the political parade

evidently human survival depends upon the interplay between belief and observation. neither alone seems able to sustain us. alas, the balance can (and often does) go awry.

i'm auditing wonderful medieval art history lectures given by a new teacher on campus, asa mittman. last time he drew a clear distinction between a world based on observation (science) and contemplation (belief). he stated categorically the two mutually exclusive.

i'm not so sure. for example, i've never understand the competition between science and religion. why couldn't a divine being simply instill consciousness in an animal (ape) that already existed? the lightning flash of the quantum leap. we experience that kind of revelation every day.

on the other hand, politics interferes with the equation. the desire for comfort, property, power. as a friend said when studying law, 'this is measurement, not art.' in a sense politics and science line up: whatever works works. unfortunately, what often works in politics is twisting people's need to believe, particularly their need to feel safe.

so the science of politics is often the big lie. i'm watching a class from http://www.thegreatcourses.com/ on the affect of biology on personality. very interesting to see how neurons learn. repetition plays a huge part and the constant repeat of a theory, belief, or lie can ultimately get many neurons (and thus individuals) to accept it as gospel.

perhaps i sound like i'm on the side of science. alas, science is in constant evolution as discoveries are made and discarded. this may not help a person under stress. yes, as my lawyer friend once stated, 'it is a matter of our technology staying ahead of our stupidity.' all kinds of inventions have allowed each of us in the developed world to live better than any king did before 1900. yet to get through the traumas of every day, a certain belief in ourselves must persist.

how do we separate out politics, art, science, and religion? i've found individuals tend to be dominated by one of these at the expense of the others. perhaps we have to depend (have faith in) a natural selection of loves. that enough people will flow into the different professions and points of view to keep humanity in balance. tough to do when times are tough.

luckily, ninety percent of americans believe in heaven and only ten percent in hell!

as the stock market rises and falls, as medieval beliefs combat scientific observation in the presidential election, the survival of the species depends upon a mystery. any paradigm can be proven true, thus we will never know the whole truth. treating each other decently is the best we can do.

some new theater pics: www.pbase.com/wwp/auto

and more new lookout photos at: www.pbase.com/wwp/smoke

a nation on speed

okay, gas has dropped below four dollars a gallon (in britain it costs twenty-seven dollars a gallon) and we may feel relieved. not me. i know it will go back up. already, sixty dollars to fill the tank of my ranger xt.

this led to a lot of research on the internet. people have invented and marketed all kinds of gadgets supposed to save gas: voltage regulators, tornados in the air line, instruments that allow you to run on half gas, half water. what should i buy, i thought? maybe those platinum bosch sparkplugs. they sound pretty cool.

of course, all the evidence indicates most of these gas-savers bogus. if the object is to save money, sixty dollars for new sparkplugs doesn't sound so good.

then there are the advocates of driving habits. coast to stop signs, catch all the green lights, don't sit and idle, start slowly, let yourself slow down going up hill (it's natural). the advice i liked the most: "drive in your socks and be gentle." then i read, it takes 30% more gas to go seventy-five than it does fifty-five. this made all the gadgets in the world moot.

so around town and on the way back to the lookout it tried this out. and i must say i enjoy driving at fifty-five. even forty-five in the canyon seemed relaxing. somehow not pushing it brought a kind of sanity.

my mother told me when i was about three my new tricycle got stuck off the sidewalk. i wailed and gnashed my teeth cause it wouldn't come loose. that tends to be the story of my life. i've hurried through everything, afraid to miss anything. for example, installing more ram in my computer i couldn't get the stick to fit. i sweated. i cursed. i got more impatient. finally...

and speaking of the computer, i've always felt mine too slow. so i installed a 64 bit vista on a new drive, upped my ram to four gigs, and have begun using safari to browse. what a difference. it's a pleasure to play around with art again (i did it all day yesterday.) speed does have a place, but not on the road or in the arm. and i've heard that farmers survive by keeping a steady, slow pace they can keep up all day long.

slowly, adding to the summer's pictures: www.pbase.com/wwp/smoke

no substitute

albert camus, the french existentialist, wrote, "there's no substitute for a long life." alas, the youngest winner of the nobel prize, he died in a car accident at 51.

and somewhere else i read, concerning dieting, "if you want chocolate cake, eat it. otherwise you'll drink a gallon of carrot juice and then eat the chocolate cake. substitutes don't work."

how are these related? i don't know. concerning the statement by camus, i always thought it meant, "live long enough and you'll understand what it's all about." unfortunately, older and no wiser, i'm much less certain of my beliefs though not of my observations.

