Forty minutes to sunset.  Skies are mixed, some thin strato-cumulus clouds but otherwise jello blue sky.  Temp is in the upper 50s and just ideal for running x-miles—which I did already. 

There were two matters somewhat out of my routine that I got involved in here today.   The first found me taking exception, while running, to a piece of plastic yellow ‘CAUTION’ ribbon tied to the lower limb of an ornamental tree aside the road.  It had been there all summer and finally I decided that it was just stupidly un-scenic.  So I ran up to it and yanked it from the tree.  Yikes—a stirring hornet nest was exposed bouncing up and down with the recoil of the limb!  Luckily, I neither had to yank very hard for very long (thus not a catastrophic disturbance) nor, because I was already running, was I an immobile target.  Nonetheless, it got me talking out loud to that arboreal booby trap . (You may be wondering what I said.  I said, “Can’t catch me I’m the Gingerbread Man.”)

The other matter happened later during the same x-miles sojourn some miles there further along.  I was running at a moderate pace around a rather blind corner (trees and shrubbery) and about to head up a steep hill when I ‘thought’ I detected the Living.  (You must understand that Dreamland—cemetery—is closed to the Living during the after-hours when I can sometimes be found here.)  Not sure if it was the scent of the Living, the sound of the Living, or just a psychic sense of mine that got me alerted.  In any case, sure enough, there was a young teenage couple strolling down the hill, hand-in-hand, and when they saw me, the girl did not hesitate to petition to me: “Can you please help us get out of here!”  Yes, they were locked in.  Yes, they were lost.  And, yes, I could help them out.  I thought of just providing them directions to the only low fence that provides easy exit, but realized they’d likely just get re-lost following my accurate but necessarily intricate directions (Dreamland’s quite the maze to those not fully familiar with it.)   So instead I began escorting them the ¾ miles along winding paths, over a bridge spanning a stream, and past innumerable but always remarkable tombstones.  The girl admitted to me: “We’ve been lost for so long here—before we found you—that we actually stopped at a few graves and asked for directions.”  I laughed and said “Actually, if you waited until dark and the spirits were assisting, the tombstones might have started glowing one after another to point you the way out.”

The young girl’s mother called the girl’s cell phone as I was escorting them out and the mother was already apparently aware of their turmoil.  The girl informed her Mom that ‘a man’ was helping them out.  Then the relay of questions from Mom to daughter and directed to me began:  “What’s your name?”  “Do you work here?”  “What section are we in?”  Ad absurdum.  Obviously, the Mom had visions of me as some sort of Day Walker or Night Stalker and feared her daughter might prematurely just have found her final resting place.  I answered only one of the questions, What’s your name?, by raising my outer shirt to reveal a tee shirt that only had a question mark on it.  “I don’t know what my name is or who I am,” I replied to the girl.  “I’ve lost my identity here and am searching for it.”  The young man accompanying the girl thought my response was hilarious and insisted on snapping a photo of me as 'a question mark' with his camera phone. 

(actually another pic, same shirt)

Anyway…

We finally arrived and I showed the two grateful teenagers the low fence, instructed them how to scale it, and then parted, saying: “I wish I could join you and hop the fence, but I can’t.”  “Why not?”, the girl genuinely inquired.  Nodding my head directionally back towards the heart of the cemetery, I said “That’s home, back there.  Not allowed to leave anymore.  After all, I’m only your apparition.”  We all ‘got it’ and laughed.

But I did go back.  And now, having sat and written this, the sun has already set.  And since all of Earth is home to me, home also this will always be.

“If I were an Al Qaeda asset, you’d all be screwed.”

 -my opening statement at a convocation of future suicide-bomber fundamentalist Islamic Boy Scouts.

I’m looking for self-enhancement and self-improvement opportunities.  Only qualified multiple other personalities need self-apply.

For most people, beyond a certain point in life, incredulity sets in (like death’s rigor mortis) regarding many previously kindly-considered things.  Like the virtue of innocence, the ultimate prevalence of goodness,  and the possibilities for true love.  That point is the exact point where most people finally and tragically fail forever more to fully trust themselves.

