another day.

Sunday was a good day because I crafted it that way, I dint do much.  Any feedback on whether I am on the right track with the management and identification and classification of emotions please let me know.  I think we should study our own emotions as much as we try to fix those emotions in others around us.  Emotions are like the eco sysytem of the mind say some.  Lets not drive our own emotions to extinction like buffalo...

HOS of space is on.  Its a great program of world sounds mixing old and new, modern synth and dijerido.  Love it.  I'm kind of traced out again and typing frantically.  trying to get to the bottom of what I felt through out the day.  Meditation for me is like that, its about the color of emotions and not just simple photographic memories of the day.   It helps a bunch and turns out to be kind of fun at the same time.  Either quiet or music works depending on my mood there is no one way I mediate or trance out.  Sometimes (although not as much lately) I will catch myself slipping into a trance to avoid having an unpleasant emotional memory.  But thats probably another story.

Check out this book by Gregory Bateson.  Its a real trip to read.  I have not picked it up in years and cant even claim to know what it is about.  But it seems to be full of excellent ways of looking at what goes on inside or extraordinary heads.

Entanglement

http://entanglement.gopherwoodstudios.com/

really cool game
nice music too.

You should try it.

I'm not sure if it works on a mobile device yet.  I will check and let you know.

Luckily I am going to a Gershwin musical tonight called "Crazy for you" in which my friend Henry is playing.  It's at the First United Methodist Church in downtown Shreveport near my work.  I will probably not be able to photograph the performance but I will be able to take pictures outside their new theater as well as some photographs of the Strand Theater.

H is getting ready to depart for Europe for two weeks.  He just bought a camera today and I am looking forward to him sending me lots of pictures from abroad.  In the meantime here in Shreveport, I will be cat sitting with McWain the yellow cat.

Cicadas outside my sleeping window

They are loud.  Wikipedia offers a sample of the sounds they make if you care to confirm what you might have thought were particularly noisy crickets.  Find that link here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cicada

Even now I can hear them with the other night noises.  Part of what is great about night is that sound, until it is so loud that it prevents one from sleeping.  For example, in an unconditioned dorm room in Baton Rouge LA I found myself awake countless nights listening to the sound of them.  Ah, the memories of dorm life so long ago now.  Soon after I would finally get to sleep on Fridays like today, the marching and would start tuning up about a quarter mile away.  Not much is better than that except maybe the sound of bacon crisping up on the cast iron skillet at 8 am.



Tormentor or treasure?

The hissing clicking bugs that are so loud during the evenings here in Louisiana have apparently gone to sleep.  So should I.  Before I do, you can find a posted video I did earlier today on you tube.

Its very hot in Shreveport.  Those bugs are probably pissed because of the lack of rain too.  Luckily TS Don is headed toward TX soon that should bring some rain to LA.  There is a 40% chance tomorrow.

A couple of political articles perhaps?  wsj says in opinion that Americans are playing chicken with the wrong bird.  Could he be talking about the bayou bird?  Anyway here is one from history by the wsj opinion guys and gals.

Bye bye for now now

Forgiving as my nose is....

What a great day at work!  Of course I dont blog about work because of it being social services and confidential most of the time, but what a good day today was.  That's all I will say.

The bus ride home was less satisfying than the day preceeding it.  Well, at first it was great to get on an airconditioned bus (powered by CNG.)  Then came the bus station.  Man, did it smell bad.  Especially at first.  But it was too hot to wait on the connecting bus outside, so I remembered the time I went to the Tabasco plant on Avery Island LA in eighth grade.  I remembered how bad that smelled -- hot vinegar and charred wood barrels I think I will never forget than terrible smell.  Then before we left I could barely smell it anymore.  Same with the bus station.  At first it smelled like... well, it smelled rotten in the most disagreeable.  But I stood there long enough.  I know the smell did not go away.  I just got used to it.

Unfortuantely when I got back out into the fresh air, the fresh air smelled no beter than the air which had previously offended me on the inside of the building.  It wasnt really a yin yang thing is what I am saying.  Not this time.  I guess the nose is forgiving but when it comes to smells the mind does not give you any more pleasant an odor than the absence of what once stank.

Im saying unfortunately life is not about anti-stink.  But some things other than smell are like action and anti action kind of light and dark and yin and yang.  Bright lights dark room  Heavy weight light weight and hot water cold water.  Hot water cold water is similar to smell because it takes a brave person to wait out the difference in the percepption of hot and cold.  At first they feel much the same -- try putting hand in hot then cold water  cold can feel very hot at first.  Weird huh?

Lets work together in the world at large and try to be as forgiving as my nose is.  Except for you politicans.  You all just do your statistics thing and argue about what percent of the population thinks your garbage actually smells good.  There's no geting used to political stink.  If lies and propaganda smelled bad, what country would smell the worst?

Aliens with their own Higher Power dilema

It is late again and I am thinking about what might have been so long ago before I was born.  Somewhere between alien astronauts perhaps visiting us when we were little more than monkeys come out of the trees.  May be aliens caused the last mass exinction of the dinosaurs because they saw where that was going in an evolutionary sense.  Intelligent dino-dudes are apparently easier to get rid of when they are but unintelligent lizards and the like.  Humans are far less threatening to space faring races than those dreaded intelligent evolved dino dudes, they might have been thinking -- lets bomb the place where they are incubating and come back a million years later to see what happens next on the blue marble of a planet called Earth.... 

Well a miilionyears is a long time and here comes earthlings!  But they will never make it out of the caves, so lets give them some help with things like technology.  Wham bam here comes religion too.  AH HA!  Instant hooey from that point forward you might think.  Or maybe not. 

Maybe you think that religion is hooey and space men are what we all mistook for gods and angels.  Why would an intelligent space faring race let the mistaken ideas about their divine origins persist unless they too had a Higher Power with whom to reckon?  Oh ha ha.  Answer me that will you.  Maybe they realized that there is a creator even above the aliens -- someone who created our space aliens, and they kind of were flattered when we mistook the former for the later.  Wouldn't you be?

So now we have a bunch of flattered advanced being who are asking the same theological questions that there little human friends are asking from the deserts and the caves and and mud huts etc.  How did we ALL get "here"?  I think the curiosity to try answering that "unknowable" may be the best motivator we have as an intelligent species.  Perhaps when all of Pandora's plagues are put back in the box, the only question remaining will be how did we get here to begin with and where do we go after death.  I wonder if our hypothetical alien progenitors ever got to the bottom of that one.

Care to give some feedback

This is a test for Google forms.  It should work.  I will read the results.  Thanks for your participation.

Sour face but good satellite signal

• Henry's playing Gershwin tonight with the orchestra at the big Methodist church downtown tonight. 
• The performance starts at 7:30 pm.  
• Mom scheduled a visit from the cable repair man today.  
• He called about 4 to say he wouldn't be able to make it until 6 to 8 pm. 
• So I canceled the evening at the Methodist church and waited for 3 hours on the repair man.  

He arrived a 6:45 and left at 7:15 after telling us it was caused by trees interfering with the satellite signal and that we should unplug the cable box once a week. He offered another solution for the trees: upgrade to HD which uses a different set of satellite signals which may also be blocked by a different set of trees. 

Apparently we in the south get much worse satellite reception than northern states because of the position of the satellites.  No much humor in that, but I am glad to know it is the fault of the trees and the position of our residence within the United States that causes the problem. Now I understand so much better that I should not be so dependent on tv anyway.  See its all about attitude and learning to get along. If God gives a you a sour face learn to eat lemons and blame it on that.

Nostra (Timmy) Domus --

The thing is I am just not such tough shit.  I am sitting here in my underwear tonight contemplating ancient astronaut theories and the band called ancient astronauts and I am thinking, I dont even know where all this started.  It has kind of gotten away from us all with the global warming especially. I worry a lot about how hot things are getting.  So I sit here and listen to radio paradise play flaming lips and Natalie Merchant and all the songs from my 20ish years and think back  that today's activities do not hold a candle to what I had going on in the 90's.  But I brag, I did all that to avoid thinking about how grim things for this world might actually be.

