Too Late The Hero

That album was a revelation for me, by the way.

At any rate, this is about a dream I had early this morning. She was simply everything a heart could ever want, and she wanted me unashamedly.

Loved me.

I was about to tell her the things I learned, and show in the process that I was ready to love her as much and as deeply as she did me. We fit like we were machined by watchmakers. Effortless, free, intertwined, one heart, one life.

And then I woke up to an empty bed, an empty heart. She was every woman who loved me, and I let down. Because I didn’t get it.

Now I do of course, and it’s too late. But I do love you all unreservedly and infinitely.

Who are you?

Who were you?

You were a thousand different women.

Every one I have ever loved, ever known.

You were beautiful.

You loved me

Without question,

Without recrimination–

Without me leading you on to my heart

By subterfuge or goading.

You listened. You cared.

You wanted me. You really tried.

How did I lose you,

Who were willing to leap

For the brass ring, heart of gold?

I was blind, I was a fool.

I was distracted by the horizon, lust,

Or the next girl’s door.

You used to come back,

I always had another chance.

But the lesson remained unlearned.

I was too much pain, too much hassle

for too little return.

Too late the hero. Game over.

And at the end there is nothing here

But the dawn over marble head.

Enlightened, free and ready,

But you took to your heels

And headed for the hills.

As you should have

As anyone would.

Love is not to be wasted, after all.

I am sorry it took so long.

I am sorry for holding you,

Guilting you into place.

I just wish I could try one last time

And prove myself worthy. Finally.

I am awake now. I understand.

Too late the hero. The dream is over.

Reason’s Greetings!

If you know the origins of the holidays at this part of the year, then this is all old news to you. If you know that I am an atheist who was once a seeker of truth before the truth found me, you know what follows too. But do you know that I love you, even if you believe in fairy tales?

Celebrating the Winter Solstice goes back thousands of years. It pre-dates Christianity and Judaism. The current Christian overlays were grafted on by the Roman church to make Christianity palatable to the various northern European tribes which existed at the time, and the holiday itself was raised into its current prominence not by Christians but by Capitalists–19th century industry and the rise of corporate culture. This was *never* a Christian holiday. It’s old news. There is nothing in the NT or any of the Christian apocrypha which puts Jesus’ birth at the end of December. If Jesus existed at all, he would probably despise the celebratory aspects of it, depending on how much of an Essene he was. In any case, the gospel attributed to Mark makes no mention of Jesus’ birth because it was unimportant. It really was.

It would be okay if Christians realized how much of their belief was co-opted or outright stolen from Mithraism, how the birth of the god-man matching the Winter Solstice is about Sun worship (not Son–though the English word has a delightful connotation), and was clearly an agrarian celebration. But you all do not.

The only reason most of you believe this tall tale of someone called Jesus is because it was what you were born into. That sort of blind acceptance is toxic. The same sort of blind acceptance that hates atheists automatically, and without reason or cause. Or feels pity toward us. Though that is rather humorous to us. Almost as humorous as you thinking that this is a Christian holiday.

Tuesday Morning

I was sitting in my new apartment on a Tuesday morning, waiting for my couch to be delivered. I had no phone or cable connection (yet). After all, I’d just finished moving everything in on Saturday. My dad and I sat that afternoon resting on boxes drinking water and Coke before dropping the dying moving van off at U-Haul. We weren’t sure the fool thing would make the trip from Haverhill to Fall River, but it did.

So back to Tuesday. I stayed at my girlfriend’s place the night before. We talked about furniture shopping that day (hence the couch) and fooled around a bit. We worked in the same office so I asked her to tell our boss I would be late when she left that morning.

All I thought of that morning was how the movers and I were going to get that fucking couch through the narrow maze-like twists of the apartment building, which like many buildings in Fall River was a converted mill.

I was committed. I was fixated. I’d never bought an actual couch before.

Maybe if the feet were removable we could slide the couch down the carpeted main corridor, stand it on end and wiggle it past the worst of the twists. Then squeeze through the apartment door, sli-i-i-de it down the equally weird and narrow main hallway in the apartment, then we were home free.

While this was happening, while I obsessed over how that damned couch was getting into my apartment, American Airlines Flight 11 flew out of an impossibly clear morning sky and slammed into the north tower of the World Trade Center. The defining moment of the new century was exploding horrifically into being, and I had a couch coming.