what i have discovered about living awhile is that you have the chance to have lots of experiences, of all kinds. you have time for your priorities to change and to explore different paths. a friend once said, "happiness is realizing your potential." well, we certainly have a lot of different potentials. d.h. lawrence wrote, "find myself? which self are you talking about? i've many selves."

true, i have discovered people's personalities do not change unless they have brain damage. hopefully, they learn to expand and expound on their possibilities and adventures. that said, the child of five is the child of eighty-five.

as i said, i thought i was pursuing understanding. now i know what really interested me was experience, a great variety. theater, romance, travel, writing, it all has led me by the nose. and luckily i've been able to switch from one to the other as my inclinations and desires decided. for example, twenty years of the sexual dillemas which took me many places and moods ended (pretty much) just about the time aids appeared on the scene. i'd never been particularly careful; all my encounters turned out to be hetero but that would not have protected me in the long run.

or theater. at least i pursued that rainbow until i could write and direct plays well, having a few minor successes. i enjoyed the process, as i never did with movie-making. i lived long enough to have a few delightful satisfactions, especially the one of feeling i could finally do it.

jack of all trades, master of none? yes, you can look at it that way. however, the real luxury in life is in being able to realize many potentials, many selves. the first psychic i ever went to see, gloria, said, "evolution is speeded up. we're living six lifetimes in one." perhaps that will console you for feeling you've never been able to make your mark because you get too bored with any particular endeavor.

many people i've known have died young. i think of everything my friend renate, a doctor in berlin, has missed by commiting suicide at thirty-one in 1971. and those hit by cars, bullets, and cancer at twelve and twenty-three. hopefully, they're back with a different name and another chance.

so, don't accept substitutes and wish for the most important thing: good luck.

ps. speaking of the return to childhood, i did it again last week, playing with the automatic pictures in paint shop pro, doing what i did in the first grade: www.pbase.com/wwp/tube

and i've doubled the number of pictures in this summer's lookout gallery: www.pbase.com/wwp/smoke

artificial tears (smoke 2)

when was the first time you snitched some cigarettes and smoked them (or tried)?

i was five or six, i think. a friend stole a pack of lucky strike from his mother and we lit up in the furnace room of the church basement. somehow i kept getting a dribble of saliva down the length of the cigarette and the fire kept going out.

first year in college i started smoking a pipe. i loved the smell and thought it was so cool. eventually, in my second year, i repeated the mantra, 'you're killing yourself. you're killing yourself.' that got me to stop.

yesterday i looked through a book on the human body with graphic illustrations of health and illness. the number of diseases attributed to smoking is as long as your arm. (so i was right.) alcohol comes second. (good thing i quite drinking when kahlua took over my life sixteen years ago.)

now, they didn't talk about smoke from forest fires. yes, sitting in it still. some days better than others but today i can only see three miles. and my eyes have been suffering (hmm, how are you doing, lungs?) as a last resort i asked the patrolman to pick me up some artificial tears at rite aid. he said a vast shelf of them almost empy. many of us must be in need of them.

never occured to me to resort to artificial tears. basically, i haven't cried freely since i was twelve when i watched my tears drop into the milk, frustrated with my mother's support of my brother over my protests. (a couple of years earlier i had merely looked at her when she whipped me with a belt. she never did it again.)

smoke, tears, alcohol, wildfire. my life passes before my eyes (since i can't see anything else.) strange how i'm now consoled by having so many memories. that's what i think i was looking for all along.

summer photos posted at www.pbase.com/wwp/smoke

the best way to view them is to click the slideshow button up in the right corner. for some reason they load much faster than clicking on one at a time.

all day i walked on the water

this line popped into my head as i was reading a poem POSTCARD by the swedish poet helena sinervo. and these were the lines that struck me:

A singer should always be smiling

and your smile won't sell unless you get your teeth fixed soon.

Furthermore you should sit on a stone and listen to how

your inner teeth are grinding.

There's nothing to beat it!