I dont know but the thing about lack of cork to bottle wine makes me think how far we have come and, how far away from the important things we have gotten.  I mean cork is an important tradition.  Maybe I am just too tired.  Maybe jaded that no one is doing things nearly to the excellent extent that we used to do them.  Life just kind of drags and I look toward Zen to contain myself.

I am no fighter, just a metaphysician who is barely able to keep my own small mind contained within my body.  I wonder that it works at all, that any of us are actually here -- doing what?  Whatever we want apparently. But how good is it to have the freedom from nature become the freedom to self destruct.  Noone is free of nature really not even.  Its Taoism and Zen and electromagnetism flirting with infinity and birthing a multitude of life under certain circumstances.  Wouldnt it be a hoot if everything was alive on some level?  Clouds water rocks bugs monkeys people all doing the dance with the cosmos.  We dance and we think we are the only ones.  We always think every thing revolves around the individual dont we?

Think big.  It may bring you backto thinking small.  All roads lead to the cosmos and right back inside your own tiny mind. When we will com to terms withour own mortality and stop fighting entropy so headlong.  We are resisting the current and being eroded by it rather than let the river carry us down the superhighways of the cosmos.  Think big  Think weird thoughts and twist my watery mind up good.  The language of anger is sweet but counterprouctive in the long run.  Laughetr is more important than knowledge.

Sometimes I think that if "It" makes any sense at all, it is the sense that I put to it that matters.  Unfortunately I am lately not so good at making sense stick to "It" very much at all.  Or maybe it is I that doesn't make much sense and perhaps I can blame "It" for not making much sense stick to me! 

It troubled me as I drove around Shreveport this morning in a parish van from which all the decal had been removed before it was donated to us.  I drove around with 65 year old James.  We carted pastries and leaky bottle of fabric softner from food banks and grocery store rejects to damaged items that no one else wants but somehow, the poorest of the poor find use for.

Smells were the most prominient thing about today.  On the gasoline powered bus to work I smelled wintergreen chewing tobacco and sweat.  Walking down the block were the smell of flowers and creosote in the building ammonia and imitation perfumes.  Upstairs where I work it smelled like stick deodorant and wasp spray.  Im thinking about adding these smells to me list of things I can use to describe my favorite cheap wines.

And there still isnt much sense to our universe -- whether panspermia or alien astronauts or exogenesis theories are sought, we just cant know.  Yet as human we feel and intuit that there is something more out there.  We feel our destiny is in the stars of the heavens and we are willing to risk the whole wad on the proposition that we can migrate upward ad infinitum.  I object like many to the huge expenses on space exploration unless there is something that we are not being told.  I know.  Conspiracy theory.  Your right.  But that is how I feel.  Sometimes the only thing that makes sense is the idea that life is cheap and ubiquitous throughout the galaxy.  Hey I might even say throughtout this universe life is abundant.  Lets just say that and see if that helps our feelings helps our understanding of human motivation.  We are returning to the womb of intergalactic space from the incuator of Planet Earth.  Hummm.

What if someone put humans here apart from the animals?  What if they are coming back to see how we are doing?  WHat if the alien scientisitst are studfying us like cells in a Petri dish?  How does that feel?  Maybe the fact that we "feel" anything at all is what it takes to buy our freedom from destruction or perhaps worse intergalactic slavery!

Ah conjecture.  Ah space music.  Easter!  The human spirit!  Life!  What wonders are there about this reality which we have yet but glimpsed?  I think we do exploration because we are curious not compelled.  I dont believe in space aliens much of the time.  But when I do entertain the idea I try to do so in spades and push the envelope -- develop a new theory or coin a phrase.

I drove around today and listented to PT on NPR and KRMD-FM All American country.  I remember the time i gutted my first fish as we drove across the brideg over Cross Lake.  Things are so very big.  My need to know is very small. 

The president gave a speech about raising the credit ceiling today and keeping certain things on a level that the general public can understand.  He is not a very gifted extemporaneous speaker.  I hope his rhetoric is not just another campaign move.  I felt stupid for listening to his speech on the radio live.  He caused me to feel that way by adressing his remarks to the lowest common denominator which it is doubtful might even listen in or follow his speech live in the first place.  He had to clarifity what BBA meant in regards to a budget amendment.  I thought that was cute, but unnecessary.  He is young.  He mentioned turning 50 next week.  Fine.  Our president wants to be our friend.  Charming to have flaws.  I am just grumpy because economics is impossible to predict and I keep expecting the Chinese to take over or something.

Overall the week was good and I am glad I got off my ass and did "It" before "It" did me.  Ha!

I can feel my bachelor's degree age as it hangs on the wall above my CD collection from the 90's which also serves to collect the dust.  The dust in this house is even familiar.  Pet dander from years past and who knows what all bacteria living in there.  Probably worlds of bacteria just on the rim of the picture frame surrounding the 8x10 certificate from Louisiana State University in Shreveport, College of Education, Department of Psychology.  I won't tell you the year exactly but I was a December graduate.  I tried biology first, then psychology, then some chemistry and even art for a while but I eventually settled on finishing a psychology degree after 7 1/2 years of working night jobs to help pay living expense and doing lots of Tuesdays and Thursday classes and staying up late nights in order to finish assignments.  That's a long time to be in school. 

Now I can feel that degree get older and hopefully appreciate in value as my experience in the field begins to mature.  I also have been reigning in expenses for the last couple of years and soon I hope to buy a car.  Soon, years away but it feels like soon and the pace things have been going.

Perhaps more troublesome is the idea that my employer may be going out of business before my grand ideas about career as case manager for the homeless fully takes flight.  Seems the director is getting older and thinking about retirement.  There's also the notion that a major north south interstate will be continued right through the neighborhood in which the institute is located.  Sooner or later the doors will probably close as they are unlikely to name me director, nor should I be able to accept such a job.  Case management is one thing but directorship of a non profit sounds a little bit too much like too many hours work for not enough compensation.  I like my time off once in a while, "thank-you-very-much."

Things weigh heavy on my mind like that.  Thanks to space music I can relax right through such anxiety once I get home.  Nutty as things get, I do well to not overextend myself intellectually.  But I have my ideas sometimes. 

Welbourne character cant quit smoking and loves to bowl.  He's everything but well-born socially, but he has always taken his name to heart and looks to women's liberation movement during the 70's with great nostalgia even though he had been in the army at the time it was all going on.  Sort of like forest gump I guess I think of Welbourne as a southern gent want to be type a lot like certain pieces of me.  Imaginitive and hard working more than inteliigent or truly industious, welbourne sites verses from song lyrics like they were messages from above.  People admire him because he is tall.  Everyone greets him in public and smiles but he never gets phone calls or emails.  He wonders why more people dont seek out his keen opinions on foriegn policy and the energy crisis.  He wonders how to make a good sandwich fit into a low carb diet.

A funny branch of Economics has become the relegion of the new world order by the time welbourne is near 80.  People are allowed to ban together and go back to nature all over the planet on a large scale.  Back to nature meaning anarchy in large part and simple patterns revolving around information sharing and processing take over as the need for real paper money and / or gold deminishes like fog yielding to a bright morning in the spring meadow.  What has happened is that energy has become free like information did around 2020.  Ten years later and the need for money just vanished and it fell off the body of humanity like a broken toenail.  Overnight, Welbourne was not a rich man any longer.  Yet he had more access to energy than money could have bought in previous years.

These are my ideas.  Please steal them and litter the streets with my funny way of saying things.

I'm really feeling kind of crappy today.  Sorry.  Just tired, and tired of being sober but to chicken to get drunk.  I'm kind of scared about the project I might be start soon.  New things scare me often these days.  Heck driving fast scares me these days.  Next month I turn 41 and that scares me.  The fear of crying out loud for my mother when times get tough -- that scares me too.  The only thing that scares me more than these things is not paying my bills on time.  That's all that hold me together sometimes, the bills.

