Xanga's new search engine really works.  It just helped me find a few mentions of "notforprophet" in others' posts that I might have otherwise missed.  There does seem to one limitation, however: It indexes back only over the last month.  So, it is only a "very current" search.  Yet better than nothing at all.  Or Xanga's old, buggy search that would furnish no results  if there were too many  hits.

It still makes my Atomz blog search that I've designed for my own site here (over in the left module) useful since that search indexes virtually my entire presence here from 2000 - today, not just the past month.

Just for the hell of it, I just peformed a comparative "hit" search on both Xanga and on my own site...

Here are the Xanga hits:

love     4,452,773
hate     1,179,756      about 4:1

sun        242,793
moon       86,239      about 3:1

god     1,028,311
satan       27,096       about 40:1

day     4,586,083
night    2,471,243      about 2:1

life       1,879,879
death     256,436       about 7:1

war       136,991
peace    572,840       about 1:4

Comparing my emphasis (as proxied by "hits") to Xanga's overall results for these same "hits::

love    254
hate     49                 about 5:1

sun     182
moon   62                 about 3:1

god     98
satan    8                   about 12:1

day     307
night   232                about 1.3:1

life     339
death 178                  about 2:1

war    105
peace  42                  about 2.5:1

*looks up*  I score proportionally higher on love, but also on death and war.  It would seem (though I'm too lazy to do the stats) that I mention life and the sun and the moon more often than the average blogger.  hrmmm.

Speaking of stats, this speaks for itself.

Fastest growing blogs and blog networks
	Unique audience, 000
Blog / Network	January 2005	July 2005	Growth
MSN Spaces	311	3,257	947%
fark.com	488	795	63%
Blogger	8,684	12,599	45%
Xanga.com	4,810	6,862	43%
Daily Kos	348	476	37%
The Smoking Gun	1,706	2,243	31%
Gawker	411	531	29%
TypePad	3,557	4,555	28%
engadget	630	787	25%
Boing Boing	506	605	20%
Source: Nielsen//NetRatings

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Except I'll make one observation: the outrageous MSN Spaces growth?  I'm prepared to bet that that much of that is due to their new official presence within the Chinese blogosphere.

Update: searching Xanga for "xanga sucks" vs. "i love xanga":

xanga sucks     2754
i love xanga     1378

Ingrates us!  ha.

Update with breaking news insight:  Katrina - Category 5?  No, as my daughter Starrr16 just remarked, it's now "Category Die". 

Live in New Orleans or thereabouts?  Want to 'stick it out'?  Just remember that the bayous are filled with millions of poisonous snakes that will fill the flooding waters inland and that hundreds of casualites likely soon to be found will not haved drowned, but be will have been snake-bitten.

It was good to run today.  Alone.  Honest.  True. 

 

You might assume that I ran where I usually do.  In Dreamland.

 

But that’s not entirely accurate..

 

I ran, also, across your lawn.  Through your garden.  In a trial for the Olympic marathon trials.  Downhill against a mortal enemy.  Hopping over a rattlesnake.  Heart beating in lust for the Earth’s nakedness.  Transcending a yell of dubious support that echoed “Run, Forrest, run.”  Breaking my shackles.  Avoiding tackles.  Sidestepping debacles. Catching sight of you looking out your window.  Yeah, that was me in the shadow of sunshine hiding beneath the illumination of eternity. Dripping with sweat.  Proud to be wet.  Mad to convene, converse, immerse myself in the unwoetocome.

 

Red.

 

Pink.

 

Misty violet-blue.

 

Dusk.

 

Gone.

Had I company now, it would be much better.

 

But I have no company.  Yet it is still good.

 

Felt again like a warrior running today.  Even more so like a guerrilla fighter. 

 

I spent several years as a youth studying guerrilla warfare and tactics, counterinsurgency, evasion  and escape, special weapons and tactics.  What’s the most important lesson I learned?  That farmers, woodsmen, or basically any sort of outdoorsmen make the best fighters.  What do you think most of our revolutionary fighters did for a living?  Or how about the Viet Cong that defeated us in the last war?   Farmers.  What about the average American soldier today?  Probably 90% or more are pure urban.  I’d bet over half never even gone true wilderness camping before joining the service. 

 

You see, the average regular army soldier, with his urban bent, fights both the enemy and the elements,  However, while the seasoned guerrilla also fights the enemy,  his typically more rural bent disposes him to employ the elements to his greatest advantage. 

 

Take George Washington, the farmer general, for example. 

 

He was one of the greatest guerrilla generals that ever lived!  Once upon a time, on one side of the Delaware River, were the British: a superior force in raw numbers, weaponry, and traditional military discipline.  On the other side of the Delaware was George with his rotting teeth, forces in anguish, and options few. 

