3.28.2

leaving in the morning for chapel hill where i hope to spend a little time with children and grandchildren. today i picked up a giclee (accent over the last "e", i'll figure out later how to put it on the page) print of five of my pictures, pretty impressive. i'll be using this technique to produce western north carolina landscapes, soon i hope. there are still some missing pieces in my repetoire at this point.

this morning i found the following scribbled on a piece of paper laying around the place; so far i've found over 150 of these things and will publish if i ever find the last one:

a wink of the eye
a flash in the pan
there i was
and here i am

god's odd moments
in between
breath heading south
if you know what i mean

it seems apparent
there's noone there
to answer the door
to god knows where

3.27a.2

last thursday morning i was waiting with my packed truck to meet some folks and caravan down to a retreat in ga. they were a little late, it was a beautiful morning, so i stood outside and leaned against the truck drinking coffee. off in the distance i saw a figure jump down from a parked semi with a beard and a backpack. young man. eventually he passed me and i asked "where you headed?" he stopped and said "the strip".

now this was happening in asheville NC, and the only 2 strips i know are commercial, huge, ugly, sprawling, and uneccessary. which i told him. "no, no" he said, "you know, where the hippies are".

"you want to go downtown", i said, and pointed out the way.

"i read about it in rolling stone", he continued. "i'm from topeka. i was too late for the height".

i thought what a wonderful country and western song might be made of his last sentence and replied "you better hurry".

3.27.2

got hit with some kind of bug: sore throat, crossed-eyes, etc. probably something just "goin araound", like the earth. still can't watch the mediated snooze, i mean news, so not a lot to say about it.

altho it does occur to me that the catholic church shenannigans, the enron mess, the anderson accounting firm brou-haha and all the other institutional melt-downs happening today involve the loss of suspended disbelief by the public/consumer/audience/viewer. the difference between the way it's done and the way it is said it is done is dissolving. not fast enough in my opinion to free up some energy for important tasks like saving the world.

3.26.2

i'm trying to get back to thoughtful (?) observations about our world. maybe that's an oxymoron. two things are delaying this:

1) devolution into techno-marathons involving computer memory, software patches, debugging, digital recording, etc. which have of late kept me locked in front of a monitor; and

2) i've been in the woods and missed sam donaldson last sunday.

from the news i've gathered in the wind (kurt vonnigut called it "visceral knowledge", ie you don't need mediated news to know what's happening) (apologies to bob dylan) i would say:

arafat's days are numbered. it's a done deal. i repeat what i said earlier, that in this day and age the fact that god tells you someone else's land is yours does not justify what isreal is doing. admittedly it is too late to be undone, but an apology is in order to the people they dispossessed and put into refugee camps. after that the isreal could share the land with the people who hold deeds to it, ie palastinians. in fact share their homes. i am not being flip, the palastinians are an honorable people who would respond in kind. sort of like they are doing today.

the saddest thing about this situation is that mediated reality does not include this point of view. so many people, like the "good germans" during wwii, keeping silent. afraid of being labeled antisemite i guess. i'm not and never have been. but fair is fair.

on a lighter note check out Robot Wisdom Weblog. concise, direct, current, informative. what "the news" could be.

3.25.2

made it back from Meher Baba Southeast Gathering in Toccoa Ga. late last night. i camped out for 3 nights, very cold, below freezing. great setting, river, rocks, mountains. trees just begining to bud out. very relaxing, timely break for me, enjoyed both mehera and ursula's talks, thought the guy who played jimi hendrix on a ukulele was outa sight. a lot of old and new friends. stopped on way back in jackson county where i lived when the earth was cooling and had pleasant visit with old friends john and cookie for the first time in a veeeery long time.

3.20.2

it's a hurry up day for me, watercolor class and pack truck. i'll be camping out for 3 days in toccoa ga. i'm leaving in the morning and i'll be back in my world sunday evening, march 24th. meanwhile i just found a whole bunch of watercolors, not sure when i did them.

3.19.2

gloomy day. we're on the edge of all that southeast flooding. spent the morning organizing "stuff" for 3 day retreat out in the mountains later this week. fixed incipient disk problem, it went well thank goodness, no marathon required.

as far as the "real" world goes, i heard a little something about there being no guarantee that the government must be truthful in dealing with it's citizens. works both ways i guess.

