"la esperanza muere Ultima"
studs terkel on what news has become. not that you didn't "know" it already.
from
t r u t h o u t - Studs Terkel | No Brass Check Journalists

very social day today - went to a book club meeting this morning for the first time and mister wilber meeting tonight. worked on layout of jeff's book. kind of dozed off around four.

so what did we talk about today? the usual, i think. what's real and what's not, memes, trends, metaphors, looking at the boundry between self and other, how to live.

it was remarked on by travelers to constantinople in the tenth century that everywhere you went in that time and place there was a continual conversation, theological and philosophic at the same time. almost everyone, from the emperor down to the baker, had much to contribute to these questions of that day.

one thing about growing older for me is that i am beginning to realize that i live in a similar situation. i am not the only one looking up in wonder, or sitting watching my big toe.

we're all asleep in the same boat.

i've changed my travel plans. driving straight to chapel hill nov.5. time with all my children and grandchildren. this will be a real treat. then i'll drive to the Baba Center and stay a few days. i am long overdue.

meanwhile this just in:

"Now, however, it seems to have been automated: some clever programmer working for one of these iniquitous outfits has written a tool that goes around a list of weblogs and collects information on the various posts made to it.

It then creates the right HTML to fool the blogging software into thinking that a comment has been entered, and the resulting advert is posted to the blog as if it was legitimate."
from
BBC NEWS | Technology | How spammers are targeting blogs:

sunday morning, nice gentle rainy morning. rose too late for friend's sunday meeting.

yesterday was a beautiful fall day, perfect. i went to a quaker-sponsered meeting on "death and dying", interesting hour and a half. then a rare foray downtown for outdoor art extravaganza and lunch with winnie.

i enjoyed talking to the artists' most of whom had really interesting work hanging. two subjects were constant: one was what is a "print" and what is an origional, this question stemming from the giclee process. the other was framing, and i may have gotten a lead about a florida company that sells plain-jane frames cheap. i also observed that texture is a big deal, especially in some of the larger paintings.

mimi hay was exhibiting, and her japanese-based fabric wearable art, kimonos and such, was quite impressive. i'll meet with her tomorrow morning to see if i can help her with a web-site. i've cancelled all plans today, realizing how behind i am with several projects that i would like to complete before i leave on trip. in fact i just now decided to leave fri the 31st instead of thursday the 30th. now on to finish typesetting jeff's book.

[much later] marathon day. i got that grayed out feeling. but i got a lot done. so now i need to watch some tv with the sound turned off.

i bought the first CD in about 10 years last week thru daedalus books. 4 CD set, the complete lester young. someting like $18. i played around with the picture above which is from a very well made booklet included. i've been chasing a recording of "dickie's dream" for 30 - 40 years now, and it's included. doesn't sound at all like i remembered. the boxed set is put out by an english company proper records.

the weekend has exploded. mimi hay will be showing her creations downtown at some giant (170 artists) outdoor festival. i'll certainly go at least one day, and maybe two. i'm very interested in how maniacs like me might move some stuff.

plus sat. morning is the first meeting of a friend's-sponsered 4 week deal on death and dying. curious about it so i'll be there sat. morning. and attend Baba meeting sunday afternoon.

as far as the kosmic situation goes, i am more and more convinced that everybody is right - there's a big change coming.

surprise!

here is an email i tried to send early this morning:

"what a nite. listened to mp3 of ken wilber and rabbi somebody, phone conversation, you sent, late last nite. an eye-opener, so to speak.

then i did my bedtime thing, which these days consists of a little reading, very little. �non-zero-sumness and human destiny�. the kind of book i would have really enjoyed a few years back, and one that is chock-full of entertaining anecdotes concerning cultural evolution. i could nit-pick it to death, but won�t. suffice to say that �parable of the nine tribes� and �guns, germs, and steel� should probably be read also for balance.

then i turn off the lights and start book on tape, story of iris murdoch by her husband. starts off very oxbridge, in the 30�s i would guess. it puts me out pretty fast. so far for 3 nites i have fallen asleep in middle of first side of first tape.

