I'm not deliberately withdrawing from the world as much as I'm just losing interest. I don't get mutually excited with other people about the stuff that gets them going. I ran across this porn site that had free videos I could look at just by clicking on them. It wasn't that long ago that watching naked people having sex together would have glued me to my monitor. Now, I get bored pretty fast, and surf on to find something to watch that interests me. My opinion about sex not even moving me around and exciting me anymore is that if sex can't motivate me, just what the hell will?
I don't watch much television, and when I do it's old folks stuff. I haven't been to the movies in years. I don't listened to recorded music, and don't go to where any live music is playing. External activity designed by professionals to emotionally stimulate me is either stupid or boring. Why would I give these people a shot at upsetting my peace and quiet? All I have to do to avoid them is not give them money.
It's difficult for me to get motivated to practice playing the piano anymore because most of the thoughts I have entertained about playing music ends up with me having sex with somebody. Why else would i use music to stir people up? My playing the scales is an intellectual pursuit, and anybody who has read my crap for a while has got to have noticed my interpretation about the true dynamics of "Curiosity kills the cat" means that when I get curious about what life means to a woman, it usually kills her interest in having sex with me.
If a woman indicates some initial interest in having sex with me, intellectual discussions tend to destroy that interest every time. No blame. Sex is just not that complicated. It's what couples do to make babies. Any deviation from procreation as the real purpose for people having sex together is open for discussion though, and it's my loss of interest in the kinky side of things that worries me into thinking the thrill is dead and gone. Now what?
What's left from the treasures I've stored on Earth to interest anybody into being with me or around me for any reason, since love and/or money is not that much a part of my life to draw people's interest toward me at all. I don't want nothing they got that they treasure, and I got nothing they want to give themselves up to me for.
Sex and money are opposites in the Zodiac. They're represented by Scorpio and Taurus. In my natal chart the Sun and Moon inhabit Taurus, and my Ascending Sign on the eastern horizon is Scorpio. A person's life long goal are represented in astrology by the placement of the Sun in the natal chart. In my case, Taurus. One's day to day goals in life are represented by the Sign intercepted by the first house (eastern horizon), and in my natal chart it's Scorpio. My life goals and my daily goals are in direct opposition by Sign and degree.
I never had no money to speak of. Especially disposable cash. I have had a lot of sex partners. Hundreds at least, thousands perhaps, if the truth were known. That all ended when I had a vasectomy and lost my second wife. She emasculated me and then left me high and dry. No blame. I too have sinned.
That was then, this is now. I've only had a few sexual partners since 1982, and what happened between us wasn't a powerful enough experience to keep us together, and in each case, our breaking up was directly attributable to my abject apathy. Now that sex nor money play a positive role in my life, I seem to be at my wit's end. I got no reason to do what used to interest me about living.
I've studied and mastered a lot of rituals that appear to allow me to manipulate people to get what I want from them. That scares the hell out of a lot of people about me. It doesn't seem to make them more comfortable when I ask them to point out what I've gained from my ability to induce a state of lust and wanting in them. I call for habeas corpus. Where's the bodies? Where are my victims to offer testimony against my evil ways. It's not there for them to point to. I just learned that stuff to protect myself against the other using me that way.
Little did I know that other people seem to think they're as gullible as I think I am. That we're all on board the ship of fools. If I would have realized that other people felt as victimized by life as I have, I wouldn't have had to jump through all those hoops I did to learn how to recognize the other's misdirection.
One of the other things about life I seem to have been pretty stupid about was that it usually wasn't the other people using me as a dupe as much as I volunteered for it just to see what happened next. There's been a lotta that. Having sex with another person out of mere curiosity instead of truly desiring them as an individual has probably been the bane of my ex-is-tense.
As noted above, however, none of that mess has been going on for a very long time. The vasectomy did not remove my ability to become aroused or perform in some adequate manner. Indifference did. Snipping my vas differens into and suturing them off made a vas-t differen-ce in my attitude toward recreational sex. I couldn't get a woman pregnant. What's the point? I felt like a ghoul. Using people's need for procreation to take advantage of them. It doesn't seem to have made any differens that they wanted me to. With the current question being: What now?
Taurus and Scorpio are only two of the twelve signs. Each of them have their own special interest and direction. I've dabbled in all the various pathways and toyed with the other's archetypes. I don't get any satisfaction from indulging what's left of my curiosity. I seem to be on felix's ninth life, and when this one's over. That's that. Praise God!
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
Saturday, May 31, 2008
Friday, May 30, 2008
Keeping A Job Is More Expensive Than It's Worth
Scott McClellan coming out of the Bush closet is a little surprising to me, but I might have done the same thing for several reasons. Money, for the first part. If you're gonna run the risk of getting ham-hocked by the Bushies, I'd wanna have a healthy Swiss bank account to compensate me for my troubles.
The second thing is that this whole thing could blow up in the Bush administration's face like Watergate did, and I'd wanna choose sides before it happens. John Dean's prison sentence was a lot less than the other members of the Nixon staff because by being the first rat to jump ship he provided himself with a negotiating stance.
If that's what McClellan's doing by writing this book, that is, providing himself with a leg to stand on and to stay outta prison for war crimes, then I don't blame him one bit for watching out for himself, and doing it first.
I know better than to believe what I read on the internet, but there has been some pretty interesting articles about how the FBI is investigating what these idiots have done, and possibly charging them with war crimes. If it's true, this could get nasty, and guaranteed to finally put O.J. Simpson in the small print on the back pages forever. Telling the world that woman was a spy was about as low as anybody can go politically. How can anybody trust somebody that would do that to their own people?
Which brings me back to Nancy Polosi's statement that there would be no impeachment trial by the House of Representatives. But, then again, if the Bush Administration is indicted for war crimes, she gets to be the President of The United States without running for office. She can't really be blamed for appearing to being noble for the time being.
I especially don't trust the traditional press to report the truth. They sold out years ago. They have been bought up by the military-industrial complex and the correspondents are pwned by corporate policy. Just like the medical profession has been bought out by the pharmaceutical companies. America is just screwed because it's morals and ethics are now non-existent.
I don't know whether to say I was born at a good time for America or not. I was young and vital at it's greatest heights in the latter decades of the 20th Century. In my opinion, I could not have lived as a bum the way I have in the world America has come to. I turned 60 years old in 2001, The Space Odyssey. I became an old man at the same time America lost it's innocence forever. That's pretty good timing as far as I'm concerned. "Life is a beach, and then you die." has been true for me.
Granted, the hobos and bums during the Depression back in the 20's and 30's of the last millennium wandered around all over the country like I have, but it was much rougher than I had it. When I rambled around the country again and again America was in it's economic hay day, and gas was less than fifty cents a gallon. When I went to the beach after the Junior/Senior prom, gas was an outrageous .17 cents a gallon. Sure, wages were much lower too, but I only worked if I couldn't get out of it, and pretty much never have. In the past, I think I was remarkably proficient at being out of sight and out of mind.
The situation for nomadic types might not be as terrible as the gas prices suggest it might be. I got picked up hitch-hiking basically by two types of people. People with a lotta money, and very poor people at the bottom of the economic ladder. The in betweenness, the middle-class people, were the least likely to give me a ride. They're the ones that will be hit the hardest by this recession (and possible depression), so as far as the nomads and bohemian wanderers are concerned, they'll only suffer from the poorest of the poor not being out on the road anymore.
The rich people will still do it. Why would they not? A bum standing by the road is the perfect setup for moneyed people to feel like regular people with, and they're easy to convince to go some different place than they first intended. I thought it would be the newly rich who would give me a ride, but it was both new money and old money people that would pick me up. The real difference was that it was more difficult to tell old money from new money, because old money dressed like bums themselves a lot, and most of the time drove older cars.
Sometime I claim to have unknowingly taken a vow of poverty. I still think it's kinda true. But, maybe the real reason I try to get by on wot's sot before me Is that it's the easy way out. Only really rich people and really poor people have much a choice about being a consumer as an enforced avocation or not. Have you ever given any serious thought to how much money it takes just to keep a job?
The second thing is that this whole thing could blow up in the Bush administration's face like Watergate did, and I'd wanna choose sides before it happens. John Dean's prison sentence was a lot less than the other members of the Nixon staff because by being the first rat to jump ship he provided himself with a negotiating stance.
If that's what McClellan's doing by writing this book, that is, providing himself with a leg to stand on and to stay outta prison for war crimes, then I don't blame him one bit for watching out for himself, and doing it first.
I know better than to believe what I read on the internet, but there has been some pretty interesting articles about how the FBI is investigating what these idiots have done, and possibly charging them with war crimes. If it's true, this could get nasty, and guaranteed to finally put O.J. Simpson in the small print on the back pages forever. Telling the world that woman was a spy was about as low as anybody can go politically. How can anybody trust somebody that would do that to their own people?
Which brings me back to Nancy Polosi's statement that there would be no impeachment trial by the House of Representatives. But, then again, if the Bush Administration is indicted for war crimes, she gets to be the President of The United States without running for office. She can't really be blamed for appearing to being noble for the time being.
I especially don't trust the traditional press to report the truth. They sold out years ago. They have been bought up by the military-industrial complex and the correspondents are pwned by corporate policy. Just like the medical profession has been bought out by the pharmaceutical companies. America is just screwed because it's morals and ethics are now non-existent.
I don't know whether to say I was born at a good time for America or not. I was young and vital at it's greatest heights in the latter decades of the 20th Century. In my opinion, I could not have lived as a bum the way I have in the world America has come to. I turned 60 years old in 2001, The Space Odyssey. I became an old man at the same time America lost it's innocence forever. That's pretty good timing as far as I'm concerned. "Life is a beach, and then you die." has been true for me.
Granted, the hobos and bums during the Depression back in the 20's and 30's of the last millennium wandered around all over the country like I have, but it was much rougher than I had it. When I rambled around the country again and again America was in it's economic hay day, and gas was less than fifty cents a gallon. When I went to the beach after the Junior/Senior prom, gas was an outrageous .17 cents a gallon. Sure, wages were much lower too, but I only worked if I couldn't get out of it, and pretty much never have. In the past, I think I was remarkably proficient at being out of sight and out of mind.
The situation for nomadic types might not be as terrible as the gas prices suggest it might be. I got picked up hitch-hiking basically by two types of people. People with a lotta money, and very poor people at the bottom of the economic ladder. The in betweenness, the middle-class people, were the least likely to give me a ride. They're the ones that will be hit the hardest by this recession (and possible depression), so as far as the nomads and bohemian wanderers are concerned, they'll only suffer from the poorest of the poor not being out on the road anymore.
The rich people will still do it. Why would they not? A bum standing by the road is the perfect setup for moneyed people to feel like regular people with, and they're easy to convince to go some different place than they first intended. I thought it would be the newly rich who would give me a ride, but it was both new money and old money people that would pick me up. The real difference was that it was more difficult to tell old money from new money, because old money dressed like bums themselves a lot, and most of the time drove older cars.
Sometime I claim to have unknowingly taken a vow of poverty. I still think it's kinda true. But, maybe the real reason I try to get by on wot's sot before me Is that it's the easy way out. Only really rich people and really poor people have much a choice about being a consumer as an enforced avocation or not. Have you ever given any serious thought to how much money it takes just to keep a job?
Thursday, May 29, 2008
The Earth Is A Black Hole
I don't know if the miniscule relief I get from taking these huge doses of ibuprofen is worth the numbness of my brain. I may have to seek some medical help to deal with this crap. Not writing and not playing the piano doesn't help. I thought that if i kicked back from doing what I normally do it would give things a chance to heal, but that's not happening. I don't know the medical terms to describe what I'm experiencing. My wrists, shoulders, and hand hurt whether I move them or not. If I were a child I would be weeping constantly. I'm not a child. I know that weeping would only be silly. It wouldn't make me feel any better.
The only real reason I haven't gone to a doctor with my problem is that I know their response will be to act as the agent of the pharmaceutical companies and get rid of me with drug that will numb my brain even more so.
I'm not going to be able to ignore this pain and act like it'll be better in the morning. It MIGHT be better in the morning, but it might not too. I'm not much in the mood to be sitting around hoping a good night sleep will take care of business. I ain't Lil Orphan Annie. Tomorrow ain't here yet.
I feel like the Greek guy who was forced to swallow hemlock and murder himself. He described death approaching from his feet up. This problem is not new with me. It's been around for a while. I've had this pain in my wrists so bad I couldn't turn the handle on a door knob before. I started playing a djembe drum and about that time it went away. I hoped that would work again. It has not. I think I described how the problem in my feet was in about the same area that was covered by a regular pair of socks. It's moved up. Death is now approaching my knees.
Maybe it's something different than what I figured. My friend Rainey has a back problem. It's something similar to a ruptured disc that he's had some success in controlling the pain without surgery. We exchanged e-mails last night, and it seems like he's having a flare-up with his back. He's taking a bunch of Moltrin with about the same success I'm not having with the ibuprofen. I'm hoping for both our sakes, and for the sake of all the people in the world, that whatever is responsible for this pain will find another planet to visit. Vamoose... Bitch!... and let me be. Fat chance... eh?
One of my great curiosities has been about what kind of person I might become if I got addicted to a drug like heroin (Hero wine). It's been a while since I thought about that. My age is showing. Heroin addict is small time compared to crack and crank. We had a family member who got strung out on crack and methodically robbed everybody in the family. I guess my own curiosity would be if I was capable of such dastardly deeds.
I think the answer is no. I'm just too good a beggar for things to ever get that far. I've never had to rob people to get what i wanted from them. I sort of feel cheated that I've never been that driven to take people's stuff out of sheer desperation. Either I could talk myself out of doing it or talk them into just giving it to me outright to stop me from trying to sell them my non-existent, oldest male child. When I get desperate, I got no shame.
The term "shaman" has returned to my writing by the association I made with it through the idea of healing as it pertained to shame. All healing is a healing of shame. I write to be my own physician. Why would I not?
I just wrote a post to the Thomas group in which I found myself writing that the Earth is a black hole and having a body here is proof positive that I'm well past the event horizon that was my final chance for escape. Now, it seems, captain of my fate or no, I'm going down with the ship.
The only real reason I haven't gone to a doctor with my problem is that I know their response will be to act as the agent of the pharmaceutical companies and get rid of me with drug that will numb my brain even more so.
I'm not going to be able to ignore this pain and act like it'll be better in the morning. It MIGHT be better in the morning, but it might not too. I'm not much in the mood to be sitting around hoping a good night sleep will take care of business. I ain't Lil Orphan Annie. Tomorrow ain't here yet.
I feel like the Greek guy who was forced to swallow hemlock and murder himself. He described death approaching from his feet up. This problem is not new with me. It's been around for a while. I've had this pain in my wrists so bad I couldn't turn the handle on a door knob before. I started playing a djembe drum and about that time it went away. I hoped that would work again. It has not. I think I described how the problem in my feet was in about the same area that was covered by a regular pair of socks. It's moved up. Death is now approaching my knees.
Maybe it's something different than what I figured. My friend Rainey has a back problem. It's something similar to a ruptured disc that he's had some success in controlling the pain without surgery. We exchanged e-mails last night, and it seems like he's having a flare-up with his back. He's taking a bunch of Moltrin with about the same success I'm not having with the ibuprofen. I'm hoping for both our sakes, and for the sake of all the people in the world, that whatever is responsible for this pain will find another planet to visit. Vamoose... Bitch!... and let me be. Fat chance... eh?
One of my great curiosities has been about what kind of person I might become if I got addicted to a drug like heroin (Hero wine). It's been a while since I thought about that. My age is showing. Heroin addict is small time compared to crack and crank. We had a family member who got strung out on crack and methodically robbed everybody in the family. I guess my own curiosity would be if I was capable of such dastardly deeds.
I think the answer is no. I'm just too good a beggar for things to ever get that far. I've never had to rob people to get what i wanted from them. I sort of feel cheated that I've never been that driven to take people's stuff out of sheer desperation. Either I could talk myself out of doing it or talk them into just giving it to me outright to stop me from trying to sell them my non-existent, oldest male child. When I get desperate, I got no shame.
The term "shaman" has returned to my writing by the association I made with it through the idea of healing as it pertained to shame. All healing is a healing of shame. I write to be my own physician. Why would I not?
I just wrote a post to the Thomas group in which I found myself writing that the Earth is a black hole and having a body here is proof positive that I'm well past the event horizon that was my final chance for escape. Now, it seems, captain of my fate or no, I'm going down with the ship.
