Category: Uncategorized

Well, we move early next week, so we’re starting to think about the long list of stuff we need to do. Though as moving goes, this one is pretty low-stress by comparison for two reasons: a) we don’t have much stuff; and b) 85% of our stuff is already packed and in storage.

It looks like I’ll get to exercise my Inner Carpenter at the new place; one of the first things I want to do is to buy some lumber to build bookshelves. This will be the first time that I’ll be able to have all of my books out on shelves, as opposed to in boxes. I’m greatly looking forward to this; having my books accessible is important to me for reasons I can’t quite explain. Something about access to one’s own intellectual history. Or something.

Another carpentry project on the horizon is to build a loft bed for my daughter. Basically, the idea is to build a sort of bunk bed, where the bed itself is on the top bunk and where the bottom bunk would be will be a desk. She’s excited by the idea of having both a loft bed and a desk, which is cool. And besides, a homeschooled child should clearly have her own desk.

Sadly, lumber prices are at an all-time high right now. All those damn hippie tree huggers standing in the way of industry must be getting expensive. Cough. Actually, the reconstruction of Iraq seems to be behind spiking lumber prices too.

So, as busy as this time is, I continue to juggle the myriad of emotions within me. They’re all still there, and they’re all still demanding my attention. Just trying to stay afloat, focus more on my daily activities and get things done (being sick for the better part of 2 weeks has put a damper in this as well; I’ve had lots of time to kick back and reflect, which is not necessarily what I’ve watned to be doing lately).

I remember reading Spider Robinson‘s Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon many years ago. It’s a delightful book, but one maxim contained therein has stuck with me: “Shared sorrow decreases. Shared joy increases. Thus do we refute Entropy.”

To this day, this maxim remains the foundation of my conception of community.

Last night, this maxim was reinforced yet again in my experience. Just sayin’.

OK, in advance, know that this post is going to be somewhat maudlin, and will contain lots of me processing recent events. Here in this quasi-public forum. But this blog is intended to be a representation of what’s on my mind, so it’s valid.

I remember when I was a philosophy student studying the notion of “tragedy.” One of my favorite definitions of “tragedy” comes from Kathleen Higgins, a Nietzsche scholar/philosopher at the University of Texas. Her conception of tragedy is something close to this: the tragic is something sad that happens that cannot be explained away rationally.

From that perspective, it seems to me that recent events in my life are tragic. I don’t mean to be melodramatic when I say this. I’m just trying — still — to process them and move through them the best I can. Everyone involved in the situation found themselves in a place where our rational minds were throwing up red flags right and left. And yet, all of us still were compelled to move forward. Had any one of us paid attention to the rational, we would have thrown a flag and put a stop to it. Yet, none of us did. Rationality was ignored. Therefore, the situation was tragic.

My task now is to reclaim my health, mind, body and spirit. I’ve been sick for most of the past two weeks, two different illnesses moving through me. This is no coincidence. My energy system is out of whack utterly. My body feels bad, I haven’t been exercising, I could be eating better.

The Hammer speaks: “all creators are hard. And it must seem blessedness to you to impress your hand on millennia as on wax.” Hardness, for me, is resoluteness; one must become hard, or use hardness as a tool, to create. Said the Schmidt. Now I must find a Linden tree so I can set up shop…

I wanted to bookmark this Slashdot story about BitTorrent. I’ve used bittorrent a number of times, and it’s quite remarkable. Supposedly, a staggering percentage of Internet traffic these days is due to BitTorrent; I can’t recall the exact percentage, but it’s something like half of all the Internet traffic.

For the uninitiated, BitTorrent is a ‘net infrastructure that allows distributed downloads. In English, it basically means that the more demand there is for a particular file, the faster it downloads. Note that this is contrary to normal downloading; when there is high demand for a normal file, typically the servers that host the file are overloaded and if you can get the file at all, it’s really slow. So BitTorrent is a way to solve these problems.

I have been using a BitTorrent program called Azureus, which is written in java and is therefore cross-platform. It has worked quite well until I recently updated it, though now as I look on the site I see there is a bug that has been addressed on the system. I am indeed experiencing the problems they outline, so I’ll apparently have to try upgrading my java installation.