Lacking a working TV and phone, I had no idea what was happening. I turned on Howard Stern while making the 40 minute commute into work and heard him talk about a plane crashing into the World Trade Center. No one mentioned it was a jet–let alone a 767 fresh out of Logan with a belly-full of jet fuel. So I thought it was a small plane that punched into the tower and left a hole.

That sky was so clear! Ten years later, I can still picture driving up 495 and noting the clear clear blue. I had a new-ish car, a new apartment, and another day of work ahead. The roads were empty, but that wasn’t remarkable. I was within the window of time when traffic hit a lull all the way up route 44 to 495 to 95 to route 1.

I got to work and everyone was piled in the conference room around the TV. Nothing but smoke all over the Manhattan skyline. By the time I’d gotten there it was all over. Well thank goodness for instant replay huh?

A Boeing 767 is a rather large plane. Each of the twin towers dwarfed the planes which destroyed them. The damage was sufficient to eventually bring both towers down. Now I know over the years there’s been a lot made of possible conspiracies regarding the events of September 11, 2001. The Twin Towers were a unique design, and a perfect storm of circumstances owing to the amount of fuel on-board, the height at which they hit and that unique design caused them to drop as they did when they did. The Pentagon is all reinforced concrete. Like Pearl Harbor, like JFK, there are enough holes both real and perceived to hang a conspiracy tale however tenuous.

I do not believe any of it. Nevertheless, the real impact of September 11th is that America is not the safe hermetically sealed place we thought it was the day before. My dad hit the nail on the head that day when he said that this was payback for all the bullshit we’ve been involved with since the end of World War II. Including our support of Israel. I have never been a supporter of Israel myself, mainly because of the terrorist tactics of Menachem Begin and Moshe Dayan and the others who fought to create that state. I still feel that way, but I understand why they did what they did. Our support of that state, right or wrong, was one of the stated reasons for Al Qaeda’s war against us. And it was proven true by the last ten years of unremitting and unfocused aggression by our military and the CIA. That asshole man-child George W. Bush went from clown-in-chief to cowboy-in-chief and wrapped us all in god and glory at the expense of so many American kids and Iraqi innocents.

Which of course leads me, finally, to the real thing we saw that day. A bunch of religious zealots supported by a regime we prop up with our oil addiction killed themselves and three thousand innocent people for their fucking religion. That’s what motivated those fruitcakes that morning. It served as a wakeup call about what religion does, and our reaction to it also shows what religion does. Poison. All of it.

I miss that blue sky. I miss that innocent morning and that lovely little apartment I could not afford and the world I lived in the day before. This is a colder, darker place. Our innocence is gone, America is not the good country we were all taught it was, the religions we cling to are killing us as quickly as our rampant use of oil is killing our environment. We can never go back, and we may not survive. Nor may we want to survive in the world those Saudi assholes and that Texas buffoon gave us that day.

Existential Interlude

So walking around early this afternoon, I felt really depressed and lonely. Nothing new here kiddies, I think my stupid ego turns me into a hermit–who wants to be with such an opinionated weird creepy prick?

Not so many as you’d think, apparently. The girl I was seeing for a few months at the end of last year stopped taking my calls in February. Nice way to send the hint along, I guess. So ever since, it’s been non-fucking-existent in that department. Nothing makes you less desirable than rejection, ain’t it the troof. Others show little interest in little ol’ me. FUCK.

So that’s brooded through my head. And, I am an outsider at my work. Generationally, et al. Oh, and a certain crush I had there (foolish really, but I wrote poetry about her. It’s in the third book) is seeing one of my bosses. FUCKETY FUCK.

Stupid stupid shit. This is what goes mulling through my head–unless I fill it with Farscape and whatever diversions the innernets have on tap. Occasionally, you see, it backs up into a green green pile of sewage at my feet.

“Get help bwah,” you might say. “Get a prescription for some happy happy joy joys.”

On the first count, I did the therapy route. After all those years, I still think a hooker would be more useful. And cost-effective. As for the latter, I tried the happy pills too. Years back. They attenuated life. Which was fine for a time, but the sleep was awful, requiring more drugs. Those gave me bloody awful dreams. Literally bloody. No thanks.