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Plasticity
800 milligrams of ibuprofen 4 times a day numbs my brain, but I feel like I have to do something to get the inflammation settled down so my joints won't hurt so bad when I type or play the piano scales. This numbing makes it practically impossible to write in a creative manner. What a drag, man.
It's cloudy outside, and the humidity is so thick that I can feel the heat of my body interacting with it as it touches my skin on my bare shoulders. It even penetrates the hair I got left on my head and on my chest. The heat of my body seems to burn it off as it contacts it, and so there is this constant buzzy feeling where that event is taking place.
Yesterday was the first day I haven't practiced the major and minor scales on my digital keyboard for a good while. Maybe a month or more. I guess i could dig out the receipt for the keyboard to find out the exact period, but that's not very important now. I owe it to myself to stop practicing for a while to see if that helps.
I don't seem as concerned about how the pain is affecting my typing. I've written about all I got to say, and in doing that I have realized just how much more of a fool I am is than I could have previously imagined.
It's easy for me to say that I don't believe I've been intentionally cruel to the people I've encountered in life, but in reflection I'd have to admit that some of the attitudes I've taken toward the other could have easily been interpreted in a way that makes it seem like I intended to be cruel. Sometime, it's just life itself on a small planet that makes life appear cruel, no matter how often I try to be considerate.
I saw this gadget on one of the web sites I visit that has fascinated me since. It was revealed as a spitball device intended for being naughty in classrooms, but i thought it was very clever. It consisted of a piece of stainless steel that fit in the the web of the hand between the thumb and index finger, and had rubber bands hooked up to this piece to use it like a slingshot.
It seemed like just what I need to discourage the squirrels from clambering all over my wooden house. I don't wanna wound them so that they become vulnerable to their predators, just convince them they need to find another place to play.
Yesterday I was at the SuperCenter and saw the various kinds of BBs they have for sale now. The ones that interest me are the colorful plastic ones. I have never imagined that. Plastic BBs, who woulda thunk it?
It's cloudy outside, and the humidity is so thick that I can feel the heat of my body interacting with it as it touches my skin on my bare shoulders. It even penetrates the hair I got left on my head and on my chest. The heat of my body seems to burn it off as it contacts it, and so there is this constant buzzy feeling where that event is taking place.
Yesterday was the first day I haven't practiced the major and minor scales on my digital keyboard for a good while. Maybe a month or more. I guess i could dig out the receipt for the keyboard to find out the exact period, but that's not very important now. I owe it to myself to stop practicing for a while to see if that helps.
I don't seem as concerned about how the pain is affecting my typing. I've written about all I got to say, and in doing that I have realized just how much more of a fool I am is than I could have previously imagined.
It's easy for me to say that I don't believe I've been intentionally cruel to the people I've encountered in life, but in reflection I'd have to admit that some of the attitudes I've taken toward the other could have easily been interpreted in a way that makes it seem like I intended to be cruel. Sometime, it's just life itself on a small planet that makes life appear cruel, no matter how often I try to be considerate.
I saw this gadget on one of the web sites I visit that has fascinated me since. It was revealed as a spitball device intended for being naughty in classrooms, but i thought it was very clever. It consisted of a piece of stainless steel that fit in the the web of the hand between the thumb and index finger, and had rubber bands hooked up to this piece to use it like a slingshot.
It seemed like just what I need to discourage the squirrels from clambering all over my wooden house. I don't wanna wound them so that they become vulnerable to their predators, just convince them they need to find another place to play.
Yesterday I was at the SuperCenter and saw the various kinds of BBs they have for sale now. The ones that interest me are the colorful plastic ones. I have never imagined that. Plastic BBs, who woulda thunk it?
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Tuesday's Rubies
Very lethargic morning. Nothing much got done. I'm taking 800 mg of ibuprofen 4 times a day to get this arthritis thing under control if I can. It wears me out. I take frequent naps. Whining doesn't do any good. I might as well take something that will for real make my lazy since the ibuprofen seems to be doing that anyway. I may even stop doing the scales everyday for a while to see if that helps. Active, debilitating pain 24/7 is no fun. I've tried to convert the pain to pleasure so it would be welcomed, but I'm not having any luck so far.
It's 80 degrees (26.66 C) today in the shade. It's the first really warm day we've had this year. I consider that pretty lucky for Spring. So far, global warming hasn't shown me very much. I stopped listening. Why would I wanna know everything I love is gonna die, and be accused of responsibility? Idiots! To this, I can just say no.
It's 80 degrees (26.66 C) today in the shade. It's the first really warm day we've had this year. I consider that pretty lucky for Spring. So far, global warming hasn't shown me very much. I stopped listening. Why would I wanna know everything I love is gonna die, and be accused of responsibility? Idiots! To this, I can just say no.
Monday, May 26, 2008
Oh, Well... If That's What Floats Yo' Boat
It's easy enough to guess it's a holiday around here. There is not much noise except for the weekend pilots taking off and landing. Airplanes oughta be forced to use mufflers like cars do. It's like having a motorcycle with no muffler hovering above my house. It's not like these assholes are actually going somewhere in their toy planes.
I wrote a post to the Thomas group about my experiences using the float tank I built a while back. Ben took a chainsaw to it and stopped my whining about it taking up so much room in my house. I could have repaired it or reworked it to make it better, but the truth is that the I Ching told me enough was enow, by suggesting I'd learned what i needed to know from that experience, and pushing the envelope wouldn't plant any peas.
The post I wrote this morning reminded me of what was really important about what can be gained from an ongoing process of experiencing sensory deprivation. A predictable moment of transition happens after ex-is-ing in a sensory deprived state-of-being repetitively, if not right away.
The transition happens gradually and rather inconspicuously until it upsurges into consciousness. Something physical happens that's prima facie evidence for the change that follows. Most interestingly, is that the lactic acid accumulated in one's muscles is immediately converted to a harmless chemical, and a sense of physical ecstasy resulting from the lack of weariness in one's muscles can be one of the most joyful things an animal can experience.
It's this physical transition that one tolerates the extreme boredom and ennui one suffers to get to this release that seems instructive. Sound familiar meditators? It should. It's the same result one seeks through meditation.
Here's what happens to bring this physical transition about. I'll be brief.
When you get into a sensory deprived situation and your brain can't update it's current impressions from the ambient sensory environment, the control factor turns up the sensitivity of what conscious awareness it employs at the moment. I've read this control is located in the medulla oblongata, but I might have forgotten where it actually happens. Who cares?
Whatever abstract constructs are being entertained by the thetic consciousness about the data produced by the five senses has to constantly be reinforced by sensory stimuli or it gets erased from short-term memory. I'm attempting to describe the same thing that happens to last night's dreams if you don't indict them for later consideration.
Ideally, the sensory deprivation chamber is 100% dark and 100% quiet. The sensory modality of sight and sound are removed from consideration by physical barriers. That leaves three more that might stimulate the thetic process. The senses of touch, smell, and taste.
Touch can be reduced mightily by the salt-laden water inside the float tank. That's why it's called a float tank. In my home-made float tank I had about a foot of water that had been laced with Epsom salt. Eight hundred pounds (363 Kg) of Epsom salt. That made the heated water I floated in 25% more buoyant than the salt water in the Earth's oceans, and more equivalent to the water in the Great Salt Lake in Utah.
Floating in this solution removes a large part of gravity from the equation. The water is heated to about five degrees lower than normal body temperature, and must be maintained at that temperature. Keeping the temperature right is the most significant problem I ran into for my home-made tank. If the temperature of the water got even as high as my body temperature I started perspiring. If it got lower than five degrees below my average body temperature, then it took heat from my body.
The temperature had to be just right in order to forget it altogether, if possible. The temperature is also a part of nullifying the sense of touch, which "feels" the effect of gravity. The sense of taste and smell are hardly distinguishable in a sensory deprived situation, You can smell the salty air, and if you get the salty water in your eyes or mouth it's a negative factor, but ignorable if you're really after the desired transition.
So, these are the elements which make sensory deprivation so powerful. 100% of the sense of sight and sound can be negated. Period. Most of the sense of touch can be compromised by the above factors, but never all of it. The senses of smell and taste are easily ignored because there is only one source to activate them.
In a sensory deprived situation the brain is not a happy camper. It opens the flood gates of sensitivity wide-open, and it still can't sustain the thoughts it entered the tank with. A human being need sensory input or it can't maintain it's abstract thoughts.
You don't have to take my word for it, get naked and crawl into a float tank. It ain't gwine happen. The active ideations the brain entertains as you crawl into the tank are going to act like old soldiers and fade away if you stay there for more than a few minutes.
For about forty-five minutes to an hour you're gonna be bored to tears. Some people just can't stand this. Apparently, from the response of the people I conned into getting inside my float tank, not many people at all can stand being totally bored for more than ten minutes, and then they panic.
I learned not to stand near the door of my tank when somebody got in it. That door got torn off twice by friends and relatives trying to get out of that tank as fast as they could, and apparently any way possible.
The highly sought transition happens when your brain gets tired of attempting to entertain itself with the objects of it's sensory environment, and turns within to it's own devices. All the lactic acid in the muscles are immediately converted into less irritating chemicals, and produces a profound state of ecstasy. So, here you are, as consciously aware as is physically possible, kicked back floating in unimaginably warm, comfortable water, with the ability to observe the content of your non-thetic consciousness with the patience of Job.
You can learn about that transition meditating. It's just not as easy to ignore the boredom and ennui.
I wrote a post to the Thomas group about my experiences using the float tank I built a while back. Ben took a chainsaw to it and stopped my whining about it taking up so much room in my house. I could have repaired it or reworked it to make it better, but the truth is that the I Ching told me enough was enow, by suggesting I'd learned what i needed to know from that experience, and pushing the envelope wouldn't plant any peas.
The post I wrote this morning reminded me of what was really important about what can be gained from an ongoing process of experiencing sensory deprivation. A predictable moment of transition happens after ex-is-ing in a sensory deprived state-of-being repetitively, if not right away.
The transition happens gradually and rather inconspicuously until it upsurges into consciousness. Something physical happens that's prima facie evidence for the change that follows. Most interestingly, is that the lactic acid accumulated in one's muscles is immediately converted to a harmless chemical, and a sense of physical ecstasy resulting from the lack of weariness in one's muscles can be one of the most joyful things an animal can experience.
It's this physical transition that one tolerates the extreme boredom and ennui one suffers to get to this release that seems instructive. Sound familiar meditators? It should. It's the same result one seeks through meditation.
Here's what happens to bring this physical transition about. I'll be brief.
When you get into a sensory deprived situation and your brain can't update it's current impressions from the ambient sensory environment, the control factor turns up the sensitivity of what conscious awareness it employs at the moment. I've read this control is located in the medulla oblongata, but I might have forgotten where it actually happens. Who cares?
Whatever abstract constructs are being entertained by the thetic consciousness about the data produced by the five senses has to constantly be reinforced by sensory stimuli or it gets erased from short-term memory. I'm attempting to describe the same thing that happens to last night's dreams if you don't indict them for later consideration.
Ideally, the sensory deprivation chamber is 100% dark and 100% quiet. The sensory modality of sight and sound are removed from consideration by physical barriers. That leaves three more that might stimulate the thetic process. The senses of touch, smell, and taste.
Touch can be reduced mightily by the salt-laden water inside the float tank. That's why it's called a float tank. In my home-made float tank I had about a foot of water that had been laced with Epsom salt. Eight hundred pounds (363 Kg) of Epsom salt. That made the heated water I floated in 25% more buoyant than the salt water in the Earth's oceans, and more equivalent to the water in the Great Salt Lake in Utah.
Floating in this solution removes a large part of gravity from the equation. The water is heated to about five degrees lower than normal body temperature, and must be maintained at that temperature. Keeping the temperature right is the most significant problem I ran into for my home-made tank. If the temperature of the water got even as high as my body temperature I started perspiring. If it got lower than five degrees below my average body temperature, then it took heat from my body.
The temperature had to be just right in order to forget it altogether, if possible. The temperature is also a part of nullifying the sense of touch, which "feels" the effect of gravity. The sense of taste and smell are hardly distinguishable in a sensory deprived situation, You can smell the salty air, and if you get the salty water in your eyes or mouth it's a negative factor, but ignorable if you're really after the desired transition.
So, these are the elements which make sensory deprivation so powerful. 100% of the sense of sight and sound can be negated. Period. Most of the sense of touch can be compromised by the above factors, but never all of it. The senses of smell and taste are easily ignored because there is only one source to activate them.
In a sensory deprived situation the brain is not a happy camper. It opens the flood gates of sensitivity wide-open, and it still can't sustain the thoughts it entered the tank with. A human being need sensory input or it can't maintain it's abstract thoughts.
You don't have to take my word for it, get naked and crawl into a float tank. It ain't gwine happen. The active ideations the brain entertains as you crawl into the tank are going to act like old soldiers and fade away if you stay there for more than a few minutes.
For about forty-five minutes to an hour you're gonna be bored to tears. Some people just can't stand this. Apparently, from the response of the people I conned into getting inside my float tank, not many people at all can stand being totally bored for more than ten minutes, and then they panic.
I learned not to stand near the door of my tank when somebody got in it. That door got torn off twice by friends and relatives trying to get out of that tank as fast as they could, and apparently any way possible.
The highly sought transition happens when your brain gets tired of attempting to entertain itself with the objects of it's sensory environment, and turns within to it's own devices. All the lactic acid in the muscles are immediately converted into less irritating chemicals, and produces a profound state of ecstasy. So, here you are, as consciously aware as is physically possible, kicked back floating in unimaginably warm, comfortable water, with the ability to observe the content of your non-thetic consciousness with the patience of Job.
You can learn about that transition meditating. It's just not as easy to ignore the boredom and ennui.
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Naked Emperors And New Clothes
I used to enjoy tuning in to the TV programs on Sunday mornings to listen to what the journalist pundits say what they gotta say to each other. Watching them do their job with the politicians is boring by comparison. I don't feel the anticipation so strong these days. I'm pretty much burned out on politics and hearing about how we're constantly getting screwed by people we're supposed to be able to trust. It never changes. The pundits have taken to playing some form or the other of "I've Got A Secret!" Basically, they say what they gotta say to get their fix of being the news instead of the usual suspects. It's not that I blame these people for doing the very thing they're hired to report on, because their motivation for these scenes is basically their own greed for power.
I don't know what happened to my greed for power. I think I remember having it at some one time or the other. I suspect I just wasn't any good at it. I couldn't compete for power on a level that impressed me, so I sorta gave up on doing it the way I thought was best for me.
My relationship to Key West, Florida serves as the example I like to write about that portrays the undoing of my lust for power came about. The first time I went there was because the Navy sent me there to study about rocket-launched nuclear weapons. The rocket part, the delivery system, not the weapons part. I'd never heard of Key West, for the most part, until the Navy sent me there in 1965. Key West made a semi-tropical impression on me that has lasted to this day.
It was my memory of being there in the Navy that drew me back to it when I ran away from home during my first marriage. Running away from "being married" got to be a habit during that period. People kept telling me I was crazy to do stuff like that, and eventually I took them at their word, convinced myself I could use that role to get out of the marriage altogether, did that, and started returning to Key West to spend the winters after hitch-hiking around the whole country and more during the warm months for about three or four years.
It was during one of those winterings that I met my second wife in Key West. She doesn't have the excuse of not knowing what she got into when we started playing house. She was fully informed of my history of mental disruptions. She knew perfectly well that I was a diagnosed schizophrenic, and had committed myself to the state hospital in order to get out of my first marriage.
She knew full well I was a bum on the streets when she met me. She didn't know my ambitions were a lie, because up until then, neither did I. I did know they were on the back burner, but not that they were missing in action completely. Not yet. Not yet... I did know I was special, but not that kind of special. I especially didn't know everybody was that kind of special, but that they didn't know it anymore than I did. I found out. I'm still finding out.
I've written on these blogs for years that my true lust from childhood was to discover how charismatics could use me to satisfy their own needs, and I couldn't stop them. i didn't know how they were doing that, and my life's ambition was to find out. I even became somewhat of a charismatic myself, but only in order to find out how they did what they did to me.
I never have used my care-is-matic power for evil, unless apathy is evil. It's not that I wouldn't do that or consider myself innocent of guilt, it's just not me to rely on physical wealth to force the issue with the other. I've always been attracted to the empty hands approach. I like having only wit and grit as my only real resources. It's gonna be the death of me. I'm gonna die when all it would take is the widow's mite to save me. Very exciting stuff.