So yeah, this post is mostly for my own use later. I don’t expect many people to be innarested in it…

I’m getting more excited about our return to Portland. Part of me wishes we ended up out in the country, closer to where my recording studio is. One goal is to spend more time doing music, so that would have been a natural way to go about it. Indeed, there was a 2-bedroom apartment that opened up next door to the studio; it turned out I was 2nd in line to get that place, and the 1st person in line wanted it. Ah well.

But returning to Portland makes sense. I like Portland. I miss walking through Portland. And, we’ll have off-street parking, which removes the biggest hassle at living in Portland. I won’t have to worry about moving my car during snow parking bans. This is clearly a good thing.

Plus, it means that we’ll elminate about 200 miles per week of commute drivetime, as my wife and I will each be able to walk, ride, or bus to work. Driving less is in itself a good thing, but another benefit is that whoever is home with Mo will have a car to go Do Stuff. And I’ll still drive to the studio at least twice weekly, a 30 minute drive rather than a 20 minute drive. So in the end, I think it’s worth it.

In the end, we’ll drive less, and I’ll be more free to go to the studio. This rocks.

There has been an incredible buzz around Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith.

One of the stories is that those accursed Pirates™ (arrr, matey!) have leaked a bootleg of the film to the Internet. And, of course, given the
increasingly
desperate
tactics
used recently by the
MPAA, there was not-so-thinly veiled outrage at these vicious criminals marauding the virtual high seas.

Despite these “crimes,” Revenge of the Sith broke the single-day record for film revenues. This movie, despite the fact that pirated copies exist and are easily obtainable online, sold more tickets in 24 hours than any other movie, ever.

When will the Intellectual Property fascists realize that enclosing Intellectual Property is not the answer? That imposing technologies that preemptively control the behavior of individuals, before any “crime” is committed, is not only unneccesary but ineffectual? This film’s success is yet another counterexample to the claim that Internet Piracy™ just isn’t the problem that the corporate studios claim it is.

Another piece of buzz about this film is that many have noticed similarities between the rhetoric of Darth Vader/Emperor Palpatine and George W. Bush. There are many responses I have to this comparison.

First, and most obviously, this story was conceived nearly 30 years ago, in the aftermath of Nixon, Watergate, and the Vietnam War. Though specific dialogue has been written recently, and all writing comes from a context, one cannot conclude that Lucas is intentionally making potshots at the BuShites.

Second, and to shift gears a bit, well let’s just say “if the shoe fits…” This is not an attack on any individual, not even George W Bush, but the fact remains that the rhetoric behind the actions of the BuShites is similar to the rhetoric behind the actions of Emperor Palpatine and Darth Vader. So this is not really a personal attack, but a semantic analysis of their thinking and utterances.

Third — and this is the crux of the issue — the Star Wars stories, like Lord of the Rings, exist in a world where Good and Evil are easily defined. There are archetypes of both good and evil embodied in specific characters that exist in the story, though at least in Star Wars there is some question about what is right and morality being perspectival. My point, though, is that one cannot collapse George W. Bush into the same evil archetype as Emperor Palpatine or Darth Vader. It just isn’t the same; one exists in a real world in which a staggeringly huge interconnected network of real people making real choices; the other is the figure of evil in a piece of fiction.

This is not so much a defense of George W. Bush — it seems clear to me that history will regard him as a criminal at the very least — but rather a claim that focusing one’s perception of Evil™ onto only one man is incredibly narrow. Again, this is not to say that the BuShites aren’t evil, but rather that the presence of evil in politics is much larger than this one man, no matter how much his rhetoric resembles that of the Evil Archetype in the most successful movie franchise in history.

The outrage against Bush that has existed since the 2000 election needs to be examined more closely. If you don’t like Bush, examine what it is about him that you don’t like, and then take a closer look at American history. His Evil™ is hardly new, it’s just more foregrounded than ever before.

Well, I was thrown a bone of concreteness today. We got the apartment in Portland, we’ll be moving on the 31st. This is good. I’m eager to return to Portland, in a place that I won’t have to move away from in a few months.

