what if you woke up one morning and were a cockroach?

today i went bananas with my samsung tab. i got the urge to look at the glass bead game by hermann hesse. why this book, i don't know. lately i've been nostalgic for the fifty-some years i read books like a monk. was it the search for the meaning of life? or merely a retreat into wonderful worlds i couldn't find around me? thinking i'd absorb some lessons from the classics, i read a lot of them.


and i began my quest for the illusive hesse, calling up a bunch of e-readers: nook, kindle, laputa, adilko, and so on. never did find the bead game, though i began downloading free classics by the dozens. the brothers karamazov, crime and punishment, pride and prejudice. each time reading a bit of the opening. none sparked my interest, not siddhartha, nor the complete wizard of 0z (though i read them all  as a kid). amazing what's out there now, merely for the asking.


okay, i thought, maybe a bit of kafka. and that worked. i read the opening of the trial in english and then german. i'm one of those people who finds the work of franz very funny. he uses the conditional-conditional tense, as if to say, 'this may be true or it may not', his heroes confused as can be. last summer i listened to a new translation of the castle as i drove back and forth to the lookout. the images and situations still stick in my mind.


once i did a stage  adaptation of the metamorphosis and played the bug myself. you can find the script here: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/kafka and when i visited prague, i bought a booklet showing the places kafka had lived and worked. the prague pics here: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/prag the town just coming out of the communist soggy grey, the place certainly lived up to my expectations. once a fanatic follower of K., i've never quite lost my taste.


what's his main insight? if you give up your own authority, you lose yourself in a search for approval and validation. his insight into the corporation/bureaucratic mentality exactly this. in the major works the hero called to stand up to the forces that be, and he always fails (except for, perhaps, the unfinished amerika, his fantasy of escaping to the far west). and once the protagonist kowtows, he's done for, lost in a melancholy and ultimately fatal dream.


'assume your own authority', what else is there to be said? 

in total darkness you can see a candle thirty miles away

i wonder what else we're capable of? lately, going through all the wonderful, useless random facts on my droid x, i keep discovering things about our bodies that astound me.

for example, in a lifetime our hearts pump a hundred million gallons of blood. my god, this one pound mass of tissue, how does it do it? (seeing my heart beating on a screen took my breath away.) and we've 100,000 miles of capillaries and veins. strung end to end that part of us would encircle the earth four times! and the human heart beats roughly 35 million times a year, 3.5 billion in a lifetime.

add further complexity: half your body's red blood cells are replaced every seven days. each day 400 gallons of recycled blood are pumped through the kidneys. two million red blood cells die every second. the numbers become more and more boggling. 100 billion neurons in the brain? and the brain 80% water?

as i see it in advancing age, i keep wondering how the hell i survived so long, all this going on without me even knowing it! all of our "thinking" is done by electricity and chemicals . every three days a human stomach gets a new lining. no wonder the processes can be upset by alcohol, heavy metals, amphetamines. i never understood where cancer came from. we're in a constant state of renewal.

when all's said and done, your body the most complicated thing in the universe. what more can it do that we haven't even imagined?

well, i've been thinking about the wonders of inebriation. new pictures: www.pbase.com/wwp/drunk


There are 10 million bacteria at the place where you rest your hands at a desk. wow, we must be a lot tougher than we think.

have you ever been drunk beyond memory?

one of my most embarrassing: friends set up a date for me with a junior at the university of wisconsin, me a freshman in indiana. they lied about my age. i think i held up the image pretty damn well, until i drank one too many beers and dropped over the edge into limbo. next day, i learned what a fool i'd been.


and what do you do the day after? blush and leave town if you can, which i did, relieved to take the option. and what do you do if you can't leave for a new country? in other situations i've blustered, hidden my tracks, pretended it never happened, got drunk again. and that's the way i feel after the tenth anniversary of 9/11.


how do you make the obvious visible? it's the toughest thing in the world. what we see everyday certainly looks like a chair, but is it? isn't it, as plato maintained, merely an idea? and once we've come to picture an historical event as we've been trained to see it, can we really unravel it into it's component pieces and perhaps recover a bit of memory? http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/nationalism_in_the_aftermath_of_9_11_20110910/
no, one person's memory of an event can't clear away the dust thrown in our eyes. 


collectively, we do not learn from history and repeat it every day. pardon me for my brashness, yet it was henry ford who said, 'history is bunk.' and i'm afraid he's right, much as i've always loved the study of history, it's full of good fairy tales. no, we copy the way our parents walk and talk. i catch myself making a statement like my dad or using a lovely sarcasm of my mother: if you don't like this hotel, you can go to another! yes, shame is a great way to keep your children under control, and a country.


