i'm adding to this post after watching the evening news. no cable so i didn't stay glued to the tube all day.

dismal. disaster. and it's getting worse by the hour.

they talk about the infrastructure. the infrastructure is a mirage if you consider the people that own it. and that is not you and me. bush works for exxon. the ownership class got a raise with the tax cut. and that cost the required maintenance of the new orleans levees. halliburton is building levees in iraq. since bush and his fellow criminals stole the government the folks in N.O. have been crying out for maintaining and improving the infrastructure holding back the water.

the criminal overworld that you depend on for survival does not care about "you the people". the corporations now have their own armies. mercenary killing is a growth industry. bechtel etc. owns you. the tower of babel is bigger than ever. looting? that is going on in the middle east, and at the gas station.

think about the insurance megaliths: will they perform any useful function at all after the devestation? they will make a profit out of the misery. pay attention and see.

fuck capitalism. it may have been useful for humans for a couple of lifetimes but it has developed into nothing but banditry, well-dressed thugs, torture, assassination, moloch, and wage slavery. your money or your life.

humanity is being bled dry, twisted, disappearing. only profit remains. screwballs abound. loose cannons, saturday night specials (a high profit product), monsters of money, rhetorical wreckage, demeaning of meaning. there are one million more homeless in the homeland today. how many were there before? phony government, terrified people, eternal corporate entities that lord it over "you the people".

time to stand up, wake up, and understand that your life is worth nothing to your owners. you have absolutely nothing to lose by adamantly remaining human no matter what.

but it will cost you.

photo my sun eric emailed me yesterday, taken, i believe, at puerto vallerta (sp?) mexico. of course i had to sprinkle it with a good dose of photoshop dust.

i made a lot of progress in corralling past images from daily postings yesterday. soon you'll be able to spend hours mezmerized by imagery and wondering why anyone would continue to pump out these visuals. i know i do.

maybe i already posted this picture. it was a watercolor that would not work. so i finished it in photoshop.

for some reason, despite that cross, this to me is an image of "dog days". maybe because that's when i did it.

the last time i lived in the boonies (southern jackson county) dog days was a time that was very noticeable. all of the notions of western appalachia seemed right on. milk spoiled. the woods filled with iredescent webs and the colors became a bit darker, lots of fluorescent spiders around. most importantly, water slowed down. if you had a spring for your water source, it might slow down to a trickle.

now that i live in the paris of the south these things are not so noticeable. but humans, dragging 100s of thousands of years living on earth behind them, are affected too. the brain slows down. sleepwalking is the mode of the day. cobwebs and clutter in the head and the world of 10,000 things.

as the earth's trip around the sun speeds up (you have noticed, right?), dog days begins to take on a startling similarity to the later harvest season. the difference between the pulchritude of harvest, with the flora hanging fruit, and dog days with it's feel of suffication, becomes easy to miss. flowering just a bit overdone becomes decadence in the true sense of the word whatever that may be.

happy birthday jane
it's my sister janes birthday. here's her picture. she's 35.

don't have much to say today. except driving to sam's memorial saturday i passed a guy walking down hwy 40 carrying a large white cross. it looked like the base was on a roller skate. if he'd been on a skateboard i might have been more interested.

i put third sample page(s) from poetry picture book i'd like to stop working on here.

living room after great kleenup
spent yesterday afternoon at memorial for sam. toby, chrissy, and chall, his children put it together and it it was done well. thanks for the chance to say so long.

i saw many folks there that i knew but didn't recognize. at first. john m.,newt, lydia, henry, lynn, ginny. hadn't seen chrissy since the 80's i guess. dr. john r. and doug and marcia i recognized. i especially appreciated the words of john m. who i last saw in collage i guess. from the perspective of straight american consensus reality he made the point that we as a culture need more folks like sam, eccentric, what we used to call "inner directed", at home - and not at home - in many socio-economic contexts. it's a hard job, but somebody has to do it. and those that are in this role are in my opinion a disappearing breed. maybe that's myopia on my part and i hope i'm wrong.

by the way, john, the name i was trying to think of was james adams who died of pancreatic cancer a couple of years ago.

got this email this morning from tharpa:

"ONE VERSION OF INFINITY

You run so fast, round and round and round, that finally the fastest way to run is to stay still. You run so fast that you begin to see your own back, and you begin to become still. At that point, the whole thing begins to become infinite. When you hold still, you supercede any kind of speed at all. You become the ultimate and utmost winner of that particular race. From that point of view, being back to square one is one version of infinity....In this case, back to square one is the infiniteness of immense immeasurable space and expansion that you experience. Therefore, it is absolutely absurd to try to search further -- and the only way not to search further is to be, to stay, to stand or sit still."

