My number

15306715
That's the number that came up when I scanned my hands with a barcode scanner app.

When I loaded the number into Google Earth, it took me to this place in Japan.  When I did a search of Google Shipping, it took me to a book that talked about the link between obesity and cancer.

What I've been working on today.

How did I not know about this guy?

http://youtu.be/wvO68CC0lV8

Pearl Jam Cover
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DflEfK7CQ3w

Ghost stories as told by Dad, Part 3: "The Job Interview"

It was probably around 1965.  I was at a job interview at Carpenter and Patterson interviewing for the job of expediter.  I had talked with the manager before, and I came in and he said he wanted me to work for the company.
Just as he was saying this, I heard a male voice speak authoritatively:  "This will last but two years."
The manager was talking right along as this voice overrode him.
I looked around at him and said, "What?"
It didn't phase him.  It was as if he hadn't heard the voice.
I took the job, and had kind of forgotten about that, until there was a point when I left the company.  After thinking about the time I was with them, it came out to just about two years, and then I remembered about the voice at the interview.

Ghost stories as told by Dad, Part 2

My mother, Grace Winnifred Rowe.  She was a Foster.  Her aunt was our aunt Amy.    So anyway, it was the calling hours before Aunt Amy's funeral.  As we were going up the street, it was almost completely empty except for a couple getting into their car to leave, and we were up ahead of them near the building where she was lying in her casket.  Then this voice that was characteristic of her, kind of a high-pitched voice called out:  "Grace, Grace!" with great urgency to us.

I started winding my window down and slowing to see if I could hear anything more.  The first thing my mother said was, "That's Aunt Amy!"

She couldn't hardly believe it.  On the way home, I said, "This is strange!"  But she didn't say very much.  It just wasn't something in her experience, having a dead person talk to her.  She was a bible-believing woman, and this was outside of anything she had ever experienced.

I've always remembered it.

Probably, she was just hovering over, seeing people she knew.

Ghost stories as told by Dad

Nancy the Dog

Grammy Grace's dog must have been around 20 lbs.  She used to let it out to do its business.  This was in the wintertime.  There was some snow on the ground.  People say some big bird must have come down and grabbed her.  But there were no marks in the snow where a bird of prey would have swooped down.  Just the dog's tracks that went out in the snow and stopped.

It was starting to get a little darker.  I summoned my friend Roger Bowles up there, and we went all around the buildings of that farm.  We went all the way around in several circles, but there was no sign or tracks except for where the little dog's tracks stopped.

It's like you said, the Virgin Mary ascended bodily to heaven.

We never saw that dog again.

Strange synchronicity and Jean Cocteau

For reasons I do not understand, I was searching for images of leaning smokestacks.  I had been looking at pictures of derelict buildings.  It seemed to me that there ought to be images of large smokestacks leaning in a threatening way.  I suppose it was through the magical spiderworks of Google that I came upon a Jean Cocteau film, "Le Sang d'un poete", which purports to show show the journey within a poets mind during the time it takes a large smokestack to fall to the ground.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAqxEq4ylb4

How to catch monsters.

Dreamed about a book that (I think) was about how to catch monsters.  I saw a red monster on a red raft in a red ocean.  I think a good way to catch them would be to put out piles of stinky gym socks, with some sort of a lasso buried in the middle.  When they came out of the dark to feast on the stinky socks, you pull the rope from within your fortress of pillows and blankets.  Something like that.

Trapped in the 80s with my Ex

Old married couple on the verge of getting divorced get caught in a time vortex and transport back to their younger selves. They have to decide whether their imperfect lives are worth protecting the timeline from change. Hilarity ensures as they discover what they thought was their past was not quite as they remember.

Be the space in which dragons dwell

http://blog.shambhala.com/category/daily-wisdom/ocean-of-dharma/

Today during meditation, I was asked what I desire. Not much, really. But thus is a place of playing with desire, so I thought, "OK, I wouldn't mind being able to heal people. Or help people heal." I heard the words and SAW the light-filled void. "Be the great space in which dragons fly." And I saw black and gold dragons flying, the must powerful agents of change. And I remembered Nisargadatta's advice to become the space behind these appearances (I'm paraphrasing). And I remembered that familiar, light-filled void. The non-being that underlies being. And now every place I turn, I see references to space.

5 AM Noontime

I love the dreams where the sun is in the wrong place in the sky.  I'm getting so good at picking that one out.  Last night, I dreamed Pilar told me it was five in the morning.  I was going to the bathroom for a pee, and I noticed that the sun was high over the skylight.

