OTHER PAGES from before

MAY 2013

INVENTIONS

He'd made it through at least two periods of INVENTION before, so

this should not be upsetting to him at all. He had learned all about change.

1950-60-70 time period - that was all that invention of whatever that thing was

that happened then – maybe personal individuality?, and freedom?, or something.

1970-80-90, when all of humanity unconsciously invented and went

along with that great big bunch of unasked-for digital re-representation

of all realities?, or something like that – something that gave away all the

stuff you could put your hands on and feel with your own fingers, for intangible bits.

All the while polarizing further and further into raging fragmented disparate groups.

Then evolving quickly to disproportionate groups – one small one that ruled the very large one,

because so many inside the big ruled group thought that *they* could become a member of the

small ruling group ( “Membership Has Its Privileges”, they said to themselves, over and over ).

But *this* time, in this new century, he no longer cared what any or all of them did any more.

This one was going to be *his* invention. Just for him. Just his own enjoyment.

And it really did seem that they really were just an invention - at first.

An invention of his own, he thought - clever, fun, maybe a little harmlessly outrageous.

That's what he liked about the idea. The multiple personalities. Debates and arguments.

Clashing, colliding, even as they were strangely revealing. Who cares what the rest of them think.

That's what he thought would be so good - at first.

He sat in his worn chair, that swivel one with the fluffed sheepskin seat.

He considered what he could do with all of this. How he could give each one

a separate voice. A voice of their own. Unique unto each of them. How they could

take different stands, come from different points of view. How they could be

different people - different from him - at first.

Time dragged on and he found himself still in his old soft seat,

looking out his wide comfortable north view windows. He noticed.

He noticed a different kind of difference. Not something that he

had thought of, or intended to be ? He had intended to give them lines.

Things for them to say. To let them become individuals. To let them be.

Last Tuesday, for instance, he gave each of them a line. Three lines - simple lines.

One line for each of the three of them. It did not go well this time. Not at all.

He felt that they were not welcomed. The lines he gave them were not

well received. But by who? These stubborn three who were now his own

made up fabricated silly bullshit creations. Who were THEY to be

unwelcoming? He rocked back and forth, then up and out of his chair.

He went downstairs to go outside for a walk. Walking always helped.

Usually his mind would defocus during the walk,

distracted by the billion details of life around him.

And that is just how it was going this time too, with

lots of intricate detailed sights, sounds, and smells.

Until they began

talking to HIM.

He ignored it - them - at first. He concentrated on the myriad details

available to him as distraction from this. He gently shook his head.

( He remembered that time when he shook his head too vigorously

and the brain case jostled too much, causing discomfort inside )

"!!!SHAKE YOUR HEAD ALL YOU LIKE, I AM NOT GOING ANYWHERE!!!"

said his Daddy Whitelegs’ voice, inside his head. He walked on, haltingly,

across town on the Esplanade. Small fears being born and growing when

"One can safely ignore him – and only pay strict attention to me."

said his separate Jivan Karayan voice.

What?

No.

No way. No. He walked on, looking at cute small chirping birds trying to nest

inside of that tall metal breather-standpipe that came up out of the broken sidewalk.

It had a rotating weather vane exhaust vent on top to exhale whatever it was down

below - underneath. He, step by step, walked by it heading west toward

the new downtown. The circular pipe vent’s mouth opening slowly - rotating around

as the small bird gripped the thin metal edges with its tiny strong claws for balance

against the slow spin rotation from the wind.

“Try to ignore them – I do. There is still a lot to do – must come back, must come back.”

said a very faint Jackson Kelley voice, a little tremulous with his own fears.

But it did not sound like that to him. To him it sounded like:

“Conantur ea ignorare - faciam. Non tamen multum est - necesse est reversus reversus est”

Because that is how he had once thought that they would all speak,

when they did all speak again, 12,000 years from now, in the future.

It really had seemed that they were just an invention.

An invention of his - clever, fun, maybe even a little harmlessly outrageous.

The multiple personalities. Clashing, colliding, even as they were strangely revealing.

That's what he thought would be so good - at first, these inventions of his.

(end?)

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APRIL 2013

BAD DECISIONS

Jivan was the first to pipe up. “The myriad of ill timed and badly considered decisions brings one to this place.”

“LEAVE HIM ALONE” barked Daddy White Legs – never one to be subtle or understated when it came to these things.

But Jivan pushed harder. “The long series of default resignations and downright desertions are the cause of this pain.”

“I SAID – LEAVE – HIM – ALONE” Daddy White Legs thundered. The noise from the two of them crowded the space.

Jackson Kelley sat quietly in that space. A small space, just big enough to feel bad in. It had never looked like that

kind of place before, until Jivan Karayan began his constant berating. And, although he was grateful for the support

from Daddy White Legs, he would be more grateful for some peace and quiet. Jackson Kelley thought, and thought.

Jackson thought of ST.FRANCIS OF ASSISI and the LONE RANGER and the HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER and more.

He shifted his weight and tugged at his shirt and thought of CHOLLY KITCHEN THE VAGABOND, and of

GARABED THE ESCAPEE, and all the way up to THE AWOG himself. Jackson Kelley thought and thought.

“One should never leave the home of one’s parents badly, as some irresponsible do.” Jivan said, almost to Jackson.

“One should be ashamed of leaving one’s parental home AND one’s country – one’s nation.” Jivan continued.

“HE WAS A KID DAMMIT, JUST A KID, LEAVE HIM BE – PICK ON SOMEBODY YOUR OWN SIZE” Daddy White Legs growled.

“That cannot be considered as a valid excuse for the unworthy deliberations and decision making.” said Jivan.

“YOU’RE A POMPOUS WINDBAG OF MIDDLE EASTERN GARLIC” boomed Daddy White Legs. Jivan backed off.

Jackson Kelley thought. About leaving home, and leaving his home nation too. They had all told him not to.

They had all warned him that he was making a mistake. Jackson thought about it now, but he did not then.

There was no thinking then. He had just left.

“One commenced upon a long trail of leavings, most unfortunate.” Jivan jabbed. “STOP IT – HE DID WHAT HE HAD TO”

Daddy White Legs tried to protect him. But Jivan’s words almost rang truly, sometimes - if he was not such an ass.

Jivan, that is. “Jivan was and is an ass” Jackson thought to himself even more quietly than before.

“A long trail of selfish, immature, and overly dramatic exits and departures, no?” Jivan asked himself, rhetorically.

“GET AWAY FROM HIM” roared Daddy White Legs “HE WAS JUST PROTECTING HIMSELF”

But Jackson knew there was something in it. Maybe not what Jivan Karayan kept haunting him with, but something.

Jackson could see the trail too. And it *was* long. Leaving HOME, leaving the USA, leaving the job in Vancouver,

leaving Ontario, leaving new found freelance freedom by the water tower, leaving lecherous smoggy Los Angeles,

leaving Hogtown again – for L.A., again – leaving the old City of Angels for colder CHI-town, leaving tail between legs

for the Big Smoke again – leaving for misty Stumptown in the rainy north west, and now . . . well, now . . .

“LEAVING THE PRESENT FOR THE PAST ... AND THE FUTURE TOO, DAMMIT” Daddy White Legs blared out.

Jackson slowly looked up. The small room had tall walls, with a dark ceiling far far above them.

Far above the three of them in the small room there together. And he would not shut up.

“Badly considered life actions – that inevitably lead one to this place.” Jivan said out of the side of his mouth

as he sipped a small cup of hot sweet Turkish coffee. “Poorly chosen actions, with resulting punishing penalties.”

“DAMN DAMN DAMN, NONE OF THAT EVER MATTERED – EVER MEANT ANYTHING – EVER HELPED AT ALL”

Then Daddy White Legs leaned back against the wall in the small place - his frustrated breathing stopped his speaking.

Jivan never spoke to Daddy White Legs. Jivan just spoke. Daddy White Legs breathed in and out, leaning against the wall.

And here he was. Jackson resting (trapped?) between the other places. Past, Present, and Future.

His long trail of leavings stretched in front and behind and above and below him now. And there were some consequences, as Jivan had cruelly alluded to. Here in this small tall deep place he remembered and reconsidered all of his bad decisions.  Jackson considered and reconsidered that they were not all bad decisions – not bad decisions.  No – not bad decisions at all.

(end)

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MARCH 2013  - "RADIO"

His old eyes squinted against the blinding sun brightened snow as the long metal door rolled noisily up into its riveted hood, allowing entry.

He pulled into the darker underground parking garage, riding in his ten year old two seater with the loud song “RUM & REDBULL” blasting from the speakers inside the old car with all windows rolled up tight. The contained muffled booming of the smiling island pop song reverberated down the concrete lanes of the car park under the historic site building. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ro2Ejt3CwuU “I'm drinking rum and Redbull - Hennessy let me heart full - Dem wah me get awful - Like dem on di dancehall get crawful”

He shut off the ignition, waited a few beats then shut down the radio channel that was playing the black island music in Toronto.

Slowly swiveling his aging frame up and out of the driver’s seat, he made his way to the rear of the car - to turn and head toward the condo elevator doorway. Two neighbour ladies approached the door way from the other direction. Probably a decade or so younger than him. They smile, he nods back speaking a civilized Canadian greeting - opening the door to the elevator area.

“With that voice you should be on the radio” one of the ladies says. “Not any more,” he smiles back at her, “Things have changed, things have changed."

He found he always repeated himself more often after listening to island music.

But he’d heard the recommendation before. “Hey, you should be a DJ on the air” they’d say. Or something like that. It happened every once in a while. And it was always a woman that said it. He could still remember when he intentionally consciously developed his ‘broadcast’ sound as a teenager back in Michigan. Very early on he had listened carefully at home to both radio and tv. Though there were slight differences in regional accents, he could always clearly hear that radio voice, that broadcast voice that made people feel right. There was one for America, and a different English language voice for England – they had the BBC voice.

By this time in his young life he’d already assembled a modular do-it-yourself Philmore Supertone Crystal Radio kit. After that he had also moved on to one that he had saved his small weekly chore allowance to buy – a real 6 transistor. Carrying around the voice of Lee Alan on the horn from WXYZ, giving out that constant Detroit soundtrack for every event in his life, it was the very same small transistor radio he listened to in his top bunk that night when he was supposed to go to sleep. That amazing night after hearing and talking about it for days, that amazing night the loud mouthed Cassius Clay was to fight Sonny Liston. He laid there quietly in the dark bedroom with his younger brother fast asleep on the bunk bed below his. He fine tuned the reception with his thumb. The reception to the fight broadcast – free on the airwaves – to hear brash sportscasters blare out about the early moments of the first round, about Clay's superior speed slipping away from Liston's lunging punches. By the sixth round Clay landed pounding combo punches at will. Clay returned to his corner stool, sat down, twisted around and hollered down directly at the reporters below, “I AM GONNA UPSET THE WORLD”. Then, middle ring, arms raised, dancing the fancy little jig to become known as the "ALI SHUFFLE" while Howard Cosell, broadcasting in his own inimitable radio voice, shouted "WAIT A MINUTE, WAIT A MINUTE!" as Liston failed to answer the bell for the seventh round!

He turned and sat up in his bunk, almost scraping his head on the bedroom ceiling, staring at his transistor radio in disbelief. Clay the winner! - by technical knockout! First time in decades a heavyweight champion had quit, just sitting there on his stool in his corner with Clay repeatedly yelling "I AM the greatest!", "I AM the greatest!", "I shook up THE WORLD!"

In his top bunk on the outskirts of Detroit that night he was certainly not able to sleep at all. And the next day after the fight, Clay announced his name to be Cassius X, later adopting the full new name of Muhammad Ali the following week.

Time passed and the world raced on. WABX-FM radio entered his ears and head and heart after the 1960’s past their mid point. A freeform progressive radio station right in Detroit, Michigan. 1967 when, if he was lucky, once in a great while he might hear something new and different on AM radio — maybe something like Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” an indicator of what might come. But, in the autumn that year, WABX-FM began broadcasting The Troubador, an experimental show, just one hour each week. Mixing blues, rock, folk and jazz. Stereophonic for those mandatory headphones that linked the radio to his body. Short months later – one hour expanded to the whole schedule. Musical finds like Paul Horn’s “Inside the Taj Mahal”, Richard Harris singing “MacArthur Park” and Harry Nilsson’s “The Point” – the complete entire side of an LP played all at once – on the radio. And, in between other long songs on other days, mixing in cuts from John Mayall’s “Blues From Laurel Canyon”, Cat Mother & the All-Night Newsboys and Laura Nyro singing “Eli's Coming”. Music, music, music, and even the “Firesign Theater” - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Firesign_Theatre .

All too abruptly he was jerked out of this fantastic new universe by something his teachers in school still called “CURRENT EVENTS” - ending up just a sad scared kid roaming across Canada, still to young to vote for anything or anybody. Meanwhile, back in Detroit there were conscientious objector guys - like Harvey Ovshinsky - being hired into WABX-FM as “radio-news-director”, right after that same busy Mr. O. had founded the well read FIFTH ESTATE underground news-paper in Detroit.

Even more time vanished with soundtracks that came from all his various radios in dashboards

and consoles and cabinets – so many changes and evolvings – so much, so much – never ever stopping.

Then, years later – well then he was told that Radio . . . . was dead. That it was over, all over.

He was told that what was left was merchant machined audio, no longer good for the soul at all.

This saddened him and he searched the ‘dial’, now a slender strip of discrete digital buttons – some no longer even physical. In each city he traveled to he found the far left side of the numerical channel choices were the student stations, manned by volunteers and low paid passionate people that did not – could not – always last a long time. But they did play while they could. And he could now get them anywhere. And so he did – in Toronto it was his local 89.5 FM http://www.ciut.fm/listen-now/ - now easily available in at least five different forms : radio, itunes, media player, satellite, or smartphone app. This kept him going where he lived, in spite of his sad missing of the good old fashioned radio he remembered from long ago.

Then he learned about radio in the rest of the world.

AND NOW, TODAY’S RADIO NEWS – 2013 :

“Police in Zimbabwe have announced a total ban on possession of shortwave radios, saying they are used to communicate hate speech ahead of next month's constitutional referendum and elections set to be held in July 2013. The many wind-up, solar-powered radios sets had already been distributed by non-governmental organizations (NGO’s), legally constituted organizations created by people operating independently from any form of government – NGO being a term that originated in the United Nations (that UN that so many American citizens seem to dislike so much) – NGO’s are not a part of a government and are not for-profit businesses. NGO organizations had already distributed the wind-up, solar-powered radio sets to rural communities, where villagers have already established listening clubs to tune in to popular independent stations such as Radio Voice of the People, Studio 7 and SW Radio Africa. The broadcasts are produced by exiled Zimbabwean journalists based in Europe and the US. Zimbabwe has four state-controlled radio stations that must support President Robert Mugabe's Zanu-PF party. There is a great demand among listeners, especially those supportive of the possible rival Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), for other viewpoints and the radios that are now to be banned are currently supplying those other viewpoints before voting this summer.”

He stopped, smiled, and continued to be grateful – for his radio.