From "Cosmic Disaster," in GLIMPSES OF REALIZATION: THE THREE BODIES OF
ENLIGHTENMENT page 14. Edited by Judith Lief. Published by Vajradhatu
Publications.

Happy birthday Eli
my son eli whose birthday it is today. he, his wife melissa, and 2 daughters are all old souls. quite a family. the very best, whatever that may be, to all of you.

it's just now dawn, the sky is that pearly luminosity that precedes the day. an early morning walk is just the ticket.

yesterday was another marathon during which i turned out a couple of pictures, a couple of prints, and a sample page from forthcoming poetry book. i PDFed the wrong page, but put it up anyway here. fooling with these pages is helping more than i would have thought to bring layout to some concluding stage.

upgraded pro-vision 4.5, an antiquated sequencing app that i've been using for a number of years, and started two new music pieces. archived off a bunch of files to create a little more working space on overloaded disks. almost finished kitchen re-do. i'll have quite a bunch of "stuff" to put out tuesday for garbage pickup: lamps, old chairs, defunct computer. bought a new tire to replace spare i've been running on.

driving to old fort after lunch to join a lot of sam's friends to celebrate his life on earth which is now in the past.

next week i'm on retreat (in retreat?). i'm staying home and working with soul, spirit, and body-mind to make a few mid-course life changes. or maybe i'll just sleep.probably redo whole site so i can update sidebars without so many workarounds i can't remember them all.

sam gray
another day riding the comet of creativity. spent quite a few time-units making an 8 by 10 print of the image above, my old friend sam gray who died last week. we'll gather at the old fort museum at 2 this coming saturday to say so long.

at this point in my life, sam was the friend i knew for the longest duration, since 1959 or 60 i think. we fought, we laughed, we saw each other through a maze of changes, fell into the past, were strangers, were friends, and in the end knew all about each other's strengths and weaknesses, successes and failures, and none of it mattered. didn't even come close.

the last time i saw sam was in thom's rehab, where i more or less bullied my way. crowded room, a lot happening, lots of tubes and wires. he didn't recognize me but as i was leaving, hand on the door knob, he looked me right in the eyes and raised his left hand, index finger extended ti his brow. so long.

i'll miss you brother.

other news: changed my flat tire and made it to the grocery store. vacuumed. tomorrow i want to unload all the kitchen cupboard and throw away - i mean give away - anything i don't recognize. no computer no paint. maybe a nap.

easing into walking again now that the blazing heat is waning. walked to a dental appt, tuesday, to the store wednesday.

mingling with asheville bloggers has inevitably pushed me towards spiffing up this site. guess i'll tackle the template today which will let me easily to update link lists and add all kinds of cyber-goodies. i've been trying to stream mp3s i have made over the years but so far no go. and put some recent pictures in the image archive. nothing is easy.

2 days ago driving back from non-dual practice i lost a tire on 240. no blowout, no 360 degree spinout, just flap flap flap. so i nursed it home on the rim. too much to do yesterday so i'll fix today i hope.

meanwhile here is sample page of poetry book i've been puttering with. double click to see pdf.

i was reading edgy mama's blog yesterday and happened on her memories of hunter thompson and distaste for the woody creek extravaganza of last week.
Edgy Mama
"'I don't think Hunter would have wanted it this way.'"

so in the interest of full disclosure i'll tell my story about hunter.

i think it was fall '68 when i started work as editorial assistant for the long-gone aspen illustrated news, a weekly that competed with the well established and right-leaning weekly aspen times, whose name i may be misremembering. we worked in the basement of the hotel jerome, and often finished the day at the bar upstairs, watching the tourists pour in on the only open road from glenwood springs.

the idea behind the paper was to use the local talent for photos and articles. and there was a lot of local talent.

