it's hard not to fall for the hype

i'm finding it difficult to trust myself, when it comes to the news. for example, amanda knox. at first i fell for the sex-crazy version, satanic ceremony, and so on. gradually, the media projection my eyes adopted wore off. i read several books by people meeting her in prison, examined the evidence - the rolling stone article revelatory - and realized i'd been bamboozled. i felt as sad as relieved when she acquitted and released two days ago. it's something that never should have happened, yet look at my original response.

and now steve jobs has died. most of us couldn't help admiring him, though i haven't found apple products at all useful. his dropping out of college, seeing the symbol potential for computers, his firing from apple and the return, his wonderful commencement address at stanford available on youtube, what's there not to like? i just finished the presentation secrets of steve jobs by carmine gallo, a lot of great tips.

unfortunately, just before his death yesterday i ran across two caveats, which we should all remember when worshipping the rich and successful. the first on jobs as a philanthropist (or not): http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F01E2DD123BF933A0575BC0A9679D8B63&scp=2&sq=steve+jobs+theater&st=nyt here, i think we can give him the benefit of the doubt. he died much too young (56) to begin thinking of his public legacy, though with the years of illness he had the chance.

the other bit, though, much more damning, with hard evidence. mike daisey, a contemporary storyteller/actor presently doing a one-person show in new york: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/02/theater/mike-daisey-discusses-the-agony-and-ecstasy-of-steve-jobs.html?scp=1&sq=steve+jobs+theater&st=nyt it's about how apple products produced in china, the polluted villages and kids as young as 12 working. alas, i believe jobs could have funneled some of his billions back into creating better working conditions and helping the people who created his wealth.

of course, who am i to talk? i'm certainly a self-indulgent as anybody. luckily, nobody worships me or envies my success. i did run across a box of old slides the other day and posted them. www.pbase.com/wwp/1970  i do see a guy on some sort of mission. unfortunately, his heroes poets like baudelaire. you can see it in his eyes...

the day the gods were bored

naturally, i've never understood the conflict between evolution and creationism. why couldn't consciousness been implanted in the neanderthals, changing them into homo-sapiens? that way the process includes a divine intervention, of some kind.

that's my theory. lolling about on olympus one fine eternal summer afternoon, those beautiful, lackadaisical bodies couldn't stand any more good weather. i mean, that happened to me. after eight months on the island of rhodes, i thought, 'this place breeds nothing but drunk swedes.' so i moved to a dark grimy basement in berlin. why should the gods be any different?

hermes, the most adolescent of them, though all could qualify, stifled a yawn and flipped a cigarette butt at hephaestus, just to get his dander up. this led to a brawl  that died from pointlessness. what real harm could they do to each other? watching them, athena got one of her brilliant ideas. she should never have been born from the head of her father.

'hey, guys, why not have a little fun? see all those stupid animals running around below? they're so predictable! all they do is sleep, grunt, and eat each other. what if we gave a group a smidgen of our intelligence? say, those apes standing upright and banging each other with bones. they'd think they were gods, having a bit of us in them, and fantastic! they can find really creative and devious ways to kill each other. wouldn't that be fun to watch?'

and so it happened long ago, just before bibical times. athena threw her javelin at the ugliest of the savage animals, and the light bounced from brain to brain, they being group-animals and primates. from this moment arose babylon, new york, delphi. the gods had invented something special, their own video game and they called it darwin.

what has this particular mammal recently posted. oh, i know, www.pbase.com/wwp/rothko ah, the painter, the poet, the lover, the god, don't they all go together? we're flies for their sport, as shakespeare related.

do it while you're young (later you will be too timid)

of course, i don't mean to spread despair amongst us older folks. that said, i'm now asking myself why i did all those things, like live in a berlin basement, wander the streets of new delhi, make love in the sand (really stupid) or swimming in salty water (i don't think astronauts have much fun from weightlessness).

 ah, the answer snuck in there: sex, libido, pleasure in the physical world, buildups of random energy needing to be expended. had i been more sensible, would i have risked pregnancy (not mine, but yet my own), nights in new york on hooker's alley (going to a loaned apartment alone)?

true, i haven't given up entirely. alas, my last attempt at an affair a disaster. i couldn't swim blindly in a stormy sea, having faith i'd stay upright til i returned to land. no, no, no, as king lear shouted, no, no. these days all i want to do is daydream and be creativc. that's how my energy frittering itself away, not at full steam, lover on water-skiis.

you see, the less you know, the more fun you have, especially true in the physical world. you've all these ridiculous impulses you take seriously. my god, how i've moaned over an imaginary woman, dreamed of flying, gone a hundred miles an hour in a convertible with a drunk driver on a very dark night in indiana, throwing  up all over the car-door without even knowing it. that was high-school.


