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.