He leaned over and switched it on, to hear her tell him to “STAY”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JF8BRvqGCNs

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FEBRUARY 2013 - SUBMITTED TO ANANSI, HOUSE OF ANANSI PRESS INC. AT 110 SPADINA AVENUE, SUITE 801, TORONTO, ONTARIO, M5V 2K4

February 2013

"Looks Just Like The Sun" – Coming Up Over The Don River

Sun Over The Don

By D.J. Philips

They were still after me.  I’d gone to every invisible place I could think of in the lower mainland.  Hiding from them in misty rains sliding down the last old places left in Kits.  But within less than days they knew each time.  I moved fast.  Again and again, vacating and crashing down without notice, but with no good lasting result.  I left her with him; I had to – safer that way, at least for them.  I think my heart would feel it and break in pain if that hammer-heart wasn’t pounding all damn day long now.  I was scared, and if I was going to pretend to tough it out my no longer young blood-pumping valves would constantly be telling me a very different story.

I made it out of Vancouver.  After several botched transits out, I ended up on the train going east to the sunrises.  The train was alright.  Not the way I had read about or even remembered it.  But they would check everything – planes, trains, busses, everything.  They were getting so fucking good at all this they could pull data trails on me now, and I knew it.  I used what cash I had left.  In the first of my messed up attempts to go east out of B.C., I did put my phone on a rig headed north, hoping.  It might throw them off for a little while.  It might.  They’d be even more pissed when they reached that dead-end and had to double back to pick up whatever scent I would have stupidly left somewhere else.

My family would hear from them.  I could not help them or that.  They knew, or at least were of the firm opinion that they thought they knew, what a shit I was.  My father would try to hold my mother as she sobbed, but she would push him away with a snarl.  I could not help them now.  A rough total of about 80 hours to a safer bigger city where maybe I could get really lost and help myself out of all this – and it would all be over soon, one way or the other.  Would’ve been a lot faster by plane but I had to keep my piece with me.  I still think it will help if I need it and I could not figure a way to fly with it on me, without them grabbing me.  With my banger and shells I felt slightly better - unless I really thought it through to the end.  You can get out of any damn disaster, except your last one.

Passengers on the train are very obliging.  No one wants to look at or talk to anyone else, except in the bar car – and I avoid that for all the obvious reasons.  In and out of towns, coming out of mountains into hills into flatter than shit flatness - I should have remembered how flat it was.  Way back when, I got stuck in Swift Current Saskatchewan with a broken fan belt and in those days they did not even stock VW beetle parts, just American car parts then.  Times have changed.  But not that much, I was on the run then too.  It was just easier to hide out then and there, in that time.

The last night is coming up.  Train should get in very early.  Big Smoke, Hog Town, Muddy York, Toronto – it is the biggest and best place to hide in plain sight.  Pushing three million people now, I can weave in and out and vanish when I have to, in a very quiet nonviolent poof of muddy hog smoke.  But I am worn.  Worn out.  Last night coming up.  The sun is going down behind us, behind the train as we jostle heavily eastward out of western and central Canada.  Still in a single seat.  No sleeper for my meager paper and polymer bills – got to hold on to all I can for as long as I can.  I just lean my head toward the window.  It is cool glass with a reflection of – me.  Darker now with thin bright streaks of spread out cheap town lights, then highway LED beams - nothing but cool blue white fronts and hot red orange backs – all stretching out right next to the train until we hit the woods again, the woods and fields – dark.  My eyes think they should look through the window.  I see her face so clear I touch her mouth in my mind.  I would say in my heart, but I cannot love her or anyone right now.  If I do love them I have to get the hell away so they will not be hurt.  It wasn’t worth it.  No matter how damn cool and swell it was.  Why do I do these fucking things?  Last time, this is the last time – and when I get this straight, that’s it – a new clean life, a start over.  Right.  I can see her in my heart.  Her face and hair and clothes the colors of completely stoned sunset at Wreck Beach – yellow and orange and red and pure gold into outer space blue midnight way up there.  I can see her in my heart, smiling, not afraid.  Somewhere I know it is darkness now, but my heart glows as it sees her.

My head jerks forward and sideways and bumps against the smudged glass window I have been sleeping on for God knows how long.  We are here.  In the dark still, but we are here.  I shrink down into my seat to let everyone else get off first.  Watching through the glass smudges to look inside Union Station, to see who is out there at the end of this night, at the end of this ride.  People of all kinds are moving sleepily down the aisle.  They want to get off the train.  They exit the car and walk out onto the platforms.  Some pulling or carrying their stuff, some exit with just their two feet and the hat on their head.  I wait.

No one is out there waiting for anyone now.  A few train station employees.  They do what they are paid to do, no more, no less.  It looks like it is time to get up and off and out.  I do. 

My eyes swing wildly all left to all right as my feet automatically move me off the train and into the big almost empty station.  Pillars, tiles, mosaics, marble, granite, all sorts of stone from Canada – Union Station says its big hollow hard hello.  The large main space echoes with the few movements being made as I point myself for the doors on Front Street.  Past the heavy doors, I am in the last of the giant re-construction of this place.  The old Toronto-The-Good train station is joining the new century just as I return to hide in her town.  I am still too tired to feel anything clearly.  My feet keep laying themselves down, one in front of the other.  I point my nose eastward, further east still.  My exposed skin is warmed just slightly as the sunrise lights up my face with its early eastern red and gold.

Instead of tucking my face down, as I probably should, I am waking up now - with real excitement as my auto pilot puts me on Front Street heading toward Jarvis, then Sherbourne, and further east all the way to the river.   I have stopped thinking about everything now.  My breath comes and goes to my heartbeat that has replaced all thoughts, all plans, anything sensible at all.

My eyes go way ahead of me now, and see the sun rise over the Don.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Daniel Joseph Philips

70 Mill Street #903

Toronto, Ontario

M5A 4R1

647-347-1478

danphilips@rogers.com

Brief biography :

Daniel J. Philips lives in Toronto on Mill Street in one of the oldest neighbourhoods from the time of Muddy York. He came originally from the Detroit/Windsor area but proceeded to wander about places in North America such as San Francisco, Fort Knox, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa, Los Angeles, Newmarket, Oakville, Chicago, and Portland, Oregon.  He returned to Toronto in 2009 to begin writing - and to stop his wandering vagabond existence.

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AND NOW, 

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FEBRUARY 2013 

The topic this month was to write about FIRE.

“It has it all, y’know...” he said to me.

I looked around as much as I could in the cold darkness. He turned a bit and looked down at me.

“Fire fascinates because it has it all.” he said. He stood on the rusted metal decking in the low cloudy moonlight. He did not move again.

“Fire has it all – brightness, contrast, color, sharp motion of soft blending shapes – and warmth, heat – it has that smokey smelling heat.”

I did not move. Could not move. The cord bonds around me held tight. Small sloshing listing of the big ship kept it from being still, but I could not move.

“Fire brings change – all change – to us all, and to everything” he said to himself as much as to me. I could no longer see his face but he talked on. We both spoke in English, though I said nothing this time. I had been raised with English. It had been forced upon him for survival. He had not lost his own language but during the last year he had lost much. The struggles had taken his family and his home. There was chaos where we lived and worked. The work itself had stopped when the troops arrived. He began to show changes. Small changes at first, but rapidly reforming him into this new man atop the cold metal deck tonight. We both knew this could happen, him more than me – but we both knew. The oil cargo in the ship was ready. Ready to go to where it would become almost happy motorized trips to 7/11 for that cold Slurpee or Slim Jim on a hot day in a faraway place with people, more families, that also never knew. Both he and I had talked – even joked – about this. But we could laugh then because we were both getting our piece of it all. That made it alright for us then. Then. But now, now the inevitable changes came and no one was laughing. All sides stiffened and postured and rushed and banged their chests together hard enough to jostle shoulder pads and helmets in a new sort of unscheduled Superbowl that would ignite the whole damned thing.

“Fire brings change.” He said and then

sparked the small oxyacetylene torch he was holding.

He dropped the 3000 degree centrigrade flame to the deck.

We never heard it hit.

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JANUARY 2013 :

IRA - I am supposed to be writing about 12,000 year old elephants, but I used this opportunity to

procrastinate further. Happy New Year to you, Aliz Coursey, and your mahhhvelous wife Nancy.

Subject: Re: “NEWS” is The New 2013 BRAINZ Topic for January

The day could not seem to start. The morning marine layer would not get up and go to lunch. The cool blue grey mist, almost black and white, laid over everything. It softened most things as they slur-blurred through it all - throughout the day. Almost tea time and still the smoggish foggish veil clung to even the paper pages at the news stand. I wove my way through those still weaving, toward the old news. It did not seem to matter anymore. Clocks do not tick, phones do not ring, and the news was no longer new at the news stand. None of it mattered anymore. I selected a set of pages off one shelf and nodded my eyeware at the sales bot, causing the confirming chirp instead of an old dirty joke that Sal used to have for me when I bought a real newspaper from him – before. It was all old news now.

(end) – dan p.

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NOVEMBER 2012 :

The JERK & the GTA Guys

They were gathered for a meal on the Danforth in Greektown. Greek town is in the GTA. The GTA is a large metropolitan area, inside the country of Canada, with a population of over six million people. The Greater Toronto Area is the central city of Toronto together with four regional municipalities that surround it. And these men, at this meal, were definitely GTA guys. They were GTA guys in spite of the fact that many of them had lived elsewhere. From time to time some lived outside this big Toronto area. Sometimes way out beyond it. Sometimes all the way out of the country of Canada itself. But there they were. And at heart, they were all GTA guys. They clustered around both sides of the long table and they talked TORONTO talk.

Their various drinks were being prepared at the nearby busy bar - that made me think of THE JERK.

Now there are many JERKS in this world – and while I have enjoyed all the many good and positive people I have met and worked with over the last 6 decades, those of us at the table had also met more than anyone’s fair share of JERKS. This may be attributable to the sad fact of staying in the field of “Entertainment” for an overly long period of time, as I did before coming to my senses. But I’d had my fill of all those other particularly ill mannered people. Rather than write about all of the bad ones I have endured or put in their place over the years, I will instead reminisce about just one particular kind of JERK. One that always brought me enjoyment, not anger. One that the busy bar reminded me of this night. Years ago I had seen this type of JERK thrive briefly, then change, then vanish as our world continued its insane rate of spin. I am speaking, of course, of THE SODA JERK.

The clinking speed, precision, and flourish of our drink preparations at this meal made me think back to all the fun watching the stylings of that Norman Rockwell-ish occupation, THE SODA JERK. Aside from this nostalgic similarity inside the Greek restaurant we had gathered at, all that seems to be left of this now are few ‘themed’ diners, and maybe just this one genuine artisan maker of equipment from that era http://sodajerkworks.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=53&Itemid=28 .

So, we GTA guys received our libations, dove into our hot meals, and just like the rest of North America, I forgot about the old bow-tied SODA JERK.  Our real reason for being there was to send off one of us off to the southernmost reaches of planet Earth. One of us was actually going to the South Pole.

“Emerald, violet, blue crimson light – not a world of white desolation”, the lucky one said to the rest of us as we hoisted beers and whiskeys and wines. “Nothing like you’ve heard about” he enthused. “It’s really a world of immense scale, huge icebergs, but smooth flat calm polar mornings.” His eyes flickered brightly as he spoke. “Huge whales, enormous penguin rookeries - that few have ever seen with their own eyes.”

The rest of us heard him, saw him, and watched as he grew more excited. Maybe none of us really wanted to go the South Pole ourselves, but all were envious of the voyage. He was going on a real adventure, while we would continue to go about our daily GTA lives. The man at the long bar prepared another round of liquid refreshments but my reminiscing visions of THE JERK had been replaced with the described crisp images of frozen adventure - farther south than I would ever go again.

- danp.

( fyi ira – I de-activated my FACEBOOK account again for a while )

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OCTOBER 2012 :

"STRENGTH"

This was going to take some strength. I knew this right away. Hell, I could never even smoothly spell the word STRENGTH let alone summon it up at will. The damned “N” and “G” in STRENGTH always confused me for some grade-school-blank-spot reason. But I knew it was going to require some of it this time. Where would I find this strength? Mothers lift monstrously heavy vehicles off their poor pinned children. Fathers hold up thick burning wooden beams to let loved family escape inferno. Families themselves cluster and form supportive protection against the raging world. But the world, the world, our world - it has only too-large overblown-unintentional muscular spasms. Bad giant painful charleyhorse’d leg muscle seizures the world has – plus searing trembling back-pain, hard-zap-pulsed with intentionally aimed electric shocks. So how? How, and where, would I find the strength to do this?

But I must. I love her and I must help her. My heart aches with frightened love for her – for who she is, and how I need her with me. I should be stronger than that right now. Hah! that’s funny. Not strong enough to resist the love I have for her and not strong enough to help her right now when she needs it. I can see her there across the shadowed room, sitting in the chair by the window. She needs me. She needs me to do this - this something, for her. I must rally my self to help. To help her. Help her to fight the many battles: woman/man, black/white, short/tall, young/old. So many things, all at once. It was supposed to be easier when we were older. It isn’t. Not at all. Need even more strength to help her to be nice to herself, in all of her talent-drive-and-beauty. And stronger still to help her walk through the deaths in her family. To go forward together through it all. Into our lives, into the future that’s left. To live.

But no. No. I cannot. I can’t do all that. My shoulders slump down quickly at the challenge. Chin rests on my chest, pot belly bulges out pitifully. PULL YOURSELF TOGETHER. Alright – Alright - Alright. Up, stand up. Shoulders back, stomach in, back straight. That’s what would my grandfather – my six foot plus Irish-cop-looking grandfather would have said. He’d say all that while my slightly shorter father would quietly shake his head in the background. But that’s o.k., alright. I am. I am up. Up and moving toward her. Just keep moving. Closer. Her head turns slightly, away from the bright window and toward me – in my direction. The fringed edges of her hair and her sweater all brightly back lit by the glaring day outside the window glass. Her eyes look up. At me. At my eyes. And when they do, when her eyes meet mine, the mighty strength inside of her flows to me and fills me up, without her even knowing? With all her pressures and tensions and problems she unknowingly gifts me with the force I need to help her. This beautiful woman gives me the strength I need, to help her. And so I will. And so I do. I am solidly there for her now. Not solving problems but giving her the strong love and support she needs to get through each piece, one piece at a time.

They say that you cannot choose whom you fall in love with, but I am very grateful that it happened to us.

....................................................................................................................................

SEPTEMBER 2012 :

“KIDS”

The young father told the story to his young sons. It was their bedtime and they wanted to hear a bedtime story. He had read all of the books they had, some of them many times. He must remember to buy them some new story books. Maybe it was because he was bored with repeating them, maybe it was because he was prone to fall asleep while rereading some of them –

even before his sons did. Whatever the reason, one night he decided to make up a story for the two small boys. The three of them all settled into comfortable positions and the light level was low and softly yellow against their bedroom walls. He spoke the first things that came to his mind.

“There was a small brown boy, named Montezuma...” he said to the two of them. He liked it because he could look right at his sons’ small young faces as he told the story rather than reading a book as they watched. “ And this small brown boy lived in a land far far away many many years ago...” he continued as both of the boys fixed him with their eyes - as their fingers pushed and pulled and played with the edges of their pajama sleeves and the hem of the blankets pulled up warm. “It was a golden land with golden bowls and plates....and apples...”

“GOLDEN APPLES” one of the boys said, and the other agreed, “Yes, GOLDEN apples...”

