the thing about this photo is that i took it on a twilight walk up sunset mountain. the light had faded into a low glow and i played around with sony "nightframing" and "nightshot". i'm amazed i got anything. a little artifact-y and i probably unsharp masked a bit more than was necessary.

so what else is new? everything, of course. otherwise it would still be yesterday. of course, if it were, everything would still be new.

woke up at 5 and realized the wedding gift i had been working on for my nephew and fiance wasn't working. so i spent until 1:30 working on another, interrupted by doctor appointment. i'll know tomorrow if new present is presentable.

meanwhile i'm in the middle of packing for a long trip and the old attention condition has got me dithering in a thousand directions it's quite amazing that it will all come together in time if i don't get in the way of the process.

got truck back if i didn't already mention it, $175 worth, runs like a top.

i had some art supplies due and finally phoned them, glad i did, they had somehow dropped a stitch. so thy are being sent to my dad's house. i had no choice.

gotta go, clean and pack for the rest of the day, check in with communists at drinking liberally at 7.

as they say around these parts, "baaa..." (bye for now).

photo i took last evening in front of domicile.

very busy next few days preparing for departure. got my truck back from jason yesterday, runs 100% better. i am a little skeptical about burning off the carbon topside which he did with some sort of additive, cleaned valves, valve cover etc. i've always avoided additives. so i have a little more time to investigate purchasing new wheels. i've decided on a hummer. i know the gas mileage is low, but it might come in handy when the roads disappear.

thinking seriously of installing OS X on my g3 running 500 megahertz g4 zif chip. if you are my friend please stop me.

packing for weeks away is tricky for me, i really resist the whole thing. i take lots of meds, whole back up for insulin pump, and now stuff for false teeth. check and double check all this stuff because without it i can run into real unpleasantness. kit includes manuals, replacement parts. i just got replacement for blood glucose meter yesterday, working fine, have to send old meter back today, along with pictures i owe folks.

i'm assembling small portable watercolor bundle also because 3 weeks is a long time to go without splashing around pigments.

after i dropped off truck i walked 2 miles back to home, very pleasant, no problem. Instituting daily 30 minute walk right now. i walk and talk better when the weather is cool, cold, or frozen.

when the election occurs i'll be in arizona, a very different neck of the woods. i already voted, straight democratic ticket. not because they will save the country, the past 6 years they have blown it for the same reasons bush has blown it: too isolated, too rich, too greedy. members of the oligarchy which wouldn't be so bad if the oligarchy was allowed to wonder around in the world most of us inhabit, but they are not allowed to do this. somehow it contaminates them and their fellow oligarchics can smell it.

i voted the way i did because it might serve as a small bump on the road the corporate owners of our world are traveling. a small delay. which can then with luck be used to derail the whole anachronistic bubble. so if the dems win - and there are no republikan tricks - take a deep breath and get ready to engage, be involved, transcend and include, put yourself on the line, you have been robbed of your birthright, your time, and most likely your soul is in hiding, hunkering down. and as adverse to confrontation as i am, living on an earth owned by greedheads is non-optional for me and you too i bet whether you know it or not.

mmm...

vote straight democratic ticket.

it will slow down just a tad the draconian oligharchy waiting in the wings. and just a little time might allow some clarity of thought and vision on the part of the human race, without which ain't nothin good gonna happen. and it won't happen quick.

i am a little off kilter lately. wear and tear. more in good time...

let's see. can i post?

oh yes. but is my post displayed?

if you don't see this the answer is no. if you do see it i suppose i should make some observation or string some words together, but hey, one step at a time.

this morning's glyph seems to me to indicate that i should post "06 election manifesto"> so maybe i will. if i can write it.

yesterday morning i did volunteer shift for phone bank of local volunteer this was a stretch for me because i have this funny thing about phones. as far as sampling the ambiance it was pleasant and interesting to be among such well-informed folks, they (we) have it together and good attitudes besides.

i found out that i was included in the footage CNN ran at 5 last tuesday, "broken promises". i think i was one of the extras, wasn't interviewed which is probably just as well.

a piece of watercolor i've been trying to salvage. it is not a metaphore, but if it was i'd be tempted to say a piece of life i've been trying to... etc.

yesterday i voted, shopped for food, ran a few errands, picked up a load of books at library and missed the showing of CNN hour long feature at 8 pm which may have featured some footage taken a few weeks back at Asheville drinking liberally.

