Office Politics

Sigh...enough said.

Emptied to Fill Up

Overdosing on Keith Jarrett music lately (yet again). I've been listening to much of his live solo work. The fact that this is totally improvised music and he is able to create such beauty for seemingly hours on end is just... magnificent. I'm jealous and quite envious of his ability. Oh I know that his natural ability has been honed by years of practice and discipline, practice that most of us never achieve but it’s just easier to say I’m jealous of some inborn mastery rather than admitting I should be working much harder at my own disciplines.

My understanding of his way of working is that he prepares for the concert by totally emptying himself of thoughts, ideas and pre-conceived notions. Once he feels emptied, he is able to sit at the piano, take in the atmosphere of the concert hall and audience, his own emotional state (and how successful he has emptied himself), and allow these elements to bring forth the music that, Jarrett says, is constantly around us.

Whatever he does resonates with me and during certain passages I literally get goose bumps.

Sublime stuff.

Surfing with the Buddha*

How can we know what people are really like? Is trying to look at things from their point of view enough? Can we really "get into" someone else's head? How does one turn the ideal of compassion into true empathetic feelings for someone else? Enough so that you "feel" what they feel and can then so identify with them that any violence against them becomes violence against yourself.

*If this isn't a song title it should be.

The Meaning of Sacrifice

For a selfish and slighty self-centered man, there is no greater lesson in true sacrifice that cleaning up after sick children, letting them fall asleep on you breathing their germs into your face and facing it all again the next day.

Frustration

The children are sick and sometimes all you can do is sit by the bed and hold their hands.

Not to Touch the Earth

Earthquake during the night.

I was awake and the rattling shook me. OK, not a great pun there but the trembling and shaking of the house and bed reminded me of the power of mother nature. Normally I feel very comfortable whether in the city or out in the country but once in awhile I remember that I'm not in charge of everything around me. Heck, I’m not even in charge of what’s inside me most of the time.

Expectations

The expectations on the first born, especially sons, can be a harsh reality to bear. All the failed plans are passed down and placed on the young shoulders of others. The burden of these unwanted ideas slowly warps the personal dreams of the bearer and as both parties gradually succumb to the weight, stunted growth appears in the relationship. It withers and then bears sour fruit in the next generation.

Notes after watching a neighborhood football game.

Vacation

Reading over some of the dreams I've recorded (and some I haven't), I realize that I really, really need a vacation!

Dream - 4

Fragment:

A group of people bunched together and discussing work-related items. I am among them. I can recognize some colleauges, while others are not known to me. It's not clear if we are at the office as the surrounding outside our circle is grey and indistinct. The conversation turns to over-work and someone mentions another co-worker (who is not there) and says he looks close to exhaustion. The discussion continues with descriptions of his face and posture, indication his fatigue. Then a few people point at me and say, "Look, just like him." I start to protest and the dream fades away.

The Bottom Line

This person is still annoying me. Even though they actually haven't done anything to bug me in awhile, I am still annoyed. What exactly am I annoyed about? That this person once did something wrong to me; that this person might do something wrong to me in the future; that this person is the opposite of what I am trying to become; that this person is very similar to what I am today?

How do you let go when you don't really want to?

Clueless and Slightly Slack

Part of the problem is that most of us are smart enough to know just how not-smart we are. And yet we still act cluelessly most of the time.

Sarcasm Is Not Lost On Me...Mostly

All right...so, after the many arguments, disagreements, questions and emotional disturbances, I realized that it is sometimes better to be kind than to be right.

And, lo, the heavens opened, trumpets blew and there was peace in the land.

Mock Me

Too much mock meta-physical/philosophical gobbledeygook running around here.

Can't wait until the weather turns warmer so that I can sit outside on my patio, fire up the barbeque and listen to steaks sizzle while I sip a nice cold beer.

Stretching the Happiness

Cycles. The moon rises and falls, new moon to whole moon and back again. The sun rises and sets. The seasons spin, hot to cool to cold and back again.

Even in our personal lives we seem to behave cyclically. One moment ecstatic, one moment livid, one moment depressed, one moment shamed, one moment fearful, one moment contrite and back again to happiness.

I'm wondering if leveling the emotions so that they don't mirror the much larger and longer moments in space/time would do us all some good.

Progress

"Suffering is our experience of the distance between what we are and who we wish to become."

Robert Fripp

Work Related

Busy at work and flying for work and thinking about work and suffering for work...

The Dreaming

The dreams lately have been mostly of an...um...erotic nature so I won't write about them here simply because I don't feel they reflect any deeper value. As letters to the editor of various adult magazines though there may be some value of a, shall we say, more superficial nature.

The Reason Not to Listen to U2 Late at Night

It's about the search for meaning of course. Not the scientific and rational how do things work, why is the sky blue, how can fish survive hundreds of feet under the sea, but the true search for why is my sky blue and if it weren't what would that mean to me and you and what does that have to do with fish under the sea, why nothing of course only it's all inter-related and what affects one affects the other.

It is about finding a way to live a spiritual/religious/ritualistic (whatever you want to call it) life in a wholly rational yet insular world with wholly irrational (to the beholder) occurences.

Interiors

Still thinking about Hunter S. Thompson's death...Killed himself with a shotgun it seems. Got me thinking how some of the toughest exteriors hide the most brittle interiors.

A problem with many boys growing up is that they're never taught how to express emotion and therefore never learn how to deal with feelings in a constructive matter. They are left to cope the best way they know how and often it is not sufficient to get them through adulthood.

Thompson also seemed to be a product of his times. Talk and walk tough. Show the world the man and then end it all in a blaze of...something.

I will be re-reading many of his books over the next few weeks.

Hunter S. Thompson R.I.P.

Damn.

Hunter Thompson died today. By a self-inflicted shotgun no less. Another victim of his own created identity perhaps, a la Hemingway.

I started reading Thompson fairly late in life when I was less impressionable and so the glamour of the drug trips didn't affect me so much. What I did like about Hunter was and is just the sheer humour in his writing. Even when he was deadly serious about a subject, Nixon say, or guns or drugs, he was damn funny. Read any of his books and they are like nothing you've read anywhere else. Part journalism, part auto-biography, part creative fiction, part social commentary, part travelogue and all guts.

The Curse of Lono, ostensibly about the Honolulu marathon, has just about nothing to do with running races but it doesn't seem to matter because whatever Thompson did write about is far more interesting. And did I mention funny?

I mean here he is in Las Vegas to write about a stock car racing event, blasted on every drug known to man and lizard-kind and he stumbles into a national DA’s convention on narcotics…bad craziness indeed.

He could also turn a phrase with the best of them. "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro", "Generation of Swine", "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas". I think if I had ever met him I would have been scared shirtless or in such awe that I would have babbled incoherently and I would have ended up just another drunkard or failure to maybe write about or not.

He changed what a journalist could write about or which stories to cover. He put himself (or at least what he wanted us to think was himself) right in the forefront of the story and yet still kept a part of his intellect back to observe and report on the craziness. He often created the craziness even if only in his head and then put pen to paper. He demonstrated that you could literally write anything you wanted and if it was good (or very funny) people would read it.

He had a distinctive voice, both in his writing and speech. He was himself and that was the most important thing I liked about him. Still do.

Plus his road trips sounded better than mine.

“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive….” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?”

Hunter S. Thompson; Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; page 3; Vintage Books 1989