It’s a page from Ken Wilbur’s site. He rocks. A quote from him:

Ego, good? bad? In fact, at this point in history, the most radical, pervasive, and earth-shaking transformation would occur simply if everybody truly evolved to a mature, rational, and responsible ego, capable of freely participating in the open exchange of mutual self-esteem. There is the ‘edge of history.’ There would be a real New Age.

Here’s a link to that page on The Tao of Twitter:

 LWIII

I ain’t got nothing special against death. Being the philosophical type I understand there’s no life without it, and life is worth death. Or used to be. Now death is the beaniest! Who needs life anyway?

The reason I’m going off (like I told myself I wouldn’t do while blogging) is there’s this guy in my apartment building who hung a six-foot plastic Grim Reaper on his door for Halloween, in an ominous hooded black robe, bony fingers hanging out. Freakin perfect for Halloween, but now it’s Halloween all year. He won’t take it down. Every time I drag my fat sad carcass up the stairs here at home, when I get to the top, there looms Death.

Now, in the spirit of Santa one might imagine, the guy’s hung Christmas ornaments for earrings on the skull. Come the Fourth of July no doubt Death will wave Old Glory. Here we go Deaaath, here we go!

Pop culture is the vampire. It sucks the heart out of our brains.

Still breathing, sorry,

LWIII

A picture

Ran a hardware diagnostic program on my computer yesterday – FAIL. It said the hard drive is about to crap out any moment. Wondered why things been getting hinky.

Hoping that day isn’t today, but will need to replace the drive. Basically I’m wiping my computer’s brain. It will still work, there just won’t be any information in there, not even a blessed operating system. May take a while for a non-geek, at least in the computer sense, to get things running again (backup city here we go, do dah, do day) so if I miss a post it won’t be that I don’t have anything to say, but because I can’t say yet, because the ol’ computer is down.

Your friend in excuses,

LWIII

This effect is especially prevelant in computer work, amongst those called cubicle drones, doing things like renaming a bunch of files manually. The exact same keystrokes every time, with a slight variation at the end. I’ve been there and am there presently. Without the Ding Dong Effect, one could blaze through these tasks like a robot: Alt copy F2 enter select-all X plus paste and again! Easy, except you start getting confused if you do it fast a bunch in a row. It all becomes meaningless and you enter Ding Dong world.

A constant battle between will and wandering mind. Or you can go slow and take lots of breaks, which may not be an option in the workplace.

Do not boing the brain,

LWIII

Ha, thank goodness for humor. I just have to laugh. I’m such a fuck-up (excuse my British, if you don’t mind…sorry about the f-word and all but I am kinda peeved). It doesn’t bother me so much because Flash animation is not something I aspire to be good at, since that would be akin to a deep need to be a famous ballerina. But it was the culmination of a very large art project, and I had to do it. Or have to, actually, since I have to do it all over.

This time I’ll do it right and re-learn from a book exactly what and why I’m doing something, instead of trying a bunch of different stuff until something works. A long, laborious, and boring process, as well as not all that constructive, since I’ll forget it all soon enough, but not as long and boring as doing it thrice.

Plus it’s not impossible. If it was impossible I’d give it up, like I did being a novelist. Nope, it’s doable, unfortunately, so I have to go back and do it again.

The silver lining? If I hadn’t gone off on that fool’s errand, doomed from the start, I’d still be living in a pighole.

Oink,

LWIII

You see, I was in the middle of creating the Flash animation for my new logo. The Word Doctor, but we won’t mention him. As a Flash master, I totally suck. You need to be organized and meticulous, at least a partial left-brainer, someone who can remember lots of stuff at once – hold several thoughts in your mind simultaneously so that all your settings are correct when you change something. You can’t just dash madly into the middle of crap the way I do, trying to get it over with, and start fiddling around in there. It’s strictly an A, B, C, kind of thing.

I’m a one-thought guy. Plus I have problems with backwards and forwards. A time would come when I had to move an image forward on the timeline in order to sync up with the sound. So I would go to the timeline and move my doodle. Then I would start up the demo reel and by golly I’d gone the wrong way! I did that a lot. Was that the sound too soon, or the movement? Darn if I could remember, a lot of the time.

So anyway, there’s probably a way in Flash to preview a small section of one’s animation, with sound, instead of the whole thing, but as a Flash hater it’s my job to not go look stuff up – not to mention that the help section blows, of course. I had to watch the whole thing up to where my change was happening, when I needed to go make sure I didn’t screw up again. It’s running at 36 frames per second, and to make something hit the mark exactly, you have to nail it to the 36th of a second, or very close. Takes a lot of concentration.

As I got towards the end, this became very wearing. It’s a 90-second animation, which may seem short to someone who never tried Flash before, but man…over and over and over and over…and over! Lordy.

Nearing the last I would have to sit here and watch that darn thing for almost a minute and a half before the part I was fixing came up. By that time, often enough I daydreamed off and ended up missing the part I was supposed to check. So I’d have to play it over again, again. Literally thousands of times. I’ve been spending 12 hours a day on this thing for two weeks now. Good thing I ain’t got a life. Hope the neighbors have earplugs.

Finally I got fed up. What to do, what to do? I noticed some dust on my desk and rose and snagged a Kleenex and wiped it off. I always hated dusting – as one could ever tell when entering my apartment. But boy, dusting was heaven compared to sitting here and watching that animation again, with those hellish sounds re-percolating like borborygmus of Satan Himself in my tormented, sizzling brain pan.

So next time, I dusted some more, then some more again. What a relief not to watch that screen for the bajillionth time. And, hey, it was looking pretty good in here. You know, it’s been awhile since I polished my oaken battleship of a desk…. So eventually I busted out some years-old furniture polish. Did my desk and the mission-style antique lamp thereupon. Man, this is kinda nice! Smells good too.