what am i getting at? with the collapse of the communist threat, the people who had used it to maintain political control in the united states were at a loss. they'd a president who'd stolen the position, the laughing-stock of the population who avoided responsibility by going fishing. UNTIL...the momentous visual event of planes crashing into two tall buildings, the towers crashing and burning, provided a new enemy THE ARAB WORLD to replace the old. 


i  in my tower on that day didn't watch the news, rather listened on the radio. i knew if i watched the tv footage over and over it would plant a searing image into my brain. the voices in the street much more real and individual. i called my friend randy, who lived in greenwich village. he'd walked toward the smoke with thousands of others until the first tower collapsed. everyone turned tail, and looked back to see the second go down.


in such circumstances it's hard to know what you saw. evidently we don't contain memories, we reconstruct them every time and they degrade. in terms of political events they get re-written. like have a huge hang-over, we can't think straight the day after, not to mention ten years later after having taken our personal tragedy and making it a world one. 


i did run across one short talk that clarifies the present situation: 


http://www.ted.com/talks/rory_stewart_time_to_end_the_war_in_afghanistan.html

however after so much patriotism, jingoism, and loss, a man of common sense can't make much headway until the fires die down. and they can't, being constantly stoked to scare the population into submission. 

what happens when you abandon your watchtowers? destruction

it's quite amazing to me: nobody said a peep when the california division of forestry closed 80 firelookout towers about ten years ago. i still can't believe it. and the united states forest service closing more all the time (three on this forest this summer). where are these officials' heads? (i decline to express the obvious.) 


in the past week a thousand homes burned near austin texas, a state that quit watching over itself years ago. you know what i hear? satellites, areal observation, both lies, foisted on the public. the first very expensive and as far as i know, a pie in the sky can't tell the difference between a campfire and a car engine. this is not a lighthouse situation. here the light flashes at me, and all too quickly. 


another example. i worked on angora lookout at lake tahoe, closed in 2002. five years ago a fire one mile from the lookout burned 90 million dollar homes. had the tower been staffed, they'd have known right away that it wasn't a control burn, that it took off like a bat out of hell. friends who live on the ridge above watched the ashes settle on their roof as they packed up their cars, just in case. a fire changes everything. 


of course, it's a numbers game. you gamble a large fire won't happen, in order to save pennies, and i mean minuscule amounts of money. almost fifty years up here and i have: no benefits, no retirement, no step raises, and earn 14 dollars an hour. you can't get much cheaper than that. one bulldozer equals 5 observation booths. which is more likely to save your home? 


yes, yes, we love our machines. for a few years after california closed its lookouts they paid 6 million dollars a day (so i heard) for a gigantic dc10 airtanker that couldn't hit a bird in a barn. and everybody assumes we've been closed down for years, the last watchers those who announced the fall of troy and the irish towers shouting the arrival of viking ships. 


check out the forest fire lookout association: http://www.firelookout.org/   fine folks dedicated to preserving and re-constructing towers.


and i've many pictures of lookoutlife: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/lookoutlife 


the angora fire images http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=angora+fire&qpvt=angora+fire&FORM=IGRE


news from texas     http://www.cbsnews.com/i/tim/2011/04/21/es_0421_TEXAS_FIRE_copy_480x360.jpg

finding your mate - what's the big secret?

my lovely friend Q. beautiful, smart, hard-working, creative. she's been in two very long relationships. unfortunately, now on her own for several years, she hasn't come up with a new one. match dot com unearthed a lot of wannabes. alas, none struck a match for her. she works at home sixteen hours a day. could that be the problem? of course it is!


one very important circumstance leads to mating: PROPINQUITY. let's face it, most people marry the guy/girl next door. they've learned enough about each other to feel safe, to trust, to fight. (marriage a wrestling match. read pairing by richard bach. he maintains an honest, if angry first encounter essential, illusions about the other quickly shattered before they become a veil of tears.) others discover partners  thru dancehalls, classrooms, work spaces.


you have to be around a lot of the kind of people you like. for example, i've never mated, yet romantic contacts have taken place, most through travel and theater. for example an artist and i made out under the stars next to the youth hostel once the home of mussolini's mistress. that led to a series of encounters with her in hamburg, berlin, and on a greek island www.pbase.com/wwp/greece . one that didn't go so far, a meeting in a london hostel, a brief love-making around midnight in a half-constructed building, and waiting all night in a burger hut for the hostel to open in the morning. 


