visited my 3rd cousin m. & friends yesterday and spent the nite in a spaceship. very comfortable. her mother was visiting who i last saw maybe... quarter century ago? probably not quite that long. a pleasure to sit around the fire and play music. first time i'd played the dobro with others. nice folks whom i hope to see again.

photo taken yesterday on ride to maxpatch. what a relief to get out.

i hear thru the grapevine that iran is setup, all is in place and moving forward, and we better start thinking of martial law, pre-election terrorist extravaganza, no election.

really. if you don't sound like a nut today you are living in dreamland.

a fundimental misunderstanding rampant today is that the junta has made mistake after mmistake over the last 6 years and the populice is pissed about it. the latter part is true, but things are going well for the criminal overworld. not that they planned it out, they are not that smart. just lucky i guess.

another lost and found watercolor. no idea of when i did it.

as most of you understand i have lost, temporarily maybe, my capacity to comment on the culture. some have not:

The Case That the President's Reach Exceeds His Grasp - New York Times:
"After Sept. 11 these efforts would accelerate with astonishing speed, often in secret from Congress and the American public. A Sept. 25, 2001, memo written by Mr. Yoo asserted that "the president's powers include inherent executive powers that are unenumerated in the Constitution, including a right to use military force as he sees fit, regardless of the views of Congress."

"The Big Con" - New York Times:
"Government is no smaller-it is simply more debt-ridden and more beholden to wealthy elites."

oil on gessoed watercolor paper. i've been on slow kleenup the last few weeks and am finding some amazing to me stuff.

i have been wrapped up tight in the coils of cyber-spighetti. far outside my window the idiots in DC circle the inevitable: iran, nukes, if you disagree with someone or thing, don't communicate with them, the criminal overworld wheeling and dealing, the prime directive willfully ignored and so on. you know this, you saw it on the news. columbia university has shot up in my estimation many levels.

so i don't have much to say. others have:

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.
Plato

Death is not the worst that can happen to men.
Plato

It is better to hide ignorance, but it is hard to do this when we relax over wine.
Heraclitus,

The road up and the road down is one and the same.
Heraclitus,

It is worse still to be ignorant of your ignorance.
Saint Jerome

Every nation ridicules other nations, and all are right.
Arthur Schopenhauer

Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.
Arthur Schopenhauer

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
William James

Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.
Friedrich Nietzsche

When you stare into the abyss the abyss stares back at you.
Friedrich Nietzsche

You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star.
Friedrich Nietzsche

I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.
Ludwig Wittgenstein

If people never did silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.
Ludwig Wittgenstein

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.
Ludwig Wittgenstein

long day, thoughts arising and sinking fast, eternal puttering.

friends driving to clemson tonight to see bob dylan. if it even close to his last performance at the ryman auditorium in nasheville it will be more than worth it.

Seeing multiple Bobs -- dailypress.com:
"'The thing I just kept hearing from every account of Dylan was about this life of serial change, in a way far more profound to a culture than David Bowie's different chameleonlike changes or Madonna's that would come decades later. These changes had deep intellectual, cultural, almost physical effects on Dylan's audience,' Haynes said. 'He undermines the things you count on, your touchstones. He shakes up the things that people used to build their own selves on. Every time you grab on to him, he's somewhere else"

i chickened out.

i guess i'm too sensitive, or else i'm getting soft.

i keep thinking it's saturday.

i'm working with a book by peter fenner, radient mind.

did some shopping, hardware store etc.

i like the song "i'm not talkin... tha-a-a-t's what i've got to say." pretty sure it was on first yardbird's lp.

saw movie "life of allen ginsburg" or similar title with tom, richard and debbie. very intense, much better than the cartoon - ie current cultural iconic brand.

