Last night I went to the grocery store. It was around 2AM. Needless to say it’s the 24-hour grocery store.

There were maybe three customers wandering the aisles, including me. The aisles themselves were full of boxes and stockers, the stockers pulling the stock from the boxes and stocking them on the shelves, thus to be in stock.

I made my usual path through the store. Part of being me is that having a usual path is mandatory. Deviation from that path can really throw things off, depending on stress level. But there wasn’t much stress last night, so I was wandering up and down my usual path with a certain inward joi de vivre. Outwardly, I must have appeared to be a mental patient, because the stockers were looking at me as if they were trying to be polite to Charles Manson, lest Charlie complain to management, and who wants to be fired for being rude to Charles Manson?

I’m not going to try to keep it a secret or anything: I mutter to myself when I’m alone in public. I talk to myself a lot (maybe even here on this ‘blog), but in public, the volume knob gets turned down to, like, 1 or 2. I complained to myself about the lack of decent lunch meat that wasn’t $5 for three slices, and I expressed a minor joy about finding a bunch of bananas that weren’t green. I don’t know who heard, and I really don’t care, except that I try to smile at a stocker, and there it is again: How is he supposed to react when Charles Manson smiles at him?

There’s a narrative here: Eventually I got to the checkout line. I have a standard joke for checkers who ask if I want paper or plastic, and that’s to say ‘Bagger’s choice,’ or ‘Whichever makes you more happy,’ or ‘Let your conscience be the guide.’ Since it was 2AM, this guy was half asleep and didn’t get it, so I expanded on it: “I mean, just go wild with that decision!” He laughed, but in a you’re-really-an-idiot kind of way. At least I wasn’t Charlie Manson.

However, over in the customer service booth, a checker has been counting his drawer while talking to the manager. He projects his voice: “When did this store become a recovery ward?” Manager, trying not to laugh: “Don’t go there.”

What I did was pretend not to hear it, or believe that it was about some employee who came in drunk, or something. Anything. Because I need this 24-hour store and its familiar pattern and easy availablility of things I like to eat.

A long, long time ago I was going to a weekly red cedar healing ceremony in Auburn, WA, at a place called the Northwest Spoken Word Lab (aka SPLAB).

SPLAB is still around, but I think they might have changed locations. The idea behind SPLAB was to get kids involved in poetry and writing, with a focus on participating in poetry slam competitions. Paul Nelson, the head honcho, sold it to the city of Auburn as a drug-prevention activity, which is both a brilliant move and a very, very sad reality. Sad not because there are kids taking drugs, although that’s sad, but sad that they needed to make a political move like that in order to bring poetry to the kids.

The red cedar circle is sort of like the white-man outreach of the local native spiritual traditions. I went to healing circles led by the one and only (truly one and only) Beaver Chief, who took on a few different names after I knew him as Beaver Chief. I wish I could remember them, so I’d be using the right name, but better an old one than none at all. BC passed on a few years back, and I’m pretty sure I’ve written about that here before.

Anyway. The point is that a bunch of folks would show up, and we’d sing songs, like the Dreamer’s Song, which is still my favorite, and always sets my heart chakra spinnin’. There’d be prayers and other ritual technology, and we’d all have a good catharsis of some kind, or maybe we’d just be OK with stuff. And then we’d have a mini drum circle or something, and sing some more songs, and say ‘a-Hoooooo!’ a lot. ‘A-ho’ is like ‘amen,’ but it has a hand gesture that goes along with it. You touch your chest with your right hand, and then pull it away palm up, to offer yourself, and then you ‘scoop’ the received blessings back to your chest again. At least, that’s how BC taught it.

See, this entry was originally just going to be a link to a web site that Paul Nelson is writing for, because I know at least one of my readers might be interested in it. And here it is: The site is Semantikon.com, which has a pretty brilliant-looking front page. Paul’s column is Left (coast) margin/s, which, in addition to being something written by someone I knew a while back who puts me within two degrees of separation from Allen Ginsberg, happens to also be some good writin’.

But I got sidetracked on SPLAB and the red cedar ceremony. And one point of interest that maybe I shouldn’t reveal, but I’m thinking about it now: One week, after the ceremony, and after most of the folks had left, and only us cool kids remained, we sat around in the happily-spinning-chakra afterglow of a few lit candles and a quiet street outside. Conversing in slow, relaxed tones about things that were nice… The kind of conversation that happens after all the barriers have fallen. Just an easy intimacy remained. All of us were spiritually satiated and were, after the metaphorical Thanksgiving day feast, draped over the living room furniture mumbling to each other in happy grunts. Except the talk was lucid, the ideas were interesting, and then…

And then someone said it. They said, “You know, I’d like to drip this candle wax over your feet.” And the response was, “Please. Go ahead,” with an attached wide grin. So the taper was held over the foot at a dangerous angle, and before we knew it all five of us were playing with fire and wax and small, warm, pain. Nothing sexual or anything, just the kind of thing you do when the barriers have been removed in the nicest possible way. There was slight disrobement, however.. Nothing more racy than a man taking off his shirt, and then it dawned on the more responsible among us: We were sitting in a storefront (where the SPLAB was located) playing with candle wax and removing articles of clothing. The huge black curtains were drawn down over the storefront windows, and while we were now free to continue, and while the street outside had been empty, the intrusion of the outside world had soured the fun.