The reason charismatics could manipulate me is the same reason anybody else can be manipulated. The ease with which charismatics cause things to go their way with me is not because I'm the biggest fool on Earth. That's been a very relieving thing to know. Well, that's a sort of lie. I am the biggest fool on Earth, that's for true, but the grace that forgives me is that every other Other on Earth is as big a fool as me. The Earth is considered by at least one writer as A Ship Of Fools.
Homo sapiens have a species-wide flaw. The charismatics manipulated my not-knowing and my unwillingness to acknowledge I can't know my own possibles in real time to jerk me around as it didn't even matter if I knew they were doing it. I did know they were doing it, and because I couldn't stop them despite my knowing is why I felt the shame and humiliation, and why, indeed, I naturally be-ka-me a sham-an. A shamed man. A wounded healer. A man of deep shame. A shaman.
"be-ka-me"? I was thinking of the world serpent some Asian cultures call Ka. One can think whatever they like about snakes, but if you put them there holy sacraments in your body as a path with heart, then you gwine run into snakes in every dimension you make into a "possible".
It's the lack of security we experience because we can't know our possibles in real time that makes us reach for the stars, and into the depths of the universe, if need be. For homo sapiens, there IS no greater need. They will pay any price. Even risk their very life... repeatedly! '-)
The Rolling Stones didn't need to record and sell but one song to have fame and fortune. "I can't git no... sat-is-fact-shun!"
They couldn't shun the fact that we do it all the ti-me without actually accomplishing, ever, what we set out to do. Not getting no satisfaction is a doing from which one learns nothing. "... and I tried, and I tried, and I tried, and I tried... Can't git no... satisfaction."
There was a final phase in my relationship with the city of Key West. I went back down there after I acquired a trade and become a master craftsman. I arranged to get a job as a journeyman with a construction company that was rebuilding some hangars for the Navy at the nearby air base.
The job paid for the condominium some of us lived at, and so I found myself in Key West with a comparative pocket full of money in this town I had spent so many years walking the streets as a homeless, but agreeable bum. The people I knew from before absolutely hated me when I had disposable cash and wasn't dependent on them anymore. Oddly enow, I hated it too.
I love for people with money thinking they can have their way with me. I can usually back up faster than they can come forward. Retreat is a strategy that makes time and space spin in the palm of yo' hand. They keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, and seem astonished they didn't notice I arrived barefooted. The Emperor was naked all along. I seem perfectly willing to allow the other to dress me in their clothes to help them find the child within. You know how it is with children, they can't keep secrets. Only the inner child knows it's own possibles in real time.
The child is the Father of the man?
I don't know what happened to my greed for power. I think I remember having it at some one time or the other. I suspect I just wasn't any good at it. I couldn't compete for power on a level that impressed me, so I sorta gave up on doing it the way I thought was best for me.
My relationship to Key West, Florida serves as the example I like to write about that portrays the undoing of my lust for power came about. The first time I went there was because the Navy sent me there to study about rocket-launched nuclear weapons. The rocket part, the delivery system, not the weapons part. I'd never heard of Key West, for the most part, until the Navy sent me there in 1965. Key West made a semi-tropical impression on me that has lasted to this day.
It was my memory of being there in the Navy that drew me back to it when I ran away from home during my first marriage. Running away from "being married" got to be a habit during that period. People kept telling me I was crazy to do stuff like that, and eventually I took them at their word, convinced myself I could use that role to get out of the marriage altogether, did that, and started returning to Key West to spend the winters after hitch-hiking around the whole country and more during the warm months for about three or four years.
It was during one of those winterings that I met my second wife in Key West. She doesn't have the excuse of not knowing what she got into when we started playing house. She was fully informed of my history of mental disruptions. She knew perfectly well that I was a diagnosed schizophrenic, and had committed myself to the state hospital in order to get out of my first marriage.
She knew full well I was a bum on the streets when she met me. She didn't know my ambitions were a lie, because up until then, neither did I. I did know they were on the back burner, but not that they were missing in action completely. Not yet. Not yet... I did know I was special, but not that kind of special. I especially didn't know everybody was that kind of special, but that they didn't know it anymore than I did. I found out. I'm still finding out.
I've written on these blogs for years that my true lust from childhood was to discover how charismatics could use me to satisfy their own needs, and I couldn't stop them. i didn't know how they were doing that, and my life's ambition was to find out. I even became somewhat of a charismatic myself, but only in order to find out how they did what they did to me.
I never have used my care-is-matic power for evil, unless apathy is evil. It's not that I wouldn't do that or consider myself innocent of guilt, it's just not me to rely on physical wealth to force the issue with the other. I've always been attracted to the empty hands approach. I like having only wit and grit as my only real resources. It's gonna be the death of me. I'm gonna die when all it would take is the widow's mite to save me. Very exciting stuff.
The reason charismatics could manipulate me is the same reason anybody else can be manipulated. The ease with which charismatics cause things to go their way with me is not because I'm the biggest fool on Earth. That's been a very relieving thing to know. Well, that's a sort of lie. I am the biggest fool on Earth, that's for true, but the grace that forgives me is that every other Other on Earth is as big a fool as me. The Earth is considered by at least one writer as A Ship Of Fools.
Homo sapiens have a species-wide flaw. The charismatics manipulated my not-knowing and my unwillingness to acknowledge I can't know my own possibles in real time to jerk me around as it didn't even matter if I knew they were doing it. I did know they were doing it, and because I couldn't stop them despite my knowing is why I felt the shame and humiliation, and why, indeed, I naturally be-ka-me a sham-an. A shamed man. A wounded healer. A man of deep shame. A shaman.
"be-ka-me"? I was thinking of the world serpent some Asian cultures call Ka. One can think whatever they like about snakes, but if you put them there holy sacraments in your body as a path with heart, then you gwine run into snakes in every dimension you make into a "possible".
It's the lack of security we experience because we can't know our possibles in real time that makes us reach for the stars, and into the depths of the universe, if need be. For homo sapiens, there IS no greater need. They will pay any price. Even risk their very life... repeatedly! '-)
The Rolling Stones didn't need to record and sell but one song to have fame and fortune. "I can't git no... sat-is-fact-shun!"
They couldn't shun the fact that we do it all the ti-me without actually accomplishing, ever, what we set out to do. Not getting no satisfaction is a doing from which one learns nothing. "... and I tried, and I tried, and I tried, and I tried... Can't git no... satisfaction."
There was a final phase in my relationship with the city of Key West. I went back down there after I acquired a trade and become a master craftsman. I arranged to get a job as a journeyman with a construction company that was rebuilding some hangars for the Navy at the nearby air base.
The job paid for the condominium some of us lived at, and so I found myself in Key West with a comparative pocket full of money in this town I had spent so many years walking the streets as a homeless, but agreeable bum. The people I knew from before absolutely hated me when I had disposable cash and wasn't dependent on them anymore. Oddly enow, I hated it too.
I love for people with money thinking they can have their way with me. I can usually back up faster than they can come forward. Retreat is a strategy that makes time and space spin in the palm of yo' hand. They keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, and seem astonished they didn't notice I arrived barefooted. The Emperor was naked all along. I seem perfectly willing to allow the other to dress me in their clothes to help them find the child within. You know how it is with children, they can't keep secrets. Only the inner child knows it's own possibles in real time.
The child is the Father of the man?
Saturday, May 24, 2008
Diamonds In The Rough
_
#024 6/8ModernEP
I don't know what the "EP" at the end of the name of the rhythm I'm writing to this morning stands for. It's a strange combination of drums. A double-pedaled bass drum beat intermingling with a firm one-beat-per-measure snare drum hit, and eight softer beats on a small hand drum that insinuates its way throughout the entire process. All done so deliberately it seems sensuous and deep jungly. Like squealing in pleasure as an ongoing, step-by-step reach for the undulating, rapturous, top-shelf reciprocity of the finest, and most memorable sort.
Looking out the window above my monitor I see the stilted green of the new leaves against a gray sky. The clouds are so thick that there are no shapes to distinguish. The sky is one impenetrable gray mass. Somewhat like the color (or absence of it) I imagine my brain to be inside my skull. Gray and green. The green isn't so bright without the Sun shining on it. It's difficult for me to see this green without brightening it up with my imagination. Like looking at a brilliant-cut emerald without a light source to distinguish the edges of it's multi-faceted surface.
It's not like I drove to Arkansas to look at the rocks found there. I've traveled to and through Arkansas for any number of reasons hundreds of times. I hardly ever stop for more than gas when I'm driving or getting put out there if I was hitch-hiking. The last time I deliberately went to Arkansas was to find a cave in the northern Ozarks up toward Missouri to meditate in. I never did.
The only diamond field in the continental United States is in Arkansas. I drove there specifically to see what that is all about. I looked for diamonds. It wasn't exactly a grand adventure. The diamond fields are now owned by the State of Arkansas, and they turned it into a State Park. They charge around three dollars a day to go out to where the old mines were located to try your luck. Diamonds are still found there. Occasionally, fairly large ones as much as a carat or two.
I didn't find any diamonds that day. I enjoyed my visit there a lot. I was by myself naturally. The State Park rangers run a sort of Exhibition Center at the Park lodge, and gave a series of lectures about diamonds at night. The whole deal is organized quite neatly, and I enjoyed getting "diamond fever" a little as I futilely searched for just the right gleam in the greenish colored dirt.
The Park rangers talked about the color of the earth there, and how it's pretty much the same color green and the same type of soil all over the world where diamonds are found. My brief visit to a real diamond field would cause me later on to Google up information about diamonds and diamond mining.
According to the information I obtained using the internet, diamonds are only found in the decayed soil where certain very deep volcanoes boiled over nearly a hundred million years ago. The man-made graphics on these websites revealed how the volcanoes were shaped sort of like carrots that start out small deep in the earth, and gradually get bigger as they upsurge through the mantle of the earth to the surface.
That's why the diamond mines are circular and get smaller and smaller the deeper they dig to look for them. According to what I read, no more of those types of earthquakes happen anymore, so however many diamonds they created is all there will be. If those types of earthquakes happen again, they will extinguish life as we know it, and it won't matter if there are more diamonds formed or not. As far as I'm concerned, it never has mattered.
I was invited as a guest speaker on neurolinguistics programming to a seminar in New York City once. It was a three-day affair in a big hotel located right in the middle of downtown Manhattan. I don't remember the exact location anymore, but right across the street from the hotel was a famous jeweler where they had a bountiful supply of diamonds for anyone who walked in their store to see.
I was surprised it was so easy to walk right in and check out their wares. One of the attendees at the seminar told me to go back over there and look around to find a sales desk. I did, and he was right, there weren't any. If you actually wanted to look at the jewels with the intent of buying them, then you had to go to another part of the building where you would be "qualified" to see if you could afford to waste their time. A visitor could look at the diamonds in the display room, but they were behind bullet-proof glass in cases that didn't even have edges in the display room.
When I was bumming around throughout North America I went to every museum I ran across that didn't charge an admission fee, and some that did, if I had the means at the time. I don't have a clue how many times I've been through the museums on the East Coast. There are some exhibits that simply don't attract my attention, but I always look at any coins or rocks exhibitions available. I don't know why. Seeing the Hope Diamond was interesting, but it didn't mean anything to me, but for some reason, taking the opportunity to take a gander at it did.
I guess one of the more interesting sights I saw during my travels were the regular tourist sights, and particularly the desert scenes. Those areas were so different from where I grew up, their very existence astounded me. The Painted Desert. The Petrified Forest, the Crater in Arizona. Monument Valley. The entire State of Nevada. it took me forever to actually stop when I was passing through the area for the umpteenth time and look over the rim at Grand Canyon.
One of my favorite places to see was Big Bend National Park in Texas. The Big Bend area doesn't impress me with any extremes. The mountains there are fairly small. They're tall enough to shoot the persistent winds that cross the great plains to get there straight up in the sky for thousands of feet, and that makes it one of the most recognized places in the world for glider airplanes.
Big Bend is just a mystery place to me. I could literally feel it's mystery while I was there, and felt it leave me once I got gone. I don't actually know how to describe the place in such a way as to recreate that transient emotional feeling it appeared to spontaneously create in me. I wasn't alone there, but with a woman I loved deeply. Unfortunately, I still do. I ought not to, but I might feel less than human if I were able to stop.
I can stop the drum machine, and just did, because it's raining outside and I love to hear it beat against my house.
Which makes me wonder why the desert area I traveled through so many times fascinates me. If I was wealthy enough to retire anywhere I wanted to, rather than retiring here simply because it's convenient, I might choose northern Arizona. Maybe Flagstaff. It's surrounded by some of the most fascinating natural scenery I've ever experienced first-hand.
#024 6/8ModernEP
I don't know what the "EP" at the end of the name of the rhythm I'm writing to this morning stands for. It's a strange combination of drums. A double-pedaled bass drum beat intermingling with a firm one-beat-per-measure snare drum hit, and eight softer beats on a small hand drum that insinuates its way throughout the entire process. All done so deliberately it seems sensuous and deep jungly. Like squealing in pleasure as an ongoing, step-by-step reach for the undulating, rapturous, top-shelf reciprocity of the finest, and most memorable sort.
Looking out the window above my monitor I see the stilted green of the new leaves against a gray sky. The clouds are so thick that there are no shapes to distinguish. The sky is one impenetrable gray mass. Somewhat like the color (or absence of it) I imagine my brain to be inside my skull. Gray and green. The green isn't so bright without the Sun shining on it. It's difficult for me to see this green without brightening it up with my imagination. Like looking at a brilliant-cut emerald without a light source to distinguish the edges of it's multi-faceted surface.
It's not like I drove to Arkansas to look at the rocks found there. I've traveled to and through Arkansas for any number of reasons hundreds of times. I hardly ever stop for more than gas when I'm driving or getting put out there if I was hitch-hiking. The last time I deliberately went to Arkansas was to find a cave in the northern Ozarks up toward Missouri to meditate in. I never did.
The only diamond field in the continental United States is in Arkansas. I drove there specifically to see what that is all about. I looked for diamonds. It wasn't exactly a grand adventure. The diamond fields are now owned by the State of Arkansas, and they turned it into a State Park. They charge around three dollars a day to go out to where the old mines were located to try your luck. Diamonds are still found there. Occasionally, fairly large ones as much as a carat or two.
I didn't find any diamonds that day. I enjoyed my visit there a lot. I was by myself naturally. The State Park rangers run a sort of Exhibition Center at the Park lodge, and gave a series of lectures about diamonds at night. The whole deal is organized quite neatly, and I enjoyed getting "diamond fever" a little as I futilely searched for just the right gleam in the greenish colored dirt.
The Park rangers talked about the color of the earth there, and how it's pretty much the same color green and the same type of soil all over the world where diamonds are found. My brief visit to a real diamond field would cause me later on to Google up information about diamonds and diamond mining.
According to the information I obtained using the internet, diamonds are only found in the decayed soil where certain very deep volcanoes boiled over nearly a hundred million years ago. The man-made graphics on these websites revealed how the volcanoes were shaped sort of like carrots that start out small deep in the earth, and gradually get bigger as they upsurge through the mantle of the earth to the surface.
That's why the diamond mines are circular and get smaller and smaller the deeper they dig to look for them. According to what I read, no more of those types of earthquakes happen anymore, so however many diamonds they created is all there will be. If those types of earthquakes happen again, they will extinguish life as we know it, and it won't matter if there are more diamonds formed or not. As far as I'm concerned, it never has mattered.
I was invited as a guest speaker on neurolinguistics programming to a seminar in New York City once. It was a three-day affair in a big hotel located right in the middle of downtown Manhattan. I don't remember the exact location anymore, but right across the street from the hotel was a famous jeweler where they had a bountiful supply of diamonds for anyone who walked in their store to see.
I was surprised it was so easy to walk right in and check out their wares. One of the attendees at the seminar told me to go back over there and look around to find a sales desk. I did, and he was right, there weren't any. If you actually wanted to look at the jewels with the intent of buying them, then you had to go to another part of the building where you would be "qualified" to see if you could afford to waste their time. A visitor could look at the diamonds in the display room, but they were behind bullet-proof glass in cases that didn't even have edges in the display room.
When I was bumming around throughout North America I went to every museum I ran across that didn't charge an admission fee, and some that did, if I had the means at the time. I don't have a clue how many times I've been through the museums on the East Coast. There are some exhibits that simply don't attract my attention, but I always look at any coins or rocks exhibitions available. I don't know why. Seeing the Hope Diamond was interesting, but it didn't mean anything to me, but for some reason, taking the opportunity to take a gander at it did.
