Category: Uncategorized

When the rain won’t stop, I don’t walk as much. Wet isn’t so bad, neither is cold, but wet and cold don’t go together well.

When the rain won’t stop, I miss being outdoors with friends. Moving through the woods, with an axe, getting things done, working outside.

When the rain won’t stop, I become more aware of just how sacred my space is.

When the rain won’t stop, I miss the stars, though their light is uncountably old. I miss knowing which phase the moon is in. I feel like they are so many friends I’ve lost touch with…

When the rain won’t stop, I like to cook pans full of rich, savory foods.

When the rain won’t stop, I am thankful that I live at the top of a hill.

When the rain won’t stop, I like to go to new beaches, walking across the sand to an island that only becomes so at high tide. The waves are large and crash into the rocks with particular intensity, a beautiful fury, unrelenting and without remorse.

When the rain won’t stop, it makes sitting in an office building for twelve hours at a time somehow more tolerable.

I worked all last weekend, and this week I’ve been listening to Freakwitch demo recordings and working on the typesetting gig. I’ve also been trying to spend more quality time with my daughter.

Not much else to report….

I saw Dead Can Dance tonight. The show was quite good. It was the 2 main people in the band, Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry, along with a half-dozen backing musicians. There was a synth player, 2 percussionists, and 3 multi-instrumentalists.

The seats were amazing. We were literally 5th row center, right in front of the stage. I was close enough to watch the contortions in Lisa Gerrard’s throat as she sang. It was incredible; this woman is a genetic wonder with considerable training and practice. Turns out she is sick; this explains the few bad notes I heard from her tonight. I felt bad for her; her energy seemed off, she looked like she was in pain. Even her smile was strained. She has an incredible voice, and tends to get a lot of the press for Dead Can Dance.

But Brendan is one of my favorite singers, very underrated with a haunting baritone. And he was spot on tonight. One of the first notes he sang tonight was a bit off, but he just wasn’t loose. Once he settled in, he didn’t miss a note the rest of the night. A strong, strong voice. He also is a great acoustic guitar player, and quite proficient in drums, bass, and several other hand instruments lying around. A solid performance.

Thanks to my friends who hosted us and acquired the tickets. Masterful job in ticket acquisition! A great night.

Man, it’s a busy time. I’ve been working some extra hours at my weekend gig, my band is rehearsing more regularly than ever (with great fruit just waiting to explode from the branches), the book I was hired to typeset 9 months ago finally got out of the copy editing stage, and I get to go see Dead Can Dance tomorrow night at the Orpheum Theater in Boston.

I like doing this typesetting thing. I think I’d rather be doing that for my job than wageslaving. For this book, if I had 1 or 2 of these gigs per month, I could afford to quit my job. Something to think about….

The authors of this piece interviewed dozens of people in the New Orleans area, and came up with a compelling list of 25 questions that need to be answered. These questions are a reflection of concerns the locals have in the aftermath of New Orleans’ destruction. A must read; normally when people bitch about the government (myself included) it’s in the abstract, but these questions are very specific.

…fall arrived. Yesterday began with blustery winds, literally blowing our trash can off our porch. Whoosh. Then the rain came, and when we were on our way out of Portland, we could see the edge of the storm, a long front, a line of clouds straight as a ruler as far as the eye could see, looking like a huge blanket inching up to the horizon.

But then the sun sank below the edge of the front, and I saw the most vivid rainbow I’ve seen in years. They truly are majestic illusions. At one point, I was driving down a 2-lane highway through a forest; the trees were tall and right up on the edge of the road. The road was straight on this particular stretch, and rising up from the edge of the road on the horizon was a very wide and vivid rainbow, curving up and just to the left.

For the past few days, the low temperatures have been in the 40s and 50s. All that wind the other day blew summer away.

I’m glad autumn is my favorite time of year…

One day, several years ago, I buried something very powerful. It was beautiful and pure, but also scary and daunting. And it contained a tremendous amount of energy. It overwhelmed me, and I didn’t know how to deal with the power contained therein. I couldn’t wield that much power myself, and with little promise of outside help wielding it, I was afraid, and had a very difficult time staying grounded when I held it.

So I buried it.

I’ve since visited that X-spot on the map many, many times, but last week, I dug it up again. It hadn’t really changed much. It’s still every bit as powerful as it was. But it’s no longer as scary. You see, I’ve become more powerful since I buried it. I now have no trouble holding it, admiring it, looking at it in the eye from every angle, and staying grounded while I do so. It still dazzles me with its beauty. It still awes me with its uncountable potential for good. And it is still utterly enthralling to the deepest levels of my soul.

Now I have to let it go.

It is nothing more than a beautiful image, a what-if, an alluring, prenascent expectation. And the wisest thing that’s been pointed out to me in weeks is “expectations are for amateurs.”

Now, there is something deeper still than this artifact from my past, something more pure, more real, something that feels good to be with, something that is comfortable and not the least bit awkward. Something infinitely more powerful, because it exists in deeper levels of reality. It is shared kinetic energy, not imaginative potential energy.

And it is right before me, making it easy to forget about past artifacts, no matter how brightly they glow.

I played some music last weekend, but beforehand an African deity manifested before my eyes. He was accompanied by a rock-solid bearded hippy white guy on a drum, keeping groovy time. The deity had a huge head, and he glided across the floor by shaking his feet and floating on the rattling.

He came up to where I was standing, looked up at me, leaned forward with his staff, and went “poink!” right in the heart chakra. The jolt seemed to send a brilliant white pulse through me, that purified and released. Zing!

Then I got to play 2 Freakwitch songs in a room full of people with their lights already on. And there were several master drummers in the room, some of whom played with us.

Then I got another pleasant jolt last Tuesday.

There is a lot of divine energy flowing through my heart chakra lately. Feels good.

So I have to wonder, what the fuck does this mean? “A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll released Thursday indicated fewer than half of Americans believe the United States will win the Iraq war.”

I’ve seen this so many times with cnn.com polls. The questions are worded in such a way as to be meaningless. What exactly does it mean to “win the Iraq war?” What are the conditions of victory?

Wasn’t the goal to oust Saddam? If so, doesn’t that mean we already won? Or was it about making sure Iraq has no WMDs? They don’t, so we already won, right?

This question reflects the big problem with this war: there is no clear, justifiable objective. Our troops have no mission there that makes any sense.

Apart from protecting the Halliburton employees in the oil fields, of course…

As always, one of the best starting points to understand the new lawsuit against Google is Lawrence Lessig:

Google wants to do nothing more to 20,000,000 books than it does to the Internet: it wants to index them, and it offers anyone in the index the right to opt out. If it is illegal to do that with 20,000,000 books, then why is it legal to do it with the Internet? The “authors” ‘ claims, if true, mean Google itself is illegal. Common sense, or better, commons sense, revolts at the idea. And so too should you.

This suit reinforces Lessig’s arguments that the old Intellectual Property paradigm is utterly outmoded in this digital age. Makes sense to me.