i moved to basalt colorado and began working about 4 months after hunter's unsuccesful run for sheriff of pitkin county. he would bring a 30-40 page article in from time to time and that is how i made his acquaintance. part of my job was to immediately take his mss to a young lawyer - no, i don't think he was samoan - who would flip thru it with a red pencil striking out word like "greedhead".

hunter at that time had the "hell's angels" book behind him, and had bought the woody creek compound with the money he made off of the book.

i always thought of his demeanor at that time as calm, cool and collected, with traces of the southern aristocrat peeping through. Very smart, very polite, only ranted about the nazi's of the aspen ski corporation on paper.

when the paper folded about a year later he was the first to come up with an alternative which involved a seriographic artist with a prosperous gallery in town. his idea: limited edition seriographs with news printed on the back. i think this was actually done for a short time altho i left town and am not sure.

one day i realized my driver's license was out of date and wondered over to the pitkin county courthouse for a renewal. the court house was a medieval looking gray fortress, and empty. i finally ended up in the dungeon, i mean basement, where i found an officer and hunter in a small room. the three of us chit chatted while paper work was shuffled around. the conversation was on about 20 different levels, the type of public discussion you don't much run across in the present day to day.

about a year ago i stumbled on the driver's license i was issued in that basement. below is the photo taken that day. we were young and in fine spirits.

cannot get it in gear today. flitting from idea to idea. the heat has circled the wagons for me, and i don't want to go anywhere.

today's sign. digital shot from last week, photoshop magic dust liberally sprinkled.

just heard it was going to be 90 degrees today. if that's the case i'll stay hermetically sealed inside - again - and tackle blog template upgrade. i dread it.

spent yesterday afternoon at blogasheville gathering in the country. most enjoyable to meet a few more folks and get to know everyone a little better. screwy hoolie and uptown ruler's instincts were sound when they envisioned getting this variegated group together. i haven't felt so comfortable in a social setting in a long time. everything takes time, and i hope to maintain contact and let a thousand flowers bloom.

when the sun set and the cool mountain air wafted through it was a real treat. i found myself taking little walks to the road, and the cool darkness, no lights, made me realize how much i missed that world. i spent a lot of time in the passed past roaming through the woods at night, and was reminded of why. no harsh electric illumination, no noise machine, just the sweet chorus on chorus of the critters that i used to dream about when i was stranded in phoenix.

the run back home was beautiful, cruising thru woodfin, admiring the full moon and the distant lights here and there. tasted a bit of simple bare attention, the for me rare joy of that inner clearing where the space allows the manifest to come and go as it will. i'm going to stop gushing now and see if i can take a walk up the mountain, depends on the heat index outside. i'll let you know.

some sad news yesterday. sam gray died at his home thursday. tubucular meningitis, which i think was developing slowly late last fall, and a series of devastating strokes. i don't think he ever came back after being in the ICU after christmas. my most sincere sympathy to his wife catherine and his children and his many friends among whom sam had a special place in all our hearts.

he was my friend, and the friend who had known me longest. since 59 or 60. over such a long period we shared a number of different eras, times, places and worlds. he knew every wrong turn i have taken, my weaknesses and strengths. and vice-versa. and it didn't matter. good times, bad times, we shared a lot of laughs.

he has been released.

after another day stranded by the heat - and rain - during which i came close to finishing spring housecleaning and working on poetry book. i gave myself the rare treat of heading out to the gray eagle. tyler ramsey opened for john hammond.

tyler played in a bunch of open tunings. i'm not a musician but have been trying to figure out open d and open g for awhile - 20 years or more - and was fascinated by how he went about it. played a lot like the guy whose name i can't remember but will in a minute.

mr. hammond had a good night, i'd say it was the best performance i've heard him play. i had a chance to talk to him briefly and mentioned that the first time i heard him was back in the 60's at some small place in raleigh after which we adjourned to someone's place out in the country. he surprised me by immediately remembering the name, which i could not dredge up and have re-forgotten at the moment. "the sidetrack?"? anyway that's what the autograph above refers to, a long way from there and then.

whatever, and he went on to talk about the klan surrounding the place and shooting out a few windows. "nobody believes me when i talk about it" he said. this must have been 65 or 66, and my own muddled memory places the klan outside in the dark and the gathering inside, half afraid and half past caring, at another farmhouse on another occasion during those same strange times. i think i remember hugh wilson (thanks to doug b. for the name correction), an old raw boned radical dairy farmer - about my age now - charging out into the darkness yelling at the klan members, calling them by name and telling them to go home to their families.

