Basic Transportation

I rode the bike to the RC yesterday and again this morning. It went pretty well... I expected it to be more difficult, considering what terrible shape I'm in. This is a distance of slightly more than two miles, so it's not like it's a major athletic achievement.

We'll see where this goes

I aired up the tires on my commuter bike this evening. I'm in such terrible shape I'll probably be stiff and sore in the morning from pumping air.

Even so, it's time to ride this thing. I bought it with the intent of making it my main transportation when I retired.

I plant to ride it to the RC in the morning. It's about two miles. Because of my ever-shrinking bubble, two miles has become an epic journey for me. We'll see...

Tuesday AM

Just woke up from another 'previous career' nightmare.

I never seem to have an IFB earphone in these dreams. And in this one I also couldn't find my right shoe - a brown captoe oxford.

Where is the United States?

Recent polls have shown that one-fifth of Americans can't find the U.S. on a world map. Why do you think this is?

A Miss Teen USA finalist explains it for you.

Or watch it here.



I wonder where she's anchoring the news now...

The rich are not like you and me

Seen via Eschaton:

"I do have to wonder, would you pay $15,000,000 to live in Irvine?"

Read the comments as well:

"Shady Canyon is right next to Newport Coast where you’ll find numerous sports stars and rich internationals..."

And yet, from the beginning...






















...nothingness.

Perfect Joy

from "Perfect Joy" by Chuang Tzu, translated by Thomas Merton

"Here is how I sum it up:

Heaven does nothing: its non-doing is its serenity.
Earth does nothing: its non-doing is its rest.
From the union of these two non-doings
All actions proceed,
All things are made.
How vast, how invisible
This coming-to-be!
All things come from nowhere!
How vast, how invisible
No way to explain it!
All beings in their perfection
Are born of non-doing.
Hence it is said:
'Heaven and earth do nothing
Yet there is nothing they do not do.'

Where is the man who can attain
To this non-doing?"

The 900th post

"Open your mouth, and already it is a mistake."

– Zen Master Seung Sahn

As I've mentioned before, I'm sort of backing off the spiritual awareness stuff.

I've come to the conclusion that every time I talk about this stuff, I just build a wall of words and opinions between the reader and the direct experience. I open my mouth, and already it is a mistake.

I know there are plenty of other people out there better able to address this subject than I am.
The late Korean zen master Seung Sahn is one of them. I'm currently rereading his book, "Wanting Enlightenment is a Big Mistake."

Here is a transcript of a 1985 session he held in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This comes from the website of Kwan Um Zen.

Three weeks down and life to go

Today is the three-week anniversary of my last day as an employee.

I cell-phoned this photo to my ex-boss this morning around 10 am.

Alan Watts Theater

More Alan Watts animations from Freshminds.

And a new (but brief) article on Watts at the Tricycle Magazine web site.

Monday evening

I've gotten over my immediate alarm regarding my overindulgence and cancelled my reservations at Jesus House.

I also remember now why I quit drinking wine - almost twenty years ago. When I got up this morning, my head felt like it was stuffed with wet sawdust ... allergic reaction, not a hangover.

I don't know how 'cute' I was - Jeebus, I'm 54 years old. I'm not supposed to be 'cute.'

---

Oh, and there was no danger regarding me driving home. I was fine by the time I got in my car, which was quite a while later - after dinner.

---

Spent the morning today as usual. In the afternoon, I did a little housecleaning and got a bunch of junk out of my car. Not that the car is clean, but it's better.

In a week or so, I should have it clean enough to take in and have the AC fixed.

Monday morning

I sat on the Paseo Sunday afternoon, had three glasses of wine, and got pretty buzzed. It occurred to me as I sat there that there's nothing to stop me now from doing that every day for the rest of my life.

When I drink, I don't know when to stop doing a lot of other things. I try too hard to be funny and witty, for one thing, and end up just being obnoxious. Or some woman lightheartedly flirts with me and I take it seriously because I'm too fried to know the difference.

There's been alcoholism in my family, and statistically I'm at high risk. It's been a combination of a lot of luck and a certain amount of self-control that has kept me from becoming one before now.

Tedium may soon become my worst enemy.

But I sobered up, drank a lot of water and went to bed early - before dark.

You know you're sedentary...

when you get up from your chair at the Red Cup and discover a spider has built a web between your arm and a potted plant.

On to more mundane matters

The electricity on my block went out at least a dozen times today. Sometimes only for a second, rarely for more than three or four seconds.

