Meteoric geology on Mars.

New profile pic.

If it’s anything but a profile, it’s a ‘picture.’ But since it’s a profile picture, it’s a ‘pic.’

Bouyed only by his advancing middle-age spread, he’s floating.

He’s floating in a creek, high up in the mountains. It’s odd, because most mountain streams are tiny enough that you’d never be able to float in them. But this one forms a sandy-bottomed, emerald pool below a small waterfall, in a ten-foot crack between two slabs of black granite which reach skyward like the twin towers before they fell.

These boulders will fall, too, eventually. He’s thinking about this. The water is cold but the sun is warm; it’s a time in between. The boulders will crumble as all things do, but they haven’t yet. Or rather, they have. They have crumbled enough to form this pool.

The sun only shines straight down here for about an hour a day. This is that hour. Darkness lifts gradually, and then there’s sun, and then it fades gradually. There’s only the narrow sliver of time overhead. Juniper and red cedar cling to the microscopic layer of soil. Mossy green carpets breathe in and out for that hour of sunlight.

Bigfoot was sighted here. There’s a story, he’s thinking about it. A story someone told him a while back about bigfoot being up on the banks near here. He doesn’t believe in bigfoot, just like he doesn’t believe in Santa Claus. It’s fun to think about, though. The twin towers and bigfoot. Scarcely imaginable.

The water is very, very cold, and he won’t be able to soak much longer. Or maybe he should quit soaking now, because it’s difficult to tell. Hypothermia, too, comes on gradually, and then all the sudden you’re in bad shape. The gentle roar of the waterfall…

When he was hiking, he had to come to terms with the shadow that followed him. Not bigfoot. There was a shadow. A thing that embodied… He doesn’t want to think about it, but it was there. A figure. Behind him. Swimming underneath him now. But on the trail it was hiking behind him.

Some people are just there. You meet someone and they don’t really say anything, but they make whole arguments just by looking at you. You say something and someone just looks at you in a certain way and you know what they mean.

And that’s this shadow, walking along behind. Scary and meaningful. Something that will one day allow itself to catch up, allow itself to say a single word. Because it’s really him, and he knows it. He has a silent message for himself.

He’s soaking in the pool, wondering what that word will be. Whether the shadow is a friend or an enemy. Why should a word make something a friend or an enemy? He stands on the gravel floor of the creek, waist-deep. Trudges to the sand bar and lays on a rock in the sun.

tristero: A game of “Constitutional chicken.”

Olbermann puts it all together for you. If you were paying attention at the time, you knew these things.

Male Restroom Etiquette.

So I was looking at this post over at Booman Tribune, and it contained this graph, which comes from CIA statistics and Dept. of State:

And it said this, quoting State again:

2004 marked the single, largest increase in terrorist activity ever recorded since the CIA started keeping records dating back to 1968.
The four fold increase in significant terrorist incidents (attacks in which people were killed and wounded) was a direct consequence of the war in Iraq. All you have to do is look at the attacks recorded and the people killed and wounded in those attacks. Iraq and India were the big targets in 2004.

Now, it seems to me that this graph, and its consequent bump-up in the year 2004, bears a striking resemblance to this graph:

See how the national debt increases radically in 2004?

These two graphs lead to one incontrovertable conclusion: Terrorists hate debt. When they smell debt on you, watch out! They’re not jihadists or disenfranchised Palestinians. No, they just hate fiscal irresponsibility. They’re the human form of the 77% interest that awaits you at the end of that $0-down, 0% for 90 days financing you took out. Usury is terrorism, and terrorism is usury!

I bet if we could get our debt-holding ways under control and cut up that IRS credit card, the terrorists Wouldn’t Hate Us Anymore.

Today I was listening to music from back when I didn’t just think that music mattered, but that it totally and completely *was everything.*

I used to listen to music and hear it in a variety of complicated ways that I always thought everyone heard. I couldn’t understand why my friends didn’t like, for instance, King Crimson’s ‘Discipline.’ They were approaching me with a straightjacket by the time ‘Thela Hun Gingeet’ came on. But how could anyone not fall for that album?

I’ve always maintained that some years are better for music than others, and 1981 was one of those years. If you want to explore a single year, you could do much worse than to get ahold of: Peter Gabriel’s melting face album, Kate Bush’s ‘The Dreaming,’ XTC’s ‘English Settlement,’ the aforementioned ‘Discipline,’ and about a half dozen others I can’t think of at the moment. Oh, and Jon Hassell’s ‘Fourth World Volume 2: Dream Theory In Malaya.’

