my self-indulgence amazes me. spent all morning on above. but i was using freehand which i have never touched before, so i was gliding on the learning curve.

my kind of weather today, gray, moisture in the air, cool.

i have totally redone muzak link. check it out. next is redo image archive, clean it up and divide into categories, eg watercolor, drawings, and weird. i've already started this; much easier than when i put up present archive which i had to mostly hand-code. newer technology for my doodles. life is good.

here is an interesting example of cross media information. we're seeing a lot of it lately, for instance comedians as the the main source of what the news used to deliver. this site is about a documentary to be released soon, under our skins, which has more information about lyme's disease than everything else i have sought out:


"Under Our Skin: Background:
"Many wonder why the Center of Disease Control (CDC)-by its own admission-systematically underreports Lyme disease and contradicts aggressive treatment. According to the CDC, Lyme borreliosis is the fastest growing infectious disease in the United States after HIV, and the number one vector-borne disease in the country. Statistics from the CDC indicate that there were 23,763 cases reported in 2002. However, they acknowledge major underreporting, perhaps 10 times higher than their official estimate. In other words, there are almost 250,000 new cases a year and 2 million people in the United States suffering from chronic Lyme disease. Based on the discrepancy between their own clinical findings and that of the CDC, many researchers theorize that Lyme disease rates may be up to 100 times higher than the official CDC numbers. Although Lyme disease occurs predominantly in the northeast, cases have been documented in 49 states, with a large number of new infections occurring along the West Coast. To further complicate matters, the ticks that transmit Lyme also carry other bacteria, and these co-infections appear to be as complex as Lyme-and as difficult to diagnose and treat. "

today's esscence-o-gram is a photo of ms kitty in better days. i am only now beginning to realize that she was one of my most significant teachers. i'm not kidding. take my word for it.

oh man i screwed up. i sent a mass mailing out with link to look at book and put in nonsense link. what a faux-pas. the link near the top of the right sidebar on this page works.

monday was a loooong day.

wasn't it?

it still may be a long day for all i know.

now tuesday is a different pile of horse feathers. it wasn't a long day (yet).

don't get me wrong. "a long day" has a negative tone to it in our lingo, as if the longer the more difficult, unpleasant. as if the duration of the day indicates hassle.

but think of the longest day you can remember.

can't do it? neither can i. but i can vaguely recall a few, and they were good days. very good.

so what's the point? in human days we have long days, short years, and they both can be either "good" or "bad".

and for humans caught in the box of now, any day is better than no day.

thank you neil
what a guy. i spent the late hours last night w/ headphones on listening to his latest release living with war. twice. as with his feb release, you can here it for free. go here and spend a little time, it will warm your heart.

here is the scoop on book. you can browse pages or buy it. right now it is not downloadable but maybe it will be later. the price is a little over twenty dollars which may seem high. it is on account of the full color reproduction. anyway it will give you a good idea of the book and i think you will want to purchase it after seeing it.

it's my statement, man.

so go here to check it out.

this is not multi-level marketing. it's just plain old multi-level.

server was down for a few days but we're back today.

some astral event must be taking place; these days i simply don't want to go anywhere. hunker down is the watchword.

tomorrow the book i've been working on should be available for purchase. here is the cover:

and here is photo of my habitation module. now you know why i am going into code orange kleenup mode.


