Musings

It is a constant struggle to live in the present moment--a struggle even to remember I want it. The past calls me back so frequently and with such haste, stirs emotions that I thought dead, brings pain and a disturbing lack of clarity, though clarity is not mine on a day-to-day basis, regardless.

This is my constant struggle: apathy versus practice, laziness versus discipline, an eye towards now with a healthy sense of the future versus a gaze filled with the past and future with no awareness of where I am, who I am, at this moment.

Daily prayer

To break the heavy shackles of inertia,
Freeing passion and prayer, and above all else the pursuit of purpose.
To each day wake with a shock, shouting to the spirits,
I am ready, I am open. Take me to the edge. Show me the way.

I'm ready to walk it.

Courage is the willingness to go forward though draped in fear.

Hermit and Lover, turning my back on Heirophant and half-loves.

Speaking in symbols imbues fuller truth in a thing; ideas that can shift to match different situations and times. That the tools are not absolute does not diminish their usefulness. This is the strength of the tarot.

Of Evil and Bus Stops

The bus stop was evil. I walked an extra five blocks every morning in order to avoid it. It was on the corner of 10th, and I would loop around the block to 11th, past the old empty Victorian house, and finally back to tenth where a non-evil bus stop resided. When asked what about it was evil, I came up blank. No upside-down pentagrams or dried blood adorned its walls--it was physically exactly as vile as every other public structure in the city. It had the same crooked blue pole and peeling out-of-date informative stickers.

Nor was it a gut reaction. No nameless fear or anything like that. I didn't feel any twisting darkness in my heart. It was just a knowledge, I guess. Solid to the point that one wouldn't really even think of questioning it. Like how I know soup is made better with the inclusion of salt.

I couldn't tell you why, but it was a property of the universe that the bus stop wished us all ill.

My friends tell me I'm anthropomorphizing inanimate objects, and that there's probably a disorder for that. I should look it up, they tell me.

I'm never actively afraid, you understand. I know it's evil, and it wants to get me, and so I don't like to be near it. But it is, after all, a bus stop. It doesn't exactly loom large on the scale of fine motor control, and I'm not the sort to believe in magic. An angry flea could do me more injury.

Still, it's hard to feel comfortable with it standing there out in the open. No sign or anything to warn people away. After my letters to City Hall were met with no response, I forced myself within the block to post signs of my own.

I guess people tear them down, after mocking me relentlessly in a combination of sharpie, pencil, and knife-scratches.

I guess people don't like those trying to keep them safe.

Of Crystalline Waters and Asking Why

Our last hope came in a wave. Not a metaphorical wave, I'm talking water and height and speed. They hid in the salt, tiny, fragile. Their bodies were crystalline, and they chimed when they touched. Communication through music, each too soft to hear on its own. They came in the trillions, and their coming was marked by a herald of sound.

We needed them. Our people were dying. Each one mutating, alone in a body they couldn't trust, shifting and cracking open with pus and blood and bile. Our people were dying, and we didn't know why.

We pleaded with our scientists, our politicians, our priests and our gods, and in the end we pleaded with the stars. We knew they were out there, somewhere. We had heard their music in the night, seen their shimmering forms in the light of the cosmos. We pleaded, and we cracked at the seams until the question was no longer if we would end, but how soon.

Our satellites still worked, our communication was sound, and for a long time we stayed in touch with each other--the diminishing dregs of our world. We swapped ideas, theories, asked ourselves why, por que, warum, keno, mbona.

The stars answered. They fell into our seas and oceans, like a rain of glitter. They waited in the night, waiting for the tide. Bonding with the water, they shaped it, gave it strength. Until they came at us in a wave.

Near the coasts the first of us were washed in water, carried on the surface as if all the saltwater in the world had become as dense as the Dead Sea. We tumbled, and feared, and some of us drowned. But when the waves subsided, those who could still speak spoke of their awe. The music had surrounded them, touched them in their core. They had bathed in the waters, and it had been cleansing, soothing, as no sea should be.

They came each day with the rising tide, again and again, washing the world clean. And those touched remained whole. Through the years, remained a person. Alive.

They stayed in our waters for a long time, becoming a part of our world so fully that our children scarce believed they had once been nothing more than music among the stars.

Po Po, take a gander

Ninaandika Kiswhahili

Siandiki huko sana. Pole sana. Nilisoma isimu ya lugha na Kiswahili. Si muda kwa kuandika. Pia, nililala na kuona Star Trek sana. Captain Picard anataka kusema na Daktari Crusher kwa sababu yeye anapenda Crusher.

Nitaandika! Kesho, nitaandika. Utaona.

FOOD

Robert made this tiramisu, and it's restaurant quality work. This shit is delicious.

Add that to perfectly broiled steaks, garlic mashed potatoes, and pancetta kale, and you have a dinner that wins. Wins in so many ways.

I've been snacking on the side dishes and tiramisu all night. I am so full.

Music?

I'm going to do something VERY RARE here and talk about music.

First: watch this.



The most recent Playing for Change music video, released for Bob Marley's birthday, is One Love. One of the groups that plays is The Exile Brothers from Dharamsala, India. Now, I never saw them play, but I often frequented the restaurant that they were affiliated with, and saw them around. I googled them up real quick and found their MySpace page. I'm a big fan of what I've heard. It's pretty chill stuff, but it's got a real power to it. They describe themselves thusly:

"Touches of the Doors mixed with Tibetan traditional instruments, Buddhist thinking, and the blues sewn together with dreams of being back in Tibet and physical and spiritual freedom."