The young father nodded and said, “Yes, GOLDEN apples . . . that the golden dragons liked to eat...”

“...DRAGONS?” said the youngest boy, half excited and half a bit worried and nervous.

“Yes, but they were friendly golden dragons. They were Montezuma’s friends. The two golden dragons would fly high over Montezuma’s land and circle down to land near him, sometimes getting some of those golden apples to eat.” the young father said. He continued to tell – invent - the story that saw Montezuma the small brown boy in his golden clothing flying up high into the skies over his home on the backs of both his friendly golden dragons. The young father told his sons about one of their adventures together, describing the flapping of the large golden dragon wings and the sounds of the air whooshing by Montezuma’s ears as they soared up and out and swoopingly down to almost touch their shadows racing under them on the grounds nearby Montezuma’s golden house. The story came alive with the colors and sounds of Montezuma’s land and people and animals, all moving and living and doing unexpected things in unexpected ways.

As the story went on, first the youngest, and then the slightly older son, both nodded and rustled slowly into their bedding – and soon they were asleep. The young father quietly rose and tucked them in, giving each a kiss on the forehead as they almost snored with soft breathing as they slept. He left their room and carefully brought their door almost to its closed position. The father went back into the other part of the house to say goodnight to his wife, as he had to go into his job on the night shift again. He had been on night shift for a while now but hoped to rotate back to a day shift soon. He gave his wife a close hug and a kiss, telling her to sleep well and that he would see her the next day. She told him she loved him and gave him his packed lunch to take into work with him. He left their house and entered their family van to drive into work.

After he had taken the freeway, quickly as there was not much traffic at this hour, he drove up to the security check-in. The young man showed his pass-card to an older man at the check-in structure and was allowed to go on. He pulled into the large parking lot behind the security fence and barriers and parked the van under one of the tall bright lights as was his custom. It was only a five minute walk to his place of work from there and he saw other young men parking and walking in too. They arrived more or less together at the building around the same time and each showed his security-pass once more, this time to an automated device on the door frame. All of them walked casually down the long hall and one by one turned off into separate rooms through separate doors. As he came up to his room with his door he also turned in, acknowledging a few men that arrived just before him and were already settling into their work.

The young father sat down in his chair-rig and turned on the various electric displays directly in front of his chair on the desk in the semi dark room. There were several rows of them, all sitting into their rigs as they either turned on the displays or manipulated controls that altered the images they saw on the screens that lit up their work area. As he ran the auto-calibration program to ensure accuracy he could see the image of his. One screen showed it flying. Several other screens showed the ground directly beneath and in front of it as it flew. After several more safety checks and routine processes to guarantee reliability he took to his controls to fly his over the village. He was too high up, or rather that which he was controlling was too high up, to see the small brown boy running below. When his drone targeted and struck he never saw him, only the dragon like shapes on the ground near the shining compound. The dragon like shapes shattered in smoke and stones and dust as his drone continued its path. He looped the drone back once more to ensure the accuracy for his report. The small brown boy in his golden clothing was no where to be seen.

( but, maybe not THE END )

=========================================================

AUGUST 2012 :

MISCONCEPTIONS

“Get out of the house and get your self a little kiss-me-ass part time job” she said smiling - with her fiery eyes lighting up my corner of the place. 

I swiveled my head halfway back toward her and made a sound in her general direction,

“Mmmmmmwelllll’owwlrite...” my usual nonstop verbosity turned down, truncated and stepped on.

But she 

was right. Being inside too long is not good. Cabin fever. I had seen it in others. Must have missed the signs in myself. She saved me. Again.

Within no time at all I was walking resume and bio around to places, looking for some little KMA ( Kiss Me Ass ) job to do part-time during the long weeks that went by so quickly now. T

 

he act of walking to these potential places of employment was important to me. You don’t finally leave the automated gridlocked rat race far behind by retiring your way out of it, just to drive straight back into it again. 

I wanted to walk to this new work, this new part-time adventure, whatever it would be.  Wherever I would find it.

It was raining lightly now, after the hot fiery days of crazy-kiln summer heat in our old part of the city. It had been several days of continuous searching for me. All of the places I walked to had gate keeper people that just looked at me as though I was really an annoying waste of their time. I could tell that I was slowing down and interrupting their own personal count-the-hours-drudgery, within their own jobs. Never felt that way myself. Always threw myself deeply into each new gig, but I already knew most others never felt that way about work. Place after place, gate-keeper after gate-keeper politely or rudely rejected me. I could see that this time it might be harder to find the KMA part-time job of my dreams.

That’s when I came upon the old tour bus company at the southern edge of our city. Just under and through the corroding freeway overpass with its occasional light showers of concrete bits that rained lightly down onto the remaining brave souls that drove or walked beneath this old steel and cement. Coming up out of these shadows and back into the light misty rain I could see several small mini-coach tour busses colorfully parked. They sat heavily out in front of the sun cracked, snow-salt-bleached, pocked and peeling front office of an old two storey building. My kind of place. I walked right in. Within one hour I had the promise of the part-time employment I sought as well as the possibility of some sort of cockamamie digital consulting work to turn this old fleet into digital-info-vehicular-conveyances.

After what seemed like an overly long period of time I finally acquired an upgraded driver’s licence to pilot the mini-coaches. I was now a Kiss Me Ass Tour Bus Driver. I was happy. Out of the house once a week and happy. 

But, it really wasn’t until that first tourist customer boarded, making his way back into the rear of the bus, that I had any notion at all I’d completely misunderstood the situation.

As the man walked slowly to one of the rear vinyl seats he was immediately followed by the rest of the bustling passengers in the waiting lineup at the curb. I watched him as he moved back, maybe because he was my first passenger - maybe because there was something about his peaceful smile as he first boarded the step-up and then turned past me at my driver’s seat.

My little Kiss Me Ass job was a complete misconception, but I would not know this,

until I drove the machine.

=========================================================

JULY 2012 :

SPIRITS

They were called ghosts. And I thought they were. Or just someone else’s imagined fears.

But they weren’t. It wasn’t until I drove the machine that I got a good sense of what they were.

It was late summer when I readied the machine, the tour van, to return to the company parking lot.

A long hot day. A full load of tourists. People from all over the world, wanting to tour the charming older

areas of the city. I had given the usual spiel – hangings in public square, enemies carved in stone, drowning

in the well – that sort of thing. The day was like any other sunny warm touring day. The passengers filed through

and then out of the bus at the end of their tour, stepping carefully down to the pavement as they thanked me in all

of their many languages.

When the last one was out and safely walking away I closed the van doors. I thought I heard

a new pressure sound as the doors sealed shut. Just my imagination I thought, as I pulled away from the curb stones.

You know that intense white flash you get on a dark street corner at night, when you are caught by a traffic camera?

The one that flashes more than enough light for a synchronized split second to allow the camera to grab your very

surprised face behind the wheel of your vehicle when you have run a red light? Well, that’s what it was. First that

odd pressure sound and then the brilliant eye blinding white flash – in the middle of the day. It was only 4pm.

It was 4pm because that was the time that I finished that tour run with all of the Germans and Chinese and

Sikhs from India. Used to be almost all Americans on board, but that was before the lost decade began.

Damn, I would not be getting any old traffic violation photo print in the mail this time though.

When I came out of the flash, only a second or two till my eyes adjusted, I was still on the correct side of the

intersection. I was sitting on Trinity and Mill Streets right next to the Distillery Tourist District in its 19th century

brick and iron. I knew this intersection. There was no camera there. No stop light either. I looked

left and right and up and down – no traffic light. But then, there were no vehicles either. What I mean is that

there were no gas or electric or hybrid vehicles. My tour van was still parked, engine idling, on Mill at

Trinity Street – the only vehicles were two thick wooden horse drawn wagons with large hefty wood spoked wheels banded with metal that rolled noisily

over the old paving stones and uneven brick paved streets. Horses. I could smell the horses. I could smell horse shit.

I don’t have to tell you it was very unnerving. It was. This intersection is normally a beehive of activity during the

warm months when everyone wants to see everything they can about old Toronto. But now, this time, sitting here

in the rough idling tour van I could count the people I saw on the fingers of my two hands that rested on the

steering wheel vibrating slightly to the gas engine burning fuel in its shuddering idle mode. And these

few people were all dressed in museum costumes, moving slowly here and there. Some of them pretended

to be doing some sort of task or work around the main entrance gate. One of the scruffy looking guys rolled

an overly built wood and metal wheel barrow with big keg and some tools and chains in it. He rolled it right

by me. Right in front of my tour van. Missed it by inches. All I could do was swivel my gaze, following him

as he whistled his way past me and into the front gate on Mill Street. Whistling. This burly red haired guy

in his museum costume and a bushy moustache was actually whistling while he worked. At first I thought

that I was seeing either some local re-enactment or was somehow tripped out dreaming. But as time

went on, as the days past there in the old neighbourhood, as I spent more time in my tour bus that they

could not see, I began to realize. I began to know a little bit about what was going on. I began to know

that *I* was the spirit, and so far they could not see me - at all.

THE END, for now....

.....................................................................................

JUNE 2012:

THE PAST

I’ve spent much time IN the past, writing it all into a current story.

I’ve been forced to think about it and its cousins: present and future.

I’m beginning work on a new story about time travel. I’ve always been

fascinated with the past – the present – and the future ( mostly the future ).

Because of this I have, coincidentally, been looking at various statements

about THE PAST. The first one I came across was :

I'm not here to discuss the past... I'm here to be positive.
Mark McGwire

And I am positive about the past. It would serve no purpose to be negative

about that which has already taken place. ( but time travel could change all that, no ? )

Next statement I found was :

The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
Albert Einstein

Which was almost instantly muddled and confused by :

Upper classes are a nation's past; the middle class is its future.
Ayn Rand

So, if there were things in our past that we really wanted to change, could we ?

As I dug deeper, dusting off more powdered quotes of yesteryear I read :

When our memories outweigh our dreams, it is then that we become old. 
Bill Clinton

But then, he just might have been talking about those aliens, from the planet VIAGRA.

Many serious things have happened that could concern us. One opinion I respect is :

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
George Orwell

Many of the things in my own past that I might like to readdress are all inside this one

- - - give or take a few years either side of the displayed date here . . .

But for now, before I take my leap into the temporal zones of time span teleportation,

I am ping-pong’ing between two points of view that span the breadth of possibilities

and the heights and depths of potential change for every aspect, known or not.

Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future,

concentrate the mind on the present moment.
Buddha

What is past is prologue.
William Shakespeare

(end, for now)

......................................................................................

MAY 2012:

ADVICE

............

“What should I do?”

The young and not very old voice came across magic space into his cell phone, next to his head.

He knew that question was coming. Part of the role he had somehow grown into was to handle these.

Through all of the highly charged feelings his job was to be neutral, almost machine-like,

but with a knowing heart that a machine could never have - at least not yet. Not yet.

Years and months and weeks and days had already run through the hourglass - taught him to not

blurt out the first thing he felt. So he made noises and struck poses that the caller could not see, just to stall for a while. Just to delay answering the question. He was glad it wasn’t a SKYPE video call.

He knew that question was coming, and here it was. What was he to do with it? Should he tell the truth?  Over the great distances between them the truth was likely to be hard, callous, even cruel. A lie then?  No, his role would not allow that. He would regret that. What then?

He countered with more questions. Questions that might allow replies to illuminate an answer for the caller.  No, that did not work. Too many emotions already aroused. Already invested and locked down for hard action.  The answers to his questions beat about the bush. Circled the wagons. Deployed the shields. Only the truth could pierce all that, he knew. So he would. He would tell the caller the truth. What they must do now.

He cleared his throat one last time and formed the first words.

“Wait, someone’s on the other line” the caller said to him “– gotta go – will call back later...”

and the caller disconnected.

His fingers tightened slightly at the edges of the plastic case as he pulled it away from his head.

He stared at the small shiny flat phone thing in his wrinkled hand.

Maybe he would follow his own advice.

(end)

......................................................................................

APRIL 2012:

NOISE

The grating cacophony shook his earlobes, longer now in his old age.

Sound waves in massive pulsing blasts moved into his head on both sides.

Bright visibly ragged static sanded his eyes until they ran with tears, then squeezed wetly shut.

Even then he could feel the concussive jolts per moment, just as they were designed to be received.  

He longed for the almost silent hot winds of the quiet barren open desert he had seen in the screen.

Then the power went out.

Then only the battery powered devices could continue the onslaught, and in time the batteries died out too.  

The sound and fury of the Municipal Ministry Of Entertainment And Citizen Information was stilled. Quiet.

He could feel his heartbeat.

The hammer heart keeping him going.

His fingers trembled slightly as

tight reflecting beads of perspiration rolled down from his brow,

around his nose and down his cheeks to his neck.

He was stopped.

He was lost in the silence. Should he turn left or right? Should he sit down or move forward?

What was he doing a moment ago? He did not know - so he just stopped. Stood there.

The strangled light from the north window let him see again. But the quiet. The quiet.

The quiet made him anxious. It was quiet. ( “It was too quiet...”) He heard a shove and a click and a clunk.

He turned his head and body in the direction of the noise but it had come thickly from behind the heavy walls.  

Another series of thunks and switch-backs ended in the sound of one heavy metal safe dropping to the floor, slamming steel into crunching wood, just behind the walls, just beyond his reach.

The regenerators kicked in and all the light and sound began ramping up. His eyes widened.

The returning sound waves in their massive pulsing blasts moved back into his head.

White hot cool bright ragged static sanded his eyes again until they re-ran with wet tears.

The concussive jolts per moment enveloped his own heartbeat, just as they were designed to.

He longed for the almost silent hot winds of the quiet barren open desert he had seen in the screen.

The NOISE shook his long creased earlobes. He stopped trying to move.

(end)

.........................................................................................

FEBRUARY 2012:

THE BEST THINGS IN LIFE

Too easy. Maybe I am mistaken, but after all this time

it really seems the best things in life are those that one gives back to others.

There is nothing like it. Nothing feels as good. I do not know why, nor do I care.

It does not matter what one gives back to others – material, emotional, spiritual even.

I wish I could wax poetic about it but that’s all I have this time. Driving fast in shining

sports cars, being intimate with beautiful women, drinking specific liquids from specific

years and places, savoring delicate tastes of exquisite foods from around the world – all good.

All of it, all of them, but the memorable BEST things in life are always the gifts one gives to another.

So, take that!

.........................................................................................

JANUARY 2012:

  “ANIMATION teaches Patience.”
That’s what I used to tell them, those eager impulsive bright eyed ones
bursting with energetic enthusiasm. I knew them. Used to be like them.
My heart within me used to be a blazing comet pushing its way through
all the new universes before it. Many were the joys of this accelerated
travel through life and its peoples, but then I ran into - ANIMATION.

Even today, in this cyber-swift world of speed and instant grabification,
ANIMATION is still . . . S – L – O – W . When I first met ANIMATION it was
even slower. Drawing things slowly by hand, image by image, drawing by
drawing, frame by frame . . . and that was AFTER having had to sit there,
quietly planning out the entire thing. Sitting there with your old fashioned
paper exposure/dope sheet imagining in your mind’s eye the entire work
finished and completed, so that you could – slowly – break down all those
imaginings into separate distinct frames and layers and levels. Then your
reward was the actual work of – slowly – drawing/painting/creating all of
those frames/layers/levels. “THIS IS INSANE” I thought. But the love of it
captured me ( the way golf or sailing or playing cards does with others ).

