yesterday... one of those good days when i didn't leave the house except for quick walk in the morning. half-heartedly fooled with a watercolor i screwed up, in general puttered around fixing things. around noon i got into installing walmart $66 air-conditioner in computer room which has gotten so unpleasant to be in this summer during the late afternoon. which meant dismantling rickety wall shelf of tech manuals, disks, CDs and bits and pieces of electronics.

actually it's all coming back to me now, i drove to [shutter] tunnel road mall to buy a cartridge for B&W printer. that was enough.

found a bunch of new silverware in kitchen. either the tooth fairy or ninian must have left it last week. much thanks.

we must be in dog day season now, but for me it has seemed like dog days for at least a month. i remember them from living in the country days where you can't miss them. they always affected me in an odd way and have been doing so lately.

something or another i read lately has me thinking about the presidential campaign. it was to the effect that democracy and politics are two different things, and they are becoming fused together in the minds of the public/citizens/consumers/audience/users we have all become.

anyway moving stuff around to get AC in reinforced feeling that my job at this point in life is to cleanup and throw away. lighten up. streamline.

it happens when you wake up and find yourself surrounded by the flotsom and jetsom of modern life lived in a trance. i have this compulsion to slim it all down to a notebook and pencil. but then i'd need a pocket knife to sharpen pencil, and then a whetstone to sharpen knife and... you get the picture.

then there is the question of enlightment vs realization. the american tradition of self-improvement has, with the help of a clutch of contemporary eastern thought and depth psychology memes, morphed into the ultimate self-improvement, getting off the wheel. i admit i am a pessimist in this regard. i believe that enlightment, god-realization, transcendence, or what have you (what do you have) does not dispense with dukkha but includes it. jesus suffered. meher baba suffered. the buddha suffered. all sentient beings suffer.

at this point in my life i am not looking for something better to change this situation. a spiritual practice to move on from this situation is necessary, but i believe it is necessary not for the improvement of life experience, but for the sake of something else. and that something else is a mystery, unknowable.

one way to think about it is to consider the experience of conscious living as a dream, but not my dream. nor anyone else's dream. the supreme dream, lila, the play of the divine. the cloud of unknowing by the pseudo-areapogite, 5th c., or the modern update, the cloud of knowing.

meister eckhart: "the eye i see god with is the same eye god sees me with". and my eyes, along with the rest of me, are beat up, worse for the wear, stuck in the conditioned world. our suffering is useful to the kosmos for reasons we'll never know.

any of this intelligible? i hope not.

scan of a batik i got in Thailand a couple of epochs ago. it lay on a basement floor in denver where some huge dog was housed for a long time. since then has been god knows where or why. i recently recovered it and will clean it and maybe reback it out of respect. probably hang it on a wall.

today i only have one quick trip in the truck, the rest of the day i am looking forward to cleaning the house, studio, maybe recreate my lost address book. put in a newish air conditioning unit. finish a water color. sleep. take a walk. the last few weeks have been so turbulent i am looking forward to sitting awhile.

ran across this in a mystery i am reading - break from jung - the narrows by michael collins:

"everybody counts or nobody counts."

here's today's metaDoodle. it looks like i'm feeling a little better.

i seem to be tiptoeing up into a new relationship with these things. not only creating them, or to put it more accurately, letting them thru, but living them in an obscure way i can not explain. creativity is the royal road for me, but it is necessary but not sufficient.

saw edwards last nite, thought he did great. what i've seen has been on PBS and i have to say i think the commentary has really missed the point. carter, boxer, the new black guy whose name has not settled into my brain, kerrys wife whose name ditto, and edwards all sailed right over the commentator's heads. as a friend remarked to me, there was some speaking from the heart and they didn't get it. i think all modern peasants might. hope so.

