i'm back. here. where i'm back from is seen above. two nights sleeping on the ground in the dark. two things of note: as is my habit i took something to draw on, in this case a failed watercolor. i drew on top of it with an "0" technical pen. the two media are contridictory, small precise delicate barely visable ink lines and giant blurs or watercolor. it'll take awhile to finish, and even longer to see if it's worth seeing.

there were some strange spirits in the dark, they kept unrolling my story. the sequence of memories was creative, in other words i have no conviction that my story is true in cold hard fact but know it doesn't matter one twit.

a piece of multicolored glass that has been around my place for a few years now. after a morning of image splashing.

i went to a birthday party last night, kim of kim & t. nice crowd, the frothy 2% i think wilber called this crowd. Interesting interplay, i had no idea who was who but sure enjoyed t's guitar playing and singing.

this image/word thing is affecting my day to day existence.

my social persona has become so diffuse. affecting has become a slight strain, not much, it's all good, i just have noticed a change. and typing words every day on this thing, where i have less and less to say.

there is a creative grace - i think i got that phrase from t's blog - that the image or letting an image develop that makes it all easy, fascinating, helpful to the kosmos (?) and not optional. i do not enjoy the social with the same spirit.

but i am going to try for the next few weeks to actually write about something. the good, the bad, and the real. or does everything contain, among everything else, nothing? or is nothing the absence of everything?

i'm not going to stake out this path; if it happens it will, if not it won't. i mean i don't care, it's just a notion that floated into my existence, so i acknowledge it and will pay attention to it, but it's a long day coming i don't have a shade to stand in.

finished w/ micky mousing around with various pshop filters i haven't used. the end result to me appears to be a poster in slaughterhouse. meat.

philip k. dick, among other things, was right. we exist in the iron castle.

but deep in the interior there is a wide screen hi def plasma screen playing soap opera, football games, and political shenanigans, not to mention virtual reality shows. so maybe it's ok unless you haven't forgotten, or maybe just recollected, boredom.

that might save us.

rogue regime rogue regime rogue regime rogue regime rogue regime rogue regime rogue regime rogue regime rogue regime rogue regime rogue regime rogue regime rogue regime rogue regime rogue regime rogue regime rogue regime rogue regime rogue regime rogue regime rogue regime rogue regime rogue regime rogue regime rogue regime rogue regime rogue regime rogue regime rogue regime rogue regime rogue regime rogue regime rogue regime rogue regime rogue regime rogue regime rogue regime rogue regime rogue regime rogue regime rogue regime rogue regime rogue regime

this mornings cryptogram. hard to decipher. i think it either means use the telephone or find my spot on the mountain.

mmmm. nice picture. took it while paying a long overdue visit to friend tom 2 days ago.

working on developing new palette for watercolors, then use similar for oils at a later date. i am really having fun getting into this. why? because it's something i don't know. and it has a certain pull to it, i guess by that it has a meaning, or potential meaning, it is important to me.

those are the qualifications that kick me into high gear. if what my sister was telling me awhile back about old people learning (she saw a special on pbs on this), then i am in good shape. altho my social skills at conversation seem to have hit a new low, i realized the other day that being techie-artist-savant keeps me on a perpetual learning curve. i never thought much about it. but at present i am working and learning everyday flash, dreamweaver, been using photoshop every since version 1 and use it almost everyday still learning how to do the impossible, studying the piano in what is for me an unusually methodical way - but one that might appear to be learning how to play dylan riffs, keeping antique hardware trans-functional that is to say doing what it's meant to do and way more to boot (so to speak), substrates, media, wish i could just relax and read a good mystery tho.

last minute addition. today i fooled around with a watercolor, worked on a sort of video, did email, and studied a bunch of new (to me) takes on the color wheel, why it doesn't work, how to correct it, on and on. i got so tangled up in this stuff when i left the house it was almost 6. i thought it was maybe 2 in the afternoon. i'm not complaining, mind you. are there many like me, hyperfocus or no-focus?

after the equinox"
not to be confused with "after the garden is gone" by neil young.

i am realizing that narrative is essential in order to blog. i watched a bit of PBS feature on andy warhol, experts and philosophers talking, explaining why he is the 20th century's most important artist. i disagree, but that's beside the point. at one point someone mentioned that he had no feel for "narrative". over the last ten years or so it has dawned on me that i don't either. not anymore.

reasons why i think this is the case:

i've never been big on theatrical events, a play leaves me totally bereft of any knowledge of the story i've just seen. Instead the experience unfolds for me as a series of moments or worlds, each with mood, tension, light, dark, and very real. but i don't experience the moment as having come from a prior moment. my attempts at musical production the same in that there is no curve or shape to the piece, no build up and climax. noisy minimalist. novels, the few i read nowadays, the same. texture, sense of place, enigmatic flash i get, but who is doing what and why usually escapes me.