one of the books i came home with is
female chauvinist pigs: women and the rise of raunch culture. i never heard of it before, it was published last year. i am hoping it is a clear exposition of a disturbing trend - to me - that i have been trying not to notice.

another glimpse from the parkway last week.

yesterday was a continual bounce from painting a watercolor, bigger than usual, and as usual a landscape i made up as i went. altho i enjoy working this way, there is no doubt that the conventional wisdom that planning and composition is necessary for this medium. maybe next time I'll try it.

now for more of my confused, blurry attempt to describe today's electoral gestalt:

discourse of every kind is changing. icons and signs are replacing conversation, and nowhere is this more apparent than politics. (except entertainment, sports, consumer brands, and the lottery).

so the elections have become soap operas, signs shuffling around in dramatic charades. what is debased, dysfunctional and sad is that any conversation is on hold while the circus is in town. (you remember: "bread and circuses">). my wish is that human discourse of old, as imperfect as it was, could play a part.

i was lucky enough to have dropped in on AM radioland sunday evening to hear matt drudge and ann coulter. drudge in my book is ok, alto - or maybe because - he has a strange sense of trends, ratings, style that modern culture deals in.

however ann colter seems to speak only spin. each question is answered with a cartoonish discription of the situation, not an answer. if i can remember one of these interchanges i will report it here. in the meantime i am spending the rest of the day putting some long delayed errands behind me.

above another from the parkway. must get up there - or somwhere - tomorrow. i need lots of ammunition i mean material to work on these coming cold dark days.

at this point in my life i am talking about the winter, not the political, cultural, technical, corporate landscape. the world of brands and institutions continues to expand and be the only commonality among us humans, and if the dems win it will not change that. but it may be a small crack in the wall of "there's me, and i'm not sure whether they are real or not".

today's picture a day keeps the doctor away. a real waste of time, this one. i spent way too much time doing it. but you never know in this realm. my positioni is do it for reasons that cannot be defined, limited, rationalized or otherwise put in some box. accept doing it. the results always rumble into the passed anyway.

so i've got to cut the 2nd installment of "what is really going on in the coming election".

the points to be made go something like this: in the days when the earth was cold, patent medicine wagons plundered the praries. jump forward 150 years and the "public relations" domain has developed from this to the form we grew up with.

today it has continued to develop into "a whole nother thang". think about the name: "public relations". where did this come from? what does it mean?

"public" has morphed down thru history. start with the classical greek "citizen" right thru john q. public, then the consumer, then the audience. point is each includes a larger more diverse/complex crowd. "relations" of the unprecedented numbers (including communication - speech) changes. we are in a new world. voting makes no sense because in it's present context it becomes an economic spectacle, a charade of dramatic typoi, ghost stories around the fire, the assumed basic "good" that must be experienced by all, the world. like christianity, islam, communism, and every other idiology.

what is the nature of ideology (and how do you spell it)? what does it have to do with our present dire straits?

wait a minute, i have to get out of here.

more.

later.

today's obligatory glimpse. last week on parkway south of aville.

i find myself wanting to write about the election. it, or something like it, is headed our way. but the only way to - almost - make sense of it is to include the larger context. and it's a bit too large for me to tackle.

so here is short version of my vision of our voting:

i assume:

that things have changed and are changing so fast behind the veil of our "news" knowledge that to stick to just that, "news", "current events", would be just like shuffling deck chairs on the titanic, only it would be shuffling manufactured, you might even get away with saying "and imposed", signs of this and that, black hats, white hats, smart, stupid, and arching above all these types, "winners" and "losers".

and we get enough of that kind of noise.

so is there a bigger picture?
of course.
can we see it?
mmmmmaybe not yet.

the context of the election is change. wait a minute, don't stop reading (or in my case writing) because by change i mean to say for every "now" the world is different than it was because "now" is new. so every election takes place on a different world.

changed because the input/output of human consciousness has had to adapt, in order to survive. and the returns are not in yet.

what sri auribindo called "the frontal persona" has become the sole experience of consciousness to an overwhelming degree.

take a political candidate. the institution of the market means communicating with 250 million citizens (i'm guessing at the number). an institution can't do that without the technical profit driven delivery machine - media - in which he or she, the icon, cannot use the "personal" mode, you know, like talking at the kitchen table with humans you have history with.

with the false darwinian of "loser loses", campaigns have become gigantic dramas, charades, like two old men at the public square a hundred years ago playing checkers; you could watch, stroll around sit down. background reality.

not the constant and increasing need for the persona to respond, respond, respond. no down time. no time away from the noise machine to let the deeper but unknown source of our existence to waft its way up.