"Nope, this is a dream," I shouted over my shoulder as I went in the bathroom.
"What?" asked Pilar, because she was halfway across the house (the dream) and couldn't hear.
"It can't be five in the morning, because the sun is too high," I shouted.
"Well that's what the clock says."

Everything DID seem just like reality to me.  I looked down at my penis as I finished my pee.  It looked the same as ever.  Often in dreams, things kind of shifted.  Sometimes these differences (like the position of the sun in the sky at 5 AM) One time I became aware I was dreaming because I had a ridiculous hard-on that was strangely blade-shaped.

Well that wasn't the case here, but there was no denying the noontime rays of sun coming through the skylight.  I decided not to pursue the conversation further with dream-Pilar, lest I get distracted and lose lucidity within the dream.

Lucid dreams are startling, because Everything Is So Damn Real.  When I first started having them, I did the usual stuff: fly, try to have sex with people, run around like a nut.  But now when I find myself in one, I just really enjoy going with the flow of whatever the dream is, enjoying the richness of detail... inspecting my surroundings carefully... (but not TOO carefully... you have to take little glances at things and just stabilize with the flow of things.... stay nice and steady.)

One time, I held my lucidity past the point where the dream collapsed.  When a dream collapses, it's like you're somersaulting backwards into a void.  Usually I lose it at this point, or lots of time even before this point.  However, on this occasion, I maintained my steady awareness of things right into and through the dissolution of the dream world as it dissolved around me.  Before I knew it, I was in another scene, and I was still aware.

Another time, I held my normal awareness right from wakefulness, right through sleep into a dream.  That was pretty cool.  I kind of flew into the back area of a delivery van.  The driver was having some kind of difficulty, so I helped him steer the thing a bit to the side of the road.  It was like my entry into his world disoriented him somehow, because once we were pulled over, he seemed fine.  I exited the delivery van, and he took off again, leaving me to walk around this unfamiliar neighborhood where there was some kind of flea market.  I walked up to one of the booths and started talking to a teenaged girl who stared at me with barely disguised contempt.  I didn't reveal who I was or what the circumstances were of my visit, but I got the sense that at some basic level she knew that I didn't belong there.  Other times I have had dreams where I engaged with the people in the dream world, they usually didn't seem to demonstrate much agency or self-awareness.  The only character who ever listened with interest to me was my son Hunter.

One time I had a lucid dream that Hunter was in.  I told him that I was actually having a dream, and he said, "Wow!  Well what do you think we should do?"  I told him I thought we ought to just go somewhere and have breakfast, so that's what we did.  While we were in the restaurant, he asked if I was going to tell the people in the dream that "this is a dream".  I said, "Sure, why not?"  I stood up in the middle of the restaurant and made an announcement in a loud voice, but people didn't really pay much attention, other than to look over at me, then return to what they were doing.  I don't remember what happened after that... probably the dream disintegrated because of me speaking in a loud voice and doing something so socially awkward.

ARTificial Intelligence

Just woke up from a dream I had in which I was looking at a photograph.  There was one of those codes in the photograph that allowed one to go online, and the page had information regarding the photographers light setting, lens, plus links to an archive of alternate images. This sort of information is already available in properties of different images.

It made me think: what if artists, craftspeople, discoverers of all types had an easy and efficient way to tag their work in such a way that others could quickly find their image (or I suppose textual article, diagrams, blueprints, etc.)

This would have an obvious benefit to the consumer-as-artist, because it would aid their self-guided journey of learning.  For instance, if someone was interested in pinhole photography, or painting techniques similar to that of Monet's Haystacks.  Local artists that taught classes might be picked up in such a search perhaps.

Someone working for an ad agency might also need something themed "haystacks" or that used pinhole photography.

Benefit to artist or craftsperson: by tagging so as to be included in this database would be opportunity to sell some work to a business who needed such an image or creation that they could make.

I think much of this database technology already exists:  meta tags, image search.