I guess one of the more interesting sights I saw during my travels were the regular tourist sights, and particularly the desert scenes. Those areas were so different from where I grew up, their very existence astounded me. The Painted Desert. The Petrified Forest, the Crater in Arizona. Monument Valley. The entire State of Nevada. it took me forever to actually stop when I was passing through the area for the umpteenth time and look over the rim at Grand Canyon.
One of my favorite places to see was Big Bend National Park in Texas. The Big Bend area doesn't impress me with any extremes. The mountains there are fairly small. They're tall enough to shoot the persistent winds that cross the great plains to get there straight up in the sky for thousands of feet, and that makes it one of the most recognized places in the world for glider airplanes.
Big Bend is just a mystery place to me. I could literally feel it's mystery while I was there, and felt it leave me once I got gone. I don't actually know how to describe the place in such a way as to recreate that transient emotional feeling it appeared to spontaneously create in me. I wasn't alone there, but with a woman I loved deeply. Unfortunately, I still do. I ought not to, but I might feel less than human if I were able to stop.
I can stop the drum machine, and just did, because it's raining outside and I love to hear it beat against my house.
Which makes me wonder why the desert area I traveled through so many times fascinates me. If I was wealthy enough to retire anywhere I wanted to, rather than retiring here simply because it's convenient, I might choose northern Arizona. Maybe Flagstaff. It's surrounded by some of the most fascinating natural scenery I've ever experienced first-hand.
Friday, May 23, 2008
Walking My Baby Back Home
I'm gonna hafta stop beating my fingers to death on this keyboard. For one thing, It hurts. I just don't have to strike the keys so hard as I'm doing it when I play the scales. Sometime I turn the volume up all the way AND strike the keys very tersely. It's like I'm trying to beat this stuff into myself. I'm trying to beat some sense into me. I start out deliberately playing the scales softly, but soon lose my intent, and only realize when I've reached a stopping point that I began banging away again sometime back. I'm gonna have to play softer to speed up.
I'm aiming to be able to play anything I wanna in any key that seems necessary or true. It's not that i ever expect to get to this place, it's just that I gotta have something to inculcate as a future. It will be easy enough for me to recognize it if I ever get to such a place. A thousand angels will dance on a pin head. The key phrase of this promise to myself is, however, "to play anything i wanna." If I don't wanna, then all bets are off.
In consideration that homo sapiens can't know their own possibles in real time, and that one's possibles are indeed their future, if they can't know their own possibles, then they have no future. That's where the inculcating comes into play. While it's true that you can't know your own "natural" possibles in real time, there is something that can be done, and that something is what makes homo sapiens the rulers of the known world.
I seem fairly amazed by women in their child-bearing years presently. I mean any female able to get pregnant, from the freshly minted to when they can't conceive a child any more due to age. The young ones seem so young to me. They seem to try to look like they haven't had a baby at first, and some of them truly look virginal. After a couple of children their priorities change. In the procreative sense, most girls turn into mothers and not runway models. That's a good thing for all mankind.
I'm aiming to be able to play anything I wanna in any key that seems necessary or true. It's not that i ever expect to get to this place, it's just that I gotta have something to inculcate as a future. It will be easy enough for me to recognize it if I ever get to such a place. A thousand angels will dance on a pin head. The key phrase of this promise to myself is, however, "to play anything i wanna." If I don't wanna, then all bets are off.
In consideration that homo sapiens can't know their own possibles in real time, and that one's possibles are indeed their future, if they can't know their own possibles, then they have no future. That's where the inculcating comes into play. While it's true that you can't know your own "natural" possibles in real time, there is something that can be done, and that something is what makes homo sapiens the rulers of the known world.
I seem fairly amazed by women in their child-bearing years presently. I mean any female able to get pregnant, from the freshly minted to when they can't conceive a child any more due to age. The young ones seem so young to me. They seem to try to look like they haven't had a baby at first, and some of them truly look virginal. After a couple of children their priorities change. In the procreative sense, most girls turn into mothers and not runway models. That's a good thing for all mankind.
Tasting Death And The Ultimate Joy Ride
>>Thanks for bringing to my attention the idea of a burial site in regard to graven images. Now I can't get the notion out of my mind that Commandment meant that one shouldn't worship dead images. Is there such a simple idea behind "worship". What's the real thinking behind the saying, "Thou shalt not worship graven images."? Is the writer suggesting "worship" in the same way as meditation. In meditation, the whole process appears to be about not allowing past thoughts to influence the present.<<
Writing the above paragraph to Isabella on the Thomas list made me wonder the original purpose of The Ten Commandments. After all, the story of Moses ascending the mountain to receive them was just another account of a "peak experience". Did he go up into the mountain to meditate? Lots of people claim to have peak experiences during their practice of meditation. Are the Ten Commandments instructions for living a life of no blame in order to enhance one's meditation practice or to "worship" some graven image?
Which begs the question: Is the term "worship" intended to be used in the same vein as the Oriental religions use the term "meditate"? I don't see how anybody who establishes a long-running practice of meditating could possibly worship anybody's version of a historical persona as their "lord and savior". Only Christianity considers the spirit of God born of woman.
"The persona is that which in reality one is not, but which oneself as well as others think one is." ~ Carl Jung
Thinking or ideating oneself to be a persona exists as the prime example of the species-wide flaw Sartre writes about in his masterwork, Being And Nothingness. It's impossible to literally perceive the persona as not "being" oneself, because nothingness gets in the way. I recommend reading Sartre if you wanna understand that. Good luck with that. It took me months and months. Just getting through that 800 page tome was accomplishment enough for me.
I burned a pile of brush located on my lawn in order to see the pond just down the hill from my house a couple of day's ago. I intended to move it out into the edge of the woods to burn to keep from burning a spot in the centipede grass. I got all scratched up pile the underbrush on my lawn, and my body is hurting from the arthritis, so after a couple of months of it laying there with the lawn getting greener by the day, I decided to burn it where it lay.
After I burned the pile, and it burnt hot because it had completely dried out during the interim of when I cut it and then lit it up, there was a charred spot right in the center of a 10 foot (9.144 M) circle, but around the edges it only charred the grass and it was left standing at the height it grew up under the pile.
I had mowed around the brush pile previous to burning it, so I had a sort of bull's eye spot of maybe three concentric circles in my lawn. There is taller around the outside where the heat only killed the spring growth, then an inner circle where the grass had burned down to the ground but there are hardly any ashes, and then the center of the pile where there are ashes.
I figured to use my brother's riding lawn mower to make it at least smooth across the area of the lawn where I had burned. I expect the outside part where only the exposed grass got burned back to grow back during the summer, but the center part was probably killed down to the root, and it will have to fill in from the outside. It doesn't matter. I live a long way off the paved road. Nobody knows.
Writing the above paragraph to Isabella on the Thomas list made me wonder the original purpose of The Ten Commandments. After all, the story of Moses ascending the mountain to receive them was just another account of a "peak experience". Did he go up into the mountain to meditate? Lots of people claim to have peak experiences during their practice of meditation. Are the Ten Commandments instructions for living a life of no blame in order to enhance one's meditation practice or to "worship" some graven image?
Which begs the question: Is the term "worship" intended to be used in the same vein as the Oriental religions use the term "meditate"? I don't see how anybody who establishes a long-running practice of meditating could possibly worship anybody's version of a historical persona as their "lord and savior". Only Christianity considers the spirit of God born of woman.
"The persona is that which in reality one is not, but which oneself as well as others think one is." ~ Carl Jung
Thinking or ideating oneself to be a persona exists as the prime example of the species-wide flaw Sartre writes about in his masterwork, Being And Nothingness. It's impossible to literally perceive the persona as not "being" oneself, because nothingness gets in the way. I recommend reading Sartre if you wanna understand that. Good luck with that. It took me months and months. Just getting through that 800 page tome was accomplishment enough for me.
I burned a pile of brush located on my lawn in order to see the pond just down the hill from my house a couple of day's ago. I intended to move it out into the edge of the woods to burn to keep from burning a spot in the centipede grass. I got all scratched up pile the underbrush on my lawn, and my body is hurting from the arthritis, so after a couple of months of it laying there with the lawn getting greener by the day, I decided to burn it where it lay.
After I burned the pile, and it burnt hot because it had completely dried out during the interim of when I cut it and then lit it up, there was a charred spot right in the center of a 10 foot (9.144 M) circle, but around the edges it only charred the grass and it was left standing at the height it grew up under the pile.
I had mowed around the brush pile previous to burning it, so I had a sort of bull's eye spot of maybe three concentric circles in my lawn. There is taller around the outside where the heat only killed the spring growth, then an inner circle where the grass had burned down to the ground but there are hardly any ashes, and then the center of the pile where there are ashes.
I figured to use my brother's riding lawn mower to make it at least smooth across the area of the lawn where I had burned. I expect the outside part where only the exposed grass got burned back to grow back during the summer, but the center part was probably killed down to the root, and it will have to fill in from the outside. It doesn't matter. I live a long way off the paved road. Nobody knows.
Thursday, May 22, 2008
A Home That Is One Heartbeat Away
There is no telling how long I can claim to live a normal live when it hurts so bad to wipe my ass I have to take a shower to clean up. I'm becoming like the James Whitmore careactor in the movie, The Shankshaw Redemption. "Just another old man with bad hands."
A while back I wrote that playing my djembe drum had stopped my hands and wrists from hurting, and that lasted a pretty good while. Then, one night while i was undressing for bed the arthritis and carpal tunnel syndrome struck again, and no amount of playing my drum has helped. The ibuprofen does help some. I am managing to get through playing the major and minor scales on my digital piano each day and type my blog entry, but it's the muscles now that hurt terribly, and I suspect it's just gonna get worse. The muscle pain may not be arthritis.
I wrote about my life here in my journal. I don't like whining, but on the other hand, it is what takes up a lot of my day. There may be one positive aspect of taking all this ibuprofen. Some research project appeared to show that men who took a regimen of ibuprofen seem to have less of a problem with Alzheimer's and other dementia problems. This way, instead of getting senile and forgetting that I experience a lotta pain, I can remember every iota of it. Yippee?
#015 PopShuffle 1
Dennis is a guy I've spent a considerable amount of time talking to during breakfast at the cafe. He's had crippling rheumatoid arthritis for around twenty years now. Some days it's painful to watch him arrive at the cafe, struggle to get out of his car, and come inside. I guess I've gotten a preview of how things are gonna go if I continue to live. I've supposed that if the pain got too bad I'd just kill myself and get it over with, but Dennis is much, much worse off than the piddling variety of arthritis I appear to suffer from, and he hasn't done the deed yet.
I'm participating on the Thomas list again. I don't know exactly why. There are not many writers now. I suspect some of the old members will return as the gasoline prices force more people to stay at home to save money. I am staying at home to save money too, but I've been staying home more and more anyway. I'm lucky to go to the cafe to eat once a week now.
I've never had many visitors to come to my house. Its not something I encourage. My friend Ben has been my most frequent visitor, but he went to Kentucky to work on a house he thinks he's gonna move to. I'll be shocked if that happens. He's an Aquarian though, and eccentricity is the keyword that applies to his unpredictable behavior.
What I really like about having this drum machine available is that it's just the percussion sounds over and over, ad infinitum. This PopShuffle beat is one of my favorites. A big part of it is played on the cymbals. I don't guess I've really considered the cymbal patterns much ere now. But, just sitting here writing and having the drum beat playing continuously in the background allows me to focus on them to hear exactly what the cymbals contribute to the whole deal.
If I pick out a part of the drum beat and play it on my djembe drum, then I can listen more specifically to the other parts the drum beat is composed of. Since it's computerized and plays exactly the same stuff the zeros and ones indicate, then the drum beat is perfectly predictable. Not many things in life are. Shit happens. Things change.
I seem to concentrate more on how the scales of the major keys fit with their relative minor chords to help me memorize them mo' bettah. I started noticing how this works while playing the Bb Major scale. In the past when I've piddled around on whatever piano was available to me, I always played in C Major, because it only uses the white keys. Even now, if I swivel my chair around and play some little ditty to amuse myself, it's most likely be played in C Major.
I'm trying to change that a little. I deliberately play the ditty in Bb major. Recently, I've been playing My Old Kentucky Home in Bb Major with my left hand. I attempt to use the same fingers I play the major scale of Bb with to sound out My Old Kentucky Home one note at a time,
It fascinates me to finger the notes this way. It's not easy for me, and seems counter-intuitive. At least for now, but that's the whole point of doing it. I intend to practice playing that song I memorized as a child in Bb until it becomes intuitive. I have very simple ambitions for teaching myself to play the piano. I'm coming to accept that I don't really know what my ambitions are in this regard.
A little something here, a little something there. If I seem satisfied to explore the feeling I get from playing My Old Kentucky Home in Bb with my left hand one note at the time, for the next ten years in a row, if I want to, then it ain't nobody's business but my own. Nobody knows.
A while back I wrote that playing my djembe drum had stopped my hands and wrists from hurting, and that lasted a pretty good while. Then, one night while i was undressing for bed the arthritis and carpal tunnel syndrome struck again, and no amount of playing my drum has helped. The ibuprofen does help some. I am managing to get through playing the major and minor scales on my digital piano each day and type my blog entry, but it's the muscles now that hurt terribly, and I suspect it's just gonna get worse. The muscle pain may not be arthritis.
I wrote about my life here in my journal. I don't like whining, but on the other hand, it is what takes up a lot of my day. There may be one positive aspect of taking all this ibuprofen. Some research project appeared to show that men who took a regimen of ibuprofen seem to have less of a problem with Alzheimer's and other dementia problems. This way, instead of getting senile and forgetting that I experience a lotta pain, I can remember every iota of it. Yippee?
#015 PopShuffle 1
Dennis is a guy I've spent a considerable amount of time talking to during breakfast at the cafe. He's had crippling rheumatoid arthritis for around twenty years now. Some days it's painful to watch him arrive at the cafe, struggle to get out of his car, and come inside. I guess I've gotten a preview of how things are gonna go if I continue to live. I've supposed that if the pain got too bad I'd just kill myself and get it over with, but Dennis is much, much worse off than the piddling variety of arthritis I appear to suffer from, and he hasn't done the deed yet.
I'm participating on the Thomas list again. I don't know exactly why. There are not many writers now. I suspect some of the old members will return as the gasoline prices force more people to stay at home to save money. I am staying at home to save money too, but I've been staying home more and more anyway. I'm lucky to go to the cafe to eat once a week now.
I've never had many visitors to come to my house. Its not something I encourage. My friend Ben has been my most frequent visitor, but he went to Kentucky to work on a house he thinks he's gonna move to. I'll be shocked if that happens. He's an Aquarian though, and eccentricity is the keyword that applies to his unpredictable behavior.
What I really like about having this drum machine available is that it's just the percussion sounds over and over, ad infinitum. This PopShuffle beat is one of my favorites. A big part of it is played on the cymbals. I don't guess I've really considered the cymbal patterns much ere now. But, just sitting here writing and having the drum beat playing continuously in the background allows me to focus on them to hear exactly what the cymbals contribute to the whole deal.
If I pick out a part of the drum beat and play it on my djembe drum, then I can listen more specifically to the other parts the drum beat is composed of. Since it's computerized and plays exactly the same stuff the zeros and ones indicate, then the drum beat is perfectly predictable. Not many things in life are. Shit happens. Things change.
I seem to concentrate more on how the scales of the major keys fit with their relative minor chords to help me memorize them mo' bettah. I started noticing how this works while playing the Bb Major scale. In the past when I've piddled around on whatever piano was available to me, I always played in C Major, because it only uses the white keys. Even now, if I swivel my chair around and play some little ditty to amuse myself, it's most likely be played in C Major.
I'm trying to change that a little. I deliberately play the ditty in Bb major. Recently, I've been playing My Old Kentucky Home in Bb Major with my left hand. I attempt to use the same fingers I play the major scale of Bb with to sound out My Old Kentucky Home one note at a time,
It fascinates me to finger the notes this way. It's not easy for me, and seems counter-intuitive. At least for now, but that's the whole point of doing it. I intend to practice playing that song I memorized as a child in Bb until it becomes intuitive. I have very simple ambitions for teaching myself to play the piano. I'm coming to accept that I don't really know what my ambitions are in this regard.