I live in an inner-city area where it would be just so damn unfair to shareholders to expect OG&E to provide reliable electric service.

But I don't see why rain should cause flickering and brownouts.

More spiritual stuff

dzaster thinks I should post more spiritual stuff, but I've run out of stuff to say. In fact, I think I ran out some time back and just kept going on fumes.

I have a fairly secure future. I could be hit by a bus or have some horrendous disease, but other than that I know pretty well what my future holds. Or at least I don't have to worry about being out on the street and living under an overpass.

In some ways, I already am Cold Mountain. Sort of an urban Cold Mountain, you could say. I'm the last leaf on my branch of the family tree, so I have no children or aging parents about whom to worry. There are no interpersonal relationships which economics or expedience require me to maintain. I can get up and walk away from everything and everyone at any time.

I think it's probably easier to be sanguine about nonattachment and your original face before you were born and so on when you don't have to worry about feeding yourself or paying your bills or caring for loved ones. If I were a twentysomething single mom working in a convenience store, I'd probably feel differently about it.

I'm thinking to I need to say less about this stuff rather than more. There are a wealth of other resources both in print and on the web, most of which were produced by folks more knowledgeable than me.

You look... mahvelous! (Or Photoshopped - take your pick)

Here's a web site for photoretoucher iWANEX Studio. Click on "portfolio" to see the artist's work.

A few observations: first of all, I think it's great that these celebrities allow these 'raw' photos to be released on the web.

Second, this gives you some idea of what's done with Photoshop in this nation every day of the week. Photoshop has distorted more reality than Karl Rove ever dreamed of.

Third, we hear a lot - and rightly so - about how advertising and celebrity journalism have given us all false expectations about appearance and image. As these before and after photos show, even the celebrities don't look like celebrities, so don't feel inferior if you don't, either.

Fourth, everybody who is in this line of work or anything remotely connected to it uses Photoshop, not Photo-Paint or MS Draw or The GIMP. ("Yew outta be usin' the GIYUMP," as the guy with the red clip-on hardware store suspenders would say, his face screwed up into a little knot beneath his woolly Twinkie crumb-spangled beard. "It's open source. Do you know what open source means?"

Okay, that last part was sort of judgemental. But what the hell.

It is now Saturday

This started out as a joke, but I am genuinely having trouble keeping track of what day it is. This after only twelve days of retirement.

Love hurts

British researchers find evidence love is bad for your health.

New blog

There's a new blog in the list of links on the right.

FootFingers

The last hippie in the Ozarks

Seven or so years ago, I had occasion to be driving from Mountain Home, Arkansas to Eldorado, Arkansas. I decided to take a winding, scenic route that paralleled the White River for the first leg, then went west into the Ozarks and south through the Ouachita National Forest.

While in the mountains, I stopped at general store that seemed to be more or less in the middle of nowhere. It was on the side of a mountain, shaded by a canopy of trees. I don't recall any other buildings nearby, although there may heve been a gas station across and down the road a piece.

The store was clean and plesasant, and the people there friendly.

As I was leaving, a man walked up the shoulder of the road toward the store. He was about my age, perhaps a little older. He had shoulder-length hair held down with a headband and a full beard. He was wearing a tie-dyed t-shirt, cutoffs and sandals. He looked as if he had fallen asleep under a tree in 1969 or 70 and had only awakened perhaps twenty minutes ago.

I invented a back story for the guy as he trudged up the road to the store. He had moved to the area back in the day to join a commune. The commune had long since closed and all its other members had moved on. He was the only one left. Maybe he lived in an old hand-built house back in the woods that had once been occupied by a dozen people.

I also had the thought that I should have been in his place. Not that I should have been like him, but that the ebb and flow of the universe should have led to me being the one living alone in some isolated Ozark cabin, separated from the world, and that guy should have ended up doing, well, whatever.

I suppose this was one of my Cold Mountain moments that just happened to come along before I had ever heard of Cold Mountain.

I'm not sure why I have this nagging feeling that I'm supposed to be separated from society.

99 degrees

I may not go out to dinner tonight. It's 99 outside and I just can't bear to think of setting foot out there.

I've heard enough.

A couple of days ago, I was having lunch in a restaurant and a couple of tables over, four IT guys were (somewhat loudly) discussing bundling VoIP telephony with web hosting services.

That's the kind of stuff I dealt with in Texas every day, and peripherally in the job from which I retired last week.