Long story short, I’m still not done with the animation (upgraded to the CS4 production suite and now all the timing is off…oops!) but I live inside the most beautiful space my imagination could devise. It’s amazing, I swear. Every wooden surface gleams with an inward glow. No dust anywhere. I even used that polish with Q-Tips on the wooden model of a Fokker triplane on my desk. And to top it all off, and the very best of all, I got rid of the old crappy books that were overstuffing my bookshelves and spilling over into piles on shelves and my beside bureau. Ten bagsworth to The Bookworm in Boulder. My book collection is now available completely, and I know where each delicious volume sits in its undusty organized splendor. Used to be hidden under old skin particles and inside two layers of halfassed books on the shelves. I sure had some crap self-help.

What a relief to get rid of those old used-up thoughts! They were clogging my brain.

Freshie,

LWIII

(oh yeah, the point of all this – you never know when something that sucks real bad is really good. And you can sure get a lot of dusting done in a minute. Who knew?)

Anyway, had to get that off my chest.

Fyi,

LWIII

And it may be merely my hedonism, but art to me, almost by definition, includes a sense of exhilaration and enjoyment, a feeling – even if reversed somehow – of beauty. So modern art, both the confusing and the ugly kinds, creeps me out.

Maybe I have a fetish for meaning. Must…have…meaning….

One time I got to see, face to face unexpectedly, my favorite painting of all time, Van Gogh’s The Starry Night. The dream of a lifetime, something I never thought would happen, plus it was a suprise. I had no idea that that painting was in MoMA.

When we went there years ago, I was really excited, off to The Big Apple to see not only the greatest artists of our time, but most likely the greatest artists of all time, since these modern guys had all the past to build on…at least that was my theory.

We started on the opposite end of Starry Night (woe to my fate that made me turn right) and worked our way through the galleries. I already knew of course that modern art was generally weird, but had no idea it could be so totally incomprehensible. And I did expect a certain amount of beauty.

Hick hits the bigtime. Duh.

By the time we had wended our long, long, long way through all those galleries, my brain was about the size of a peanut: IQ, 8. Why? I kept asking, both to myself and aloud, as we passed all those leering mysteries. The one that finally did it for me was some penciled French scribbled on a brown paper bag under broken glass, saying, “To be viewed for six hours from a distance of six inches.” Oh, the cad! From intrigued to bemused to baffled to furious, my journey was inexorable, my fate an evil doom. Unfortunately I was sober.

So when I finally stood in person before the opus of my imagination, the painting I had dreamt on and spent so much time looking at in a book: my beloved Starry Night, I projectile vomited. Not actually, but I sure was done. Who cares about this shit? The poor dear girl who accompanied me on that trip kept assuring me that the reason these abominations were in the museum was because it was the first time it had ever been done. That was small consolation for me, in my bereaved and bitter state.

So imagine my shock when I first stood before a Jackson Pollock painting, in the Milwaukee Art Museum, later on. We were skating quickly through the modicum of modernists – having learned my lesson – when we came upon the glorious sight of a Pollock, a huge painting practically vibrating off the wall. Don’t recall which one it was, by name, but it was one of his drippings, kind of like this:

 Lavender Mist: 1954, Jackson Pollock

Since I’d only seen his paintings in books, I had always scoffed at Pollock as the squiggles guy or something. But when you stand right in front of one of those giant walls of color, it’s a whole different story. Those paintings are deep, not intellectually but visually. They stand out from the wall like a fat horizontal tone-dance. It’s as if it’s alive in there. – Almost like you can see beyond physicality into the innards of things. Nanoquantumvisiospectravision, freaking amazing. First time I ever saw into the spirit world.

Anyway, point was supposed to be that I saw the movie Pollock last night. Ed Harris was great. Watching him drip-paint, in imitation of the master, was a joy. Made me realize that one of the precious times the genius of a human being lived wholly inside art was when Jackson Pollock dripped in a pure dripping mood, involved in the moment like few people have ever been. Creating something alive.

Yay art!

LWIII

For a while I enjoyed my miniature fame as a sort of eyeball magician, the lone guy in our small circle who could make tears run out of his eyes whenever he wanted. But then, to my horror, I found it was becoming involuntary. Oh no! I started to tear up merely when I was talking to someone. O lordy, let it not be so. But it was so. I couldn’t stop it.

That was the beginning, and that ghost story has haunted me the rest of my life. Ever since then, whenever I speak feelingly about any subject to anyone, tears start to my eyes, and if I talk long enough and strong enough, they run down my face.

Eek! One reason I joined Scientology in my early twenties was my hope that they could cure this damnable curse. My dream was that they’d say, “Oh yeah, that’s XXX, all you have to do is YYY and it’ll ZZZ.” But no, no ideas, no name, and no cure. And all of my army of therapists (oh, okay, squad) were let in on the secret, and my other cults. Nobody had ever heard of such a complaint, or had a cure for it.

So I call it lachrymosia, for lack of a better, or an actual, word. Never underestimate the value of not crying when you’re talking to somebody, especially when you’re asking them out, or in a job interview, or manning up with your buddies about football or golf, or cracking wise, or trying not to make your interlocutor abashed and uneasy.

Waaaa,

LWIII

I am not a huge joiner of political causes or an activist about anything in particular, other than thinking about stuff, but I really want to get behind this, because climate change and taking care of the environment is so important.

What can someone like me, who hates politics and avoids activism like the plague, do about climate change? Of course there’s the obvious, create a smaller energy footprint my ownself, which I try to do.

There’s always haranguing people, but I avoid that. So all I can do is join the chorus.

 Save The World!

Climate change is real. We must act.

Bless us all,

LWIII