Its not sex drugs or rock n roll.  I like the blues less and less as I grow older too.  I think I have been off facebook long enough now that nobody is going to miss me there.  I have been off that service for 6 months or so now.  Nobody misses me.  It's the success of my long term plan to make myself invisible to everyone but the people I would otherwise miss the most.  It backfired along the way a few times, but I am happier with a small group of friends more than I would be trying to  manage a large group of friends.  Well I say manage them.  Even remembering birthdays can be a chore when you have the number of friends ppl on facebook attain.  Luckily the handy computer keeps track of that for you, whether you like it or not.  Domo arigato mr computer.

Life has been long already to me.  Music is about the only thing I love, everything but the blues.  I used to love everything but country, but now I listen to country in small doeses and I kind of like it.  Tastes change over time, I'm told.

Anyway I am taking a survey that may help me get an idea of who reads this blog.  If ppl will actually submit to my questions I may do more surveys on the blog and publish the results for you.  But first I have to know approx how many ppl are reading to participate.  In all likelihood, I am just doing all this for fun.  And for practise of sustaining a positive frame of mind.

That's it I try to be positive and creative and sometimes funny.  It is not easy.  Give me feedback, suggestions, send money and flowers and some of those werther's original candies.  Take my survey.  It wont kill ya.  I'm gone to bed.

I like lo fi

Minimalism and I like lo fi records
And lo fi technology in the face
of plots like High Definition.
My friend I like lof fi messages across
Technology bridges built to house millions
Of years of midnight chattering
My lo fi way is an anchronism of morse
code telegraph typing across a light year
of computerized storage

Where does all that knowledge go
and I wonder if information can take on
A life of its own.

My friend Robert the guitarist from Denver
founded the Apples in Stereo
Introduced me to music that is aptly named
Lofi even though he could make a hi fi sing
He chose lo fi and added noise
rather than substracted it, to his music.
He's a fan of the Beach Boys.  It
kind of Works, sounding that way.

that's what is called an experimental control.  It's the difference between what you have and what you would have if you did nothing.  What you have if you do nothing is the "control" condition. 

Ah control.  What a pleasant sounding word.  In a group of people that grew up around each other then parted company after high school, it is important to have some sort of control or measuring stick.  Or is it?  What may be most important is devising a measure by which you are #1, at least to ourselves, in private sometimes maybe even unconsciously measuring and comparing regardless of how hard you try not to do so.

That must be the scientist I have become after college, social science of charts and statistics. Control what?  No self control.  "No will whatsoever."  (Down down the rabbitt hole.)  The difference between what you want and what you need....  How does one judge some one with compassion and fairness when everyone is so economically heterogeneous a word that sounds erogenous to some, their are such striking but subtle differences among everyone that is it all but impossible to base a true control.  Think of how to construct a natural social science experiment rather that just practisig the "snapshot in time" statistically.  How to develop an ethical social science experiememt in the Shreveport area.  (There's the rub.)

 I feel like I am part of a failing data base project at work.  Damned thing just is slow to refresh.   Or I am too tired to work it, or both most likely.  Haven't had time to watch movies lately, but this seems like a probable one True Grit for viewing soon.  I wonder if it is on redbox yet?  Oh well I have really lost the thread of control now.  Had to do with a diverse group of compatriots young and old gathering after thirty years or so.  We remembered the time we all dressed like birds and swore we could live forever.  I feel like I have already lived that long 2 lives or more.  I am just weird I guess.  Looking for control in knowing:  how did I get here?  Where is my great big car?  Where is my beautiful wife?!  My God!  What have I done!" (David Byrne sort of if you know the song....)

ZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzz

A scorching 102 at high yesterday.  Summer is not even officially begun yet.  I am glad the mornings are only in the mid 80 to mid 90's but even so there is a breeze that is like a blast from a furnace sometimes.  And humid.  The air manages to stick to your skin like a layer of fat.  Trying not to jump out of this city sized frying pan into the fire.  Then I realize "oh hell, I am already in the fire anyway."  and I think "just breathe" and try to relax.  Damnedest thing.  It passes.

When the summer is finally over, my big time consuming project is over also.  I think my next less stringent project might be working with a dyslexic 24 yo male.  That may take three months or longer to get him ready to succeed on his GRE.  That would be a big accomplishment.

So today I am busy doing work for works sake.  And to pay the bills.  There will surly be time for more daydreams from me later in this hot summer when AC units are a must have item against temperatures than do actually kill a few local residents some summers.  Saw the sunrise now I wait for the pale skeleton of the daytime moon to come up.

So I am all caught up in the quest for knowledge of the supernatural now.  The quest for ideas I will never know for sure without a leap of faith at some point.  Nature.  Even Nature seems to have some aspects of the unknowable.  When did it begin exactly why?  How big is nature? why are We here.  Are there others like us out there?  Don't know.

It occupies my time when the chips are down and I need to focus on things outside my self.  Things for me are no too hard.  I am employed, it just seems that things are moving along so slowly.  I have trouble paying attention from week to week, staying focused and on task.  I have some hope that coming to terms with my feelings about things supernatural will help me focus and stay on my objectives for a longer time than I have been doing.

You see my problem with life without faith is that things for me quickly move to hedonistic behaviors.  I am all for hedonism and all the Greek fun things but in small small doses.  It is too easy to sit around and eat chocolate and ice cream and drink wine and chase younger women around town.  Too easy.  And too counterproductive when the idea is to save money and pay down the personal short term debt and reset this little mouse trap to see if someday I might actually be a desirable mate for a woman more sane than I deserve.

This will all pass one day and I will move on to brighter better shiny things to talk about.  For now keep looking up.  The space man coming for you some day may be me.

It was 99 again today in Shreveport and bright outside.  I stayed inside all day and tried to shake off the stress of looming inspections and the need to organize my thoughts and my files better. 

I went to a great friends house and had fish fillets yesterday with Henry.  It was he who invited me.  Being vegetarian, Henry only eats fish and vegetables and eggs.  I eat all that stuff plus meat.  I will eat almost anything put before me these days.  The refernces in past blogs has been to Andrew Zimmern in Bizzare Foods on the Travel Channel.  People have nearly lost fingers if as they put gourmet food before me, I hand back an empty plate fast if the food is really good.  That was pretty much the case at Jeff's house as he and Renae cooked for me and Henry.  As the corn in the cob burned, then we all sat and laughed as Jeff got drunk and started to make less an less sense.  It was late.

Today, not so much going on.  I am trying to begin practising mediation again and succeeding.  The most difficult thing is to begin.  Once things begin to quite down with each passing moment.  Moments become minutes and then half hour is gone.  Wait, did I fall asleep sitting up with my eyes open?  The full of my minds eye takes in a gulp of memories.  Mixing them with a steady vision of tomorrow's trick of consistency with time and the illusion of scale when moments become years.  Did I fall asleep this last decade.  "Rivers always reach the sea" (Ten Years Gone by Led Zeppelin).

Whatever matters most is that which is left after the unimportant has been chiseled away.  Free the spirit of the artist, not the gnome trapped in the granite.  Faith and Spirit must they always revert to supernatural definitions?  Look at the atheist Soviet government and wonder why they failed to be relevant to their own people.  Another good question there I have no intention of trying to answer.  I am lazy on politics because I have earned the luxury of not needing to know about politics.  I need to know very little really.  Things like how to cook.  How to iron a short or change the spark plugs on a lawnmower. 

These things I need to know but what does the state of affairs in Russia really have to do with me?  Absolutely nothing.  It is akin in that sense to the price of tea in china.  Academic my dear Watson.  And so I defer to some greater database than myself and ask YAhoo and Google.  Its a plus for theists that there is a benefit for the arguement in favor of the existence of God.  The benefits of faith contribute to the social success of the governement and human motivation is hard wired in the brain to understand the realationship with the Creator.  The natural desire of humans is to assume there to be a Creator of it all, until recently when science and technology and overcrowding and pollution and the need to recycle and unite in a world we travel through faster each year.