 I refuse to subscribe to the current regime’s descriptor (echoed by the preponderance of the news’ re-echoing) of “The War on Terror”.  Why?   Because, from a state-power perspective, that’s tantamount to always backing the status quo, which by definition, has the most to fear from terror.  Terror is often just a guerrilla tactic.  Sometimes it is a guerrilla strategy.  Sometimes it is a despotic-state strategy such as Ivan the Terrible and Saddam Hussein unleashed upon their own citizenry.  In any case, a War on a Tactic or a War on a Strategy  makes no sense whatsoever.  If someday a radical, militant fundamentalist Islamic tyranny seizes hold of America, you can be damn sure that I’d be quite engaged as a guerrilla in demonstrating at great cost to them what real  terror is.   So let’s stop resorting to this sloganistic misnomer of "The War on Terror".   Call it what it is:  The Virtual Evisceration of Radical Militant Islamic Nihilism (The Vermin).

(This account is from last evening.  Already a new sun has risen - time to shine on and leave these words here.  Behind... )

Who sent the news crew?  No running x-miles in Dreamland today.

Just got to my favorite Dreamland haunt to jog about this evening and found a film crew lingering even though it’s after hours and the cemetery gates are locked for the night.  While I really don’t believe they were there to cover my special ops regimen (running, popping a beer, and blogging—in that order), I decided to change up, wander off elsewhere, and quietly engage in the latter two-thirds of the fore-mentioned guerrilla training. 

And as I now sit on the base of the obelisk of John D. Rockefeller, I must remark about my running:  I’m tired.  I think I’ll go home now.

Yeah.  Right.  Over John D’s grave.   But, I’ll be back tomorrow.  Either going to run twice as far as my discipline stipulates—or just as far, but as fast as I possibly can.

Oh hell.  A little red fox, unsuspecting of my presence, just ran past me ten feet away, then saw me and jumped frightened  into the woods.  Now three squirrels in the immediate environ are all chirping their “don’t fuck with me” chirp.  Things seem a bit odd and a’kilter all around.  Too much activity for a non-thinking man such as myself to process.  I non-think it’s time to slip unnoticed back into the world of the living…  Yes, your world.  And mine.

My undercurrent: Still running x-miles in Dreamland (cemetery).

Observation of one man to another about women:  “You can’t figure them out.  Don’t even try.  If you shit all over them, they treat you like you’re a brand new puppy dog.  If you treat them good right from the start, they wonder what’s  wrong with you.”

(Okay. So I am one of the guys involved in the previous mention. I’m just not designating my role.  But it makes you wonder what was mentioned just prior to that generalization to warrant it, doesn’t it now?)

I thought with the arrival of fall weather and dwindling sunlight on the North Coast that I’d be spending more time indoors.  So much for ‘indoors thinking’.  I’m actually more engaged in the arrival of the new season and its manifestations outdoors than I was with this past summer in its most glorious stride.  I may just be transitioning spiritually from a summer-lover and sun-worshiper to an autumn activist spurred on by the quickening of all that’s in the air.  So as you near- and fellow-latituders cuddle in your houses in the hastening twilight of an imminent vanish-into-fall night seeking comfort from northerly winds pimping an ungodly upstart chill, just imagine that I’m somewhere ‘out there’ seeking new-found thrills.

Very boylike this morning:  leaping up flights of stairs—three stairs at a time, hopping off and up onto street curbs, dashing across traffic-filled avenues, finding a huge slab of concrete in the middle of a city sidewalk and lifting it over my head and tossing it aside, petting flowers that with autumn’s coolness soon shall die, pounding on hollow street light poles to make them sound like bells, stepping briskly lightly knowingly and feeling the power of my advance, smiling at all the girls I pass while avoiding falling into their trance.

Update:  Seems like the Xanga clock is slow 6 minutes.  As I updated the time on this post, I checked the US Naval Observatory Master Clock Time and noticed the deviation.  This is not a good thing for Xanga since it could taint any cyber-forensic investigation and give cause to a court to throw 'evidence' out.  Xanga: sync your time - NTP ! 
....update to this update:  The time has been corrected and now appears accurate.

Other update: A Kansas City teenager accused of attacking a classmate and then bragging about it on a Web site was sentenced Thursday to three years in prison.  Yes, the Web site was Xanga.

Shall I write of soft soothing sentiments  or fomenting vitriol?

Both inundate me in the every-now mobius-ly and simultaneously.

It almost seems like a fair feminine spirit upon a sunny path is calling out to me to come play and romp about in happy-go-lucky dalliance.  While at the same time, along the shadowy back track, a dark-armored machismo spirit warns me, of not only dangers ahead, but dangers at hand, and begs for my warrior wariness.

As if an omniscient observer perfectly balanced, I attempt to trace the mobius flow wondering wherefrom and whereto?  From what beginning and unto what end?

