Old what's his face...

(Nico the oldest silverback in captivity)

It only happens once in your life and today was that day. A wonderfully uninhibited fellow called me "old" today. I was riding my bike on the safe side of a temporary construction barricade on a busy street, when said agitated pedestrian started screaming at me, "This is a walkway not a bike path man!" Then the clincher (as I slowly glided by him with plenty of room to spare): "Shit, are all you old people crazy?" I laughed. I guess the gray hair is eclipsing the baby face. Or maybe the baby face has turned into a toddler face. With wrinkles. And bags under its eyes. And a faraway stare that says, "I've tasted the absolute chill of deep outer space motherfucker." Or maybe it was the flacon of Geritol on a tether of giraffe intestine.

On the subject of faces, I've got nothing to complain about. I am, however, still reeling from the piece on face transplants in this week's New Yorker. Sure the philosophical implications of wearing a stranger's face are mind boggling, but what really seared my neurons were the horrific tales leading up to the actual transplants... Assume that the reason you need a new face is because your old one is gone. Assume that because you can't live as an exposed skull for too long, that old exposed skull of yours will be essentially shrink wrapped in pig skin that your body will reject. Assume that most of the people who have undergone this thoroughly modern experience are remarkable individuals with lots of fascinating things to say about the experience. At least when they're being interviewed for a New Yorker piece. Wouldn't you be at your most fascinating then? So it's hard to say what these people are really like. But I like them.

Are you drawing on all your horsepower?

(1 HP vehicle)

Vainglorious Universe...

1. There is an underlying principle that constrains the universe to evolve towards life and mind.
2. Only universes whose properties are such as to allow observers to exist are observed.
3. Our universe likes to be looked at.

Conclusion: Our universe is a pretty beast who likes attention and so she invented us as living mirrors scattered here and there striving to catch a glimpse of her reflection, which is, of course, impossible by her design. We seek her vanity in vain.

Rock and River...

What kind of dialogue can they have?

I'm still afraid, but it's ok now...

It's political season, which means the ethers are crammed with lies and hidden agendas and words and gestures some people think other people want to hear and see. Around this time, I start to get a creepy feeling that the world is actually filled with Nazis and pedophiles who have mastered the art of smiling for the camera and shoveling out sanctimonious proclamations and actions born of guilt and self-loathing. The Cove, in particular, was a movie that really illuminated this for me. Can those dolphins lobby for better human champions? Hope so...

The way we're wired we can't really know what's going on in the world. Isn't it wonderfully maddening? There's a performative surface and 7 billion bubble worlds beneath this, burbling in various uncensored degrees, complicated and embarrassing spaces that curious thinkers and artists strive to tap and/or exploit while the rest of us broker in pantomime and shame.

"Forget voyeurism and fetishism cliché... It is about what people hide inside themselves. In their inner space full of opinions, attitudes, thoughts, dreams and taste."

(quotation and photo by Dany Peschl)

Leap into art...

Yup. Maurizio Cattelan... all that work hanging from the ceiling... 24 bolts holding so many tons of stuff... playful and provocative, bla bla bla... But what I really want to know is how many of you have tried (or considered) leaping to your death as you climb Frank Wright's spiral art walk to its dizzying heights? Can't find record of a single suicide or attempt. The Guggenheim must really have some clout in hushing such things up, cuz I can't believe that this fall remains unexplored by such a creative clientele for half a century.

The heart chakra is massive...

Up the spine you go. From the coiled kundalini in the root of your pelvis to the thousand petalled lotus of your divine crown, these timeless chakras are excellent compartmentalized metaphors for various aspects of the psyche as well as our experience of life. Devout Hindus spend much of their lives exploring and ultimately transcending each chakra on their personal journey to enlightenment. Very few ever get past the heart chakra. It is simply too big, too complex, too flammable for most of us to transcend. When we "follow our hearts" we are acknowledging a pathway that comes from our higher self, i.e. messages intuited via the heart from the higher chakras, the extra-karmic realms, the ones we may never get to.

