anamnesis

Around this time, every year, I rethink objectives. Cyclic rituals, like New Year's resolutions, may seem silly in this post-agrarian age, but I find they help punctuate time in the daily stream of affairs. A pause button, where we can freeze-frame the blur of the parade, pan around and take in the themes or make fun of the floats. If we've been chasing the parade all this time, we probably haven't seen anything new. That's how parades work. Of course, if we run the opposite direction, we have an analog fast forward, especially if it's a real sucky parade. But you get the picture. Each year I notice something new that helps set perspective. This year it was the insidious nature of deadlines. The name alone evokes a static sense of direction. They say the only difference between a goal and dream, is that a goal has a deadline. But then again, "they" also say a bunch of stupid stuff. I'd like to say I don't really listen to "them", but...

Just got a package today from a good friend in Japan ---I didn't believe him when he said I was a character in a manga series. My friend had gone on to start his own style of Karate after I left Japan; his son, little Ryu in the picture below, became a national champion. The series happens before that, back in the good old days when he, Ryu and I were training in his small, family dojo. Ryu is about the same age as Tao, so he was about 8-12 when I was there. In this one I'm teaching Ryu what a "feint" is while we were at a tournament (By shouting, Look! A beetle! and stealing his chips.) The characters all use our actual names and, while embellished (heh), it's based on real events and brought back lots of memories. And it looks just like me. LOL. You read it right to left, btw. I might scan some more of our adventures from this series in the future. Click on the image to zoom. Now there is a certain, small culture of martial arts enthusiasts whom I've never...

Got back after midnight last night. Bone tired. Great trip! We left early for the conference to give us time to stop by Bryce canyon. A surreal experience. The rock formations at Bryce have an interesting legend (click the picture to zoom.) Bright-eyes and I invented stories about them coming to life on the night of a full moon and dancing in the valley. They allow night hikes through the canyon, which got us both thinking about another trip timed to check this out. After Bryce we left for Las Vegas, drove through the Dixie National Forest and at the top of a summit pass, standing on the edge of the mountain, you could hear the wind blowing in the valleys below. This is the music I'd like to capture in my flute. We kind of waffled our way through Las Vegas and found our hotel. I went to conferences for a few days and bright-eyes wandered around unsupervised but seemed to stay out of trouble. Mostly. We rendezvoused for lunches and hit the town on the evenings. Lots of glitter. And ...

The Indian myth Ramayana tells a story of prince named Rama's journey to enlightenment. It's an amazing epic, full of subtle application, the way most myths are, to modern life. At a point in the story, Rama has become king and holds daily court. Pressing issues, judgments and measures come rolling in with the waves of his subject's concerns du jour. Rama bears his role solemnly and with great responsibility. But every morning also, a monkey jumps in through the court window and hands Rama a piece of fruit. It's become such a routine that he hardly acknowledges it, he thanks the monkey and tosses the fruit behind him and gets on with business. As you might imagine, the pile of fruit grows pretty substantial; finally one day they decide to clean up. As they are picking through it, they discover that each fruit contains a jewel. Rama, wrapped in his duties of dispensing wisdom and managing daily affairs, had been tossing these precious gifts without thought. In the course...

I'm in a hotel. I drove here with a rented car, that looks like a car from an old get-away chase game one of us had long ago. Bright-eyes had to take a picture of it before I left, it was so odd. Its license plates say Oklahoma. Maybe I will get a copy from her and post it someday. Every evening, since my arrival, an angry thunderstorm sweeps the sky, throws bolts of lightning and growls for a couple of hours while it dumps sheets of water. Late tonight, when it was not raining, I took a short walkabout and came upon a curious sign. Drawn by a rushing sound, I discovered a fence where a parking lot ended, about 20 yards from the freeway. Between fence and freeway runs a drainage ditch, transformed into a stream by rain. Wired several places on the fence, guarding the ditch and claiming the 20 yard strip to the freeway, was a sign: No Trespassing. This is a U.S. Air Force Installation. Anyone caught trespassing with be detained and searched.