driving home i thought about the mystery of time and the worlds it manifests. that was a different time and a different world. "mama mama many worlds i've known since i first left home" (grateful dead). they're all different and all the same. but as a child of "my time", i guess that world marked me for life as much as anything has. and those of us left are in my opinion a demographic anomaly, not boomers, not yuppies, not hippies, just... true to ourselves and our story as it twists and turns through an increasingly distant landscape.

today's icon. somehow appropriate.

finished 2 prints today, they go out next monday. fooled around too long trying to figure out how to stream MP3.

most importantly, though, i began the great kitchen clean-up.

the kriminal overworld is in a death spiral. it won't be pretty.

war against terrorism

not much has been said about how this war is a kairos, a jungian term for change in the collective unconcious and therefor what we call "reality".

the reason: it is half war as we knew it, declared, conducted and ended (?) in the domain of the nation-states. this has been the way of war for a few hundred years.

but the other half of the war is a noun, not a nation state. "terrorism". it is as if we declared war against "bombing" or "aircraft carriers". terrorism is a tactic of war.

so when the nation-state, any nation-state, is in a war with a noun, what follows? traditionally the losing side officially surrenders, think WWII and the battleship missouri. papers are signed, treaties are made, and it's history.

driving to the 7-11 this morning i heard the enemy called "franchised terrorism". there is no command and control. there is no nation-state that can surrender.

part of the reason that the USA put itself in this position is the power of metaphor. think "war against drugs", "war against obesity", etc. we have become habituated to think of any organized effort to correct societal ills as a "war".

bush's war has some of these attributes, and some of the attributes of former wars, such as command structure, meetings, powerpoint presentations and white papers. a critical mismatch.

if today somebody robbed a bank, shot some people, blew up the safe, he or she would become defined as a "criminal", not "terrorist", and the institutional law enforcement would handle it. war would not be declared.

what are the implications of this situation?

the war ends when washington dc says it is over.

the enemy is anyone who the government suspects is a terrorist. this is different from the criminal domain, where the case is solved and the judiciary decides guilt or innocence, and metes out the appropriate penalty.

so we have a rigged up trumped up mixture of metaphors for bush's war. criminals commit a massive crime and the result is a war against a nation state which will end when we have transformed it into our idea of a nation state. remember that spreading democracy throughout the world is more like the soviets spreading communism than any thing else.

i do not believe this is the result of those evil geniuses the republicans. on the contrary, they are so stuck in their mind-set that they fell into this situation through ignorance. which leads to another subject:

the powers that be have no idea of the arab, persian world. they can locate it geographically, but have no idea of how things are done, how people live, or what they are saying in that part of the world. what means what there is a mystery to our government.

if this were not the case, and saddam had to be removed to stabilize that part of the world, we could have accomplished his removal by paying attention to how things are done there: indirection, subtle unspoken alliances, influence, a phrase dropped here and there, face to face meetings. it was not bad intelligence that caused this nightmare to develop, it was bad judgment based on the premise that the entire world population is just like us. if they’re not, they should be.

today's mountain xpress has cover story on asheville bloggers and my site is mentioned.

this blog has been on automatic for awhile. i've been more involved with painting, printmaking, digital photography. now it's a habit, but one that never stops being it's moment. it seems to shift it's shape all the time.

yeah it's four years old or so, and now i guess i have to update image archive, i think i have 2 years of pictures posted i haven't put on the image archive page. multimedia page never took off, it'll soon be streaming mp3s of modern peasant the band.

my motto:
the best things in life aren't things

today's image is a question: "Y?"

it also brings up a technical issue i'll deal w/ later:unsharp masking at 72 ppi.

last night was my turn to sleep well. feel great.

let's see, from my truncated view of the snews, what did i "get" from the last 24 snews cycle? i'm waiting for the turnabout for cindy at the crawford ranch. suppose it's already in play: she's a publicity hound, she's after a book contract, how are all those folks getting to crawford, some agency must be paying them - and her - maybe the iranians, and so on. the lack of "mainstream" (you know what i mean, corporate) snews coverage should be the kiss of death for the networks altho i haven't seen CNN etc. kurt vonnegut's "visceral knowledge" should be in play, people know about this situation even if it does not manifest in the official organs of the state. sounds kind of soviet doesn't it?