People get down on this enlightenment stuff, and yeah, I can see why. It's vertically integrated, heavy-handed, and woefully unscientific mysticism. But without a doubt, I do notice progress, growth, and even a kind of elevation of spirit as I age. Call that what you will. I'm game for these "higher" levels of existence. I'm game for the churning ride of the heart. A muscle you must explore but mustn't explode.

Futurizing...

Someone mentioned that humans experience the present in six minute intervals. That is, any given moment contains about four minutes of short term memory from the immediate past mixed with a general sense of what we can expect internally and externally for approximately two minutes into the future.

This futurizing is very interesting stuff, for there are all sorts of ideas and emotions we might project onto the immediate future before we arrive there. We might psychically predetermine a negative or a positive future, a simple or a complicated one, one that brings excitement or anxiety. Of course the future doesn't contain any of these things - we conjure these adornments unconsciously in order to set a stage for ourselves so that we might find ourselves in the kind of future we vaguely expect. Perhaps the function of our present is to generate a six minute window of narrative continuity through a string of psychic environments we've spun together in the time leading up to our experience of a present moment. It follows then, that actual present remains a mystery shrouded in our comfy projections. Unless that actual, external present radically alters the storyline for us.

When ordering helium balloons the other day, Sarah and I noticed that they line each pre-inflated balloon with a strange jelly-like substance that when dried is said to fortify the balloon and make it last longer. In the same way, we too might line our imagined future with all sorts of advance notions that act as a filter or lens which makes the actual future more familiar to us when it arrives in the form of the perceived present. Does time endlessly fill a succession of psychically generated future balloons that fulfill our predestined allotment of dismay or delight?

("Tons of Balloons" by Mary Fagot)

Propulsive and Repulsive...

If you know something scares the shit out of you, long term avoidance is the equivalent of bad constipation. Pretty soon your whole being takes on the shape of non-shitting. A stooped question mark of impacted fecal back matter.

Let go. Unclench. Float in a most peculiar way. Drop the kids into the pool. Get jelly legs. Scare yourself horny.

No, I wouldn't be the first to encourage you to face your fears, but I might be the first to do it in such a scatological way. Moral fiber, yes, but also, prune your hedgings.

Dark coffee, light vexation...

Maintaining the right mix of darkness and light for your soul is an essential part of any good transcendental hygiene regimen. Johnny Cash, Jesus Christ, Joe Coleman. Layers of black, beams of white light. Get it right!

You make art happen...

The more I live the more I'm convinced that art is a reflection of the consumer, not the producer. We fetishize/project all kinds of things onto creators, and I'm down with that as a phenomenon. I often find the artist more interesting than their art. When it comes to leaning on the artist for extracting a meaning, I generally call foul. I'm not saying that artists' intentions are unimportant, I'm saying that one's experience with an artwork is ultimately more personal than code cracking.

Most art is meaningless to me and I'm ok with that. I'm not really interested in contextualizing at this stage. Too cerebral, too distracting, a quagmire I'd rather avoid. The stuff that stronks my neurons gets absorbed, and the stuff that successfully ignites two or more chakras gets my allegiance. The stuff that arrests me in my tracks, that hijacks and derails my own inner art show, well that's really what it's all about now isn't it...

(Adam Eckberg)

Medium is the massage...

The state of beige is a little frightening. But you know what? That's just the initial non-shock of it. When your world has been all scarlets and aubergines well, that tan tonality might just seem a little empty. Really though, it is its inherent neutrality, its medium grade, that makes beige the perfect canvas color on which to paint a life. That something can be ordinary and extraordinary at the same time is worth remembering. The extremes have (had) their place, and one can grow to find comfort in their drama, but the calm mediums, the relaxed schemas, are where the real action takes place. In other words, when your insides are a swirling samovar of psychedelia the material world doesn't stand a chance. Come to think of it, I've always liked the combination of tan red and black. I suppose there's some B.L. Montgomery in me ready for a campaign in the beige desert.

