just about a perfect day. missed walking this morning but spent the rest of the day catching up on things, health, painting, printing, house-cleaning. i feel like i'm starting to be the light at the end of the tunnel.

[a slight time out.] just turned down going to hear someone play music, can't remember his name. also found out that sneaky pete (think "new riders of the purple sage" and "flying burritto bros.") and garth hudson (the band) are playing at the gray eagle sat so i will go for that. never been to the gray eagle. yet.

curmudgeon mode: one problem in today's life is that first institutions crowded out all human affinity groups, well almost, there are still the street people, the junkies, what the chinese called "the floating life", but mostly by my own middle age the institution was all.

now young and ambitious people want to be an institution, a brand, a commodity. leaves someone like me sidetracked, oblivion express, bring it on.

been an exciting few days. walk in the morning going nicely, replacing medications - stolen last week - going. finished a roll of film don't know when the first pictures would have been taken. hope it's the last one i take i'm going digital.

i've always wanted to say that.

saw collateral with j. this afternoon. i didn't know it was directed by michael mann, but guessed it right away. it's a strangely beautiful film, luminescent, gleams, LA all night long. much better than miami vice, highly overated in my opinion. the new film has enigmatic meanings swirling through. that's a pretty good action movie.

things definitely out of hand. i should have emailed that thing i got on fri. the 13th to ten people because things, life, experience, are trending downward and outward, all with no concious effort on my part.

drew the above last night during a visit with a couple of friends.

i need more grace than i thought.

this week's celestial clue for yours truly. makes sense to me.
(from www.freewillastrology.com.

pretty much slept all day yesterday. not sure why.

my plan for today: continue to lose objects cluttering space. an ancient mac ci and a treadmill are going to go. Somewhere. and i'd feel really good if i could get rid of mountain of papers i have been moving into the living room.

i've been reading James Hillman again. here are a couple of sentences that have caught my eye.

"what is unreflected tends to become compulsive, or greedy."

"psychology usually gives to ambivalence a major perjoritive judgement. it is associated with schizophrenia. as the term 'twilight state,' 'ambivalence' tends to be reserved for a faulty ego. but ambivalence is natural, as the necessary concomitant to the ambiguity of psychic wholeness whose light is in a twilight state."

"and one feels through such experiences that there is meaning, that one is in meaning, that one is personally, individually meant."

nice moody dark misty rainy day. now maybe i can think. or at least brood.

this weblog has transmongrified over the years from commentary to visual stuff. so i'm going to redo it into art first, any gems - or pearls - of wisdom i might have second.

when i have time.

why?

"we are living in what the greeks called kairos - the right moment - for a 'metamorphosis of the gods' of the fundamental principles and symbols. this peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious man within us who is changing..."

there's a lot more, too much to type. this quote is from c. g. jung, 1956, pointed out in puer papers by hillman.

the thing is that this change has affected language to the point where an endless chain of reflexive commentary just adds more weight to a sinking ship: western civilization. we have to come up with a new way to convey meaning, especially to the crowd which now includes the entire world.

i'm working on it.

i've got 15 minutes to post this thing this morning, doctor's appointment i'm on the way to. yesterday was exhausting for me, insulin pump clogged while i was engaged in long drawn out task, unpleasant but necessary. when i got home my blood glucose reading was in the 500's and what that means to those of you that don't know is lot's of insulin, lot's of water, and lots of rest. back to normal by seven in the evening, but as i emailed a friend, it takes the wind out of your cells and i was left with overwhelming fatigue, nothing left to do but stumble around or go to bed. i chose the latter. picture above is straight scan of something i did god knows when but i'm doing it again.

monday a little before one o'clock and i'm ready to post whatever i got to post. you might think i'm lazy, you might think i'm crazy, but don't forget i was up at 6, walked for an hour up sunset mountain, took a few pictures, then walked to uptown bakery, coffee and a scone, walked back, realized i forgot camera, drove back to pick it up, discovered truck wouldn't start, rolled it, got camera, visited a little with janice and a friend who were there by then, managed to start truck and drove home.

ain't life grand?

the picture above i drew at the iris dement concert before she began. ran it thru special photoshop apparatus this morning.

now i'm going to clean bedroom and throw out stuff until three when i drive my truck to mechanic who is getting to know it pretty well. i guess i'll begin looking for another one.

yesterday and today we are still in the beautiful weather zone, what a pleasure to be able to open the windows again. and last two night's down to 50 degrees, cool air flowing like a mountain river thru the windows. maybe i can start to sleep again.

spent most of yesterday fooling with needless complications that a strong person struggling with a stronger soul can leave behind them. went to see iris dement last night.