[to be posted]

today's logo. i did it playing with an app called compositor, not sure what it is good for (the app, not the picture).

europe, in the 30's, metamorphed from high civilization to low. if you think about vienna around 1900 which had a very high culture, to germany in the 30's you get the picture. some would say WWI was the beginning of the tumble, and indeed it was, but the 30's resembles our time more.

the similarity can be summed up in a phrase with both an optimistic and pessimistic subtext:

"it will come, there is no human effort that can stop it, but we'll survive maybe and it will pass".

this has always been the way of the peasant.

took a whirl drawing with flash to as they and we say "see what happens" and in the above auragram for today you see what happens.

probably indicates a kind of resignation to being myself as well as a relaxation that this is what is.

anything interesting or intelligent to say?

naaaah.

took a pleasant 2 1/2 mile walk up haywood road in west asheville with the ashevillebloggers, you know, leftist extremists. two things: it was cool, misty and damp which was great, i'd almost forgotten what it felt like: and two the small roadhouses are so familiar to me, easy, friendly, maybe if you're lucky a few hair-trigger pool players. i'm a child of my time, and feeling, excitement, wacko dialogs, maybe a monologue or two, are the commercial ambiance (think burl's place, just over the sc line down the mountain from cashiers) that i appreciate. as opposed, say, to las vegas.

i've been reminded for some reason that is not clear to me of a mysterious photo/snapshot i had for years. now it is a memory and probably not very accurate at that. i was living with my wife and two young twins when we decided to move from colorado springs to aspen. the "runup" (if i may use a neoligsm) was for me to drive up thru independance pass and scout, explore, find a place etc. many trips thru the collegiate range that summer.

at that time there was a hotel in aspen whose prime had long since evaporated and was more or less a flop house hostel type thing for the "young". i forget the name. inside (and outside) it was 4 stories tall. inside there was a large atrium where you could look up at the roof. it was a busy place, lots of every sort of traffic.

a lot of very strange things occurred during these visits. a slightly sinister air was creeping into the youth culture. looking back - i know i know that is a no no today and believe me there is no nostalgia on my part for the particular phase i'm writing about here.

anyway i was upstairs in somebodys room, probably with a lot of folks milling around. somehow i left with this snapshot. somebody gave it to me.

it was a black and white 5 x 7 or thereabouts, a close up of a young woman. the camera was tilted, and she was in motion, slightly blurred. she looked like i knew her, or used to know her, or something. uncanny resemblance to.... what? who? i never figured it out.

on the back of the photo there was ball point pen inscription. it read:

if i had an accident wouldn't you come to help me?
i have had an accident. i was born.

there was a story, a fantasy, a life somewhere that i felt i was a part of, but never could remember what.

all women are mysteries. hey don't get me wrong, so are all men.

saturday's jumble and auragram.

this pencil drawing i made last week somewhere out of the house, like waiting in a doctor's office. no it was waiting in port java coffee island in north aville.

haven't been out yet but from in here it feels overcast and gray out.

lot of catching up to do today, things of the mundane world a little too loose, a little more than tweaking is in order.

today's mood indicator: sweetness and light.

i am of a sudden inundated with stuff to do, all in the creative domain:
4 color prints 8X10 to ship.
waiting for proof copy of my book whistling in the dark. please buy it when i release it. if you wish bury it in the back yard in a time capsule with a note, "artifact from the age of delusion done by an unknown minor artist living in america's newest new age theme park".
a flash doo hicky featuring bouncing bingo balls.
copy of audio CD to go in mail.
make some of the graphics on this page open a small sized window containing various maxims, conundrums, or something else, haven't got that far yet.

so i am insulated from vegitative despair for awhile longer.

meanwhile, for those of you from a certain time and place, sad news that author lee has departed the scene.
Mad Love
Arthur Lee Love

what it is? what it is?

today's ideogram.

what it mean?

it means that i have no idea.

if i literally had no idea - of anything - this would not be good. but if i did, would it make a difference? yes.

but would the difference make a difference?

no.

what might make a difference?

if personality and ego were experienced as something other than the experiencer it might, ummmm...

why?

my present mental life and emotional limbic dramas might become objects of some other kind of witness. they would still be hyperactive, redundant, digressive, and pointless (ie point nowhere), not to mention painful, suffering and jubilation. however as object of an unknown subject, i'm betting they will be a shade less "the whole thing".