Assassination vs. murder...

The cold compress character of mad men who do big business, making murders happen, making money, making history, a desk at the Rand Corporation, debating language, dubious plan: funnel art as opium, masses of flesh, stuffed into white shirts, think tank tops, denying bob cratchits raises, razing cities, call me al capone, corrupt, fun fun fun, a lot of people hate me, keep the bandwidth narrow, silos of conscience, duty-bound, the mafioso doing it for his family, manifestos and mantras, the ethical greed, the gonads of good, the 1%, tiny tims of the elite soldier, strangling mothers, burning fields, in boxes, out houses, sunsets in the Pacific, surf tunes, tin radios, drink the day, your spineless sons, testosterone rivers, blue danube, waltzing daughters pressed between glass, devoured and shat in the hallowed hallways of a 10 million dollar mansion in Aruba, moguls, baby tossers, beach vultures, Mars rovers, all of this and more can be yours if only you close your eyes and open your mouth and swallow the regurgitated tapeworms of articulated eagles tethered to bakelite recording devices that skate on tracks over coagulated seas of hot vomit. And I have understood, in this, but not of this, that I love you. A present beyond. Inversions of horror, warm universes spun from the echoes of a beautiful music jointly composed in all the happy suicide falls of the romantic emperors all the clairvoyant quilties, sewing flags for a space program worth inhabiting.

Breaking the reality spell...

It's funny the things you pick up over time. I haven't been listening to a lot of music lately. It just seems - extra? Distracting? Lack of headphones? Unreal? I can't quite articulate the relationship. Generally, the focus has been on the here and now, the big present, not fearing futures that haven't happened or lamenting pasts that can't be controlled. It's been good. I like this approach.

Last night, I put on some new music, crappy iPod headphones and all. It was the sort of yearning ecstatic music that strives to stretch your innards into silly putty. Echoes of soundtracks of a former lives. Aural dope.

The effect was shockingly immediate. The rich and fulfilling present I'd been inhabiting disappeared, and a micro-depression set in: All the things I don't have, all the regrets of days gone by and out of reach futures. These came rushing in, reverse osmosis style, tsunami on my being, the mood power of the music colonizing me and enforcing its demands like an emotional legal system. Manufactured melancholy borne of synthetic sonic yearning. I'm ok now, but golly. Altering stuff that music. So much power in the hands of so many dopeheads.

So now you know...

"Shoppers looking for the cheapest airfare online can learn something from stand-up comedians: It's all about timing. Ticket prices are highest on weekends, on average, according to online travel agencies, fare trackers and airline pricing executives. When's the best time to buy? Travel experts have long said Tuesday is when sales are most often in place, which is true. An analysis of domestic fares shows that Wednesday also has good—and occasionally better—ticket prices..."

(WSJ)

The wisdom of the cranky creative...

(more about this)

Can you handle not knowing?

Dwight D. Kronersveld had spent most of the night putting cigar bands around the larger, errant dog turds around town again. And I had to decide whether what meaning, or barring that, what emotion, I was going to assign to this. I filled a large scientific beaker to the top with explanations and drank it down. Immediately the back of my head began stinging as if the tentacles of a Portuguese Man of War were tangled in my medulla oblongata. I rinsed out the beaker and topped it off with a boiling mass of fresh anxiety. Down it went. Naturally, I sweat it out over the course of a most unpleasant hour. I had some old depression lying around, so I put that in and mixed it with some furtive paranoia beads I found rolling around behind the couch. Boy was that a mistake. I spent two days on a step ladder watching my neighbor make some kind of dark red jam through a dirty window. In time, it became abundantly clear that if I was going to live with the elusive Mr. Kronersveld's actions, I would have to accept their mystery. I left the beaker empty on the table. A family of spiders moved into it.

(Untitled watercolor. Robert H. Cumming)

Awoken to truth, the day dreams...