"...but things... have changed".

during my lifetime the population of the world has doubled. hey, i didn't do it.

not only that, but everyone's name is known. either by god or NSA.

the effort to know the new before it is the old is rarely successful.

the crown of creation is a baseball cap.

we experience personal and collective life. but do we experience "experience"?

late summer. the dog days are fading. i don't know how many more summers i can take, but i'll takem all.

so i was writing about the coming "big thing", the branded spectacular, iran.

it is apparent to me that bush's war is going exactly according to plan. a long war. nebulous enemy. corporate prescence in the middle east.

except for the grumbling and mumbling of the growing dispossessed, and that seems to be a minor detail taken care of by endless wordplay.

just as bush's war was on the table way before he stole the election (not bush really it was the whole kit and cabel stole it, from the supreme court on down thru the oligarchy), so the iranian phase is not only in place but happening right now. when some spectacular move manifests it might even keep the dems from winning the presidency. not that it matters a whole lot, they seem to have done nothing since bush stole the election, nothing before they captured congress, not much since. topic for another day, but can you say economic pressure, personal blackmail, threats and dirty tricks?

anyway iran will be a whole different thing. probably the most pro-american populice in the middle east. they don't speak arabic but farsi. if the CIA hadn't replaced their government with the shah in the early 50s they would not have dealt with reagon, agreeing to release the hostiges on the day of his inaugeration, but then again they got weapons for this.

today is my youngest son's birthday. nathan: it seems like yesterday when i was barreling down the mountain in a dodge longbed headed for the hospital where he was born about 15 minutes after we got there. i am very proud of him, he has been thru a lot, and i emphasize the past tense: thru, not stuck in some in some zone he could remain in for life.

more political rants later today.

talking points (use only in case of emergency)

1. the world is becoming more uniform. local flavors everywhere of bandit rule, pirates, mercenarys, death camps, the disappeared, the economic wage slavery, the dispossesed wondering around humming "gimmeee shelter".

2.since reagon, maybe much further back, the "guv'ment", behind many closed doors, has morphed from govt "for the people by the people" to govt for and by profit and corporations. 500 families run most of the board of director's of the fortune 500.

3. the consumer culture, and the continuous transfer of wealth it entails, has become by constantly one upping itself, a sort of cartoon, a meme, a joke. most humans now look a little perplexed at govt instead of as in the past considering themseves enclosed within it, part of it and protected.

4. specifically, us americans find ourselves separated and fragmented, communities gone, implicit threat of excommunication by the state for speaking out and consequent loss of economic viability. surrvaillance, data mining, the cell phone acting as a microphone piped to god knows what, road rage, justice a set of choreographed moves, a highly stylized domain with no room for the human being, hanging by your fingernails paycheck to paycheck, all in the glitter of false gold at twlight.

5 about iraq and the 2008 political election con...

taken on a walk along the swannanoa river, part of warren wilson collage which is a much underated institution.

last friday evening at r&d's. i was so exhausted that instead of going to town as we had talked about, i was for sitting in rocking chair and mumbling about this and that.

about to go outside this morning and finish caulking cammper. raintight. i think i've got a raised platform for sleeping in mind that will work. requires trip to big box building supplies and maybe target's.

other events that may occur today: trip to greenlife for carrots and vegetables and first attempt to "juice" vegetables.

finish fooling w/ images. this project has forced me to organize and find the good ones. and the software that processes them, while slick, is not real user-friendly.

was about to go to t's yesterday afternoon when i was hit with the perfect storm of fatigue. perfect 2 hour nap followed, i was wide awake when i awoke - not a commmon occurence - and continued to work on past dark. zowee.

ornimental doodad done early this morning. hyperfocused nearly the whole day yesterday. the present image archive is coming along but a lot of the images are placeholders, and i am dropping back to the print files which are larger and sharper. they should all be in place by the end of the weekend.

after about a year trying to come up with a bumper sticker that says it all i came up with a bumper sticker that says not all but as close to it as i can come. as an extreme intuitive i'm satisfied.

after this post i'm going to take a walk. my resistance to this is not easy to overcome, don't know why but it is.

i'll spend the day cleaning up image archive, making it super spiffy or whatever. slept like a log last nite, probably because after a sleepless night the night before i worked solid thru yesterday, sealing camper against rain and bringing 2 current projects to penultimate stage. i'm laying off piano and dobro practice for a few days, tendonitus (no spell checker) has kicked in.

one of those nights when sleep was scarce. i'm a little punchy at the moment. a couple more non-optional maintenance tasks and i may go back to bed.

i have taken the first jump into process of site transformation into gallery of sight and sound. click on "image archive" above - the circle upper left - and let me know if it works.

you'll need flash which i hope you have. the flash player on mac OS 9 doesn't play, but who uses it nowdays but me?

beautiful morning. maybe the endless summer is really over. i hope to have image gallery updated and a whole lot spiffier by the end of the day.