But my anima and animus both grow impatient and  are equally unassuaged by my non-deliberative non-committal non-decision.

Oh damn the both of them.  I shall simply revel in the transition of seasons underway.   Grabbing moments sunning warmly while I still can.  And running amidst the gusts of cool winds about to rip leaves from limbs.

The stranger approached the master seeking enlightenment on how to avoid the trap of Illusion totally and forever.

The master, in response, challenged the stranger: “Let’s keep it real.  What’s been the play of Illusion in your life?  What does Illusion mean to you?”

The stranger did not hesitate to volunteer:

“To speak to a trusted intimate of Illusion—

of all the previous lovers and intimacies that served no ultimate

end but to disillusion—

to speak so and have the loving courage

to believe that this trusted one

would never join their company—

to have this trusted one pledge most adamantly,

in brilliant contrast, to stand apart from all who failed before—

and then to awaken one day with the full realization

that this  one, too, had passed fully over into the company

of that  oblivion—

that is cold-ass Illusion.”

The master paused considering the eloquence of the stranger’s response.  Actually, an onlooker, had one been present, might have observed that the master’s last sip on a can of beer coincided precisely with the last words of the stranger.  No matter.

 Before rummaging around for another beer, the Master spoke:

“Please , tell me you didn’t see it coming..."

Then, digging deeply into the profoundity of his enlightened non-self, he declared:

"Wake up.  Wake up.  Your Illusion is just a bad dream-plot for an unremarkable afternoon TV soap opera.   If you must dream, dream a little dream about dreaming about…”

The master never finished verbalizing his thought.  Instead, an onlooker, had one been present, might have been invited by the master, at that precise adverbial loss, to share the next "beers-of-great-destiny" along with him ...and the stranger.

I've never ever authored an email-no comment post before.

So maybe it's about time.  What to say?  What to say?  Okay:

If you suddenly feel I'm 'far away', all I want you to honestly ask (and answer) yourself is: "Who moved?"

Oh, to hell with this post.  You can't (won't) comment anyway!

If you care not to comment , continue to the post below, published one minute prior, and choose not to comment (thus reaffirming your self-found hidden freedom).  Rather than, here, being restricted from doing so.

It's all good.  There's only one Golden Eternity.

Virtual people live in virtual worlds which depend upon one’s acceptance of them as a good enough mimics of reality to serve as a surrogate for the real thing.

Life without virtualization is sparser, perhaps even spartan, yet more sober and closer to the heart.

Very few people truly know themselves very well, let alone wholly.   Fewer still are those who can know another truly in a significant way.  Much of what is believed about others by the vast majority of semi-knowing selves is a projected virtual encapsulation of those others’ personalities—colored by culture, colored by habits, colored by consensualized expectations. 

Do the math: a semi-knowing self (½) can ‘know’ another semi-knowing self (½)  only to the amount of two bits (  or one quarter,  that is, ½  * ½ = ¼).   Knowing, in terms of relationships, is multiplicative, not additive.  You cannot put two half-knows together and sum up the relationship as an enlightened one.  Only two self-enlightened individuals (1 * 1 ) can find wholeness (=1) in mutuality.

So if you find yourself living in a world where you pretty much feel you know all your friends and lovers, or even ex-friends and ex-lovers really, really well, either you are (were) all enlightened (all 1’s—and there’s still hope for Utopia) …or you have filled in the actualized ¼ or ½ of your knowledge-in-relationship with the ¾ or ½ of an unctualized virtualized relationship.

I started out the summer believing that all my friends, my acquaintances-becoming-friends, and even I, myself, were near-1’s in terms of self-actualization and honesty in matters of self-revealment.  I was clearly wrong about myself.  I  was only just a half-know believing in the addition rule. 

But I’ve changed over the past 3 months.  This has been the summer of my devirtualization.  I’m no longer just a half-know believing himself/herself whole.  I’ve acknowledged and confronted my self-ignorance and fractionally progressed somewhat more toward unity.   Fractionally.  But I’ve also come to understand that the principle of multiplicativity factors a multiplicity of two selves into a numinously psychic bond with one another.

Paradigmatically, You (1) times I (1) equals US (1).

 (thus ever approximating the soulmate ideal of an irreducible United Selves).