Let a splinter work itself out (rather than digging around in there for it and causing all kinds of undue suffering). Magic!

("Maiden and Unicorn" Domenichino, 1602)

Taking Shit Mountain by Stradivarius...

This morning one man in a shit brown shirt
walked home with his shit brown coffee
and a roll of toilet paper for his love's
shit brown asshole.

Some shit brown road workers
hollered at him
pointing out the timely links
that connect coffee to TP.

A parrot vomited behind a bush.
a noise that could vaporize the bones of a condor.

Upon arriving home
he realized that the shirt
was chocolate
the coffee
was delicious
and his love's asshole
was a rose...

He handed her the tissue
and they smiled kindly in the Monday
Cauliflournia
sun.

You dig?

CG Jung had a fine-sized mid-life crisis without which the world could not possibly have embraced the stone-cutting, shadow-loving sage we know of today.

"The focus of these critical years," said Carl, "simply had to be a struggle with my narcissism: the loss of idealized others and the absorbing of surrogate selves, the pride and grandiosity in the sphere of the self, and the resulting periods of narcissistic rage."

Only by entering the psychic labyrinths where his buried narcissism lived and ruled, by poking holes in the resistant crust around his own blind spot, and seeing the beast at work, could that alchemical process occur by which Jung taps into his most vital essence and emerges as a truly independent theorist (and human being).

(Herzog: Lessons of Darkness)

See Papa G's sculptures in action...

Papa Gazpachot has an art show of his animated found object sculptures up now. If you're in NY, find your way to ALLI. It's definitely worth the trip!

(Richard Gachot's "Ice House" studio in New York).

Fimping...

I've invented a new form of advertising. It's called "Fimp Advertising" which is of course a contraction of "First Impression." How does "fimping" work? It's all about empowering the individual to choose their own brands and to advertise in the intimacy of their own homes. Their own beds actually. The "fimper" signs up with a brand of their choice and is sent a pair of little logos or ads mounted on cardboard, each about the size of a large postage stamp.

Keep these "fimp cards" by your bed and then in the morning when you wake up next to your sleeping beloved, hold the fimp cards about two inches from their sleeping eyes. Then with your elbow, knock the side of their head. Upon opening their eyes the first thing they see will be the fimp cards. Bingo! We all know how important first impressions are! Your beloved is guaranteed to think about the brand in a strong new light. Mission accomplished!

RIP Graham Leggat...

Friend, mentor, catalyst, film champion, suave man of mystery, and science fictions. You will be missed.

Pretty, but too many notes...

After all, isn't cynicism just a way of expressing a desire for purity and a disappointment with the evident compromise?

(idea by Ross Lipman)

Walk in truth, fly in hot pants...

Yes, I know... it's been a little earnest around here lately. I guess there's been a tendency to dig deep and look around with serious awe, and to walk in the overlaps of inner and outer, dreams and materiality. Still though, as ever, I love to ride the waves of the present, the surface, the fun, the people, that. But not as a fear-born substitute for depth, and not to undermine the good stuff that's underway.

The bell-curve of any arc-like journey returns. Zarathustra came down from the mountains, Jacques Cousteau swam up to Calypso, and little ol' me will climb out of my rabbit hole.

Complements are what I'm after. Worlds that work together without over-thinking or queasy consequences or the need for shattered safety-glass goggles.

Let's get airborne...

Prune your dendrites...

Your postnatal mind developed, your synapses laid down connection chains, your recurring habits and thoughts created solid dendritic branches, thoroughfares of behavior, while other neurons didn't interconnect and therefore atrophied or were 'pruned' out of the network. This natural pruning phenomena suggests to some that bad habits and thought patterns can be pruned away by laying down new ones. How do you create new and preferable dendritic superhighways and let the old and undesirable ones wilt away? I'll let you know when I've got a real answer.

(Rivers of the world straightened and sorted)

Glass eyes...

