The influence of gaslight or electric light on the growth of paraheliotropic trees

– life is full of wins and losses. when winning, feel and love winning;

– watch the Wire again in its entirety, writing along side it about how the story develops;

– circles of magic, based on true love for the next person in the chain; love magic; blood magic;

– it all follows from love your neighbor; one suggestion passed down from higher realm before the connection closed (i.e., if God had only one chance to send a message to humanity that did not naturally follow from existence, the message would be to ‘love your neighbor’)

– Magic: the speech that makes things real – wizards singing called singing, singing creation, singing creation

Two years ago I lay in your bed after you left for work and watched a documentary about a girl who lived in a Redwood Tree named Luna for 738 days. I remember listening to her describe listening to the tree — even while the camera filmed her.

“Listen,” she said, with the forested hills behind her, the branches of Luna rising up around her.

“Listen,” she said. “Listen.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Butterfly_Hill

While it is certainly natural that someone resorting to Internet Dating Services will have to, as it were, cast their net wide, one wonders how many successful JDates in Manhattan in the summer and fall of 2009 involved a “picnic on the High Line” with a bottle of “three buck chuck,” name-dropping Chelsea, Trader Joe’s, and possibly the New Yorker in one ad.

And that said, she’s one of the more compelling ones —

the problem with Manhattan is that smart, ambitious, half-thoughful people all gravitate here, like salmon upriver, only to find themselves on the last page of the Great Waldo Search, surrounded by a sea of red and white stripes. Hard to find the one-socked soulmate, and frankly, starts to grate at the significance of your own poor miserable existence.

The Black Queen sits at the center of the board – time spins around her. Different men, strong souls, court and love her, through different times and different ages, faster, now slower — she remains — everything around her shifts and changes, but she remains still, motionless, untouched.

Alice and Michael were quite the co-dependents back in 2005 and 2006, having gotten together after several Disco Biscuit shows where the combination of Alice’s cute blond hair, Mike’s worldy ways, and several different chemical concoctions conspired to fill the role left vacant when Western Europeans and their Colonists ceased believing in Cupid and his arrows. Firing of neurons and all that. Corresponding intake of breath. Iron filings all lining up in one direction and all that.

What began as a simple attraction, and then a simple engagement with each other’s bodies and minds, what began with each of them carefully walling off their faculties of judgment, not so hard, considering the chemical fog they were generally living under, a delay of judgment, maybe, a procrastination, and of course, that everpresent need of Other that will always privilege the present over any number of uncertain tomorrows, in short, a simple relationship without much investment, revolving around music and drugs, six months later had became a relationship of almost unending importance to them —

In short, they had fallen in love. Accidentally? Sure. It does not make it less important.

Six months after that, they had moved in together. Deeper and deeper. I saw them every now and again, at shows, or at Genie’s apartment — they were very attached to each other, co-dependent — still smoking plenty of pot sure, still half addled, but liking the same things and loving each other.

I moved away, but the 21st century uberwelt presses on. Three years later, Alice is in Rhode Island with somebody else. I do not know what happened to Michael.

I have lived 10,007 days. I will have lived 20,000 days on March 25, 2037. That is my mother’s birthday. She will be 80 years old. I will be 54, 9 months, and 16 days. Between now and then, everything in my life must happen.

I wander, newborn through the world. Until – her, my true companion, my best friend, my one and only. And then we walk the world together, her hand in my mine, looking up now and again to notice we’re getting older, rising with the dawn and sleeping with the dusk, again and again and again, for ten thousand, twenty thousand, thirty thousand days, watching hair thin, skin lose its strength, bones their vigor —

the fire of our love will not fade but will continue burning —

and then she dies. And then I sit by her grave a time. And then I die.

And that life is sad, but the best one can hope for.

And it has not yet happened. I have found hers, but lost them too early. Were they not the one, neither, or was I not the one, or are we Digital Nomads too thrifty with our hearts. Where is the one? The great fear of the single man at 27. Absurd and irrational. One third of my life is gone. Memento Mori. I don’t want to be alone when I go.

The Saddest Game in the Whole Wide World

If evil involves (at its Kantian basic) the failure to recognize individuals as ends worthy of dignity, instead using them as only means, then a Collective Identity which de-emphasizes individuality may make us far more likely to make this cognitive choice.

Then, the fact that humans are social creatures capable of being partially or wholly subsumed into a Collective Identity (which function relies on our Rich Imaginative Construction of Identity, where our Minds Adrift and Strange have a large say in constructing our conception of who and what we are) will naturally lead to the great possibility of evil.

However, a militant rejection of Collective Identity may also lead one to evil, in that we begin to focus on the difference between our self and everyone else instead of the commonality of consciousness.

(Musings inspired by Wikipedia’s discussion of Philip Zimbardo’s book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil.)

The fact that we live in a world of relative good and relative bad, or, to use the cliche, myriad shades of grey, should not lead us to accept the conclusion that grey is all there is. Grey being the mixture of white and black, black, in this metaphor, absolute evil, exists as the a priori concept that brings darkness, evil, pain, what have you into the world.

(Of course, the possibility of this argument should not be taken as dispositive. It is equally possible that gray is a color, the only color, and there is no absolute a priori morality, only strategies based on contingencies responding to varying degrees of fellow-feeling, developed by experience, evolution, and temperament.)

Your time is near, the mission’s clear
It’s later than we think
Before you slip into the night
You’ll want something to drink
Steal away before the dawn, and
Bring us back good news
But if you’ve tread in primal soup
Please wipe it from your shoes

Just then a porthole pirate
Scourged the evening with his cry
And sanctuary bugs deprived
The monkey of its thigh
A dust arose and clogged my nose
Before I could blink twice
Despite the stuff that bubbled up
I gave some last advice:

“The flesh from Satan’s dogs
Will make the rudiments of gruel”

“Deduct the carrots from your pay
You worthless swampy fool”

Exploding then through fields and fen
And swimming in the mire
The septic maiden’s gargoyle tooth
Demented me with fire
I drifted where the current chose
Afloat upon my back
And if perchance a newt slimed by
I’d stuff it in my sack

Soon I felt a bubble form, Somewhere below my skin
But with handy spine of hedgehog
I removed the force within
Suzie then removed her mask
And caused a mighty stir
The angry mob responded
Taking turns at grabbing her

The foggy cavern’s musty grime
Appeared within my palm
I snatched Rick’s fork to scrape it off
With deadly icy calm

The crowd meanwhile had taken Sue
And used her like a rag
To mop the slime from where the slug
Had slithered with the bag

In summing up, the moral seems
A little bit obscure…

Give the director a serpent deflector
a mudrat detector, a ribbon reflector
a cushion convector, a picture of nectar *
a virile dissector,a hormone collector

whatever you do take care of your shoes