Motivation and the belief in God.  Do highly successful people believe in God?  No always.  Only certain regions and fields favor those who believe in a diety.  However no everyone believes in a uniform supernatural being  The supernatural is always anthropomorphized into the personal god of a largish group of people.  I dont know but that has always seemed a little humorous to me.  My bottom line is that I just dont know.  Don really need to know.  I will lead the best life I can and hope that the supernatural if it is really deep into the creation of this reality, then maybe I will be rewarded with peace in eternity of nature rather than vision of hell.  Motivation to keep myself from going bonkers. 


But seriously, how does this Faith stuff work when it comes to accomplishments large and small too?  I have tried things with faith and tries things without faith.  I have faith in Nature at this point.  That seems to be better than faith in nothing.

The need to organized and excerie some elbow grease on my jobs filing system. As we speak I am making lists for tomorrow and I hope to complete most of the task on the list in 3 hours or less.  Spirituality.  I like Indian music both the subcontinent and the native American versions of Indian music.  The Tao.  Om. 

I dust off my ideas about meditation when times get tough.  Times have been tough a lot these last few years.  Well, decade. But one day at a time I manage to make it through until I can get some sleep and dream about better things.  Maybe it is our need to dream that fuels our knowledge of the supernatural and or extra dimensional.  Where do dreams come from?  Let me see, I had a dream about that once....

I really think dreams are a completing of what the perceptions of the day bring to us.  I think dreams serve as a chemical rinse to the neurons in a way resetting circuits and pathways.   I think they serve a psychological function of completing the circle of reasoning and perhaps wish fulfillment.  Negative dreams may actually result from physical or emotional disturbances.  I don't believe that dreams states put me in touch with external realities other than whats within my own mind.

Mind is the summation of sensation and perception and cognition.  These are off the cuff words I am hanging on some abstract concepts and not really meant as a definitive academic form of investigation.  Personally I gain more from insight these days than from reading.  I do have on the shelf books like Zen Guitar, Opening the Hand of Thought and Zen Training.  I am just too preoccupied to begin any of that until recently.  Those books have been sitting there for years.

I am seemingly lazy and I love to dream.  I wanted to study dreams when I graduated from high school but that dream never did come true as a vocation.  Now as a hobby I study things like cognition and dreaming and I do ponder these things when I need to slow things down.

I also like space music like hos.com and www.di.fm/spacemusic.  I listen to that a lot on iTunes and on my favorite old style radio station redriverradio.org which streams their audio signal as do many radio stations these days.  It is interesting that "new age" music has stuck around and grown as much as it has.  I mean since Eno did Music for Airports in what year, in 1978 or something?  That has been over three decades of space music.  It is so simple it is hard to tell most artists apart.  But the spirit of the music endures, kind of like a cosmic bluegrass.

I mediate in bad posture and my breathing limps along to the irregular beating of my stone heart!  No.  I am just suffering from the heat and humidity of the South.  Luckily there is central air where I live.  I have been having so much fun lately I forget to diet and exercise regularly.  I forget to meditate and even forget to brush my hair.  These next few years I plan to set some achievable goals and stick to them this time!  Hey, I am not superman here.  Quite the contrary you will find if you know me.  But I am not a complete lame-o either. I mean, so I swear easily and mostly hate physical exercise now, but I have been that way for a decade.  Meditation, diet and a brisk walk or two everyday should be enough to keep me fit.  That's my hypothesis. My plan of action is to begin again, as always the simple ancient wisdom of allowing myself to just start over once again.

supernatural science?

I was late this morning to the phone bank where I was a volunteer pledge taker.  I remember that part of a dream I was having then as the alarm clock went off in which I was conversing with a kid I knew in Jr High about the state of affairs the world is in today.  I woke up and forgot what we were talking about.  But I am glad I had that dream.  I felt all day like I had really gotten in touch with an old friend even though that was not really the case.

The mind can play tricks on us.  It is all a matter of perception and makes us question things like reality.  Complicated stuff.  I train myself to avoid attacking things like the nature of reality from a traditional philosophical or western stance.  I far prefer the leaner fillet of philosophy that eastern cultures offers, especially zen Buddhism.  I ask myself what do I like sen so much and I am reminded by things like thunder and rain and the night sky.  What is the nature of reality?  A tree, a bayou (or brook) that flying duck, the moon, the spiral galaxy (here my understanding breaks down.)  That's the easy explanation for reality is that it is the concrete stuff all around us.

The simple complexity of nature is real.  The fact that the mathematics of nature permeates our bodies link us directly to the concrete all around us everyday.  I wonder sometimes if the supernatural is really all that necessary an entity.  In the same breathe I can wonder if we will ever totally be able to divorce human nature from the idea of supernatural connections.  I wonder if all this talk about extra dimensional membranes may just be a scientific way of invoking the supernatural.

I laugh when I read that the Vatican is meeting with leading astronomers to decide what to do if / when life is discovered be it ever so humble on another planet or moon.  It took hundreds of years to get the fact that Earth revolves around the Sun and not vice-versa straightened out and like 30 years later ground is given up about our Uniquely alive planet Earth.  That is fabulous progress for humanity! So with progress like that I think we will begin the next phase of looking at science and asking scientist for answers to more "spiritual" question.  I am going to enjoy the unfolding of the next few chapters of Krista Tippett on Being to see how science draws not only on Buddhism but also on Judeo-Christian traditions to formulate the kinds of answers we need in the 21st century.

•   The need to feel connected with things that are important, verily, knowing which things are important to us; 
• the need to feel connected with a more diverse population of humanity; 
• the necessity that we be able to cope with said diversity when it is thrust upon us by technology.  
• The fear of reaching out into that very technology being so small one part of the big big picture.  
• The mind must be the universe in microcosm and maybe we are all just a thought crossing the mind of an extra dimensional pulse of high energy traveling faster than the speed of light.  
• Thanks to the Universe we live in for such good science fiction.  
• Participating through technology and taking one day at a time.
• working with the idea that lists help things make more sense ;)
• Notice how there are no numbers on this list of things that clutter the mind 
• Dont forget to listen to your Stephane Pompougnac
• Why is the spiritual so often associated associated with music?  Another good question worth answering... " if only I knew" seems to be the best I can do at this point. 
• Obviously I am having too much fun with my need for a nap in the 100 degree heat just outside my window, so I will stop now.
• read something cool and try to explain it to me in the comments section below

Made you look :)

drum squeak
aluminum rim shot
steel barrel drum roll echo

drum squeak
drum squeak
finger drum roll

thumb slap
finger roll
finger roll

squeak squeak
thump.

Ha ha.  Just self indulgent non sense after a long day of 100 degree temperaures.  I am only exagerating by one degree here.  It was hot in Shreveport today.  Luckily James and I got all the moving done this morning in the afternoon I worked on the social services widgets.

Work is a good time to practise tolerance and all the other things that I think about while waiting to fall asleep.  I love the way my mind wanders when I am tired.  I am fascinated by the border beween wake and sleep.  I often try to capture the logic of sleepy minds in my writitng.  It is easy for me just wander and ponder about things.  It is far more difficult to focus on my message and be clear.  I have always been that way.

Home= away from work.  I like home.  I am thinking of going for a walk.  Thinking of trying to lose weight.  Thinking of saving money and paying down these pesky student loans.  Thinking of how I can squeeze a little fun out of those parameters of my existence.  Right now I am thinking I need a 'nother Diet Coke.

Bizzare food

Crawfish are pretty bizarre as far as food goes.  There are worse things than crawfish however.  Like dumpster diving.  I am not an enormous fan of crawfish, but contrary to popular opinion, I think they go better with a red wine than a beer.  The need for alcohol while eating crawfish is clear.  Or maybe iced tea, but generally speaking I avoid alcohol and crawfish and dr pepper just dont go.