And I think the world is a strangely beautiful place to have allowed us to meet and become friends as we have.  But it's also a strangely cruel place to keep us apart as it does.  Ah—this world is the perfection of a public laundry conundrum (lost socks and all) and we are just wet rag dolls tossed into its assorted dryers to thump away our wetness.  But how I'd love someday, if just once, to thump playfully in the same dryer with you.

Well...

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) -- An al-Qaeda-linked extremist group warned Pope Benedict XVI on Monday that he and the West were "doomed," as protesters returned to the streets across the Muslim world to demand more of an apology from the pontiff for his remarks about Islam and violence...

The pope on Sunday said he was "deeply sorry" about the angry reaction to his speech last week in which he cited the words of a Byzantine emperor who characterized some of the teachings of Islam's Prophet Muhammad as "evil and inhuman" and referred to spreading Islam "by the sword."

  -chron.com

Let's see, I've been "notfor" Prophet here since the year 2000.  I've had the "The Looseness of Doom" banner up there for just as long.  "The United States of America" has always been emblazoned in my background.  And that's not a metallic popsicle stick that I'm brandishing in my ever-so old original profile pic.  So...al-Qaeda is telling us something I didn't already  know?!

At 09:02 today, world-famous sailor and cartoon superstar Popeye was rushed to Sweet Haven Bay General Hospital but was pronounced dead on arraival. Peepeye, 76, Popeye's only surviving nephew and family spokesman, said tainted spinach was likely to blame. "This is his finich", said Peepeye.

Peek-aboo, Oh I want to sing…No, I want to write…though I want to chat. Can’t do all—without inspiration, can’t do any. Circles. I’ve been turning in endless circles on myself, chasing my own tail. And sometimes catching it. Then berating it for be such a loser. Imagine my tail allowing itself to get caught—even by me. So I admonish myself to just stop chasing and stop losing out to myself. I drove to work today just living for the music. Literally, music was in my ears and on my mind, and I thought even worth dying for, defending if the need arose against a future nightmarish cultureless music-less oppressive status quo. Certainly I was high but I didn’t know why. Then I thought of you. You, too, I thought would live and die for the music. You, truer in this than I. For the music that you had given me was right, stealing my heart away from the commonplace and trite, easing me melodically through many nights. And the music of the morning was sweeter yet. And this was all I energized all day: ~~~Shaggy - Angel~~~ Girl, you're my angel, you're my darling angel Closer than my peeps you are to me, baby Shorty, you're my angel, you're my darling angel Girl, you're my friend when I'm in need... ~~~~~~ I love the music. Love, love, love, the music. And when before I die I go senseless, on that great day, it’s all I wanna hear.

Chris and Xanga are announcing Xanga Audio beta...  hrmmm....

March 1, 2003 - my first audioblog on Xanga.... And I then wondered:   "Will aud(io)blog(ing) ever be a part of Xanga? "

I now wonder if Xanga (like Audioblogger/Blogger) plans to enable phone audio postings (as contrasted to just manual audio uploads) by calling a Xanga number, recording a post, and then having your blog updated with an audblog icon and a link to your recorded audio?

Unrelated self-note (to remind me where I 'was' today  - as I view my archives years from now): blogging from Chicago, here just for the morning, early afternoon.  Back in Cleveland this evening. Go Buckeyes.

True memories of another are more than just addressable recalls of encounters in the past.

They are psychic post-dispositions to guide one henceforth in understanding one’s world.  One must take responsibility for one’s world.  Take complete responsibility for everything in one’s world, including those memories.  And learn.  Or disappear forever into a night of unknowing.

What we know today:

1)  "For most of the past 800,000 years, carbon dioxide levels had remained at between 180 and 300 parts per million (ppm) of air. Now they are at 380ppm.... In the past, it had taken 1,000 years for carbon dioxide to rise by 30ppm during natural warming periods. According to the new measurements, the same level of increase has occurred in just the last 17 years....It's an experiment we don't know the result of."

2) A process of worldwide global warming change has now begun, and projections of its course range from benign over the coming century to catastrophic in the next ten years.

What we strongly have reason to believe:

The principal cause of this warming is very probably the carbon dioxide generated by burning the fossil fuels on which the world depends for most of its energy.

What we don't know:

How significant an impact global warming will have on life, including human life, resulting from changes in precipitation, sea level, strength of storms, and transmission of diseases.

