bouncing between pool ends, Brian decides to share a lane with me 'cause all the old folks have filled the other lanes, we laugh about it. he's a tour bus driver, for high-end groups like the Stones, Winton Marsalis, folks like that, use to live in Denver, around the time I was doing the Feyline shows for the Denver Post and the college paper, way back. good to share the lane with a fast swimmer. I have to crank a bit to keep up the pace, but definitely am getting stronger since I've been doing around 200 fly at the end of the 2500-yard workout. go into the Safeway to pick up drugs from the Pharmacy for Mom. can't stand these stores, like the new WalMart that has a minimum of 100 vid-surveillance cams, those big black hemispheres hanging from the corrugated ceiling, and the squat armored boxes, multiples, on poles all along the front of the building. makes me wanna take 'em out. or at least pull out my little digital cam and start taking pix. just to see what happens. and they smell. of commerce. the javelina head dangles on the barbed-wire fence-post, half-eaten. it's season, but it looks like a mountain lion kill.

6-inches of wet snow, starting last night, but by noon, the sun begins to drive it away rapidly. the normal view from the porch where the photo is taken is about 90 miles all the way to the San Francisco (Kachina) Peaks, the remains of a 16,000-plus-foot stratovolcano (now only 12,633 feet left after a catastrophic explosion before human habitation of the area. the Hopi Indians consider the peaks a holy place, the winter home of the kachina spirits and the source of rain clouds for crops. of course, you can't see them today. too many clouds

not something to expect on a public bench placed on a traffic island at the intersection of Ruth and Whipple in Prescott, Arizona. in case it's not clear, the quotation is History always repeats itself; the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. -- Karl Marx now, who could have put that there? not something expected in this ultra-conservative region. and it's been around for at least a year, if I recall correctly. possibly longer. maybe nobody knows who Karl Marx was, or maybe they think it only just that he be consigned to a now-peeling bench that is placed where no one would possibly sit.

in the context of facilitating a deeper understanding of human connection: sustainability, understanding of dynamic nature of, and moving in auspicious directions with it.

Sunny, Bella, Kadie and Fling.

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems, You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,) You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books, You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self. -- Walt Whitman

strong how reflexive Whitman is for my own praxis. this issue of being fed the secondary interpretations of lived experience in education versus finding the world through the primary apprehension of be-ing. but the role of the teacher is something else.

high water. seemed like Iceland there for a few days, gale rains straight from California, turning the yard of dark brown basalt soil to a soupy flow. rain barrel full many times over. dry washes overflowing (surprising neophyte Westerners), streets awash (pavement rapidly pounded to soaking pot-holes from cheap aggregate of soft volcanic ash from the cinder cones around San Francisco Peaks), then a day later, cloudless blue, and the normal total dryness in air, sky, and land. no end to the drought, though for the days of rain, those recent arrivals think it is now okay to plan ten new golf courses instead of two.

Dr. Donaldson performs a root canal on the four long roots of a molar, the one that was giving me so much trouble over the last eight months. low-grade infection had been irritating the nerves so this is the only way to go. his technique is incredibly focused and attentive: I spend the 90 minutes in the chair concentrating on my breathing and listening through bone to the sounds made by the different borers, rasps, probes, and sonic cleaners. wishing it would be possible to record. contact mike on forehead perhaps? have to have direct bone contact, though, no flesh. one could mount a small contact mike directly onto a tooth: noize!

speaking of modern, post-modern, along with avant-garde, and such terms... some very abstract musings:

I am wondering if there is a connection between the concept of being 'avant garde' or 'modern' with a basic concept of being: where confronting the unknown is a test of the embodied self (the full set of abilities to deal with the unknown). Certain kinds of people can deal with the unknown better than others. Fear is a definite factor, but so is basic psychic ability.

Of course there are many facets of the unknown, but it can be defined as the sensual/sensory apprehension of any previously un-experienced energy flow. For example, in a materialist/physical sense, someone with a strong body constitution is better able to confront the unknown (unpredictable enemy, new viral infection, can move further in order to 'find' the unknown more easily).

Those who confront the unknown are the primary source of information for those who do not. (In a hunting/gathering society, it was the hunters (of meat and of other substances) who determined the gross fate of the tribe as a collective. Those who could range beyond the known territory to ascertain the possibilities.

Those who avoid the unknown, who seek pre-defined (overtly socially defined) situations because of fear of the unknown rely on those who are able and willing to seek it out.

So, perhaps it is easy to slip into the paradigm that 'early adoption' is a sign of suitablilty for survival and strength of being. But technology is fundamentally NOT an unknown territory. It is a territory that presents us with sets of highly sophisticated/complicated socially pre-defined situations. So, early adoption might even be seen as a weakness for more and more overtly socialized and defined (read: safe) living conditions rather than any risk-taking behavior. Versus dealing with life in a more ad hoc and open(indeterminate) way. A dialectic example popped into mind -- that of the 'canned' weather of weather.com (and the 'weather channel' on US cable) versus the person who watches un-aided the local 180-degree sky for signs. What are the degrees of unknown in those two situations, and how does technology confront, (de)contextualize, reduce, amplify, modulate, or change survivability...

