Time Travel
06/27/2005
I had typed the date as the year 1005.
After just reading the Burning Man "Jack Rabbit Speaks" newsletter where the
author relayed the same curious mix of joy and discomfort when they typoed the
year 3005. I think that's why some novels begn with, "It was the year
1827"... because it has quite an effect on the writer. Who knows about the
reader. It says all those people are dead or alternately we'll all be dead
and life is a roving point of reference. The Burning Man joy I
understand. Imagining a burn in 3005 would be on the lines of returning to
Deep Thought for the ultimate answer. A thought I love about Douglas
Adams' book is that the metaphor of the machinery for discovering ultimate truth
could have been a planet, a mouse, a man or a grain of sand.
Slartibartfast is a great name.
I like to read fridge
magnets. Apparently my truth machinery is an icebox. One magnet has
an interior view of a 50s/60s atomic age styley jetset transit lounge with it's
dolls and swingers being served cocktails by a svelte stewardess. But then
you notice the lounge is not a waiting area, it has portholes... they are
transitting as they lounge. It says, "Happiness is a journey, not a
place", which sounds all so campy unless you need to hear it then it's divine.
They're not waiting for an answer, the answer is like Einstein's relativity
explaining why an hour next to a beautiful woman is like five minutes.
We'll talk about beauty later cause it's related to truth or may be it? To close
for the moment on fridge magnets I also have a bumpersticker that nears it's own
consciousness quoting Richard Nixon: "Television is to news what bumperstickers
are to philosophy", and another self-aware sticker I saw read, "Worst Bumper
Sticker Ever". HA!
Dreams from early morning 06/28/2005
Holy cow! I made up
for dreamless sleep at Apogaea this morning. Not necessarily in duration
but very vivid. First I dreamt that PJ and I were over at Ian's house on a
summer day and Ian had a new bicycle that he wasn't familiar with yet. It
was some sort of recumbent trike. PJ hops on and rides it around the
grassy lawn under the shade trees. Ian and I walk down the yard, below a
terraced landscaping berm to the sidewalk and chat. I look over and see
PJ, on the bike, charging the berm like he's going to jump it and land on the
sidewalk or in the street. I instantly recognize it's not going to go
well. Now it gets a little weird. On the sidewalk is now a penny
arcade horsey ride. PJ goes airborne off the terraced yard and he almost
clears the shiny fiberglass brown and green horse's ass but it clips his rear
tire and sends him pitching forward, spilling and crashing on the street.
His upper forehead hits with a thud. I get over to him as he's trying to
get up and he looks like he's been hit. I'm talking to him and trying to
see if he's caved in his skull. The anxiety of the accident and injury to
PJ sets the dream on a darker slide as it fades out and I get a new
dream.
I'm driving or riding, alone or not (can't tell) in
a sedan through a city at what looks like five in the morning: still night but
near the blue grey lightening of dawn. The city feels German or
Belgian. We come to a city park and turn in. The headlights sweep
the entrance sign but there's an Audi bumper hanging over it obscuring.
The park is level and treed. The lush but tidy green grass is punctuated
by heavy healthy oaks and elms. The oaks' dark trunks are low and
spreading. As we drive the meandering park lane we come upon some
activity. There are a few conservatively official looking vehicles parked
ahead. We get closer and see two or three men in suits and dark long
coats, inspectors I sense. And there are fawn grey hounds, looking like
weimaraner crossbreeds, moving systematically through the dim light, low over
the grass searching. My point of view leaves the car and I find what they
are looking for. A lone hound circles an area in the grass below a large
oak. As an inspector looks upward into the oak, I see in the crook of a
high broad branch the back of a blonde woman wrapped loosely in coarse brown
paper. Her head is out the top of the paper, resting lightly against the
branch facing the inspector. The size of the large brown paper wrapped
package tells me her slim body had to be neatly folded, crouching inside.
I don't see her face, only her wavy hair, and it feels obvious that she is
dead.
I don't necessarily believe in tidy explanations for
dreams but the first dream about the head injury I know in most part stems from
an accident during building the art car for Burning Man 2004. Whether it
manifested from general anxiety, guilt, portense, or what, who knows.
Definitely struck an anchor line that recedes out of sight into the deep.
As for the mystery blonde even in the dream I was partly aware that it was
Natalie Holloway, the missing girl in Aruba that sparked it. That would
explain why I thought Belgium or Germany because of the Dutch. Some might
suggest guilt over broken relationships but I don't usually hang on to
guilt. Maybe I'm stuffing and denying some but I don't sense that to be
so. I think fear of death, of murder, and the grieving of past
relationships is partly at work. On a more plain speculation of bodies in
trees, I also coincidentally saw both "Predator" and "Alien Versus Predator"
movies in the past few weeks.