3.17.2

somewhere in the last couple of days i have noticed that the govt vs anderson accounting or whatever it's official name is has stirred up the question of how do corporations and people differ, or to put it another way, how are they the same? should the corporation be indicted for obstructing justice, or a few humans that worked for the corporation?

i recall running into the same question when i worked for intel corp., and was astounded to learn that from a legalistic point of view, humans and corporations have a lot in common: they both can buy, sell, own, sue, etc. of course corporations can theoretically live for ever and we humans can't.

the bad thing is that the "official" global culture has reduced concensus-reality to that of the corporate. anything in the human world that once would have distinguished it from the corporate is regarded as unreal, or at least not very important. these things include conciousness, imagination, creativity, self-expression, and perhaps some relation to the invisible world.

3.16.2

going to try some Giclee printing today. i'll let you know how it goes.

Q: "We could also put it this way: What do you know that the Buddha doesn't?"
A: "How to drive a Jeep."

from an interesting and perplexing interview by a new name to me, KenWilber

3.15.2

description for my activities for this week and the near future (from "free will astrology" column by rob brezseny) and before you ask no i don't particularly believe or speak astrology but i enjoy his weekly column.

tinkering = puttering = doing stuff with no fixed agenda and vague curiosity: creative meditation at the speed i'm most comfortable with.

3.14.2

today i'll be reformatting this site a tad. so you may get some funny stuff here for a few hours.

soon i will get back to slightly askew and very much passing comments on the passing scene. like arafat being shoved, possibly terminally, off the world stage by isreal. or the approaching action against saddam. the "emerging contaminants" phenomena.

or the more mundane. when i was in the old folks home at the collage, harvard coop bookbags suddenly became very popular. it was the beginning of people having to have lots of stuff with them as they went about thier business.

years later (now) kids carry backpacks, biz denizens have thier compulsary attache cases and daytimers, the invisible people (read homeless) have their plastic garbage bags and grocery carts, and everyone has a cell phone. the proliferation of "stuff" has become so extreme that you can't leave home without some of it.

son eli's old woodshed, chatham county

3.12.2

modonna of low res heaven
this picture is many years old, so i guess it's understandable i lost the source file and had to rebuild it from index color gif.

no breakthroughs today, altho i did get my emailer back up and running.

quote of the day, many meanings, altho i can't think of one:

"all the business of war, and indeed all the business of life, is to endevour to find out what you don't know by what you do; that's what i called 'guessing what was on the other side of the hill'." - duke of wellington

3.11.2

email is down but by jumping thru hoops backwards i can still grab them. so keep those letters, emails, doodles, songs of glory, and dour observations rollin in and first thing tommorrow i'll fix something, anything that crosses my path, and maybe even fix email too.

ran into an "activist-survivalist" today while working on my truck. she lives "off the grid". i want to relay to you her favorite bumper sticker. it may become a meme (Memes are contagious ideas) if its not one already:

denial is not a river in africa

3.10.2

yesterday was another fun day in the 22nd century. my email totally flaked out. i figured i could fix it without to much fuss, but it's still broke today. at the same time i was attempting to install OMS midi driver on another computer and it isn't quite right yet. on the other hand i finally finished a watercolor i don't like (they are the hardest to finish.) worked on camper, getting ready for a trip in a few weeks. pleasant visit by old friend J.R. and best of all talked to my daughter nicole on the phone.

today is another beautiful sunny day which i will probably spend most of making things right on computers.

meanwhile here is some food for thought i stumbled on:

"He [james hillman] writes that the image, although it is a snapshot of a personally inflected archetypal process, is not static. He quotes Ezra Pound: "...the image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy....a vortex, from which and through which and into which, ideas are constantly rushing."

from an article by Cliff Bostock. Towards a Jungian Psychology of Technology ( 1989, p. 264)

3.9.2

reading "only yesterday - an informal history of the 1920's" by frederick lewis allen. it's about the 20's in america, and was published in 1931 so he was there and memories were fresh. amazingly accurate in retrospect and relevant to today. here's a quote:

"...james truslow adams lamented in the atlantic monthly, 'i am wondering, as a personal but practical question, just how and where a man of moderate means who prefers simple living, simple pleasures, and the things of the mind is going to be able to live any longer in his native country.'" interesting question, only today it would probably be phrased "live any longer in this world".