Void

Just so I don't forget again.  And in case anybody reads these things and is interested.
Meditating with Hunter just before bedtime, I got back to a place I had discovered a couple years ago, but had forgotten.  OK, I didn't FORGET; I knew I had gotten to a place.  I remembered exactly where I was the last time I was there. I remember having the same, "Oh yeah this is reality and it is always here for me. This is really cool." But then I forgot what the magic steps are to get there.  I KNEW that it is not hidden, but yet it has eluded me for a couple years.
Meditating for me is usually about concentrating on breath and focusing awareness between the thoughts.  At least as a starting point.  But there is a way you can also turn your inward gaze around backwards. There is this void that is dark, yet at the same time has light that flows through it.  It's very good.
Let me explain.
It's as if I am usually sitting in my body somewhere in my mind behind my eyes.  Usually I'm focused on whatever is in front of me, or whatever is in front of my mind's eye-- you know, thought objects, stuff I'm planning, or worried about... things I need to do.  That sort of stuff.  There's usually so much of this, that I can barely hold on to any kind of inner space... so I have to kind of just move between the thoughts... the spaces in between.  That's about as good as it usually gets for me.  I'm not really that great of a meditation practitioner.
But if you accept that the thought objects and feelings in consciousness are kind of  "in front" of your point of awareness, or the place where that awareness comes from, then you can begin to imagine that there is a "behind" that point.
I think that this might be what they were talking about in that classical Chinese Taoist text, "The Golden Pill" where they talk about "turning the light around"  (i.e., the light of awareness) and "bathing in the infinite".  I think this might be what the Buddhist texts refer to as Void.

For me it was a place of stillness.  Dark, yet with light moving through it somehow. I had the feeling that it would be good to stay there for a good long while, and that this was indeed possible, although perhaps not a good choice at this exact moment, because it would take my body a bit of time to get used to sitting for that length of time.  Also, because I need to sleep and get ready for work tomorrow and that sort of thing.

It is like a place of non-being that is more real than being somehow.   And it's always available to us.  It is really big, yet it's also really small because it can fit in the little tiny silent space between two thoughts or a brief good-night meditation session with my child.

So anyway, I don't want to forget this so I'm writing it down.  Kind of like a map, so I can find my way back tomorrow.

Everything ends.

I was getting a massage.  The young woman who I go to was telling me how she was watching a show about bunkers on TV.  This show was about people who think the world is going to end, so they build bunkers.  It made me think of somebody I knew who had a trap door on  his walkway.  You pulled the trapdoor up, and there were stairs that went down to a room in his basement where he had all sorts of supplies.  He'd built it around the time of the whole Y2K thing.

I was going to tell her about this guy, so I said, "You're probably too young to remember how some people were really freaked out about the Y2K bug."

She said, "Oh no, I remember.  I was like ten years old.  My mom had jugs and jugs of water and crackers. Boxes and boxes of crackers. And buckets. She was convinced the world was going to end."

"What were the buckets for?"  I asked.  "Were they to collect rainwater or something?"

"I never knew.  But, man, she sure had a LOT of them.  I'll have to ask her sometime."

I don't know what I said after that.  I think I might have been falling asleep a little bit while she kneaded my shoulders.  I was a bit startled when she spoke again.

"But everything has to have an end.  It just makes sense.  Because everything ends."

I thought back to the day before.  I'd been looking at a website that showed abandoned buildings.  After a while, I had to go to the bathroom, so I cut through our bedroom to use the bathroom in there.  While walking through, it occurred to me that our bedroom might look like those abandoned rooms I'd been looking at on the website.  Maybe people would be walking around through our ruined house some day, wondering about the people who lived in this house.  Maybe they were in some future, standing right where I was, wondering about us, wondering what it was like.  Our house wouldn't survive forever.  What would it be?  Depopulation from some horrible pandemic? 

Something would come along.  Wouldn't matter how many buckets you had in the basement.

Morning Thought

Underneath the thin skin of appearances, everything is light.

Mountain fastness.

We are all remote as far-off mountain tops. At first I thought I should be grieving this, but it just wouldn't take. The sadness, I mean. We are all alone together. This is the seed of all melancholy, the blues, art. It works, somehow, if you don't try to cover it up or suppress it. If you can merge with it, then... Well done, you!

Ms Britty

Dear steve

Nice day!

We develop some new tablet PC, its brand is Freelander which sales well in China, and I introduce some adornment commodities, they bring you fresh and happiness,

Thank you for your attention,

Ms Britty

Tea cup mountains and bathtub tubas

Tonight I had finished taking a bath and was in the midst of draining the tub when I discovered an odd oscillation in the drain plug creating a low-pitched tone. By altering the pressure of the plug, I could change the sound. Somehow the emergency valve above the main valve created a resonance chamber.

The sound was reminiscent of a didgeridoo.

