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.

tree
branches
sky

got truck to hospital this am, a few books back to library, with ninian's help. he's leaving for west va right now (banjo heaven). i'll be stuck here for awhile, and really don't mind the prospect. it will be too hot for me to survive outdoors. of course were the electricity to go off - and someday it will - i guess i would become "just another accident statistic".

[for those of you not in the know, that's a quote from mr dylan, the last LP i listened to by him before long hiatus. from slow train coming, his first christian album. around '79 i think, he was right then and he is right now.]

early morning , nicole's back yard in chatham county.

spent a few hours yesterday morning with ninian who was kind enough to help me run a bunch of errands, including scheduling truck for doc appt tomorrow. took a nap in the afternoon which more or less lasted until 6 this morning.

little "at sea" this morning, i always appreciated that phrase which could mean a lot of things but denotes for me that loose slipping and sliding the sense of reality undergoes from time to time.

i'll spend the day cleaning and unpacking material, mental and emotional baggage, maybe make it down to bele chere - i'm close enough to walk downtown - if the sun lays low.

ninian showed up late last night and we made grocery pharmacy run this morning which was a great help. talked to mechanic, will fix monday. the photosquiggle above is, i don't know, too much squiggle.

i'm going to check out news and weather and maybe walk down to bele chere, the largest mostest festival anywhere, cast of millions, the frenzy of the crowd, the polite onlookers, the who knows what or why. on the other hand why not.

heading up the mountain this morning. have had a pleasant visit. baby natalie is certainly worth getting to know, very placid and what a smile. lily and corbin continue to grow, very rapidly. my youngest son nathan is unavailable for visit - with anyone i guess. i wish him well and hope he comes out on the other side of whatever miasma he is in (this means: a difficult path is still a path, or can be). nicole is struggling, way too busy, i think she will soon adapt a strategy of giving herself more time. eli and melissa are doing well, healthy and navigating the family life well. never made it into chapel hill, wait i take that back did go to wellspring.

i've had a lot of fun with camera, tried some new things. also maybe am starting to get the hang of cadence changes on 5 string guitar in open "g".

ok i'm off catch you on the phlip side.
[but wait, there's more...]
now i'm there, you know, where i was going a paragraph ago. stopped at old fort and visited with louise at the museum. also filled tank up with new personal best, $40 plus. made it past the oteen turnoff and truck died. i think it was getting gas, but no spark. all wires present and accounted for. i think the whatchamacallit, charger, can't remember the name but the thing that goes to distributor. so i arrives via tow truck.

sure seems funny here with no miss kitty.

h i folks. i'm at jim's. reporting in. another day at the beach. dylan dvds missing. it's all good.

everything slow and hot in the piedmont. still haven't seen my son nathan which is too bad. doing laundry at eli's right now. i think nap time is soon.

i've decided travel takes more organization than i give it.

sitting at eli's on an overcast, almost gloomy morning. i fell out yesterday around 3 and napped until 6, never really woke up.

so i feel great this morning.

ran into raymond yesterday at wellspring, it was good to see him.

natalie is the smiliest little girl. she is happy.

to sum up: everything is summed up.

friday i was up and at'em, ready to drive to the piedmont. but miss kitty was not doing well at all. so saturday we went to the vet and miss kitty who was suffering more than a creature deserves, left the planet. the vet was very simpatico and i "held her in the light" as the quakers say. i drove her poor body to chapel hill and eli and i buried her sunday morning.

she was 17, and spent all but her first four years with me. a gentle spirit, her presence in the world of 10,000 things was beneficent and helpful to us all, whether we knew it or not.

tossed and turned all night, got up at 6. and constructed lookin point of the day above. my latest plan is to drive to the peidmont early tomorrow morning, say about 5. the rest of my day will be devoted to packing, puttering, and otherwise reconfiguring domicile to my traveling yurt. this is a consequence of no AC in truck and my own willingness to acknowledge personal limitations, such as the steamy weather makes me crazy so i will do my best to avoid it.