A little something here, a little something there. If I seem satisfied to explore the feeling I get from playing My Old Kentucky Home in Bb with my left hand one note at the time, for the next ten years in a row, if I want to, then it ain't nobody's business but my own. Nobody knows.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
People
Penny wise, dollar stupid. That's me alright. I've been considering more things that seem silly now that the America's romance with the automobile is over. What triggered this futility was reading just the beginning of an article on where GPS is headed as far as the car industry is going. If you can't afford to buy gas for your GPS equipped car, then what good is going to do to have the latest device that tells you exactly how to get there? That whole industry and all the people who work for them is doomed.
On the other hand, it may cause more stay-at-home moms because they won't be able to afford the gas to take their kids to soccer practice and ballet lessons. Playing soccer and practicing ballet are two of the most strenuous sports there are. Those kids gotta have a ride to the practice areas in order to work their butts off? What's happened to the United States?
The saddest thing about the earthquake in China is the school buildings collapsing and killing the only child a Chinese couple is allowed to have. But, that's not as sad as the government feeling they had to institute those rules in the first place. This earthquake in combination with the Olympics is going to cause Chinese couples to break those rules, and within five years there will be double the number of Chinese people with even less food to feed the original group.
Their own government is gonna have to somehow eliminate their own citizens to keep themselves in power. Their neighbors will have to use nuclear weapons to hold the Yellow Horde back. You wanna have an exciting watch on the six o'clock? Watch what happens when the Chinese take over their own government and grant themselves civil rights such as the Western societies promulgate. Their population will explode. All I can hope for them is that they taste just like chicken, because when the population doubles and triples in Asia, there won't be anything left to eat there, but people.
The craziest thing in America is that they introduced the pill to give women a choice about having babies or not. That was kind of stupid. Women don't have pregnancies to interrupt their periods and so they have unending PMS until they start going dormant.
When there was nobody to fill the jobs the lack of children made possible, they imported people from other places that have too many people, and then educate them and their children, so they'll feel too smart to do the manual labor the natural-born Americans won't do. Educated people don't do manual labor. Right? The natural citizens have been institutionalized-by-law into thinking they're too good to do physical work. Why educate people into thinking they're too smart to do the jobs they were imported to do, and then give them pills so they won't have many babies?
If those earthquakes in China had instead killed 300,000,000 people, in other words, the same number of people as the entire population of the United States, there would still be 1,000,000,000 people left to breed like rabbits in China. I'm not picking on China. There are even more people in India, and no one-child-per-couple laws there. China is more worried about getting swamped by the overspill of people from that region than they are about what happens in the Western Hemisphere.
The logistics I understand indicate that a lotta people are gonna have to be eliminated to make life on the planet we call Earth possible. The numbers get ridiculous. In the last few decades some entrepreneurs have discovered that the coastal plains of the Carolinas would make a great place to raise swine in huge buildings designed just for that purpose.
It soon because readily apparent that hogs produce twice as much excrement as humans do. In this county with a human population of around fifty thousand people they constructed housing for millions of pigs. Soon, the millions of pigs contaminated the ground water so that the coastal plains was quickly becoming a quagmire unfit for human beings to live upon. They might as well have had a nuclear meltdown.
I'm perfectly aware that I might harbor an unpopular opinion, but I'm sorta pleased about the gas prices. Too many poor people with four or five cars sitting around in the yard is like having too many pigs shitting and pissing you outta house and home. If there ain't no gas for these people to need cars for, then they won't need insurance on those cars either. A world with fewer insurance salesmen sounds just fine with me.
On the other hand, it may cause more stay-at-home moms because they won't be able to afford the gas to take their kids to soccer practice and ballet lessons. Playing soccer and practicing ballet are two of the most strenuous sports there are. Those kids gotta have a ride to the practice areas in order to work their butts off? What's happened to the United States?
The saddest thing about the earthquake in China is the school buildings collapsing and killing the only child a Chinese couple is allowed to have. But, that's not as sad as the government feeling they had to institute those rules in the first place. This earthquake in combination with the Olympics is going to cause Chinese couples to break those rules, and within five years there will be double the number of Chinese people with even less food to feed the original group.
Their own government is gonna have to somehow eliminate their own citizens to keep themselves in power. Their neighbors will have to use nuclear weapons to hold the Yellow Horde back. You wanna have an exciting watch on the six o'clock? Watch what happens when the Chinese take over their own government and grant themselves civil rights such as the Western societies promulgate. Their population will explode. All I can hope for them is that they taste just like chicken, because when the population doubles and triples in Asia, there won't be anything left to eat there, but people.
The craziest thing in America is that they introduced the pill to give women a choice about having babies or not. That was kind of stupid. Women don't have pregnancies to interrupt their periods and so they have unending PMS until they start going dormant.
When there was nobody to fill the jobs the lack of children made possible, they imported people from other places that have too many people, and then educate them and their children, so they'll feel too smart to do the manual labor the natural-born Americans won't do. Educated people don't do manual labor. Right? The natural citizens have been institutionalized-by-law into thinking they're too good to do physical work. Why educate people into thinking they're too smart to do the jobs they were imported to do, and then give them pills so they won't have many babies?
If those earthquakes in China had instead killed 300,000,000 people, in other words, the same number of people as the entire population of the United States, there would still be 1,000,000,000 people left to breed like rabbits in China. I'm not picking on China. There are even more people in India, and no one-child-per-couple laws there. China is more worried about getting swamped by the overspill of people from that region than they are about what happens in the Western Hemisphere.
The logistics I understand indicate that a lotta people are gonna have to be eliminated to make life on the planet we call Earth possible. The numbers get ridiculous. In the last few decades some entrepreneurs have discovered that the coastal plains of the Carolinas would make a great place to raise swine in huge buildings designed just for that purpose.
It soon because readily apparent that hogs produce twice as much excrement as humans do. In this county with a human population of around fifty thousand people they constructed housing for millions of pigs. Soon, the millions of pigs contaminated the ground water so that the coastal plains was quickly becoming a quagmire unfit for human beings to live upon. They might as well have had a nuclear meltdown.
I'm perfectly aware that I might harbor an unpopular opinion, but I'm sorta pleased about the gas prices. Too many poor people with four or five cars sitting around in the yard is like having too many pigs shitting and pissing you outta house and home. If there ain't no gas for these people to need cars for, then they won't need insurance on those cars either. A world with fewer insurance salesmen sounds just fine with me.
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Blues And The Lowered Third
I've always wondered if I could be successful at technical writing. Creating technical manuals from the numeric materials the science types provide seems like it would be a real challenge to a liberal arts type like me, How to turn the technical data into descriptions a lay person can understand how to operate a certain machine has got to be one of the more daunting tasks a writer could face.
When I boot up my digital keyboard in the morning it brings up all the defaults it's set to at the factory. The keyboard instrument is always Yamaha's best digital emulation of it's classical acoustic grand piano. It's a very close approximation to the real thing. The default drum beat on the drum machine is always #001 8BeatModern.
I know these things because that's what it says on the LED screen that constantly informs the player what the settings on every aspect of the keyboard. Learning how to read the information on the LED screen takes a while, but it's pretty thorough once it's secrets are revealed.
There are several ways I can change the default drum beat to what I want to happen currently. In each case I have to push on the "Style" button first to make the selection. That done, I can rotate a dial button that manipulates the five choices of drum beats that show up in the middle of the LED screen when I press on the Style button.
The high-lighted middle choice of the list of five available beats is the one that is playing. When I rotate the dial button it changes those five choices. Just beneath the rotary dial are two buttons with up and down arrows on them. If I push on either of those two buttons the selection seen on the LED screen will move up or down to the next category of drumbeats.
Just to the right of the rotary dial there is a number keypad with twelve buttons that are arranged three buttons across and four buttons down. The top rows have 1-9 and the bottom row has the zero button in the middle, with the other two button having a "plus" and "minus" button. They move the current selection up or down one drum beat at the time.
Instantly. It usually doesn't even miss one beat before it starts on the new rhythm. That catches me a little off-guard each time. If I press the "plus" button on the keypad and #001 8BeatModern is currently playing, it instantly changes to #002 Cool8Beat without hesitation. There ain't no moving parts. I can spin the rotary dial randomly, and it immediately starts playing the indicated beat.
That's what I did this morning. I turned both my computer and the keyboard on. They're set adjacent to each other so that all I have to do to address one or the other is swivel my chair forty-five degrees. After I'd gone into the kitchen and turned the coffee pot I'd prepared last night on to brew, I came back out of the kitchen and pressed the Style button, randomly spun the rotary dial and pressed the Start/Stop button. I was surprised to recognize the name of drum beat that started playing. #015 PopShuffle. I seem to like any of the beats that have "Shuffle" in their title.
The fact that I'm recognizing some of these beats is interesting to me. As I've mentioned several times, percussion is the one area of music with which I'm the least familiar. The biggest problem i had while playing in the high school band was keeping count so I would know when to play my part at the right time.
I can't say I really know why I bought that djembe drum. I saw it in the display window of a music store I passed by down in Wilmington on the corner of Front Street and Third. I liked the image when I imagined myself playing it. I suspect impulsively buying it was some sort of attempt to strengthen my weakness in percussion, but there are extenuating circumstances that point toward shamanism. Drumming is one way of dealing with shame. That's why there are sha-men. I sho' am that, and more sure of myself in this regard as I go along. Like everything else, man, it's just another rap, and I really, really like words.
I'm a little bit at loose ends these days. It's difficult to think futuristically about music when my hands are showing me more persistently than ever that this grand scheme can disappear in a heartbeat due the the pain I'm experiencing with arthritis and carpal tunnel syndrome. I'm trying to play through it, but there's always the chance that it might not go away. It has before.
Playing the scale of G minor has been a trial for me. I start the scale out on the bass end of the keyboard on G with the pinkie finger on my left hand and my thumb on my right hand. Theoretically, I should move up the keyboard playing the notes of the G minor scale until I reach the treble end of the keyboard and play G with the thumb on my left hand and my pinkie finger on my right hand.
Just the opposite as I started the scale out, and just like it's supposed to be. Right? So why do I go back down the scale and finish it with the ring finger on my left hand and the index finger on my right hand, and I've done everything right in between. This would be a lot easier if I had a piano teacher who could, if nothing else, answer me questions about things like this. I'm pretty sure it has to be this way.
The part of doing this presently that fascinates me (and embarrasses me too, because it's soooo rudimentary) is that I'm beginning to connect with the reality that the relative minor of each major scale uses the same sharps and flats. Something about playing the black keys the way they're interspersed with the white keys in G minor seems a little confusing. Intellectually I can figure which keys to press down and with which finger, but it hasn't felt right. In some way it seems counter-intuitive.
I 'know" the key of G minor uses the same black keys of Bb Major, but for reason I hadn't "seen" my fingers reaching to use that same note (piano key) pattern. I was pretty familiar with the notes used to perform the scale of Bb Major before I started learning the scales, because the blues song Adam's Apple that I memorized the chords to was done in Bb Major.
That's a little disconcerting to me. I play the scales by following the Circle of Fifths. It doesn't appear to matter where I start out on the Circle of Fifths or which direction around the Circle I go, so I choose a starting point randomly, and play a major scale first, then follow it by playing it's relative minor. My point is that I play the major scale and it's relative minor together. One after the other. Yet, even then it's difficult, for some odd reason, for me to "see" that I'm playing the same notes except for a lowered third from a different starting point.
I don't understand why this connection doesn't happen automagically with me. I have to deliberately make myself aware that I'm playing the same notes on the piano except for the lowered third. I have to think about it. I can't just assume that's the way things are and act accordingly.
So, I'm just doing it the only way that seems to work for me. I play the Bb Major scale trying to remember that when I finish doing that I'm gonna play pretty much the same notes starting three half steps earlier. Then, I have to remember that when I begin the G minor scale. I have to remember that's all I'm doing, and I have to "watch" my fingers do it and realize while they're doing it, that they just finished doing about the same thing.
I don't know if I'm describing what's really going on or whether I'm just writing anything I can pass off as reasonable. It just seems odd that playing the scales in by pairs is strangely satisfying. I've done this dozens of times, and each time I appear to gain the sense that I'm learning something very fundamental. I don't seem to care how long it will take for this to reach atonement, but it's fun to do. and so it doesn't matter. Nobody knows. Not even me, and yet....
I do appear to understand how the brain entrains itself to whatever environment it enters, and it's doing that no matter what it's purported "owner" thinks about it. I learned about how the brain entrains itself to it's environment from the writings and seminars of Robert Monroe. After he intuitively realized the dynamics involved his theories were proved scientifically valid. Bob came from the carnival barker school, which in itself fascinated me.
I'm sitting here writing while my brainwaves are being manipulated by the constant and persevering sound of this computerized drum beat that hasn't changed one whit in the last hour and a half or more. Once my physical brain and it's patterns take what's going on into consideration, it starts acting like it used to when I was using the float tank and meditating a lot.
One thing I learned from sensory deprivation is that the brain will not abide boredom and ennui unless it's forced to, and even that doesn't control it. Left to it's own devices it's gonna reach out and touch someone. Contrarily, In a sensory deprived environment it can't manipulate by either hook or crook, it turns inward upon itself, and produces the stuff dreams are made of as it's own muse. Click!
I disclaim knowing what the truth is. I can't rightly claim I write to figure it out because I don't that's a useful approach. Truth is what it is whatever it may be. I watch what my fingers show me as we go along. I don't even know if they're lying or playing a joke on me.
I attempt to capture drifting thoughts with words. I can't do that and judge their veracity at the sa-me ti-me. To me, the drifting thoughts I attempt to possess temporarily are either useful right damn now or never. They come and go like somebody I used to know, but never really understood.
When I boot up my digital keyboard in the morning it brings up all the defaults it's set to at the factory. The keyboard instrument is always Yamaha's best digital emulation of it's classical acoustic grand piano. It's a very close approximation to the real thing. The default drum beat on the drum machine is always #001 8BeatModern.
I know these things because that's what it says on the LED screen that constantly informs the player what the settings on every aspect of the keyboard. Learning how to read the information on the LED screen takes a while, but it's pretty thorough once it's secrets are revealed.
There are several ways I can change the default drum beat to what I want to happen currently. In each case I have to push on the "Style" button first to make the selection. That done, I can rotate a dial button that manipulates the five choices of drum beats that show up in the middle of the LED screen when I press on the Style button.
The high-lighted middle choice of the list of five available beats is the one that is playing. When I rotate the dial button it changes those five choices. Just beneath the rotary dial are two buttons with up and down arrows on them. If I push on either of those two buttons the selection seen on the LED screen will move up or down to the next category of drumbeats.
Just to the right of the rotary dial there is a number keypad with twelve buttons that are arranged three buttons across and four buttons down. The top rows have 1-9 and the bottom row has the zero button in the middle, with the other two button having a "plus" and "minus" button. They move the current selection up or down one drum beat at the time.
Instantly. It usually doesn't even miss one beat before it starts on the new rhythm. That catches me a little off-guard each time. If I press the "plus" button on the keypad and #001 8BeatModern is currently playing, it instantly changes to #002 Cool8Beat without hesitation. There ain't no moving parts. I can spin the rotary dial randomly, and it immediately starts playing the indicated beat.
That's what I did this morning. I turned both my computer and the keyboard on. They're set adjacent to each other so that all I have to do to address one or the other is swivel my chair forty-five degrees. After I'd gone into the kitchen and turned the coffee pot I'd prepared last night on to brew, I came back out of the kitchen and pressed the Style button, randomly spun the rotary dial and pressed the Start/Stop button. I was surprised to recognize the name of drum beat that started playing. #015 PopShuffle. I seem to like any of the beats that have "Shuffle" in their title.
The fact that I'm recognizing some of these beats is interesting to me. As I've mentioned several times, percussion is the one area of music with which I'm the least familiar. The biggest problem i had while playing in the high school band was keeping count so I would know when to play my part at the right time.
I can't say I really know why I bought that djembe drum. I saw it in the display window of a music store I passed by down in Wilmington on the corner of Front Street and Third. I liked the image when I imagined myself playing it. I suspect impulsively buying it was some sort of attempt to strengthen my weakness in percussion, but there are extenuating circumstances that point toward shamanism. Drumming is one way of dealing with shame. That's why there are sha-men. I sho' am that, and more sure of myself in this regard as I go along. Like everything else, man, it's just another rap, and I really, really like words.
I'm a little bit at loose ends these days. It's difficult to think futuristically about music when my hands are showing me more persistently than ever that this grand scheme can disappear in a heartbeat due the the pain I'm experiencing with arthritis and carpal tunnel syndrome. I'm trying to play through it, but there's always the chance that it might not go away. It has before.