"in the abundance of water, the fool is thirsty..."
~Bob Marley

Watched the Andrew Zimmern Bizarre Foods episode about prepared food from dumpsters after the food had been discarded by the restaurants for no other reason than it had gotten expired shelf life.  Thats illegal but in San Fransisco they are getting away with it in one downtown district.  Crawfish are not so bad as that.  But the consumption of alcohol while eating them goes a long way to the contributing to how long you or I can sit around and consume the small crustaceans.  They can be large or small but after a few dozen I get tired of fooling around with them.

Apparently Bob Marley in the above quotation was not talking about hunger in the abundance of foods.  There are some foods like 1000 year old eggs and molded tofu that I will never eat no matter how hungry.  Now pho or menudo, I'm there.  Luckily these are items available locally.  I am even sneaking up on purchasing a Dorian fruit from a local Vietnamese grocer.

Daffy stuff

After I applied the jackhammer calm
to the back of my neck
I worked at getting back into my small foreign car

Then remembering the time I had to navigate
An Italian restaurant in a wheelchair
And all I broke at the last possible second
Was a coffee cup.

I've been watching the skies at night
I saw lightening and towering clouds
Cosmology in miniature for Earthlings like we are.

Nebulae clouds and horizontal lightning
Flashes of insight fire synaptic thunder of chemicals across the synapse of water vapor in the clouds as they make their fluid calculations at motion.

The darkness of the night was just beginning to set in,
But it did not rain here.
The rain passed south and west to east of me.
So this season I have been lucky like that.

Later that night I walked around the bayous
Under the sodium arc lamps orange glow
Then home where I fell asleep right away
After stretching my back for a minute on the floor or a firm mattress.

The bed of my friend was infested with roaches last week
His girlfriend got arrested for shoplifting roach spray
Her bail was $100 plus restitution  and a fine
I bought him 2 types of roach killer for under $7
How the roaches ended up in my friend's bed I did not ask.
He confided in me that she and he eat cookies in the bed.

You know what a bell pepper is don't you?  I asked the friar
Over lunch.  Oh yes he responded quite proudly
He loves to overstate the obvious.

He seemed a little sick today however and I think
He is working way  too hard at keeping all the adults
He is in charge of in some way in keeping with his personal values
He must try to see things from the eyes of the clients more.

I tell him this in the morning before lunch
And he agrees with me
He tells me he feels a little better than yesterday
We observe this may be the last cool morning for a while
As summer purrs along with snakes and mosquitoes
I look forward to fireworks on the Fourth of July.

Sometimes I practice just sitting quietly at the desk.  I have gotten pretty good at it.  The phone inevitably rings at the wrong time, wrong person, wrong problem....  I go back to just sitting.  I have gotten pretty good at it.

The other morning was cool outside.  I got off the bus about a mile from work and walked through the historically impoverished neighborhood in Shreveport.  I enjoyed the quiet of the morning and the golden sunlight mixed with the green vines and flowers along the sidewalks and cobblestone streets which have been paved over but still show brick colored stones like heavy chocolate colored breasts beneath my slow and determined footfalls.  The sycamore trees have been dropping pollen like wild fire.  Feral cats hunt between the dandelions.

Now I am sitting, remembering all the things from the morning and not being able to recall the multitude of separate story lines that ran through my head while driving the old van with James. Just dance.  Just clean your bowl.  Just "git er done."  For Thursday maybe this is enough.  Maybe I don't have to save the entire city today, maybe just sitting here quietly is enough to get me through just one more day.  And then there will be tomorrow.

Glad it's Friday.  The weather is warm and threatening rain.  Im getting rady to walk in the windy overcast late afternoon.  Listening to Michael Hedges play Bensusan on the guitar.  Wishing I was in a tent on the Ouchita National Forest now.  Swimming in the last cool days of springtime.  Thats about a 4 hours drive north of here though.  I doubt I will be going there this year.  The memories of such outings are as often as not more pleasant than the actual experience -- like so many things.  Sometimes I live for the memory of things as much as for the things itself.

kind of getting over a little stage fright now.  Writer's block, who knows...  Reflecting on the art of my blog while doing my walk this evening.  I just type this once.  Spellcheck.  Maybe re read it once if it is good.  I back up my blog occasionally so I can see the HTML codes as well as have a record of what I am writing.  I push the envelope of grammar and spelling.  I try to just let the words fly to my finger tips without so much editing.  The more I do this is so the sound of my words can be emphasized at times, other times it is just a typo.

I will write more soon.  I need to get back into the habit of trying to blog every day.  Just for fun and the ocassional guest comment. 

Rasputin: Gregori v Vladmir

http://www.moviegoods.com/Assets/product_images/1020/206708.1020.A.jpg

Not being Russian I find it dfifficult to understand their psychology.  But being American and such long time adversaries of the Soviet Union, I must give it a try.  Be warn, I took Soviet history twice and failed to complete the course both time.  I remember how terrible that looked on my transcript when I was 20.  Now I am 40 and I still have trouble understanding what goes on in Russia.

Rasputin v Vladamir Putin is what I am getting at in the title above.  The names are similiar as you can see.  Here in Shreveport what I hear about Mr Putin these days has been his prowess with a rifle and his love for Siberian tigers.

Rasputin on the other hand was more of a charlatan that the former statesman for Russian Mr Putin.  But Rasputin deserves some respect for his role in the life of Russian nobility in his day.  There must be types like Rasputin running around in the hills somewhere even today.  I am trying to feel what it must have been like to be a fraud like character in a drama so big and folklorish that even Rasputin himself may have bought into the idea that he had supernatural powers.

For now, check out the link to the movie poster of the name Rasputin and I will dig into the wikipedia article and see if I can come up with any similarities between the two Russians.  Maybe I can even find some similiarities between myself and Rasputin, or V Putin.  Your comments are welcome about this, especially if you are an armchair philosopher like me.

Post # 40

Patrick O'Hearn "87 Dreams of a Lifetime". Nice song. I first encountered it on a Yoga Zone compilation CD and liked it very much. Often considered music for women doing yoga or something, I being a man, find it relaxing to listen to also. It's a little like saying "grown men don't listen to New Age music" whatever that is. I listen to new age music a lot and often. Not that I am a paradigm of healthiness or anything like masculinity, but hey I like women, if you know what I mean. And then there is this nice music. Too bad they have taken my favorite video of it off YouTube. Maybe tomorrow. Anyway here is an index of other Patrick O'Hearn songs which appear on YouTube.com YouTube Patrick O'Hearn

Sleep versus the supernatural idea

verdant hills of green sound deep and slowly swaying in the wind.

the cloudy sky is turbulent and menacing

The chlorophyl must shine through

Swaying plant creatures waiting for it to rain.

Waiting and swaying and abuzz

with producing the energy from the stars

Who's heat drives lightning and tosses the supercell clouds.

Dazzled by the self extraction of life

organizing itself out of the chaos,

Every night renews its contract with the beckoning of time

Time the thief

The master of illusion

The reaper is also, in time, the healer of wounds.

I barter my way though time 

Chasing the circle on a reflexive

Power grab that never ends

Except when time comes for me too.

When I am brave through my pen

I see death as a doorway into back Nature.

Time brings life to us and takes life away.  When time offers the door we almost always stand up and take it.  When the time is right we return all our part to the planet and we are free of the confines of the flesh.  Where might that lifeforce go and how quickly might we travel there then. 


The idea of the lifeforce or soul is held by so many on such a diverse scale we are all about the same,  Until modern culture takes over.  We think we are our selves supernatural sometimes -- literally speaking we fall victim to the ideas that man is above nature or over nature and that kind of worried me about all the great  religions.  I don't think our desire to be thought of as above Nature is as ubiquitous an idea as a westerner might think.  Just my feeling that God is Nature plus supernatural stuff too.  Why I worry about supernatural ideas when I am trying to sleep I cannot say.  Thinking I know what happens to the soul after death brings me great comfort.  I can make it though an otherwise crappy day based solely on the feeling that I am special self aware and independent of the whimsical spirit of Nature and Death, the fact that this may not be true doesn't bother me. 