"politics and democracy are entirely different things."
from This Modern World

thanks to jim for pointing this link out. i guess it's the most cogent of all the convention blogs, but then what else would you expect from mr. tomorrow.

well this picture popped out of my head recently, sometimes ugliness is helpful. apparently my unconcious is busy with some unpleasant but helpful tasks. hope it knows what it's doing. i don't.

another new meta-doodle, fresh from the fevered mind of mine. this was done with water soluble colored pencils and probably some other stuff i don't quite recall.

so now that that is done i can start my "real" day which will be a lot of shopping. i'll grit my teeth and sail into the commercial zones. this is one activity where my non-contemporary slowness really disappears, i'm in and out of the stores real fast. holding my nose and breath as long as i can.

saw jimmy carters speech last night and loved it. i think he gave the dems all the memes they need to win. to fight a war you need to fight the enemy, not the object of a personal vendetta or a with a theoretical plan made years before the enemy attacked.

it appears my 12 year old 17" monitor is beginning its slide towards heat death. getting pronounced waver the first 20 minutes or so i turn it on.

on another subject entirely, the more i find out about the woman i was entangled with awhile back the more the itch for revenge rears its ugly head. i absolutely will not scratch it, but it's a new feeling for me so i am experiencing what a lack of compassion and empathy can do to a person. just a personal blip. i am blessed with no desire to spend any time with it since i am at least half a holy fool who can be fooled some but not all of the time.

umm...the above paragraph shows a little spiritual hubris. to better express what i mean maybe i should simply say it ain't my way.

an exhausting day and week. too many distorted paradigms and ripples in the psychic atmosphere. the scenery is being dismantled. words are up for grabs, and the Word - note that i'm not talking exclusively christian here folks - is feeling dizzy. vertigo of the verbal and transuded deluge sweeping past our front door. sleepy civilians rioting at the oceans edge. seashell currencies disappearing like bad examples.

the hidden cost of life: Life.

sunday morning, missed Friends Meeting. friend ninian dropped by around 9, we stayed up talking. tossed turned, and listened to AM talk show all night. couldn't tell you what it was about.

today is the last day of bele chere, asheville's summer street extravaganza. usually too hot, too crowded, and too much pavement for me. may drift down late afternoon.

the picture above is watercolor i did in ashe county. started a second on clayboard which will be fun to finish.

it feels like august will be a retreat for me, i'll stay put and indoors, really need to tie up some loose ends - almost said entities - and maybe modify my ongoing attempt to re-socialize. back to the bunker, my back to the wall. but i will maintain contact with some of the good folks i have met over the last year.

well i'm back. my friend jim c. opined in an email that maybe on the bed and under the covers might work better, but it never has for me.

ashe county was cool, altho around 4 it could turn into that steamy charlston weather the whole south seems to be reverting to. b and a were doing their retreat in the morning, i painted, as the day progressed a's meds would catch up with her and she was asleep by 7. so i didn't see much of her. anyway 2 women who go back many years were too much for a simpleton like me, i don't catch the nuances and frankly don't care.

back here at the ranch a number of voice-mails. apparently my old projection mona is loose and on the street. lotta talk i won't go into, but my opinion is she is hanging out in the 7th nether ring and devising a new and improved method to live a few rungs lower in hell. i suppose she thinks it's all a tragedy - caused by someone else. but it's not, it fits like a glove. i've seen other people go down, but they maintained the grace to accept their destiny and not shotgun blame all over anyone in their life. but hey, i don't know anything about it, or much else. last week i went to a salon of conversation 'bout this and that. my friend janice told me driving back that i had fit in nicely, joining in to the flow of discourse. i told her it was easy because i didn't know anything about anything.

i'll say it one more time: being crazy does not justify or explain criminal hurtful behavior. neither does being abused as a child. neither does being a junky. i've know folks in all of these categories who were beneficent, meant no harm, and by grace and courage had the guts to turn themselves around.

meanwhile none of it is part of my life. what is part of it is the crazed dark insane feminine within, without whose acquaintance i would never have been attracted or recognized the beautiful departed soul that left nothing but trash behind her.

redemption, salvation, enlightenment, the cloud of unknowing, an innermost turning of the heart: none of it will happen. what an education i'm getting.

yipee.

meanwhile check this out - the clearest description of the present state of mediated discoure available. thanks jim:
This Modern World

i admit it, i have a small addiction problem: every day i have to do a picture and put it up before i can start the rest of the day. it may be a little like a psychic journal, you know, when words fail. a few too many loose entities bouncing around in my head lately. i guess i can live with it. mr. rorshach.

meanwhile i'll be doing my least favorite thing, organizing "stuff". objects. gear. lost my address book, anyone out there that was in it give me a call.

ok: get ready day here i come.

this mornings inarticulate doodle. fifteen minutes of unmitigated fun.

got a call last night around 2 am. the news is that the spainish harlem mona lisa is loose again and going down fast. slow motion suicide. maybe not so slow at this point. it is truly a living nightmare to encounter that much self-hatred. you can't read about it and appreciate what it means. you have to experience it to realize it even exists.