"i've got new eyes
everything seems so far away"
dylan

latest...what?.

i don't know if these things have a name. kind of like memes, they proliferate overnight and quickly become known thruout the land. for maybe a week.

anyway if you already haven't, go to google and type in "failure".

or, to put it in the millenial manner, google "failure".

this morning's bumper sticker looks good. by comparison, i've lost the last 3 days with very weird pattern, couldn't sleep, daytime a little jerky. meds related and over now but it's a little intimidating to physically realize how venerable the old meat wagon is. (i meant vunrable, but can't spell it so what the hell.)

i could read: "buried alive" myra, "forign corrispondant" by alan furst

FC very 30's paris noir, but with a tactile sense similar to cold mountain, where the sense of place becomes felt.

BA what can i say? a history booK? i liked this quote:
"is the movie black or white?"

watercolor i've been pecking away at for a couple of days. unfinished.

morning chores done, been out to the south forty where i found the above engraved on a rock.

now it's a moody gray morning, sounds of rain, coolish. how delightful after the last few weeks.

you know how in the non-dual tradition there is the tenant that anything you are aware of is not you? it seems as if kulturely we are in a similar fix.

what am i trying to say here?

something like if you took all of the observations of the world now and put them together the cause, the basis of the catastrophic tango today would still be an unknown. because the answer to the problem lies outside the domain of the question.

really.

hope i spelled "tenant" right.

from a picture i took yesterday at tharpa's. we tried a little music but it didn't go very far.

i have appt. with eye doc this morning, hope i leave with no bad news.

i'm still in clean up mode: every little nook full of odds and ends will be inspected, categorized and labeled. or not. maybe i'll start the great american novel instead. everyone should do this. notice i am saying nothing about finishing.

my sister and brother in law flew from rhode island to phoenix yesterday, no glitches, surprises or delays.

weekend coming, i'll probably hunker down here. sleepless night, i'd still be in bed except for doc's appt. i'm slowly pecking away at jamwave modernpeasant page. don't quite understand how it works, but i've put 4 or 5 musical tracks up.. they stream and sound ok and are probably an accurate sampling of the creative audio domain i keep returning to. check it out.

couldn't help it beside my intention to write and not illustrate. it's like doing the jumble every morning, a daily habit hard to break (altho i have to confess here that among my vice's the daily jumble is not included).

so here is my daily commentary:

institutions have replaced humans as citizens. Institutions meet, vote, buy sell, sue, and never die unless one of the 5% of humans alive who serve the corporate citizenry gets a chance to demolish the institution for personal profit.

i have begun placing music here:

http://jamwave.com/modernpeasant

son eli is doing the same with more at

http://jamwave.com/signalboss

yesterday's post was maybe more than you ever wanted to know about an escapade i was involved in, let's see, in 1967. i'd like to post about the mega-dilemma we find ourselves involved in today. and the post didn't appear until this morning for some reason.

but language is the problem. the "official" language to describe our world is locked up tight. you can only resay what has been already said. like rearranging furniture one can only rearrange the memes. newspapers and the media do it. nothing new is communicated.

to repeatedly attempt to capture in words cause and effect, the story behind the story, requires new words, new cliches, new points of view.

the bumper sticker i saw yesterday is a good try:

had enough?
don't vote for anybody

i've decided to stop posting a picture a day here. it's the easiest and most natural thing for me to get up in the morning and scramble up a 72dpi visual and post it, which i've been doing for some while now.

i'm falling back to daily commentary which i've lost my knack for. i developed it way past what i thought i could when i began this blob maybe 4 years ago. (blog, blog, i meant blog.). so i'm going to do it again and seewhat happens.

since i'm reading buried alive, maybe for the second time, not sure, its a bio of janis joplin and has a tone that comes from being written in a time closer to the time it depicts. this being so i'll tell you my janis joplin story. not that i met her, partied etc. i was a married man with two young twins at he time. the feel of the already fabled sixties had largely disappeared from my day to day existence in denver.