Somehow, the cultural reality was churning at that moment, with the beginning of sampling, a new popular appreciation of electronic music, and a cultural moment where music industry people literally didn’t know what the hell to release. New Wave was about to take up some of that slack, and the NeuroMantics were appearing, like Thomas Dolby. That’s another one: Dolby’s ‘Golden Age Of Wireless.’ But record execs didn’t know what to do, what with the new MTV and the VCR and the blank CrO2 cassettes. Musicians could do something weird and find a niche.

Personally, I think it all revolved around ‘Discipline.’ I know it did for me. Robert Fripp (King Crimson’s motivating force) was and is a nerdy egghead who learned to play the guitar despite being tone-deaf, and not only that, but in 1981 he re-formed King Crimson with a new idea: The distinction between rhythm section and lead should be abolished. So you end up with a quartet that plays as equals, each part as its own voice. Basically rock and roll as chamber music.

I wanted to be a member of that King Crimson. But I was never all that competent as a musician or arranger. Then I got into Brian Eno. Eno had lots of connection to Fripp; they had released a couple of albums together, both highly recommended if slightly unapproachable. Plus, in 1981, Brian Eno and David Byrne released a seminal album I’ve ‘blogged about before: ‘My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts.’ The point of this discursion, however is that Eno wasn’t really a musician, but he was being successful at making and producing music. Now he’s the grand old man of… something. He’s an interesting guy who says interesting things, and everyone says they’re a fan even though they’ve never heard ‘King’s Lead Hat,’ ‘Seven Deadly Finns,’ or ‘Thursday Afternoon.’

Anyway. There’s plenty more I could say, but it’s already boring. I leave you with something that was inspiring to me. Warning: It’s long, but you should listen to the whole thing. Put it on in the background. And that’s a trumpet. It really is. Click to listen. Remember: This is from a time before there was ‘new age’ and world music. In fact, without this album and a slim few of its contemporaries, there wouldn’t be any ‘new age’ or world music. There’d be no trance music, no house music, no rave music. No sampled sitars or djembes. You know that music they have at the beginning of the TV show ‘Survivor?’ There’d be no public taste for such things without Jon Hassell and Brian Eno and a few others from 1981. And that’s the truth.

‘Malaya‘ Jon Hassell, from ‘Fourth World Vol. 2: Dream Theory In Malaya’

My parents celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary last Saturday. I’m really proud of them.

James tries to bust my chops again by saying (in comments) that you can’t have a war unless you take sides. The context of this statement is that I’m busting Republicans’ chops for being inhumane inconsiderate partisan motherfuckers.

And you know what? It’s true: It takes sides to tango into war. But if someone brings a war to you, you have to decide. And that’s what’s going on here. I’m not the one declaring war, to use your metaphor. To use a better metaphor, I’d take the opportunity to re-state the definition of the fallacy of the middle ground. Sometimes some people are wrong, and other people are right, and there are consequences to the fact that splitting the difference won’t make the wrong people any more right. I might also use the metaphor of joining and spiraling, from aikido: Let’s help these jerks find the floor before they hurt anyone else.

I understand from the excellent podcasts (and all the reading I’d done before) that the Fourth Way is about identifying ‘I’s and learning that we can’t ‘do.’ And by not being able to ‘do,’ we’re talking about shattering the illusion of false competence, shattering the illusion that we can accomlish things that we really can’t. Setting sights on things that are real, rather than imagined or aspired-to.

And it’s seductively easy to say that being passionate about the political situation is a ‘do’ that you really can’t, because the world of the politician seems so remote, and requires so much energy, energy better spent figuring out that you can’t ‘do.’ But that’s artificial. That’s not real. That’s a cop out. It’s like saying you can’t breathe. Politics is what you *do* do. Yes, politics is do do. Politics is speech and action, and anyone who can speak or act in a meaningful way is being political when they do so.

It’s simply true that trying to be above or outside politics, because of spiritual concerns, doesn’t work. Some revolutionary shoots you and you end up dead despite your attempts to save his soul, your dying breath a prayer for his well-being. Politics, like all other forms of human behavior, is simply a context. It’s a theater in which everyone works out their shit. Just like everything else. Just like time spent meditating, and just like time spent mugging elderly ladies to steal their social security checks.

Religion is politics. Spirituality is the politics of the esoteric world. Which policy will we enact in our mind? Which constitution shall all our ‘I’s ratify? We have to struggle with revolution of the mind. We have to form a more perfect union of intent. Declarations of ‘mission accomplished’ are almost always premature.

The inside and the outside aren’t all that different. In fact, I’d argue that there’s no boundary between them. It’s true that everyone’s situation can be elevated through spiritual practice. It’s not true that this is ‘do’able by ignoring the real conflicts around you.