I believe that life abounds in the universe but is not just everywhere.  I don't think we have much chance of roaming the galaxy like capt Kirk, but then  again if we try let us not try to reach the stars with half measure or give up the quest for a light speed drive unless we just don't have the resources to continue.  There is enough room for everyone on this planet if it was indeed meant to be this way.  Otherwise life is a statistical menace like a weed growing in a perfectly manicured lawn.  Can we adjust adapt and transform ourselves from savages in order to learn the physical mysterious universe.  Just because we don't like the idea that we are to learn to live here in peace and never encounter the deity again until the end of time does not mean by some leap of faith it might not be true.

yes i can

I am still trying to get the hang of blogging.  trying to get in the habit of writing.  trying to push the envelope of the style in some ways.  When the spirit moves me I can be pedantic, passive, and everything but passionate.  Other times I can feel the conviction with which I try to excavate truth from the liberal education.  Alot of times I rely on psycholgy to give my first impressions then I retract back into a quiet shell.  Overstating the obvious emphasizing the most plain logic.  But I think in the simple equilibrium on finds not only Occam's razor, but lair of Nature herself.  Strong as the Mississippi River relentlessly marching onward.

Mother was happy but I did nothing special.  Spent time around the house and provided lunch and listened to church music all morning.  Both of us are feeling comfortable and rested.  I have to admit that I am attributing some of this to current news features.  My feeling of Yes I can is there again.  I am a long way off from the next time I will vacation outside the NWLA area.  But I once again feel like I can make it.  So thats what I am focusing on this meditation: the feeling of yes i can.

My work in a run on sentence

shortly after 8 am and walked the six or seven blocks to work.  The first half of that morning walk is through the edge of downtown Shreveport past city hall and a YMCA then past a large church and a few more smaller homes and the new movie studio, and some abandoned lots then the cottage house left standing from around 1890 ( no typo ) which is directly across from the cemetery where the city buried a number of people who died from yellow fever around that same time in Shreveport. 

Its a small but old cemetery.  During the treasure hunt last fall they chose a spot in there as a treasure hunt location and the one who forst found the hidden treasure won about 1500 dollars.  The founder of the program is buried there too now.  A fitting place for her since the organization she founded to serve the poor in that historical area is so near the spot of her internment.  It is not far from where Elvis Presley played at the Louisiana Hayride along time ago too.

So I work each day in an old part of town with lots of wooden buildings usually owned by someone renting out the semi delapidated dwellings to the low class men and women who depend on all kinds of public existence just to make it physically from one day to the next.  SOmetimes you see a person living in neighborhood like this one in the South actually make ends meet and they rise out of the stark poverty into an overworked and anonymous middle class, other times that man or woman becomes a fmiliar face in the social services offices that dot city, especially the downtown area.

I started to become familiar with these faces and poverty stricken places almost three years ago now.  I have to report that I have gotten to know many of the folks that will be there until they die.  I myself may be one of them but I hope not at this point. It is not an easy life to endure such a fate into one's later years.

Once to my employers office, the director gives me the keys to the van and some outgoing mail and daily instructions and Mary who arrives just before me gives me more details.  Then 65 year old James arrives.  He is a black man, retired boxer who escourts me through these once rough areas to deliver donated food and clothes to and from the free soup kitchen and countless charities and charitable private homes and businesses around Shreveport and Bossier city.  This takes all of about 3 hours each morning and each week like clockwork we pour 75 dollars worth of gas into the 1999 red van we use to haul food and clothes to upwards of 300 people.  It is difficult to realize that many people's meals each day are comprised of such meager rations.

The second half of my day I answer the phones and take philanthropic applications of and from a variety of sources.  I try to match peoples needs with one of several assistance programs that might benefit them.  The requirements for these programs are simple and strict.  I end up telling far more people no than yes when they inquire about such things but through it all I am able to help about 3 maybe sometimes 4 people each day toward problems they have paying rent or utilities.  That can be gratifying.  But the real reason I am there is just like anyone who works for a living.  I am there simply to put food on my own table and keep a roof over my own head.  If in the process of doing so I also can help keep a few others feed clothed and sheltered all the better.  After all I am a socialist at heart.  I am not so much a follower of Ayn Rand anymore as I could never figure out what her philosophy proposed to do with the poor and the criminals of society.

So that's it.  I call myself a coordinator.  And after that I walk back through the fields where the red light district thrived for a century and now has been slain by bulldozers police and the light of day.  I walk back into downtown, past the big church and past some old multi-level buildings and old movie theaters past the court house and boarded up department stores and past the buildings where they house the ubiquitous energy company to the city bus station -- a big tent held down by steel cables ad concrete pillars that looks like a giant cream colored sail against the blue sky.  I wonder that it might fly off in the wind every time it rains.

Today Henry picked me up from there.  We ate Mexican food for cinco de mayo.  I had chicken wrapped in corn tortillas and a beer. That shot my budget for days, meaning more bus rides and more walks through the quiet mornings.  Tomorrow is Friday.  The list of things to shuffle around is long on Fridays.  The weather is supposed to be nice though.  And there will be phone calls and people to assist as best I can.  Sometimes this psychology degree is as much for my own peace of mind as it is to help others in need of counseling.  I am my own best patient most of the time.  Lately things have been going so smoothly. 

Yet I must hold myself to the same set of standards that I require of my clients.  Sometimes I let my personal habits slip a little especially around the edges of my budget. If I can't fix my budget problems soon I will be there in the poorest part of town forever paying back big loans I took to help just those populations I face joining now in the bread lines and at the free clothing stores.  Scary to see this preview of the way things might be for me if I dont watch it.  Really motivating too.  You should try it.

Sometimes I think we are the dreamer and sometimes I think we are the dream. The truth is more plainly that we are a statistic in a vast database floating in the multiverse like a Tardus from Dr Who episodes. Really should there be a purpose or plan to creation in the first place. Is the world less beautiful if we are simply here by the grace of probablity on a interstellar scale? Maybe that would make us appreciate things more. The impulse to manipulate, now there was a discovery a tool of language and concept. The lever to more mountains. The method by which we chase the tail of our own existence!

Alas I think we are catching up with our tails on a number of levels, for instance ecologically we are running out of resources and energy.  I feel that as we press onward technology will be faced with the physical limits of scale both in space and electronics.  Hopefully we will find ways to continue to conserve energy and provide clean renewable sources of the energy needs of a growing population.

well that last post was certainly a workout.  i was a little chilled to re read what apparently just poured out of my distressed mind that night.  The philosopher and organ grinder thing really kind of made me laugh but then I see too much Tom Waits scenarios in it.  What was that about?

The smell I think comes from the fields of abandoned lots near where I work.  When it rains they do have this smell of rotten vegetables which is not entirely disagreeable.  I am not sure where I got the idea that it smelled like old cheese in my neighborhood.  Bizarre foods and an appatite for cheese I guess.  Maybe straw and mushrooms would have been a better decription.  But I wanted it to be an evil smell like burning flesh sickly sweet etc.

Foremost I admit it was self-indulgent>  But thats what blogging should be all about in my opinion.  Oh I have a long way to go as a writer.  I can justify most of this only by the therapuetic benefits of making shit up for strangers and friends to laugh about and scorn me for writing.  It makes my skin thicker as a writer and I dont worry so much about what other people think.  It also improves my typing skills and build a lot of creative ideas in a searchable format digital even.

For one day when I do embark on writing that novel or story or whatever it may be and when I inevitability have writers block I can thumb through these pages and remember how crazy ideas once poured from my pen as well as analysis of my own version of reality.

There are you know many versions of reality each instant can be its own infinity like a still photo taken.  But that may be another blog all together.  Rest assured that your boy the bayou bird is still hanging onto some threads of sanity despite all attempts to push me over the edge I cling to eternal truths such as debts taxes and death.  The will to repay is often the only thing that keeps me going!