And as I listened to the guys in the restaurant talk, I realized I just don't want to hear any more about it. I don't want to hear any more about Web 2.0, or IPv6 conversion, or Ubuntu Linux on the enterprise desktop or any of the rest of that stuff. I've heard enough. Someone else can leverage robust infrastructure assets from now on.

I watched someone (Amanda Joy, actually) drawing sunflowers in a sketchbook the other day. That was more interesting than about 70% of what I've been doing professionally the past thirty years or so.

---

I'm going back to bed.

2:15 am

Just woke up from another TV news dream. In this one, a photographer tried to kill me and himself both by plowing the news car into a big installation of equipment in the station's parking garage.

(I never worked in a station that had a parking garage, btw. As is almost always the case with these dreams, this one happened in some place that was sort of an amalgam of all the stations I ever saw, either as an employee or a visitor.)

We were driving through the garage, and he kept accelerating. This big piece of equipment got closer and closer, and he kept going faster and faster. 'Is he going to stop?' I thought. 'What's he doing?'

At the last second, I grabbed the steering wheel, turned it, and caused the car to skid more or less harmlessly out of control. We still hit something, but not hard enough to cause injury.

I got out of the car and staggered into the station. There was a big commotion inside because the ratings had just come out and the station was number one. Everyone was yelling and cheering. I didn't recognize any of them. No one I actually knew was in the dream.

I tried to tell someone what had just happened. His name was Sam and he may have been a managing editor or something like that. But he was distracted by the ratings news and didn't want to talk to me. I got him into an office where we could talk privately, but then he took a phone call and I never got to tell him what happened.

Then my cell phone rang. It was the photographer, wanting to know why I had disrupted his plan. He told me he was waiting for me outside. I was trying to figure out how to get out of the building without running into him.

I remember the building was fairly new, but even so it was cluttered and the doorway to Sam's office was grimy and paint-chipped.

My mistake

turns out today is Saturday.

Isn't it?

My schedule for tomorrow

What is tomorrow? Tuesday?

Whatever.

Feels like Sunday

...doesn't it?

Does to me.

My schedule for tomorrow

Bwah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah!

The earth is roundish

I remember when the news broke that the earth is not a perfect sphere, but is actually slightly egg-shaped. It was a new way of looking at it, challenging a long-held assumption. But my emotional reaction to it was... nothing. The earth is a sphere, the earth is an egg... what of it?

I'm trying to figure out if I should expect to have some sort of emotional reaction to other new ways of seeing things. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't.

The mountain is not a mountain, then it is, etc.

New to me, anyway.

This has apparently been around awhile, but I saw it for the first time today.

Effects of drugs on the wood spider. Be sure to watch the whole thing.

But enough about me

...no, I mean it. Seriously. The way I write you'd think I actually know what I'm talking about.

More precisely, I guess, I sometimes tend to write in a tone that is far more authoritative than my actual knowledge can support.

Well, WTF... I was a TV reporter for 25 years. I made a career out of making ignorance sound authoritative.

I need to take up stamp collecting or something.

LA Times: This is your brain on love

From the Los Angeles Times:

"... romantic love is a lot like addiction to alcohol or drugs. The brain is playing a trick, necessary for evolution, by associating something that just happened with pleasure and attributing the feeling to that magnificent specimen right before your eyes."

More here.

My take: 'Love', like a lot of other things, is just something fizzing around in your brain. It has no reality outside your own skull.

No particular place to go

Today is my first full day of non-employment since about 2001.

I enjoyed the five-plus years I spent on my most recent job. I got to ramp up the hardware side of our operation and push the creative envelope. (Not that the average designer would consider what I did particularly daring. Within context, though, we made a lot of progress.)

Some other things changed during the time I was there. A few people to whom I felt especially close moved on. I fell off the non-attachment wagon in a big way with one of them. As our staff shrank, I found myself doing less and less of the work I was hired to do and more and more clerical-type work.

And I've re-evaluated a lot of things as regards the basic nature of reality. At the moment, it's hard for me to have a sense of importance about anything at all. As I've written before, our natural state is to be inanimate matter - talk about your ultimate state of non-knowing, non-thinking. All the stuff we get dragged through, or drag ourselves through, during our brief interregnum of sentience seems irrelevant.

From the Great Pyramid and space travel to oil changes and love affairs, it's all faint flickers of light on the periphery of the universe. (Well, maybe not the Great Pyramid. That was the tallest building on earth for more than a thousand years, and it will still be around long after we and our latter-day works are dust.)

So, I plan to use the rest of my time as animate matter watching the world go by with about the same level of interest one might have in a run-of-the-mill TV sitcom.