Playing the scale of G minor has been a trial for me. I start the scale out on the bass end of the keyboard on G with the pinkie finger on my left hand and my thumb on my right hand. Theoretically, I should move up the keyboard playing the notes of the G minor scale until I reach the treble end of the keyboard and play G with the thumb on my left hand and my pinkie finger on my right hand.
Just the opposite as I started the scale out, and just like it's supposed to be. Right? So why do I go back down the scale and finish it with the ring finger on my left hand and the index finger on my right hand, and I've done everything right in between. This would be a lot easier if I had a piano teacher who could, if nothing else, answer me questions about things like this. I'm pretty sure it has to be this way.
The part of doing this presently that fascinates me (and embarrasses me too, because it's soooo rudimentary) is that I'm beginning to connect with the reality that the relative minor of each major scale uses the same sharps and flats. Something about playing the black keys the way they're interspersed with the white keys in G minor seems a little confusing. Intellectually I can figure which keys to press down and with which finger, but it hasn't felt right. In some way it seems counter-intuitive.
I 'know" the key of G minor uses the same black keys of Bb Major, but for reason I hadn't "seen" my fingers reaching to use that same note (piano key) pattern. I was pretty familiar with the notes used to perform the scale of Bb Major before I started learning the scales, because the blues song Adam's Apple that I memorized the chords to was done in Bb Major.
That's a little disconcerting to me. I play the scales by following the Circle of Fifths. It doesn't appear to matter where I start out on the Circle of Fifths or which direction around the Circle I go, so I choose a starting point randomly, and play a major scale first, then follow it by playing it's relative minor. My point is that I play the major scale and it's relative minor together. One after the other. Yet, even then it's difficult, for some odd reason, for me to "see" that I'm playing the same notes except for a lowered third from a different starting point.
I don't understand why this connection doesn't happen automagically with me. I have to deliberately make myself aware that I'm playing the same notes on the piano except for the lowered third. I have to think about it. I can't just assume that's the way things are and act accordingly.
So, I'm just doing it the only way that seems to work for me. I play the Bb Major scale trying to remember that when I finish doing that I'm gonna play pretty much the same notes starting three half steps earlier. Then, I have to remember that when I begin the G minor scale. I have to remember that's all I'm doing, and I have to "watch" my fingers do it and realize while they're doing it, that they just finished doing about the same thing.
I don't know if I'm describing what's really going on or whether I'm just writing anything I can pass off as reasonable. It just seems odd that playing the scales in by pairs is strangely satisfying. I've done this dozens of times, and each time I appear to gain the sense that I'm learning something very fundamental. I don't seem to care how long it will take for this to reach atonement, but it's fun to do. and so it doesn't matter. Nobody knows. Not even me, and yet....
I do appear to understand how the brain entrains itself to whatever environment it enters, and it's doing that no matter what it's purported "owner" thinks about it. I learned about how the brain entrains itself to it's environment from the writings and seminars of Robert Monroe. After he intuitively realized the dynamics involved his theories were proved scientifically valid. Bob came from the carnival barker school, which in itself fascinated me.
I'm sitting here writing while my brainwaves are being manipulated by the constant and persevering sound of this computerized drum beat that hasn't changed one whit in the last hour and a half or more. Once my physical brain and it's patterns take what's going on into consideration, it starts acting like it used to when I was using the float tank and meditating a lot.
One thing I learned from sensory deprivation is that the brain will not abide boredom and ennui unless it's forced to, and even that doesn't control it. Left to it's own devices it's gonna reach out and touch someone. Contrarily, In a sensory deprived environment it can't manipulate by either hook or crook, it turns inward upon itself, and produces the stuff dreams are made of as it's own muse. Click!
I disclaim knowing what the truth is. I can't rightly claim I write to figure it out because I don't that's a useful approach. Truth is what it is whatever it may be. I watch what my fingers show me as we go along. I don't even know if they're lying or playing a joke on me.
I attempt to capture drifting thoughts with words. I can't do that and judge their veracity at the sa-me ti-me. To me, the drifting thoughts I attempt to possess temporarily are either useful right damn now or never. They come and go like somebody I used to know, but never really understood.
Monday, May 19, 2008
Gaslessness, The Cure For Obesity
The idea that gas prices are going to go so high that people have to quit buying the stuff they think they need just to keep their job is fascinating to me. I think this is a serious wake-up call that ain't going away. I suspect a lotta people gone have to realize they've been seriously lied to about the way life is, and there's gonna be hell to pay.
It's my opinion that the elite classes are trying to take the middle-class out. They enjoy too many luxuries that should be available only to the rich. If the rich don't have some sort of exclusivity over luxury, then it's not really luxurious is it? Poor people should be worried about whether their children are going to starve to death, not how high last month's cell phone bill was.
Why buy a limousine if the SUV's that surround you on the highway are as luxurious as today's limousines. How big and powerful do cars have to get before the rich and privileged can feel rich and privileged? The solution is obvious. Make gas so expensive only the rich and privileged can afford to be on the highway.
There is nothing I can do about how this is coming down nor any human being I'm personally acquainted with. The horse is outta the barn. I'm gonna close the gate? True, it would be very inconvenient not to have an internet connection. I've done without that most of my life. It would be very inconvenient to not be able to drive to the grocery store for groceries. Although not as much for me as some people further away. The most inconvenient utility to do without is electricity. Aye, and there's the rub.
I burned a brush pile on my lawn today. I had been putting it off thinking that I'd move it off my lawn to burn it. That part of my lawn has had a rough time of it in regard to fire. I kept a used motor home I intended to fix up and use it to travel in when I worked outta town in construction. It didn't work out. I couldn't get it fixed. So, it just sat there for years until Ben finally hauled it off under the pretense he was going to use it as an office at one of his farms.
When I cleaned up after that fiasco I burned another fire in nearly the same place. It took a good, long while for the centipede grass to re-sod itself in the spot I had the fire. Even now there is a strange looking brown fungus that grows there that I haven't seen anywhere else on the property. I've burned another pile there now, and it will probably take a while to recover too.
I guess I'm developing the very sort of nostalgia I seem to have been able to ignore in the past. I've watched a couple of documentaries on PBS about Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He died in office when I was six years old. His influence on my parents was palpable. When he died my mother cried inconsolably for hours. She really frightened me. My father seemed to understand her tears, because he was not himself for a while after that.
I didn't understand the Great Depression because I was born just as it was ending. I don't particularly wanna have the experience just so I can empathize with my dead parents. It was a very scary time for them, and after World War Two was over, they were some very happy campers by comparison.
I'm not fooling myself about how inflation is going to affect me. It's gonna wipe out my savings and leave me blowing in the wind. I know what that's like. I know that a lot of what has to be adjusted to can be done with minimal fuss, and that's about the only positive one can make of a situation of utter destitution. Look at all the catastrophes going on around us continuously.
Look at all the un-nay-me-d bodies floating around in the rice paddies in Burma. Every idea they ever had about themselves gone with the cyclone/tsunami/hurricane/flood/tornado/whatever. Life never has meant very much when there's too much suffering to care about any other individual but oneself.
That's why I keep reminding myself that I'll die like a dog in a ditch. When you die you're just another stinking body that keep the living from thinking they're immortal. I've been overwhelmed by nature more than once. The fact that I somehow survived doesn't provide or require much of an explanation.
It's only the personality that dies anyway. That's the only thing anybody seems to think they got to lose. That's all they really hope will survive. Their identity. They want who-they-think-they-are to survive. There are times when I think that's all that can be saved from death.
It's my opinion that the elite classes are trying to take the middle-class out. They enjoy too many luxuries that should be available only to the rich. If the rich don't have some sort of exclusivity over luxury, then it's not really luxurious is it? Poor people should be worried about whether their children are going to starve to death, not how high last month's cell phone bill was.
Why buy a limousine if the SUV's that surround you on the highway are as luxurious as today's limousines. How big and powerful do cars have to get before the rich and privileged can feel rich and privileged? The solution is obvious. Make gas so expensive only the rich and privileged can afford to be on the highway.
There is nothing I can do about how this is coming down nor any human being I'm personally acquainted with. The horse is outta the barn. I'm gonna close the gate? True, it would be very inconvenient not to have an internet connection. I've done without that most of my life. It would be very inconvenient to not be able to drive to the grocery store for groceries. Although not as much for me as some people further away. The most inconvenient utility to do without is electricity. Aye, and there's the rub.
I burned a brush pile on my lawn today. I had been putting it off thinking that I'd move it off my lawn to burn it. That part of my lawn has had a rough time of it in regard to fire. I kept a used motor home I intended to fix up and use it to travel in when I worked outta town in construction. It didn't work out. I couldn't get it fixed. So, it just sat there for years until Ben finally hauled it off under the pretense he was going to use it as an office at one of his farms.
When I cleaned up after that fiasco I burned another fire in nearly the same place. It took a good, long while for the centipede grass to re-sod itself in the spot I had the fire. Even now there is a strange looking brown fungus that grows there that I haven't seen anywhere else on the property. I've burned another pile there now, and it will probably take a while to recover too.
I guess I'm developing the very sort of nostalgia I seem to have been able to ignore in the past. I've watched a couple of documentaries on PBS about Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He died in office when I was six years old. His influence on my parents was palpable. When he died my mother cried inconsolably for hours. She really frightened me. My father seemed to understand her tears, because he was not himself for a while after that.
I didn't understand the Great Depression because I was born just as it was ending. I don't particularly wanna have the experience just so I can empathize with my dead parents. It was a very scary time for them, and after World War Two was over, they were some very happy campers by comparison.
I'm not fooling myself about how inflation is going to affect me. It's gonna wipe out my savings and leave me blowing in the wind. I know what that's like. I know that a lot of what has to be adjusted to can be done with minimal fuss, and that's about the only positive one can make of a situation of utter destitution. Look at all the catastrophes going on around us continuously.
Look at all the un-nay-me-d bodies floating around in the rice paddies in Burma. Every idea they ever had about themselves gone with the cyclone/tsunami/hurricane/flood/tornado/whatever. Life never has meant very much when there's too much suffering to care about any other individual but oneself.
That's why I keep reminding myself that I'll die like a dog in a ditch. When you die you're just another stinking body that keep the living from thinking they're immortal. I've been overwhelmed by nature more than once. The fact that I somehow survived doesn't provide or require much of an explanation.
It's only the personality that dies anyway. That's the only thing anybody seems to think they got to lose. That's all they really hope will survive. Their identity. They want who-they-think-they-are to survive. There are times when I think that's all that can be saved from death.
The Beguine
I woke up listening for the traffic out on Highway 24. It was early Monday morning. Time to go to work. Right? It wasn't there. The noise is gone. The road maintenance crews are gonna find it easier to make a living. The monster trucks are gonna quit trying to run us off the road. They won't be there. Soon, just like they shipped all the factories to China, they're gonna send all the big trucks there too. There will be nothing to haul here.
I think about Ms. Pollack's house a lot. She was a widow who rented out half her house to make enough money to buy food. We moved there from Mississippi. It was the first house we lived in after coming to North Carolina. World War Two broke out just before Winter that year in 1941. I was two years old.
It got quiet then too. After World War Two started, that is. Back then, they rationed gasoline and rubber tires because they needed them for the war effort. A family couldn't even buy sugar without a ration coupon. People went back to horse and buggy as the only way to get around. There was only one paved road in that entire county. It was paved with federal money and they called it a "defense road".
I used to play on the front porch of Ms. Pollack's house that was right up next to the paved road. I could hear the horses and wagons coming to that little village on the weekends to shop. Such as there was stuff to shop for. The steel rims that bound the wagon wheels together crunched the small pebbles on the concrete road, and sent some of them pebbles flying when the steel rim rolled up again them. It was an odd sound, and I could hear them coming from a good distance away.
Ms. Pollack's house was on the north edge of town out toward the fire tower. It was a very small village. The south edge of town was only a hundred and fifty yards (137 M) from the north edge of town. It was located on a ridge in the rambling sinks of the the Great Dismal Swamp. Every town and village on the coastal plains is located on a ridge of some aptly named swamp.
Did I mention that it was a quiet little village? Back then, there were so few airplanes around that when one flew over this quiet little village, all the residents turned out into the streets to gawk. Back they was over sixty years ago, and the world was very different than the way it is now. Those differences are going to grow vastly less in the coming months. America is gonna get quiet and sleepy once again.
The Beguine is a dance from Guadeloupe and Martinique from back in the 1930's. I don't know anything about it except what I read on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beguine_%28dance%29
To me it's a drum beat on my digital piano drum machine. #092, to be precise. All I have to do to listen to it is to punch a few buttons, and there it is. Not on #092 though, but several hundred rhythms and drum beats and other odd noises from all over the world.
I think today is when I'm gonna start preparing for a world-wide depression. There ain't gwine be no food for sale at the SuperCenter or it's equivalent in a fairly short amount of time. There won't be any electricity for the poor. No refrigerators to keep the meat from spoiling. No media. No amusement centers. It's gonna be a hard row to hoe.
Of course, I could be just flat wrong, but I've thought it could come to this for a long time now. Running outta gas might just save the world. Well, after enough people die of starvation to get the numbers right.
I think about Ms. Pollack's house a lot. She was a widow who rented out half her house to make enough money to buy food. We moved there from Mississippi. It was the first house we lived in after coming to North Carolina. World War Two broke out just before Winter that year in 1941. I was two years old.
It got quiet then too. After World War Two started, that is. Back then, they rationed gasoline and rubber tires because they needed them for the war effort. A family couldn't even buy sugar without a ration coupon. People went back to horse and buggy as the only way to get around. There was only one paved road in that entire county. It was paved with federal money and they called it a "defense road".
I used to play on the front porch of Ms. Pollack's house that was right up next to the paved road. I could hear the horses and wagons coming to that little village on the weekends to shop. Such as there was stuff to shop for. The steel rims that bound the wagon wheels together crunched the small pebbles on the concrete road, and sent some of them pebbles flying when the steel rim rolled up again them. It was an odd sound, and I could hear them coming from a good distance away.
Ms. Pollack's house was on the north edge of town out toward the fire tower. It was a very small village. The south edge of town was only a hundred and fifty yards (137 M) from the north edge of town. It was located on a ridge in the rambling sinks of the the Great Dismal Swamp. Every town and village on the coastal plains is located on a ridge of some aptly named swamp.
Did I mention that it was a quiet little village? Back then, there were so few airplanes around that when one flew over this quiet little village, all the residents turned out into the streets to gawk. Back they was over sixty years ago, and the world was very different than the way it is now. Those differences are going to grow vastly less in the coming months. America is gonna get quiet and sleepy once again.
The Beguine is a dance from Guadeloupe and Martinique from back in the 1930's. I don't know anything about it except what I read on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beguine_%28dance%29
To me it's a drum beat on my digital piano drum machine. #092, to be precise. All I have to do to listen to it is to punch a few buttons, and there it is. Not on #092 though, but several hundred rhythms and drum beats and other odd noises from all over the world.
I think today is when I'm gonna start preparing for a world-wide depression. There ain't gwine be no food for sale at the SuperCenter or it's equivalent in a fairly short amount of time. There won't be any electricity for the poor. No refrigerators to keep the meat from spoiling. No media. No amusement centers. It's gonna be a hard row to hoe.
Of course, I could be just flat wrong, but I've thought it could come to this for a long time now. Running outta gas might just save the world. Well, after enough people die of starvation to get the numbers right.
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Blueberries Galore!
Saturday morning. Brilliant blue sky after all the clouds the past few days. Cool spring day on the coastal plains. Another week of doing nothing much constructive. I put notices on my other blogs and direct any readers who are interested to come here. This blogspot place is owned by Google now, and Google also bought Feedburner. Feedburner is a system that keeps statistics on what happens here. For the first time I'll know if anybody is actually reading this blog. I won't know who comes here, but at least it will count them if anyone does. I've pretended some people come here to read the crap I write, but I've never known for sure. If nobody is reading me it probably won't make any difference, but I wanna know whether there are or not. Believe me when I say my ego can stand it if there is not. Well, maybe...
The arthritis is still acting up, but it's not as painful as it was. As soon as these steroids stop working it will probably go back to driving me nuts. Presently, there is some deep pain in the muscles around my right elbow. It's probably caused by clicking on the mouse so much when i play card games. I gotta give that a rest. Despite the pain and the nausea associated with the drugs I'm putting in my body I've managed somehow to play the major and minor scales on my digital keyboard everyday.
I didn't know how much difference it would make if I switched from the 61-key keyboard on my old synthesizer to the 88-key keyboard on my Yamaha Portable Grand. I've been finding that out as I go along. Yesterday while i was playing the scales I noticed that I was using the entire keyboard on most of the keys I practiced. That brings out careless mistakes on the extremes of either end. In other words, that's where I'm most likely to make an obvious mistake.