So. Things are getting warmer. (I  really like it.)  Industrialization is probably to blame.  But will warmer mean your country becomes a desert...or a rain forest?  A more wasted land or a greener, more agriculturally productive land?  (Some Chinese scientists believe China will get greener and significantly more productive agriculturally while the US will experience major drought.)  Will your coastal cities get submerged?  Will extreme weather become even more extreme and common?  Will world immigration pressure go manic as populations in growingly destitute areas flee towards the growing greener pastures?  Will tropical diseases like malaria and yellow fever range farther?  Migrating birds are likely to migrate much farther than before carrying diseases like H5N1 (bird flu) along with them.

"Oh mommy, look at that big strange bird in the sky.  I've never seen a bird like that before!"

Google Image Labeler launched today. It’s a game, based on Luis von Ahn’s ESP Game, that puts two random users together and asks them to label/tag an image. The idea is that if two people come up with the same label, it is probably a good one and will make Google’s image search better.

   -TechCrunch

What a clever game.  It provides fun for the participants (yes, I tried it and found it interesting, amusing, and engaging) while it improves Google's search and thus potentially makes Google more $$$.  Hence, if you hate Google, don't play.  Or play 'bad' and hope you match up well with some other deranged Google-hater.

If I hadn’t loved you, I’d now conclude that knowing you was a waste of time.

Not that a waste of time is always a bad thing.  Crosswords are a waste of time.  Blogging is, too, pretty much.  And washing and waxing a car is as much a waste of time as anything I can imagine.

So, it follows, that only knowing you would have been like washing and waxing my car.  Only knowing you would have been like blogging.  In fact, it was through blogging that I got to know you.  See there.

Except for the loving part, all will fade. 
That love, however, will remain ours-untouched-
even after all of time has wasted away.

As a young adolescent, I was quite an introvert.  As an introvert, I was a loner, spent much time at home reading books, exploring the workings of the mind.  By brute force of such habit, I became something of a genius.  Or at least peculiar enough to be worthy, by some frank folk, of such a consideration.  Well, that peculiar sense of self has been too long neglected.  Changes ahead.

It is true that I have led many of you here through the gates and onto the grounds of Dreamland.  I have led you where I have gone: to hallowed grounds, to an expanse of sacred doom, to the land of the dead.  I connected up philosophically with Death at  a very young age—at 2, I think, I had my first premonition that nothing in life lasts.  Still a child, there were subsequent deaths in the family—of course sad but not shocking, heartbreaking but not insurmountable for the surviving.  Death visited again most tragically when, as a freshman in college , I was driving my mother to work (so that I could then take the car to school) and another driver ran a red light, crashed into us, and killed her.  Not instantly, but painfully.  Yet ultimately she died with dignity in the company of the children she loved.  After her death, something in me changed.  I became more fearless, sometimes reckless.  I firmly believed I’d not myself live until the age of 30.  Yet I resolved never to surrender to Death—it would have to come and drag me battling to my grave.  Death did come to claim me a few years later.  But it was a mistake.  A Death angel, literally, hovered over me and queried me wordlessly (hence, mentally or psychically—or more aptly described: directly ) as to whether I was the Pope: Are you the Pope?  I was shocked by the mere vision of that above-my-bed swirling Angel.  Yet more shocked by the realization that it had mistaken me somehow for the Pope and needed my affirmation to continue its mission.  In response, I directly indicated no, I am not the Pope.  It departed and I fell back to sleep.  I awoke to discover that the Pope had in the meanwhile died.  After that fiasco of near mistaken identity, Death and its angels seemed to avoid annoying me like I was the plague.   Many years of mindful adventures followed, with fine uninterrupted health, and a sense of life embracing an endless path to eternity.  The confluence of those three factors washed away my adolescent impression that I was destined to be good—in the sense that only the good die young.

There is an intention of space as a proxy for time between this sentence and the last.  Much has transpired in that space.  Most darkly, somewhere in that space just before the beginning of this sentence—Death decided it had neglected me long enough. Perhaps it finally got over its embarrassment in nearly mistaking me for the Pope. (More likely:  I had screwed up once too often in flirting with danger <<details here omitted>> and drew its unkind attention back upon myself.)  Increasingly so for the past month, but most acutely over just this past week, Death has been hacking at me.  Yes, hacking.  Like a hacker does a web server.  The good news is that it hasn’t (yet) found me vulnerable.  The other news is that my psyche is getting battered by a seemingly endless barrage of reminders of hammered mortality. 

Changes ahead.  Death has reminded me that it’s time for me to stop neglecting myself.

After an unprecedentedly expansive, far-reaching total summer self-survey, I've come to the conclusion: better sober-dry than fucked-up high.