Stridently optimistic

I decided, just now, to throw caution to the wind. How wonderful would it be to be optimistic without that adverbial modifier holding it back? Cautiously optimistic. How about nervously happy? Worriedly content?

We modify our language and we modify our thought. Today I am going to be optimistic. If I choose to modify it, I'm not going to use the prescribed modifier cautiously. Today I'll be stridently optimistic. Hopefully optimistic. Confidently optimistic.

Save cautiously for tightrope walking and brain surgery.

PKD Quote....

The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.

Philip K. Dick, How To Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later (1978)
US science fiction author (1928 - 1982)

Beaker has quite the set of pipes.

from Light: All that is seen and unseen...

I'm sitting at my desk in my office watching the sky turn to day with each bolt of lightning. It's such a beautiful sight: that momentary flicker when the pitch-blackness, for an instant, looks like day. There is an excitement involved in the cognitive dissonance inherent in a light sky at night. (Maybe I'm part Inuit.) Even if it is only for a brief moment. Funny how thunderclouds seem to bring night to day, yet they can bring day to night.

That gets me thinking about light and dark both literally and as concepts. Is there a more powerful metaphor for our existence? It's ages old, but never overplayed. Light and dark -- it is the perennial metaphor from which all being springs. And since existence as we perceive it is the mind's great metaphor, it is no wonder why we identify with this mother and father of all symbolism. Darkness falls, it is all encompassing, but light always shines through. Have you ever tried to completely darken a room? It's almost impossible without solid walls or special curtains. But light, light so easily permeates. It seamlessly eradicates darkness, irradiates the abyss.

Darkness is the great receiver. The vessel that light enters and fills fully. Without the darkness to receive we would never see light. Do we see the air we breathe? Does fish from the other age-old symbol see the water in which it swims? Darkness creates the vessel of the void. Without it there is no there there. Not only does light need a void to fill, it needs something off of which to reflect. So our great vessel is illuminated with all the colors of the spectrum because the matter inside absorbs and reflects the light, emitting varying permutations of the pure photon stream. Light and dark and all that is seen and unseen exist in their interplay.

How would we perceive dark without light? How would we know light without the vessel of darkness? What is beyond? What is light without dark, what the mystics think of as "the boundless"? Some believe that God is so great that it exists beyond light and dark. That God is the boundless that preexists light. That light needs the void. The void is the great receiver of the divinity. And all of existence springs from the distillation of this divine light -- from its pure boundless form to its contained state within the subatomic particles that give rise to our reality.

But the boundless light just is. Its purpose is unknowable to us, here in this universe. To us, the darkened void creates purpose for the light. More than just being, the light illuminates, irradiates, creates. But at its essence, it simply is.

So I ask, not rhetorically, what is light without dark? What is content without form? What is being without purpose?

He's Giuseppe Franco!!!

I was perusing the Mets blogs after last nights choke-attack and I came across this bit of awsomeness from Metsblog.com:

While walking on a street in Beverly Hills, a man stepped in front of me, smoking a cigarette, pacing and swearing while ranting and raving on his cell phone.

I turned to my wife and said, “Wait, that’s Giuseppe Franco.” Sure enough, we happened to be walking in front of his ‘famed Beverly Hills salon,’ as the repetitive commercial says.

That dude is a legend in my home! I love everything about GF. He comes on the TV and I just smile and giggle: "heh heh Giuseppe Franco..." My favorite part is when they mention celebrity clientele and then show a shot of him greeting Gary Busey. Gary Busey! What?! They couldn't get Nick Nolte?! It's one of the best things going on television.

Apparently the GF name is renowned. Because he says clearly, "I'm Giuseppe Franco. I'm not going to put my name on a product that doesn't work." I'm hoping that he branches out from hair-care, leaves his roots if you will, and develops other product lines. It could be like Newman's Own, but GF. How amazing would that be?

Remember, he doesn't own the company. He doesn't own anything about it. In the commercial it sounds like he's saying, "I don't own the company; I don't know anything about it." Which used to always make me chuckle. The fact that he slurs that line and you can't tell if he is saying know or own is funny enough. Don't they edit these things?

And then there are the Chia-dudes who are in the commercial. Do I want to look like them?! I mean, I already look like a slackerschlep. Don't you think they would pick actual good-looking men to push their hair-care product? Are they afraid that some decent man-meat may overshadow the striking good looks of GF and Gary Busey?

Oh well. I watch so much Mets baseball that I've been overexposed on GF and Verizon ads. Oh, and the Optimum guy. Don't get me started on that smarmball.

Long live Giuseppe Franco!

10 IN ROW! 10 IN ROW!

Praying to the porcelain God

Nobody wins unless everybody wins

The majority of the people who walk the surface of this planet are out of their minds. This is not to put myself above the rest of us; I say this not to differentiate myself from my brothers and sisters. But the more I try to find enlightenment - gnosis - my higher self - the more I come up against the cold hard fact that most of the people who walk among us are out of their skulls, batguano insane, nuts.

This makes it extremely difficult to attain enlightenment. One must cultivate the will to rise to levels to which most people do not aspire. Levels to which most people could not be bothered to even contemplate. This inherently puts The Aspirant at odds with the sleeping masses. The One must rise above while loving all else as his self. Hence the notion of the Bodhisattva - the one who forgoes the kingdom of heaven to stay behind and enlighten the masses. Because in reality every soul that inhabits this reality is an extension of ourselves. Even scientifically, break reality down to its smallest components and ask the question, "where do I end and my surroundings begin?" We are parts of a vast vibrating energy field where frequencies of energy bubble up into matter and form the particles that create experiential reality. We are all made of the same stuff, stemming from the same source. We are one - manifestations of one divine light.