I had a good long conversation this morning with one of my best friends in the world. It was good. He and I have been there for each other in ways that are beyond measure. And it always seems to help us when we process in this way. One thing, through the past several weeks, my friends and my community have been solid as a rock, an anchor in the storm, etc etc. Words fail, but gratitude does not.

In other news, our dear friend JG is back in the hospital with abdominal issues again. Keep her in your prayers. She is a strong bird, and she’s literally scrapped and clawed, crawling back literally from death’s door, but this is clearly a setback. So send JG some good healing abdominal energy, as well as the people closest to her who have been through enough anguish over the past year and a half.

The world feels somehow lighter today. This is good.

I have been told — recently, though I’ve been told before — that I must be “swimming in energy” all the time. That’s sort of true, particularly over the past year. By this, I mean that I am sensitive to all sorts of subtle energies around me, this includes being an empath, sensitivity to emotions around me, as well as sensitivity to Ki/Qi/Chi that I’ve written about here before. This is kind of funny to me in a way; I remember being told by some hardcore feminist separatist witchlet many years ago when I was first getting into paganism that I was headblind, a term that means something close to “utterly oblivious to energy.”

Anyway, this is not necessarily the best condition to be in after the past 2 weeks. There have been lots of emotions, lots of negativity, lots of suffering within myself and all around me, most of it caused directly and indirectly by me. I’m still working my way through this emotional space. The overwhelming negative emotion for me is sadness, with tinges of anger under it, though the anger seems to be subsiding much more quickly and easily than the sadness. And I’m still not quite sure what to do with it. I’m trying very hard not to plunge headfirst into a sea of depression with this; I sometimes feel like I’m on autopilot, moving through the day-to-day tasks of my reality in some anhedonious haze. Swimming in anti-energy, almost.

Yet, I know there is so much joy to experience in living. And I just want to be able to experience this joy again without feeling bogged down by this depressive weight. I think it will take time to let these emotions move through me.

I keep trying to tell myself that everything happens for a reason, and I’m trying to cling to the vision that when I emerge from this dark forest, the light will be bright and beautiful. I just don’t want to fall asleep under some gloomy yet somehow inviting tree trunk.

Clearly, I need to find my inner Tom Bombadil, to tell off Old Man Willow and rescue my inner hobbit from the clutches of this situation:

Tom sprang away, and breaking off a hanging branch smote the side of the willow with it. ‘You let them out again, Old Man Willow!’ he said. ‘What be you a-thinking of? You should not be waking. Eat earth! Dig deep! Drink water! Go to sleep! Bombadil is talking!’ He then seized Merry’s feet and drew him out of the suddenly widening crack.
–Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings

So the search for Merry continues…

Looks like the new Vatican administration is choosing as wisely as one could expect for it’s new “church enforcer.” It is the American archbishop William Levada of the San Francisco archdiocese who will head up the “Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,” which is what used to be called the Holy Office of the Inquisition. The same post that Ratzinger held before he became pope.

Now, this says a lot, mostly within the context of the pedophile priest crisis in the US. Levada was one of the key figures in the American Catholic Church’s response to the sex abuse; he was widely praised for “deftly handling” the church’s evasion of responsibility or accountability for this tragedy.

And now, this guy has the highest Vatican post ever by an American. It would have been easy for the new Vatican administration to show how it feels about this situation; it is hardly the case that an American would be an obvious choice for such a high post. Indeed, this post is unprecedented for an American.

So in the wake of this pedophilia scandal, this just reinforces how distant the Vatican — and by extension the Catholic church — is from the cold, brutal, psychologically and spiritually damaged reality of priesthood in the US.

…happened to me today.

1. We found a new place to live. See previous post.
2. I got the new album, Deadwing by Porcupine Tree. Great album.
3. Freakwitch got a gig. We’ll be opening the Guitar Therapy Tour with The Mike Keneally Band and The Alex Skolnick Trio at The Asylum in Portland on Wednesday, June 15th. We’ll be playing early, at around 7pm, probably a brief set, like 30minutes. Very cool, but I have no hope at outplaying any of these guys on guitar. Good thing I believe in our songs.

There was also a fourth thing, but time will tell if it was good or not.