had to laugh(!?) when stumbling onto this quote which leads off Charles Mackay's book Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, published in 1852. the book explores economic, political, and social scandals of his recent past -- which, without much alteration, are a decent mirror to see reflected the future of now.

Some in clandestine companies combine;
Erect new stocks to trade beyond the line;
With air and empty names beguile the town,
And raise new credits first, then cry 'em down;
Divide the empty nothing into shares,
And set the crowd together by the ears.
-- Daniel Defoe.

the beat-meisters of the high school marching band attempt to get their mojo on.

reverberatory, wet, raucous, humid, and somehow the same as it always was: a swimming pool.

late Monsoon storm rolls by Granite Mountain, seen from the deck.

hmmm, Solstice spent in a mega-church, The Heights Church or a church aspiring to be one. dot.com. which suggests the necessity for threading through the complex layering of cultural, social, and political detritus. a guy walks in ahead of us with an NRA tee-shirt on and a giant insulated travel-mug of coffee in hand.

Al always sits in the front and center of the large industrial sanctuary space. one row back from the front row. his eyesight is pretty bad, macular degeneration, and likewise, his hearing is attenuated to whatever narrow frequency band that his hearing aids provide.

I have my shit-kickers on, the dressiest items available for church at this point. can't find my Colorado School of Mines belt-buckle with the hand-tooled leather belt. the bronze buckle in the form of the school seal cast in a metallurgy class with an ancient prof, forgotten his name. proof of Western citizenship.

anyway, there on the stage -- one of those portable raised prefab affairs for concerts and political spectacles -- is a miked drum-set, a bass and amp, a Rhodes with vocalists mike, a set of congas (not timbales!), and a guitar on a stand. no podium, dais, but plenty of microphones. on either side, two very large video projection screens.

club scene? will there be a concert? the Rhodes is the most prominent object, at the front edge near the center of the stage. later the preacher uses it to as a place for his notes and Bible.

it's the eight o'clock service. Al tells me that there are usually around three hundred people at this, this first of four services. the 300? we are early.

as the service starts out, it's clear that I should have brought earplugs to attenuate the 100 db blast from the sound system.

somehow I can imagine doing a visual-sonic performance here. good sound and video system, focused audience, yeah, a good venue overall. more notes on this later.

well, two in one. it's Rod's birthday today and, it's Madeleine Karolin Dworak's birth day today at 00:40 AM as well. welcome dear sweet gal to this incarnation! everybody's doing fine, at least SMS tells so -- 54 cm, 4200 gm. here's a pic of Madeleine with big brother Fritz.

the sonic flow through the night is a subtle symphony.

Liberty International Airport. 0500. Stef yet again, graciously, gets up at an infernal hour (though not too very much earlier than his normal working hours) and runs me over to the airport. a very long day it is before I arrive by taxi to Al's place in Prescott. extremely bad weather in Chicago caused a couple hours' delay, but otherwise a routine vegetation in the bowels of the transportation network.

a short stop at the Magnusson-Morris home to catch up, have some final words with Ellen about the Sustainable Solutions web site, do a partial visual house inventory, repack my two full bags to be checked, and ready myself for the continuation of the voyage westward which begins at 0400 on Saturday morning. nine-eleven today.

with my Discraft freestyle disc. another event fifty years ago this year... ah, for a nice freestyle workout...

Another important event occurred in 1958. Bob and Jake Healy organized a frisbee game at their family's Fourth of July celebration in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, the Ball Yard at Eagle Harbor. This family's frisbee get-together became an annual event that grew in size and popularity each year. It became known as the IFT (International Frisbee Tournament). During the mid-sixties, the event's enthusiasm attracted the attention of Wham-O. The synergy that developed between Wham-O and the IFT started the modern era of disc sports. The formation of the IFA (International Frisbee Association) newsletter in 1968 was a direct result. The IFA newsletter spread information to frisbee enthusiasts in Canada and the USA. Frisbee players started to travel to the IFT in huge numbers. By 1970, the tournament became the Mecca for frisbee enthusiasts from all over the world. The event fostered the free exchanges of ideas on all types of frisbee play. This is where the idea of freestyle as a distinct type of disc play got disseminated to the frisbee community at large.

meeting life, being submerged in its flow remains only a goal. like breathing. where a developed consciousness of breathing becomes a stabilizing influence on the extremes of condition that impress the body and the soul as night turns to day and day following transitions to night.

by the same author of Where Are the Customers' Yachts?, Andrea passes this wacky niblet (below) along. the yacht question is incredibly germane in the situation these days when a vast swath of the population still takes hits on the market (is foolish to listen to dullards/brokers) and then calculates for a few seconds in some small cavity in brain why the brokers still have the yachts, but then passes over any clear thought in order to stay up with discussions about lipstick in the national election. sheesh.

Wacky had plenty of other stuff too. He had different shells that he had found himself when he visited the seashore. Some of them had been on the beach, but some of them he had got out of almost two feet of water, which meant that when he had reached down for them, he had nearly had to put his nose in the water, because you have to take those chances if you want to get something valuable. The snail shells made a sound quite like the ocean, and the clam shells were going to be useful to keep collar buttons in as soon as he got old enough to wear collar buttons.

He had only one college pennant, but it was of the Colorado School of Mines, which is a college where they teach you to dig. Mr. Wallaby said that was more than they taught you in other colleges, so he wouldn't need any other pennants. -- Fred Schwed, Jr., "Wacky, The Small Boy," 1939

head from Bedford by train into the Big Apple, through Grand Central, cross town to Port Authority, and catch a bus to Glen Ridge with all my stuff. but despite the material over-load, managed to make a few nice audio samples from deep in the city. along with a phone pic or so.

Bill and Andrea gave me the possibility to stay up at the ski house another couple days to try to get more writing done in the peaceful setting. between typing, I stacked a cord of wood, split some, and went through the woods in the immediate vicinity of the house trimming all reachable deadwood, getting it down to ground level where, in that climate, it will mulch in a couple years. there were several large, what are they called, conglomerations of trees fallen into each other, and I brought those down, as well as axing a few more trees that Bill picked out, trimming branches off of downed trees. no ATV use, everything by hand. such a nice location.