it's one of those extreme days. don't know what else to call it. i have the first of 3 dental appointments at 11:30 which is the beginning of 1) reconstructed teeth or 2) false teeth. arrrrgh.
but to counterbalance this i received this email this morning so everything is cool.
"You have now been approved to collect a total payment sum of USD$970,000.00 (NINE HUNDRED AND SEVEN THOUSAND US DOLLARS ONLY) attaches to file REF NO: CSI/8813/6329-05. We know it will be of a surprise to have received such a notification message due to the fact that you did not purchase any lottery ticket from us and the high rate of internet scam, but be informed here that this is a free promotional/test program from us as a way of introducing our software services and also in promoting the benefit of the Internet usage."
i've got pictures running riot through my head. spent yesterday cleaning up & finessing watercolor scans, reducing and unsharp masking for mounting on note cards.
then went back through hi-res scans and photoshop creations to find, reduce, mess with resolution and color, and include in poetry book. up till now i had 72 dpi place holders.
both of these projects are returning to life. next step with note cards is to figure out what i want to design and say on back label. then assemble what is called make-ready in graphic arts, ie an rigid assembly which positions notecard and photoprint for permanent mounting.
you probably suspect that i write the above more for me than you. and you're right. now i have a faint glimmer of what to do next.
jeff w. from north myrtle beach phoned this morning, we're cranking up again on new life book. task here is to come up with least confusing way to incorporate corrections into mss. i'll email balaji in india and see if he uses PDF workflow which could save much to-and-froing from quark to acrobat.
but what about the world and it's problems?
i feel them but have nothing to say at this time about it. Intuitively i feel it might be better for us all if noone said anything about the delirium of current events.
if you checked this site and didn't see anything, i put a stop on a post this morning and i guess messed things up more than i expected, be right back.
was just flipping through Mountain Xpress, asheville's ad drenched tabloid. on page 10, left hand page, there is an ad that says "strive not to drive." on the right hand page 11 there is an ad that says "think. feel. drive."
"content is king" was the buzzword for the web community awhile back. still may be. but the language of public discourse has deserted me. i can't keep up with the nonsense i hear and see in the noosphere.
the creative emergent is what i'm interested in, and it by definition doesn't exist (yet). (see whitehead and wilber).
so what does a poor boy do? me, i'm going shopping instead.
Good day yesterday, finally finding things and organizing. got color printer going, printed a couple of pieces, they look great. worked on an ancient picture for dr. r. i promised it to him awhile back. almost done. wrestled with new photo files for the new life book.
here is the poem i found and lost and found again recently. i may place this at the end of book of poetry i am putting together, "whistling in the dark".
The End Never Ends
End of the Book,
End of the Trail,
Confusion vanished
That I knew so well.
I don't remember
Where it came from.
The songs i forget
But some I can hum.
Autunm slides in
The air settles down.
My thoughts remain lost
I hear winter's sound.
Energies ebbing
It blows me away.
Morning Light dims,
The children they play.
Under slow light
The Garden's a riot,
The Lake is a laugh.
I walk real quiet.
Who said I come
Who said let go
Who said I thought
Who thought they know?
The beach is silent
Dark like the light.
Waves wash my mind
With the blackness of sight.
Time hunkers down
It's all the same day.
Same people same person
With nothing to say.
Some world
Surrounds me,
The scenes that I know
And the scene I don't see.
The difference is nothing
The nothing you know:
Ten thousand things
All in a row.
Who's seeing what
Is what i want to know
But I know nothing.
It might be time to go.
Peace to this morning
And the three AM burlesque.
Twitching shadows dance
The Dharma of the Blessed.
just went for first class of "exploring consciousness". roughly an overview of last ten years work, research in the world of science, what wilber calls "the descended grid" or upper right hand quadrant. 70 people in class, i'm betting at least 25% will bring up the difference between brain and consciousness. i know i will.
i'm cleaning up old unused links. this i think i thought was a good source of news not snooze:
Global Vision News Network:
"News Not In The News"
i forget why i thought this might be of interest:
Barron's Online - Fighting the Tape
"'Like most cliche's,' I wrote, 'the term 'liberal bias' has a grain of truth, and was probably more valid 20 years ago when conservatives still could plausibly view themselves as a beleaguered minority.