As I labored on each animated project, whether it was low priced commercial,
hasty tv work or even big budget movie, the slowness required gave us gifts.
I received the gift of Patience that I was never able to receive before. Oddly,
that allowed me to be more patient with many things, many people, and many
events in my life that would have caused my former self to burn an ulcer or
blow a heart valve. I still am known to blaze bright with emotion and haste
from time to time, but ANIMATION taught me PATIENCE - and I am grateful.

..........................................................................................
DECEMBER 2011:

Beginnings used to matter to me.

They really used to mean something. They used to define LIFE.

Before the BIG BANG was a tv comedy show in syndication there must have been a beginning, right ?

I mean, even in tedious and boring animation art there is a start frame and an end frame,

with assorted important key frames along the way. I really used to think LIFE was like that.

Then I learned about many beginnings all happening all at once all over the place - all the time.

Everything in LIFE I bumped into or decided to try to do really should have been a beginning, a new

starting out - fresh and clean and uniquely original. And for a long while it did seem just like that.

But, as I entered each one of these new adventures - as I started out on the new journey - things began

to run together. They ran together in a pleasing way. In a way that gave me a different sense of calm.

LIFE felt better. And it all just kept going. No more earth shakingly new paradigms, just flowing all one

to the next and then over and back and up and out again. I could have been disappointed, but I wasn’t.

LIFE had always felt like a comic book ( or a movie made from a comic book, or set of graphic novels ).

But now it looked and felt more now like one long and flowing story, forever entertainingly there for us.

And at long last I began to understand the long & always flowing Ampersand too.

Best beginning I ever started out on.

Happy New Year.

- dan(p)

- on the 9th floor

in Toronto, Canada.

......................................................................................

NOVEMBER 2011:

Re: RUMOURS : New Topic for BRAINZ

TMZ, ENTERTAINMENT TONIGHT, THE INSIDER, even places like

CONGRESS, THE PENTAGON, THE WHITE HOUSE, and of course

the great granmammy of them all, HOLLYWOOD – all purveyors and

exploiters of the creation and use of RUMORS in our lives.

Regular folks, everyday people – like you and me - when we partake

in RUMORS we do so either unwittingly or because some inferior

component of that which makes us US gets the infrequent

upper hand in the day to day running of things.

Until I went to work in Los Angeles I really had no idea. I had seen the

lives of people destroyed by mean spirited rumors when growing up in

Michigan, but it was the sordid exception rather than the regular rule.

When I reached the golden glowing streets of Hollywood I learned that

RUMORS were a growth industry, not only sanctioned but required to

lubricate the physical and virtual machinery of product profits.

Nowadays the slim distinction between SHOW BUSINESS and our

POLITICAL MILITARY GOVERNANCE can be made only in the careful

comparison of the STYLE of rumors that come one’s way. The rumors

from HOLLYWOOD are meant only to gets “butts in seats”; be they about

nymphet overdosage or marital cheating with overly tattoo’d tushies.

As long as we are all provoked by our base curiosity or lookeeloo morbidity

into parting with the money that we should have done better with but blew

on some entertaining movie-tv-show-video-game-itunes-download instead,

HOLLYWOOD has then done its job. They delivered what we apparently ask for.

They drive to the banks in Bugatti Veyrons http://celebritycar.weebly.com/simon-cowell.html .

As long as we are goaded by raw fear and mob-tribe overprotectivity

into turning against one segment of humanity or totally ignoring another

when we really should have been stopping, thinking, and forming our own

opinions and views based on real facts - to behave appropriately to events,

then POLITICAL MILITARY GOVERNANCE has done its job.

They deliver what

they are being paid to give us. They no longer drive at all,

they don’t have to.

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,15519307,00.html , http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/archive.cgi?read=208010

http://atlanta.cbslocal.com/2011/11/04/occupy-atlanta-denies-rumors-of-partnership-with-nation-of-islam/

Rumours, (as they are spelled in the remnants of that last great empire),

have been part of our weaker and more negative side for a long time,

so there must be some original useful purpose for them,

lost to all of us

as we learned to use them to motivate ourselves. Some old timey rumors

not intended

to alter behavior but rather to warn us about our behavior did prove to be true.

GLOBAL WARMING – HOLE IN THE OZONE – CANCER FROM TOBACCO – BRAIN DAMAGE FROM CELL PHONES

( oops, sorry about that last one – there are already counter-rumors being employed to keep us all constantly using 

the damn things in spite of medical evidence ). As for me, I have ended up just trying to follow the old advice of that wise old grumpy pants. 

“When you hear it, don’t you believe it”, he had said.

The whole famous and often misquoted quote went something like:

“It has been rumored that I was seriously ill --- it was another man;

rumored that I was dying --- it was another man; rumored that I was dead --- the other man again ...

As far as I can see, nothing remains to be reported. When you hear it, don't you believe it. And don't

take the trouble to deny it. Merely just raise the American flag on our house in Hartford, Connecticut

and let it talk.”
- Mark Twain’s Letter to Frank E. Bliss, 11/4/1897

(end)

.......................................................................................


OCTOBER 2011:

Agent Dan Philips

On Assignment In Toronto, Ontario, Canada, Earth :

LETTING GO

Strong wind slamming aging camping tent just right – angry perfect storm.

Gravelly grinding sounds of metal tent pegs being yanked out of the stony

camping soil – the bivouac sounds I hear with my last batch of letting go.

The turning of the last century forced that batch of letting go.

The career stopped cold, laid off far from some home, somewhere.

The wife stiffened, cooling self defense and emotionally pulling out.

The grand house with grand mortgage payments moaned to be let go too.

The fragmented family shuddered in three different cities all at the same time.

And ...the dog died.

The sound of tent pegs sliding up and out of rocky soil gave me a sound for it all.

When all the tethers slipped and were gone there was nothing left for it all but the

letting go.

So I did.

All of those things pulling violently against my white knuckled grasp, my fingers opened.

I let the one life go – to make room for the next, in this next new century I am happy to be in.

.......................................................................................

AUGUST 2011:

LOSING – is, unfortunately, memorable.

__________________________________

The phone rang ( it chirped actually ).

It was Jackson’s wife Shari on their bed, back in Chicago.

She did not want to join him. She would not move from Chicago.

The new temporary bed Jackson rested on remained firm, but he completely deflated.

Jackson Kelley just sat there on the firm foam bed trying to figure out what the right guy-thing would be to do now.  He sat on his two layers of foam-mattress in his new small apartment, looking out at the thick summer air hanging stubbornly to the paths and trees on the breakwaters and parkland out his balcony window. He had the small floor fan pointed directly at him. His Step-Mother had reminded him that his father had always said he could tell good stories, by which both he and she meant that he was a real liar as a kid. He would write. In his current state of mind Jackson would write a story about a man who had loved a woman. A seagull flew by his balcony railing, headed back out over

the cove in a wide and graceful arc. Jackson opened his laptop computer and began his hunt and peck typing. He put his head back resting it on the wall behind him, looked out over the top of his computer display at the misty waves lapping at the shores of the lake. He exhaled and began to tell of a man who could see the woman he loved. Today this man had to reply to the woman he had lived with for more than 3 decades. He hoped that this act of his would be honorable.

On the phone she had demanded an answer to her question, which was

"Will you stay married to me but live apart?"

Jackson had dwelt on this question as he understood it for a few days now

....and he had promised to give a reply.

When he thought about her......for he never got to see her anymore.....he thought of

her in the different roles, ages, looks, and attitudes that he had come to know.

Memory is an amazing thing. Although he knew there had been days when they both

hated each other - when they might have done bodily damage to one another,

he could not resurrect more than an indistinct image of those times. No.

All he remembered clearly were the good things, the happy times,

and the beautiful girl-woman that joined him in Canada all those years ago.

Her clear eyes, her open heart, her brightness, her enjoyment of life, and all the things

they were discovering together as they lived together in various towns, meeting various people.

They were still marginally in touch with many of the people they had

met along the way. Those people always liked her, and always wondered about him.

"Will you stay married to me but live apart?" she had asked.

He ran this question over and over in his mind. He remembered his original feelings

about being married at all... as a young man Jackson had always blurted out

that he did not need a piece of paper to guarantee his commitment of Love to her.

He loved her. He lived with her. Why did there have to be some ceremony and

tradition to BIND him to her? If he did not love her, no ceremony nor tradition could

bind him to her anyway. Wasn’t the idea of GETTING MARRIED to live together,

to go through life together, to experience and share things together on a daily basis?

And if they WERE married, shouldn’t they then live together? For a while he had thought

they might maintain their recently re-discovered closeness

with the help of technology. He had hoped that the use of daily email, and even the telephone,

would keep some of the vibrant passion and emotion thriving.

Jackson had hoped that these strong emotions had been rekindled in the last few years,

and he also hoped they were a sign that the two of them loved each other

as much as ever before. It had made him so happy to see and feel that.

But unfortunately, she did not use the daily email methods he had hoped for ... nor did they talk much

at all anymore since she turned down his recent re-marriage proposal ... and she asked him not

to come home for her birthday. They had less communication now than at any point in their entire

relationship. And now she wanted to be away from him......to have a place that

" everyone can just come home to ... it’s that simple" she said in a written note to him.

He thought that he understood her desire to build a nest, but it still made no sense to him.

Did anyone ask her to build a nest for them all? He knew their sons were men now.

This single fact was more than a small part of the whole complicated and painful situation.

One son was making his own nest with his girlfriend as he ventured further

into independent Life himself. The other was tired of living in the expensive, superficial,

isolated and faraway city he was in but was very unsure about where to complete

his education and rejoin the human race. This son did not need the increased tension

between his parents happening at the same time that he was trying to define who he was,

and what he wanted to do next. The note she had sent to him in Canada, to tell him

she wanted to be away from him......to have a place that

" everyone can just come home to....it’s that simple"

...that note did not say "love" at the bottom, in fact it wasn’t even signed.

The note had opened with

" You are very special to me’.

This continued to sound and feel like a girl in school telling a boy that she did not want him

for a boyfriend? Her work situation was another factor in her reasoning to stay apart from

him. Although she did not like the company she worked for, nor the boss that would not

truly manage her and her work, nor the grueling commute each day into the old downtown

of the city where she lived, she maintained that it was important to stay at this particular job,

in this particular place, in that particular city. He could not find the right words to express his thoughts,

but he knew that if they did not live together, it made no difference how much or how little

money either one was able to make. The last factor that she had mentioned to him during one

of their increasingly rare verbal exchanges was the closeness to her father.......but that really

didn’t make much sense to him either as the distance to see him was only one hour further by air,

or 6 hours further by car? Jackson tried and tried, but could not stay focused on a clear reply to her.

He shook his head to clear it of self-defense. He took a break from his writing, and fired up his new local internet connection, a big deal for him in this small place by the lake. He wrote an email to the Pastor of their church in Chicago, Father Flamethrower. He asked the Pastor to meet with them ( or recommend someone that could meet with them ) to hear their story, and possibly offer advice and guidance on just what to do? He sent the email off to this man because he had great respect for him....and would listen and heed any advice this man would give. But in the end, if forced to reply to her, clear-headed or fuzzy, he knew the part that hurt, the part that could not work – the part about being married, but not being together. As Jackson tried to focus and find a solution to this hurtful problem, all that came into his mind were the good things, those happy times, that beautiful girl-woman whose sadness had been so mysterious. Her clear eyes, open heart, brightness, the things they had discovered together as they lived together in various towns, meeting various people. He even felt that now, after all that had happened, and after all of the personality changes that God and Life had caused in him, that although people would most certainly always like her, they might even like him now. He just wished that she did too. He loved her so much – or maybe just needed to love her as much or more than the first time he ever saw her....as much or more than each time in the past he had tried to convince her how much he loved her. He loved her so much he was almost completely disabled in this situation. If she did not love him anymore, he could not bear to see, talk, write to, or be connected to her in any way. If she did not love him and did not want to live with him, she should stop pretending, he thought. If she did not love him and want to go through Life together for the remaining years, then the charade must stop. Jackson felt that Shari was certainly entitled to ANY decision she would make about her own life, but if she did not love him enough to live with him, they should be painfully honest and admit that it is over.

He had offered, during one of the few intense exchanges of information, to let her come to a final

decision in December, and if she still did not love him and still did not want to live with him, then

they would split 50/50 in the following year. He had blurted this all out spontaneously trying to be

"reasonable", "fair", and "understanding". He hated every minute of it. He hated every word he

uttered. And now, he was being forced to reply again to

"Will you stay married to me but live apart?"

His head dropped forward. His fingers hung and froze over the keyboard.

His heart was breaking. He needed her so much. He typed in slowly:

"No, I cannot........but if you must live apart from me, I will try to learn to understand....I just cannot

pretend anymore.....and I need you so much..........but, no.....I cannot.”

This one was going to be the story about a man who had loved a woman. But Jackson said no.

He could not stay married but live apart. Shari made no reply. She agreed to meet with their pastor,

Father Flamethrower, in Chicago to talk through their situation with him. Jackson never found out

whether the pastor was in on it too for Father Flamethrower described a separation in his own earlier

life that day that the three of them met in the pastor’s office at the church in Chicago, but afterward

when Jackson and Shari finished brunch in a restaurant nearby she drove Jackson to the airport to

return him to Canada. Jackson thought she acted more tense and sad than usual when he was getting

out of the vehicle but he dismissed it as he pulled his two bags out of the back. When the door closed

and latched Shari drove away not looking back and Jackson walked toward the curb carrying his bags

toward the airport terminal building. That’s exactly when the sympathetic summons server walked

up to Jackson and handed him papers for the divorce she had prearranged before they met the pastor

at the church. The summons server said something conciliatory then left him, as all the other fully

loaded airport vehicles slowly moved around Jackson standing stock still in traffic with a vacant

blank look in his wet eyes.

Many months later, after much despised painful legal correspondence constantly arriving at his small

place in Toronto and no communication at all between Jackson and Shari, he journeyed to Windy

City again. He joined the anonymous jostle and rush of moving Chicagoans as he headed numbly for

his very first divorce hearing. The morning light was thin with partly overcast skies barely aiding

Jackson’s vision of huge buildings, packed sidewalks, streets jammed with rushing vehicles

punctuated with an occasional taxicab screeching to an unexpected stop to prevent hitting

pedestrians crossing the street at will. Jackson found the big metal baboon that Picasso had supplied

for the front of the giant stark black box building of glass and metal. The big silly sculpture tugged

whimsically away from the tall dark Darth Vader soul killing dark glass Divorce Court building. On

the 16th floor of the Court Building, its high glass wall looking out on the 1800's cathedral spires

being restored across the wide Chicago street, Jackson thought how the workmen that built those

spires probably wondered why so much care, attention, and detail should be lavished on something

that could not even be seen from the ground. But now, in this century, then finely clad 16th floor

Chicago lawyers walking with their unhappy divorce clients could stop, look out the window, and

plainly see the hideous gargoyles and torturously elaborate gothic ornamentation along the top edges

of the cathedral spires. The lawyers and their clients walked from this vantage point to the closed

court chamber rooms flanking the elevators. It was in one of these wood and stone chapel-like

courtrooms that he felt the first tent peg pull out. After he had heard the standing divorce lawyers

speak - then the seated judge reply - and after his peripheral vision unwillingly saw the confusingly

dejected image of his soon-to-be-EX-wife standing alongside her rather miserable looking attorney,

Jackson heard the metal tent peg scrape against the pebbles and rock, mixed with the softer dirt that

had been his foundation. He heard the peg slide and grate and scrape as it pulled out with the wind,

lifting his tent off the ground. All the memories and images of three decades scraped and tried to

hold the tent peg in, but he heard and felt it yank out - and up into the flapping wind. He would never

see her again. She had asked for divorce from him and now it was taking place. He briefly and

absurdly remembered the old photographic image of her standing against a pink-red stucco wall

somewhere and in his mind hearing the actor who played old Scotty from old STAR-TREK

saying in her engine room,

“ She ‘ken’tek’it inny mo Cap’n”.