i do fine i think with this mode, but there is another sense in which narrative might be essential, and that is telling (or living) your "story". Inhabiting your narrative, knowing it is a "story" something is telling the world.

so, with the arc of the tale demolished, what is my "story"? i've lost track.

but that's another story.

ooh whee blogger is fast this morning. i'm not. above from the doctor's spread on reems creek.

right now i am going to walk about a mile to the bakery, buy a lof of bread, walk back.

if it's the last thing i do.

even if it isn't.

this morning's moodoglyph. as usual it doesn't tell me a thing.

yesterday i worked on watercolor till 1 then drove to kim's. we had agreed to spend some time teaching her watercolor. but the equinox threw her timing off, so i spent some time on the deck with the dogs drawing a pencil sketch. then i hurried home, worked some more, and set out for reems creek where i had told jim that i would drop by. couldn't find his driveway. so i continued on for an unannounced visit to dr. r. when i got far enough up the driveway i came upon a padlocked gate. so i got out and walked, taking my camera with me. and leaving my truck blocking the gate. click click click, and then heard a horn honk. i walked back to the gate where i was blocking john and bev, and we continued up to the house. very pleasant interlude, a little talk, a little this, a little that, walked around. i won't go into details here but the good doctor is switching identity again. should be a good one.

i got 2 new mp3s up during this time, they can be found here:
modernpeasant - JamWave Artist Page

after 4 months of more or less creative isolation i finally got out of the house yesterday and drove south on the parkway. it was rainy, gloomy, foggy, i loved it. above is one of many pictures i took.

i have made a lot of progress on piano. and the guitar, 5 string tuned open g. i was so energized after drive yesterday that i stayed up till 1:30 - waaay past my bedtime - putting together a new piece of music.

as far as recent notions go, and they do come and go, i feel like the work is to not only know yourself (including, but not limited to what auribindo calls "the frontal personality", the social persona), but to be your self. problems, politics, catastrophe will remain, and from all accounts you will be more engaged with them than if you were not yourself. the true self is engaged with maya. a paradox. but aren't they all.

finished this watercolor last night. it is a copy of a painting in a book. last week i tried the same image in oils, didn't work too well - but i am going to see if oil pastels might help it.

you can see that the drawing i did the day before (below) is reminiscent of this composition even tho i did it with from imagination.

so what's new? remember that scene from star wars, the first go round, one of the 3 movies i can't remember which, when the heros are trapped in a room full of garbage and then the walls begin to move inward?

that's new, at least a new feeling that is widespread. the walls lurch inward, a bump here and there, but mostly silent, while the noise machine sends out a non-stop babble of consumer dialect, a miasma of trance, and the polished image of clean well appointed tv homes that look like sets because they are becomes the background of existence.

my friend george raised an interesting point the other day. what if the democrats win and don't impeach mr. bush? remember, impeachment is a process, not a declaration of guilt. if the process is skipped, can we say representative govt. is out to lunch?

as things unravel, one trend seems to be the breakup of populations into affinity groups that have very little to do with nationality or the nation-state. the romans supposedly presided over an empire that outstripped it's means of communication, and played into their demise. we are in a similar position i think, with the difference being technology fools fools into thinking we are "virtually" everywhere. and we are, so long as the "virtual" is accepted as real but it isn't.

hmmm... this is what i drew waiting for doc yesterday. eyes were ultra dilated, i guess it doesn't matter.

probably won't get out of town until tomorrow.

the first "cold" day. has more to do with air transparency, crispness than temperature. i'm still in tshirt and shorts.

damn i wish i had something to say. well i do have somethings to say but don't exactly know how to say them. comes from talking to the void i guess.

by the time i finish this post the picture above should show up. scanned a drawing and mokeyed around this morning. there's words in it. can you see them?

almost finished organizing living pod. today i even found two insurance cards i've been looking for for a couple of months.

tomorrow i'm driving up to yancey county and camp out a day or two. i'm looking for a certain waterfall near the nail's spread.

had a doc's appt. today at 3:10. an excercise in non-attachment, i didn't get in to see him until after 5. this was with retnapathist (?), everything looked good so to speak. the non-dual attitude helped me with the long wait, but i did draw a pencil landscape, dilated eyes and all. i'll have to check it out in the morning.

slung another ditty over the transom to jamwave.com.