but this morning... woke up from a dream, the first i can remember having in a long time. went something like this:

airplane lands at narita airport outside tokyo. i�m dressed in coat and tie and have several hours wait for next flight, so i decide to take a walk. quickly i am in small japanese neighborhood when i see someone who looks like rob, an Australian vw mechanic i used to know. it�s not him but he invites me in where i discover that lynn, old time dealer from the past is living there.

she talks about the owner of the place, who is a secret presence responsible for vast shipments of cannabis in and out of the place. i ask who this person is and whispered conversation takes place. turns out that it is somebody that remembers me from the ancient past, but her identity is withheld.

meanwhile cooking, chopping is going on in kitchen. the guys who live upstairs, foreigners like everyone else in the dream, move pounds of coke every day. or so i am told. all of this biz bothers me a little, and i have visions of japanese storm troopers raiding the place.

so some of us begin the stroll back to the airport. i take a rest on a bed in a room that is open to the street. there are many beds there. housewife comes out and busily sweeps the outdoor bedroom and i realize that i am being unmannered, hop off the bed, and hands in front, palms together, bow to her and turn to catch up with group walking to airport. she says something in japanese, sounds irate but not too extreme. i get the idea that foreigners like myself are known to be a little crass.

catching up with friends we end up in another large room where two men live. the place is full of tatamis, tapestries, and blade runner like holograms floating here and there. the two are american, and one of their business cards reads �i find things�. they are both young entepenuers, fairly successful. one of them mentions �this isn�t woodstock anymore�.

now we start to try and remember what time plane is leaving and do we have time to catch it. wholly confusing, i can�t figure out what time zone it is or where the airport is. one of the group mentions a sore throat he is dealing with. the two who live there mutter that this guy is having entirely too much trouble with his throat. a thought occurs to me, and at the exact same time i am thinking �things are breaking up down there�, one of the two says it. i tell him what just happened, and he nods his head. one of us says �dylan�.

we decide we might make the airport in time for departure, and start long journey up and down escalators, hallways, public underground spaces, total confusion. i am realizing that we are completely lost and wake up shaky, low blood sugar, fluorescent balloons blooming in front of my face.

--
chris
http://modernpeasant.com
We seem to believe it is possible
to ward off death by
following rules of good grooming.
Don Delillo "

"The answer is obvious, Seehusen said: 'America's drug warriors are
shameless hypocrites who believe in one standard of justice for
ordinary Americans and another for themselves, their families and their
political allies."
from Pravda forum:
Forums - America owes Rush Limbaugh a debt of gratitude

here's todays almost straight foto. i also put up visual and textual extrvaganza, whistling in the dark, it's available in upper right column.

speaking of stuff, have you noticed how much of it there is lately?

OK. today's clouds are looking more like it.

interesting and odd day. got up around 9 and worked all day on a few projects i can let go of soon. threw in a trip to the post office, walmart, and best buy. took my 45 minute walk. and the picture above. looked up at the clock in total amazement: 11:00 PM.

i still say one thing at a time is the way to go, but how fast is a" time"?

then there's this flavor. i seem to be in a cloud phase as far as this weblog goes.

other news from hypomania heights: worked all day at burning my first CD of various sonic items i've done over the last year and a half. a little time spent exploring the complexities of graphics heavy internet pdf and how best to display it. (i think it's goint to be a download). and worked an an oil pastel. what a fun day! hyperfocus or bust!

but i still can't reliably email.

pretty cool, huh? this comes from a photo that i took on the parkway a few days ago. ain't technology wonderful.

well i did it again. spent all day noodling. the usual gang of suspects.

another long beautiful day. got my hour walk in this evening, took camera and finished off 2nd roll of film. lots of fancy wide-angle shots with sun blaring thru tree branches. now have 2 rolls to develop, the first reaches back to this summer in arizona i think.

the question of the day seems to circle around the delimma of living singly or as part of a dyad, ie couple.

this came up a few weeks ago in a conversation with dr. r., who opined that in our circle of old friends, those who never married seem not to be doing so well. oversweeping generalization i think, but backed up by the mental health industry, acturarial tables, and anecdotal evidence.