My new favorite thing: SSH with keys.

Earlier today, in another forum, someone said they thought Dr. Condoleeza Rice would make a much better president than Hillary Clinton, since she was so much more qualified. I responded with an elucidation of the horror that is Dr. Rice, all very factual, and ended with the throwaway statement that there’s no way she’d win against Hillary… It’s not a skin-color thing, it’s a tooth gap thing. Which led me to this page about political cartoons skewering Dr. Rice, which makes the point that the gap between her teeth isn’t what’s wrong about her.

Now, through MeFi, I land on a satire called ‘The 10 Least Successful Holiday Specials of All Time,’ which is darn funny. My favorite is the ‘Star Trek’ one, because it quotes Harlan Ellison as saying, “a quiescently glistening cherem of pus.” But it also has one called ‘Noam Chomsky: Deconstructing Christmas.’ As you can see from the picture, Noam has certain dental features which sends one’s mind off into a flight of fantasy…

See, from time to time certain items come into one’s mind, and they fit together a certain way, only by virtue of geometry. That is, if I hear about one thing, and then another thing, by proximity they seem connected. And then my mind finds a way to make them connected, and then I spend a bunch of effort figuring out how I’m wrong about that connection. So when I see these two sets of gapped chompers, I want them to line up, to fit together in my personal psychic space, to represent some kind of unit. So…

I see Noam Chomsky and Condoleeza Rice making out. It’s a furtive, delicate attempt. The public debate over foreign policy earlier that evening had seemed like so much foreplay. The secret service troubles, finding the right hotel room, explaining to the President why she’d be a few hours late…

I see them french… er… FREEDOM kissing. I see them turning, rotating their heads around each other as their embrace pulses and shudders in fits and starts. They dive into each other again and again, until… SNAP! Their heads are locked together like a couple of Lego blocks.

There will be no more debate. There, on the bed, partially clothed, in a darkened room, they begin to gag on each others’ tongues.

Just got through watching the concert for George on my local PBS station, and I have to say wow a few times.

It is isn’t just that it was cool to see all those people on the stage together, or that Dhani Harrison looks just like his dad, or that Eric Clapton plays the solo in ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ exactly a year after George’s death. What really struck me was the complete sincerity of the music.

I was thinking about who’s making sincere music today. Not just sincere, but optimistic and wise, as well. There’s so little out there that hooks you at the same time as it challenges you to be better.

At the moment, I’m ripping the remastered version of ‘All Things Must Pass’ that came out after Harrison’s death. My landlord left it in his CD rack. I’m listening to some of the same songs I really enjoyed in the concert, and they just don’t pull me like the concert versions. The spirit of the performance is more important than the songs, in just about every case. That’s not to say the spirit of the studio versions is unimportant, just that they’re more like a freshly-open time capsule, from a time when a lot of people thought humanity was evolving for the better.

Things are very, very different now.

Even old New York was once New Amsterdam
Why they changed it I can’t say
People just liked it better that way…

Useful list of Mac OS X ‘hacking’ tools.

And here’s a nifty utility called iWipe which basically writes a file as big as free space on your hard drive, writing over it a few times with random data and specific bit patterns designed to prevent anyone from recovering old data from it. (It then deletes the file, of course.) There are a few utilities like this, but the other Mac-specific ones either cost lots of money or only ‘shred’ deleted files, and the open source versions come from the land of BSD and linux, and I don’t want to trust my HFS+ filesystem to them.

Also, on a whim I decided to see if LaCie had any firmware updates newer than the one that killed my LaCie hard drive. Guess what? They do! And guess what else: The hard drive enclosure works properly now. Too bad it killed the hard drive itself back when it had BAD FIRMWARE IN IT.

LaCie gets no more money from me for anything.

Back when I first heard that Apple was making a special-edition iPod to coincide with the release of a U2 album, I instantly thought about Negativland’s ‘U2′ EP, which was the subject of a lawsuit and subsequently pulled from shelves. The lawsuit had to do with sampling. This was back in the days before MP3s and internet file sharing.

So it was a great irony that U2 was teaming up with the technology that enables illegal file sharing. And this irony hasn’t gone unnoticed: Someone named Francis Hwang is auctioning a U2/Negativland special edition iPod on ebay. It comes loaded with a big old selection of Negativland’s most subversive material.

(If you don’t want to get the iPod, you could just download a whole lotta Negativland stuff here.)

A while back I wrote a story about photographing a war memorial. It turns out that around the time I wrote that, a number of photographers all over the world were taking panoramic pictures of WWI memorials. For instance: this, and this.

It’s purely coincidence that the main character of my story mentions that he’s part of a project to photograph war memorials around the world.

KarmabanQue is a web community discussing stock-price based boycotts of various companies.

They have the KbQ Index, which shows you stocks you could have profited by shorting, as a direct result of boycotts.

Since their site isn’t very well organized, here’s a link to their FAQ.