Photography and Translation: Bright Eyes Factual Narrative: K

Ger-beans was telling me one of Ms. Bean's, I'll leave that for him to post, it was pretty funny. The first clear memory I have must have been around 2 or 3 years old. Crawling out from behind a couch that I knew I wasn't supposed to be behind and seeing this giant figure of Mom waiting at the other side. Pure terror, but then she must have seen my eyes, cause she cracked this really big and radiant smile and hugged me. Close call, but the smile left a lasting impression. Second is about 3 memories, and I don't know which order they came, was about 4 or 5. Used to go riding on these horses on the weekends. One I liked, called "Red" and the other I didn't; I called him "trashcan." Well, for some reason it was decided I'd ride trashcan that day. The second the corral opened he bolted with me on his back. Reins were not going to cut it, I threw them aside and reached down to grab two clawfulls of horsey mien and hold on for dear life. He was run...

Ger-bean's post on pancake dips got me thinking. I'll try almost any food once. Sometimes twice, just make sure I really didn't like it. And some foods which I really don't like, I'll keep trying once a year or so just see if I have developed a taste ---because they look like such fun to eat (pickles comes to mind.) But there are a few that I've learned to approach with caution. I'm going to describe one that probably should have a warning label on it, and then offer a cool fast-food-health recipe I've had success with of late. My first experience with Ethiopian food was what Ger-beans technique reminded me of. We took the chilipeppers out for dinner once when they were about 4 and 6 and sat down to a feast at a little family run Ethiopian place painted in Jamaican hues. We were seated on the floor and the meal came out on a low table. You ate everything with your hands and rolled or picked up the courses with pieces of injera, a type of Ethiopian spong...

Tao had a interesting post on our experience of time. Rather than fill up his comment space with something that may take it on a tangent, I thought I'd post some personal observations here. This is just an exploration. It seems time accelerates for two major reasons and there is one way to slow it down that most of us know but few of us practice. One reason it seems to accelerate may be that the relative ratio of any unit of time gets smaller as we get older. When we're 4, a summer is 1/16th of our entire life and goes on forever. By the time we hit 30, the same summer is only 1/120th of our life so far. A much smaller fraction. And since time seems to be more about our subjective experience than the wall clock, the context of this accumulated experience seems to carry greater and greater weight. But not just because of its quantity. Another factor, one more insidious, is our habits. The other day at a restaurant I watched two three year olds from different tables dashing arou...

A man rowed a small boat upstream, heading toward home, when he felt another small boat, heading downstream, collide with his boat. Since he had the right of way, he felt angry. Turning, he yelled at the other boatman, "Watch where you're going! Be more careful!" The other man apologized, and passed by without further incident. But an hour later, as the man continued upstream, he felt another boat collide with his. Furious, he turned to yell at the reckless person. His anger vanished when he saw that they boat was empty---it must have come loose from its moorings. Calmly, he pushed it aside and continued on his journey. He never lost his temper again, because from then on, he treated everyone like an empty boat. In Don Miguel Ruiz's book, The Four Agreements, he speaks of the many agreements we have made with ourselves and others over the course of our lifes, the most important of which are those we have made with ourselves; the ones where we tell ourselves who we are...

I carry around in my head several stories that I consult from time to time. The sufi stories about the Mulla Nasrudin are some of my most prized possessions. What is interesting about these stories is that they are like onions. Over the years of thinking about them, they keep revealing layer after layer of meaning. Their first layer will pop to mind instantly. But if you keep thinking about them, you may be surprised how valuable they are in revealing more and more. Here's one of my favorites: A man was walking home late one night when he saw the Mulla Nasrudin searching under a street light on hands and knees for something on the ground. "Mulla, what have you lost?" he asked. "The key to my house," Nasrudin said. "I'll help you look," the man said. Soon, both men were down on their knees, looking for the key. After a number of minutes, the man asked, "Where exactly did you drop it?" Nasrudin waved his arm back toward ...