at last i am hearing on some of Big Media that a war between a nation state and an unknown group of people is a mismatch. the USA doesn't much like saddam, so as much as declares war against his victims. isreal has reason to defend itself against hezzbullah - i know, sp?, so devastates the nation of lebonon.

i think france will be next. our leaders - and much of the little people that serve it - doesn't much like france. there used to be an apophrical sign at calais saying "the wogs start here". besides, they talk funny.

this morning's gray room wall paper has little to endear itself so the less said the better.

going to go to bank and library in a minute and that's it for travel today. chatham county here i come. later.

before friday i hope.

mmmm... This morning's cyber-jumble got a little out of hand.

spent the last 3 days indoors, chained to G3 and an easel. i'm having way too much fun.

there is a shadow of guilt lurking around: should i be having so much fun when the world is having a breakdown?

when we are all dying?

just a shadow. it blurs things when i think of mental, dare i say "spiritual" health; the inner world (see picture above) and the outer world both must be included in being someone, i don't know why, i don't even care. so at long last i am finding a valid use for "discipline": it is useful when i go out and have fun, as opposed to when i stay in and have way too much fun.

hey, as the kids say, 'it's all good".

maybe this morning's cyberdoodle is the beginning of a set of new age greeting cards for the aville theme park. probably not.

i continue to be fascinated with the contortions language is going through when the talking heads describe the current "reality". yesterday i heard the air waves say quite destinctly "de-escaltion". i wonder if it means anything like "de-excavation" or "de-levitation".

i don't think i want to de-levitate, it sounds painful. of course i'm not much into levitation either, it could be - surprise - just as painful.

it seems like i am well on my way to becoming very slow. all i can say about it is on the imaginary bumper sticker i will sport some day:

DeFog the Brain Fog

a quickie. i've been getting into some of the less accessible regions of photoshop with varying amounts of surprise. it is, of course, endless.

is it a war yet? war has for a couple of centuries been strictly, or almost strictly, the domain of the nation state. as that institution slowly morphs to god knows what, war becomes something we do not have a clear idea of. are there uniformed armies? are there treaties and alliances? or are there gangs, thugs and criminals? some folks who live in the middle east are afraid to go out at night. ditto with some folks in nicaragua, detroit.

maybe the closest thing to what is happening that we have experienced in the past is times of the warlords. gang leaders.

maybe the closest thing to the perpetual war orwell wrote about is not a result of declarations and control by the nation state, but the result of an armed populace not included within the domain of "citizen" of this or that country.

it's bandits all the way down and all the way up.

digging around i found 3 new poems just now. heres one:


woke up this morning
got out of my head
wiggled my toes
and got out of bed

stumbled to the coffee pot
circled for a bit
mixed up the medicine
the light bulb was lit

remembered a dream
which i promptly forgot
later i'll eat
or maybe not.

right now i'm sitting
looking at my talk.
words here & there
key in the lock.

the door might be open
to one more day.
i think i'll walk out
and check out the play.

today's peculiargram tells me i'd better start looking for my walking shoes.

dropped in on "drinking liberally" last night and ran into old acquaitence don who was playing with his son and some of the "real" asheville folks. his son has taken up the mandolin and plays pretty darn good.

spent a good 9 hours yesterday working with flash, i now am accomplished enough to be dangerous. worked on oil painting at the same time. got book to publisher.

just talked to doug who is in marion on the road headed for yancey county. depending on something or another - don't know what that might be at present - i may head up to yancey county tomorrow and camp out at his spot. counting on driving to chatham county wednesday to see old friends and children, grandchildren who i haven't seen in too long.

looks like today's gizmo is ariadne's thread. found in a rat's nest of consequence, delivered to the black helicopters of the iron castle so they can scuttle the dream anchors of routine in time for the cookout.

on another note entirely, i just put up 3rd or 4th flash muzak doo-dad. give them a try, they are on muzak page.

this morning's jumble.