today's icon. i have no idea why. maybe it's because i'm a visual feeling type, inexhaustible images forming in and out of my head.

anyway woke up at 7:30, made doc's appt. at 8. i think i was coherent. stopped at huddled house for breakfast on the way back. my favorite breakfast place, i go for the proletarian eating-spaces.

got a big list of catching up to do, one fone call, 3 errands to run which require truck module. driving is becoming my less and less favorite thing to do.

which reminds me i caught a psuedo-neologism on the tay-vay recently. this one was "more complete". aren't we all.

worked on a flash piece last night, basically what i'm aiming for is streaming mp3 with a little visual sparkle.

one day this week i want to get up to parkway with camera and tripod. i know, i know it requires driving but i can handle it. if a pleasant temperate breeze blows by.

heading out the door
to grocery-store.
i might get lost
if i try any more.

delivered PDF disk to ups w/ 5 minutes to spare yesterday. surprised myself by immediately going into clean-up mode and took up where i left off, shoving junk in the direction of dump or thrift shop.

engaged in this activity i came across some old snapshots of which the above is a sample. i had to clean it up quite a bit, apparently peanut butter and photos don't play together well.

working on 2 prints, one from watercolor, the other from snapshot. they will be 16 x 20 and 8 x 10. the larger will go out of house because i can't print that large.

miss kitty, my familiar, is not well. 2 trips to vet so far and one month of meds ($80) which she is to continue taking for a year. hope something works,

just finished shipping CD to NJ where a bunch of adobe PDF files will be printed and then leave for India thursday. this was a very hairy deadline, i made UPS with 5 minutes to spare.

this task drifted over the transom when i was almost finished emptying apt of all excess baggage. now since it is a long-ingrained habit of mine when working under impossible deadline, to let everything else go, it will take some time to wade thru the chaos that surrounds me. but i've done it before and i have a system. i start with finding spoons and cups and work my way up to clean clothes if there are any left.

i've got 2 prints to design, paint, and print in the next seven days. i'll begin when i've found all lost items.

just a reminder: the worst thing about the oligarchy's war is that it was conceived, planned and implemented by ignorant folks. i don't mean the military. i mean the washington dc where the inhabitants within the seat of power might as well be living on the moon. they've never truly been anywhere in the sense of landing in a strange culture and having to make their way. they actually thought iraq only existed on their flow charts. they are millenial hicks, unworldly rubes who actually believe what they think. they all need to be dropped into weird little spots all over the globe with a couple of bucks in their pockets and learn the street.

just finished this. . . piece of my mind. had to take a break from typesetting.

i was losing it yesterday around 4. i tried to use a second master page to anchor the maps. bad idea. blew away a few hours of work.

and in the middle of this inexplicable catastrophe, i got a call. someone with a very foreign accent who said his name was "chris" (i think). he was looking for st. teresa, and had gotten my number from the yellow pages. i told him she had left for the coast.

another foto from the digital camera learning curve. this is indoor pic, taken in my hallway.

today's likely activities. groceries, send package ups, finish registering at unca if any classes left open, and all day working on photos for new life book. last day for tweaks & i'm sure they will be plenty.

the last 36 hours have not gone well, but they're gone.

i spent a lot of time late yesterday archiving files to cd, moving files to other disks, and in general trying to slim down files on partitioned disk that no longer had enough room to process quark -> pdf. of course quark didn't like it, and i spent a few hours more restoring picture files to appropriate folder.

i finished this off early this morning, and then lit out to sign up for courses at unca college for creative retirement. i lasted in a mob scene two hours, still in line, gave someone my enrollment form and told them to treat it as if i had mailed it in, which means they will process it at the end of the day, courses may be full, but i don't care, i'd had enough.

now about the language of political discourse: the lady who lost a son in bush's war and is waiting outside his pseudo-ranch to talk with him apparently will be arrested tomorrow if she's still there, as a "security" threat. heard a call on air america yesterday - or today, i can't remember - from ex-marine nam vet who said his marine friends returning from iraq have been told not to express any negative views on the war, verbal, print, chat rooms, whatever.
living under the threat of terrorism means living under the threat of fearing to speak out. livlihood and it's loss are the threat.