Well, Gerbean's post on The Next Exit was wildly informative, as usual, and the philosophy on "places I want to go on this interstate" triggered this entry. I'm curious about the folk wisdom kids remember from their elders. The little sayings and such that we carry with us. Like Marble Lady's "if it's not yours don't touch it." One that my chilipeppers probably got sick of hearing was "if you don't know where you're going, you'll probably end up somewhere else." I went out for a long walk last night around midnight. The wind was blowing and the smell of trees, earth and stream shifted me out of my mental ruts for a while. The moon was waning, always a good time to reflect rather than act. (And, in the spirit of the interstate factoids, you can tell if the moon is waxing or waning by which side the light is on; if it's lit on the left it's waning.) I started thinking about this rut I've been in the last couple o...

When I was 16, I made a conscious decision to learn to think in words; I did so because I thought it may come in handy, in the future, for communicating with others. It's been sort of a hit and miss project ever since. Two sources were indispensable in figuring out how these weird word constructs worked: The Devil's Dictionary (for how words are intertwingled with bigger things) and Alice in Wonderland (for how to navigate where rules don't make sense). The later is sandwiched in my office between books on the Visual Presentation of Information and the Art of War, the former is on my desktop at home. Alice let me know I could still use words without relinquishing my thought processes to them: "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -neither more or less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question i...

My beauty sleep was cut short this morning by a large moving truck at a neighbor's house with their radio cranked up. Now the music wasn't bad at all, but the commercials and dj had to go. And I had a plan. I put some coffee on to brew, took a shower, caught up with work related emails (decided to work from home today) and began preparations to rock their world. So to speak. Now with mechanical things, I'm lucky if I get the hammer pointed the right direction. (And was mightily impressed with ger-bean's shelving work!) With electronics, even with no training, I'm deadly. Just ask a certain Marble lady about a coffee-pot I hot wired for her. (I blame the explosion on cheap components.) Anyway, I had come into possession of a small FM transmitter. The neat thing about this was discovering, upon poking around, that the power output wasn't hardwired, but controlled by a simple rheostat underneath a plate behind the batteries (with something scratched on it about a ...

I have in my keeping, a small sliver of psyche named Ywen, that lives in an online game called wow . She has an odd family tree; although she is an elf, her relatives are gnomes, trolls and taurens. Sometimes they meet for mischief. As a rogue by trade, she has a number of devious abilities and, with her offbeat relatives (you know who you are), they play a game within the game where the object is to capture the flag of enemies. The enemies resist mightily. Chaos, death and resurrection and fights with magic, swords, curses, arrows, bombs and exploding sheep ensue. The world is richly textured and the gameplay is real-time interactive with 10 other slivers of human psyches on each side in this mini-flag-game. In the larger game there is a world with two continents to explore and varied adventures in a population of over 6 million humans. Virtually larger than some small countries are physically. There is an economy , crafts and professions. It is as addictive as any drug for some. Ea...

Carrying on the tradition for "firing up" things on Sunday, we fired up the barbie and had Sonic and Mew over for some juicy flame broiled steaks, broccoli-cheese casserole, asparagus, Portobellos and general visiting. Mew and I had a long philosophical discussion before Sonic arrived, and the topic of this particular excursion of thought was on the "One Thing." Interesting synchronicity with gerbean's ruminations , but a slightly different take on the "big picture." Don't know if you've seen City Slickers, but in the movie, this crusty old cow-hand tells a city slicker that the meaning of life is just one thing. And it don't matter what that thing is, but it's the one thing in life that defines you. This flies in the face of a lot of modern culture which, largely as the result of advertisement I suspect, would rather enjoy things they can get right away. Instant gratification. Short attention spans. And this is not to say it's no...

Mew left with a car-full o' pals for camping in the mountains while bright-eyes and I decided to go pick up groceries. The sun was out, a few clouds loitered in the sky, but there was some rumbling in the distance, so we made sure all the windows at home were closed. After meandering around the isles and bumping into bright-eyes a few times, distracted by all the pretty colors and jars, until she subtly suggested I get my butt in front where I would be less dangerous, we made it to checkout and pushed our cart toward the big exit ---which was crowded with people who didn't want to leave the store. Suspecting roving gangs of girl-scouts, with cookies in one hand and the leash of their Dobermans in the other, imagine my surprise to see a somewhat less probable turn of events and this (click image to see actual size): Sheets of marble sized hail had the entire parking lot in a vicious cross-fire. So, figuring it would be over in about 15 minutes, I lounged back against the wall an...