Saturday, March 1, 2014

REPOST: john trudell, courtesy of the family blog whore

First published on 2/24/2013

Tip of the hat, finger aside the nose, to TW, as I steal from his Valentine's Day post: "They Didn't Listen" -- and thank him for the find, and kiss the very center of his forehead.



Uploaded on Jun 27, 2009 by NancyRedStar·

"These Memories"


In the reality of many realities
how we see what we see
affects the quality 
of our reality 

We are 
children of earth and sky
DNA descendant and ancestor 
human being physical spirit 
bone flesh blood as spirit

We are 
in time and space 
but we're from beyond time and space 
the past is part of the present 
the future is part of the present 
life and being are interwoven

We are 
DNA of Earth, Moon, planets, stars 
we are related to the universal 
Creator created creation 
spirit and intelligence with clarity 
being and human as power

We are 
a part of the memories of evolution
these memories carry knowledge
these memories carry our identity
beneath race, gender, class, age
beneath citizen, business, state, religion

We are human beings
and these memories are trying
to remind us
human beings human beings
it is time to rise up,
remember who we are
~ John Trudell


Lyrics: John Trudell 
Music: Mark Matson & Hayley Hutt 
Vocals:John Trudell & Hayley Hutt 
Additional Vocals and Harmony:Deirdre Radford
Keyboards and Drum: Mark Matson 
Guitars: Byron Roberts
Produced and Engineered by: Mark Matson
Executive Producer: Nancy Red Star 




i don't think he likes it one bit but that's just too doggone bad.  someone in this family must be shameless, and i volunteered long ago ----->> if you love the land, this country, the solid comfort of the amazingly real, the white skull recognition of all that you forgot.... go read, revel,  and rest at TW's american idyll.

The Amazon Cloud Robbery

This is here because it is the only song from this album that will successfully load onto my Major Pain Management Treatment When The Manor Is Enveloped In Darkness And Swathed In Silence, that being my mp3 player.  Were it not a vaporous thing, mere wisps, I'd be tempted to shoot the Amazon Cloud.  Because I've tried everything...




Album: Peace (1999)




I've Tried Everything

The truth of life is the greatest gift
But I don't think, I can make it fit
And who would guess it would come to this
When I've tried everything

And I should know, but I can't explain
The endless noise sounding in my brain
Who would've thought that you could feel such pain
When you've tried everything

Ooh, you're a loser now
Yeah, you're a loser
Yeah, you're a loser now

La la la
La la la
La la la

I should be cool, but I'm burning hot
I should be good, but I fell apart
Don't look at me, now don't even start
'Cause I've tried everything
Yeah, I've tried everything

Ooh, you're a loser now
Yeah, you're a loser

Ooh, you're a loser now
Yeah, you're a loser now, now

Songwriters
LENNOX, ANNIE / STEWART, DAVID ALLAN



"You Have A New Follower!"



Twitter politely informed me, via email, that I had a new follower.  Still woozy from yesterday, I dove headlong into today's wooz by googling the name of this person, found him, found him, also, to be seemingly aboveboard and legitimate.  That's where most people would stop, having better things to do.  But by then I was in wooz up to my belly button and had consumed three scones.

I started looking at other guys using the same name.

The first laid me low in the land of woozy laughter.  He has a Wikipedia entry.  So gasp or something. No, a gasp might be excessive.  A brief intake of breath might be more appropriate.  His entry is just a stub, a mere nub, under the categories of "Israeli linguists, Israeli expatriates in Japan, Jewish Japanologists, Living people, Lexicographers, Asian linguist stubs, Israeli academic biography stubs."  

Slightly jealous, I found myself wondering if, one day, provided that I play my cards right and meet the right people, I might be a stub.

Listen to what Stub Man has done, how his life is beautifully wrapped in that exotic Asian yellowish orange tissue paper, secured with a miniature obi:

Jxxx Hxxxxxx (春遍雀來, ハルペン・ジャック) is an entrepreneur and linguist specializing in Chinese characters or Kanji. He is best known as Editor in Chief for the Kodansha Kanji Learner's Dictionary and the New Japanese-English Character Dictionary.
H is CEO of the CJK Dictionary Institute, offering electronic resources for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean dictionary data. Hxxxxxx is also a Fellow at Showa Women's University.
Hxxxxxx also is the founder and current Executive Director for International Development of the International Unicycling Federation. Hxxxxxx is a major contributor to the Lifeboat Foundation, a project which aims to build a space colony so that humanity can survive in the event of the Earth's destruction.

