THEY Got Blisters on Their Fingers!

More about Rodrigo y Gabriela

I Wanted to Write

I do watch BBC while getting ready and when I get home. But it leaves me with the same thought -- why can't people just get along? Pakistan you have a power struggle and people die, the Middle East where a lot of it is, and let's face it, dogmatic principles of something that may entirely be a product of the human need to find meaning but how on EARTH does that entail taking another human life?
Okay, I don't want to sound holier than thou and I perhaps could think of a few people I would have done away with if I were Grand High Poobah Ruler of the Universe. But the point remains, how much of it is unnecessary. And it makes me sad to think of the kind of place I will bring another life into.

There is so much beauty in the world, so many things to see and understand, and even beauty created by men. Van Gogh, Da Vinci, Mozart, Neruda, the piano, zeniths of greatness, the ability to change the course of history...but still, I can't help be a cynic sometimes.

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I want to write but am lost as to what. I need to find something on to focus, to take me away from waiting for the phone to ring from this chap who runs a fund in India, yeah...still looking for a job.

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It's turning cold again in the City, I can hear the wind making that quiet hissing between the now brown and orange leaves. I love walking down the cement after a rain at this time of the year. The rain makes the leaves stick to the pavement and in the morning they are blow away by the maintenance crews but the dust imprint of the leaves still lingers, like so many brown chalk outlines.
The lights are coming up, the thin naked trees near the place I get breakfast, the corner of 57th and 6th, have a string of lights that look a bit comical at night, trying to cover themselves up. The lobby has a beautiful Christmas tree, several feet tall and all decked out for the Holidays. People walk past on their way home, arms with shopping bags or cradling Christmas themed Starbucks cinnamon lattes. The huge crystal light is up on 5th avenue and I can see it from the office window.
I was in London this time last year. Piccadilly Circus had those garish lights up and people seemed happy near the Troccodero.
I have to go shopping for my family and list ranges from flip-flops from Gap to Splenda to a laptop.

I find it hard to sit in silence and to just be. Even then I am thinking about what to do to occupy myself. It's the silences in my head that I try and stave off. I wonder why, what's hidden behind the chatter that goes on in there.

(a big smile)

BBC America is advertising the shows I used to watch on my couch in London. London was fun after all despite all the confusion. I just wish I had known that then. I had an absolutely brilliant time, even when I was sitting and sulking on the couch, Bobo sharing the sulk.

Oh dear, an end of the year post in the making? Time to take stock and all that?

If I had to think of five things to sum up the year, the first five, the Short One, moving, confusion, my folks, engagement.
I suspect the second and third and inter-related

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So many words and nothing said. What a waste

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How much is left to chance? Why do we try and wrest control from (Fate)? Everything is an accident, a happy chance. From conception to the moment of death, precious few instances are truly under our control.
People try and dictate how you should live your life, create an illusion of control to create some sense of order and direction. But in the end, perhaps it all is a question of chance. A chance meeting, being at the right place at the serendipitous moment, the right words said, the right train missed, the fortunate delay, all of them causing events way beyond our control, too many variable to know them all.
The only thing we DO control is how we react, how we recover when we stumble and fall, and how we let things affect us. But perhaps that's all we need?

And Something Scary/Wonderful/Haunting/Happy/Used/Tired/Mad/Gleeful...

www.wefeelfine.org

Something Brilliant

Oh. My. God.

Read more about him here

Pictures

How Would You Describe This?

http://sanderplug.com/projects/39/chocoladepaashaas2.mov

Ignore Last Post

I figure it was just a bad case of the blues. Am back now. And to prove it, here's something randome from the Big Bag of Random Crap or the Internets

Dinner was fine, over her, Done with it

But if I had felt strongly about it, would have written more. Am right now feeling depressed. No, this isn't the oh people aren't writing in with job offers kind or there are millions of homeless people kind.
It's ...at least then I could have given a reason. This is just this overwhelming blahness that sucks away everything and you dont feel like moving a muscle and deep deep breaths far apart because every time you move, it disturbs things inside and I dont know how to fix it, no one has ever fixed it and I don't know what to do. I don't know how to snap myself out of it.
I lie back and I'm swimming my own head and I don't know what I'm thinking about because its blotted about and all I can do is focus on how I feel and I can't seem to distract myself long enough for it to pass and its...exhausting, not being able to do anything, feel this empty sucking inside and I see how much it frustrates the Short one because she wants to help and wants to know why I feel like things but even I don't know man! I don't know anything and I don't know why or how or what do about it.

I know I'm going to get out of bed, I'm going to smoke and hopefully drag myself out of the house to buy groceries and cook just to do something. And hopefully not mechanically but with some sort of feeling.

I'm scared I'll never meet anyone with the patience to deal with it. It's unfair I suppose but I just feel depressed right now and I don't know how to fix it and it's been the first time I said on the phone that it's perhaps best if I go ...and I've never said that but I can see the miscomprehension of how i feel and the frustration of ineffectuality that is no ones fault, least of all, hers.

And I suppose it isn't fair to have any one else deal with this so I guess I should try and fix it. On my own. Ugh

I wish I could describe how it feels, saying this like swimming in my head make sense to me instantly and I know immediately how I feel but I don't know how to describe it, I don;t know how to describe why I feel sad without reason. I just do. And I know I will soon snap out of it but it still worries me because I know what happens if it doesn't go, if it does stay.


Okay, do this by steps. Get out of bed, feet firmly on the floor. Hands on either side of legs and push and stand up. Listen to music while smoking. Shave.
Decide what to do cook. Change and step out and not think about the weather, about wondering what it would be like if she were there with me to go to the grocery store, get excited over the cheese, pick up the small tomatoes they sell on the vine, the kind you just put on the frying pan, let them simmer in a little oil and eat them off the vine (are amazing with a little salt and pepper)

Hahah, it's so easy to slip into a dream like that and then feel yourself snap back to reality and just go about it. Again, like always, stuck inside this head.