oh yeah i found a notebook with a lot of writing in it: i'll grab a few samples:

i had a lady once,
her name was spring.
when she got in trouble
i could always hear her sing.

a melody with spirit
a morning without end.
if i kenw more about it,
i'd know what to send."

and..... so....... on.........

the woods, the woods...

good for folks because you can't find your way until you are lost. getting lost in the woods is such a relief. the eyes and the mind remain active, but take a back seat to touch. feet find the way. and in the meantime there is nothing to do but wonder (if you are one of those that have to be doing something).

wonder in both senses of the word.

above is an image that began as a watercolor on fredrix watercolor canvas, maybe the 2nd or 3rd i've done on that surface.. messed it up pretty good. so i got out my emergency oils pastels and went into it. then this morning i scanned it and spent some time with color balance and a lot more.

that's kind of how i work. if one thing doesn't, another does. all i have to do is give them a chance.

probably it is unfinished. i have a slight urge to put some marks or embossing inside the bubble that the guy is inside of. but probably not. it is far more cartoonish than anything i have done in a long time.

don't know why picture is not appearing above. hope you can see it, i can't.

i am by now fully convinced that the mess the manifest world is in now has Kosmic implications and causes. a case of spiritual evolution. as we often forget, when something evolves, there is no guarantee of the result. a good analogy might be the developmental evolution of the individual. thinking in terms of freud, jung, maslow, piaget, winnicott et al, if a person is at a certain point in development, say around 2 1/2 years old, there is a next point which a healthy person to-be goes thru. as wilber notes, each development can be successfully navigated or not. if not, problems will later develop, neuroses, pathologies etc.

cultural evolution is similar. one difference is that the development of a person has been studied and variously classified into stages. cultures have been looked at also in this way, but the data is very thin. toynbee, vico, mumford.

today the culture is surely at an inflection point. a new context and landscape requires a new evolutionary stage. the new context is among other things, the development of chardin's noossphere. the inhabitants of the planet are now more or less aware of all the cultures on the globe. style, memes, flash crowds, a whole new raft of signs (dress, language, attitudes, slogans, branding) affect the inhabitants far more than the institutions (nation-state, rule of law) that some of us grew up with.

we either grow into awareness of what these things are or pathology sets in. "he who is not busy being born is dying".

from frewillastrology.com

this weeks weather forecast. it's a puzzler for me. because it's what i think i've been doing for awhile now.

the piano is interesting. because i'm starting to get somewhere learning how to play it. i practice every day. in my manner, which means i alternate between scales and dylan songs.

i heard about the rock in the tree on NPR one morning. the theory was that it fell on the tree, split it, and then the tree slowly grew up lifting the rock. that seems to imply slowness, like the rabbit and the tortoise.

otherwise wrapping things up. almost thru with site redesign, have to fix image archive, one last little twist, so that the images are centered and if you hit "home", should say click on home, you won't get a duplicate page.

yesterday i ran into the present challenge i deal with which is knowing where things are. for 2 days i hunted for prescriptions i needed to fill but i couldn't find the. i thought maybe i had left them unfilled at pharmacy, but no. while looking for them i realized i also could not locate copy of whispering in the dark. i live in a small dwelling, and searched everywhere for these things. finally i phoned doc's office to see if i could get new scripts but it turned out not to be a workable solution. i panicked and looked again, the scripts were where i thought i had put them, the same place i must have looked at 20 times in the last 2 days. dysfunction. on the other hand i found book by sitting down and actually remembering a very likely but obscure place they might be and they were.

so if you hear dear landlord wafting from the treetops this week be assured that all is what it is, and what is is real.

new version of old picture. (i think.)

the present political shenanigans are not unprecedented. i am talking about the ABC-Disneyland-presidential-TV "happening" on the 5th year anniversary of 9/11.

the imperial presidency has been oozing into the culture for awhile. remember nixon's attempt to put some of the white house staff in uniform a la the swiss guards? do you remember the proposed uniforms? Gaudy banana-republic (no, not the brand name) looking. like Mussolini's victor emmanuel II monument in rome, the epitome of bad taste. two night's of mediated higgledy-piggaldy playing with storylines, meat- and sub-texts, soap opera explication, and presidential pep talk to the people just pushed it to a new apogee.

meanwhile books and videos pouring out, i'll list some of them later, spilling bits and pieces of another story, what happened?

no sleep last night. i feel beat to a pulp.

yesterday and today have been brutal. the monumental can of worms that took over what teillard de chardin once called the "noosphere" was... well it was monumental. disney plus lies, millions of dollars to produce, and wait until the interlocking finances of such a weird idea becomes the story for a day. so many good people have worked so long with such perseverence. all of a sudden i'm galvanised by the political in it's death spiral. i dare you to check this out:

Loose Change 2nd Edition Recut - Google Video

---

being among the "disconnected" (all it takes is living without tv) i missed out on the 5th year festivities of 9/11. but i did wake up around 3 in the morning and turn on the radio, listening to coast2coastAM. also, a little earlier, to the sound of the disneyfied story of 9/11.

when the drama? documentary? propaganda? was interuppted by a speech from mr. bush i was amazed. well not amazed, but once again slammed over the head with the whole short-sided, confused, willfully(?) ignorant package. this is not confusion between truth and falsehood, this is an entirely new (i think) phenomena, resemblences to the super bowl notwithstanding. a new high in the age of presentation we are in. the presentation is the message, not the content.

bush is merely swimming in the age of presentation, not by choice but because it's the only world he and the junta know. i'm sure that when they see a whiz-bang power point presentation, three bullets to a frame, they are reassured. anything else would not signify.

for a much more clear response check this out. i heard on the radio last night that not many people watch this guy. a shame.

Bloggermann: This hole in the ground - Bloggermann - MSNBC.com:
..."and then, in perhaps his finest piece of writing, Rod Serling sums it up with words of remarkable prescience, given where we find ourselves tonight: 'The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men.

'For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own -- for the children, and the children yet unborn.'"

five years ago. zowee time times fast times now. that's about whem i began my present phase: up at five, listened to npr while i did god knows what on the computer. i remember turning the radio off after 2 or 3 cycles of the same stuff.

around 8:30 my dad phoned. i was watching the noize box when the 2nd bldg went down.

but that's another story. i've turned out more painting, writing, music in this sad period than the total for all the rest of my life.

is there a connection? of course! what is it? i'll never know.

i'm into it. water i mean. i didn't even realize i was working with the same photo as yesterday.

i've redone the image archive and also put a link to another image archive. they are both a little glitchy at the moment, will fix.

just bip bangin along. nothing much to say. lot of time in the last couple of weeks rooting around and finding eeverything i could and dumping on the floor. hope to finish tossing most of it today, and whatever is left has to have a dedicated spot to stay in. with a label. i started wearing my keys around my neck, works great.

do you think there is an election taking place in about 8 weeks? what will the mediated charade of meme-posturing look like? the alpha dance, the slither of those who ignore the day to day actual experience of the daily mundane?

i'm just not very verbal today. i'm going to find something on the web that may make sense and post a link to it right [here]. watch this space.

still hung up on water. the above is a straight shot, none of the meta-effects that i tend to get carried away with.

as yesterday unfolded i got progressively more irritable. nothing worked. couldn't find anything. spinning my wheels.

by late evening, after a few hours of letting dreamweaver tie me into knots (table layout) i had sense enough to stop. or maybe i should say i was beaten into submission.

and of course got up at 6 and had the confusion cleared in an easy hour.

"what a difference a day makes."

i guess you can tell i'm all wet. i took yesterday's and today's images from steve's pond. this particular shot reminds me of warnock's pond, someplace off ferrington rd. outside chapel hill a long time ago. today it is no doubt part of the govener's club or some such.

every now and then a bunch of us would walk thru the woods, always at night, and visit the pond. it had a strange black pull to it from time to time.

haven't heard dylan's latest yet. have you?

yesterday's water.

"Keith Olbermann:
'Have You No Sense of Decency, Sir?':
i've heard this guy's name, but being out of the media loop did not know his stuff. it's not so much what he is saying, but the fact that it is said on national platform that makes me feel a little less alone.

another wet gray august dog day. it's a great relief to me, the kind of weather i can dysfunction in.

a work of art is (literally) never finished. it's either infinite regress or infinite egress. either way it'll keep you engaged. i guess that is why narrative is so distant from me now, it's got a beginning, middle and ending. not sure anything else does. i seem to lean towards the taste and texture of the moment.

wrestled with image archive yesterday, dreamweaver, links, blind alleys, dark paths, the occasional luminescent meadow, snarled skiens of tangled connections. ariadne's thread i can't quite see yet.

[note} i have replaced the image described in the next para, didn't much like the way it felt. this one is more appropriate to a day in the life.