My actual new follower, of the same name, is also a wonder of a person, even if there's no mention in his pedigree of unicycling or 4-man bobsledding. He is an advocate for old people and the families of old people, who usually meet him at a point of crisis and agitation.  Elder Care, it's called these days, a subset in the economy of gerontology.  He hates bed sores and is apparently a knight whose shining sword swiftly slices through the sticky webs of red tape at nursing homes, "rehabs," hospitals, and inappropriate home health set ups.

I'm thinking of "following back," since I'm closer to the bed sore scene than the many Seas of Tranquility awaiting humankind after the zombies, werewolves, and nuclear disasters have sent us fleeing this benevolent home.

Funny.  In my wooziness following a long and difficult day yesterday, I immersed myself in Le Petit Prince, available now through the Gutenberg Project (isn't that wonderful?).  In fact, here at the end of today's wooz -- there's been a considerable time lapse between beginning and end of this fascinating entry, mostly spent sleeping and reading a newspaper, the real kind, that folds and rustles, and smells all newspapery -- I think Antoine de Saint-Exupéry developed the single most meaningful test of our individual lucidities, stripped of space colony escape pods and nursing home neglect, being fourteen or ninety.

And he was kind enough, before politely disappearing in the sky or in the sand or in the ocean, wherever it was he ended up, to make this single most meaningful test of our individual lucidities a test that cannot embarrass us.

Aren't people, generally, wonderful?



illustration from Le Petit Prince






© 2013 L. Ryan

Thursday, February 27, 2014

A Moment in Time

I love this photo.

It's of a friend and her horse, Flea Bag, as they round a barrel.

There's such a oneness in horse and rider, horse and friend, that the barrel had not a chance in this world -- they make that barrel about as inconsequential as spit.

Look at the lines!  The speed!  The trust!

I could do without the hat, would rather see girly curls in the breeze, but I'm told that, like the wind in those parts, it's something I just don't understand.  Something to do with "culture." Harrumph.



Please do not reproduce this photo.
If you do, Flea Bag will run you down.

On Barrel Racing


© 2013 L. Ryan

Physicists are killing the dream of suicide

Square, Cube, Tesseract
 "the tesseract is to the cube as the cube is to the square"
************************************************


I'll be straight up with you, Dear Readers.  I've been suicidal.  No, not mushy-mushy "suicidal ideation," give your belongings away trite and tripe, but stone-cold "I feel nothing compels me to stop any longer" days and nights.  Because anyone with a bad case of CRPS for longer than, say, three years, thinks about suicide every morning they are unlucky enough to wake up.  Morning, afternoon, evening, whatever.  And three years is equally arbitrary.

This is when I'm supposed to tell you what stayed my hand.

Except that nothing has.  It hovers, instead, shaking in midair.

Not even the usual stuff could stop me now.  That being::  the accrual of sufficient funds to support Fred in his final years, as he winds and wends his way around the grounds of these grand Haddock Family holdings. That being:  teaching him (or Sven, Bianca, or maybe even the Cabin Boy) to clear the kitchen counters, do the dishes, and put everything back in its place once clean and dry.  That being: paying off my debts so that my departure is not the kerplunk of a tiny pebble in our moat, but the gentlest surface addition of a dandelion parachute and seed, a complement to the naturally accruing muck of the moat.  Only I would think to think "Ah, le futur du dent de lion..."  But I have been neither perennial nor herbaceous.

That being:  the desire to know how things turn out for my family members and the people who fell into my gnobby spider's web and became my friends.

The old concerns of the novitiate died with my solemn vows -- I don't care who has to find me, who has to do the cleaning up, who has to make a phone call or two.  It's not that difficult, and no soul known to me would be shocked.  The even older concerns of the narcissist don't keep the heart contracting, the thought of how some would be hurt, some insulted, some angry, some mildly disappointed.  Will the truth of my life come out, every secret, every fault, every unknown success?  I murdered narcissism about a decade ago, with lapses, true, but that's no longer the darkest stain on my soul.  (The secret to getting out most organic stains is the oxygenating action of hydrogen peroxide.  And, by the by, an excellent help to CRPSers out there with feet that make passers-by cringe in revulsion?  One cup hydrogen peroxide and one cup Epsom Salts, diluted to an amount that seems practical.  Oh, but first take a handful of pain meds, say 25-40 minutes beforehand, because the use of an old toothbrush is required.  If someone really loves you, they'll do that part while you smack some gum and watch "Duck Soup.")