yesterday was a strange day. but then aren't they all?

no. but a lot are.

got a lot of this and that done in the morning. around three i lay down and read for a minute. when i got up it was 8:30 in the evening. i couldn't believe it.

phone was out all day yesterday. a young man with all kind of apparatus hanging from his belt knocked on the door this morning, came in and found problem in phone jack. this is the second time i have been perplexed by situation where i get DSL but no dial tone. both times i have felt sort of stupid for not snugging up cables - which i have many of on the floor going here and there - before calling for help.

more later ...

a few technical difficulties: life.

phone is out, it must have rained. picture above doesn't show, must be cut and run electrons around.

found out who is more or less responsible for the concept of memes: richard dawkins.

just got back from oil change and kat food run. miss kitty can only eat what appears to be kitty pudding.

put another flash mp3 up. it can be found on muzak page.

art brute, otherwise known as mess around before breakfast.

i got an automated call this morning telling me that UPS has a package that will be delivered today. no idea what it is, but it gives me an uneasy feeling.

finished i hope whistling in the dark, will upload file after this post. book should be available this week, i'll let you know the particulars when i know them.

today's list:

mop kitchen floor.

sunday painter.

focus on thoughts to see if there are any.

taken yesterday swannanoa river - i think - pleasant with tharpa and kim.

now what do i have to say this pleasantly slow sunday morning? gotta get a move on talking heads are about to appear. and i can pick up the big soccer game at one o'clock.

photo taken at steve's last night. dougie the nail was up for a visit. maybe still is.

almost finished with domicile organization. really cleared out this room where i am sitting, you could call it the "computer room" but i prefer "the rumpus room".

still digging into flash, it is so left-handed so to speak (so an i) that the gotchas seem endless.

the midi files on music animation page no longer play under NS7. they are fine in IE. i'm not going to spend much time on figuring out why.

heard some astronomer on coast2coast last night, an expert cosmologist with this and that to say, for instance that hubble has allowed us to peer almost to the edge of the universe. once we get past that, according to this gentleman, and map out the border, we can use that map to calculate the center of the universe.

besides being inclined towards the statements of some classical greek, can't remember the name, who said the center of the kosmos was nowhere - or everywhere - so i disagreed with that prediction there was another interesting bit. he was asked if he believes in intelligent design or god. very lucid answer, something to the effect that past the blackness of space is the unknowable, the invisible. and that is the locus of what gives the world of 10,000 things meaning.

i would restate it and say that existence has meaning, but the meaning is a mystery. experience of a human life always seem to indicate that you can move towards it, but not reach it. you can accept it or not. and IMHO it is best to respect and acknowledge the formless.

straight photo i took yesterday outside front door. i hope it makes a nice 8x10 print.

so what's happening? had last doc appt today, hope to get to chatham county late next week. want to visit tom. want to visit tharpa and play some music. friend doug is arriving from fort whose name i always forget this evening.

i'm working on something i've had in mind for a long time: adding visuals to music i've recorded. i'm using flash and starting to get the hang of it. the idea is that you get an mp3 to listen to or a flash .swf file with some kind of twinkle that appears with it.

think i'll go up to the parkway today.

forget when and where i took the above, messed with it this morning.

====> late flash: just put up 2nd flash thingamabob up. you can find it here. still don't know what i'm doing but i'm doing. this one is not finished but it will be.

just used a wonderful media catalogger - spelling, i know - and discovered all sorts of digital shots. above is one. will send book off for printing today come hell or high water.

then i'll have to write another.

my days have fallen into a rhythm. few hours at computer in the am, usually have a picture i am working on, always a piece of music to putter with, always a painting in the backroom, and lately always a flash molecule - i mean module - to slowly develop. and of course book to finish. then organize a small bit of my domain, today it's going to be printing materials.

i've been corresponding with kathy f., she is definite and clear about her worldview. which in many ways is reminiscent of wilber, but probably in other ways not. i think she is trying to conserve the logical, human reasoning, in this circus of disappearing personality.