One fringe benefit of that therapy–something laid on me in passing almost 13 years ago–was “Cognitive Therapy.” Basically, slowing down and observing how your mind works. How it snaps into certain mental frames. Tiring but useful. Although it didn’t become such until the Zen years. Ah. Thich Nhat Hanh and mindfulness. The two dovetail nicely.

So in that walking interlude, when mind rumbles through its incessant half-thought and monologue–though sometimes it’s dialogue too, only the voices are both mine and it passes the seconds okay enough (fuck you, you do it too)–I felt this tremendous sadness! UN-fucking-LOVED. Less than nothing.

(Come back to the present moment, the breath, the wind. There is nothing but that. Nothing (that) matters.)

I would detail the contents of what snapped me back into sanity, but I’ve poured it out here before, and in other places too. If you know Zen, if you know science, if you know, You’ll not only understand, but you’ll wonder why I let the stupid shit hang over me.

Well, it was a Wednesday.

Love to you all. Endlessly.

Mercury Aura Pro for the 2010 Macbook Air – An appreciation of both.

One morning some years ago, I sat in a coffee shop in town and poked out a screed about what was up that day, which I re-read to re-fresh. I got some nookie earlier that morning, apparently–nice to hear that that used to happen to me sometimes. But I was also going on about not having internet access at home and hitting up the various wireless hotspots in the Old Pueblo to bumble around online when I wasn’t at work or trying to sleep. Which led me to talking about tha few-chaaah! ”The Cloud” is a big deal right now, but has been a long time coming. I am not going to claim prescience or anything like that. I will simply appreciate the hell out of this Mercury Aura Pro.

In October 2010, Apple did a refresh of the fabulous Macbook Air into two models: A 13-inch like the original and, most excitingly for me, an 11-inch model–the portability I always needed. Also, SSD was not merely an option but was standard on these foxes. Plus, the prices were much more realistic. Small and light too. Two annoyances typical of Apple: the RAM was soldered directly onto the motherboard (no upgrade path possible) and the SSD was a non-standard design, though it was removable. Plus they used these funny Pentalobe screws to fix the bottom plate to the machine. Clearly upgradability (and thus longevity) was not in Apple’s design philosophy anymore.

No matter. I obsessed over getting one of these, especially the little 11-inch. No question I was going to get that. I went for the $999 base model (1.4 GHz CPU, 2 GB RAM, 64 GB SSD) knowing that the 64 GB storage was going to be a problem, but only a small one as long as I kept a 2 TB drive handy and looked seriously at online storage, which by now was improving in availability and options. I’d already spent eight months experimenting with the iPad as a computer replacement (no dice), and really wanted a real frickin keyboard again. And not to have to deal with iOS on a day-to-day basis for all my computing needs.

Not too long later, Other World Computing came up with a solution: The Mercury Aura Pro. They’d come up with a line of SSDs exactly like the ones in the new Macbook Airs, only much higher capacity. The low-end was 180 GB–slightly more, mind you, than my black Macbook Marlena‘s hard drive, but much faster in terms of access. Just lovely! Expensive as hell, but worth the bother if you really need/want the space. Almost six months into my sojourn with this Macbook Air, I routinely maxed out the storage thanks to iTunes. I kept an eye on the Aura Pros though. The 180 GB model was my target, if only because that would bring this computer more into line with what I had with Marlena. Plus I could swing the $400-plus price tag if I was really careful, but no more than that.

So I placed the order yesterday (Friday) and put in for Saturday delivery since the price on the 180 model had dropped by about $60 from what it was back in January. It showed up this morning. Took me longer to get it home than it did to install it. OWC was kind enough to include in the box the two screwdrivers needed to perform the install: A Torx for the screw that holds the SSD in place in the computer and a Pentalobe to get at the ten screws holding the bottom plate in place. Those little bastards were a pain, but once you got them off, the plate just popped right out. If you’ve ever looked at tear-downs of this model of computer, it’s mostly battery inside. I took a couple of pictures I’ll try to include here. Like I said, it took longer to get the thing home than it did to get the drive in, even with the tiny little screws and the funny screwdriver.