my wife sally and i and a friend from Michigan named mike went to hear ms joplin, i think she was still with big brother, at the family dog which chet helms was trying to get going along with an already up and running family dog dance hall in san francisco.

janis was for me more background noise of a particular time and place than music. Nostalgia act? i did not know what her performance would be about.

because when their music started i was totally blown away by what i was hearing. the whole show just kept topping itself. how? her voice was like a band of furys, overtones galore, choruses of echoes, all perfectly loosely timed and placed, the band behind her left in the dust, but still a necessary part of the landscape. I remember thinking that no audio euipment in existence could have captured that sonic world, nor play it back.

well that's it. the story. unless i wanted to go into the taxi drive back which had some thrilling moments. ah hell ok: the 3 of us took a taxi back to capital hill and went to some coffee shop they had back then, lit like hopper's nighthawks and full of people. we ended up sitting at a large booth. there was a vietnam vet sitting with 3 or 4 folks and he quickly hooked into us. our heads were still reverberating, and he was pressing us about some situation we couldn't begin to get our heads around: something about he'd been kicked out of a bar up the street and should he go to his car and get the loaded .45 from his glove compartment and blow the bartender away or not.

he grew more and more frantic as we sat there silent, wondering about the table scattered with round flat white circles, something about turning them over and you get an extra cup of coffee, i never did figure it out. we finally oozed out and began walking the 20 or 30 minute walk home.

a block or two up colfax, the guy caught up with us. we stopped and there was some kind of emotional psychic drama we were acting out. it was short. i said something which i have no idea of and he reared back and swung at me.

now it was funny because that swing seemed so slowed down that i felt no threat. at the same time i could see him pull his punch a tad and i tilted my head a tad to the right.

so he missed me and broke the plate glass window pane of a jewler's shop. much crashing of glass and alarms ripping through the air.

capital hill at that time had back alleys behind the homes on the street. we scrambled through the them in the dark trying not to look like we were running, and finally got home. i think i remember building a fire in the fireplace that eased us back into "reality".

or maybe i'ii start putting pictures up.

watercolor i am working on. maybe i'm finished working on it.

lately i've noticed that the nation-state is exhibiting a tendency to become as omnipotent as it can. the only game in town.

if Israel and the USA continue to destroy Lebanon (all three are nation states, right?) in order to protect themselves from Hezbollah (not a nation state) then this tendency becomes very clear.

the end of the action if there is an end comes when one or more of the nation states says it is over. any citizen is an enemy if the state says he or she is.

and don't forget the state is a fascist state, best described by Mussolini as a combination of nation and corporation.

the citizens of this new omnipotent state are corporations, not people.

people are either necessary worker bees - wage slaves; or marginal problem - gangs and the homeless; or institutionalized, no not in a nut house but in an institution that is part of the corporate state - govt., big biz, academia, etc. - and which does not tolerate human values.

personally i am looking forward to the next step in cultural evolution which is unknown today. forward or backward, i don't care, let's get on with it.

this picture was framed and hung at eli & melissa'a home. i got it in Bangkok in '65.

quite a few hours ago i put down my glasses and have not seen them since.

haven't seen much of anything since i lost them.

nonetheless finishing a watercolor and files for my book, whistling in the dark which should be available soon. i'll let you know.

reading Buried Alive: The Biography of Janis Joplin, an early bio of janis joplin. the early part is set in port author texas late 50s, early 60's, and it's interesting to revisit that world, no wonder everything busted loose in short order. this is also a thesis of The Fifties: Books: David Halberstam. the sixties were not so much revolutionary as evolutionary, and the reason it had to morph was the zeitgeist of the times, when a lot of well educated young people found they were living absurd lives, ie conventional.

a really wierd day. like every other day.

i've been tied to the computer for a couple of days, starting when i realized that i could not convert quark file to pdf. my disk memory was way too sparse. so this and that and all is well but today (sigh) is really hot.