see, as you advance in age, you naturally become careful. so and so, a good friend, ended up behind glass in a black coffin. jesus, she got killed by a baseball bat at a party, and i haven't even mentioned the great C word. lately, i've looked at the obits in the ny times. almost everybody toppling over younger than me.

and now i think, o boy, i don't have to stand in that rickety bus bounding along the worst dirt road in costa rica, for hours and hours. if i traveled now, i'd be a victim of tours, reclining in beds at the ritz, not even daring to pay for a call-girl, much less roaming  the streets in search of miss Bad. even in my youth i didn't do that.


let me tell it like it is. learn a skill - and i mean damn well. play the ukulele, read tarot cards, learn to cut hair. go on the road and pay your own way. college becoming a sink-hole for the debts that bind. i love hanging out around all that intellectual stuff, but it didn't stop me from taking very stupid chances. i wish the same for you.

let's see, at 52 i wrote these notes: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/zen

i'm bewildered by my brain

today i found out my forty-year writer friend steve suffered a massive stroke last may, right in the language part of his brain. with the help of his wife janice he's fighting to make it back (they expected him to die). he's walking and swallowing and learning to form simple words.


so i lay down on my bed and felt something intangible. then i realized, this is terror. lately, i've picked up a lot of stray facts: the brain 80% water, white and gray matter, about two and a half pounds. and it's doing all these things over which i have no control!

of course, if i were a supreme yogi, i could go into a trance and feel better. we're in trances all the time. take driving to san francisco. i can cover the whole distance without remembering anything but the conversation with myself, flashes of lightning in that underground lake. and there's always the caterpillar who couldn't walk when thinking about which leg to move first.

it's good we forget (the chinese believe we're blessed if we do). otherwise every moment would be added to another and recalling them all we'd soon be so burdened with the past, we'd crumble like a turtle swimming in jello. having met people with brain-damage i know it's the one way we can completely change our personality. why so frightening if we don't even know the person we used to be?

always, we've got things undone, i suppose that's it. when death is there, we're not, but we don't like treading the trail to meet him: pain, loss, the absence of independence. maybe it really is all about control. that being said, i offer this very interesting video from the TED site:



i've also been reading about steve jobs and trying out another apple product. here are drawings of my own brain done on his lozenge, not very flattering: www.pbase.com/wwp/pod
 
and related to the squishy situation in my noggin, three thousand lighting strikes bounced around the tower last week. did a short-circuit occur? am i no longer myself? all our thoughts electricity and water, what a concept!

if you could regret one thing, what would it be?

true, i've felt regrets to be useless. and actually, i've been hard-put to dig one up. i could, of course, ask to be a nicer person, or a more ambitious one, maybe even famous as a writer, and so on. in other words, a complete sheep or a ravenous wolf. somehow, it seems pointless. i mean, i wouldn't have changed anything i've done, really, except one thing.


damn, i wish i'd savored each moment more! less nervous, less restless. of course, i enjoy remembering driving thru the desert in my vw bus, camping among shrouded louisianna trees, stopping for a rain-shower in new orlean's storyville, water dripping from the old wrought iron railings. yes, continuing along the mississippi coast right after hurricane camille, houses turned over, sand thrown over the road. i enjoyed touring williamsburg, hearing the museum docent proudly declaim on southern art.


alas, the end not so happy. i stored my vehicle in a brooklyn garage and endured the worst month in europe ever, not to travel again for fifteen years. yes, it was that bad, that lonely, the last time i visited my berlin friend renate before she drank poison and lept into oblivion. luckily, i landed two sisters for the drive back, susan horn and her sister. i did have to meet their russian mother, who said she'd kill me if anything happened to them. 


what i mean is, i've learned we only live one day at a time and our imperative to take pleasure in at least one piece of it, even if we're meditating in a salt-mine, doing yoga in prison, reading poetry in the war zone. all this planning, all this ambition, all this remembering, what a waste. not that it isn't fun and often a balm, but the eternal truth? we put one foot in front of the other.


had i savored those moments, making love, drinking sherry, laughing at charlie chaplin, i could feel fulfilled. not only that, i would have understood early on the best we can do is help someone else enjoy a bit of their day, cause that's all they have too. dear, dear, it's not to be. i'm still dancing like a flea on the back of a flying pig. the moment i settle down, i feel i'm missing something.


and i've regressed, taking up the finger-painting i loved to do in the second grade.... www.pbase.com/wwp/finger

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.