Performance tests of this drive are just a Google search away if you’re curious. I am not writing this as a review of this SSD anyway as such is not necessary. I am writing this as an appreciation. In terms of speed, the SSD is an obvious win over any hard drive. The 2010 Macbook Air has the fastest boot time I have ever seen in a computer–even counting the DOS days. The OWC upgrade doesn’t improve upon that, but it’s also no slouch. This is still as peppy as it was, only now it has some lebensraum! The $400-plus price tag might give an indication of why Apple did not add substantial storage to these computers. The size and the apparently underpowered CPU have been criticized by various haters out there, but this was a pretty brisk seller for Apple when it came out so the compromise was worthwhile.

What it means to me though is that I can hold on to this computer for a long time–which you might say I’d have to in order to justify dropping a hunk of change into this little honey. I bought this originally with the idea that I could upgrade to a 13 inch Macbook Pro next year while at the same time retiring my black Macbook Marlena (if Mom ends up finally buying a new computer at that point), maybe selling both to underwrite the upgrade. I don’t hold on to old tech anymore out of sentiment. If it’s not useful, out it goes.

As I’ve been using this computer though, and keeping a weather eye on the developments with Chrome OS, I realize that this computer is damn near perfect for what I need right now and for the forseeable–even more so than Marlena was. It’s lighter, smaller, and in some ways faster than that computer–though not really up to resource-heavy tasks given the slower CPU. My computer use right now is practically at thin-client level. I use this to watch TV shows and movies with Hulu and Netflix (and iTunes). I also use it to sync my phone and drop in the occasional audiobook. I also use it to write, and am trying to increase that usage wherever possible. With Zoho Writer out there (at the moment more feature-rich than Google Docs), I don’t really need a heavy-duty computer for writing, trolling websites–I mean research–or for ”multimedia,” to use an outdated word. I don’t game and if I do it’s on my iPhone, so I don’t need the latest and the fastest. Besides, I’m tired of heating up a room with my computer.

The Chromebooks look interesting, and if one can make a few habit changes would be viable for most computer use. I still believe that the Chrome OS will make a far superior tablet OS to all the alternatives out there right now, including Android, once web designers make the distinction between mobile and touch (and stop using fucking Flash!). Inertia and habit are the main reasons why anyone would want a physical keyboard at this point, including me. The keyboard/pointer paradigm of human-computer interface is clunky but no one has come up with a truly compelling alternative. The iPhone OS and what we’re seeing so far from ”Windows 8″ are really innovative ideas, but the iPhone OS is a powerful smartphone operating system–not meant for heavy lifting–and ”Windows 8″ is an intriguing idea grafted on top of the biggest pile of baggage outside an ex-girlfriend’s head, the MS Windows OS.

So what I’m getting at is that there aren’t many options on the horizon for your forward-thinking tappity-tapper here. As I said, I’m intrigued by the Chromebooks–even if Google didn’t send a CR-48 to yours truly when I really REALLY could have used one. Damn you all. However, if the Chromebooks were about the size and heft of this very Macbook Air–and maybe had a little more generous SSD inside (16 gigs? Really? Not everything is in the cloud yet Google…), I would scoop up one lickety-frickin-split. And love it. Each time I think about it though, I realize I’ve got it pretty good with this little Macbook Air. And the Mercury Aura Pro has made it even better.

Good Looking out OWC. Good looking out.

Twenty Years On

It’s been hard to write lately. Bit of a drought. Sitting in the car listening to an audiobook, pondering an impossibly blue sky.

It’s been twenty years exactly since my last cross-country drive. Phoenix to Peterborough in just under three days. Me in a little white Corolla getting knocked around by passing semis, seeing the snow-capped mountains up north, Meteor Crater (up close it’s no different from any other great hole in the ground), the rounded contours of New Mexico’s sandstone cliffs, Texas Texas Texas.

Oklahoma smelled like cowshit from the Texas border to Missouri. This was all in the days before GPS and Google Maps. I had a AAA triptych, as it was called, and less than $300 to my name–and that was borrowed from Mom to make the trip home.

Home. I spent half my life to that point in New Hampshire, and it never felt like home. I had idealized Phoenix as my long-lost belonging place. Then I moved back there. Like most places made of “developments,” carved out of the earth and pre-washed with strip-mall bonhomie to pretend it was there all along and not simply set up to exchange cash for the fiction we call existence (fuck you, I’m on a roll here), Phoenix is a soulless city. It’s all too new, and too obvious in its pretense of having an identity. Tucson has more soul– more character. Or maybe it’s that the street names don’t stay consistent. It was cobbled together like Boston and New York. Not a rigid plan like Phoenix.