her show ran from about 8 - 10:30, and there were seats for the geezers like me to sit in. she played solo, alternating piano and guitar. the entire performance was shot through with a bittersweet quality. i shed a few tears during some of the songs and don't mind admitting it. the melancholy was real, an accepted part of life, but not a life-stopper. bemusement tinged with the golden light of a late afternoon. what a voice, and what a woman.

it's somebody"s birthday give or take a day or two. and also my grandson corbin's.

i remember 40 years or so ago standing at the sundial near morehead planetarium in chapel hill and reading:

"it's always morning somewhere".

along the same lines i guess it's always someone's birthday somewhere.

last night i went to my first artwalk. i guess what they are is a night the galleries stay open late. aville was in it'd heyday, music all over the place, drum circles etc. i enjoyed it.

this is the first watercolor i ever did, back in arizona around the mid 80's. i like it, a perfect example of beginner's mind. i did maybe 20 the following year, then dropped it. don't remember any being this good. i had a conscious reason for trying the medium, mainly to get as far away as i could from digital artwork which i was up to my ears with working for intel.

lately i am back to bed at 8 or 9 and up at 5. this is the diurnal rhythm i like best these days, as opposed to 45 years ago when i saw the sun rise every morning because i'd been up all night.

tonight, however, prof. sam may drop by, in which case we'll do the aville gallery crawl. if this works out, it will be the culmination of 20 years trying to make one of these events.

and to top things off, there has been a change in the weather: more than a hint of fall. thank god for cold fronts.

my grandson corbin whose birthday is this coming saturday. i made this morning and am about to go out and mail it. his father doug lost his mother this week i am sorry to say. she was a lady of good humor and a fighter.

today will be a catch-up day i hope. the usual round of daily maintenance with a few fun things like finishing a watercolor on clayboard which i found myself etching with a razor and sanding down last night. clayboard is very different than watercolor paper.

listened to rush limbaugh yesterday while on the road. he's scary but the callers are more scary by an order of magnitude. if the democrats don't quickly learn how to use public language they are going down. already the public is talking about

1) flip-flop
2) results count - and kerry spent 20 or so years in congress without "doing anything"
3) tax and spend liberal.

there are an almost endless supply of these language morphs in the republican arsenal, and they will be used. i still think edwards is the man to field these attacks by sound bytes that are sensible and short. talk straight. for instance redefine "liberal" as an honorable tradition which accomplished etc etc, but whose effectiveness, like all methods or techniques, is no longer what it was, take the best from it and up date the rest.

this picture i was glad to find during great kleenup extravaganza. i drew it in india ink while living with my wife and 4 children at big ridge, jackson county, western NC mountains, around 1975.

at that point i had not picked up a pencil for probably ten years. no drawing or painting, i had completely forgotten there was such a thing. one winter night i got the urge to try it, rounded up what materials i could - if memory serves, i drew it on a shirt cardboard. while monkeying around i noticed a newspaper on the floor. the page i saw had an advertisement for a rug company, and pictured a rug with a design similar to the picture i drew. i stayed up nearly all night doing it, and the next day drew another one. this was the beginning of a long period which has lasted the rest of my life discovering and rediscovering how important it is for me to create "art" with a lower case "a".

seven in the morning. got up at 5 and created the above, i don't know what it is or means.

missed friends meeting yesterday, took a long morning walk and didn't get back until a quarter to ten, when the meeting starts. stayed home until 1:30, doing this and that, tweaking computer and reconstructing the address book i carry around and lost a few weeks ago.

drove out to the reitzle's where bev helped to clean batik i found a few weeks ago. it now looks really great. it's a depiction of buddha that had not been very well treated over the last 39 years since i got it.

this week should be a light one, i plan to stay here most of the week and close out a lot of loose end projects. and rearrange domicile once more, since the big cleanup and throwaway of a few weeks ago, plus the small $66 air conditioner i stuck in small computer room - where it makes the room usable all day, a great improvement - required dismantling shelf full of CD-ROMs, disks, zip disks, and tech manuals.

more and more i am running into folks of my ilk - or maybe i should say cohort - who are engaging in penultimate clean up so as to be ready to leave the scene and not burden their children with the reminants of a messy life. life is messy, right?

been taking time off of reading heavy stuff, now on 2nd mystery book from library. this seems to happen about 3 or 4 times a year.

yesterday... one of those good days when i didn't leave the house except for quick walk in the morning. half-heartedly fooled with a watercolor i screwed up, in general puttered around fixing things. around noon i got into installing walmart $66 air-conditioner in computer room which has gotten so unpleasant to be in this summer during the late afternoon. which meant dismantling rickety wall shelf of tech manuals, disks, CDs and bits and pieces of electronics.

actually it's all coming back to me now, i drove to [shutter] tunnel road mall to buy a cartridge for B&W printer. that was enough.