Cabbage breath or words about nature

Outside tonight it smelled like some treasured old cheese mixed with a wave of cabbage breathe.  I think the smell came from the rain that devastated Birmingham and other southern US cities overnight.  The smell of cabbage and cheese it left here in Shreveport was like the passing of the evil spirit in the night.

Luckily all we got here was a lot of rain and thunder and wind a few days ago.  I walked to Henry's house before it hit.  We listened to the sound of the thunder and rain and watched the weather channel.  We suited up in rain gear and stood in the driveway during the height of it all wondering if it was advisable or even safe to walk down the street to McDonalds for coffee.  In the end, when my shoes began to let the rain water seep in and dampen my socks, I decided that it was neither of these things and went back inside my friend's house to wait for all this maddening downpouring of water and thunder to stop.

Now according to my mother, "Everything seems greener."  And it smells a little bit like rotting cheese and or moldy cabbage outside around the bayous and sewers especially.  Rotting vegetable matter and higher water levels in all the houses that back up against the slow meanderign waterways so lush and green and ultimately smelly.  That's about all that is left of what turned so evil and destructive when it reached our neighboring states.  The awesomeness of nature's power always strikes the anvil will of americans desire to remain in the driver's seat of this corvette running up hill on fumes and trying to shift gears to save us all.


That's is all.  The struggle to be free and at once return to nature's bliss.  Insulate and imitate the call of the wild.  Keep the cycle spinning like a Ferris wheel turning for the song of the organ grinder the blind man with the monkey an the tin cup all the philosophers try to bargain over as they grinders songs ebb and flow erudite logic crumbles to the sound of mere coins rattling the tin cup.  It plays on.  And the haggling continues to approximate lessons we described a war ago and still fail to heed.  Trying to decide if we are monkey, or grinder, or the philosopher's coin in the tin cup.  Trying to decide if the philosopher exists at all.  Maybe it is really all just the coin of a realm long vanished.  Maybe the realm is our own shadow stretching out long before us like at the first sunrise, big shoes to fill. 


Nature is like that to me.  So big and yet so near and accessible.  The moon in a dew drop say some Zen koans.  The moon in a dew drop.... now imagine a genuine dew drop on the moon and nature has thought of that too.  We are a finger pointing at Zen.  We are the philosopher's coin and nature is the blind organ grinder.  The monkey is technology and we must bargain with it whether or not the blind grinder overhears our worldly dealings.

There is a way to look at things that brings to bear the fruit of the last century on the weight of history.  Move the fulcrum and the lever can move great mountains of BS.  Great mountains.  And time itself will cleave open someday giving way to a path beyond the stars.  Then all this will begin again from the dewdrop to the mountain to the tornado stricken cities because the monkey will never be able to cure the blindness of his master.  And the philosopher has a pocket full of monkey coins like us.  I can only understand nature insofar as I am not a part of it, being nothing yields satori and then it can burst forth again in the form of the only class of koan that is not a paradox.

Haircut day

Hey this nice woman named Sydni gave me a haircut I really like.  Now my locks are long and tame for a few more weeks.  The only problem now is that I haven't eaten diner.  Since I have a mild form of diabetes that may develop into a problem as the evening wears on.

Man I love any woman named Sydni just about.  It's all in the spelling of the name I guess.  What man can resist a woman who cleverly transposes the "y" and the "i" in what is traditionally a male name.  It's all about being sexy and strong and yes a little bit more clever than your average female.  The fact that she liked my Zeppelin t shirt only underscored her above average intelligence and good taste.  Yes, I hope to return to see Sydni to get my manly locks trimmed as often as possible now.  More often than every four months at least.

The rest of the day today was a little bit less exciting.  Just work and meetings and riding the bus and driving the Mattie-mobile (my mom's car.)  I have gotten to where I prefer to ride the bus I think because a quarter tank of gas set me back twenty seven and 50 today.  The bus ride one way was only a buck and a quarter.  So I dont mind the bus -- as long as I am not in a hurry.  And as long as its not raining; or too hot.

But food.  What is good to eat when you have to consider cholesterol and carbohydrates and calories.  I eat a lot of grilled fish and chicken.  Almost no breads.  No milk even though I love the stuff so much I try to fool myself into thinking soy milk comes out of a cow.  Salad.  Strawberries.  For some reason I like peanut butter and white corn tortillas and chicken or fish.  Buckwheat noodles are good too.  Oh yeah a boiled egg every now and then is not the end of the world.

McDonalds french fries are like the assassin hiding in the shadows.  Each cholesterol drenched morsel a ninja sworn to clog my otherwise pristine arteries.  But alas in the real world there is even a small flirtation with death by ninja.  Nina the french fry ninja at McDonalds.  The thief set on breaking my heart.  For real.

Henry and Tim crash India Night at the University

Dude:  Thanks for phoning in you comments Saturday.

Everyone else:  I like this Kiran Arwuhalia song for some vision of rice fields in Thailand at dusk.  Never even left Louisiana in years though.  I must be recalling a Rambo movie scene or just trippin'  HA!  arwuhalia is apparently the same person as

Kiran Ahluwalia

who appears in wikipedia here. if you google the above name you get a lot more info.  Click the face typography above for link to google search for that name.
Then if you click on the name below you perhaps get some different results...


It took me all night to figure that out. 


But I realize now the rice paddies are supposed to be in India and not in Thailand.  Oh well.  Must have been the beef burrito I ate while watching Rambo save more POWs that gave me such a vivid image of sunsets.


Og course I jest.  Its just that India and or Thailand are so far away.  It is both easy to imagine and very difficult to believe my imagaination may be anywhere nearly approximating the real thing.  I would be the same me that I am in SHreveport I guess, only I would be far away, but not like on a different planet.  Easy to imagine a sunset there.  Much more difficult to imagine what on earth I may be doing in India or Thailand than it would be to simply imagine standing there and watching the sun set.  The question then is what do i do NEXT?


I would probably be trying to make my way back to lovely Louisiana.


The indian music was very good last night and the food was terrific indian food.  I am fond of the mailai kofta little vegetable balls in a orange cream sauce which is pretty hot from all the peppers.


Henry though it was funny that the music sounded a little like dueling bajos.  It was Hindustani music and folkish during th esecond half with lots of visual genstures between the musicians as they took us on a flight of imagaination around the musical tones from India and as they gestured I could see they were engaging in musical calculations and navigating through mathemeatics and logic to bring the audience safely to a fitting conclusion>  Buffet diner was available for some 23 tables.  I found great pride in telling the lawyer beside me that I worked for the poirest non profit organization in town and got in to the prestigeous company that evening for free.  I must have smiled at every woman there twice also.  Did not drink a drop, chatted it up with the neighbors from down the street who I havent seen in 10 in years an drove Henry home in his own car.  It was fun.

Im in super chill mode right now.  Tired and feeling the energycirculating around my shoulders.  Nervous about attending and Indian music concert tomorrow afternoon.  I was invited to attend free of charge by the organizer of the event.  It should be a great and mind opening concert that does not happen but once a year here.  This is the first year I will be attending.  Henry is going to drive I think.  I mean Im talking a slacks and tie event here.  If I were wealthy I would wear Indian clothes all made especially for me.  I hope there are plenty of celebrating Indian Ameican people there.

Also I am making another disc.  This time Simon and Garfunkle and the Beatles meet the NevillesBros and Liquid Mind and Moby. I am putting it on my mp3 player as I write this.

But the meditation I have when I am tired is great.  I can feel my heart rate slow and muscles relax.  I has taken me years of practise and I am still not an expert meditate-er but I am making progress.  I am starting to enjoy living again.  Things have slowed way down from a couple of years ago when I felt like I was on a run away roller-coaster ride.