You paddle strenuously through yourself through rapids and unseen obstacles beneath the surface. Growth doesn't happen in your bones while you sleep anymore. You believe that you'll know what to do when your boat tips and drops you into chaos. And sometimes you do.

You cannot fix good feelings in time. You can not nail your hand to a breast. You can not spare another from the suffering that leads to growth. Though you will want to sometimes.

You can try to curate your life in bits and pieces. You may go to great lengths and subtractions to avoid suffering. But the gods offer a full spectrum of experience from dust to glory. Ignore one god, chthonic or Olympian, and they will become offended and knock you off balance in a way in you that you may or may not recognize.

What are we asking others for that we need to be doing for ourselves? And what should we be asking for that we can not give ourselves? Solve that with your partner and you've got yourself some true love bub. Given the brevity of the ride, and the chill of the night, it seems worth the effort.

Leo month continues...

LIfe expands or contracts in proportion to one's courage.

- Anais Nin

Who made it?

"I don't believe in art. I believe in artists."

- Marcel Duchamp

The thin strip of reality...

The material world, aka "reality," is such a tightly regulated space, it can only take a sliver of us at a time. The vast rest of our self must sit and watch from the unearthly sidelines. And the things we put into this space are at best crude and fragile representations of abstract notions and cognitive or emotional constructs. Artists try to bring things into reality that remind us of the rest of being. Politicians try to own this narrow strip of experience. Kids are bored by it, and adults struggle to maintain their place in it. Crazy thing.

Dark knight of the poop...

A friend tells me about his best moments of connectivity with his partner, and how strangely, in the rumpled sheet of afterlove, he sees a bright purple light in front of his eyes that is deeply pleasing. He's just been married. This is bliss. The light is not cause for alarm, it is a psychic aurora borealis celebrating the goodness. And then, as can happen, an iota of doubt enters his mind. Fear. Did I do the right thing? Suddenly the purple light turns brown. Shit brown.

And we carry brown around with us because it represents how we might be feeling about our days. Our actual days, the ones in reality, which are just a sliver of our personal internal experience at any given moment. Brown is honest. But brown is not the answer. One must strive to paint their days with other colors.

And walking home from the coffee shop I see people marching their brown about. I can see it in their body language. I can see it in their mood. I can see it in their feces.

(Gao Huijun, "Clouds on Jingting Mountains")

The road to Damascus...

I've learned that yesterday was St. Paul's day. Who was he? I mistakenly remembered him as one of the original disciples but he was actually their enemy at first, before becoming an apostle. He was Saul before he was Paul. An angry, violent, worldly man who one day saw the light, so bright, he was blinded by it. He changed his name to Paul and became a great teacher and Christian leader and he wrote for the original bible club. He gained healing powers and performed miracles. He had a serious beef with St. Peter at Antioch over circumcision. Martin Scorsese chose Harry Dean Stanton to play him. What's in a name? Letters.

After the bloodletting...

To the ferocious beauty who tore me to smithereens, I dedicate this rebuild to you.

Love and war...

"In love the currency is virtue. You love people not for what they do for you, you love them for their values, the virtues which they have achieved in their own character." - Ayn Rand

"If Man is going to stay aboard our spaceship Earth, it can't be done by politics because politics is so inadequate. The Earth can not be commanded by politicians because they don't know about the Earth, they have to go on the kind of design we now have and so they can only give you war."
- Buckminster Fuller

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace...

“It is fashionable to suggest that cyberspace is some island of the blessed where people are free to indulge and express their individuality. This is not true. I have seen many people spill out their emotions – their guts – online and I did so myself until I began to see that I had commodified myself.”

- Carmen Hermosillo

“On Facebook and Twitter, you are performing to attract people – you are dancing emotionally, on a platform created by a large corporation. People’s feelings bounce back and forth – happy Stakhanovites, ignoring and denying the system of power... I think sometime in the future people will look back at the millions and millions of descriptions of personal feelings on the internet and see them in similar ways. This is the driving belief of our time: that ‘me’ and what I feel minute by minute is the natural centre of the world. Far from revealing that this is an ideology – and that there are other ways of looking at human society – what Twitter and Facebook do is reinforce the feeling that this is the natural way to be."