The next day the next tent peg was pulled out, even as the one corner of this imaginary tent canvas

already flapped and snapped in the new wind. Jackson Kelley used his son's borrowed celphone with

its configurable ringer set to emulate the horse 'whinny' of a large stallion in this more rural

Chicagoland. He used the celphone to confirm the return-inspection of his over muscled, chipped,

and slightly scuffed 1999 leased red Corvette. The ringing horse 'whinny' ( when the taxicab driver

called back to pick him up ) caused he and the efficient car lease inspector to stop and look around

themselves by the used Corvette in the large wide open farm-encircled asphalt parking lot where all

the many return leased vehicles awaited their final inspections.

" Did you hear a horse? "

" Uh, yeah, are there horses near here? " Jackson replied forgetting the sound was the phone ringer.

When they realized that it was just his taxi calling back on his son's celphone to take him home to his

son's place, they both laughed and completed the final inspection of the older leased Corvette with its

fat exhaust pipes rumbling their pre-emptive American road power.

Jackson’s last glance back at the returned car caused him to feel the next metal tent peg twist

and scrape and break free of the parking lot asphalt. He could hear the two pegs clanging

against one another as they whipped upward on their tethering lines in the strong winds,

pulling against the remaining imaginary tent material, out into a dark sail-like shape against the

Illinois farm country blue sky. Jackson felt the rip. A part of him, most of him, was being torn loose.

He tried to think clearly, objectively, but could not – could not even hear for the massive deep sounds

of the flapping tarpaulin changing everything right in front of his eyes. No more family - no more

known things - no more known people – next all new. He tried but could not focus.

Survival was driving him and did not allow thought until safety.

He had loss not able to be known or felt. He had pain not able to register or to cause change of mind or heart.

GO, just go – that’s all.

That was all that Jackson knew-felt-breathed-dreamt, for days, for weeks…….just go.

The taxicab came and went and rolled on. After Jackson’s long cab ride back to his

son's apartment in DeKalb, Illinois, he heard his Producer's voicemail message :

" You are flying to Israel on Monday to work on the movie." she said.

He imagined the flapping tent and its wild snapping lines and clanging metal pegs

up against the saturated deep blue Middle Eastern skies.

......................................................................................

JUNE 2011 :

SWEETS { AKA S-3 : Sweet/Salty/Smooth }

It was the damned siren call as he drove the long way home, at the end of the work day. Even worse were the weekend temptations to collapse into an artificial sense of well being that always led to the same wasted and deadly oblivion. And it was never twice the same gauntlet.

On certain days, at certain times, it was the golden radiance and ember warmth of whoopdeedoo fancy-schmancy Cognac that he had become all but addicted to many years before, long before there was talk of Urban Yak in the American cities. He became enslaved to the cognac by those wonderful Quebecois that still ruled Ottawa to this day. Their parties and music caused the liquid to lock into his being back then.

Then on other days, at other times, it was the more recently familiar Bajan Rum that claimed him.

Its silk smooth bronze passage through his old pale white body would light up his mind and heart

with love, passion, and ideas.

But worse yet, or at least just as bad, was the oddly-coupled double-header of Chocolate and Salt – Sweet and Salty. Both would tug at his veins during the day or night at unpredictable times. He could feel the skin over his muscles draw tight as the craving grew, only to be relaxed and set free by more than adequate doses of the two contrasting agents of evil. The exquisitely paired aroma and flavor of slight mint with rich dark semi-sweet chocolate delivered a brief heavenly hit right here on earth. The barely visible salt on the surfaces of curving cashews, or exotically sprinkled flat breads – hell, even on those overly engineered multi-stacking-come-in-a-cylinder Potato Chips

… all of these would administer the required, demanded amount of salt back into him. And the shame, how did it manifest itself?

Like some cheap device in a less than good novel, he WORE his shame. The flab-jacket of aged Cognac, Rum, Chocolate, and Salt hung heavily on his bones. As each year passed the weight and size of it increased. It shook when he did. It reverberated slightly in strong winds. It caused people to ask how he was feeling.

And he knew that one day it would kill him, prematurely. But even as he thought about the too-early demise,

he questioned the worth of a Life without Cognac and Rum, Chocolate and Salt.

( or, did I already say this? )

.......................................................................................

MAY 2011:

AWAKE, AWAKE - AWAKE AND AWARE.

I don’t know. Not sure and not convinced.

There are memories – of sunshine and warmth, nightmares of slithering cold wet steam.

But they might not be real, not unless I am awake – and I might not be. When I see and hear

the things I increasingly see and hear I doubt more and more that I am up and awake.

Asleep somewhere, rolled up under a warm blanket with all these dreams

pulling my feet forward further into them no matter how hard I try to float back away.

I remember knowing that I was aware even while sleeping before, so now it is very hard

for me to tell the difference – to know that I am really awake. If all this is me being awake

then I will be staying awake for a long while. If I am not awake I don’t know when I will be back.

......................................................................................
APRIL 2011:

EXPECTATIONS

- - - - - - - - - - well, they are dangerous, aren’t they?

People have had various expectations of me. Some were pleased. Others less so.

I have had my own differing expectations of myself and in most cases I have been surprised.

Whatever the expectations have been, and as happy as I am in my life these days,

I still expect and need more. Yes, more. I don’t mean more material things. We have more new

material things to acquire than you can shake a whittled stick at these days. No, I don’t expect more

ipods, ipads, iphones, iplethoras - nor droids, xooms, roombas or segways. What I expect, what I feel

is justified and necessary to expect is deeper and broader than that. I do not expect success in the conventional sense.

I sat in a scheduled library talk by an author last night, in front of a large literate wine-sipping audience of Torontonians.  

The first thing he said, his opening line, was “Successful People Do Not Come To The Library”. He proceeded to explain and show us how and why we should need and expect and seek out more than conventional success in this world. He told us what

we already knew. That we should and do need and expect ART. Art that takes us deeper and wider than our regular lives.

I now expect to read his book, based on impressions of his words and views last night.

( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-TWjw5QENc )

But, “THAT’S JUST ALL ABOUT ART” you say.

Yes, that is true. And of course there are expectations that are not about art, that are about our actual lives in this world. 

Those are more dangerous I think. In 2007 and 2008 I allowed myself to raise my expectations back up to a level that I had previously buried deep down. The events and times in North America and the world were forming a back drop for a new star.

I began to create new and grand expectations of a human being and what that human might and could do for us in this world.  

For me it eventually became heightened expectations that marched toward a great let down with realistic reawakening.

- in a quick note I wrote in a November 2008 journal :

". . . . all of this is happening amidst a very tumultuous time.

The black-white man Obama has become President of the USA,

which gives me happiness, pride, AND confusion. Since 1965 I have

been ashamed of being an "American", but now...if this is all real...

I must change my attitude and behavior and behave as a NEW

American. All this at the same time as the local layoffs during

collapse of the global economy leaving me and thousands of

others reeling."

Now, I have worked with people I liked as people

but detested or was at least let down by the way

they did their jobs in the workplace.

I still know and communicate with some of those.

Unfortunately that is how I now feel about Obama.

After going through the difficult realignment of my own expectations,

attitudes, and beliefs to match up to this OPTIMISTIC POSITIVE MAN OF HONESTY

I have now more or less returned to a position closer to what I felt in the 1960’s-70’s-80’s-90’s.

It is dangerous and perhaps naively foolish to expect too much, to expect more than can be done.

I will vote for him again, but have separated my expectations for what I must do and what he will do.

Live and re-learn.

.......................................................................................

FEBRUARY 2011 :

- there was this lesson about using pain to stay conscious.

- not sure how young I was when I first learned about it, but it was probably from a movie.

- if I think hard enough I remember movies like THE IPCRESS FILE and BLADE RUNNER

but I am sure the lesson came earlier than those.

- earliest frightening depiction of pain was in my church, as a young Roman Catholic,

but I doubt if those thousands crucified by the real Romans were taking nails to stay conscious.

- but I know pain for what it is, a warning in the extreme.

- pain has been given out to all kinds of people

in all kinds of situations . . . innocents that get sick and die slow,

by-standers in drive-by’s . . . guilty bad ones that get what they gave.

- pain is there to remind us that we are not in control.

......................................................................................
NOVEMBER 2010:

 CRAZY PEOPLE.

=============

The look in the eye.

That sound in the voice.

The rate and pace of the breathing.

These are just some of the ways to spot them. To spot crazy people.

When they look at you with that intensity that can scorch your face,

but are focused on a spot way behind you, then you know you may have a problem.

If the sounds coming to you from their body give you the involuntary chills or shudders,

even when you know they are talking to themselves, your adrenaline floods up.

The evolution of our species equips us to perceive them quickly.

The conventions of our societal world instruct how to deal firmly and swiftly with them.

Then why is it that I *like* crazy people?

Why is it that all my life I have enjoyed meeting people that are a bit crazy, either this way or that?

All of the interesting people I have met in the last six decades, all of the memorable ones, they were all a bit crazy.  And for many years now I have known that I myself am more than a bit crazy too.

As an adolescent this concerned me, but not for long. There seem to be a great worth in craziness.

I could feel the value and the richness of this unique perception of Life and Love and Happiness.

And so I either went with it or it dragged me along behind itself and out into the world at large.

There was a lot of craziness out there. Lots of crazy people. Oh sure there have been a few crazy people

that probably could have been dangerous and I have tried in my own more sane ways to give them wide berth.  Like that aging grizzled thin-bent half-smoked cigarette of a man walking down the rainy street in Portland, Oregon - who spat his words at me when he saw my wife and I walking down the same street as he and the other good white people of Oregon. Or like the two black Motown guys that 

I spotted - spotting me,filling my carwith gas at a derelict war-zone service station in Old Detroit a few years back.

And more recently the tight brown man at work who parks his scratched and rusting van

with the ass-end almost blocking the lane by which people have to drive on to get into the lot.

His van license plate reads “BDLY” and he has a magnetic ash tray on his dashboard overflowing with crushed used cigarettes that spill out gray-white onto his thick dust dashboard.

He and I locked eyes last week and though I had on one of my posed faces 

meant to deflect or fracture in-coming, his sight-line burnt a hole in the adjacent

unused passenger headrest

beside me in the front seat,

instead of flaming itself into and through my skull on my driver’s headrest.

I knew then my life had been spared once again.

Spared by or from the crazy people I continue to run into.

There is an insane and calibrated range into which all of us crazy people fit and operate from.

From smiling giggling amusement all the way to tortured vacant interior terror.

But as I say, I continue to be lucky. I continue to relish the encounters and savor the acquaintances.

This may be a mistake and my fated end may already

be waiting for me at the hands ( or smoking sightlines )

of one or another of these fellow crazy people that might be a shade too close to the edge.

But, much like falling in love ( wherein one cannot choose who they will fall in love with )

one cannot really make a determined choice about being crazy or not,

nor of liking or avoiding other crazy people in this the best of all possible worlds.

......................................................................................

OCTOBER 2010:

SPACE toward the end of 2010

It is a new space I find myself in.

After finally shaking off the brittle bonds of WORKAHOLIC affliction,

and beginning to at least partially resemble the more normal working people

I have known for decades, this new space has me re-muddled once more.

As the mighty governments of this world, our planet Earth, struggle in earnest

to find a new next home-planet for our not-so-future generations ( or at least

those of the next generations that 'qualify' ), I am consciously shrinking my space

here on this old planet of ours.

I do know that I want my space to be smaller ( simpler? ) now.

The space I desire will be walkable and ideally workable.

So far I have broken old scattered connections and forged

all new and more local links with all the people and things that I need and can walk to

- doctor, barber, dentist, grocer, gym, café, cinema, bank, parks, rum & wine store, etc.

With any luck I will find reduced and simpler employment within walking distance too.

My old gas vehicle will still be parked and paid for in its concrete underground stable,

but will last much longer once I stop the stupid multi-hour daily commuting to work.

So, all things seem to be shaping up for the new space that I have this hankering for.

Or at least it seemed so until recently. In order to actually collect the various small monies

from various small funds that I have contributed to all across my working life in two countries

it seems I must actually almost completely stop working. There are very firm and very low

maximum limits set on how many hours can be worked at all in one month, and if I were

to over-enthusiastically work too much . . . all incoming benefits would be deleted for all time.

"Hmmmm" I said to myself as the significance of this set in.

I have never been a practical man. Money always found its way to me as I boiled through

workloads that would have terrified many. I just never thought about it. And I always found work.

( this last time took 6 months due to the depression that it is still going on, but the job did come )

But now the further definition of this SPACE is being more carefully delineated.

There are or soon will be very clear edges and boundaries on this smaller space

that I desired and have been building. Not having thought it through completely,

it *feels* like this confluence of these two distinct space-reduction things

( physical distance and monetary foolishness ) may be causing A BRAND NEW SPACE

that I had fleetingly thought of once or twice or three times before,

but never really took any certain solid steps toward.

This new space might end up defining my next decade or so with markedly different actions and behaviors that redefine not just walkable living, but also more healthy living, and more writable time itself.

I am not sure of any of this yet. In fact I am supposed to be writing down my usual list of pro's & con's in order to make my next round of decisions over October and November so that I may act on them in December, and begin the new Life in the new Space in January 2011. I am using this writing exercise to procrastinate, but even as I do the certainty of a more major change to my space feels stronger.

I can hear it yelling to me. No, I can feel it yelling to me because as we all know by now

in space no one can hear you scream . . . no matter how small it gets.

......................................................................................

SEPTEMBER 2010:

M O V I E T H E A T R E S

Didn't really know one,

until grandparents took me to the old ones in downtown Detroit in the 1950's.

Those were a far cry from the open air gravel pathed drive-in movie screens with

freshly painted metal tube swing-sets and teeter - todders and further back the

buttery salty popcorn concession bunker buildings with night lights thick with

swarming summer insects.

The elaborate and extreme architecture of the old movie theatres

with their decorative surfaces in gold and plaster all dramatically lit in yellow and amber and the

heavy and gigantically tall deep wine red velour stage curtains in front of the large silver screen . . .

all of this surrounded and locked the mind of this young moviegoer forever.

Looking back, I now know how these places and the experiences in them shaped my life.

As my young brain took in all it could about my homeland of America and the world around it,

these places and the films they ran, and the posters they displayed, and the sound tracks that

echoed in my child's heart for months after hearing them in those cavernous dark but truly

wonderful brilliantly lit up places . . . all these helped to make me who I became.