Anyway, it was not home. Neither was Peterborough. Or Tucson. Or maybe they all are, since they each feel like putting on a well-worn pair of sneakers, or an old jacket.

Home like love and self is just an illusion. A state of mind, just like everything else.

I do miss that ride though. Twenty years on, riding into uncertain certainty, starting again, nothing but the endless road ahead. I do miss that ride.

Writing The Storm Out (no waiting for the fallout)

M​y first memories are of reading in front of some neighbors. I was maybe two or three.

All this context was given to me later. What I see in this dim recollection is a coffee table in front of me at near-shoulder level and two older people sitting on a couch smiling at me. I am holding something or looking at something in front of me (on the table?), and reading it.

T​he legend goes that I started reading when I was two.  T​his was apparently me doing the show for a couple of people, probably in Pratt, KS. And that is it as far as memories go. Beyond that are impressions perhaps–nothing substantial or verifiable.

S​o I have no memories of being the child of two, well, kids really (both my parents were 22 when I was born), one of whom came from a Catholic family who apparently weren’t too comfortable with their daughter getting knocked up by a Marine without being married. I have no memories of being shunned, apparently, by both sets of grandparents early on–apparently the embarrassment was complete. Who the fuck knows?

W​hat brings this up is a random message from my Dad the other night, recollecting with some venom how alone the three of us were–me, Mom and Dad. My sister came two years later, and had the good fortune I suppose of not being the unannounced guest at her parents’ wedding. See, Mom cut a slender figure as a teenager/young woman. Her wedding pictures show her with a lovely little bump in her sheer wedding dress.

I’m t​hat bump. Pleezter meetcher. 

I​ have wondered vaguely over the past few days why any of this matters to me. It clearly does, cuz here I am tappity tapping.  I​ grew up in a house of discomfort, of hidden tensions. This house was the model upon which my conception of relationships was forged and tempered, and boy is it ugly. No wonder I never spawned offspring.

Guns, blood, shattered glass and reading for the neighbors. My pre-kindergarten memories.

W​hy do I hang on to this old shit? That’s the real question of the hour.  I​ am 42 years old. The King died at 42 by the way. Anyhoo, I am old enough now to take responsibility for me and my actions. And I do of course without question. I am a grown-ass man after all. But some of my actions sometimes require after-the-fact deconstruction and understanding. Why am I such a petulant twat at times? Why do I want love so badly but push it away when offered? Why do I indulge in all the proven stupidities I do, even after all the trouble and pain it’s caused?

Why can’t I just let go and live, and continue to do so without such navel-gazing? I understand how best to go through life without being brooding or depressive. Figured that one out years ago. Now it’s just reminding myself everyday that dead car batteries and lonely moments and bills and such and all are ephemeral.

What the hell will any of this matter in a hundred years? And why must I remind myself that that is a happy thought? Happiest one of all in fact. Why stress and strain through your life to “make something” when all you will ever make, my friends, is a name etched in granite above your mouldering form? Unless of course you have the good taste and sense to have your body burned and your ashes scattered back to the world.

The point, sez Zen, is that there is no point. We made all this shit up that’s important to us, and that’s all well and good. But when this made-up shit begs to be taken so seriously you give yourself a heart attack, something has gone hilariously wrong.

Maybe you got something out of this interlude, maybe not. In any case, I thank you for coming this far with me. Write it out. Better than trying to drink it away.

I love you too.

 

Ah, finally…

So anyway, the big-ish news this last week has been the CR-48 Chrome OS laptop. Google had (and still has) a sign-in program where you can sign up to be considered for their pilot of the Chrome OS. This little black laptop is bare-bones (a proof of concept basically), but it is a cutie patootie, reminding me of my MacBook, er, which is not mine at the moment. Ahem.

Anyhoo, yours truly wants at this golden ticket something fierce. Not the least because I don’t have an actual primary computer at this time. But also because I want to try this OS out, and really really get into a web-based existence. They had a little contest today I found out about at lunch. So I entered the following screed by typing it into my iPhone.

Google, goddammit, I want one of these machines. I pecked this in with my own fat fingers using my iPhone. MY IPHONE FER CRISSAKES! I’m your man! Come on!!