3.8.2

i'm typing this while i watch folks work in space. and listen to their conversation. since i am over 20 years old this amazes me.

i try to post thoughts, observations, and visuals on this daily log, not too much on my daily life, what i ate for lunch and so forth.

but yesterday i got two emails and had a subsequent conversation that seemed to point out that i was a monastic recluse.

this was all light-hearted no doubt but did give me pause for thought. because i am sort of an accidental monastic recluse. it's time to take time to hunker down, lay low, be quiet. i don't know why. and though i value my friends more than almost anything else, i don't see much of them.

now that i know this, what to do? get out of the house more often i guess, excercise my atrophied social instincts. i guess i need a laptop.

3.7.2

"It may seem strange to imagine the blogging community as a force that will shape the information environment almost as powerfully as corporate media. We learn in the history books about Samuel Morse's invention of the telegraph but not about the thousands of operators who shaped the circulation of messages."
from an optimistic article in Technology Review - Blog This

3.6.2

man i'm so tired i can't think straight. i hope this is not a permanent situation. i know this weblog is scattered all over the place but hey, that's life (literally).

the war against terrorism is an evolution of the war against drugs. the concept i mean, not a war between nation states but between a nation state and...something else.

afghanistan is a part of the world tom friedman calls "the slow world" that he correctly points out will probably not survive the globalization of post-modern capatilism.

the inhabitants can wait. and wait. american troops on the ground there is a tough proposition, a scary situation for the troops. it seems as if their hi-tech arsenal may be too fast, whiz right by the enemy hunkering down in some of the most rugged terrain in the world where they have been at home since g.khan was finally stopped there.

i really dislike the way mr. bush and cohorts are handling this, making radical changes in the machinery of government that the public does not know about. he really hit the ground running with his dad's country club friends who had had a few years to brood and plot. it's all a big secret. need to know. what they don't understand is we all need to know.

we're following the war via standard neo-republican protocol, a sentence a day, the more cliche the better, repeated ad nauseum. it's not a war: it's a secret government plan. and then 9-11 happens and everything is justified.(excuse me for a minute while i gulp down a pill for paranoia).

the 9-11 attack helped bush justify secrecy and maintain popularity.

there is no doubt that some kind of action is called for, but prehaps a slower, evolving action involving personal values and clear discourse rather than wham-bam you're history (forgotten history at that, if there is such a thing. and there is. the 20th century world pioneered it.)

these guys have become a meta-class. you know them. might even want to be one of them. every now and then they slip up, like on the nixon tapes recently released in which billy graham explains to mr nixon that the jews don't know what he really thinks of them, he talks one way to them but thinks they are ruining the country. and mr graham is not nearly in the class of, say cheyney. you hear this kind of quiet discussion at the golf games where the powerful dress up in wierd garb, pose and bluster, drink, wheel and make deals.

i don't like these guys and if the world comes apart at the seams they are the aristotilian efficient cause. something far deeper than this is the formal cause so these 21st c. rubes are being used to destroy not only my world but my experience of myself.

enough babble. here's a quote:

"however entrancing it is to wonder unchecked through
a garden of bright images, are we not enticing your
mind from another subject of almost equal importance."
ernest bramah 1868-1942.

notice the "almost".

3.5.2

5AM this morning i'm either dreaming or listening to NPR or both. a young lady who seemed to have about 5 years in the corporate world and is currently unemployed was talking about how happy she and her friend's in a similar situation were. walking the dog, spending time in coffee shops, gradually disengaging from the american nightmare. time, in fact, was her main point. she now had time instead of the hysterical go-go-go of almost any professional life. it was encouraging to hear this from a temporary refugee from the adrenalized stage-set we in the 22nd century call "the world".

picture of man wondering what's going on in the office

3.4.2

today i spent in the technical realm. still trying to use earthlink who seem to have a major problem with my logon. worked on image archive - it's gonna take awhile. went to kinko's and printed 2 restored photos of my grandfather's for my mother. one was perfect, i came home and just finished redoing the second. worked on a minute and a half quicktime movie. refreshed watercolor palette for 4 landscapes i'll do next.

i don't have much of a life besides this stuff at present. so as far as the economy, the world we have made (largely invisible to the normal mind: it's like disneyland, all the action is hidden), endrun, pseudo-war, and so on i guess i need to poke my head outdoors and "follow my nose" as mr. dylan recently allowed.