i think each of us has to balance - and experience - both solitude and community. the balance is different for all of us. i spend days without talking - or seeing - another human. like my friend lucius s. said to me the last time i talked to him, alone, brooding over some half finished creative project. it takes a little of that to push a painting, poem, or song thru to completion.

in my so called personal life i have found it increasingly difficult to pay enough attention to a women in my life. so there has not been one for many years. my listening skills still survive, but are of short duration.

or as my friend sam said the other day, women get bored after the love rush. i remember a lady i lived with for four years who was fascinated that i was an "artist". a couple of years later she resented the time and attention it took for me to to be an "artist".

and yet for mental health's sake if nothing more, humans - among who i count myself - seem to need friends, community if for nothing more than to widen the horizon, and stretch the psyche. the sangha is a case in point, a community of like-minded (tho not identical) humans where mutual respect can develop.

myself i've been solitary - without a woman - for, let's see, maybe 10 years or more, with one small interuption. is this selfish? i guess it depends on what world you are living in at the time.

i needed a time-out. didn't realize it would last this long. but most of my days are feeled - freudian slip i guess - filled with starting and finishing highly challanging creative endevors. i wake up thinking about them. i feel the fresh breezes from somewhere when i am dealing with the imagination manifesting itself through my addled pate and beat-up heart.

so what is it? a choice between artist and lover? no i don't think you have the choice. and i disagree with allan combs statement the other night that socrates' dictum, "know thyself", meant only to know your social strengths and fit within the community, nothing deeper. he was making the point that the modern persona had not yet developed. but check out sappho's fragments, a modern reflexive personality, not defined soley by her role in her world.

parenthetically i also disagree with his description of the individual developing in the roman era, sculpture suddenly representing real named individuals - scars and all - rather than the greek sculpture representing the ideal. that is, i agree that it developed this way, but i don't think it totally was wiped out in the middle ages, but continued to slowly and secretly develop, albeit in a culture centered on power and instutional religion, a mythic culture where the introspective was not allowed in public.

so today's personhood, with it's rich inner life - sometimes - and aperspectival mode, make for a situation where solitude can exist, the life of the mind and heart can be lived, and not always in conjunction with a partner. it depends on so many particulars, like what you do in the solitude state, what purpose it is serving.

still it would be nice to grow old with another human who has some idea how this might work. in my case we are still very much hypothetical. cf "no expectations" by the rolling stones.

oops... what happened - skipped a few days posts. life in the 21st century. and i really can't remember too much about the last few days. have poetry/art extravaganza about ready to go online. sequencing what i hope becomes a CD in the near future. making brave attempt to finish 2 oils that are still hanging around (my neck). the situation is not so much obsessive perfectionism, not even close. just want to put them away and move on.

attended lecture on "art and the development of human conciousness" by allen combs of UNCA yesterday evening. very pleasant and interesting couple of hours. i discovered that the desks they use today in higher education are soft, and mine, when i leaned back, went into a recline position. progress.

after lecture a few of us headed out to hear the mahavishnu orchestra downtown. but i chickened out. medications and insuline seemed to be off, and i had visions of getting drunk in some nightclub. which i wouldn't have done, i guess it was a twitch from the past. in the daylight i can handle crowds and traffic, but when it gets dark i get a little sketchy sometimes.

yesterday ... can't really remember much about it. i guess i hung around puttering, cleaning, finally jumped into an oil painting that has been languishing for some attention. it was a case of leave as is, pretty ok picture, or rip into it, do or die, either destroying or improving it in some inscrutable way. messed about trying to zip a pdf for PC users. tuned instruments. readjusted basil rates on insulin pump. worked on converting MP3s into aiffs in order to burn a CD of my crazy jive music. took a long twilight walk. ninian arrived during the night. went to friend's meeting 10 this morning, glad i did.

one of my big discoveries this week was local "pirate" FM radio station. understand that my reception here picks up one NPR station heavy on what i would call top 40 classical, and an AM station of neo-con talk shows, and that's it (altho have to admit that i have come to enjoy dr....joy brothers? not sure of her name. there are other stations but they are even less interesting. so these guys are a real kick even if they do play a bit too much rap:

Free Radio Asheville - 107.5

what is it? the begining of a whole new thing, an image at the very inception on a cocktail napkin. actually it was a paper towel.

i've had more friends drop by this past week than ever before. it's been fun. the weather has been - to my taste - perfect, open windows, lots of bird noise, dampness in the air, overcast, breezes. really want to get up to parkway next week with camera.

last night - i think it was - i watched "threatmatrix" premier on the tube. due to a long fun day my hold on official reality was shakey at best and then to be bombarded with an ebola outbreak in amirrillo. the strange thing was that every commercial break seguewayed right out of the show, hard to tell the difference. i flipped to other channels and they were in on it too, so i went to sleep.

this one is better than the one below, but i think it is still unfinished.

got a book, "non-zero sum games and human destiny" (or something like that) for book club i hope to join soon. book does not look life changing but maybe a good read. we'll see.

bill o. from hendersonville visited today. played a little music. it's a dark dreary day but we took a walk anyway. really haven't accomplished much else altho almost finished wilber's appendix C of the new stuff he is presenting online.

even more of a milestone is discovery of some kind of pirate radio i can pick up. they play everything, including homemade music and too much rap. 107.5 on FM for those of you in asheville.

i'm not sure about this picture. i did it, as is my habit from time to time, very quickly, really just so i could put up a picture tonight. probably do it better sometime.

as you might gather - or not - i've been on a roll today, working on my panoply of projects the entire day. i'm starting to get a glimmer of how i can put it all together on a CD-ROM, movment, sound and maybe text. interactivity. whoopie. trance material.

but my email is still erratic. so mike e. and miss n., i got your emails much appreciated and you will hear from me when i fix my bits and bytes.

man i feel wierdness today. not "i feel wierd", altho of course that too. pretty constant, looking back and understanding that i felt that way even when i didn't.

but i feel wierdness. in the air, in the square, rambling waves everywhere. some kind of change or transformation trembling on the brink of blankness.

no i don't mean the slow swell and surge of anti-republicanism surfacing. i mean looking thru the window after dinner and seeing - or not seeing - darkness. realizing for the first time that my deceased ex-wife sally's birthday was the first day of autumn, oct 22, right after the equinox, right? or maybe the 22nd is the equinox itself, i don't at the moment know.

wierdness like getting bit by a spider earlier this week and watching it carrode a patch of my arm. getting a flu shot yestyerday, totally unable to paint, sing, or dance. nicotine withdrawel which i've been working on hard for a year, every since the habit took me up again. endless pharmaceutical ads bombarding my psyche. people dying left and right. probably other places too.

ten days of on and off hard and software upgradeing, and me too dizzy to care to RTFM... that's nerd for read directions. listening to alex gray fade in and out on shortwave in bed at night. the only guy i know who can rant and be reasonable at the same time.

tuesday i vote and i don't even know who is running for what. but i'll find out. i have contacts in high places.

feeling that tug towards hibernation, low light-level, scattered thoughts and memories, or what seem like memories, bob and weave in and out of somewhere called my mind. clothes rippling on a clothesline, brilliant spring light. hearing on the radio that we don't "have" children, they are lent to us. immense background sadness and longing for days disappeared. living in the now is living nowhere, in the endless space that waits behind of what is in front of and behind face. faces falling thru the fog, weak french deux-chevaux headlights splattering the wet cobblestones, all night conversations in the cafe or deep in the woods and not a stitch dropped, boots burning in campfires, cascades of pointers towards nothing.

i mean i got the oldtime blues, beneath the banter and blare of the noise life, a dying campfire barely glows in the early morning phospherescence, all blues.

maybe i should take my blood pressure. or maybe it should take me. too many tokes, too many strokes.

and behind it all the first person looks out thru my eyes. i'm here to be me and then not be me. right on track.