====>to be continued)<=====

this morning's limbic-graph is as usual a puzzle to me. is it art? is it wallpaper? is it the product of someone with too much time on his hands?

the answer to the last question is no.

how does one express oneself today? who is expressing what? more to the point, to whom?

"today" because the who and the whom are in flux, object and subject have lost their place and are wiggling all over the map. metaconfusion. this is good.

but it will be better when the new kosmos settles down to give conciousness a break. in the meanwhile be as confused as you can be, because that will condense the confusion duration and we can come out on the other side, where we are just plain old confused like our ancestors.

received this in email at jamwave.com. from my son eli who is known as "signal boss" over thataway. if you are interested in music check his site out:
http://jamwave.com/signalboss

i spent the last 24 hours in bed, just a touch of illness. dreams, hallucinations and so forth. the usual. not the first time in my life, probably not the last.

photo taken from parkway yesterday. i learned a lot on the fly, mostly puttering so to speak with white balance. this one is a time exposure taken after i drove off from a spot without tripod, so the camera was on a flat rock.

a very strange day.

a really strange day.

but not really.

like any other day.

finally put rollovers up top.

this morning's meditation. light at the end of the tunnel?

at 1 i'm going to moveon.org gaggle, phone banks and movie iraq for sale.

this must be one of those new lows that i hear about. can you imagine? they flutter like malavolent spirits in and out of our embunkered world. i got this after i got back from parkway, didn't make moveon movie. more in a bit.

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this one is a real mess i guess. it was a very active watercolor oil pastel india ink thing. i guess i took a lot of agression out on it. oh well, that is a part of as honest as i can be in this digital domain.

an absolutely gorgeous however you spell it day. i was going up to parkway today but time slipped away so early tomorrow i'll try again.

this morning i got taken by the spirit that has been pushing me into study of watercolor palettes, by that i mean actual pigments used together. it has been eye opening so to speak, the imformation at handprint.com is staggering, and even more importantly, useful to even an intuitive like myself.

another one from nowhere. from a foto i took on yesterday's walk.

a review of my latest (first & last?) book:
Whistling in the Dark: Poems & Pictures -- book review
a word here and there i would have adjusted, but the reviewer and i pretty much agree on what the book is about.

ken nordine's site is working much better than last time i checked. a master of sound and silence. and he's been doing this stuff for years.
Ken Nordine's Word Jazz - "Where Did You Go" Podcast

pencil sketch i did awhile back. i think this is looking out of my dentist's waiting room.

i'm going hitek here. see if clicking here works. if it does you will hear one of the best responses to telemarketeers ever. my nephew jon emailed it to me.[it's not doing anything right now, but maybe the server will catch up so i'm leaving the link.]

i finished a lot of paperwork this morning. i surely resist this, no matter what attitude i try with it. it is like there is a negitive force field around the stack of envelopes that somehow, as i walk towards it ready to deal, spaces me out and i find myself otherwise engaged. i get it done, but it sure takes a long time doing it this way.

my goal is to clean kitchen, truck. today. if i get it done i'nm taking a weeklong retreat that just keeps retreating.

BlogAsheville: "It's Peanut Butter Charlie Time"

i am such a creature of habit. the day just does not start until i post something. above is a small pencil sketch. i think i did it a long time ago in a doctor's office. one of the few sketches i didn't make up but looked at something and tried to draw.

more political stuff & nonsense:

it occurs to me creative novelty is loose in our world. it always is of course. the next minute will be a surprise or else it's the same minute it was and time stops.

but the novelty can be and is at present moment a bad surprise. Institutional world of logos and brands squeezing the life out of "democracy" while usa positions itself as it's source and takes the stance that it is compulsory that the world adapt it. similar to communist era when ussr had obligation to spread it's way of life. similar to christianity when it was obligatory to spread the word.

it is as if the one world must be monolithic, of a kind. whoever has the upper hand, whatever may be in that hand, is compelled to paint the world that color. the entire world.