So I say here all day wrestling with finances.  I just got paid my meager salary from the non profit and already the money is largely gone.  Bills.  Student loans and imprudent purchases all look the same on the checks I write.  One day all this will be settled and I guess that will be the day that I die. 

It is hard to be austere and happy at the same time but not entirely impossible.  It just takes imagaination and some help from my friends.  The budget need not be broken by an occassional indulgence of the sweet tooth.  The need to communbe with nature looms large in my mind during the spring also.  So with some help from my friends I satisfy my self with walks and planning to go to Hot Springs National Forest before it gets too hot and bug-y there.  Soon, we will camp near the place where 6 people lost their lives in 2010 due to flash flooding.  But that was in March .  I think May is a much safer month to camp in the ancient Ouchita and Ozark National Forests.  Then we hot the springs in the city if there is any money left an pot of coffee at the hotel across the street late at night for the sleepy city of Hot SPrings and then the 4 hourride back to Shreveport.

Talked to "Red Becca" at the historic Blind Tiger restaurant during lunch today.  Sam Mason ate with me and Henry.  We talked about quitting smoking and psychology mostly while we sat at the bar and drank clear ice tea with out the ice.  Henry played video poker as usual. 

Tonight Hery plays the Puccini opera Tosca.  I can either take or leave opera.  As I said before the Indian Music sounded more interesting this time.  I dont speak Italian and I undertand the sitar much better that the singers in such operas as that one.

Late now, mp3 player is synched and now I will walk for 1/2 hour and visit with Henry some more when he returns from the opera in which he is one of the musicians.  We will eat cheese and listen to Public radio for a bit and then I walk home and dream about what embrace-able similarities to today that tomorrow will bring.

It's supposed to rain tonight, but it has not yet rained.  I am supposed to walk 2 mi before the rain, before McDonald's lobby closes.  I do not think I will make it to get coffee at McDonald's tonight.  Instead I find myself sitting inside my spare bedroom office and listening to old New Age albums.  Pretty typical stuff like Michael Hedges and Ray Lynch mixed with the Decembrists and Nirvana and Pat Metheny and believe it or not I even listened to Nora Jones recording of Come Away with Me.  As far as Nora Jones goes I like her singing Tom Waits "got a head full of lightning and a hand full of rain...I always take the long way home"  Oh yeah I was listening to Tom sing Way Down in the Hole which is convincing good.

$1 Crab cakes from SUper One.  Mmm Mmm Mmm.  Hot and spicy even.

Still waiting on it to rain.  I wanted orginally to go to the Indian Night at LSUS on Sunday because I kinda like sitar music, but now I heare there will be an intermission and a buffet and I am beginning to wonder how much the ticket(s) will be.

Oh good ness sakes alive I cannot type to save my simple life.  I guess soon I will get a speech recog thing and try to dictate a book of poems to it.  I will see how mcuh that costs!  The reason I like to work in verse.  I was thinking about this earluier today is because I can seem more like an expert in verse than in prose and I am no expert.  I am fluent only in English and only marginally so in evenEnglish.  SOmetimes I think there are large parts of the the English language that only get spoke behind closed doors subrosa and are never heard by large swathes of the population that watches FOX News and that kind of fair.  I don t think people hear everything that goes on all aroudn them.  Not a new Idea here.  People have selective hearing.  Even me.  Even you!

NO I havenet gotten the speech recog thing yet.  Not sure if it would work with the blogger interface.  Speech recog has been aroudn for a few decades now I wonder if it has gotten to the point where it works worth a damn?  Trying out somwthing like that could be fun for me, perhaps even theraputic.  You think?

But finally the quarter is over at workl and now I can take a little but of a breather again.  No more hurrying around for a week or sol.  But it will always be soemthing wont it?  Yes it will.  Would you like to buy some worthless junk now?  He he.  Just wonderig if you are giving in to my subliminal salemanship.  SHeepishly I slink arounf the off ice here at home wondering who that love poem I wrote last week is about.?  It think I am in love with Sade!  "There s a quiet storm and I ve never felt like this before... "

My Extradimentional Thoughts (turned love poem as an afterthought)

Mold spore of a self assembling abyss:
Why should intelligence and language
Be any different than Nature?

Someone knows the answer to this
In all the laws of practical philosophy
Someone unknown hurmit crab of man

Someone knows why their is a heartbeat
To time itself and resonance between reincarnation
And our churning galaxy dancing with infinity.

Mold spores at the air vent
Of a transport to Mars
Look like the Mandelbrot sets of
the coloring book you left on the my desk.

You must not like the way I ignore you when I write.
But when I look you are gone again.

The spots I see before my eyes now
Are fractals exploding over and over
They are like snow crystals under the magnifier
The are fireworks than never end

Time is the noose around the neck of impossible
Distance is the time it takes to die
Speed is like the knife that cuts the rope of infinity
I am the thief that loots the gems of escape.
You are the cook that brings each morning
Sweets to a condemned prisoner of your love.

Romantic ideas from what little I know of cosmology.
Your eyes capture the transcendental
The paradoxical the ethos and the mystery

The line of your torso is the expression
Of a spring wind kissing the thunderstorm's
Delicate rumble -- your fingers the first cool rain
On the minerally leaffy foilage I once called Music.

How do we come to assemble from the abyss?
Someone knows the answer. 
Whisper it to me when your lips touch my kiss.

Saturday night in New Orleans

I was only in New Orleans for about 24 hours.  Stayed in Metairie, LA and partied in the French Quarter of New Orleans on Canal and Bourbon St then toward the river.  Neighbor and friend Henry and I ate our way back to Shreveport.  Drinking can be a problem in the Vieux Carre of New Orleans, or eating.  One kind of chooses one or t'other pretty quickly upon arriving,  In some cases drinking chooses you and then you end up getting lost in New Orleans driving around with too many demons and arms of the oak trees just wanna reach out and grab you.  That's what can happen on too much coffee too.  I should know.  That's what happened to me last weekend.

But no.  I did not crash or even have red and blue lights flashed at me.  Henry and I got off pretty easily.  One hundred dollars is apparently about the right amount to offer up to the gods of Bacchus there -- during Lent, ha!

Bourbon St was crowded.  It was a visage from another world, the skinny girl dancing in the door way and the balconies over the street where more people teased the crowd with beads, a tradition even though Mardi Gras is well over.

I found out that it was the 100th anniversary of Tennessee Williams, the playwright as well as being a final in March madness basketball that was in New Orleans that weekend.  It was in fact so much fun on such a shoe string budget that I will devote a few more blogs to the topic of my somewhat annual trip to the Greater New Orleans area, the Big Easy.

For now I am listening to Pressure Drop by the Clash from Super Black Market Clash and wishing I was still in the French Quarter, perhaps working on a novel or something.  Alas, I still work at the non profit in Shreveport, some 350 miles from the the Cafe du Monde.  You may ask if New Orleans is still around after Katrina and such and once again the answer is an outstanding affirmative.  I even ate 1/2 dozen (raw) oysters on the half shell.

Robert was there in Baton Rouge with Henry the friendly dog of some breed unknown.  We had lunch Sunday at the Chimes East in Baton Rouge with all them on the patio including Henry the dog and Henry the dude.  Henry the dog stuck to his water dish and relaxed under the table.  Henry the dud chowed down on some blackened snapper and a large young man at the table next to us confessed at some point that he too was a friendly dog.  The fog, the fog.  It was a headachey Sunday after struggling through the oak trees to get to the bed in the wee hours of the morning.  I was suprised to wake up in one piece that Sunday,.  I found that I had not turned into a vampire by checking my relection in the bathroom mirror of the cafe outside our hote.  We stopped briefly at Prejeans in Lafayette LA and picked up the company cell phone which I had accidenatlly left on the table on Sturday afternoon, and we mosied by to the port on the red river in time for Heart of Space on the public radio station, which I slept through without waking up at all.

It was good to see you RB.  Too bad for the blog that I took no video or picture this time.  Lots of real memories I will share with you all later.  I plan to take three days off from work next week so maybe I will write again then.