we have all been pretty well trained to keep mum by our "jobs", where most everyone learned not to rock the boat, not to speak the truth, and pretend to be enthusiastic about whatever the word of the day was.

but as the unease of the "good" americans increases, expect the realization to grow that there comes a point when one must speak-up no matter what the consequences may be.

or stem-cell research. excess frozen human embryos are an integral part of the process by which infertile couples can birth a child. you can't have one part of the process without the other. is the case that as long as they remain frozen society has remained within a moral imperative? why?

i'm grumpy, confused, tired of being horsewhipped by stale rhetoric. the culture is a wasteland, glossy, jumpy, in denial, and if you'll notice outbreaks of violence seem to be increasing as the longer, hotter summer continues to melt down the marginal. i'd bet even money that the murder rate this summer takes a huge jump upward.

enough, i've got to get back to real life.

photo i found, don't know if i took it in nc or arizona. now that i look at it a little closer, i think it's the tree in my father's back yard in prescott az.

up to my ears with deadline fever. Bhauji's new life book. layout, text finished with a few details to clean up. will be receiving eps maps and replacement photos, pdf disk needs to leave my hands no later than saturday. book is currently running 720 plus pages.

when that's done maybe i can clean up the kitchen.

picture of my granddaughter lily i am sending to her today. took it with a disposable and sprinkled it with magic dust. she has a new baby sister.

after fooling with em-dashes and adding a supplement in word, i'll be finished with text for new lifebook. then on to photos and maps.

was going to upscale arts and crafts at biltmore square yesterday but got rained out. just as well, made a lot of progress on book.

my sister bought me an airline ticket to phoenix mid-nov to end of nov. $99 each way, she grabbed it when it came up for sale.

another day with nothing to say.

another digital photo. yesterday's sky.

last night i woke up with bee in bed, i mean a stinging insect. ouch. why was he there? i have no idea.

now that my domicile is (mostly) clutter-free i made a start on watercolor last night. what a relief, have'nt painted in awhile.

this is the bumper sticker you can expect to see all over town and coming soon all over the country. memes happen.

or not.

i'm on one of those production marathons finishing the new life book. glued to the computer twitching and tweaking.

took a break yesterday and was outfitted with new insulin pump. it's a deltec cosmo. my initial impression is that it is not as bullet proof as the older disetronic model i have been using for five years. the case is not to my liking at all, so i'll be rigging up some alternative. it comes with a built in blood glucose meter which communicates with the pump. the main plus of this arrangement is that a high reading which requires a correction bolus factors in the past readings - i think - and remaining insulin from any past boluses. i'm used to doing all this in my head and am not sure i like the pump taking this over. plus a lot of the bells and whistles seem to be just that, bells and whistles. in a month or so i'll have a better idea of how it compares.

meanwhile i'll be learning the many screens, selections, modes and suchlike. probably mix it up with the sony dsc-v3 digital camera where i'm more or less at the same end of the learning curve.

a month ago i switched to using the mouse with my left-hand on account of tendonitus (?) in my right hand. no problem, it works fine and i think has helped the right hand which i need for dobro and keyboards.

just got a call from the vet, Kat has hyperthyroid condition - common to older kats which is news to me - and will start medication monday. sometime later teeth will be pulled.

we have a lot in common.

my attempt at timely bumper sticker. it's not quite there yet, suggestions appreciated.

spent all day yesterday working on prepress for new life book. hope to be finished by week's end. (isn't that the phrase time magazine overused for such a long time?)

this afternoon i get new insulin pump "installed". the latest and greatest, but i don't think it can be used as ipod or telephone.

just about finished with kitchen: when it is done i will have gone thru entire abode and thrown everything away i could part with. i kept the kat.

tomorrow is day for hike with UU Blazers. if it's not too hot i'll go. the other happening is biltmore art show which i understand is upscale and i've never been too.

thanks to the syntax of things for pointing me to trnsnd, a goofy site right up my alley, cyber-graffiti that twitches.

took the above photo the other day during long walk up sunset morning. of course i couldn't help messing with it so here it is, oversharpened and all.

spent most of the day yesterday working on new life book. it's running 700 plus pages. i'm not writing it , i'm laying it out for print with quark 5. one of those cases where the writing and production were simultaneous, not sequential, which most pre-press people dread, but it's coming along.