as far as america's situation, we are under rogue regime just about by definition. remember robber barons? we are now owned by their successors, bandits in $2000 suits. i saw an ad for tv show about lawyers yesterday. they were on the march, facing camera, striding towards it, a bunch of them, methodically and with great determination. it reminded my of the seven samurai, or the renaissance italian mercenaries, determined, smart, movers and shakers. serious.

conditoned bandits i'd say, no idea of where they are or what they are. i heard recently that 5 of the 7 wealthiest counties in usa surround washington. conspicuous consumption has morphed into obligatory style of the powerful. i may be wrong but there is some factoid floating around about the square footage of homes built last year. like everything else in the winner take all (loser take nothing) culture, the preponderance of square footage, (we used to call it living space), is included in huge structures, what is left is spread among the owned wage slaves. and they are the fortunate, the housed as opposed to the houseless. ( i refuse to use the homeless word).

ok ok i changed the quicky i posted below. it was just not me.

of course none of them are. i'm me.

and just because i'm posting this does not mean i'm not in retreat mode. in fact i think it proves it.

beautiful night out. when i was a teen ager i would wonder all over on a night like this. in my 20's too come to think of it. maybe even a night or two in my thirty's.

tonight? ...naaah.

i could say been there done that. but it would not be true because i didn't do it tonight, as me here and now.

saw a thing on PBS last night on death valley. hit you in the head with a sledgehammer beautiful cinamaphotography. the night sky. full blown mutideminsional resonant epiphany holding you at it's exact center at all times, along with entire kosmos. what our ancestor's wore until yesterday.

and the noise machine? (talking about today's snews).

rogue regimes do not go gracefully. if they could do that they probably would have thought it foolish to play john wayne in a part of the world they did not know.

so i predict that whatever happens this will not: polls get closer, election day arrives, the dems take over both houses. and the bandit war generals, the roguest regime of them all, accepts it.

this one zig zagged right out of the old unconcious. a few minutes ago.

i'm checking out for one week, there will be no posts got to retreat.

so wonder around the site, there is really a lot happening here.

had to show off my new tattoo. i did it myself with a safety pin and ink jet printer.

i see etta baker has passed away. for some reason this news item really hit me hard. she was a graceful, peaceful 93 year old lady who played the real blues her way.
"She could easily be called 'Queen' of the Piedmont blues, because she has a grace and graciousness rarely seen."

water runs downhill. in the western states, they say it runs towards money.

photo was taken at roaring forks waterfall near celo.

natural law: downhill.

the new world we as humans are constructing: money.

i was talking with alex last night about art w/ a lower case "a". he was talking about the market. the market is a basic piece of the above mentioned new world disorder. an artist's survival depends on the markets whims on any given day. the thought of refining one's skills, talent and goal into satisfying the market is a dismal prospect in my opinion. the whole ball of wax in the branded culture means to make a living via art successfully you must: be a smoker; or be so technically proficient you can turn out what the market wants; or (and this is the best situation) be lucky and turn out what you turn out and the market likes it.

another aspect of the new post-post culture is "winner take all". that is, the top 5% of any creative endeavor makes millions, the other 95% cannot survive and the wonderful world of day job comes into play.

i've used this example many times so i'll do it again: i heard kurt vonnegut on tv many years ago say that 300 people in the world, and only 300, could live comfortably doing what he does (write novels). ditto for athletes, musicians, poets, entertainers etc. in the culture of manufactured conditioned desires, there is no incremental path to working on your work and surviving at the same time. as in apprentice, guild, etc. this is much complicated by the correlate to winner take all, which is a public persona recognizable by millions, ie fame. i have heard young people, say 20 years old, reflect this by saying they want to be famous when they grow up. as fatuous as that sounds, it is a reasonable statement given the alternative. Notice that they are not saying i want to be a famous (you fill in the noun). the adjective is what matters, not the noun. in other words to be a brand. in our culture where presentation and style of presentation is key, a public persona, a face that is recognizable to the inhabitants of the culture, is literally worth millions.

and this at he same time that there appears to be a growing, vague, but widespread feeling that the personality, ego, personal identification is coming to be regarded as the core problem of modern life. the paradigm of the personality as developing up to the point (and then stopping) where it shuts the door to recognizing, experiencing sat-chit-ananda, the real Real World.

we live in interesting times; may we see times that are more than that.

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.