'[But] the idea of an all-powerful liberal media (or establishment media, as the left would call it) that can manipulate public opinion at will is a fantasy.'"
now i remember:
substitute "right" for "liberal" in last para and it is not a fantasy.
something to ponder:
ZNet |Activism | A FAQ: What do you think about suicide bombers?: "why ask about suicide bombers rather than about bombers simpliciter? Is the questioner interested in our view about suicide bombers as distinct from non-suicide ones? Surely, whether a perpetrator of a bombing commits suicide in the act is -- morally speaking -- not the principal issue: what matters most is the bombing."
back from SEG no problem. left new telephone unplugged so any messages not recieved, sorry.
very special time and place.
i will be incommunicado - more than usual - for the next 4 days. why?
well because pluto in retrograde has dislodged my triune scorpio and confused it with the 7th house. the resulting sunspot furor has my bluberry - or is it blackberry - fritzing and i can only pick up boulder colorado. i';; be back when the muons settle down.
there's nothing less interesting than listening to somebody relate the dream(s) they had the night before. but since i lost the ability to remember my dreams some time ago, and had a humdinger last night, i'll tell you about it anyway:
i was in a work situation which was a large, in fact huge, corporation - intel. i was dressed in coat and tie etc. for some reason. but i was lost in a vast series of rooms, staircases, elevators, cul-de-sacs. there had been many changes, reconstruction was in progress, and i couldn't figure out how to get where i was going.
every room, hallway, office, auditorium or whatever i passed through was packed with people, all going somewhere. like an airport. i was getting roughed up just wiggling through the crowds, shirttail flapping, coat not fitting. every place was ornate, baroque. i kept struggling. the crowds got thicker. cameras and attache cases were stacked everywhere, as if other people were also lost, and lightening their load. every now and then i would tag along with a moving group, but we always ended up nowhere.
at one point i somehow exited past a security point, was outside in some urban nightmare, and could see the complex i had been floundering in miles away, towering over the city like a nuclear plant.
later, back inside, i made a startling discovery: a narrow diagonal hall took me to a vast park-like space as big as many football fields. it was walled and had an impossibly high ceiling. it was then that i realized that it each of the four walls were the structures i had been struggling through. i had to cross the space - which had a few people milling around in the distance - to get to the opposite corner and enter through another narrow diagonal narrow passageway.
somehow i ended up at a VA hospital in washington dc and woke up, feeling like i'd just been through WWIII. or IV.
now for something completly different. this is something i have noticed lately in my own life: many folks eschewing any relationship that might include sex. i think there are 2 reasons for this, one, we're getting older and two, so many people have been burned. after-effects of the sexual revolution?
"'Asexuality: It's not just for amoebas anymore.'"
Asexual Healing (Promo) Laine Bergeson
and here is another tasty little item:
"[T]he dramatic rise in suicides in Andhra Pradesh, which have become a huge scandal....are particularly striking because they are so close to the jewels of the Indian economy, the high tech IT centers in Bangalore and Hyderabad, which evoke paroxysms of awe from the worshippers of neoliberalism."
India on the Edge of Survival (ZNet Blog)"
and finally this which seems to be a meme, we're hearing more and more about this, in fact it came up in a conversation i had this week:
"Bhutan is pioneering a holistic national agenda based on a tenet of Buddhism called jimba. In the west, jimba is most closely related to public service. Instead of capitalizing on 'production' as in Gross National Product (GNP), Bhutan is introducing the concept of Gross National Happiness (GNH) that capitalizes on the happiness that public service, or jimba, yields."
yesterday i spent the morning coming up with 2 medications i was out of. i am a member in good standing of "medicare" as it slowly drifts into "medicare inc."
so far nothing happens. i fillout forms, send them in, and that's it. no reply, no card, no nothin'. what a surprise. anyway all worked and i'm in good shape now. but then i went outside the empty box.
spent the afternoon at tom's out in the country. really pleasant visit & i needed it. he & erin live in a small older home, well maintained, and the atmosphere reminds me of so many places that have been important in my life.
i was a young man in the 60's paying by any measure of today what was an astoudingly low rent for homes from another time, or what was rapidly becoming another time.
i got in one quick sketch, came home and played music.
woke up this morning with no electricity, blowing snow outside. got in the truck and took care of some quick business - including a cup of coffee - came home and got in bed with the Kat and read for three minutes. woke up at noon when the juice came back on.
i have a pretty coherent list of things to do - "i do things therefore i exist" - so here goes.
carolina and duke are playing right now, i can only pick it up on AM radio where it serves as background noise.
