Day too nice to ‘blog. Be back later.

In our lives we hunger for those we cannot touch
All the thoughs un-uttered, all the feelings unexpressed
Play upon our hearts like the mist upon our breath
But awoken by grief, our spirits speak
How could you believe that the life within the seed
That grew arms that reached
And a heart that beat
And lips that smiled and eyes that cried
Could ever die?
Here come the blue skies
Here come the springtime
When the rivers run high and the tears run dry
When everything that dies
Shall rise
Love, love, love, love
Is stronger than death.

–Matt Johnson

Searching for my last name on the web, I came up with these…

Mark does a sort of interpretive sign language singing. He does it as a Christian ministry, and I’m fine with that. People gotta do what they gotta do. Besides, he’s probably a relative, so I better not giggle.

Bentley is one of the grandsons of Robert Mitchum (and, oddly, so am I). He’s been in movies, I haven’t. He gives seminars, and I don’t. His grandpa was arrested for possessing marijuana. My grandpa was a tea-totaller. I’m tempted to approach Bentley about a site re-design, because… well.

So you’re in England and you want to go surfing. Why not go to Mitchum Meadow? It’s just a few minutes away from Croyde, known for its hospitality and numerous public houses. Please, however, leave Fido and Junior at home. And don’t pitch a frame tent. And what’s that, an RV? Hie thee homeward! Oh, and don’t bother showing up in a month not named August. Yes, it’s a little bit of California dreamin’ in North Devon!

Need a sue-happy counselor? Throw down some MITCHUMLAW! (Again, I should solicit a web site re-do..)

Eric is the athlete I never was (or really ever intended to be). It turns out he’s just a hop, skip, and jump (and a few more hops, skips, and jumps after that) to the south, in Eugene, OR. Maybe he’s one of the Eugene Anarchists… Naw, he’s an honor student at the University of Oregon.

Apparently, being a political pain in the ass is a sort of recessive family trait that crops up from time to time. That article is so sad. It’s obvious that the paper was happy to see him go. I mean, surely they had a better picture…?

Anna took some pictures. Make up your own captions.

“Your kung fu! Is no GOOD!” I like the sound of ‘sensei Mitchum.’ I also like the transcultural sound of this sentence from that web page: “His three sons, James Tatsuo, Leon and Steve, became proficient karateka and helped in running his dojo.”

Je suis un comic-book tres bizarre, en Francaise. (Translation)

Oh bury me not… On the lone prarie… I’d actually be interested in going to the Mitchum Family Cemetary, just out of sheer morbid curiosity. So to speak. Maybe next time I’m in South Carolina.

Dominick, Niobrara Senior Class of 2003, could teach us all a thing or two about not having regrets. He also confirms that, while the name Mitchum carries no stigma, someone somewhere has created a rule that combining last name Mitchum with middle name Joseph turns you into the nerdiest kid in your class. I’m glad my parents named me after my grandpa Joe, but I wish they had known the consequences!

Oh crap. I’m laughing at my relatives.

So there’s a little confusion about the anticipation ‘blog a few entries back. And that’s as it should be, because I was intentionally vague.

I don’t really like knowing that something definite is going to happen at a definite time. Anticipation consumes me to the point of becoming a blithering idiot. Or at least becoming more of a blithering idiot (take that either way).

The deal was that I was going to go eat lunch today with someone, and I was going a little nuts with anticipation during the intervening time. My head filled with all kinds of fictions about what might happen, how it might turn out, all that kind of stuff.

It wasn’t a romantic meeting, and it wasn’t a job interview, and it wasn’t anything really all that important, except in the sense that human interaction is pretty important. But my mind was making it important in all kinds of ways that it wasn’t, because it thinks doing that is its job. I tried firing it, but it just keeps coming back to work. Better than a total walk-out though, I suppose, considering.

So we went and had lunch and it was good, and we had a more open conversation than I thought we would, and it was pleasant, and then we went our separate ways. Which is much, much more boring than any of the stories I made up beforehand.

