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.