When i practice the scales I follow the Circle of Fifths around. First i play the Major scale and then it's relative minor. I've read articles about how the relative minor of each Major scale uses the same sharps and flats. I've had that in the back of my mind, but it's only been lately that I've been paying attention to this.
For some reason I've had some trouble getting the D minor scale to end up with my fingers on the right keys. It's been in my left hand mostly, but sometimes both hands. When something like that happens I usually start playing the troublesome scale using separate hands. Then, when I get each hand performing correctly, I try to put them back together again. D minor just wasn't working out for me, but after I started switching between F Major and D minor because they both have Bb (A#) as the only black key, I realized that I had to end up on the fingers I end up on because that's the only way it can work right.
I've been thinking about lactic acid. I know how to convert all the lactic acid in my system to some harmless chemical in one fell swoop, but i've avoided doing that for a long time. It's almost like I'm punishing myself. I know a lot about my body from having practiced hatha yoga for a long time. I've tried to encourage some people to take it up when I think doing yoga will help them with what they complain about, but they don't do it. They probably look at the source and decide they don't wanna have anything to do with something that will turn them into something like whatever it is they think I am. That's an odd dynamic. They don't wanna be like what they think I am like and yet that's all they can ever be.
The big surprise this Spring has to do with blueberries. My younger brother dug up some blueberry bushes that were at my parent's home that was took from us through eminent domain. He planted on of those bushes here, but it hasn't took root like we'd hoped. Admittedly, it looks better this year. It might make it yet.
Yet, if it does or don't it doesn't seem so critical as far as me getting fresh blueberries in the Spring is concerned. Yesterday, while I was pulling grass from around the one fig cutting that's sprouted, I noticed some bushes growing around the base of a young jack oak I'm encouraging that splits where my driveway comes into my yard. I cut back those bushes last year as unwanted, and they grew back.
When I was pulling that grass from around my fig sprout I noticed some green berries laying low on the ground coming from those previously unwanted bushes. When I looked more closely I realized they were young blueberries. Lots of them. Growing on bushes so hardy they didn't even die when I cut them back. What a stroke of luck!
What I figure happened was that some birds were eating the blueberries next door at my youngest brother's house, came and roosted in that young jack oak, and then nature took it's course with the seeds of the blueberries they excreted found a path with heart in the dirt beneath the jack oak. I gotta start looking around beneath other trees to see if the same thing happened elsewhere. I may have blueberries up the yingyang and not know it.
The arthritis is still acting up, but it's not as painful as it was. As soon as these steroids stop working it will probably go back to driving me nuts. Presently, there is some deep pain in the muscles around my right elbow. It's probably caused by clicking on the mouse so much when i play card games. I gotta give that a rest. Despite the pain and the nausea associated with the drugs I'm putting in my body I've managed somehow to play the major and minor scales on my digital keyboard everyday.
I didn't know how much difference it would make if I switched from the 61-key keyboard on my old synthesizer to the 88-key keyboard on my Yamaha Portable Grand. I've been finding that out as I go along. Yesterday while i was playing the scales I noticed that I was using the entire keyboard on most of the keys I practiced. That brings out careless mistakes on the extremes of either end. In other words, that's where I'm most likely to make an obvious mistake.
When i practice the scales I follow the Circle of Fifths around. First i play the Major scale and then it's relative minor. I've read articles about how the relative minor of each Major scale uses the same sharps and flats. I've had that in the back of my mind, but it's only been lately that I've been paying attention to this.
For some reason I've had some trouble getting the D minor scale to end up with my fingers on the right keys. It's been in my left hand mostly, but sometimes both hands. When something like that happens I usually start playing the troublesome scale using separate hands. Then, when I get each hand performing correctly, I try to put them back together again. D minor just wasn't working out for me, but after I started switching between F Major and D minor because they both have Bb (A#) as the only black key, I realized that I had to end up on the fingers I end up on because that's the only way it can work right.
I've been thinking about lactic acid. I know how to convert all the lactic acid in my system to some harmless chemical in one fell swoop, but i've avoided doing that for a long time. It's almost like I'm punishing myself. I know a lot about my body from having practiced hatha yoga for a long time. I've tried to encourage some people to take it up when I think doing yoga will help them with what they complain about, but they don't do it. They probably look at the source and decide they don't wanna have anything to do with something that will turn them into something like whatever it is they think I am. That's an odd dynamic. They don't wanna be like what they think I am like and yet that's all they can ever be.
The big surprise this Spring has to do with blueberries. My younger brother dug up some blueberry bushes that were at my parent's home that was took from us through eminent domain. He planted on of those bushes here, but it hasn't took root like we'd hoped. Admittedly, it looks better this year. It might make it yet.
Yet, if it does or don't it doesn't seem so critical as far as me getting fresh blueberries in the Spring is concerned. Yesterday, while I was pulling grass from around the one fig cutting that's sprouted, I noticed some bushes growing around the base of a young jack oak I'm encouraging that splits where my driveway comes into my yard. I cut back those bushes last year as unwanted, and they grew back.
When I was pulling that grass from around my fig sprout I noticed some green berries laying low on the ground coming from those previously unwanted bushes. When I looked more closely I realized they were young blueberries. Lots of them. Growing on bushes so hardy they didn't even die when I cut them back. What a stroke of luck!
What I figure happened was that some birds were eating the blueberries next door at my youngest brother's house, came and roosted in that young jack oak, and then nature took it's course with the seeds of the blueberries they excreted found a path with heart in the dirt beneath the jack oak. I gotta start looking around beneath other trees to see if the same thing happened elsewhere. I may have blueberries up the yingyang and not know it.
Friday, May 16, 2008
Little Boy Blue
Other than stopping smoking tobacco the next best thing i could have possibly done for my health was to buy the budget-breaking digital piano. It has a digital drum machine on it. It plays what it plays very precisely for as long as it has electricity supplied to it. I have no idea why that facet of it fascinates me. I expect humans to be humans and computers to be just that. What I do know fascinates me is dancing to these drum beats. Nobody is here watching me dance. That's an important part of this crazy dancing I'm doing. Nobody knows.
I remember learning to dance in high school. There was a chaperoned dance after all the ball games on Friday nights. In reflection, I guess I wasn't, and I'm still not a shy person as far as getting up and trying something new for the first time. I knew the girls liked boys who would ask them to dance. I liked girls. It didn't take a genius...
I'm also a big showoff. I like to attract attention to myself. I know exactly what to do with it. Most rabble rousers do. I've danced all my adult life for-the-other. Not here. Not now. Nobody knows. I dance for-myself. Sometimes after I get up and get to moving my feet I'll go outside my front door to the outside deck and dance out in the open.
I built another deck on the second floor, and there are sixteen 7" high steps that provide me with a fire escape from the upstairs. Sometime when I git jiggy I dance up and down those stairs like beating the band. That's why I say that buying this digital piano has been good for my health.
Some of these drum beats are real lively when it comes to dancing. The drum beat I have playing now is #094 RumbaFlamenco. I've been stuck on it for a couple of days. The rhythm has so many parts to it I can just pick out one that's easy to fall into and go from there. How fast or how slow the parts of the drum beat I attend to depends on how my old body feels about it.
I must have been waiting for somebody to come along to dance with. As if it took two to tango. That was rather stupid of me. I haven't wanted anybody around me for any reason for a while now. Much less somebody just so I'd get up and dance. It seems like since there's nobody around and I'm not dancing for-somebody, the entire movement of my body takes on the careactoristics it feels good about in the moment. If it wants to run up and down stairs... what choice have I?
One of the reasons I like this quantized, perfectly executed drum beat available to me at the touch of a button is to play my djembe drum with. My drumming is not anywhere near perfect because I'm a homo sapien, not a computer. It seems like for me (and you milage should vary if you have a modicum of self-respect) that it's the computer that's revealing my humanity to me in ever more exacting ways.
I naively thought in my early thirties that I must have been one of the world's best spellers of the English language. Can you spell s-p-e-l-l-c-h-e-c-k-e-r? Maybe I'm not as good a speller as I once thought, but the spellchecker only knows the correct way to spell compassion, not exhibit it. The one associated with this relentless text editor does it in real time while I'm typing.
Maybe I only thought I was sorta perfect ere now. How would I know? I didn't have digital perfection available to compare myself to. Such as a spellchecker software program. Cheap. I never thought computers would be this cheap ever before there was such a thing. But, even what I think is cheap now is gonna seem ridiculously expensive in even the very near future.
In some ways I like the way capitalism works. Lots of people would be perfectly willing for computers to stay the way they are now. Particularly the people and companies that have made billions of dollars doing it just the way they have so far. No blame. Like it or not, however, the fickle finger of fate moves on when some upstart fifteen year old sees a better way to do it or to not do it at all, and the old ways are just that. Hickory, dickory, dock...
I remember learning to dance in high school. There was a chaperoned dance after all the ball games on Friday nights. In reflection, I guess I wasn't, and I'm still not a shy person as far as getting up and trying something new for the first time. I knew the girls liked boys who would ask them to dance. I liked girls. It didn't take a genius...
I'm also a big showoff. I like to attract attention to myself. I know exactly what to do with it. Most rabble rousers do. I've danced all my adult life for-the-other. Not here. Not now. Nobody knows. I dance for-myself. Sometimes after I get up and get to moving my feet I'll go outside my front door to the outside deck and dance out in the open.
I built another deck on the second floor, and there are sixteen 7" high steps that provide me with a fire escape from the upstairs. Sometime when I git jiggy I dance up and down those stairs like beating the band. That's why I say that buying this digital piano has been good for my health.
Some of these drum beats are real lively when it comes to dancing. The drum beat I have playing now is #094 RumbaFlamenco. I've been stuck on it for a couple of days. The rhythm has so many parts to it I can just pick out one that's easy to fall into and go from there. How fast or how slow the parts of the drum beat I attend to depends on how my old body feels about it.
I must have been waiting for somebody to come along to dance with. As if it took two to tango. That was rather stupid of me. I haven't wanted anybody around me for any reason for a while now. Much less somebody just so I'd get up and dance. It seems like since there's nobody around and I'm not dancing for-somebody, the entire movement of my body takes on the careactoristics it feels good about in the moment. If it wants to run up and down stairs... what choice have I?
One of the reasons I like this quantized, perfectly executed drum beat available to me at the touch of a button is to play my djembe drum with. My drumming is not anywhere near perfect because I'm a homo sapien, not a computer. It seems like for me (and you milage should vary if you have a modicum of self-respect) that it's the computer that's revealing my humanity to me in ever more exacting ways.
I naively thought in my early thirties that I must have been one of the world's best spellers of the English language. Can you spell s-p-e-l-l-c-h-e-c-k-e-r? Maybe I'm not as good a speller as I once thought, but the spellchecker only knows the correct way to spell compassion, not exhibit it. The one associated with this relentless text editor does it in real time while I'm typing.
Maybe I only thought I was sorta perfect ere now. How would I know? I didn't have digital perfection available to compare myself to. Such as a spellchecker software program. Cheap. I never thought computers would be this cheap ever before there was such a thing. But, even what I think is cheap now is gonna seem ridiculously expensive in even the very near future.
In some ways I like the way capitalism works. Lots of people would be perfectly willing for computers to stay the way they are now. Particularly the people and companies that have made billions of dollars doing it just the way they have so far. No blame. Like it or not, however, the fickle finger of fate moves on when some upstart fifteen year old sees a better way to do it or to not do it at all, and the old ways are just that. Hickory, dickory, dock...
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Hot Pockets And Cheap Wine
I seem to have just discovered Hot Pockets. I've heard of them before, of course, and I might have eaten one or two before, but now I've eaten at least ten of them, and went back to the store and bought another box of twelve. It's just too easy to pop them in the the microwave for two minutes and have them ready to eat and be done with it. I've tried some of the other quick meals that can be heated up in the microwave, but they're not that good, and the list of ingredients really looks pathetic.
I seem a little overwhelmed by realizing just how many people there are in the world today. I think it started back when I did a People Search on Yahoo, and discovered there was over 400 people in the State of Florida that have my exact same legal name, and at least 800 people in Texas. Word for word my same name. That kind of freaked me out. I don't know what I was thinking. I guess I thought that at least my family name was special. Not even a little bit.
I guess I do feel a little special when it comes to how many people there are in Asia. A billion and one third in China. Over a billion in India. Around 300 million in the US. I don't even know what that means. Well, yes I do, I suppose, it means there are too many people for the Earth to continue to support. There's not even enough fish in all the oceans for us to eat anymore. Why life?
How much more can man invent, and to what end? I keep hearing the statement, "Man, if you think this is something, just hang around." Hang around for what? All people have ever done is eat, drink, and fuck. We've made it easier to do that, but to what end? So our offspring can eat, drink, and fuck? Big whoop... eh?
I watched a little bit of a TV show about this rich woman who was showing off her $35 million dollar yacht. She looked like shit from all the things she'd had done to her body to keep looking desirable enough to fuck. I was really confused. Why on Earth did this woman wanna look desirable enough to fuck. She'd been fucking for sixty years and never got no satisfaction out of it.
I did one of them thar faux pas' recently. I doubt if it even matters. Nobody knows. I used to be friendly with this woman who is in fact a real go-getter. The only problem she had was that she was an alcoholic. I personally only thought she was a drunk like me, but nooooo, she had to push the envelope and BE an alcoholic. BEING an alcohol is what she turned her life into. I liked her just fine as a drunk.
I even asked this woman to marry me once in a fit of insanity. She was the woman I truly deserved. Some deluded bitch who used to read me stories written by people a sophisticated person might have recognized right away, but I could tell from the way she read his brilliant writing to me, that she found him subjectively interesting. Besides, this bitch really is as smart as me, or was, but now that she's decided she's an alcoholic she's got too much baggage. The problem for me was that I am not man enough for her. Oh, I don't feel bad about that. I'm not a good enough man for anybody. Who does she think she is? Who am I?
...
I am a light
from very far
that gleams
with all the beauty
of a star,
and is in day
the very night,
the shadow of
a very bright
daydream.
July, 1973
Whatever it is that I am, it's not good enow for the significant others in my life. The problem with that is that I set the parameters by which they judged me, and ruled me unworthy. It's very difficult to get past that facticity.
I seem to be one of those people who figure you're either fer me or agin me. You put an organization you fished for between me and you, I'm gonna give you that organization for company. If you're not cool with being the first person in your life, then you sure as hell ain't gwine allow sech from or for me. I don't buy $20 a pound coffee to use it twice. Brazilian lowland coffee is better the first time than the high mountain arabica the second time around.
My daughter seems to have decided she's an alcoholic instead of drunk too. I really hate that for her. Granted, I failed her as a father, but she failed her own self as a drunk. There are institutions one may commit themselves to, and then there are institutions one can commit oneself to. Alcoholics Anonymous might be a nice place to visit, but the idea of becoming a permanent guest is worse than absurd, it's pathetic.
I'm kind of bingeing on Hot Pockets because of the horrible news. Oh, it's not news to me. I figured this crap out a couple of years ago, but you see, when i figure something out, after all is said and done, it's not written in stone. I learned how not to do that because it's just freaking foolish to paint myself in a corner. The horrible news is that fat cells never go away. They may not be filled with suet, but they're still there just waiting for me to fill them up again.
I saw this article in a reputable scientific online magazine (It's on the internet, asshole, it's gotta be true!) where it stated that even if you get liposuction, once you recover from the operation, the fat cells return on their own, they come back even if you starved yourself. We're doomed! No... I"m doomed. Your milage may vary.
You tell me! My old father was fat as a pig from the time he married that Cancer woman who became my mother. She treated him like God. Why would she not? He saved her from a fate worse than death. My point is that he was a good eighty pounds over-weight from middle age on, and lived to be eighty-eight years old. I'm not a momma's boy because of the way she treated me. I'm a momma's boy because of the way she treated my father until the day he died. In fact, when he had developed pneumonia and was a goner, she put him out of his unperceived misery. I'm absolutely sure she was just following orders. No woman on Earth could owe me that much loyalty. There is not enough I could do for them to bring that sort of debt into play.
People have to give themselves to me. It's not because of some decision I made. I don't know why they have to give themselves to me. It's almost as if I'm not even a part of the decision-making process that ends up with some sort eternal commitment. I'm a double-Taurus. The keyword for Taureans is: I possess.