For as Sprinsteen said, "Remember in the end, nobody wins unless everybody wins."

Because in REALITY - the realm of the truly real - we are all enlightened. Somewhere outside of spacetime we have all merged with the one.

But we're not there until we're all there.

But paradoxically we're all there. Here. Now.

And we can all access this here and now when we experience a timeless feeling of joy. Sometimes it's ephemeral, but when we step out of the riverflow of linear time and experience the loving joy of the here and now we experience the eternal Grace of God. We reunite with The One.

ANIMAL WANT POPS!!!!

ANIMAL ROCK YOUR WORLD!!!

Lazy Saturday

So we're having this nice lazy Saturday, hanging out, listening to music. I decided to put this old gem on, from 1987. I remember watching the video on the MTV with my cousins on the floor of my Grandparents' living room. Remember when the MTV played videos? Good times, good times.




Whatever happened to these few-hit wonders?

I would TOTALLY watch the news if it were like this!

See more funny videos at Funny or Die

The only thing we have to fear is...

...fear itself.

When fear comes upon a person, one should know that there is none else but Him. And even witchcraft. And if one sees that fear overcomes him, he should say that there is no such thing as chance, but God has given him an opportunity from Above, and he must contemplate and study the end of which one has been sent this fear. It appears that it is so that he will prevail and say, “there is none else besides Him.”

Baal HaSulam
About Fear That Sometimes Comes Upon a Person

This makes me proud to be an American!

Taco!

Man, this brings me back:




And this is cooler than watching The Wizard of Oz with the Dark Side of the Moon playing: Weapon of Choice Taco mashup.

Do you do?

Feel like I do.

Strange question. Followed by a stranger demand. Well, yes, Mr. Frampton, I do do. I am, therefore I do. You are. You should know. But I refuse to feel like you do. Piss off. I am that I am and I am not to feel like you do. I do what I am. I do from whence I am and therefore I feel like I do from all that I am and do. Are we clear? Good.

Moving on.

I like to ask strange questions. I also like to give strange answers. Life gets far too boring if we stick to the tried, tired and true pat banality of expectation. (Sorry, Pat, but you're banal.) He who dares not deviate is as dead as a dried douche. You can use that. Add it to your list of idiomatic sayings. Yes. You're welcome.

What really makes this illusion of time worth suffering? It's the expectation of what I can make with this moment. If all I am going to make is the same dry dust I kicked up yesterday than I may as well pack it in.

Right now I am resisting the impulse to turn on the AC. A small concession to novelty, but pleasant all the same. There's a very kind breeze gently licking my face from the open window. When the breeze stops I get the urge to shut the window and turn on the AC. But then comes the breeze. First she touches each leaf, turns each branch over, inspecting the flora, then she reaches in my window, peruses some papers on my desk, brushes my bangs away from my face, kisses my forehead and clears my eyes.

Ah the silent miracles in deviation. Frost took the road less traveled. But the roads diverge more often than you think. And if there is only one road, use the hands that God gave you to build your own.

Stuck in time

We get stuck in time, don't we?
When the month turns over I find myself still writing the previous one on the date. From the 1st through at least the 5th you'll see that I've crossed out or written over the number. It just happened earlier, as I sat down to hand-write a page.

Well I got used to writing a "6", and it took me a while to get over "5". Now I have to move to "7"?! What the frig?

I can't help but notice a cheap and easy metaphor for my life in all of this. Change is a bugger of a bitch. And no matter how deftly I wade through it, or how positively things turn out, it never fails to knock the shit out of me. At least for a little while. It's a kick right in the psyche's groin.

But life really requires the fortitude to successfully navigate these changes. Because as perfectly eternal our platonic forms remain, the experiential world is a tumult of passing scenes. As one gives way to the next, there is often a nostalgia for what passed, and trepidation for what's ahead. Eventually, that which I once feared becomes comfortable. It becomes "life". And soon that passes away toward a new version of the cycle.

So here comes another one of those transitional periods. A chapter has just passed and a new one is just beginning. Only this time I am acutely aware that I have to write the next chapter. I guess I can start by writing the correct date.

Darkest before the dawn...

There's the well-established idea that in order to grow, we must break out of our comfort zone, experience the bewildering clusterf*ck of the unknown, flounder, and eventually master our new surroundings. It's a primal experience. When our experiential puddle stagnates, the waters of the real become a rocking basin of stormy waterspouts, tsunamis, gales and monsoons. Eventually, when all settles our puddle has become a pond, maybe after the next torrent it will be a lake, maybe a sea or eventually an ocean.

The point is that we can never grow until we test ourselves beyond our current level of mastery. It's the hero's journey. It's the arc of every epic drama, every life well-lived. It's the Universe's way of giving us the chance to build something better, with our own hands.

It is because of my firm belief in this principle that I was so delighted to see this article. In it, the author puts forth the assertion that George W. Bush has helped America more than we would ever know, through kicking our puddle into one of the greatest shitstorms we've ever seen.

Maybe he's exactly what we needed. Maybe Bush's brand of frighteningly inept politicking has been just the right kind of sociocultural emetic to induce a true purge of our congested system, just the thing to finally snap us out of our lethargy. Hell, sometimes you gotta go deep into the darkness to realize just how much you need the light.

So thank you, George, for exemplifying and embodying everything that's wrong with the neocon agenda, for serving as the final death knell of the failed conservative movement, of a once-noble Republican Party that's run out of ideas and has turned bitter and nasty and paranoid.

The Universe moves in cycles. Light is nothing without a darkness to illuminate. It's the Yin and Yang spinning in the alchemical egg of existence.....