i've said it before, because the culture is evolving, dragging us within it along, is no guarantee of success. any change of the order we are experiencing today can be navigated either successfully or pathologically. the question for me then becomes are the values i live with which seem to be vaporizing, worth the struggle to preserve (and so part of the next phase), or just plain anachronistic, ie the inhabitants of the next world won't need them.

you can guess which answer i live. and the only way i have to preserve is to live them.

couple of nights ago.

interesting conversation with pete the other night. sometime back he was talking to a friend, a polymath, who said the word "intellectual" comes from the greek and meant the process of 2 people conversing and interpreting and learning. i'm going to check this out. if so, it reminds me of ken wilber's distinction between what he call the right side and the left side, right being objective, measurable, repeatable; the left being interior, subjective. which is unknowable without conversation and interpretation. he (and i) are of the opinion that since the enlightenment the latter has been slowly displaced by the former. conversation is out; presentation is in.

not only do my 7 reader's get the icon of the day today, meaning unclear, but this is i hope the last illustration for book. started and finished this morning. lost a little in translation to jpg.

i can't tell if i'm depressed or hypomaniac anymore. they both feel the same. know what i mean?

another find from recent pile everything on living room floor and look at it a long time before sorting and tossing. this is a from a photo i took and printed (remember darkrooms) of my daughter nicole in aspen co. around 1969. this beautiful little girl is still around.

i've decided to hole up this week, let the 4th slide by, and attend to my own business which is get book finished and uploaded and finish an oil landscape i started featuring everything i haven't figured out yet.

i've been thinking about words. i agree with lewis mumford that rhythm, movement, dance, and music all proceeded language and developed into the spoken word. then the written word. then the printed word. then what i call the graphic word, the electronic word that surrounds us today.

fliss's brother mentioned a well known book i have never heard of called the word as object.

dylan's line "and there's less and less to say". i think we all have less and less to say because the words needed to actually say something are not yet in existence. the context for them exists, but in that translucent periphery where contexts always exist (until they become objects) and are not immediately visible.

the artist brings these words out of the distant almost knowable periphery into the visible. the words needed today will be created/invented/found and used as soon as we back off and become aware of their frame which is the New World that is a fantasy so far.

still plowing thru "stuff" from all shelves, horizontal surfaces, closets, boxes. lots of surprises. one was the objects above, carefully sealed in a small envelope. i'm thinking of taking them to pawn shop.

a doodle is a doodle is a doodle.

having a good day, already got most of art paraphilnia organized and resettled, a lot thrown out.

i saw a bit of leonard cohen last night on pbs. he has a book of poetry out. i really appreciated the way he expresses himself, obviously based on a deep view of life. like dylan's time out of mind, there was a lot about growing older, or maybe more accurately, growing old. it strikes me that the under culture is about to redefine and live old age in a new manner, new attitude, and it is not what the ny times or any other institution thinks. among other things it will be dark, tragic, necessary, and a lot of untraveled new worlds.

speaking of dylan i happened on the first half of scorses's documentary which i saw maybe six months ago. amazing how much it was like seeing it for the first time, a sign of original mind or memory loss or both. i wrote this quote down while watching it:

speaking of his early years ripping thru genres, he said "i needed to sing in that language... which i hadn't heard before".

he became a poet so he could sing.

as most of you know this site is in eternal beta. always something new that i don't quite know how to do. for instance the animation section is dysfunctional running under NS7: a small innocuous change has resulted in the midis no longer playing well with my browser (ns7); seems to play fine running under IE.

i've put up my first flash doo-dad. check it out and tell me what's broken because i plan to put a bunch up.

yesterday was a slow one, didn't feel quite up to snuff. or stuff. but i did get most all of my mini-art studio dumped in the living room where i can piddle around sorting thru it and throwing away useless clutter. then i reput it back in an elegant, efficient and well organized and labeled manner. that's the plan anyway.

cyberdoodle done this morning.

i totally have nothing to write about. words have receded away in the distance. i let my fingers do the talking.