I did not know at that time that I was living at the height of

a new empire, this new one that reveled in Hollywood versions

of older empires . . . . the early color epics that Cecil B. Demille'd

me once and for all time.

But it wasn't just the epic movies, no.

I learned the terrifying depths of my young imagination when they

took me to see the black and white scary movies too.

I left the tall ornate cinema palaces of a time gone by with

confused images of terror and sex that gave me horrid

nightmares for days. That's how I knew that I had seen a

good one . . . I could not sleep and my parents were

frustrated and impatient with me.

" It was only a silly movie " they would say.

They just did not know.

They didn't know that these cathedrals of 35 millimeter film

and their gaudy curving golden fenestrations were very quickly

building the personality components that would help me through

the rest of my life.

All the things I learned or was shown on the screen I researched later.

When the big deep red curtains pulled back to reveal everything from

black and white hoodlums to full color CINERAMA Wonders of the World,

I was there . . . soaking it in like nothing else provided to me in either

school or home.

As time dragged on and Bogart, Wayne, and Eastwood aged and left

the memories of that one night in the movie theatre long long ago,

the memories of a young boy and of honesty and lies and of

Monstro whales and Donkey ears and horror and

redemption . . . it all made me who I am and set

me on a path that may not be over yet ?

- - - - - written in the skies between old & new worlds.

........................................................................................

JULY 2010:
GADGETS

The critic Reyner Banham defines as:

"A characteristic class of US products––perhaps the most characteristic––is a small self-contained unit of high performance in relation to its size and cost, whose function is to transform some undifferentiated set of circumstances to a condition nearer human desires. The minimum of skills is required in its installation and use, and it is independent of any physical or social infrastructure beyond that by which it may be ordered from catalogue and delivered to its prospective user. A class of servants to human needs, these clip-on devices, these portable gadgets, have coloured American thought and action far more deeply––I suspect––than is commonly understood."

- but, THE ONLY GADGET I OWN IS ANDROIDAL :

- - - and I use it everyday, all the time, for everything . . . . images, sound, communication, internet websearching, map routing, and more . . . I await digital displays in 3d stereo and in 2d on my clothing or on projected realworld surfaces . . . I await sunglasses interface for digital stereo 3d simulation of collected and projected data.

.......................................................................................
JUNE 2010:

Strange Places Between Worlds

The feeling of violent emptiness, of deafening silence, he knew them.

The light-headed silliness interrupted by tears brought forth from no where and no place.

When his grandparents passed away, he felt all these from afar. He was in another country and could not be there. When his parents left, one early, one later, concussive hits left him useless and drifting. The worlds he knew were gone.  When this continued on and left him as the next oldest member of "the family" he ignored it as he was still far away and could do so.

Over years he adjusted, he retraced, remembered, and accepted as best he could that he was in some state of TRANSITION.  His new world finally began to rebuild itself around new experiences, and seemed to begin to take the place of the old world he had once known.

Life led him almost directly to her, and she came with him, back out into the world, this new world. But not much later it began to happen to her. To her world. 

The two of them, she and he, returned to her home, her old world, just as her mother was beginning to leave it.  They, and especially she, spent more and more time in that flickering older world, trying to comfort and accompany her mother.  After a time her mother gently passed away too.  He felt loss, but nothing like she and her blood family did. They were foundering. 

They were reaching out and pulling back. Their old world was gone.

Their actions and reactions were all too familiar, while still being completely and individually unique to each of them. He stood by to help as best he could.  He knew that when he looked out onto the thin pale horizon of their coming future even he could barely perceive the new world that was already coming at them.  But coming at them it was. He tried to guess when the new world would settle into their realities and give them all just enough firm ground to stand upright on again.  But he knew by now that he could not know. He knew these strange places between worlds were beyond their human control and navigation.  He would be there, with her as she took her next steps out onto that landscape that was still forming and emerging from a future that none could know.  These strange places between worlds 

were the strangest places he had ever been.

.................................................................................................
APRIL 2010:

SILENCE

------------------

It was April, 1913 and his other grandfather had arrived in silence.

His other grandfather had been born the same year that Ellis Island opened in New York as a gateway to the United States for new immigrants from everywhere. This quiet grandfather, as a quiet young man, wrote simple poems on the backs of printed pages and other scraps of paper. It all had the feeling of sincere poetry and was written in English, not Armenian. He arrived in New York just as he ceased being a teenager, even though “teenagers” had not yet been invented then. At twenty years of age he came quietly to a noisy America. If he had not come he would have been murdered too.

He came from Tokat, an Armenian town in north central Turkey. It was an important town back in the Roman times, but then declined under the Byzantines - revived once again after its capture by the Ottoman Turks in the 1400's. The quiet knowledge about the plight of his grandfather and all of the family members on his father’s side came from various texts on the massacre that Turkey insisted for many years had never happened. Those things all started in the early 1900's, when secret meetings began to be held by the Turks of that time. One of the Turkish doctors at the meetings there said: "If we are going to do something like the Adana massacre of 1909, the result will do us more harm than good."

In the doctor’s words at these meetings he had said that:

"The Turks must not leave a single Armenian alive in our country; we must kill the Armenian name."

The results looked disastrous for the Armenians when the Turks all voted that not a single Armenian should be left alive. But, they soon realized that they could not eliminate all the Armenians solely by means of slaughter so they created an artificial famine. This caused many to die of hunger or forced them to eat the carcasses of dead animals. The Turkish soldiers spared no one, not even children, because they feared that they might carry the seeds of vengeance inside them.

This kind of extreme genocidal nationalistic patriotism was not new. It had happened before, and it has happened afterward. It has been waged on all sorts of different groups by those in power. What the Turks did to his relatives and family friends is no better nor worse than what Americans did to the native peoples of North America while following their self-stated Manifest Destiny during those days. It seemed to him that these things all came from fear. But the real reasons for these horrific things are almost always hidden or quietly, silently tucked away from any review or discussion. He thought that the people of the U.S.A. were afraid, more afraid than possibly any other people of any other nation on Earth.

Americans were, he thought, very afraid on a continuing and ongoing basis because of the collective guilt they carried either consciously or subconsciously over their mass murder of the tribal peoples of North America to take their land and its wealth, and the pitiful and cruel enslavement of the Africans they brought and purchased to supply the labor to build their early great American wealth and power. He recalled the later days when all Americans agreed with their government that the rogue island nation of Cuba must be stopped. The U.S.A. was incensed that this fledgling government of rebels that disliked and kicked out rich American commercial interests could exist at all in their American hemisphere, especially after the Americans had “liberated” them from the Powerful nations of Europe back in the Teddy Roosevelt Rough Rider days. Eventually only the alliance with Russia protected Cuba from complete “regime change” over the many decades of blockade with random terror attacks by the U.S.A. The American population, the people of America, while always in a state of guilty fear stoked white hot by the various ruling American governments and corporations, were kept busy and distracted by the ever increasing and never ending onslaught of Noisy Entertainment and rampant expanding Noisy Consumerism. They did not need nor really enjoy any of this all that much, but it did keep most of them distracted from what their government and the large body of corporations were actually doing at home and out there in the world. They were actually continuously expanding, taking, raping, and killing to increase profits and seize control of wider and wider areas until they even began this immoral acquisition all the way into the space around, above, and beyond the Earth.

He knew that some erroneously thought the Armenian Genocide started in the year 1915, when in fact it had been going on for years before that, and continued to happen even when it was thought to be officially over. The first more official massacres began in the early months of 1915 when the Turks began to brutally and systematically eliminate the Armenian race. But it was on September 16, 1916 when the Turkish government decided to absolutely destroy every Armenian living in Turkey.

Armenians serving in the Imperial Armies were to be taken to silent and solitary places where the public couldn't see and they were shot. The Turks stopped at nothing, murdering men, women, children, doctors, and even government officials. The photographs of the time show hanged Armenians doctors with their Turkish hangmen above them.

Within six days from when they had started gathering all the Armenians for extermination, all the males fifteen years of age and under had been murdered. The Turks tortured and degraded the women of Armenia. They were beaten, raped, starved, and murdered. Thousands of Armenians corpses lined the roads to all the provinces in Turkey.

One Moslem traveler had described his nine hour journey from Malatia to Sivas as utterly gruesome with hundreds of thousands of Armenians laying with their limbs severed from their bodies. German travelers tried to describe the corpses of starved Armenians, horribly distorted.

For months afterwards the corpses of murdered Armenians were observed to be floating down the Euphrates River. Most often the male corpses were hideously mutilated with their sexual organs cut off and the females were usually ripped open. German eyewitnesses have said that the remains of these Armenians were stranded on the banks of the rivers and were later devoured by animals of the area.

He knew, he had learned slowly and painfully, that the reasons for all of these horrific warlike atrocities, and others much like them, were always silently hidden away. People did not talk openly. And if they did many of them did not really know or admit the real reason for all of the horrendous violence to others. In almost every case, in almost every situation from oldest Rome to Olde London to newer Washington D.C. these inhumane and barbarous behaviors were about at least Power, if not both Power and Wealth, for the wealthy people in the attacking country.

He had been amazed many years ago when no one seemed to understand that the U.S.A. actually did win the Viet Nam war. People had not learned by observation that the real purpose of the entire Viet Nam war was to brutally beat and punish the small country, to stop any degree of Asian unification as an economic power in the world, and it worked . . . for many years.

All the conflicts and wars and genocide that brag and beat their chest about providing or defending or delivering FREEDOM to the poor and already weak victims are always only about Power and Wealth. And all of these horrific episodes are always born of fear. In his lifetime, he knew that Americans were quite possibly the most fearful people on the planet.

So as he discovered more and more about the sad history of his people, his grandfather’s family, he actually lost sleep after reading the descriptions. Armenian bodies had been plucked of hair, breasts, with their bleeding genitals cut off, and their bloodied feet hammered with nails as if the Turks of that time had been shoeing horses. Some people couldn't take the torture anymore so they threw themselves and their children into rivers to drown. Their remains were not buried but just left to be eaten by wild dogs and vultures.

Millions of Armenians were brought to their death. Many Armenians left their homeland as quickly as possible to ensure their safety. They went to many places, including places in the United States and Europe. His grandfather, who arrived at Ellis Island in New York in April of 1913 when he was 20 years old, quietly said years later :

“I am proud to call myself an Armenian and so should you be. We Armenians got through the toughest times and despite Turkish efforts to eliminate our race we beat the odds and are here today to prove it.”

Yes, he did survive. His family and friends back there were all gone, but there was new hope in this new generation, even it was to be of mixed blood in a new and mixed world. The Turks then had behaved in a brutal way that was not new. Similar though not well known events of horrible death had happened for many years. He learned that all the way back in the 1500’s it had been written:

“If an injury has to be done to a man

it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.”

Niccolo Machiavelli

But all those old days were finished now and not talked about much in the prosperous times, at least here in North America, at least for most of the people in North America. As the old world troubles faded away for them even the buildings they lived and worked in began to change.

The thick dark wooden moldings, leaded glass windows, tasteful contrasting mosaics and ornate ceiling medallions of the Old World vanished everywhere except in the poorer sections across the nation, where they then proceeded to age badly through neglect. He remembered those traditional architectural elements being sneered at as “old-fashioned dust-catchers”, as in marched all of the Stainless Steel, Formica, Linoleums, and Wall-to-Wall Carpets. What traditional carved solid wood furniture was left still standing then changed to clean, sleek, Danish Modern.

There were a few remaining North American samples of Fine Architecture from the more historical periods, but mostly all was being built anew to be new. They all felt, most of them, that new was better. That new provided more of everything for more people. There was the intoxicating allure of the New Good Life for the Everyman, and not too long after that for the Everywoman and Everychild too. They even called it The American Dream.

They really did not know what it was or where it was going, or even why.

And all he knew was that it had been April, 1913, and his other grandfather had arrived in silence.

(end)

.....................................................................................

JANUARY 2010:

On BEING COOL :

Started long ago when he was young, on black & white tv.

It was probably those interlocking "O's" in the name KOOL.

( central to the Audi logo he still stared at on his TT steering wheel even now )

As time went on and chocolate mints led to menthol and he met

an entire segment of the Detroit population that seemed to smoke KOOLS

he emulated to try again to fit in.

No matter who he was with, no matter what he did, no matter how cool he

tried to be, he remained on the outside. Outside away from them all.

But even after he learned he was an outsider, that he was

never naturally cool, he remained hooked on those KOOLs.

As he ceased any attempt to be cool or emulate anyone that he

thought of as cool, he continued smoking them until he left the

United States Army ( smoke 'em if ya gottem ).

He even refused to use the word "cool", especially as it more firmly

entrenched itself in the North American vocabulary in the 1980-90's.

When he left the Army he left a lot of things.

He stopped smoking those KOOLs.

He stopped being cool in his life.

Stopped being cool in any way.

Stopped many many things.

What was left grew.

And it was good.

(end)

..........................................................................................

NOVEMBER 2009:

It had come to pass before.

The slow but all encompassing feeling . . . . . lifting him . . . . . up.

Once, when he was about eleven, he fell in love and felt happiness engulf him

even when she did not know he was there at all. Did not know he existed in the same world.

Again when he was about 17, but this time her love outgrew his and he had been simultaneously pulled

into the strong horizontal currents of change that drove her out and him west, in the crazy days of the '60's.

Then again about 4 years later as the slow rising thermals of happiness floated him up and up and up for years,

until a combination of his own insecure greedy career-pursuit along with new fatherhood to her overwhelming motherhood once again sucked him violently horizontal, parallel to the earth, torn and tattered, and much-much lower than the high reaches of

L o v e   a n d    H a p p i n e s s .

And now, this time in this century, from the depths of crazed chaos and confusion his old heart woke up and glowed again. He knew more by now and would not let ANY thing suck and pull and drag him airbound unwillingly horizontally sideways. This new and genuinely slow rising thermal of Happiness would be the one.

The one that would take him HOME.

(end) 

.........................................................................................

OCTOBER 2009:

FAMILIES

In the most unexpected ways

In some most unanticipated places

In the most unplanned - for manner,

he found himself within a family of Families, and he was glad.

..........................................................................................

SEPTEMBER 2009:

LOST, yes I am.

Though happy and re-transplanted in greater harmonic tranquility, I do actually feel LOST again.

I wait for the skies and the winds to reveal or push me into the next passage, all the while knowing

I am already in that next passage. Now that more simplicity has been achieved I seem to long for

more clarity, but take some warm comfort in all of the fuzzy ambiguities too?

My father was right when he told me, "It doesn't get any easier, it just goes by faster each year."

- dan(p) in the Distillery.

......................................................................................

AUGUST 2009:

- i never really saw any WILD THINGS until i left detroit.

- i am not counting all the semi-wild-city people i met and knew.

- sure, there was the infrequent wild bat in the woods of michigan,

but when it came to REAL wild things, like Bears, Deer, Cougar, Moose,

i never encountered them ( outside of a zoo, where they are not really wild )

until i left the country and went to Beautiful British Columbia.

- there, among and with them, i learned when to be quiet

and when to be noisy.

- i NEVER went location hunting for the filmed series

i worked on up there unless a had a loud BEAR BELL or

at least clapped my city-hands noisily every few seconds

to let the bears know i was there, to avoid startling them

so they woudn't startle me. ( black bear not grizzly )

THERE IS JUST NO MESSING WITH THE GRIZZLY BEAR.