Rush Limbaugh May Teach Conservatives A Lesson: "The reaction to the drug problem - and drug felonies - recently alleged against Rush Limbaugh highlight sharply the differences between conservative morality and liberal/progressive morality."

caught a second - maybe third - wind last nite and stayed up late - for me - and watched PBS blues series. marshall chess and chicago blues featured, great stuff. lot of old and new footage.

the reoccuring motif was a record put out about 35 years ago by chess records, "electric mud". this was an attempt to put muddy waters in a psychedelic context, and was universally panned. had a double album cover, which when opened displayed a very sheepish-looking muddy wearing a white robe and not looking too angelic. it was a blip in the chronicle of the times and quickly sunk without a trace.

except that chuck d., later to become part of rap group whose name i cannot at the moment remember heard it, loved it, and it gradually pulled him into the chess catalogue of chicago blues. so the film was intercut with reassembling the "mud" band and doing it again, sans muddy who has passed on.

marshall chess insisted the origional intent was to use the psychedelic hook to introduce the hippies to electric chicago-based blues. altho i don't think it worked that way, it did for chuckie d. he made the comment that "the kids of today" are not much aware of the music of 5 years ago, not to mention robert johnson, sonnyboy williamson II, magic slim etc.

i had that album and played it on and off for years, kind of liked it in an off-center way, even tho by then i was very familiar with the blues - the first 45 (remember them?) i ever bought was "mannish boy" by muddy. i'm still a nut for otis spann, the keyboard player for muddy for many years. he and horace silver are the keyboard artisits i wish i could play like.

anyway it brought back memories of living in boulder colorado with wife and two twin children - they had thier first christmas there - during the tail end of the 60's, almost said tailspin. nice house tucked away on canyon blvd., in a neighborhood i later came to understand astounding amounts of all kinds of dope moved in and out of on a daily basis.

another time, another place, another me, another space.

here is a site sent to me by a member of ken wilber discussion group. too much for me to poke around in at the moment, let me know what you find if you do:

GURUS- SPIRITUAL MASTERS AND GUIDES; SATSANG AND SPIRITUAL TRAINING CENTERS

this picture was an old watercolor i fixed with oil pastel. got truck heater back together, sort of, hope the defroster works, hope the whole thing doesn't quit in the middle - or beginning - of winter.

it's funny not having much to say lately. working on poetry book, music CD, but words escape me. or maybe i escape them.

task for tonight: see if i can stay awake long enough to find out about enneagrams. if i do, i'll be right back.

...
ok here it is:

Conscious self	Overall self

Take Free Enneagram Test

i'm sooo tired. remember john lennons song? sleepless 7-10 days plus medication change. i'll be in bed by 8 tonight.

last nite went to bed at 1 AM, this morning i got up at 5, tested blood sugar (low) ate breakfast and had a cup of coffee, got back into bed and read a little of ken wilber's appendix C of new manuscript (found on shambala.com's site). put me to sleep until 10.

when i got up and still had low blood glucose. nonetheless twinkled new computer set-up, put truck heater blower back in truck. i don't think it'll last the winter, only runs on high. plus i have to do the yearly reconfiguration of under the dash adjustments which i dislike intensly. objective is to get heat into cab and window defrosters, has to be done with paper clips and chewing gum, on account of broken plastic connectors.

last nite had good wilber meeting. met a lady who moved down from cashiers nc, jackson county, my old stomping grounds.

i lived for five years with wife and children way up in the southern part of the county. it was an important part of my life, one i still dream about. one of the things that i miss about that lost world was the weather. cool liquid breezes, like mountain streams flowed thru the open windows at nite. it was a time and place, like some others in my life, that marked me.

come to find out from the lady, karen, that that has changed: the summers and winters are about like here in asheville. i was astounded by this information, but it makes sense. it's happening everywhere else. it never occured to me that that scene was over, vamoosed, nothing but a memory. those cool, moist breezes have moved on.

for those of us who think the internet is an exception to the capitalist choke hold on information, check this out:

Project Censored: "Such degree of market control spells trouble for freedom of information on the Internet. Cable and phone monopolies would become clearinghouses for information. Corporations and government agencies will hold tremendous power to filter and censor content. ISPs already have the capability to privilege, or block out, content traveling through their web servers. With the demise of open access regulations, Internet content will likely resemble the 'monotonous diet of corporate content' that viewers now receive with cable television."