"content is king", the old cliche about the web, like all cliches has some truth to it.

just to clarify, i started this thing long ago and one thing has led to another etc. but currently my interest is in the image and that's the content. one a day keeps the doctor away.

picture of front porch object. tried RAW format but so far can't do much with it, probably because pshop 7 under os9 doesn't have native RAW import.

so far it is a delicious day; got up at 5 when coast2coast went off the air. art bell was talking with Gerald Celente, whose vocation was something like "trend expert". a really straight forward lucid conversation about the new world we live in. i was surprised when i went to site to find out his name and discovered it was a rebroadcast from 2004. the guy must know his trends.

worked a little then the electricity failed (what else can one expect on a very rainy day).

it's 9 am now and i'm heading for the grocery store.

when i get back i'll finish book and upload it. will be available through lulu.com. i finessed ISBN number when i learned that vendors other than lulu can only sell black and white version.

miss kitty ventured out yesterday evening for the first time in 2 weeks. she's much better.

i'm trapped for another week with Kat. antibiotics twice a day (eyedropper) not so difficult, but setting up drip (like you see on tv, war, hospitals) is another matter entirely. kat no like. fish no like dish (paul reps).

today i should finish emptying out kitchen shelves and cabinets. lots to throw away. why am i doing this? don't know but it feels right. computer/music room is next, "studio" (bedroom) is after that.

early this morning i heard a piece on philip k. dick (BBC), during which new movie was mentioned, through a scanner darkly certainly one of his noirest books.

really dipping deep into image bag, this is the earliest watercolor i put up ages ago.

talked to mr sloan this am, he's close to logging on to harry's blog.

i need to get out of town.

i'm down to snapshots as far as putting up pix. this one is from walk up sunset mountain.

i was talking to my sister on the phone the other day when the subject of "enantiodromia" came up. so i googled it and came across this very interesting site. i have been asked in the past what my fascination with the morton's salt container is all about. context within context is the answer, and the question is if it is turtles "all the way up, all the way down", is there a beginning point and ending point? in my opinion there is not, so we get infinity in both directions. but this paper uses enantiodromia as a method of describing how "all the way up" becomes "all the way down". is the circumference of a circle infinite?

The Structure of Consciousness - Liminocentricity, Enantiodromia, and Personality
"Attention plays the function of 'bifurcating' consciousness, dividing it into levels of awareness. It brings a 'figure' (of which we are explicitly aware) into relief against a 'background'. The background remains in what Evans called 'unprojected' consciousness. Although elements in the background of consciousness remain outside of the focal area circumscribed by attention, they are nonetheless 'in' consciousness. We can be said to be 'aware' of what is in the background, but in a different way than we are aware of what is in attention.

We are 'subsidiarily aware' of what is in the background of awareness, according to Evans and Fudjack (1976) 4, who chose to use Michael Polanyi's term to describe the kind of awareness that is relegated to the background. Out of this subsidiary awareness of elements in the background of consciousness we construct what we normally call 'context'. As we go about our daily business we are aware of the contexts in which we operate, albeit subsidiarily aware.

Objects of our attention are best conceived, then, as embedded in contexts, somewhat like a content in a container. The context, when it is operating AS context, remains in the background and is experienced in a non-focal way, with a more diffuse type of awareness. Context is typically experienced, Evans and Fudjack postulated, in the mode of 'feeling' 5 - we directly experience context as an 'underlying feeling state'; it lends a 'feeling tone' to whatever the object of attention is at the moment.

From behind the scenes, our feeling states influence what items will be 'selected' and relevated into projected consciousness as objects of attention. It is in this way that our feeling states can be said to perform the 'evaluative' function that Jung singled out as the defining quality of what he called the 'feeling function'.

Conversely, we respond to the objects to which we attend by subtle changes that occur in our feeling states (moods) or not-so-subtle changes (emotions).