 

The British knew they could defeat the Americans and extinguish the rebellion anytime, if they took the battle to them and ferried across the Delaware.  But they dreaded the heavy losses in casualties that ferry-crossing a river while fighting would entail.  So they planned instead to wait until the Delaware River froze over sometime in January or February, then cross the frozen  river, and end the insurgency with a minimum of British causalities.  Brilliant! 

 

But George knew that.  Nobody had to tell him.  He was a farmer and knew that kind of stuff instinctively.  So what to do?  What to do? 

 

Wait and face certain defeat?.

 

No.  Embrace the element as it is (was).  Don’t wait upon it.  Turn it, instead, to one’s only advantage.

 

Of course, it helped  that the Prussians or Hessians or whatever the hell those German-for-hire forces in the British camps were called were all Catholics who traditionally got stinking drunk around raging campfires on Christmas Eve…

 

On the other hand George and his band faced…

 

Deadly cold.  Darkness.  A treacherous crossing.  Uncertainty.

 

Embrace the element.  Be like the wind, and the water, and the sky, and the trees and blend and blend and blend…

 

Such was the great guerrilla general and his ragtag half-regular force’s  victory.

 

As I have said that the Tao has said that Nature has whispered before:  “Darkness within darkness.  The gate to all mystery.”

I’ve got the feeling that a lot of people are now looking to the end of summer here in the mid-latitudes of the northern hemisphere.  But I just ran my 5+ miles in Dreamland in honest-summer stride and now continue to enjoy a perfect summer evening R&R-ing on a sun-smirched hillside and so happy to be alive.  In other words, it’s all good in the hood.

 

You know, I do some of my clearest thinking while running.  I really do.  My senses grow sharper, my memory gets keener, my sympathetic affections surge, and my synthetic pragmatism outs.

 

I’ve been meaning to say something but thought it might be taken in the wrong way.  But now I’ve realized there is no wrong way.  There’s only the way you choose and choose to respond.  Learn or die.  Experience or experiment.

 

 

So…it  occurs to me, from my own experience, that woman are always right.

 

And men are always wrong.

 

But wondering is beautiful.  And everyone enjoys a good song.

A love that craves to affair but fails is only a strange tease.

 

  —by the grave of Irene Love Wade , 1885-1966

 

 

Give freely.  And if you can help it, take nothing with odd strings attached.

 

  —by the grave of Priscilla Thompson,  1942-1970

 

 

Enjoy the view.  For you are me.  And I am you.

 

  —by the grave of  “The one whom we remember”

 

Ha.  I guess I'm finally officially a stranger here to Xanga.

I just checked "Featured Content" and didn't recognize a single soul by namesake. I imagine, if I came to any of their attentions, it would be mutual.

"darkness within darkness, the gate to all mystery"

    -tao te ching

Why does is always feel, even though in your heart you know it’s not true, that when someone doesn’t love you anymore, that they never really loved you in the first place?

 

I have observed lately that nasty, disgruntled, annoyed, angry, sarcastic, discontented and/or vituperative bloggers on Xanga tend to be more popular than the decent person who writes a decent blog.  I guess that’s the equivalent of sensational or “bad” news winning out over “good” news in the general news media.  And you’re a asshole with no life if you don’t want to agree with me.

 

Something good is happening!  Something good is happening!    No, I don’t know where at or to whom; I’m just psychic enough to know that it IS happening.

 

I was wondering if I could get into the World Record book as “the person most esoterically deserving of being here who will never get here”?

 

I was, after all, psychically-involved in the death of two Popes.  I think that’s a record, though it’s hard to be sure.

 

Did someone just say “give me an A!” ?

 

Amreica’s like any lover: love her or lose her.

• George Will,  the brightest of political enigmas, made a great point on a Sunday morning talk show yesterday (that I happened to be watching).  He said that insurgencies like that in Iraq usually take an average of 9 years to quell and they almost always end with amnesty being given to the surviving insurgents. Great.  Our men get to die for another seven years and then many of those who have and will have participated in killing them get to become “good citizens” again.
   
  
• A cascade of thoughts: The psychic psychoanalyst C.G. Jung once asserted that 4 is the perfect archetypal number.  Today’s the (catholic) Feast of the Assumption.  Upon this day, Mary, the Un-sinning One is taken undead into Heaven.  If that’s not a guarantee of Godhood, I’m missing something.  Someone who’s totally pure, never sins, and never dies?!  Don’t you see?  On this, the Feast, Mary hacks the Trinity and completes the deal.  The Divine Pattern is perfected as a quartet.  Jung is awesome.  
   