And yes! I am being dramatic but you know what, you don't have to be here.

Now to put those steps into practice. But first, deep breath

Halloween has Gone and so Have the Ghosts

I haven’t mentioned the Ex in a long time. Interesting given that my angst and hurt was the reason I started to write, like I always said, was therapy.
Well, she’s in town and I’m having dinner with her about 20 minutes. Should be interesting. Plus the Short-one said much in the past two days that well, was an epiphany for me and matter-of-fact for her.
Thank god for smart women.

I Don't Know Why...

...am suddenly acutely aware of the loneliness.

I don't think I've ever written about it, not even one line.  I don't know why.  Perhaps I just didn't want to think about it.

Ironic

"In the Words of Others" or "I Will Quote the Truth Wherever I Find it"

Norman Mailer in the December 2007 Playboy:

I remember something else you said about getting close to yourself: "If you dig deep enough into yourself, you're going to come out your asshole."

(NM laughs)

In other words, yes, there are doors, and you must open many of those doors, and the ensuing doors with in doors, but every once in a while you want to be careful about what you open.

Well, of course you have to be careful about certain doors.  Anyone who fling everything ajar at once would be blown away.  A mighty change could range through all the rooms in your psyche.  One of the most jealously self-protective elements in human nature may be to protect oneself from one's own dark and barricaded corners.

So I don't think it's a real problem that we're going to open, by mistake, all the doors at once -- we don't.  We can't...

Things That Make You Go "Oooooh! That's Going to Sting!"

Sometime in August…
The Girl: You have a terrible voice mail message, such a bad accent
Me: (mumble mumble incomprehensible weak defense)
Girl takes phone and records over my voice mail message: You have reached the voice mail box of Zaphod B. He can not take your call right now as he is undisposed with a girl
Me: (part shocked part amused)

Girl and Me doing our own thing
Phone rings. Scrabble for it. Can’t find it. Mortified because it has gone to voice mail.

The Universe screwing her over just begins.
Voice mail: Hi, this is (the Girl’s Ex). Could you please ask her to call me back. Oh and also, it’s indisposed, not undisposed.

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Email from Me
Subject: you can show your appreciation in kind…
Body: …with drink... http://3hive.com/
lotsa new music

Sent to Sasquatch, Bobo, Bobo’s brother.



Later on Chat:
Girl: crap crap crap ... shit ... fuck
Me (always game to join in): piss piss twat shit
Girl: “Alcohol is only a poor substitute for the kind of payback i have in mind. think kinky journalist. (other details), spectacles and a notepad” -- this is the email i wanted to send you. I have sent it to (Bobo) instead. I want to die
Me (ever sympathetic): HAHAHAHA

Time Off

Relationship Snapshot

Dating someone whose parents religious background is differnt from your own (non-practicing religion regardless of the fact that you are agnostic)

(via SMS)
Me: im eating crab stuffed into fish. how wrong is it to eat meat of one animal stuffed into another, on the jain scale?

Would I Do This?

Post a clip of a cockatoo right after one of a Buddhist Monk/Philospher?

Sure I would!

Please Watch This

The thing is, it all makes sense, what this chap says.  And it's so simple and it just falls into place and makes so much sense.

And I know I'm going to watch this the next time I'm the throes of another funk.

Please, watch this

Matthieu Ricard (born 1946) is a Buddhist monk who resides at Shechen Tennyi Dargyeling Monastery in Nepal.


Born in Paris, he is the son of Jean-François Revel (born Jean-François Ricard), a renowned French philosopher, and grew up among the personalities and ideas of French intellectual circles. He first traveled to India in 1967.

He worked for a Ph.D. degree in molecular genetics at the Institut Pasteur. After completing his doctoral thesis in 1972, Ricard decided to forsake his scientific career and concentrate on the practice of Tibetan Buddhism. He lived in the Himalayas studying with the Kangyur Rinpoche and some other great masters of that tradition and became the close student and attendant of Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche until his passing in 1991. Since then, Mr. Ricard has dedicated his activities to fulfilling Khyentse Rinpoche’s vision.

Ricard’s photographs of the spiritual masters, the landscape, and the people of the Himayalas have appeared in numerous books and magazines. Henri Cartier-Bresson has said of his work, “Matthieu’s spiritual life and his camera are one, from which springs these images, fleeting and eternal.” He is the author and photographer of Journey to Enlightenment and Monk Dancers of Tibet and , in collaboration, the photobook, Buddhist Himalayas, TIbet, An Inner Journey as well as recently A Motionless Journey, The Himalayas seen from a hermitage. He is the translator of numerous Buddhist texts, including The Life of Shabkar. The dialogue with his father, Jean-Francois Revel, The Monk and the Philosopher, was a best seller in Europe and was translated in 21 languages, and The Quantum and the Lotus (coauthored with Trinh Xuan Thuan) reflects his long-standing interest in science and Buddhism. His new book, Happiness, Cultivating Life's Most Important Skill was also a major best-seller in France.

A board member of the Mind and Life Institute, which is devoted to meetings and collaborative research between scientists and Buddhist scholars and meditators, his contributions have appeared in Working with Destructive Emotions (edited by Daniel Goleman) and other books of essays. He is deeply engaged in the research on the effect of mind training on the brain, at Madison-Wisconsin, Princeton and Berkeley.

He received the French National Order of Merit for his humanitarian work in the East. For the last few years, Mr. Ricard has dedicated his effort and the royalites of his books to various charitable projects in Asia, that include building and maintaining clinics, schools and orphanages in the region. Since 1989, he has acted as the French interpreter for the Dalai Lama.