i'm about finished packing for trip to ashe county. going tonight with friend janice to the gray eagle to hear freeplanetradio. don't know much about them except middle eastern percussion, world music, 3 members in the band. oh yeah, it's a CD release gathering.

was going to leave in the morning, but i'm going at 5 to a "salon" with janice, chance to meet some folks, wet my finger and put it in the air, always interested in what people are doing, feeling and thinking of in this very convoluted cage we have transformed the culture into.

this mornings postcard from nowhere. i do'em from scratch, y'know, or at least i did this morning.

got up at 5, got a lot of color print research, walked up the mountain at 7.

yesterday on the radio i heard twice mention of postponing the coming election should something unusual happen, like taking out las angeles or perhaps some "chatter" overheard indicating a possible problem.

remember you heard it here first. i raised this hypothetical some months back.

so what else is new? what isn't? it's no surprise that each instant is a surprise.

reading jung again i am realizing how difficult it is to be an INFP, that's Introverted Intuitive Feeling Perception type, but those words mean nothing without studying jung, and maybe even then they don't. anyway the difficulty is not intuition, it works fine, it is the jungian compliment of intuition, sensation. in his typology i think i function in the sensation world as an unconscious, childish manner. and since the only way one can "see" the unconscious is projection, that's what i am dealing with. glad to get that figured out.

today's found doodle worked over a little. i did this back when i first started drawing - again - after maybe ten years layoff. living at big ridge, hard times, beautiful times.

going to get to see a lot of political ads because i guess north carolina is politically now "in play".

last night on leher news, i saw speech by bush, and then by kerry.

bush looked good, in control. both his speech and his ad pounded kerry for voting for war and then against supporting the troops. the ad ended with clip of kerry saying "i did vote for the war before i voted against it."

kerry's speech was from the day before where he spoke of the things the prez was responding too, namely that by the second vote it was clear the war was out of control and his vote "against" supporting the troops was part of a larger effort to stop the madness and reevaluate.

now this is where edwards comes in: his daily soundbite should make mincemeat out of this sophistry.

testing, testing... i think bellsouth has changed something...if you don't see this they have & i don't have the tiiiiime to fix it.

ok they haven't. but i can't seem to put up today's picture. one more time - here goes:

ok it worked. doing this stuff on a computer gets real old sometimes...but i don't think it is too unique in that respect.

it's just that the waste of time that "staying busy" entails is sometimes more obvious working a pc than, say, building a sand castle before the waves rush in.

the poem dylan reads for woody on bootleg series vols 1-3 is the best description of what it was like to grow up in the 50's, for me anyway, that i have ever heard.
Bob Dylan: Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie

above from a doodle i found. i think i must have done it at interminal meeting when i worked at intel.

another drawing of cabin in chatham county.

talked to steve late friday while slaving over a hot computer. he told me doug had been in town on was en route to yancy county spread, and was meeting sam there. 20 minutes later i was on my way. hadn't realized how much i needed to get out of town.

spent the night in the cool, camped out in my truck yurt. pleasant evening, pleasant morning.

when i got back yestyerday i had a few phone messages, one of which mentioned that yesterday was silence day for the Baba lovers. so i shut everything down and shut up. watched my favorite TV show later, cops.

fridays quote from psychological types was pretty ho-hum. here's another one (as always picked at random):

"...the world of inner images is never a moral problem for the intuitive. for [extraverted and introverted intuitives] it is an aesthetic problem, a matter of perception, a "sensation". because of this the introverted intuitive has little conciousness of his own bodily existence or its effects on others....the perception of the images of the unconcious, produced in such inexhaustible abundance by the creative energy of life, is of course fruitless from the standpoint of immediate utility. but since these images represent possible views of the world which may give life a new potential, this function, which to the outside world is strangest of all, is as indispensable to the total psychic economy as is the corresponding type to the psychic life of a people. had this type not existed, there would have been no prophets in israel."

another pencil drawing found by me during the recent "clean it up & throw it all out" binge.

it's the upper room of the chatham county double slave cabin i and others lived in around 65-68 (?).

reading psychological types by jung. let's see if i can find something in it that is close to the bone:

"[heraclitus] himself says:

"it is the opposite which is good for us.

"for souls it is death to become water, for water death to become earth. but from earth comes water, and from water soul.