I asked Pilar if she quite enjoyed my concert, and she said that she did.

As if this discovery was not enough, the dreaming universe presented me with a perfect image of a mountain in the bottom of my tea cup. The image was left by the small amount of material left in ether bottom after most of the moisture had evaporated.

I said to Pilar, "A tuba in my bath tub and a mountain in my tea cup; what does it mean?"

"That you're very happy," was her reply.

Update

Sometimes I visit the old neighborhood in Google Earth's street view, trying to catch a glimpse of myself.

Last Friday, I saw five snails.  They were all heading south.

Snake Story

Coming back from the park behind my house, I was startled to see a snake on my lawn.  The snake seemed in distress. I wasn't sure why I thought this at first, though as I write this, it occurs to me that it could be my own consciousness playing tricks with me, creating this narrative. I'm sure I had the thought: "Something isn't right with that snake." As I walked around him toward my door, I saw the reason why.  He was missing a bit of his tail.  The lawn maintenance people had been by just a half hour earlier to mow the grass in the park.  I surmised that he had a bad encounter with the lawn tractor.  The snake quickly left the small patch of grass and went off into some undergrowth below the fir tree by my corner window. It looked like he ought to be three inches longer.  His tail looked wrong, but there was nothing I could do.  I don't particularly like snakes, but I didn't like the idea of another species suffering because of something we humans had done, accident or no. I briefly considered going to the garden shed for a shovel to kill him, but he was certainly able to move and so might easily survive.  I decided not to do anything.

I went back inside the house and made a few phone calls. Immersed in the flow tiny necessities that is business, I forgot all about the snake.  Now that it is night, however, I see that moment like a bright bubble wobbling upwards through the dark. Remembering something you have forgotten is a bit like dreaming.  It's an island in a silent sea of unconsciousness.  What is the difference between dream, memory and narrative?  Oh, don't answer me that, I know that you know the difference; you're not insane.  What I mean is: what is the difference at the point of awareness?  It doesn't seem like there's much difference, although in my waking moments, I'm definitely aware that I'm carrying more body weight than I am in my dreams.

As I write this, I remember from the interminable Home Owner's Association meeting that the name of the landscape maintenance firm is American Dream.  The dream of owning one's own business is a piece of the American narrative. The lawn mower men named their business American Dream.  The poor snake doesn't give a shit.  He's off under some leaves somewhere thinking Oh My Fucking God That Hurts!  Now it's late.I really should turn in.  I need sleep.  I don't know why I feel compelled to save this little bit I have retrieved from the anonymous grains of moments and days.

At the end of the story, I say a prayer for the snake, not that it will do him any good.

May you find a safe place to stay.
May your find what it is you need.
May your pain be not more than you can bear.

OK, that was a false ending.  I've just remembered another thing.  After work, Hunter and I went back down to the park to shoot some baskets.  No, I didn't see the snake.  But Hunter found a dead bird.  I thought it was still alive, perhaps stunned by flying into a window or something. I said, "No, I think he's still alive." Hunter insisted he was dead, but once again, I decided to do nothing.  Well, nothing with the bird anyway.  I remember thinking, "Well I'm sure as hell not going to bury it just yet."  Because the thought of burying an animal that isn't really dead is quite horrible.  Better they be really dead before you go burying them.  Anyway, I went down and played basketball for a bit and was quite mediocre.  However, I am better than I am in my dreams.

Lately, I have been having a recurring dream in which I can not get the basketball up to the hoop.  Like, there's something wrong with my arm muscles or my brain or nerves or something, and I can't get it to go that high.  It's rather frustrating.  I've had the dream so much lately that I've actually become aware that I was dreaming, because I'll say something like, "Hey, this is just like these dreams I've been having lately..." And then I realize, "Oh yeah, because this is a dream, too."  In fact, last night I had a variant of the same dream, although I did not become lucid.  I did explain to my teammates that I have this strange thing that happens where I simply can not shoot the basket, so my contribution would be go get the ball and try to pass it to someone in scoring position.

This is the true end to the snake story.  Yes, I know, it's a strand of narrative about a recurring dream, and something about a dead bird.  I was kind of hoping for some grand loop tying it back to the theme of memory, narrative and dreams, but that's all I've got. If you want more, why don't you pray for the snake or something.

5/20/13 Update:

Stumpy is still alive.  I saw him last week as I came out of my house.  He was sunning himself in the front garden. Hunter chased him under a bush, but I made him leave him alone.