So there is a feed-back and feed-forward relationship between what is in projected consciousness at any given moment and what is in unprojected consciousness. There are shifts in our feeling state as attention deflects from one object to another, in a complex series of moves which, taken together, make up the personal 'storylines' of our lives.

Although we can bring elements of the background into attention, we can never make the background itself an object of attention. 6 But this does not prevent us from widening the scope of attention in order to make explicit what is currently in 'subsidiary awareness' as an element of unprojected consciousness - although by doing so, that element is taken out of subsidiary awareness and is brought into projected consciousness as a focal object of attention.

By manipulating attention in this way, we can bring what was previously operating AS CONTEXT into the foreground of attention, as object. Or, conversely, we can narrow the scope of attention, focusing on some 'detail' of a particular object of attention - making this detail the new object of attention, while allowing other aspects of the previous object of attention to recede into the background.

"

photo jeff sent me taken in chaco canyon last year. i was really entranced there. i want to move there.

i'm giving miss kitty antibiotics twice a day plus every other day have to hook her up to one of those drips you see in the hospital for 15 minutes.

i defrosted fridge last nite & am spending day emptying kitchen shelves, sorting, throwing away and spraying for bugs. it's like living out in the country here, just critters. every summer crickets invade, don't seem to do any harm but i don't think i want to keep them as pets.

soon i'll take a week off, i'm totally out of energy or interest. i started an oil this morning and would really enjoy taking my time with it and making it look right.

my world is shrinking, the minutes getting smaller, the seasons a blur. blogging is for the quick and i'm not so much that anymore. wanna take my time.

in 25 minutes will see dentist for dental adjustment. i'm nowhere near being able to wear them and eat and talk at the same time.

but i am in possession of brainshrub's high-school clarinet.all hard drives are jam packed, so i need to (carefully) archive a lot of files. couple of day's work?

=========== i've picked up about 4 gigs on hard drives (2) and have a third to do tomorrow. things are picking up. i'm no longer concerned with sneezing my dentures out. they "bite" much better.

gotta go to bed. yuck. listen to michael savage, avery strange one. of all the right-wing noise he's the one i'd most like to share a bottle of wine with. i don't know if it's his viciousness, his altered perspective, or his rambling style.

all i could conjure up this morning. one damn image after another. no end in sight. is this just another bad habit? a way to deny the moment? a way to experience the moment? an immense interior reflex that takes every psychic space it can? i don't know anymore.

maybe i should go shopping instead.

zowee, this one came out of nowhere. might be muse, face in the crowd, or both.

going to the vet's this morning so they can teach me how to give misskitty subcutaneous hydration with potassium. her sodium-potassium balance is way off and that, in my experience, is a bad sign. her liver functions are way off too.

so the plan is to continue with antibiotics for 2 weeks, do iv once or twice a day, and then when she's better she can do me.

from digital snap taken yesterday at edgy mama's shortly before the beginning of blogapiloofus festivities.

got back in time to give miss kitty 11:00 antibiotic meds. she's definitely feeling better.

uummm... don't know about this one. i did it from nice looking snapshot taken in chaco canyon jeff sent me. (later i replaced it)

very strange day so far. fell out early last night and before i got up had one of those working at intel dreams. then got up and had to take miss kitty to vet. she weighs 5 lbs., 4 years ago weighed ten. she's on antibiotics and some other meds and i postponed trip east once again.

now for reasons a lot of you will not understand i have to shut this thing down and find a prize.

later... the taoist dictum comes to mind..."if it ain't one thing it's a whole bunch of'em".

a window of possibility, not super busy. the domicile is organized, but not yet labeled. in conversation last week it was suggested that labeling resonates somewhere in the brain and makes it easier to find what you've labeled. i'll start with "silverware".

today (after i label the house), i'll pack for trip to chatham county that i've been pointed towards since march. leaving sunday morning.

this morning's puzzleator. thanks bob.

started off as a watercolor 2 days ago, yesterday morphed into "mixed media".