Anyway, I recommend checking them out if you're into that sort of thing.

Another artist I've been listening to for a while is Andy McKee. He's ancient news, especially by internet standards, but if you haven't seen him play, well, he is fairly impressive, at least to a musical Luddite like me:



Sounds like a bit of a douche, though?

One last video to make up for a lack of original content!

Sense of Self

I had a fairly shitty day today, though I guess it started last night. These feelings have been building for a while, but just recently I've come to doubt my own character and integrity in a fundamental way. It's scary that I might not be the person I thought I was. That the people who know me might not consistantly tell me what they really think or that I might not listen when they do. I feel like I'm walking blind through the world, like I'm throwing out signals using technology I don't understand, and that I've never heard my messages played back.

This current perceived lack of self-awareness has made me interested in something I saw today on Boing Boing. To quote: "Since 1955, Jerry Davidson has obsessively written down everything he does during the day: visits to the store, telephone calls, meals, sex. Davidson has an impenetrable code, involving abbreviations and multiple colors of inks. A star on the top of a page means Jerry had a good day. Davidson never writes in the first person though, always in the third. He takes himself out of his experiences. His life is raw data."

I think this would be fascinating: to see myself through the data of my life. Of course, I would never create opinions of myself based solely on this data, but it could very well show me trends I normally don't perceive. It would be a way to look at myself through another filter, another lens, and would add to my collected knowledge of myself.

I would also be interested in other methods of developing self-awareness.

The lexicon and paradigm of sociolinguistics is slowly leaking into my life. Eli mentioned earlier today that a Spanish announcement on the bus didn't sound very announcementy, and my mind jumped to wondering about differences between unmarked speech in the register of announcements between Spanish-speaking and English-speaking speech communities. In this case I think it was just a poor recording, but I'm pleased that that's where my mind went. Maybe I'm actually getting a handle on this stuff after all.

Escape to Awesome Mountain

There's something about stories intended for children that resonate with me far more strongly than stuff written for adults, however brilliant it may be. This is particularly true with things I read in my youth. It is the reason that to this day authors like Bruce Coville, J.K. Rowling, Susan Cooper, Dr. Seuss, Tamora Pierce, and others remain such favorites of mine. I think these authors themselves would speak to the power of their words for all ages.

Shopping the other day at the thrift store, I saw a number of books from my childhood. I picked up three of the Dark is Rising Sequence by Susan Cooper, three of the Enchanted Forest Chronicles by Patricia C. Wrede, The Skull of Truth by Bruce Coville, and Escape to Witch Mountain by Alexander Key.

I never read Escape to Witch Mountain as a child, but I was insanely in love with the two movies. I remember scenes from each, and the powerful feeling watching them instilled in me. A brief, relatively spoiler-free summary for those who haven't read or seen:

Tony and Tia are brother and sister. They are orphans, and they can do amazing things. Tony can move objects with his mind and visualize places he's never been. Tia can open any lock, has a perfect memory, and can speak with animals. A greedy man chases them to use for his own profit as they try to find out who they are and where they came from.

I read the book over the last couple of days. It's a tiny thing, 180 pages with large type, a quick read. Yet it still brought up in me the sense of awesome that the old movies did.

Quick note, a trailer to yet another remake of Witch Mountain aired during the Superbowl. It's called Race to Witch Mountain, stars the kid that raped the role of Will Stanton, and you would have to pay me quadruple digits in AMERICAN CURRENCY to get me to see it. (Just from the preview I've already seen Tony phase through solid matter and stop a truck by letting it crash into him. In other cases those italics might stand for excitement. In cases where my childhood is getting stomped into the pavement it indexes sharp pointy rage.)

Moldy Beds and Bedded Moles

I am taking a stand: despite the fact that my other, main blag doesn't work, I will still write. Here, for the nonce. I think I might try to be more casual with this one.

I went shopping for clothes today, as my two pairs of pants are falling apart and were getting, frankly, embarrassing. My shopping took place at Value Village, where my mother gets a 40% discount on Mondays because she's over 55. I got five pairs of pants, a sweater, jacket, and shirt for forty bucks.

Here's where my insecurities enter the picture. I hate wearing new clothes (or y'know, new to me), because I always feel that everyone around me will judge me poorly because of them. I have no confidence in my sense of style (which may be non-existent). This is why I wear clothes until they wear out completely: they're horrible and tattered, but at least I know where I stand with them.

It's a fucking waste of mental and emotional energy, but I don't know how to just be comfortable and like what I like.

Saturday night I was cleaning out my room. I had been sleeping on an old futon set directly on the floor. I lifted it up to vacuum under the edges, and was greeted by the reek of mold. The entire bottom of the futon and the floor directly under it was soaking wet and covered in black growth. Foul foul foul disgusting. I threw the mattress away and cleaned up the mold in the carpet as best as I could. However, since then I've developed a stuffy nose and sore throat: I suspect it's related to the mold exposed to the air. I'm looking into getting a dehumidifier to help prevent mold from developing in the future--and let's just say I'm sleeping on a raised bed from here on out.