[cyberdoodle. an old one. i spent yesterday cyber house cleaning and found a bunch of 72 dpi whatnots. above is a little rough, but i have found myself creating images lately that are a little rough. is it art brute? graffiti influenced?]

also yesterday was a marathon in front of the computer, i'm about thru i hope with redesigning and reorganizing image archive. much expanded my dreamweaver methodology. the new pages may be up before the day is done.

i hear this months full moon will be the closest and largest of the year, so i'll spend the early evening taking photos with a tripod, see what i get. i think this is next week sometime, must pin the date down.

in addition i was on and off all day programming insulin pump. finally got it early evening, by which time BG was 360. except for that last couple of hours lantus insulin kept me in bounds. now i have to trouble shoot the meter which is part of the pump and no longer works.

got latest (and last) revision ofwhistling in the dark, looks great. now to archive the many files that were used building the book, need disk space.

setup the 3rd oil i did spring before last. it was done in plein aire, a landscape of the botanical gardens. i've got enough under my belt now to improve it and make it right. i think. or i'll totally destroy it. kind of a metaphor of evolution.

watercolor i finished yesterday. actually i found it in pile of unsuccessful attempts, barely started. i turned it upside down, what were the mountains became the sky, and fooled around with it. as with many of my watercolors, or quite a few anyway, i finished it with a little oil pastel.

glad that is out of the way. now i can spend labor day trying to program replacement insulin pump. i spent some time yesterday at it, but couldn't get the basel rates into the memory.

one discovery: i've been injecting lantus long acting genetically engineered insulin. a slow acting 24 hour insulin, it has come ono the market since i've been pumping insulin. i had an unopened bottle on hand to use in case of pump problems. using it once a day and regular fast acting humulog for meal boluses my control has been perfect.

i spent most of yesterday as i do too many days, in front of computer monitor. i'm about done with reformat of image archive. maybe. as a side benefit, i've absorbed enough intuitive moves with with dreamweaver and flash to the point that i'm dangerous.

everyone learns software in different ways. my way is to endlessly play around, and after many dead ends, glitches, manual or no manual available, then one day without my knowledge, things begin to click so to speak, and i find myself able to do whatever it is i need to do without too much thought. i'm at that point with these applications.

it is my feeling that learning computer software, for me anyway, is a neuro-muscular process, the "mental" part riding on top of reflexes. like driving a car, using these packages is a question of learned reflexes one does not want to think about too much. let your fingers do the thinking.

so i tapped away at keyboard all day. one of those deals where i was so close to wrapping things up i didn't dare stop.

then an unexpected development. around 8 in the evening my insulin pump died. i won't go into the details but after about an hour of trying this and that, i phoned tech support, i think only the third time i've had to do this with my pump which is a cosmo delta.

the short story is a replacement will i hope arrive here 11:30 this morning, which i will then have to program.

as a matter of possible interest to some, what do you do when high and dry in this manner? insulin dependant diabetes is such a poorly understood chronic condition not to say disease that i'll tell you: gather yr contingency supplies together, a second meter, new vial of test strips for the meter, vial of humulog insulin, syringes, and a vial og lantus insulin. lantus is a long acting insulin i've never used before but keep on hand for just these times. then figure out how much insulin you have "on board", not easy when pump is locked and display is not happening. then figure out what yr basel rate is, ie how much humulog insulin you are receiving per hour.(this differs depending on the which hour it is). then inject. when it comes time to eat, test, inject enough humulog to cover the carbohydrates and correct for any high blood glucose readings.

so now, early sunday morning, a web first: i'm going to check my blood glucose while blogging, let you know how it all worked out this morning.

190. not bad. so now i inject maybe i i/2 units of humulog which will get me a little lower than 120 in about an hour. plus 4 units which will cover about 40 grams of carbohydrates for breakfast.

when pump replacement comes after i program it and plug it in, i'll have to deal with the 24 hours lantus lasts, probably turn basel rate off or cut it down to 25% while lantus is still active.

which leaves one last thing: as usual the bunker where i live is in disarray and i have to find my current basel rates which are on a paper from my last visit to the endocrinologist.

because all of these numbers shift and change as life tumbles on.

moving targets. fragmented brain pathways. cellular dismay.

i think there are in this country alone about one million folks who deal on a 24/7 basis with the all of the above.

and while i'm at it let me once again propose that adult onset diabetes and insulin dependent diabetes be separated by new names: they are entirely different diseases, different symptoms, pathology, presentation, treatment. the only thing they have in common is long term complications. every time i read or hear somewhere about diabetes i get pissed because almost every time they are talking about adult onset, which is on a tear right now, numbers exploding, but has nothing or little to do with my life as a diabetic.

something i did in the obscure past, maybe over a month ago, i can't remember.

i got this quote from someone the other night. he got it somewhere, thinks perhaps mark twain. i'll let the mystery be.

if i had enough time
life would be shorter

on this particular quiet sat. morning i have not even begun to sort out the implications of this thought and have no idea of wheter it's true, false or even matters.

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.