this morning's heliogram is from an ink drawing on yellow paper - at least it's yellow today - that i did to the best of my recollection in 66 or 67. [note: i've noticed on my rero system that this picture always displays a white horizontal line at vertical middle: until i click on broswer and do a quick window shade. line is gone.]

i'm finished with whistling in the dark, fixed a few lines, typos and graphics. but disk space is keeping me from converting from quark to pdf which i need to upload to make it available to the world. filled up 6 CDs with audio i have done over the last 4 or 5 years (too much good stuff to delete, percussion tracks etc etc). i'll spend part of this morning archiving lots of 300 dpi graphics and maybe i can convert, upload, and call it a done deal. started and finished another flash animation, well almost finished, should go up today. each one i do i learn a whole lot more and it's beginning to snowball.

otherwise pretty much caught up on re-entry from chatham county, had a few loose strings to tie up. got my truck back - it quit on my return to aville 7 miles from town. two tows. turned out to be ignition module, about $140 including labor. what is an ignition module?

tieing up those loose ends involved driving here and there yesterday afternoon and i was whipped when i got back. i can't take the heat anymore, which i hope means i've had enough of it to last a lifetime. summer in istanbul and another in bangkok were my personal worst previously, both like hitting a brick wall. now i have to throw in the land of the sky as a third.

another opportunity to ask the question of the day, applicable to everything:

what happened?

of course there are other universal questions bubbling up nowadays. example: what does meaning mean?

while i'm babbling i have to mention a short portion of the shawn henidy radio show i heard the other day. telephone interview with an academic who thinks 9/11 may have involved a little more than we know. not a full blown conspiracy buff a la alex - can't remember last name, is it gray? - but he had a few interesting points.

the interview encapsulated the flat out wrongness of public discourse today. hennidy was like a inquisitor, cutting answers off, hostile, totally oblivious to the other guy, tone of voice if you can call it a tone like angry authority figure, abusive parent, or pissed off cop. unbelievable that this passes as communication.

this morning this song is on my mind.

"We live in a political world,
Love don't have any place.
We're living in times where men commit crimes,
And crime don't have a face.

We live in a political world,
Icicles hanging down,
Wedding bells ring and angels sing,
clouds cover up the ground.

We live in a political world,
Wisdom is thrown into jail,
It rots in a cell, is misguided as hell,
Leaving no one to pick up a trail.

We live in a political world
Where mercy walks the plank,
Life is in mirrors, death disappears
Up the steps into the nearest bank.

We live in a political world
Where courage is a thing of the past,
Houses are haunted, children are unwanted,
The next day could be your last.

We live in a political world,
The one we can see and can feel,
But there's no one to check, it's all a stacked deck,
We all know for sure that it's real.

We live in a political world,
In the cities of lonesome fear,
Little by little you turn in the middle
But you're never sure why you're here.

We live in a political world,
Under the microscope,
You can travel anywhere and hang yourself there,
You always got more than enough rope.

We live in a political world,
Turning and a-thrashing about,
As soon as you're awake, you're trained to take,
What looks like the easy way out.

We live in a political world,
Where peace is not welcome at all,
It's turned away from the door to wander some more,
Or put up against the wall.

We live in a political world,
Everything is hers or his,
Climb into the frame and shout God's name,
But you're never sure what it is."

bob hits another nail on the head. 17 years ago.

another artifact from chatham county, fresh from the mind of me. i also just put up another flash thingy on muzak page.

remember hearing, reading about the native americans and Rain Dance? today we are faced with a similar situation (too hot) and a similar possible response, electricity dance. if the power grid goes down today the progressive unraveling of the nation state mythos is going to escalate. no AC.

if it doesn't happen today, stick around for a few years.

dance, pray to keep the electrons moving.

my daughter nicole's house in chatham county. it is a nice hideaway, very comfortable, watch out for possums.