found a bunch of new silverware in kitchen. either the tooth fairy or ninian must have left it last week. much thanks.

we must be in dog day season now, but for me it has seemed like dog days for at least a month. i remember them from living in the country days where you can't miss them. they always affected me in an odd way and have been doing so lately.

something or another i read lately has me thinking about the presidential campaign. it was to the effect that democracy and politics are two different things, and they are becoming fused together in the minds of the public/citizens/consumers/audience/users we have all become.

anyway moving stuff around to get AC in reinforced feeling that my job at this point in life is to cleanup and throw away. lighten up. streamline.

it happens when you wake up and find yourself surrounded by the flotsom and jetsom of modern life lived in a trance. i have this compulsion to slim it all down to a notebook and pencil. but then i'd need a pocket knife to sharpen pencil, and then a whetstone to sharpen knife and... you get the picture.

then there is the question of enlightment vs realization. the american tradition of self-improvement has, with the help of a clutch of contemporary eastern thought and depth psychology memes, morphed into the ultimate self-improvement, getting off the wheel. i admit i am a pessimist in this regard. i believe that enlightment, god-realization, transcendence, or what have you (what do you have) does not dispense with dukkha but includes it. jesus suffered. meher baba suffered. the buddha suffered. all sentient beings suffer.

at this point in my life i am not looking for something better to change this situation. a spiritual practice to move on from this situation is necessary, but i believe it is necessary not for the improvement of life experience, but for the sake of something else. and that something else is a mystery, unknowable.

one way to think about it is to consider the experience of conscious living as a dream, but not my dream. nor anyone else's dream. the supreme dream, lila, the play of the divine. the cloud of unknowing by the pseudo-areapogite, 5th c., or the modern update, the cloud of knowing.

meister eckhart: "the eye i see god with is the same eye god sees me with". and my eyes, along with the rest of me, are beat up, worse for the wear, stuck in the conditioned world. our suffering is useful to the kosmos for reasons we'll never know.

any of this intelligible? i hope not.

scan of a batik i got in Thailand a couple of epochs ago. it lay on a basement floor in denver where some huge dog was housed for a long time. since then has been god knows where or why. i recently recovered it and will clean it and maybe reback it out of respect. probably hang it on a wall.

today i only have one quick trip in the truck, the rest of the day i am looking forward to cleaning the house, studio, maybe recreate my lost address book. put in a newish air conditioning unit. finish a water color. sleep. take a walk. the last few weeks have been so turbulent i am looking forward to sitting awhile.

ran across this in a mystery i am reading - break from jung - the narrows by michael collins:

"everybody counts or nobody counts."

here's today's metaDoodle. it looks like i'm feeling a little better.

i seem to be tiptoeing up into a new relationship with these things. not only creating them, or to put it more accurately, letting them thru, but living them in an obscure way i can not explain. creativity is the royal road for me, but it is necessary but not sufficient.

saw edwards last nite, thought he did great. what i've seen has been on PBS and i have to say i think the commentary has really missed the point. carter, boxer, the new black guy whose name has not settled into my brain, kerrys wife whose name ditto, and edwards all sailed right over the commentator's heads. as a friend remarked to me, there was some speaking from the heart and they didn't get it. i think all modern peasants might. hope so.

"politics and democracy are entirely different things."
from This Modern World

thanks to jim for pointing this link out. i guess it's the most cogent of all the convention blogs, but then what else would you expect from mr. tomorrow.

well this picture popped out of my head recently, sometimes ugliness is helpful. apparently my unconcious is busy with some unpleasant but helpful tasks. hope it knows what it's doing. i don't.

another new meta-doodle, fresh from the fevered mind of mine. this was done with water soluble colored pencils and probably some other stuff i don't quite recall.

so now that that is done i can start my "real" day which will be a lot of shopping. i'll grit my teeth and sail into the commercial zones. this is one activity where my non-contemporary slowness really disappears, i'm in and out of the stores real fast. holding my nose and breath as long as i can.

saw jimmy carters speech last night and loved it. i think he gave the dems all the memes they need to win. to fight a war you need to fight the enemy, not the object of a personal vendetta or a with a theoretical plan made years before the enemy attacked.

it appears my 12 year old 17" monitor is beginning its slide towards heat death. getting pronounced waver the first 20 minutes or so i turn it on.

on another subject entirely, the more i find out about the woman i was entangled with awhile back the more the itch for revenge rears its ugly head. i absolutely will not scratch it, but it's a new feeling for me so i am experiencing what a lack of compassion and empathy can do to a person. just a personal blip. i am blessed with no desire to spend any time with it since i am at least half a holy fool who can be fooled some but not all of the time.

umm...the above paragraph shows a little spiritual hubris. to better express what i mean maybe i should simply say it ain't my way.