this sunday has been so far a most peculiar day for me. i can't seem to wake up. it's like i imagine a petite mal moment must be but it's been all day: dozing in the park.
realizing that it happening - or might say nothing was happening - i wrote off the day early. today is a blank.
yesterday, on the other hand, i worked steady until 5, doing this, than that, then a little more of this. at 5 i escaped and walked up sunset mountain. very windy, nice sunset. dark when i got back, had 15 minutes to leave for the gray eagle where i had the privilege of hearing greg brown playing to a sold-out house.
his daughter opened. she and her dad were both accompanied by bo ramsey playing an electric guitar who manages to fade into the background with sounds that at time resemble a thermion played on qualuudes, very quiet eerie b spare bottleneck.
greg was everything i expected. a big down to earth prescience with a deep country voice. his songs were impressive. they are rough, redneck, authentic, nostalgic (for the homeland we never knew (neil young - and have a noir sensibility that is never far away. that mix of nostalgia and noir is a killer, i don't know of anyone performing today who conjures up this mixture quite so well.
here is part of a sung he wrote and sang:
"One wrong turn is all it takes
and there ain't many signs - you only get a few breaks.
Some get more. Some get less.
One wrong turn leads to the next.
The days go slow and the years go fast.
The future you look for is soon the past.
You seldom end up where you thought you would.
One wrong turn can change it all for good.
Love ain't a hug. Love ain't a kiss.
Love is every day doing this, that, this.
We put in our time and we put in our heart.
One wrong turn can tear it all apart."
i met the sister of an old friend of mine and talk turned to cullowhee. i had just started a sketch while waiting for the show to start. in the dim light it was hard for me to tell what i was doing, but eventually i realized that it was whiteside cove in jackson county. the whole evening was pulling me back to another time and place, big ridge, cullowhee, jackson county.
leaving the show i talked to a couple, my age or more, who had heard greg at the cat's cradle in carrboro the night before. they were from kinston and knew the maddox family one of whom is my daughter in law melissa. they had nothing but praise for her father clyde's dobro playing.
i came home and spent hours in bed, legs kicking and twitching, waiting for sleep.
woke up at 7, thought about getting ready for hike.
i think i was still thinking about it when i lay down and woke back up at 10. so no sycamore cove trek for me today. the place i inhabit is an ADD disaster so i'll clean and organize. who knows what i'll find.
blip.
flip.
still thrashing thru getting post archives up. whether the world needs this or not is not a question. whether i need to complete this one-off code change so it works is. ne of those things that by dfinition once you start you can't stop.
i'm squeezing in a simple water color during this troublesome activity.
...[evenings empire has returned] i'm calling it a day.
blog archive is working, sort of. very ugly, but 4 years of posts are accessible.
i have no idea why.
something to do with permalinks and page titles, settings, <$kode$>. all kinds of gremlins appearing and disappearing. (check the browser window title, at he top of the window.)
today has been kind of fun. wondering thru philip k. dick territory, form becoming formless. this is a familiar place.
so kindly forgive the twitchs, technical and other wise while i change things and things change.
just can't seem to get my mind together today. everything is start and stop.
frustrating not being able to fix archives. too many things half started. but i did get the picture below up - i think. depends on if you can see it or not.
ummmm.... modernpeasant is down right now. something to do with bits and pieces - i mean bytes - and i'll fix it.
this day is a little on the wobbly side. i've learned to fall as gracefully as i can.
the light
is strange this morning, bright, brilliant. it reminds me of when i was a child, early spring, an icy brilliance.
tried to see a play wed. nite, but fell asleep and met friend janice too late to go, blood sugar bottoming out. pleasant interlude anyway.
finishing an oil on top of oil pastel, which is a no-no. we'll see what happens.
it's one of those mornings i have little to say. i've reached the end of language.
even so i talked to sam's youngest son whose name i cannot spell. he told me sam is making good progress with physical and speech therapy.
me, i feel like staying in bed today and watching the light crawl across the ceiling.
"With the Bushies, if you're their friend, anything goes. If you're their critic, nothing goes. They're waging a jihad against journalists - buying them off so they'll promote administration programs, trying to put them in jail for doing their jobs and replacing them with ringers."
The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Bush's Barberini Faun
is there something not quite "right" about the desktop revolution?
The New Republic Online: The Revolution Will Not Be Computerized
i'm making some changes to this site, so be patient with any surprises. thanks
[edit made much later: what a can of worms i opened.]