- the grizzly clawed paw is bigger than my head.

- the cougar ( or mountain lion? ) i saw was eventually

shot by someone more macho than me that had a real

rifle rack with a real loaded rifle at the ready.

- the rest of all the four legged wild things i saw

were all living in their own worlds, and i was the

intruder/visitor with only a passport of youth.

- there are very few WILD THINGS in my

life today, we have pushed them all very

far away . . . and i will settle for all of the

new semi-wild-city people.

- they are much easier

to handle.

- dan(p), born in detroit, michigan.

( the oft ignored but now duly scorned previous industrial giant )

......................................................................................

JULY 2009:

==========

A R T ,  h i s   A r t .

In the latest transcontinental road trip travel of July in this year of 2009

there were good things and bad things. One of the very few bad things

was the waking reverberation of a bad bad dream had in a large hotel room.

The hotel room was older and larger than most nowadays. The tall hotel itself also seemed to take up an entire large city block in this the largest city of Canada. It was a good hotel for him to end this latest long traveling ( or “travelling”, depending on which dialect one spelled in ).

He awoke sharply at 3am, sitting reactively rigidly upright on his side of the very big king sized bed in the very big room in the very big hotel in this very big city. The early morning dream that had yanked him from sleep into this anxiety awakedness had to do with ART. It had to do with ART, it had to do with him.

He dreamt that he was losing a job somewhere in an unknown city in the past,

and that the person ( unknown to him ) that was replacing him in this old job was taking the time to explain in a friendly, supportive, but also naturally handsome and self confident

Robert-Redford-in-his-prime off-hand kind of way, just why this was all happening.

The friendly person talked about several things but it all came down to one thing for him.

“ . . . then they found out you were an Artist, a really horrible Artist . . .”

This hit him with more force, fear, rejection and soul shaking insecurity than anything he could remember since childhood. This dream pushed him coldly awake instantly. He arose from the giant king sized bed without waking his sleeping wife. He snatched up the big hotel message pad and the big hotel ball point pen from the night table and went into the very large washroom so he could turn on a light without disturbing the softly sleeping beautiful woman

on her side of the giant king sized bed.

He sat on the wide edge of the very large tub in the bright light of the washroom in the largest city in Canada at 3am, awake. He took the hotel pen and wrote as legibly as he could on the hotel message pad.

“What is the need for an Artist?, for a Bad Artist?”

“Why do the Gods give one the gift of Sight, of Perception, and allow for Prodigious Energy and Drive to push that gift of Sight over the edge into the Physical Realities of Creative Existence . . .

especially if the results are deemed not brilliant, not good enough?”

He was shaken, to his very core. The last time he felt this disturbed was at his father’s funeral nine years ago. But just as with that event, time goes on, Life proceeds. This time quickly. In the biggest city in Canada he was fine by noon of that day. His old feelings about Art, about the Creation of Art, about himself . . . all those old feelings returned. He knew again what he had come to know over the last few years. His “art” had become his Life and vice versa.

He no longer created images or objects as he passed through. The Life he experienced and the actual living of it had become his “Art”? While some of this had to do with the emotional buffeting of just living though the phases of Life that one does and must do, some of it also had to do with the rapidly changing ways in which humans created things with the use of new digital rather than physical methods. He did not know how much of each was affecting him, but he knew these things combined to reshape him and what he did.

While he knew all of this again by noon of that next day, he did not know what to do with the freshly and vividly regained knowledge. He did not know how to address the insecurities of the dream that had “slapped him upside the head”. He was still not entirely sure that the dream had no purpose. That perhaps it had been meant to spur him into Artistic Action again, like the old days, before he stopped drawing and painting and designing. Like the old days when he would awake at 4am propelled forward into waking to paint a picture while the household slept. Perhaps he was finally supposed to create and paint that SHAMAN picture that he was told he was destined to do over 40 years ago? He just did not know, and in the words of his 95 year old mother-in-law living just outside this largest city in Canada,

“Sometimes you don’t know . . . you just don’t know.”

All he really knew was that Fear, Threat, and Insult had been delivered to him in a large dream in a large hotel, and that those forces and their echo waves would blend or contrast with all of the new events about to take place as he and his Life were modulated into this largest city

of Canada in the year 2009. And that his Life itself had slowly become his Art.

End ( for now )

......................................................................................

MAY 2009 - DEATH :

- they did not deserve it........those that died young.

- the young friend who had just left home in windsor, ontario, canada.....to die on a road in ottawa, too young.

- the mother who arrived at my ottawan door step said it : "He was too young."

- the young brother....in toronto the good.....too young.

- any first born that did not make it..............too young.

- they were not like those of us that persistently get up and go through each day

from birth day to the much much later final end-date dead-line.

- they were cheated short while we were pushed long.

- it is not fair, and i do not even pretend to understand it.

- i myself was not supposed to live beyond 30

and now, i don't know what to do......

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoIebIKNS4s&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpkdOA1LU5I&feature=related

..........................................................................................................

APRIL 2009:

---

COURAGE?
WELL, IF COURAGE IS :

- a quality of spirit that enables one to face danger or pain without showing fear
- the quality of a confident character not to be afraid or intimidated easily but
without being incautious or inconsiderate, retain the ability TO DO
- an ability to manage danger
THEN, I would blame my early leaning toward Computer Graphics ( CG ) on “Courage”.
From my first run in with CG it was obvious to me that this would be irresistible not only to me, but to all of humanity. What at first appeared to be a geeky-techno obsession was and is in actuality a major part of the revolution that is changing us all forever.

Yes, I would blame “Courage”, or at least that notion of it that was instilled in me by watching Hollywood movies in black and white on old cathode ray tube television sets before I could afford to buy tickets to movie theatres to see them in color, very large and bright color, in cavernous dark places with lots of other humans all wanting to escape their non-courageous lives.

Although it was a degree of desperation that drove me smack into CGI ( Computer Generated Imagery ) in 1981, it was the similarity of it to both the eye-jerking surrealism of Salvador Dali and the very real spacial depths of locations and sound stages I had worked on in the years previous that really did me in, that hooked me for good. Seeing that we could be *IN* 3-space that did not really exist physically in our tangible world, but with all the lighting and color and camera work having infinitesimal controls to build images that could look EXACTLY as we wildly imagined them….well, it just downright made a person even more “Courageous” than before.

And the fact was that no one had a handle on this thing. This thing invented by the new artists of our time for the military, for universities, but really and actually invented just for themselves….to create. By the time I had to muster the bravery to step into this world the Pre-Pixar Bunch was already installed in New York at NYIT …and the Canadian company I stumbled into with my ART DIRECTOR portfolio was licensing software from this NYIT Computer Graphics Lab. The Canadian company hired me as a CREATIVE DIRECTOR and I was grateful as I had just left the West Coast to buy a farm, stop working, and be a painter ….but found that the bad investment in the farm drained all the money we had, forcing me back out there with my portfolio of physical artwork ( as there were NO digital artwork portfolios nor websites then ).

That was when I needed to find the “COURAGE” to learn, and learn fast.
With a wife and two young children and a dog to support, I took the job at OMNIBUS and began to learn. After almost three decades I have not stopped learning, and I love that. What was it like to go to work in that kind of boot-strap, start-up operation?
It was fun……demanding, crazy, neurotic, contradictory, ridiculously deceptive, and fun. The people I joined there were truly a handful of guinea pigs and I was the latest experimental animal thrown in to “manage” them creatively.
As we added more people of this “type” it became more and more impossible to manage anything. Between the hardware and software always breaking down, over-heating, or just crashing….and the people themselves exploding in great surges of innovative creativity…..all one could do was to have the “Courage” to perceive the direction this train or ship or force of nature was heading, and then help it to go there as fast and as painlessly as possible.

The people, being regular human beings, experienced all the joys and crises of the creative process coupled with the insanely unpredictable nature of infant CG “Production”…………….nothing worked as expected, but that was ok because the fun part was the discovery of THE NEW.

This is still going on today. You can see it in their faces and hear it in their
voices. It is irresistibly seductive, whatever it is. And for whatever reason we continue to be compelled to go further and further and faster and faster in this direction. I have seen this same pattern of very human COURAGE repeat itself over and over at different studios large and small, always trying to mesh itself with the laws and logic of BUSINESS, even as those laws and rules of logic shift, fracture, and crumble in our current new century. The companies change, the methods and process change, but the “COURAGE” is still there…..still driving this thing
forward into the unknown.

We will all need a lot of “COURAGE” when we finally arrive at the subconsciously determined destination for all of this ALWAYS NEW activity. That’s when we will most definitely need the ability to manage danger.
COMPUTER GENERATED IMAGERY
COMPUTER GRAPHICS
COURAGE GYPSIES
COURAGE GALVANIZERS
COURAGEOUS GAMBLERS

More later, dan(p).

...............................................................................................

MARCH 2009:

COLLECTIONS

...............................................

Never had any real "collections",

other than maybe some baseball cards as a kid.

Never had any real experience with those who professionaly made "collections" either,

(though I had heard of legs being broken back in Detroit, if the collection could not be made).

If this, the Best Of All Possible Worlds, continues on its current erratic roll and orbit

I do, however, stand to hand over my home to those that do "collections" for the bank

that holds my normal, safe, conventional mortgage.

All of the people the real estate agents bring through to try to sell it really LIKE the

nice condo we live in at the heart of downtown Portland Oregon

( http://bensontower.epropertysites.com/ )

....and in spite of the fact that we have already dropped the price once, no one....

....no one is making an offer to buy it......no one is buying because they are

either waiting to see if they will lose THEIR jobs, or if the prices will plummet.

Seems the "collections" people ( and their new "TRASH-OUT CREWS" ) will have more and more

meaningful work to do in this area, as this City of Roses is just not too rose-y these days.

But, one must collect one's wits about oneself, musn't one?

I do my best to remember that there is nothing personal in all of this.

And that many thousands of others are experiencing the same thing

at the same time I am.

But to want a Home so bad, and to have tried to have a Home so many

times before.....and to have really enjoyed living in THIS particular home,

well, I can only say that the feelings that are filling me up now are not

exactly at the level of objective understanding that maybe they should be.

Oh well, tomorrow is a Better Day, and Everything Happens For A Reason.

I do my best to reassure myself that at least it is not as bad as it once was, before.

And I promise a much happier-cheerier BRAINZ contribution next time............................from Canada.

......................................................................................

OCT.2008:

BEING INVISIBLE.

=======================================

When he was young

they would not stop looking.

They would not leave him alone.

He was the target of all their mean childhood persecution.

Seems no one was more VISIBLE than a pale-skinned red head

that blushed so hot and red and bright that the very visual difference

made them feel uneasy enough to taunt and punish and be

better than.

Then he got older, during a point in history when

being DIFFERENT began to take on some value.

He made love, not war.

Older still, married, fathering new ones...

all this led to a furiously fast fading away.

The females no longer flirted, if they even saw him at all.

He'd always wondered about the super-power

of true INVISIBILITY, but now that he had it

he thought that maybe it was not all that it

had been cracked up to be.

Even OLDER....he met up with an old friend

in a hotel on the outskirts of a frozen city

who brought his attention to a simple fact that

he had missed along the long long way.

There were less of them left now.

Many of them, many of those like him,

had dropped dead in their tracks already and were gone.

So now, just by sheer force ( or lack of ) numbers

he once again found himself VISIBLE to those

that had not really been able to see him for

about 2.5 decades.

So ....................................he went out and bought a hat.

..............................................................................................

AUGUST 2008:

Way back then, in that summer,

he had just stepped off the hot 1960's Detroit city bus

that brought him home from his job a little north of the city.

He couldn't wait for dinner though, and the new small red box of salted cheese crackers were a good stand-in.

He passed the few old chipped brick veneer adjoining house units, each with its own basement, but all joined together.

Each were two storeys with a front cement porch. All of these were in the same 1930's crumbling condition as the corner store

where he bought the box of cheese crackers for dinner.

The owner of the corner store was the landlord of the house units. The other house units were rented out

by hard working minority group families. Asians, called "Orientals" then, were on one side, and Hispanics on the other. His home unit.....or rather THEIR home unit, as several of them lived there together, was not occupied by a true-blood family. It was home to this young white kid and two black men only about 5 years older than the kid. The story of them coming together in this house is too long, with riots, police, Martin Luther King's assassination, drugs, sex, and music.

But as he came up the front steps this day, the summer party had already begun. They each worked different shifts. He was on a day shift right now, while Scotty-The-Who was on afternoons, and Nickel-Nathan worked the graveyard shift. He walked past Fat-Frankie hitting on this young white girl on the front cement porch steps as he went through the front door to the red-walled interior on the main floor. People and smoke everywhere as usual, and the music....................the music.....

Nickel-Nathan's sound system just kept coming. As he entered he heard

" you only live once an'when you done, you done....so let the GOOD times roll....."

This song wove itself into the fabric of the sounds and smoke and sassy happy people of several ages and races.

He entered the evening to meet two important women that night. While the posing and smiling boys and girls,

men and women all pursued happiness and each other.....there was always the music...one piece right after another....

JAMES BROWN, LIL STEVIE WONDER, YOUSEF LATEEF, OLA TUNJI,ARETHA, SMOKEY, JIMI,

MARTHA AND HER VANDELLAS, MUDDY WATERS, BB KING, GABOR CZABO, MONGO SANTAMARIA, MARVIN GAYE, THE TEMPTATIONS, NINA SIMONE, GILSCOTT HERON, ETTA JAMES, RICHIE HAVENS, MITCH RIDER, THE CHAMBERS BROTHERS, JANIS JOPLIN, THE ROLLING STONES,

COUNTRY JOE AND THE FISH,THE DOORS, and even THE BEATLES.

He ended up in his tall black and white room upstairs next to Scotty's gold room, and down the hall from Nathan's silver room.

Nathan had a thing for silver.....his room, his car, and his nickel-plated revolver. The one that gave him his nick-name, after he flashed the shiny pistol out and fired three shots into the walls trying to hit an elusive cockroach, that time in the winter. Scotty stuck his head out from behind the door to his gold room. He asked him to come over to the doorway. He went. In this time, before he had ever heard the term "mentor", Scotty had become his. The young red-haired white kid Leaned into the older black guy to listen. Scotty touched the wire rims of his always-on sunglasses.

"Any weed or Thunnahbird?" he asked.

"No, but there's lots downstairs." He answered, nodding his head down at the stairway by the end of the hall, each few stair treads holding up one couple or another as the music and smoke rose from the main level.

He could see past Scotty's head into the gold room. Scotty had used gold automotive lacquer "liberated" from a Detroit place of business and manufacture, then finely sprayed coat after coat onto the walls and ceiling until he had a room of Motor City Gold. A white girl sat up in Scotty's bed, with one gold satin sheet pulled up. There was an unusual fierce intensity on the face of the girl...most white girls in there looked more timid, or stoned.

Scotty narrowed the door and asked for some cold Thunderbird.

"Sure, I'm going down there in a minute....I'll knock when I come back up with it." He replied.

Scotty smiled and pulled his head back into the gold room, his afro making a slight noise as it brushed both sides of the closing doorway. The kid turned back to his black and white room at the front of the house on the second floor. It was a simpler room by comparison.

