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!