Brain Droppings on the Short Bus...

This little pile of brain droppings is salvage material dating from 2002 relating to the women folk, one from when I was compelled to not only buy but sit through an induction and indoctrination course at (hack-spit) Oklahoma State University for the sin of enrolling thirty five years late for my freshman year, two others from the infamous freshman comp where the lad running the class (a drinking buddy of my son's) was trying an almost desperate mind to mind resuscitation on thirty assembly line kids (I'm not knocking him at all, he did a good job for what he had to work with).  I'm posting this as a conversation starter for some friends to read, I'll tag in a few modern thoughts in italics along the way.

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This One's for You...

Sing it Shirley, sing it... it's all comin' back around again.

Folded...



"Pluto: Planet or Asteroid?"
Photographer: Mic-Ardent
Model: Nikky Case
Source: DeviantArt.com

The name she shows the world is Nikky Case, she's a Czech, a skilled photo model and as beautiful a woman as God ever saw fit to grace planet Earth with.  She's one of the women who can, when she wants to, tell you a story with only one or two frames if you'll pay attention.  She is both artist, and catalyst for art,  I have no doubt she hosts the muse for those she agrees to pose for. 

There is another artist in this story, a French fellow, a photographer who is known on DeviantArt by the name mic-ardant.  As a photographer he is a good match to Nikky, skilled at capturing the nuances left floating by the women who pose for him, obviously skilled at setting them into a frame of mind to float such nuances for his lens to capture.  

There is little reason to doubt that for Mic just as for Nikky the nature of how the erotic represents itself is well known, for them how that deep ache and poignant trembling hope that defies all description will manifest itself is part of their profession, part of the palette from which they draw to create their art, an understanding they use to seed a dream within the minds of their audience.  For those of us who are their audience their skills can be almost narcotic, give them your full attention for five seconds and they are quite able to hold you captive for an hour using nothing but wonder and delight.  That is how it is for us, we who are their audience.  But how is it for them, they who provide that wonder and delight? 

Of Mother and Muse...

Once upon a time I wrote a poem called "Of Man and Muse" inspired by and dedicated to the beautiful woman who hosted the muse for me.  Like all gifts of the muse the older that work becomes the more facets I find within it, things I didn't realize were there while wandering in the expansions of her tender spell that allowed the words to find their way to me. 

An Original Sin is hard to find...

I'd thought about writing out some long winded ramble on the subject, but in the end decided there was no way I could match Meatloaf's version in his great but not so well known song by the same name... listen to what the man has to say, he's saying quite a lot.

Once Upon a Time...

A self portrait of me in say 1977

Once upon a time I thought I might earn my living with art.  I had this odd idea I might eke out enough income to keep body and soul in the same place.  But that was back in the days when I was young, and very poor, and what the hell you could live on a dream five dollars a day.  I didn't need much in those days, not really.

The Exile of Love

In my post "Of Sex and Secrets" I spoke of Ira, the woman who gave me quite a gift, a rare gift really, a gift that cost her dearly even though that cost was not something she chose but rather something she endured and overcame in her own life.  Thinking back on those days when I kept company with she and her sisters-in-seduction was pleasant, they worked magic with their beauty, their skill and their understanding.  But I am not such a sister, I am a man, and as a man every time I visit those memories I find myself asking questions of myself, first among those questions always why was it those women could do what they did? It is a question of deep introspection, it really is, you have to look deep inside yourself to find an answer that fits the reality of yourself.

Theme for a protest...

This one is from my son, who said if the British can use "The 1812 Overture" to blow up Parliament (in "V for Vendetta") then by golly gump we American's should use "Hall of the Mountain King" for a theme song for the assualt on Wall Street.  And you know what?  I think he's right.  Somehow it all fits.  The version below is a bit off (ok, a good ways off) the way it would have been performed in Grieg's day, but somehow?  It fits today, it fits the mood boiling below the surface of our country.

Pink Floyd had marching hammers in "The Wall" so why not rank upon rank of head-banging electrified cello's to lead the charge against Wall Street?  What better a way to show the hypocrites and traitors of the conservative establishment that even their own will turn on them sooner or later?  Boys and Girls, can we say "Bow Attack?"

That... would be me.

Yup, that's me all right.  No doubt about it, not anymore.

That time of year...

It is autumn now, the old year fading into winter, a time of endings and remembrances.  But autumn must proceed winter, and winter leads off for spring when all things are renewed.  There is a distinct air of melancholy and loneliness in the air.  I feel it, I do.  But there are many things survive the years, the changes, the winters, they survive and return.  I was thinking of my father this morning, gone over forty years now, thinking of the things he left to me, the memories. 

Among those memories was a song, and old cowboy standard that many people have covered, a song my father liked to sing.  I remember him best singing it the night I was riding with him (he was a long haul trucker), the night the muffler blew out on the truck somewhere west of Texas on I-40 and he had to pull it off the pipe to let the engine breathe enough to get us down the road to where he could get parts for a repair, which was up the mountain in New Mexico.  As diesel engines go it wasn't a terribly big engine, but even a little diesel has a full throated roar when the muffler is gone and it's pulling the slope with a full load behind.  The cab was almost painfully loud, there was nothing could be done about it.  Daddy stuffed some cotton in my ears, in his ears, and into the night we went with hammer down hard: the only way to run the engine was flat out, he didn't dare let it suck cold air up against hot exhaust valves, that would have been the end of the engine.  Soon enough I was all but punch drunk with the noise. Somewhere in the middle of that six hour run up the mountain I remember him singing this song, out shouting the roar of the engine that had somehow hit a minor key resonance in tempo to the song.

Just for whoops and grins I've included two versions of the song, one the original and the other a cover by someone modern so you can pick your vintage.  My Dad would have raised an eyebrow at the modern fellows appearance, but hey, he would have fully appreciated his music.

All good things come back around, one way or another.

Floppy Recollections

I was cleaning today, well, last night, and lost in the bottom of an obscure drawer I found an old floppy disc.  Yes, one of those things, 3.5HD 1.44meg floppy from back in the good old days.  The label was bare, the contents a mystery.  Since I'm in possession of one of probably twenty working 3.5 drives in town I crossed my fingers (that the dust bunnies hadn't converted the inside of the drive into time share condos), stuck it in, and lo!  Everything spun up like it should, the disc read perfectly.  To most folks what I found would have been a total case of WTF? of course, as it was for me for the first few moments.

The contents were rather cryptic.  Four text files, named in a code of some sort.  I wasn't sure what I was looking at, not right at first. I glanced into the files, and found a DOS command line, next a long string in the all but forgotten command line language of VAX/VMS followed by long columns of numbers in text and tab format.  The memory returned, a bit slowly, the facts have been in the deep archives for fifteen years.  Those four files document one of my greatest triumphs, and betrayals.

Of Salt Suspended…

I've come to understand something, something that might possibly apply to others as well as myself.  Against the chance these things might be of value for someone else I'll share them here.

What I am speaking of is a thing akin to a form of momentum, emotional momentum.  For five months now I've been in mourning, various stages of the work.  But for the last say six weeks it has been of an ever stranger nature, seemingly the same mechanisms in play and yet the peripheral environment diverged from what had been.  It's dawned on me that I'm not mourning the same event.  For a while this worried me, and I suppose it still does, but for different reasons than at first.  Any powerful emotional mechanism can take on a life of its' own, run on beyond where it should, a danger I've understood for a long time.  Searching about for the why of these last weeks has brought me to understand it is not time to worry, not just yet.