yesterday evening paid a visit to asheville brewing co. with some aville bloggers and a reporter from the mountain xpress. whether the tabloid gets a story out of it remains to be seen; at any given moment there were about as many conversations going as people present.

i went to the library earlier and got about a dozen books. iris murdoch and john gregory dunne, two folks i've not yet read but am curious about. ed mcbain and raymond chandler as fallbacks, them i know i could read standing on my head.

i don't think i've painted a picture this summer. course i've been doing massive cleanup during that time so it's understandable, but i am anxious to jump back in. "i've got a thousand ideas that are driving me insane."

waiting on blood tests results for miss kitty. she has been not herself for awhile.

tried to take some night shots using sony dsc-v3 "night framing" feature, didn't get too much.

hope to get bumper sticker out soon. working with the phrase "criminal overworld", which came from bob massingale, chapel hill circa 60's. he died about 25 years ago, still young.

got to upgrade this blog when i can get to it. when blogger was sold to google they changed some of the code so it's not going to be straight-forward & i've been putting off for ages.

this was emailed to me yesterday and i am posting the email here. it has to do with SB 223, Public Confidence in Elections. do more than just read it.

------

Please forward this to anyone you know that supports S223 whose name is not in this distribution:

*If you can be at the hearing, please come.

*Also, Please send an email, or make a call if you can.

Committee on Election Law and Campaign Finance Reform will meet as
follows: Wednesday, August 3, 2005 TIME: 1:00 p.m. LOCATION: 1425 LB

SB 223, Public Confidence in Elections--Sen. Kinnaird

**Contact the Election Law Committee members:

Election Law and Campaign Finance Reform Meets Wednesdays at 1:00 pm in 1425
Chairman Rep. Moore
Chairman Rep. Ross
Vice Chairman Rep. Kiser
Vice Chairman Rep. Luebke
Vice Chairman Rep. Michaux
Members Rep. Blust,
Rep. Church, Rep. Harrison, Rep. Holliman, Rep. Holmes, Rep. Lewis, Rep. Nye, Rep. Starnes
****Their contact info here: http://tinyurl.com/arrbn

Group's email addies:

Timm@ncleg.net, Deborahr@ncleg.net, Joek@ncleg.net, Paull@ncleg.net, Mickeym@ncleg.net, johnbl@ncleg.net, Waltc@ncleg.net,
priceyh@ncleg.net,Hughh@ncleg.net,Georgeho@ncleg.net, Davidl@ncleg.net, Eddn@ncleg.net, Edgars@ncleg.net

Sample message/talking points:

Dear Representative _________________ We urge you to vote yes and pass S223, the Public Confidence in Elections Act immediately.This legislation
will require:

A voter verified paper ballot that will be used in any recounts or
audits.

Review of source code of computerized voting machines for flaws or malfeasance. Random mandatory hand-to-eye audit of the paper ballot.
Code of Ethics for election officials.

Funding is available, with about $53 Million in Federal money from the Help America Vote Act. This is more than enough to purchase new optical scanners for every precinct in the state, plus ballot marking devices to assist the disabled. The new ballot marking device offers the most
features for disabled access while allowing the use of the more affordable and accurate optical scan system. Cash strapped counties and the voters both come out winners when this bill is enacted.
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this from a recent speech by bill moyers. in this time of branded talking points and factiods, he speaks from the heart and head:
"One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe, to sit in the seat of power in the Oval Office and in Congress."
AlterNet: Battlefield Earth

rough day yesterday. i was up at 6 and the air was so cool and misty i had to get some of it so grabbed camera and took a walk after breakfast. i got totally involved with camera, still figuring out many many things, and wondered far up on the maze of roads that lace their way up sunset mountain. to the point i was not sure how to get down. more accurately the quickest way down. i had a pocket full of life savers but otherwise no food and blood sugar was becoming a problem. couldn't figure out how to lower temporary basal rate on insulin pump so i turned it off, gobbled life savers, and got back to house, measured blood sugar which was 45. too low, but i've survived trips before that low, fixed it, and fell asleep. what i've noticed the last year or so is that when i go thru a low like that and come out of it, a tremendous lethargy sets in. anyway snagged the photo above.