Anyway, read and enjoy.

The web has promised platform neutrality since the coming of Java in the mid nineties. Since then we have seen this convergence in fits and starts with ground-up movements like mp3′s displacement of physical media for music–assisted by the development of the iPod but succeeding in spite of that device and its limitations.

The web has developed quickly from a curiosity to a source of entertainment and learning to someplace where everyday work can get done, without your hardware getting in the way (unless you’re mashing your fingers into an iPhone virtual keyboard!).

We have also seen examples of “server-side computing,” and its strong advantages and disadvantages. However, the greatest promise of this concept is now manifest in the Chrome OS from Google and its centering on the web and a browser as the focus.

Hardware can finally be irrelevant, as it was supposed to be. As it was promised to us so long ago. Our experience of the internet and its full promise can be delivered seamlessly, without any one company or platform coloring that experience. And it’s midwifed by the plain search engine that became its own verb.

Ah, finally.

Artificial God, the Red Thread and the Unwoven Rainbow

For the past few days, I’ve been pondering this idea of an Artificial God. To give a bit of background, this idea comes from a speech by Douglas Adams in 1998. Here is the link to a transcript.

The basic idea is that some concepts, though clear products of the imagination, and as not-real as, well, money, have a definite impact and a definite meaning to us. Money, and the entire system of transacting these pieces of paper–or better, sliding a plastic card through a little device–forms the very real underpinnings of our civilization. So much so that we’d doubtless drop back 100,000 years if the whole system collapsed. Having it in place though has allowed unprecedented advances in art, technology and science to happen. Shakespeare, Heinlein, Apollo 11, the Empire State Building, John Ford, Richard Dawkins, the Beatles, all these people and their works, and so many tangible things exist because at its heart, our civilization depends on a largely imaginary concept, and evolved from that and around that. It allowed the species to delve into philosophy, science, music, learning, in a way impossible otherwise.

The same can be said for God. God as a concept. God as principal creator as envisioned by a species of tool-makers and creators. Such a concept is strictly a product of the human imagination–make no mistake, Douglas Adams was very much an atheist and found the other way of thinking a bit silly. But he saw the need some may have for such crutches, hence his extemporaneous speech.

This comes to mind as I read a book by Becky Garrison called Jesus Died For This? To be certain, I am not her target audience–her disparaging references to the New Atheists are eye-rollingly typical of Christians. Also, her interludes of trying to commune with the spirits of St. Brigid and St. Kevin while travelling in Ireland do read like flights of fancy. However, she is trying to find something authentic and, well, “real” to her–the “risen Christ.”

I can identify with this. I did the same thing for a short time some years back. I was never a born-again Christian. That would be impossible because I don’t believe in the resurrection as an actual historic event. I believe my description of such a thing would be “highly fucking unlikely.” I cannot be a Christian for that reason right there. Also I cannot countenance–let alone actually believe–in the notion of Biblical literalness or (chuckle) infallibility. That I would describe as “bullshit.”

I do love the English language.

So how could I possibly identify with an avowed Christian like that?

Why, the search for authenticity of course. The search for capital-tee Truth. For Garrison it is the search for the “risen Christ.” For me it was just trying to find a way to reconcile my Catholic upbringing with my travels through Zen and the findings of science. The Truth was there somewhere.

Perhaps it was in a more metaphoric reading of the Bible. A reading filtered through human nature and Buddhist thought. The connections between Jesus and Buddha were explored by Thich Nhat Hanh, and I commend you to his teachings.

Trouble with that was, of course, the schitzophrenic nature of God in the old versus new testaments. Not to mention the contradictory views of Jesus in the four gospels. I am not talking Rashomon-style point-of-view errors, I am talking about the sort of depictions that can only come from four separate traditions based on one story, what we call the Gospel of Mark.

So suffice to say there was some serious cherry-picking done by yours truly. In fact, except for Ecclesiastes and Mark (and maybe Romans), the rest of the Bible is completely useless, even as a metaphoric guide to human behavior. Complete and utter shit.

But of course, what all that inspired over the last two millennia! Ah yes, the art and music! Yeah, not all bad, and should each and all be considered on their own merits, and owing to that other imaginary concept, money. Excess time and excess money and someone’s devotion can produce amazing art.