06/29/2005 Americans in a
funk?
I'm still updating parts of the website,
especially the home page with more talking talking talking. I don't think
I'm Jesus. I think I have too much spare time. I'm definitely out of
shape for writing. My spelling has gotten lousy. I write these raw
into the html so I should be using a word processor and then pasting but this is
working for now. I focus so much on understanding but understanding relies
on communication: verbal or other. I don't have any mad art skills worth
posting nor the knowhow so I guess I'm resigned to talking talking
talking. I just realized the talking talking talking may not be worth
posting either but it's helpful to me. It's helpful if it manifests itself
in action that is. The first two paragraphs of the article by Cuomo were
like I was reading my own. Not that I write that well but he hit a big
malaise right on the swelling. What dawned on me and should have dawned
several decades ago is that the corporate interests controlling our government
have infected it with the same psychosis of externalizing costs to the
public. The few at the top steer it like a hemorhaging cash cow. No
milk or honey for the little people. I used to think the government had
corruption, pork, and bloat everywhere but didn't see it as top down
systematic. I saw it as rampant instances of entrepreneurial
exploitation. Now I realize we've had a hostile takeover and all the
machinery is acting in concert to keep us quiet while it's ridden off a
cliff. The CEO/Director barons will be on a Tropical island with security
we've never dreamt of by the time we hit bottom. Can it be saved? Can you
work grassroots into elections into real change? I have to believe so. If
I get convinced otherwise then it's Jeffersonian revolution or anarchy as the
only solutions. My brother says power is never given, it has to be
taken. --Grim--
Hope it's not all that bad.
There are bright spots that don't seem to be engineered to distract. Maybe
we should be campaigning to revoke Corporations' charters or locally restrict
them since they control the federal election process maybe state or local
regulation would tie them down. I do agree that neoclassical economics
will ruin the planet. Well this thread has run dry. Off to act in
the world of real phenomena. I'll be back to reflect in my consciousness
later.
06/30/2005 Making My Brain
Hurt
Read some of the gleeful Bush bashing after his speech
the other night and then read some more and some more and after a while I
realized that what I thought was at stake was greed, corporate control of our
government and whose hand would be on the spigot as the oil barrel ran
dry. Instead the economic relativity of oil and the currency market seems
to have the unavoidable feel of gravity and the US is airwalking. Even
given that the alarmist and fatalistic filters are on, the US economic motives
beyond Halliburton and Exxon for invading Iraq can't be ignored. Those
motives rest in every wallet and trust and account in the dollar dominated
world. The euro has definitely been flogging us lately. Two years
back I had the vision of dollars being removed from underneath mattresses and
from coffee cans and being replaced with euros but it didn't dawn on me in a
macroeconomic sense. A sardonic voice asks why shouldn't this discussion be more
public? The TV viewing American public can't stomach blood for oil but maybe a
direct blood for money media campaign would force a honest turn in the endgame,
conservatives and liberals could argue economic strategies to stop the killing
and defuse a lot of propaganda. At least the soldiers in the fight would
know what could be at stake, despite the truth being as ugly as they feared,
just larger.
Peacekeeping forces could be called garrisons,
anti-terrorism could be called state terrorism, military becomes imperial
forces, coalitions become mercenary auxilliaries, liberations invasions, just
like the words that will be used to describe these current events in the
textbooks of the future. Maybe "Chicken Little" will be a shocker of a
movie.
I needed to add an uptick at the end of today's
entry. I reread it and was overwhelmed. Alternative energy! In my
small way, I helped to pass Amendment 37 here in Colorado and if enforced will
rock us towards a sustainable domestic energy policy. I buy all my
electricity from wind farms. Don't count out Ethanol. Ethanol can do
lots of things as a fuel and is a competitive source for non-petroleum
plastics. It comes mostly from corn. We have lots of farms.
Sell your SUV yesterday and use energy efficient bulbs and appliances! I have a
quality of light snobbishness that has held me back from fluorescents. I
adapted and overcame enough to put two fluorescent replacement bulbs in my
coachlight fixtures on the front and back patios. They're quite nice! They
are the bulbs that burn the longest in my house every night so I started there,
plus I don't have to read or eat by them... but maybe soon I'll get the
nerve.
I hope
you feel better 'cause I do.