Begin quote:

So you go over to Fremont and what we did was ride our bikes up the Burke-Gilman to the place just below the Fremont drawbridge. There’s a stairway you can take right from the foot of the bridge, to up on the deck. Just a few flights. No big deal.

So you go up there and sort of look around. It’s best at night, because the view is much nicer, and it’s easier to not be seen by the bridge attendant, up in his little tower. Thing is, not much traffic goes under the bridge at night, especially since the locks close at 9pm, so you’re more likely to do it during the day.

So anyway you go about midway out the drawbridge part, and you stand there and smoke a cigarette or something, and you make sure you’re on the far side from the attendant tower, and you just slowly blend into a shadow somewhere. It helps to wear black if it’s night time.

The goal here is to be unnoticed by the attendant. Near the time when a big boat is coming through, but not just before, because then the guy’s looking for people like you who are still on the deck. If you do it too soon, you’ll be noticed by passing traffic, and just your luck some cop will drive across the bridge, and then you’re toast.

So through guile and luck, you end up leaning against one of the vertical beams on the drawbridge. You want your back to be toward the nearest landfall, OK? Or you’ll have a landfall of your own. And you want to be facing away from the attendant in his little tower, or you’ll be discovered as soon as the bridge opens up.

And then you have to hold on tight! If you’re truly badass, you could just try and hang on, but the supports aren’t all that big when the bridge is jerking around up in mid-air. But if you’re smart, you could get some climbing gear or something and tie yourself on.

But when you hear the clanging bell, and you see that traffic barrier fall, you know, you just know. You know you’re breaking the law, and you could die. And that big ass machine just glides right up to vertical, 90 full degrees, and you’re watching the landscape fall away in front of you. The whole place is shifting around, and you kind of lose your footing, becaue gravity isn’t down anymore, it’s backward.

Your hands dig into the metal, and you feel like you’re gonna die from exhaustion. And you look sideways, and the whole world is sideways. You look up and see Ballard, and you look down and see Interbay. You want to scream, you want to hoot and holler, but if you do, you’ll be discovered.

And that’s the real shame, too. The excitement and the thrill of it is something you can’t let out, because it would give the whole game away. And how much of fukkin’ American consumerism is like that? Some guy wants to sell you the life-experience equivalent of junk mail, and you’re supposed to yell and scream and make a joyful fukkin’ noise, but you do something real, and scary, and joyous, and if you tell anybody they’ll come and drag you away in handcuffs.

But anyway, we rode the thing up and down. We did it one at a time so if one of us got noticed, only one of us would end up in jail. And afterward we rode our bikes to Gasworks park and sat on top of the big hill with the weird sundial on it, and got stoned. And we kept tilting our heads and trying to remember what it was like to be on top of that huge machine.

Tell me: Is anticipation supposed to be fun?

Did a little bit of a layout change, adapted (read: stolen) from the Web Consortium’s Quality Assurance project.

CSS is a nifty thing.

The Xanga skin tags <$Private_Site_Link$> and <$Private_Site_Tagline$> seem kind of broken, which is why there’s a mysterious extra link in the ‘Elsewhere’ section over there. Maybe I just don’t understand it well enough.

Love takes the world. That is to say, love is a bet, and you win the world. You bet on love and if you win, you win everything. Some might say that merely placing the bet is the same as winning, but I disagree. The world doesn’t have to love you back, and if it doesn’t, you might break even, but you won’t win.

I’m world-weary. I’ve had a round of arguing, and I’m tired. Love is on the table, between the poker chips and the Rolex and the pink car note. The commodity of love, the love that can be counted, though it dare not speak its name.

All bets are on hold, until I figure out if this is the game I want to play. Simply caring. Simply caring isn’t simple at all. They’ll lie and steal and cheat. They’ll slip an ace out of their sleeve and steal love right off the table.