  
• I’ve worked 24 of the last 29 hours.  Sorry, I can’t tell you what I was doing.  But I’ve returned now to Dreamland, anyway, to jog and blog and watch the Sun set.  Ah, the Sun!   It has and will always fascinate me from whence to wither!

Are you ready to play?  Today?

Ran 5 miles in record 94 dog-sun degree heat yesterday.  5 more in 90% humidity this morning.

I'm ready to kick some ass today.

But if you want to come and pitch, we could have fun and play.

Desire is broken.  And that’s a good thing.  Providing the cast of desire was the pursuit of an illusion. But what of those delicious, reassuring somewhat illusionary assurances of love that can shelter you through the hurt of this life and into the fog of beyond?

 

Hunger is shattered.  And that’s good thing.  Providing that the urge to eat was overly-contrived beyond any genuine metabolic need.  But what of the smell of popcorn wafting one’s way?  Or the spoon with frosting, or bowl of raw cookie dough begging for a taste?

 

Judgment is suspended.  And that’s a good thing.  Providing that the flight to a conclusion was the over-reaction to a misperception of  another’s intent to innocently act, not attack.  But what of the fierceness of the true warrior in facing the most formidable and irreconciling enemy? 

 

Ah, judgment is even better debarred then.

 

Empty your boat entirely and you’ll sail thereafter forever unchallenged around the world. 

I’ve run thousands of miles in Dreamland over the last four years.  But today I did something I never did before while running.  I made music.

 

Of course, my feet pounding the pavement have always had a barely audible rhythm.  The ever-accompanying runner’s thump. thump. thump…   Rather monotonous.   Self-hypnotic.  And very martial.

 

But today, along my running ways, I came upon a rather handy tree-debris-fallen type of stick upon the advancing cemetery trail.  That I, for the hell of it, impulsively kicked ahead of me.  And it resonated, as it bounced upon the asphalt and then aside and into the graveyard, in a series of stunning wood-chimed clangs.  And being a guy that always pays special attention to stunning-kind of things, I naturally turned around, ran back and picked it up.  But laying right next to it (your left, my right), was another handy stick.  In a perfectly matching length.  Begging for similar involvement.  So I picked them both up.  And resumed my running.

 

 

Now I’ve never played drums before.  I guess I could have held and carried both sticks apart while I ran, like individual batons in a relay race, and never let them tangle.  But, instead, I playfully angled them in upon one another and let them bangle, clink, clatter, and jangle just in and by the act of running.  In other words, I wasn’t banging the sticks together with intentional arm movements.  Rather, I let the free movement of my run bring the sticks together. 

 

I was stunned!  The air was filled with a bash of sticks.  My body was making music on the run.  Strange rhythms. Unpredictable tones.  Running-man chimes!

 

As I proceeded along, I began experimenting with holding the sticks longer and lower, and then shorter and higher, and discovered new consequent patterns of chiming, thumping, tapping, and bumpety-gumpety ta-tupping. 

 

How fucking marvelous a discovery this was for me!  ha.  As I ran, I forgot all about the typical fatigue induced by running and became totally audibly and vibrationally absorbed in this newly-found transformation of energetic self-expression.

 

What did you say (just think)?  After you really hear the music, you’re never the same?  

 

You know. 

 

 

• I've begun drinking a Great Lakes beer called Nosferatu. 
  
• It's self-described as "The Beer with a bite. Aptly named after the notorious German vampire from the 1920s.  This deep red ale is highly topped and rich with flavor, yet remarkably balanced from start to finish."
  
• (notice the biting disdain that Nosferatu casts upon my drinking his beer out of  a CocaCola glass.)

• I've taken lately to running in Dreamland cemetary just in black, or (here) for a change, in Escher-ghostly charcoal and black.

• With every passing year, Goldie Hawn, as an actress, grows in my bestowed esteem and admiration.
  
• She never does seem to get older in real life, does she?  What's up with that?!

• (from Death Becomes Her)
  
• Don't you dare try to profile me by this blog.  Offenders will be punished under the glow of the upcoming full moon.

A stitch in time will never be there when ya needs it in a torn universe.....

Author.... yet to be announced

In response to benevolentmitch's comment (above) to me in my last post:

Nice ride, this Xanga-thing.

Had me going for awhile.

Up the slope of romance.

Down the slip of heartbreak.

Like the incessant hills I run in Dreamland—

Up and down, up and down, around and around.

 

Enough.

 

Time now to chase my shadow into the woods  and lose it there.. 

Or stick pine needles into the ground  pretending to stitch-mend the ever-oozing Earth.