...you should walk these paths, across water

everything appears in a different light, absolutely everything...

and then for no reason at all the words of bill gates to a highschool class bounced out of the blue. i'd found them on a college wall.

why is it some people have the magic touch? in how to get control of your time and your life, the author allen lakein says it's all a matter of setting priorities and doing only the most important, but working on them every day. he says 80% of the result comes from the first 20% of the effort, so do that and skip the rest.

somewhere i read years ago that the great scientists have gotten their basic insight around 20 and spend the rest of their lives working it out. not very helpful if you're three times that plus some. of course, colonel sanders formed his chicken empire starting at 66. maybe business is a bit easier.

anyway, here's what bill gates (supposedly, it's contested) had to say:

Bill Gates recently gave a speech at a High School about 11 things they did not and will not learn in school.
Rule 1 : Life is not fair - get used to it!
Rule 2: The world won’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.
Rule 3 : You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won’t be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.
Rule 4 : If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.
Rule 5 : Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping: they called it opportunity.
Rule 6 : If you mess up, it’s not your parents’ fault, so don’t whine about your mistakes, learn from them.
Rule 7: Before you were born, your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent’s generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.
Rule 8 : Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they’ll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.
Rule 9 : Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time.
Rule 10: Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
Rule 11 : Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.


whether bill actually said it or not it makes a nice contrast with the words of the poet!

fires and smoke continue. i've posted more pics at

http://forum.getdpi.com/forum/showthread.php?t=2426

we're all renters here

when i had that realization, it was very liberating.

it came about when a friend who had bought a fixer-upper with the help of her family said about her neighbors, 'oh, they're only renters!' i didn't take umbrage with her, but i felt it. after all, i've been a renter my whole life.

then came the epiphany: we don't really own anything. everything is contingent. we don't own our children. they leave. we don't own our parents. they die. we don't own our houses: my sister's house burned down and the vast family history my mother had gathered ashes. recently, a friend had most of her house flattened by a tree falling in a storm. an acquaintance lost his house to one of our wildland fires a couple weeks ago.

even our bodies we don't possess, not in the way we'd like to believe. two days ago i visited my friend ed in the hospital. an avid bike leader in the community, six months ago he hit a stanchion and tumbled, injuring his spine. he looked very tired, paralyzed from the neck down. he's feisty and hopefully will recover the use of his limbs. however, for the moment, it's been taken away.

most of our suffering comes from a sense of loss. perhaps it helps to think that loss is the name of the game. at the moment california burning up. according to botany, it's supposed to burn. the oils build up in the brush. a fire releases a lot of seed, puts healthy ash in the soil. of course, people build in the woods. it's merely a matter of time, especially since global warming is charging the atmosphere with higher energy that must find an outlet.

if we are only renters, we might consider stressing less about buying a home, a new car, and so on and on. they say, 'you only get to keep what you give away.' it's not a bad philosophy to live by, despite our need for the illusion of owning.

here are some pics from the lookout in the smoke:

http://forum.getdpi.com/forum/showthread.php?t=2426

when the smoke gets in your eyes

during the night, someone discovered a hundred acre four miles north of me, where i would normally have spotted it right away. (visibility at the moment half a mile.) the most fire-ridden june i've seen in 45 years as a lookout. four days of lightning (perhaps dry) now predicted.

maybe that's why this morning before getting up, i began thinking where i'd like to die. this is, of course, the return of a morbid subject, but i have my reasons.

two weeks ago, i paid my next six months on my secret storage space. roger, the manager, has become a friend over the years. i've heard lots about his troubles. for example, this time he pulls me aside from the house and tells me his wife's daughter, husband, and two kids showed up may 1st with no money. one baby sleeps in the stroller outside the door. i ask, 'other than that, is everything okay?' 'no, afraid not,' pointing to a bump on his jaw. 'cancer. lungs. blood in my stool.' he's about to leave for treatment at the veteran's hospital.' i do my best to reassure him and give him a bottle of french wine. his little blond granddaughter asheley comes out, smiling. 'i've got thirteen of them,' he says, still puffing on a cigarette.

last night, i watched 'wit', the story of a youngish woman professor of metaphysical poetry diagnosed with cancer. she's lively and witty and if you want to see chemo in action, this is the movie for you. unfortunately, the treatment fails.

can i be forgiven for considering the subject while i'm in this twilight zone? (i'm trying to be as realistic as i can be.)

thus, this morning i thought, 'okay, i'd like to die right here, on this bed, surrounded by nature and the sky. where else? in the house i'm house-sitting, artwork and books taking me into themselves. and lastly? on a train, going through fields in europe.' this my secret way of finding what means most to me.

here are pictures of my friend berta on our travels. as she grew weaker, her sister sat her down and they put pins in a world map of all the places she'd been, a very lovely if sad way of showing her she had lived and had a full life. i was very happy to have these photos as a momento.

www.pbase.com/wwp/berta