I own some people. Only the people who of their own volition gave themselves to me. Not only did I not ask this of them, I couldn't prevent it. Worse, I don't even know who some of them are. They never bothered to inform me of their intentions. Leeches. I call them Remoras. People like Mona Worley from when I was a child in the first grade. She adored me for reasons I had no say so about.
Do you have any idea how tasty these stupid Hot Pockets are with cheap burgundy?
I seem a little overwhelmed by realizing just how many people there are in the world today. I think it started back when I did a People Search on Yahoo, and discovered there was over 400 people in the State of Florida that have my exact same legal name, and at least 800 people in Texas. Word for word my same name. That kind of freaked me out. I don't know what I was thinking. I guess I thought that at least my family name was special. Not even a little bit.
I guess I do feel a little special when it comes to how many people there are in Asia. A billion and one third in China. Over a billion in India. Around 300 million in the US. I don't even know what that means. Well, yes I do, I suppose, it means there are too many people for the Earth to continue to support. There's not even enough fish in all the oceans for us to eat anymore. Why life?
How much more can man invent, and to what end? I keep hearing the statement, "Man, if you think this is something, just hang around." Hang around for what? All people have ever done is eat, drink, and fuck. We've made it easier to do that, but to what end? So our offspring can eat, drink, and fuck? Big whoop... eh?
I watched a little bit of a TV show about this rich woman who was showing off her $35 million dollar yacht. She looked like shit from all the things she'd had done to her body to keep looking desirable enough to fuck. I was really confused. Why on Earth did this woman wanna look desirable enough to fuck. She'd been fucking for sixty years and never got no satisfaction out of it.
I did one of them thar faux pas' recently. I doubt if it even matters. Nobody knows. I used to be friendly with this woman who is in fact a real go-getter. The only problem she had was that she was an alcoholic. I personally only thought she was a drunk like me, but nooooo, she had to push the envelope and BE an alcoholic. BEING an alcohol is what she turned her life into. I liked her just fine as a drunk.
I even asked this woman to marry me once in a fit of insanity. She was the woman I truly deserved. Some deluded bitch who used to read me stories written by people a sophisticated person might have recognized right away, but I could tell from the way she read his brilliant writing to me, that she found him subjectively interesting. Besides, this bitch really is as smart as me, or was, but now that she's decided she's an alcoholic she's got too much baggage. The problem for me was that I am not man enough for her. Oh, I don't feel bad about that. I'm not a good enough man for anybody. Who does she think she is? Who am I?
...
I am a light
from very far
that gleams
with all the beauty
of a star,
and is in day
the very night,
the shadow of
a very bright
daydream.
July, 1973
Whatever it is that I am, it's not good enow for the significant others in my life. The problem with that is that I set the parameters by which they judged me, and ruled me unworthy. It's very difficult to get past that facticity.
I seem to be one of those people who figure you're either fer me or agin me. You put an organization you fished for between me and you, I'm gonna give you that organization for company. If you're not cool with being the first person in your life, then you sure as hell ain't gwine allow sech from or for me. I don't buy $20 a pound coffee to use it twice. Brazilian lowland coffee is better the first time than the high mountain arabica the second time around.
My daughter seems to have decided she's an alcoholic instead of drunk too. I really hate that for her. Granted, I failed her as a father, but she failed her own self as a drunk. There are institutions one may commit themselves to, and then there are institutions one can commit oneself to. Alcoholics Anonymous might be a nice place to visit, but the idea of becoming a permanent guest is worse than absurd, it's pathetic.
I'm kind of bingeing on Hot Pockets because of the horrible news. Oh, it's not news to me. I figured this crap out a couple of years ago, but you see, when i figure something out, after all is said and done, it's not written in stone. I learned how not to do that because it's just freaking foolish to paint myself in a corner. The horrible news is that fat cells never go away. They may not be filled with suet, but they're still there just waiting for me to fill them up again.
I saw this article in a reputable scientific online magazine (It's on the internet, asshole, it's gotta be true!) where it stated that even if you get liposuction, once you recover from the operation, the fat cells return on their own, they come back even if you starved yourself. We're doomed! No... I"m doomed. Your milage may vary.
You tell me! My old father was fat as a pig from the time he married that Cancer woman who became my mother. She treated him like God. Why would she not? He saved her from a fate worse than death. My point is that he was a good eighty pounds over-weight from middle age on, and lived to be eighty-eight years old. I'm not a momma's boy because of the way she treated me. I'm a momma's boy because of the way she treated my father until the day he died. In fact, when he had developed pneumonia and was a goner, she put him out of his unperceived misery. I'm absolutely sure she was just following orders. No woman on Earth could owe me that much loyalty. There is not enough I could do for them to bring that sort of debt into play.
People have to give themselves to me. It's not because of some decision I made. I don't know why they have to give themselves to me. It's almost as if I'm not even a part of the decision-making process that ends up with some sort eternal commitment. I'm a double-Taurus. The keyword for Taureans is: I possess.
I own some people. Only the people who of their own volition gave themselves to me. Not only did I not ask this of them, I couldn't prevent it. Worse, I don't even know who some of them are. They never bothered to inform me of their intentions. Leeches. I call them Remoras. People like Mona Worley from when I was a child in the first grade. She adored me for reasons I had no say so about.
Do you have any idea how tasty these stupid Hot Pockets are with cheap burgundy?
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Beguine
One of the things I've done and felt good about was to imitate other people. There are some people, however, that it's not been alright to imitate them because it is considered impolite, and that's retards. I don't use that word lightly. Especially when it's been applied to me infrequently all of my life. I'd be willing bet, if the truth could be known, that most people have been accused of being a retard more often than is comfortable.
Today I realized that I could not only dance inside my house and out on the decks and stairs, but i can dance all over my yard too, because nobody can see in here from the paved road. I'm surrounded by my family's properties and the woods and underbrush, and literally... truly... nobody knows. My family already knows I'm crazy. they brag about it sometime. As if to express gratitude that it's me instead of them. No blame.
I stumbled out on to my lawn and swirled and twirled like a maniac. I walked around my house backwards and spun around in circles until i almost fell down. Then, I started walking like a retard and screwing up my face like that grinning idiot piano player with the yellow jackets band, and it felt just great. Some things do happen when I hold my mouth just right. I ain't here just to display the right faces to all the right people. Who decides who that might be?
I did all this crazy stuff to the rhythm of drumbeat #092 Beguine. Well, that's what the LED readout says it's called. I'm familiar with an old Forty's song labeled Begin The Beguine. I never knew what that meant. After seeing this drum beat called Beguine I figured maybe it was the name of some exotic South American dance. I got curious and Googled it up. Nope. Not even close.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beguine
Some weird Catholic religious cult back in the Thirteen Hundreds that had something to do with the Crusades. The legitimate church didn't approve, so they just killed them and let God sort it out. Typical Papist response. It's a fairly interesting read though. The world was a different place back in those days, much less a thousand or two years ere that. Certain human careactoristics were quelled, and if you didn't accept the rules of conscience the ruling majority provided for you, then you either went to live some place else or got dead. I don't think death meant that much until some wackos started making something of it.
Why Yamaha thought this drum beat should be called Beguine is beyond me. All I know is that i like it. I pick out parts of it and play them on my Djembe drum, and listen to the parts I'm not playing, and they seem to take on a different meaning. Then, I stop playing that part and take up another, and listen to what I just played and to what I haven't played yet, and at the end of this round-robin I can hear all the individual parts together.
There are four instruments and the continuous jangle of cymbals being played with brush sticks. It's digital perfect. Over and over. Never missing a stroke. Never adding a stroke. I'll never be that way, but it's cute to have such a model to compare what I do against. It's fun to try to play it perfectly like the computer does, yet, all the while knowing it's not going to happen.
Today I realized that I could not only dance inside my house and out on the decks and stairs, but i can dance all over my yard too, because nobody can see in here from the paved road. I'm surrounded by my family's properties and the woods and underbrush, and literally... truly... nobody knows. My family already knows I'm crazy. they brag about it sometime. As if to express gratitude that it's me instead of them. No blame.
I stumbled out on to my lawn and swirled and twirled like a maniac. I walked around my house backwards and spun around in circles until i almost fell down. Then, I started walking like a retard and screwing up my face like that grinning idiot piano player with the yellow jackets band, and it felt just great. Some things do happen when I hold my mouth just right. I ain't here just to display the right faces to all the right people. Who decides who that might be?
I did all this crazy stuff to the rhythm of drumbeat #092 Beguine. Well, that's what the LED readout says it's called. I'm familiar with an old Forty's song labeled Begin The Beguine. I never knew what that meant. After seeing this drum beat called Beguine I figured maybe it was the name of some exotic South American dance. I got curious and Googled it up. Nope. Not even close.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beguine
Some weird Catholic religious cult back in the Thirteen Hundreds that had something to do with the Crusades. The legitimate church didn't approve, so they just killed them and let God sort it out. Typical Papist response. It's a fairly interesting read though. The world was a different place back in those days, much less a thousand or two years ere that. Certain human careactoristics were quelled, and if you didn't accept the rules of conscience the ruling majority provided for you, then you either went to live some place else or got dead. I don't think death meant that much until some wackos started making something of it.
Why Yamaha thought this drum beat should be called Beguine is beyond me. All I know is that i like it. I pick out parts of it and play them on my Djembe drum, and listen to the parts I'm not playing, and they seem to take on a different meaning. Then, I stop playing that part and take up another, and listen to what I just played and to what I haven't played yet, and at the end of this round-robin I can hear all the individual parts together.
There are four instruments and the continuous jangle of cymbals being played with brush sticks. It's digital perfect. Over and over. Never missing a stroke. Never adding a stroke. I'll never be that way, but it's cute to have such a model to compare what I do against. It's fun to try to play it perfectly like the computer does, yet, all the while knowing it's not going to happen.
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Memsistors
Another slack day. I did a minimal effort to sustain all my ghastly habits. I stayed home all day. I didn't even go out to see if I had any snail mail in my rural delivery box out on the paved road. The only exercise I got today was done strictly to relieve my guilt about being so lazy. I just got and danced to the rhythm of the drum machine for maybe two minutes and figured that oughta keep me alive another five minutes. So much for aerobics today. I did go outside and walk up and down the outside stairs a couple of times.
I've been so lazy I haven't even changed the drum beat from it's default setting. I've had it playing 001 8BeatModern for some time now, and ignored it for the most part. I spent a good part of my slovenly day checking out the other sounds on my keyboard. Some of them are very good. Some of the choices have the appellation "sweet" attached to an instrument like 074 Sweet! Clarinet, and 080 Breathy Tenor Sax. I understand why they call them sweet. Just by playing some simple tune using these instrument samples I can make them sound real good. Have I mentioned how much I'm enjoying my fairly new Yamaha Portable Grand digital piano?
Most of the time I use it I've got it set on the Grand Piano setting that it's famous for. It's got this black button, see, that immediately changes all the setting so that it plays the digitally sampled sounds of Yamaha's acoustic grand piano. It sounds a lot like an acoustic piano, a very expensive grand piano, and I never have to get it tuned. That's a big selling point with me. I'm not your musical instrument tuning fanatic some people are.
I'm still thinking about this new electronic discovery announced by the HP Labs today. I seem to have intuited it was a big deal when i read the early morning article. By lunch there were all sorts of highly complimentary accolades going around. If the hype is only half-way right (they literally have working prototypes) it's gonna change the digital revolution more than any event since the invention of the transistor. Maybe even more.
The Hewlett-Packard home page announced the results, and the guy who lead the research team readily acknowledged that the possibility had been worked out mathematically nearly forty years ago by a professor at Berkley. He also stated in no uncertain terms that the "memristor" was a discovery and not an invention. How could it not have already existed if it rang a bell with me.
I'm not sure how it rang a bell with me, and I don't know what that means either. It was the comments about how it not only remember what it's contents were in the present, but it was capable of remembering it's previous contents, and it was further capable of comparing its former occupant with it's present occupant, and that's what makes it capable of simple consciousness.
I don't know if I read this right, but it the articles I've been reading off and on all day about it was that it could do comparative operations such as required in face-reading without any software to direct it's purpose. Granted, I don't know what the hell that means, but if it's the missing link in electronics the way it's being claimed, the possibilities can't even be addressed yet.
If nothing else got done today I did do a lotta reading on memristors. It's sure something to look forward to as this technology comes into it's own. I don't know how this will affect the future of quantum computers. They may be circumvented altogether.
The guy who worked out the mathematics in 1971, Leon Chua, stated that the electronic theorists had ignored the possibilities of memristors existing and scoffed at the notion that a prototype could ever be constructed. The work done at the HP labs proved he was right and they were wrong. It's startling to me to consider what has transpired to date without memristors. Artificial intelligence is about to make a giant leap forward.
I've been so lazy I haven't even changed the drum beat from it's default setting. I've had it playing 001 8BeatModern for some time now, and ignored it for the most part. I spent a good part of my slovenly day checking out the other sounds on my keyboard. Some of them are very good. Some of the choices have the appellation "sweet" attached to an instrument like 074 Sweet! Clarinet, and 080 Breathy Tenor Sax. I understand why they call them sweet. Just by playing some simple tune using these instrument samples I can make them sound real good. Have I mentioned how much I'm enjoying my fairly new Yamaha Portable Grand digital piano?
Most of the time I use it I've got it set on the Grand Piano setting that it's famous for. It's got this black button, see, that immediately changes all the setting so that it plays the digitally sampled sounds of Yamaha's acoustic grand piano. It sounds a lot like an acoustic piano, a very expensive grand piano, and I never have to get it tuned. That's a big selling point with me. I'm not your musical instrument tuning fanatic some people are.
I'm still thinking about this new electronic discovery announced by the HP Labs today. I seem to have intuited it was a big deal when i read the early morning article. By lunch there were all sorts of highly complimentary accolades going around. If the hype is only half-way right (they literally have working prototypes) it's gonna change the digital revolution more than any event since the invention of the transistor. Maybe even more.
The Hewlett-Packard home page announced the results, and the guy who lead the research team readily acknowledged that the possibility had been worked out mathematically nearly forty years ago by a professor at Berkley. He also stated in no uncertain terms that the "memristor" was a discovery and not an invention. How could it not have already existed if it rang a bell with me.
I'm not sure how it rang a bell with me, and I don't know what that means either. It was the comments about how it not only remember what it's contents were in the present, but it was capable of remembering it's previous contents, and it was further capable of comparing its former occupant with it's present occupant, and that's what makes it capable of simple consciousness.
I don't know if I read this right, but it the articles I've been reading off and on all day about it was that it could do comparative operations such as required in face-reading without any software to direct it's purpose. Granted, I don't know what the hell that means, but if it's the missing link in electronics the way it's being claimed, the possibilities can't even be addressed yet.
If nothing else got done today I did do a lotta reading on memristors. It's sure something to look forward to as this technology comes into it's own. I don't know how this will affect the future of quantum computers. They may be circumvented altogether.
The guy who worked out the mathematics in 1971, Leon Chua, stated that the electronic theorists had ignored the possibilities of memristors existing and scoffed at the notion that a prototype could ever be constructed. The work done at the HP labs proved he was right and they were wrong. It's startling to me to consider what has transpired to date without memristors. Artificial intelligence is about to make a giant leap forward.
The iPhone And Me
Apple has really got me thinking about buying an iPhone as my main internet connection device. It may be cheaper than my home phone/DSL connection, and portable after the initial costs. I'm reading about what Apple plans to do with the iPhone on the digital news sites, and it's starting to look like the iPhone will have a WiMax chip in it.
It's difficult to know what's going on with WiMax these days because the Telcos and cable companies are definitely against it. Like a lotta people, I've been following the news about WiMax since the idea of it first began showing up on the tech news sites. I got all worked up about it's possibilities.
WiMax is a threat to a lot of present day businesses and technologies, and they're putting out negative propaganda to negate it's chances of matriculating into the main stream. If Apple puts a WiMax chip in the iPhone, it'll be all over but the shouting. I don't think it will put anybody out of business, but it sure will put a different slant on how people look at the web.
It's difficult to know what's going on with WiMax these days because the Telcos and cable companies are definitely against it. Like a lotta people, I've been following the news about WiMax since the idea of it first began showing up on the tech news sites. I got all worked up about it's possibilities.
WiMax is a threat to a lot of present day businesses and technologies, and they're putting out negative propaganda to negate it's chances of matriculating into the main stream. If Apple puts a WiMax chip in the iPhone, it'll be all over but the shouting. I don't think it will put anybody out of business, but it sure will put a different slant on how people look at the web.
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