- Adam Curtis

From her to eternity...

(Windsor McCay)

Paraprosdokian...

If all the girls who attended the Yale prom were laid end to end,
I wouldn't be a bit surprised.

- Dorothy Parker

(Harry Holland)

Bison bullies from New York...

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

Help?

Lost in found lexical ambiguity...

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

Binaural Beats on Kanye's Monster...

Let's wallow in our infantile "NSFW" culture today shall we? A world that treats human anatomy and sexuality as bad things that can get working people into serious trouble. How can we get on with the business of life, and by life I mean money, when it turns out that people might have squidgy erotic lives and ew-gross biological yearnings that transcend the safety of our work cubicles and our cool outfits. Impossible!

I want to also make a prediction for the Summer of 2011. I predict that members of the NSFW tribe (and the media-makers who feed them) will fill the airwaves with digital outrage when it is discovered that there are hidden evil messages in our pop songs. Let me clarify: I had a pretty awful experience with reigning provocateur of NSFW culture, Kanye West's new "Monster"" video yesterday... (seriously, listen at your own risk).

Visual content aside, three minutes in my heart was pounding and my head was throbbing. I knew at once why: binaural beats. Though I can't find anything to verify my intuition, I'm telling you the song is heavily laced with dark binaural beats, very likely lifted from the oddly expensive "Gates of Hades" by iDoser or other similar aural toxins. Seriously kids, I know you love a thrill but this stuff is dangerously potent at the emotional/neurological level. Must you?

My prediction is that the public will get wind of this "subliminal brainwashing" (via leak of course) and the fear will kick in. Binaural beats will be collectively demonized as dangerous and downright evil in some circles. And that would be a shame. Because like politicians, neckties, wines, jokes, and human beings, there are all kinds of binaural beats. Many are quite benign, palliative, and even uplifting, while others are hellbent on pushing the technology to its darkest most injurious extremes. And that's how we are in the NSFW age. Uninterested in the good, obsessed with the bad that is always a click away.

Torque...

There are many words a guy like me could benefit from meditating on, and "torque" is one of them. In the metaphoric realms it represents both the power with which a core lifeforce spins and the internal mechanism that propels a life forward through space and time. Some are born with rich, beautiful souls but zero torque, and therefore little place in the modern world. Others born with unrelenting natural torque that drives a lifeforce lacking in depth and dynamism. Torque channels and regulates our personal force into precise real world action. Calibrate it wisely. The physical world loves momentum...

(Team Hot Wheels teaser by Bandito Brothers)

To boldly go nowhere...

Frankly I'm shocked that no one responded to my rallying cry for a transgressive cat fiction (and non-fiction!) book club. What's wrong with people? Alas, chalk another one up for the visionary righteousness of the marketplace.

Lasers slicing chaos...

The boiling, swirling soup of creative chaos. It's an eternal place. A confusing place. A hellish place. A place of infinite potential. A place of impossible progress. The romantic image of the genius magician who intoxicated by cosmic input miraculously orchestrates masterful worldly output. Ta Da!

In contrast to all that magnificent teen hippie shit, I was struck by Ingmar Bergman's assessment of the creative process in his autobiography The Magic Lantern.

"My rehearsals are operations in premises equipped for the purpose, where self-discipline, cleanliness, light, and quiet prevail. It is proper work, not a place for private therapy between producer and actor... I want calm, order, and friendliness. Only in that way can we approach a limitless world."

Timelines...

At some point I would like to plot the days and events my life on a graphic timeline. The one seen here, a Victorian era wall chart of world history, starting with Adam and Eve (hmm...) was hanging on my wall as a kid. Loved it.

Hours shall pass...

(Doxa Sinistra "The Other Stranger")

Two by Helen Sear...