talked to ludie on the phone in the afternoon and loaded up the truck with what i hope is the last load of surplus "stuff" i have been throwing out for 4 weeks and started unloading kitchen cupboards. any broken cups, gadgets i don't recognize, odds and ends are going away. went to bed about 8, listened to mike savage for awhile on the AM radio. he is the hyper-dark force of talk radio, and was on a rant about how HUAC must be restored to eliminate the internal terrorist groups that abound in our country, mainly the ACLU. that's right, he literally called the ACLU an internal terrorist group more dangerous than al-Qaida.

got up this morning at 6, took care of a few things, ate breakfast, and fell asleep in a chair until the phone rang at 9:30. it was jeff from myrtle beach who needs a pdf of the book i have been typesetting for him and which unfortunately still needs a lot of work so i'll spend the day on it and do what i can. with a break at 3:30 for a visit to the kat doctor, miss kitty is not feeling so well.

another day in the life.

yesterday was R&R for me. didn't make the friends meeting at 10 again. the windows were open all day, and so was i. maybe i won't have to move to canada. barely made it to 4:00 Baba meeting at rita's. good clean straight to the point gathering. back home and watched the simpson's and to bed.

fooled around most of the afternoon and ended up in personality test land. these are the results.
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some kind of mythos test:


You are Form 3, Unicorn: The Innocent.

"And The Unicorn knew she wasn't meant to
go into the Dark Wood. Disregarding the advice
given to her by the spirits, Unicorn went
inside and bled silver blood.. For her
misdeed, the world knew evil."

[yikes... misdeed indeed... i wonder which one of many?]

Some examples of the Unicorn Form are Eve
(Christian) and Pandora (Greek).
The Unicorn is associated with the concept of
innocence, the number 3, and the element of
water.
Her sign is the twilight sun.

As a member of Form 3, you are a curious
individual. You are drawn to new things and
become fascinated with ideas you've never come
in contact with before. Some people may say
you are too nosey, but it's only because you
like getting to the bottom of things and
solving them. Unicorns are the best friends to
have because they are inquisitive.

[because they are inquisitive? i guess i would rephrase it to say that the best kind of friend's for a unicorn to have are inquisitive.]


Which Mythological Form Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla
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[this one was enneagram test - i think - & i don't speak enneagram. a year ago i tested 5W4.]

Main Type	Overall Self

Take Free Enneagram Personality Test

Scale (|||||||%) results:

Enneagram Test Results Type 1 Perfectionism |||| 18% Type 2 Helpfulness |||||||||||| 48% Type 3 Image Focus |||||| 22% Type 4 Hypersensitivity |||||||||||| 49% Type 5 Detachment |||||||||||||||||| 76% Type 6 Anxiety |||||| 29% Type 7 Adventurousness |||||||||||| 42% Type 8 Aggressiveness |||||||||| 34% Type 9 Calmness |||||||||||||||| 66% Your main type is 5 Your variant is self pres [low on perfectioism, image focus, and anxiety. wonder which image? (self-image i suppose, but which self?]

Take Free Enneagram Personality Test

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[maslow's inventory. never took it before.

]

Maslow Inventory Results

Physiological Needs (47%) you appear to have an adequate supply of basic necessities. Safety Needs (37%) you appear to have a very secure environment. Love Needs (47%) you appear to be semi-content with the quality of your social connections. Esteem Needs (60%) you appear to have a medium level of skill competence. Self-Actualization (73%) you appear to have a high level of individual development.

Take Free Maslow Inventory Test
personality tests by similarminds.com

------------------
[i thought this was myer's brigg's. maybe it was.
INFP. i first took it 30 years ago and have always tested INFP. my friend karen was telling me that high intuitive and complimentary low sensation can be thought of as pathological, and that is how i always test. the only difference this result showed was the thinking/feeling axis, which in the past has been about 50/50. this time it was more like feeling 75% feeling and 25% thinking, which sounds about right to me.]

INFP - "Questor". High capacity for caring. Emotional face to the world. High sense of honor derived from internal values. 4.4% of total population.

Take Free Jung Personality Test
personality tests by similarminds.com

----------------

my thoughts on this stuff:
i need to construct yet another personality typology test, maybe the modern peasant Little People Running Amuck in Your Head Test.

it's 7am and i'm taking camera for a walk up sunset mountain.