Again, what has my hand jangling so in a jello-shimmy just short of suicide, since nothing has changed the sieve envy of my mind?  Mine own anger, that's what.  Not yours, the possessive referring to none of you, Dear Readers, but the "yours" that designates the Usual Suspects, more precisely, the You the eye and mind of Keyser Söze would flit upon, briefly, not to concoct a credible story, but as the world's best annihilator of essence, a succubus of haloed ringlets of shades, lengths, and quality to rival Joseph's ridiculous coat, a precision parser of your particular sentence.  Everything is a circle, isn't it?

So now I must pretend.  Pretend that that is not my hand jazz dancing near hot flame, that that is not furor lighting up mine eyes, but joy at seeing you again.

It's nothing to do with being happy or not, or any other sentient commonplace.  I've explained, even, that it is not self-pity.  I recognize that there are people who suffer beyond my wilds.  I am sorry for them and do what I can, when I can, to alleviate their situation -- though usually that alleviation is so abstracted it will do the individual inciting it no good whatsoever.

I can see the goddamned glass is half full.  Three-quarters, even, if you press me, and if we can chat physics and the effects of modifying the shape of the eye's boundary.

Fred delights in the notion of a holographic multiverse.  Would you believe that I find most succinct the explanation given by the Physics section of About.com?  (Especially in comparison to the hair-raising versions Fred blurts out as he rocks in the green rocker by my bed!)  Here! I've stolen some of "About"'s explanation:

The holographic principle is a mathematical principle that the total information contained in a volume of space corresponds to an equal amount of information contained on the boundary of that space. This dependence of information on surface area, rather than volume, is one of the key principles of black hole thermodynamics.  
In Brian Greene's 2011 book The Hidden Reality, he suggests a tightly interlocked Holographic Multiverse:
the holographic principle envisions that all we experience may be fully and equivalently described as the comings and goings that take place at a thin and remote locus. It says that if we could understand the laws that govern physics on that distant surface, and the way phenomena there link to experience here, we would grasp all there is to know about reality.
Now, here is where "About" dumbs it down, and pretty much says what Fred, a-rockin', also says, but degarbled. Speech going back and forth in space, combined with smug glee, is not conducive to teaching. The sound is aimed all over the darned place, distorting the waxy protective vernix of my immature comprehension.

According to the holographic principle, there should be a physically-equivalent parallel universe that would exist on a distant bounding surface (the edge of the universe), in which everything about our universe is precisely mirrored.
What exactly does this mean?
Well, we live in a three dimensional universe. If you have a 3-dimensional region then the edge of that region would be a 2-dimensional surface. For example, if you have a solid rubber ball, the 3-dimensional object has a 2-dimensional spherical surface.
The holographic principle suggests that this surface would contain enough information to perfectly represent everything that takes place within it. Think of it kind of like a reflection on the surface (although this is only a useful analogy, the precise formulation of the holographic principle is a mathematical relationship based upon quantum physics).
If this highly-theoretical conjecture is true, then that means that our universe exists in two different forms, though those two universes are completely identical in every respect. As Brian Greene explains in his 2011 book, The Hidden Reality:
Our experiences here, and that distant reality there, would form the most interlocked of parallel worlds. Phenomena in the two - I'll call them Holographic Parallel Universes - would be so fully joined that their respective evolutions would be as connected as me and my shadow.

This is, in short, the origin of my anger.  I want to object, as if these worlds retained any proper respect for Robert's Rules -- using a diaphragm-controlled stage voice to call out, "Point of order!"  That would stop everything -- EVERYTHING -- until I could get everything -- EVERYTHING -- figured out.  Because my understanding, at this point, is that, while I may exist, how, where, when, and why I do has less force of impact than my dandelion fluff coalescing with our algae-rich moat water.

It seems that for my suicide to be a true thing, I must first strive to be one-dimensional, a pair of points whose surface has no dimension.

Rocking beside me a few days ago, happy as a clam, Fred marvels, to and fro, that we've found the Higgs boson and now he puzzles at its lightness.  Particle physics has gone red with the shame of its insufficiency to explain the 85% of matter that we cannot find, dark matter, and over the purple prose of the new fictive string in the narrative, that of supersymmetry, which posited an undiscovered doppelganger that is, for symmetry's sake, much heavier.  Elegant mathematics and no proof, string theory, and now... mucking up my suicide, extra dimensions, microscopic, and always, evidentiary failure of tests of "existing" models.

Fred sounds so content, excited.  Like one of those people who will live, old, bent, and aching within that contentment, and will greet death as a passageway, a chance to morph into some of that formulaic elegance, that chalk eeked out across green slate, erasable marker on white board, those old dreams, smashed to smithereens in search of God.

Physicists are killing the dream of suicide.


© 2013 L. Ryan