theater a tricky business, everybody in a heightened state. no wonder movie stars so caught up. they have to sit around half the day in empty trailers. the stage busier, so people even blinder. i recommend theater classes, less intense, more informal over time. never ever, however, fall in love with the character about which you salivate while they're onstage! what you see, the god or goddess, the highly simplified and eroticized version of the human being they really are. 


again, let me repeat: PROPINQUITY, PROPINQUITY, PROPINQUITY, it's so easy.   go to a lot of weddings and funerals:  www.pbase.com/wwp/family my mother got her last mate of twenty years waiting for his wife to die of cancer and pouncing. who said love was ethical? as kurt vonnegut remarked, 'could we have a little less love - and more common decency?'


read more: http://www.bobsommers.com/tag/propinquity-effect

work is more fun than fun

okay, so i'm crazy. please give me a little credit for knowing it. as i watch certain friends retire, fall apart and die or get bitter, projecting their own decay onto the world, i'm glad i'm still able to labor, though i need to define what i mean, or you'll  onto have me thrown in the nuthouse.


look at it this way, a hundred years ago retirement didn't exist, nor health insurance, people survived i don't know how. (no penicillin, yet they did put cocaine in coke!) we've risen to the top like scum on a fermenting wine-barrel. true, benefits being slashed and if you truly want security, work for the government, they print the money. 


this brings up the main reason people hate work: supervision and bureaucracy. what do teachers bitch about? not their time in the class room. or friends in the forest service? have you ever had to sit in useless meetings all day? if you're a professor, you can clap your hands and say 'i have, almost every day of my working life.' 


and actually, i just finished reading a book every one should: 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People you will learn an amazing amount of stuff about human nature. and low and behold, group decision-making most often faulty! i'll let you find the chapter. and did you know research proves our minds wander 30% of the time. what fun. i'm not the only bozo day-dreamer.


i have to admit something damning: i'm a workaholic. oh, my friends don't think so. lazy bum, works seasonally, looks out the window and makes money. unfortunately perhaps for me, i've never been able to stop doing. traveling, for example, you know it's reward only comes after you forget the beggars and sand-fleas. everything looks beautiful in colored photographs. writing, damn, hundreds of manuscripts. photography, a million pictures a year for eight years. now the drawings pile up. i think this section almost to five hundred: www.pbase.com/wwp/android


yesterday i did do eight hours of honest labor - and at the end i couldn't see straight. fifty years ago i stole a bag of family photographs from my grandparents. why, i don't know. i'm not a family history bug. i don't think we can take credit for what other people have done.  these photos buried themselves in my belongings, and honest to god, i never looked at them, not til yesterday. 


my niece dawn fascinated  by our family through time. i decided, okay, i'll help her out and i scanned over two hundred pictures. not that it wasn't fascinating, especially since my sister's house burned down years ago, charring every evidence of familial memory. this is it, none of it can replaced. i drove myself, and later in the night the electricity died and i stiffened in my bed from the cold. so much for history keeping us warm.


you can scan the pics yourself: www.pbase.com/wwp/family

resume': reply to an inquiry from bill johnson

A good, rich life, Wayne...and I am the richer a person for having shared a part of it. Question: Do you regret not having finished at Stanford?

Bill

hi bill,

so funny you should ask! for three months late spring, early summer, I had a theater dream almost every night. they took place in opera houses, on the beach, all kinds of stuff, mostly I was an in and out observer, but you were directing a lot of the shows, great stuff. what a dream career.

of course, I sometimes yearn for status. then I wake up the next morning feeling 

I've escaped with my life (like now). it's the having to work at a false authority persona I could never quite do. psychics have told me I've had so much responsibility in past lives, I get to have fun in this one (I wish it felt more often like fun). and one told me I was too impressed by death when young. well, that certainly took away the illusion I'd never end. other factors like ww2 helped, my first five years of life, newsreels of battles and the dead buried at sea.

at thirteen I try to decide: writer or artist? the first only needed a pencil and paper, me a bookworm who couldn't draw realistically.

to answer your question, I sabotaged stanford from the beginning. as a teenager I decided 1. no television 2. no teaching 3. no kids 4. no house. time was what I wanted, the little I had. so I've stuck to these thru thick and thin, tho stanfords have been thrown in my path.

by the way, the most important people in the world teachers and politicians, they influence the most people in the deepest way. I'm just out here tap-dancing on my coffin.

you've been an inspiration. best, wayne

www.pbase.com/wwp/theaterpics

                                             3 days later we hiked to my first lookout 1951

                                                 cone peak pinnacles national monument

                                          i spent the first six months of my life looking up
                                          at it from a crib in soledad, california. only 
                                         realized many years later when driving back 
                                         from southern california.