It is true that there are those who seize technological tools in order to 'safely' find or confront the unknown, to create previously unknown manifestations with energy from that chaotic unknown. I would label those people as avant garde. This is a fundamentally different activity than simply using the technology to traverse the pre-ordained territories, to participate as one-of-many (as we do here). People who are functioning this way would be 'conservative.' It takes an extra splurge of energy to be 'liberal.' Along with the real risk of being seen by others as being too strange (too unknown, unpredictable) to fit into their scheme of life, and thus the person too far ahead of the avant garde is seen to be, in retrospect, as 'being ahead of their time' -- that is, existing in a space where they are inscrutable to the surrounding conservative others... and seen to be traversing spaces which are feared by the others...

(these labels NOT connected to contemporary political usage, but more in their root meanings).

SO, modern, as a label is an attempt to position something in a strong, robust, lively, place, but it is basically only a weak socialized action which has no real substance, like post-modern which, sheesh, still relies on the SAME word, and seems to know nothing of the unknown anymore than it's predecessor.

(I don't use these Cartesian descriptors Lightly here, for the locative audience, but only because there isn't such good metaphoric language forms to circumscribe the space of discourse...)

This is a stretch of imagining, but I thought I'd send it out, especially on account of some of the off-list discussions I've been having lately...!

The revolution will not be televised! (that is, momentary life cannot be re-created or re-produced...)

The vacuum as an organizational phenomenon has the disturbing logical implication that the ancient dream of commanding the ultimate power of the universe just by thinking about it is a delusion, made so not by human frailty but by the very physical processes one is trying to understand. Ironically, nature abets this delusion. It can, and often does, happen that an experiment improved to reveal an ultimate cause reveals instead emergent universality of a nearby phase transition masquerading as one. This effect is unfortunately very likely to be occurring in the vacuum of space-time, for unstable renormalizability, one of its strangest attributes, is observed in tabletop experiments to emerge very generally near phase transitions. If it is indeed the case that the vacuum is characterized by a hierarchical cascade of universalities, then all of our allegedly fundamental knowledge about it is temporary, and destined to pass away in the future as experiments improve. -- R. B. Laughlin

pissing in the night, first the awareness of a full bladder, then the struggle into a wakefulness or forceful sleeping to ignore it all. or checking the air temperature in the stellar darkness. chilling. unzip the bag and squirm out, sandles on, turn around, open the door. skin is less sensitive to the cold with sleep-warmth stored up. intake breath with the brilliance of horizon-to-horizon density of stars. vision is possible. it's not totally dark. the Orion nebula clearly a nebula. planets almost shedding shadows on dark ground.

up in the morning with the sun cracking the southeast horizon. dense fog filling the entire valley to the south, covering the railroad line and floating the mountains far beyond on a silver sea. have a fast breakfast, loadup, and drive to the Cadiz-Soda Lake road, but there has been so much rain in the last week the road is flooded so instead retrace path to the old Route 66, paralleling the rail line east to Needles. stop at the BLM office and have a chat with Murl, a local with tremendous knowledge of the Mojave area. trade stories and show respective trilobite samples, mine not too bad, considering that I had little memory of the place and that I found outcrops that had not yet been worked over completely. thence on east, into the Arizona (Sonoran) desert with the Saguaro and Cholla cactus. each growing in specific and very distinct ranges. The Saguaro limited to south-facing rocky hill- and mountain-sides, never in the flats. the Cholla often in north-sloping gravel alluvium. as the local nursery-lady, working in the native flora department said to me -- "if it (a particular native plant) isn't growing somewhere, then it can't grow there..." without enough help to overcome the negative characteristics of the location, water, soil chemistry, Light, etc -- obvious, but profound at the same time...

the desert is green, some areas like a billiard table, wildflowers will be respendent later in March and April as the rainfall in the last month has already totaled more than the usual annual fall.

coulds race towards the highlands to find the winter storms. still in the lowlands, I trace a prickly pear and a Joshua tree in electron fullness.

in the process of re-tooling the site, catching fragments of the travelog from ages past it surfaces, that self-constraining cover over many events that did take place, but are not noted in the log. incidents that, if recounted from my viewpoint, might hurt, insult, or reveal something about an Other, or the Self.

make a rainy trip to Stockton to the Haggin Museum where Nancy has located a favorite painting, "Moose," painted by Albert Bierstadt, one of the Hudson River School's (German-born) shining stars. the museum turns out to be pretty interesting, quite a large collection of art, cultural objects, and historical items.

the history of an art form. agrilithography yields up such treasured pieces as Buxom Melons... 'nuf said.