They say you should know the game you’re walking into before you walk into it. They say you should do your research. But love doesn’t research, love doesn’t judge the deserving and the undeserving. That’s why it’s love. Love sits on the table there, next to the Rolex and the car note, just another poker chip. There’s no betting on love, because that’s not love on the table. It’s as fake as the Rolex, bought in Taiwan for fifty cents.

Just take the world. Take it in your hands and walk away from the table.

From ‘When Compassion Becomes Dissent‘ by David James Duncan: (Please go read the whole thing…)

[..]

THERE IS A SUPERSTITION — fed most savagely these days by politicians and news media — holding that what we hear firsthand is “true” or “real” and that what we merely imagine is “untrue” or “unreal.” News reports, for instance, are real, while the works of Tolstoy are not. This is nonsense. Insofar as literature enlivens imaginations, firms our grasp of reality, or strengthens our regard for fellow humans, it serves the world. And insofar as the president-character speaks scripts that deny life-threatening facts or erode the careful distinctions that sustain civil discourse and international goodwill, the “real” news report merely disseminates propaganda.

Reportage can, and daily does, lie. Even first-hand experience can lie. And “mere” imaginary experience can open us to truths that would remain inaccessible forever if we had to wait for reportage or experience to teach us the same truth. One of the greatest of human traits, for example, is compassion , which means, literally, “to suffer with another.” But this high art is seldom born in an instant thanks to “news” or to first-hand experiences. More often its seed is sown via a preliminary magic known as empathy. And empathy begins with a fictive act.

[..]

To be a Christian, a Buddhist, a Muslim, is to immerse oneself daily in unstinting fiction-making. Christ’s words “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” to cite a famously ignored example, demand an arduous imaginative act. This deceptively simple line orders me, as I look at you, to imagine that I am not seeing you, but me, and then to treat this imaginative you as if you are me. And for how long? Till the day I die! Christ orders anyone who’s serious about him to commit this “Neighbor = Me” fiction until they forget for good which of the two of themselves to cheat in a business deal or abandon in a crisis or smart-bomb in a war — at which point their imaginative act, their fiction-making, will have turned his words into reality and they’ll be saying with Mother Teresa, “I see Christ in every woman and man.”

[..]

Rode my bike yesterday, for the first time in, uh, too many months. I did better than I thought I would, but I still had to walk over a few hills.

Thankfully, I got to the Burke-Gillman trail pretty easily. The trail’s a converted rail line, so it doesn’t have steep inclines or drops.

Went down to University Village and ate a burrito. They called it a ‘wrap,’ but it’s a burrito. Looked at books for a while in the ajacent bookstore and found one about the history and science of sundials.

It mentioned giant solar observatories that once existed in Mesopotamia, present-day Iraq. From building-sized sundials (science and understanding) to GPS units on the heads of guided missiles (shock and awe). Measuring the sky from the earth to measuring the earth from the sky.

I want to build a giant sundial. I want it to be made of trees, planted in such a way that as they grow, they get more accurate. And when they fall over, they fall in just the right pattern so that they’re nurse logs for the next sundial. This is unlikely to happen, of course, but it sends me on another tangent, which is the Clock Of The Long Now, an ambitious project if ever there was.

At the present moment, the Clock’s database contains the largest amount of linguistic data on the planet, recorded for posterity. The Clock project has also spun off a really cool site called Long Bets, where you bet on things like:

“The first discovery of extraterrestrial life will be someplace other than on a planet or on a satellite of a planet.”

YES freeman j. dyson
NO Peter A. Spark

Stakes: $2,000
($1,000 each)

The winnings go to charity, assuming the charity still exists. This is important because some of the bets won’t be known for quite some time, like the one about whether the universe will stop expanding.

Thinking about Big Time makes me happy. It’s seeing the beach instead of the grains of sand, and who’d argue that a day with some grains of sand is more pleasant than a day at the beach?

And anyway. The long bet site is a really nice place to read tiny essays by the authors, many of whom are quite respectable.