Just a gloss black ceiling with white walls, but the black paint came down from the ceiling in each corner in long straight vertical strokes until they reached the floor. It sometimes felt like the high old ceiling was melting down into the floor. He had brought the sheets to his floor mattress upstairs to make his bed. He kept the folded sheets and pillowcase in the refrigerator all day, so that he could sleep on the cool bedding each hot, humid, Detroit night. They didn't have a window fan, and very few buildings had air conditioning yet, especially in this part of town.

He turned, went down the hall, into the harem-fabic-draped bathroom at the other end of the hall upstairs,

but a couple were in the bubble-bathed tub, so he just turned right again and headed down the stairs,

stepping over and around amorous couples until he reached the fridge on the main floor.

He opened the vintage fridge from the early 1950's using its big chromed metal handle. He reached in

and grabbed a cold bottle of Thunderbird wine from behind the other two bottles of Ripple wine,

and what was left of a case of beer. He did not drink, but everyone else seemed to. He headed back

through the red living room with its cement couch and low hanging spherical paper lantern illuminated by

a single 60 watt bulb. Sitting on the floor with a large GIQ of beer was the white girl he'd seen Frankie

chasing out on the porch when he had come home. They looked at each other. Said nothing.

He thought better of it, turned his head, went upstairs again. He knocked on Scotty's door.

It opened a little wider this time as he handed over the cold bottle. She looked back over her shoulder at him

from across the room on the bed, as she pulled the gold sheet snug over her rear.

" This is Snake " Scotty said.

" Hi Snake.... and this is the last of the Thunderbird, rest is all Ripple." he said.

"Thanks brother" and Scotty put forth his other hand in a friendly aggressive soul-handshake.

" Y'know I don't do that shit....I'm just staying as the Young-White-Devil......and don't call me Boy" he grinned at Scotty.

The door closed. Flutes and drums from Yousef Lateef came up at him from the stairway. He decided to go back down again to talk to the young white girl with the GIQ in the living room. But when he got there she was gone. She wasn't half of any of the couples embracing through the smoke and sounds. She'd left. That summer night he'd met both the new woman called "Snake" and his future bride-to-be, a young girl that others just called "hari-kiri". He never got her real name. Until later.

(end)

........................................................................................................

NOV2007

s e n s u a l p l e a s u r e s

He could never tell.

He was never sure which.

At certain times it was the curve of her body with that slight gleam on sheen.

The heavy fragrance of her smokey sweetness was the thing much of the rest of the time.

But probably, most likely, more often than not, it was the joyful warmth of her loving heart as he neared her.

That one sensual pleasure swelled and grew and spiked right off the charts,

whenever he could be next to her.

He was gratefully captured.

- dan(p).

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THE LORD’S NAME - in 3 Acts

ONE:     

At that time King Gargoyle, King G for short, was a skinny black man about four years older than Jackson. Born in the deep American south during the 1940’s, King G had somewhere along the way changed the sound of his heavy southern black accent.  Now, in these 1960’s, he sounded whiter than Jackson Kelley himself.  King Gargoyle told tales.  Whoppers, real lies so extreme people had to join him in suspension of disbelief – and they did. Aside from being able to walk down any street and pick up strange women with engaging tall tales, King G also told Jackson Kelley about God's name.

            “Y’dwanna-be usin' HIS name n’vain, boh.”  King G said one time, re-employing

his old deep southern black accented words for dramatic effect.

            “Don't call me boy” young white Jackson answered back.

            “Doan sass ME boy....an’ do NOT take th’ name of th’Lord, MY God, in vain, y'dig?”

 King G spoke fiercely; his two red rimmed stoned eyes vainly attempting to drill into Jackson’s skull.  Jackson refused to take it back, but ceased speaking like that around the King. 

The next time this came up was with a couple in old Detroit; a hooker and her john.  Her name was Cinny and the john's name was actually John.  Jackson had met Cinny before meeting her pimp, Green Zeke.  Green Zeke finally did come to their old brick Detroit row house and was admiring Jackson’s paintings of human figures seen on almost every wall of their rented home.   Green Zeke introduced himself to Jackson and presented himself with carefully mixed disdain (for the white kid) and desire (for the artwork).  Green wore a long loose topcoat over his iridescent blue shirt and pants with gator skin belt and shoes. His topcoat was cream colored and flowed like a cape when he walked. In one wide hand he carried his blue velour wide brimmed hat.  Green Zeke explained his desire for artwork as his other large black hand reached into the cream topcoat’s full folds and emerged with a short shotgun, having been sawed off for close carrying.  Green smiled when Jackson and several others reverberated back like so many scuba divers down deep, bounced to one side by sudden abrupt powerful shifts in water currents. Jackson recovered by staring at Green Zeke's bright gold cap on his shining upper left smiling teeth.

            “You'd like me to paint this guh… “  Jackson struggled to say, as evenly as he could

before Green Zeke overlapped him in wide smiling reply,

            “Raht-On, Lil Whide Honkey-Bro...”  Green replied, snap-swiveling the gun on his

trigger finger until the gun stock slapped down, facing the kid.  Jackson could not hold it

together any longer and exhaled with

            “God Damnnnn...”

Green Zeke said nothing.  Cinny and her john who were accompanying Zeke reacted.

Cinny said, with a forward shake of her body pulled tight in yellow orange and black,

            “Hush y’mouf boy.....y’not be TALKIN' bout de Lawd”

And her john closely followed with

            “What th’hell's WRONG witchoo kid? Why y’wanna talk like that?”

Young confused Jackson Kelley, much to Green Zeke's amusement, could not recover

but shone even whiter as he said,

                       

            “Oh - right, yeh .....sorry...... So, uh, want some Art Nouveau, or maybe my

           

             own kind of human bodies style on this short stock?”

As the kid would learn later, clients always went with the popular ART NOUVEAU style. 

Green Zeke nodded and Jackson began that night, very quietly, on the wooden part of the

lethal object while his patron watched over the work.

TWO: 

This thing came up again, with yet another black man.  Two years later it was Jackson’s short, fat and solid 40 year old drill sergeant during Jackson’s abbreviated stay in the U.S. Army way down south.  A buck private in the United States army, Jackson was tasked with carrying new machine parts to the old mess hall in the hot summer time state of Georgia.  He was to give the multiple parts to the assembly crew working on the brand new automatic potato peeler drum machine. He was very grateful that these new machines existed now, saving him from at least that one unpopular manual aspect of K.P.  After managing to pick up all the oddly shaped pieces halfway across the military base, lock them into his arms; negotiate his way through the 1920's painted white frame screen door and down the white painted wooden plank stair treads he saw his short solid drill sergeant crunching toward him on freshly policed white gravel.  Larger medium sized round stones painted white bordered the path that brought the sergeant along. He and this sergeant got along better than most privates and sergeants he had observed in his short time there.  When the originally gruff sergeant discovered this young kid could draw and paint (caught him sketching on old newspaper on his bunk in the old barracks over a no-pass weekend), he “asked” him to make a piece of artwork.  In fact, the sergeant really wanted two pieces of art but felt he could only “ask” for one. On the day the sergeant was trying to decide, he thought out loud, in front of the private. 

            “M’wahf ha’this photo....” he held up the framed photograph of a very respectable black woman dressed for Sunday church smiling under her large church hat. 

            “Nah've allays wann’da paintin'uh her.....” he said, putting the photo back down on the  clean wooden shelf surface. 

            “But sheeit...” he said to Jackson, his hard sergeant's eyes growing larger and brighter, something Jackson had never seen the sergeant do before.

            “Sheeeit.....”  he said again.

            “ah’wahn CLANKCLANK, WE-BE-A-TANK”, and he smiled as he said it.  

Jackson did not get it.

            “Excuse me Sergeant ... what?” Jackson asked.

            “Day’m boh, CLANKCLANK - WE BEE'S ATANK” the sergeant spoke flatly but with volume. It was the sergeant's favourite marching drill-chant. He was an old tanker.  He’d lost part of his hearing to the tank guns. He wanted a painted plaque for his barracks that honoured that tradition and read, “CLANK CLANK, WE'RE A TANK”.  These words, when chanted by a marching squad, were effective.  When spoken loudly by a platoon on the move they were motivating, and when shouted by an entire company of heavy booted stomping men all rolling forward to their targeted destination it was frighteningly powerful.  The sergeant ended up with both pieces of art.  He also got a newly designed and custom hand-built non-com officers’ brick barbeque area, as well as all new safety motivational mess hall murals for his walls too.  So on this day, when the young private was outside struggling past the sergeant with his two long arms full of clumsy metal potato peeling machine parts, there was neither tension nor concern.  But when Private Jackson’s boot landed slightly wrong on the loose white gravel stones – the boots that had never fit properly due to constant flat foot pain that should have kept him out of the army in the first place – he tripped himself and fell forward. The sergeant stopped short to watch the private flail out and fall down.  Arms out, legs buckled, on his way down, amidst a small shower of medium-sized but still heavy metal army machine parts.

            “God Damn It.......JESUS KEEY-RISTE” the private burst out with as he hit the gravel

Hard, unsuccessfully trying to avoid the heavy metal falling parts.

            “Wh'th'fuhky'say muhfuhker?”, loudly fired the sergeant in one clean shot at the kid.

            “Huh?” replied the surprised private getting up, picking up parts.

            “Iffn ah EVAH hear y'take th’name of th’Lord, MAH God in vain again,

              yoh ass is grass son .... you copy?”

Relocking the last of the machine parts within his skinny white arms again, Jackson mumbled

             “Yes sergeant, sorry sergeant....”

            “Move yo’sorry white ass outta here son” the sergeant ordered. 

And so he did. Jackson delivered the K.P. parts.  By keeping his nose clean and shooting better than anyone in his crop of fresh meat; Jackson was promoted several times that year until he reached E5 rank.  Jackson began thinking he might want to be like his drill sergeant someday.

But those thoughts left him.  After marching inside a company, inside a battalion – hearing the thunderous synchronized impact of their U.S. combat boots on the parade pavement as the new soldiers roared in their newly trained way, he had other thoughts.  They all roared like murderous warriors pretending no fear of death - steeped in mud they’d crawled though while white hot tracer bullets zinged and zipped and popped over their young butts. Jackson also watched the few conscientious objector kids forced to dig full trenches at night in dark moon shadows under old wooden barracks with a singular damned teaspoon from the mess.  They put one of the vocally protesting kids that were now U.S. Army draftees through the gas-mask testing chamber without a gas mask, to make an example of him.  That kid broke down, the whole giant American citizen tax-driven Army machine grinding him down.  Strong questions formed in Jackson. But no important decision should be reached until after a talk with a Man Of God, until after a last requested scheduled discussion with his base chaplain.  With a straight and serious face the chaplain told Jackson it was Jackson’s personal duty “as an American son, to kill evil dishonest Communist Vietnamese people - our enemy”.  After that Jackson Kelley eventually left the United States Army, and the United States of America itself.  Though he continued to learn more and more about machines, and the things that drove the machines forward, he almost never took God's name in vain again.

THREE: 

More than a year later in winter it was cold in Windsor, Ontario, Canada.  Across the Detroit River in this Canadian city Jackson couldn't quite grow a beard yet; still had no chest hair, but did have a first struggling thin blonde moustache. He wore a winter coat against ice winds of Canadian December.  Jackson was to get married for the first time. There was old fashioned bridal march organ music mixed with a new British Beatle George Harrison song called, what else?  “MY SWEET LORD”.   Bitter Ontario cold was exactly like frosted winters of his youth across the river.  He stood outside in the brittle parking lot during this Christmas season’s first heavy snowfall.  He stomped his feet to warm them against the slippery hard pavement.  Jackson was about to go in and get married for the first time. If previous chaotic times had taken the form of a new game of pool in one of those beer-soaked, nicotine thick Detroit pool halls, someone would have done one hell of a job breaking to start this particular game. The balls went everywhere that year ... fast.  Now Jackson was here, in Canada, with his young bride-to-be. Their immediate families trudged through crisp crunching white snow after driving across the bridge from Michigan.  But all of their former close friends and lively friendly acquaintances were each and all uniformly missing.  All scattered crazily across the globe.

That imaginary cosmic pool hall cue stick had exerted rapid and tremendous force on all of them.  The life changing force seemed to have been within the very calendar year of 1968 itself.  Assassination, war, protest, sexual disease, end of innocent vulnerable little hippies, beginning of greedy yuppies to come, and the start of truly efficient wide scale organized drugs backed with violence and corruption at every level of government.  All of this and newly exploited racial divisions combined, collapsed, and concentrated into one long focused force that increased the speeding ballistic impact colliding and fragmenting all to hell each of their newly forming young  lives. It would change them all forever.  A hard hit with a sharp loud crack sent them swiftly into new places, people, and problems.  Detroit, San Francisco, Utah, Los Angeles, Washington, Kentucky, Georgia, Texas, Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, London, places in India, more horrific places in Viet-Nam - and for some, all the way back . . . back to bad old Detroit.  His friends, her friends, were gone.  All gone.

Jackson looked at the cigarette in the freezing fingers of his cold right hand. The Canadian tobacco smoke his lungs had been pulling on shivered up outside this cold church – PLAYER’S cigarettes from a flat cardboard slide box of twenty.  Jackson laughed.  The exhaled smoke mixed greyly with the white steam of his warm young breath in the frigid air.  His even younger wife-to-be was waiting for him inside the church.  She’d been escorted separately inside.  His new employer had seen quite enough of their cohabitation and orchestrated this very small contemporary Catholic wedding for them, here in this church in Ontario.  Until this wedding none of the other members of their families would acknowledge or visit them. 

Still outside the church, Jackson took a last deep hit from the PLAYER’S filter.  All of Jackson’s and Shari’s closest friends from “the States” were not at the wedding.  They were being shot, killed or imprisoned in Viet-Nam, or diving heavily into drugs in San Francisco, LA, Seattle, London, and Vancouver - or being locked up and worked over by the cops in Detroit.  Jackson exhaled the deceptively beautiful tobacco smoke and looked down at his double breasted gray pinstriped wedding suit showing through beneath the conservative winter overcoat.  Jackson’s black leather dress shoes shined brightly over tight black over-the-calf socks. He dropped his cigarette into the snow and stubbed it out.  A hushed hiss as the bright red end melted the snow crystals around it, no two the same ever again.  He did not field-strip the smoke as they had taught him in the army, but Jackson did turn sharply, pivoting on one foot, and walked straight into the old Canadian church.  He with his thin blonde moustache joined Shari Howard, the young girl he'd met at the old brick house in Detroit across the river.  While their radical contemporaries had stopped making wedding vows, these two had gone from living together to fully committing in marriage in a Catholic ceremony that somehow included acoustic guitars, folk singing, and long fringed leather clothing.  The two of them married that day after Christmas, on the very British Boxing Day in the City of Roses in the Dominion of Canada. 

When the service was over, white rice was thrown and excitement was high.  A happy Jackson drove away with a joyful young Shari through the blinding Ontario winter snow storm.  Flushed and lustful with officially sanctioned anticipation, they made their way to a first time inexpensive honeymoon in the snow bound rural town outside the city.  Happy faced young Shari had too much Ontario wine, quickly became ill, and fell immediately into a deep sleep.  Jackson leaned heavily back against his side of the creaking headboard. 

He lit up another filtered PLAYER'S cigarette in the dark room.

           

            “Goddamn it.”  he said to himself.

(end)