Read Jason Evans' article on her in this month's Aperture...

"I am looking at a photographic image and what I see is a picture... Nowadays a lot of photographs look like photographs. Sear does not play into [this]."

(Helen Sear)

The External World...

The External World, by David O'Reily, is definitely worth watching. Sharp and provocative madness...

Film is here.

Rapture me...

I'd say this image pretty accurately captures everything that's not going on over where I just was in Santa Monica, where endless processions of physically fit, flabby-souled grotesques stagger in and out of cute boutiques and over-designed cafes hunting for bargains and sugar fixes. Please Jesus, take me with you.

Paws press play...

Oh Mychtar, while I applaud any creative gesture that keeps human civilization in check with all life on Earth, your self-portrait in snow made my morning.

("Mychtar and his Snowdog" via Ferlinka Borzoi)

Closer to the stars...

If fame eluded you in life, you can at least be very near it in death. Worth every penny to spend eternity inches away from that sexy pile of blonde bombshell ashes.

"I stuck!"...

"I stuck!" says nephew Jack when he can't get what he wants or where he wants to go. At 3, he's not always making well-formulated plans that pan out to spec. To his credit, when he stuck, he knows it, he announces it, and he often gets some help that returns him to wonderful unstuckness.

Thanks to our caretakers' hard work, early life is full of favorable outcomes that just happen. The child expects this kind of magic to be around forever (and suffers upon learning the truth). How we mold this original clay of magical thinking is hugely influential upon our future. Discovering a material world, many of us develop policies of pragmatism and logic, from which highly functional systems of living and planning emerge. For many it's an addicting solution to the puzzle of being alive.

At some point though, the memory of that initial magic crops up. What has matched its power? What have we seen or done that tastes better than those ecstatic fruits of our initial life impressions? The ripe memories. The good feelings. The first pain. It's Rosebud. It's music. It's all the exquisite beauty and horror of the cosmos imprinting itself on the fresh senses of a child in an instant. It's gods and monsters. And those are just the low hanging fruits. What might we find higher up in that tree if we stopped navigating in the real world and returned to our seedling consciousness? Certainly rediscovering those sublime mysteries would become a total private obsession. Of course we don't do that. We can't. But we remember. And so you find expressions on midlife faces that clearly say one thing: "I stuck!"

(Ozant Kamaci)

The gong of memory...

What is it about Mondays lately?

(Toby Coulson)

Nature's good humor...

Thank you well wishers. After several days of sad paralysis, Chi Chi is miraculously opting for more cat-like routines. She's eating, going to the bathroom, and best yet, trying to walk, a few steps at a time - wobbly like a town drunk, and toppling over frequently. But it's real progress and a fucking joy to see her return to the living after that scare.

We're not out of the woods yet. The steroids we're giving her are definitely not good for her already compromised heart. And yet they certainly seem to be putting those herniated discs in their proper place. One day at a time. She'll do what she needs to do on her end, and we'll tap some medical modernity on ours.

Perhaps nature puts up with some of our interventions, even sees the good in them, like a grandpa who let's his granddaughter put his hair in ribbons.

("Photogram Beneath the Stencil, Fall, Aomori Prefecture" by Jane Alden Stevens)

Good thoughts for Chi Chi...

Our little Chi Chi isn't doing so well. Compression in her spinal cord has left her back legs paralyzed. She's a fighter and a lover, but she'll be needing your good thoughts. She's not in pain, she just looks at us with her typically alert eyes that say, what's up with the bum hindquarters? I'd like to wander!

("Chi Chi in the Cone of Shame" painting by Hanna Williams)

Aesthetic camouflage...

I say uggh to Monday funks where all the games and art come across as rotting denials of something heavier, more core, more brutal. It's such a plodding moralistic lens. Move on weightiness. I don't know what to do with you today...

Towing the line...

The provincial Don Giovannis have no talent for original sin.
Or worse, they have no original talent for sin.

Happy Mother's Day!