"the way up and the way down are the same."

makes me think of involution evolution and also mr dylan's line
"the people you meet on the way up
you meet again on the way down."

we sure get around.

combination of very old ink drawing and too much time on someone's hands.

lately i've been thinking about intimicy: it can exist only between two people who both respect themselves and the truth.

another pix from the past i found in the great clean-up extravaganza. must have been done in my outside the zone period.

been puttering with book of mixed poetry and illustration. i'll put up a page or two as it develops.

i got some encouragement from george yesterday when i went into consensus opinion that it is not good to mix text and pix.

a few have gotten away with it: Blake, Patchin, Reps, the very talented guy who did the illustrated rumi.

but with the mixture - or mix up - of the genres today, why not? besides, you gotta do what you gotta do.

or someone does.

man i've adapted so many lifestyles lately - not to mention so far - it's an attempt i think to deal with the weather which is truly becoming s0mething differant, maybe like a combination of charlston, sc and bangkok.

today's picture is from a doodle i made during a meeting at the last place i worked.

i'm waiting for mr. kerry to thank me for my vice-presidential advice. maybe he's busy.

here's another old picture i found during the great clean-up of the last few days. it is the interior of a stone room that connected two slave cabins i - and a lot of others - lived in during the (shudder) 60's.

i'll probably be putting up versions of a lot of ancient drawings for awhile. they certainly bring back memories to me that i'd forgotten i remembered.

the psychic wear and tear of sorting through so much stuff from another, earlier life and world is amazing.

and i still can't remember what i did last week.

the world of "stuff" is a relatively new one for humans. seven hundred years ago the majority of people in the world just knocked down the yurt and moved on. if you divided the gross tonnage of stuff and divided it by the world population today and did the same thing for the world of 2,000 years ago, the difference would be mind-boggling.

the colossal clean-up i have been doing this week reached fever pitch yesterday. an exercise in confusion. way too much.

richard and debbie called and we went downtown to "shindig on the green" plus ate dinner at rosetta's, a place that has to be experienced to be believed. it was a most welcome break from wading thru disks, CDs, old papers, paintings that i had forgotten, and various large and small objects that have accumulated around me. philip k. dick called this stuff "dottle". it is a new phenomena belonging to life today, something our ancestors would not have understood.

picture above is an example of the things i found - and simply cannot throw out. my friend jim did it back in the bad good old days, somewhere in mexico. i remember the night he left better than i remember last week.

saturday AM. tossed and turned and returned all night.

going thru the house throwing stuff away. i've found lots of forgotten art work.

here's one: a picture of my ex-wife sally. taken in one of those photo booths - 4 small pictures for a quarter - in manitou springs, maybe 1969. she was beautiful.

so today is dedicated to creating a huge pile of forgotten fragments of my life to give to some homeless shelter.

listening to a lot of dylan. it's amazing how he reads my mind. maybe because he's a poet, an artist, a prophet. check this out:

MAMA, YOU BEEN ON MY MIND:
"I don't mean trouble, please don't put me down or get upset,
I am not pleadin' or sayin', 'I can't forget.'
I do not walk the floor bowed down an' bent, but yet,
Mama, you been on my mind.

Even though my mind is hazy an' my thoughts they might be narrow,
Where you been don't bother me nor bring me down in sorrow.
It don't even matter to me where you're wakin' up tomorrow,
But mama, you're just on my mind."

[later] server was down so i didn't post this morning. am now knee deep in a combination of junk and a few priceless items. was thinking of going to shindig on the green this evening but it's pretty muggy outside.

good day to stay put.

Interesting day yesterday, doc in the morning, Karen at noon, wanted to talk with her about her ideas on a sort of cohousing deal. Saw Janet in the evening, nice walk thru Kenilworth, an area of aville I did not know.

when I got home in the afternoon a bundle was wrapped hanging from the door handle. dylans bootleg series, 3 CDs.

so I sent him this as a thank you:

it's about 2 in the afternoon now, I have spent the whole day dumping piles of paintings, drawings, technical manuals, all kinds of paperwork in the living room.

purpose: throw away, lighten up, streamline. Now I've got to do it or I can't get to the kitchen.

Mozilla, Opera Unite to Standardize Web: "On Tuesday, the U.S. government's Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) warned Web users to stop using IE, because of the 'significant vulnerabilities' found in domain/zone security model, DHTML object model, MIME-type determination and ActiveX."