Eat only when I’m hungry, drink only when I’m thirsty, piss when I need to.

 

Sit, soak up a beer, and wonder what next to do.

Realize that soaking up that beer was the doing of that next.

Find inspiration is such zazen and springboard on to more lucrative matters…

 

To paraphrase Marx: there’s nothing to lose; just a world to win.

And understand that though there’s a little bit of the world *here*, it’s just a wee bit.

 

Imagine yourself a bird with dinosaur wings, defiantly imagining, in one moment, all of the feathers that have ever fallen and will ever fall from the sky.  Now fly.

• "DaDa is beautiful like the night, who cradles the young day in her arms." - Hans Arp
  
• "DADA speaks with you, it is everything, it envelops everything, it belongs to every religion, can be neither victory or defeat, it lives in space and not in time." - Francis Picabia
  
• "Dada is the sun, Dada is the egg. Dada is the Police of the Police." - Richard Huelsenbeck
  
• Roaring dreams take place in a perfectly silent mind. Now that we know this, throw the raft away. - jack kerouac
  

Wondering is Wandering.

Last night, in a state of pre-sleep neblouslessnes, I suffered a tear in the fabric of consciousness. The seams in my normal raggedy andy ragdoll head are usually well-sown, but last night a few became undone and allowed an influx of otherness. Though it was probably lost to me, I imagine there might have also been a leaking outflux to the universe of my own shadowy threshold ragdoll intimations which would probably otherwise have come to constitute a Xanga blog. Oh well, all’s a tradeoff in the balance of energies and nothing’s ever really lost.

I was prepared to totally indulge in the psychic trepanning thus visited upon me, but it seems that a secret seamstress pulled my rag-thread seams back tight but a little further into the night. And with that nurturing I fell asleep. Damn that nurturing! But something tells me that it was a reflex to conserve sanity and stop my shadowy threshold ragdoll bleeding. Damn that sanity!

There are doors of perception to other worlds - worlds yet strange and un-unified with our “own.” And I seek their opening. Much as the microscope prior to its invention was the unknown key to an unknown world that there before, except by some mystical visionaries, was considered pure chimera and fantasy, so too, do I believe, that we are on the threshold to finding new doors to unseen worlds providing new discovery.

For there is, must always be, new discovery, in this, our Golden Eternity.

I just extinguished a small though promising fire in Dreamland that someone had more than likely inadvertently but apparently started by tossing a lit cigarette upon a richness of dry needles lying beneath a pine tree.

 

All I can say is that if you don’t know how to extinguish your burning butts properly, swallow them.

 

Before that I was running more miles. More miles, that is, than any other sane person seems to run in this swelter called weather.  Was that an improper use of “other” ?

 

There are lots of little bugs scurrying about in the air today.  More so than in many weeks recent.  It’s not that it’s any cooler or wetter and so more hospitable today.  In fact, it’s hotter and dryer than yesterday. (which, too, was hot and dry—thus adding fuel to the fire.)  And the crickets, too, are much noticeably louder today than yesterday or anytime before.  And so the season progresses.

 

Life goes on!

 

Ha.

 

It’s just so amazing.

I just got done running 5 miles and then spent a bit of time electronically paying my bills from atop Tombstone Hill (my latest nickname for my  Dreamland perch atop a hillside with a view overlooking Lake Erie.)  I think in paying my bills here I make the dead feel good, in that they can celebrate boisterously, even mockingly, that that’s one thing they’re no longer burdened with.

 

Last week was a kick-ass week turned mad.  It started off by me getting a stellar mid-year review at work.  Then I cracked the cover on some cyber-spies and got praised for that.  I ran 25 miles despite the continuing 90-degree heat.  But by the weekend I was degenerate, self-indulgent, mind-wasting and was acting upon strictly unmentionable impulses.  Frankly, I never before realized that I was capable of pissing so much. 

 

Things are better now.

(I hear somebody ask: “Weren’t they ‘better’ then ?”  My reply: “No, they were exactly the same.”)

 

I got a prescription for dinosaur flu.  Got it from a psychiatrist friend just for the asking. But I never intend to use it personally.  Should the avian flu ever strike, the med is for my daughter.  Hitchcock was right: “Birds” is the ultimate horror scenario.  But if I go, I intend to take a birdshit load of those feathery therapods with me.

 

Summer—where has it gone?  Only three more months of it left.  (I’m projecting, by the current heat wave, that it won’t even seem like the beginning of Fall until November.)   There’s going to be a lot of wild weeds long-in-the-tooth by then. 

 

I thereby proclaim this “The Summer of the Droughted Weed.”

 

*resumes lotus position on Tombstone Hill while basking under the Sun*