And that is the Truth right there, isn’t it? Devotion. Inspiration. Even the word speaks of the “cool breeze” of the Jesus Sutras. Spiritus Sanctus. Sacred breath, sacred wind. (watch which hole it’s coming out!) Inspiration is the heart of creativity, whatever that inspiration might be. Some of my material in Turboblues comes from the time when I took inspiration from my cherry-picked vision of God. Even at my most starry-eyed though, I knew it was the product of a powerful (albeit sleep-deprived) imagination. God as love, love as the product of devotion, or through the power of sex, sex as the timeless yet long-lost union with the divine. Ikkyu called his brand of lust-infused Zen “red-thread.” It’s the less imaginative, the less daring, the simple-minded, who conflate lust with something bad. Lust is what it is. Used well, it can bring you to quite tangible, almost divine bliss. Used poorly, well, you might understand Hell as it truly is. Hell’s not a place, though I have been there through misused lust.

In any case, that way of thinking, that circular and circuitous route to and through an imaginary god, had to stop. It was the product of a powerful imagination and a lot of thinking. And lack of sleep.

So bring this back to Artificial God, why doncha!

I’m getting there.

Man has a peculiar ability to create, beyond mere problem solving. He creates tools and thinks of processes to solve problems, like how to kill food more efficiently, or to stay warm, or to eat better. He sees the lightning, hears the thunder, feels the wind and the sun, and comprehends this according to terms he understands: Hierarchy. Pecking order. Leadership. Something that makes such mighty forces must be an entity greater than himself. And these things must be “made” by someone, else how did they come to be?

So he combines all this into something he calls, well, one of the billion names of God. Every tribe had its personal name for this being, and make no mistake, it was a human being, only amplified a thousandfold. Fallible, emotional, petty, just like humans. They create totems, symbols, icons, to signify their god, and invent amazing stories to entertain themselves, because this creation of theirs inspired them. In time, as generations picked up, made sense and made use of the concept, it became an institution which was itself picked up and used and understood in differing ways.

Fast-forward through the ages, and God becomes less real, more idealized. More abstract. Terms like infinite, omnipotent, omnipresent and omnibenevolent become used to describe the god we call God. The world of phenomenon known to the ancients gives way to a world described by something called the Scientific Method. The world this method describes is one of simple processes which, when writ large and repeatedly, shows enormous complexity. Even to the point where a simpler mind would intuit a designer. The ancient concepts die hard, and the world as it truly exists (like, say, at the quantum level) is one that is foreign to our thinking.

Douglas Adams posited an Artificial God as a way of inspiring creative thought while something enormously better becomes more well known. Richard Dawkins wrote a wonderful book on that something better called Unweaving The Rainbow, and I fully commend that book to you as well.

Unconsciously, those who search for a Theory of Everything follow the same path to the divine. Their search may one day bear fruit, and it may not. The Artificial God of their understanding inspires them to push back the darkness, but it is definitely an artifice, and they do not pretend otherwise.

The god of my understanding was always an artificial one and try as I might, I could not pretend otherwise either. But I do love the work I got out of it.

Adventures In Ordinary Time

That’s been the name of this latest project of mine, and it appears it will remain so unless a better title materializes.

In essence, it’s me trying to express the sense of wonder that the universe contains, and how very close it is to all of us every day. Plus I get to reconcile that mystic sense of wonder and interconnectedness with the mental phenomenon it really is. Ain’t nothing supernatural here babies. Super and Natural, but nothing that can’t be explained by simple chemistry and physics.

All of chemistry happens along the electron shells. That little tidbit I picked up years ago in my various readings. So what that means is that everything of consequence around us, everything to which we attach labels in order to lessen the confusion, it’s all just agglomerations of atoms of various sizes joined by their electrons. No design to it, it’s all just how shit falls together.

Except for the shit we design deliberately of course.

Anyway, that’s that. Last night’s drive home from town was a hell-ride. About as bad as I’ve seen it. Houghton, the road I take out of town, becomes awash with rivers and rapids of water this time of year. Just crazy.

Also, I have never been so alone among people as I have been here in Tucson. No one am I really close to, and it seems no one wants to be close to me. Forgive the poor-pitiful-me, but I wanted to get this out without it devolving into self-defensive contempt. Which is what I feel right now. And any equanimity I can generate is what I’d rather feel.

So there you have it.