What's your story?

What's your story?
Mine is atypically typical. I am amazed at how unimportant so many of us can be. Particularly me, I mean. I'm just floundering along through life. Perhaps that is a divorce thing. Single at 53, by someone else's choice has perhaps clouded my view of where it was that I was going. Some of my friends have suggested therapy. Yeah right. That is just a not-so-clever way of telling me to pull over and ask for directions. Like I'm gonna do that. How can any stranger, albeit professional, tell me which way to go when I have no destination in mind? (Professional stranger), I like that. It's in fact how I see myself being seen by the world. (Actually, I am the almost invisible professional stranger, but that is quite a digression) I believe in motion. Just move, does't matter where you are or where you are headed, you've got to pop out somewhere eventually. Go like hell and, if you run fast enough, the ugly things you left back in the trees can't catch up. Not that I don't like getting lost in the trees. I was snowshoeing near Milton-Freewater this past winter, having only intended to stretch my legs a bit, and I was on the snow for 6 hours and better. Fortunately, I had my decent hiking snowshoes along and not just the lightweight running shoes. (you don't care if you get wet if you're only running a 10 K )Breaking trail the whole time I ended up in a stand of trees that was so uniform and dense that the light that reached the ground was like twilight. No shadows, just the flat (homgeneous) light that you see in the evenings or on the occasional early morning. So comforting, because it is so unusual, less (judgmental) then typical daylight. Looking up to the tops of the trees I was struck by that diverging line thing that always occurs when one looks up from the base of closely packed trees. The tops sway and lean away from each other as they climb. (I do have this optical sneeze reflex and generally when I stare up into the sky it is followed by a bout of sneezing) I just stopped and enjoyed the quiet. But one does have to move on, eventually, and I spotted a blaze on the tree across the way and knew that I was at least on somebody's trail. I also found some ski tracks and decided that shoes were the right choice in these conditions. Chest deep powder as one is inclined to find in the Rockies, this was not. These were the Blues after all. But the snow was relatively dry and had fallen deep and fast. I had a butt-load of extra bits to eat and gear in my day pack, so time was not a real issue. I was reminded again by the wealth of color in the blue and green range that one finds in the Northwest. Bits of that delicate lacework that falls from evergreens and lies like pale green coral on the snow brought this to mind. I don't know if it's a moss or lichen. I should, but I don't. The Rocky Mountains are dry and they tend to run in the browns, yellows, and reds. In the Rocky Mountains you get lightning every afternoon, in the Blues (more so in the Cascades) it tends to be rain. I remember my X wife and me camping near Lake Lillian and the rain drumming (again) on the tent in the early morning. Tents get so small when it rains.
One morning we were camped on the beach on Lopez Island and the sun had just come up. A raven was squawking in the distance, as they do. An arm came out of my X's sleeping bag and pointed, unwavering, towards the sound.

"Hear that?"
"Uh... yeah...?"
"Kill it!"
I took that to mean that she was in a good mood.

This more or less filtered through my thoughts while I searched for a trail in the snow. This was fresh snow so the rocks were covered and packed tightly, their actual shapes hidden by engulfing snow. You can tell when the snow is at least a day old. The rocks absorbing energy from the sunlight during the day heat up and melt away the snow all around their perimeters. It's always a little odd to come across a rock that is isolated that way. A uniform air gap from the surrounding snow as if the rock had been carved out of the snow itself. Immersed in snow, but untouched, forever peering across that gap. Separated from its' environment. (You know what's coming now in this woe is me tale.) I'm peering across that gap everyday....blah de blah de blah.
Now fresh deep snow blankets everything and smoothes the bumps, takes away the rough edges, averages dimensions, fills voids, eliminating the noise on the curve. It can also hide your past and begs to be written on with footprints and hands (and other stuff that doesn't fit the mood here). I always knew that snow angels were an allegory for self realization. People lie down in the snow to mark it with their own dimensions and leave a personal signature for others to come and find later. (note to self: face up when doing snow angels) A transitory and idealized self portrait, but aren't they all. (Like the ones on match dotcom. What are those people thinking?)
It was just about this time that I was approaching the trailhead and passed a couple tramping through the snow with a puppy following behind. He (the puppy) was so small that he had to leap from foot print to footprint to make his way, floundering, through the snow. A touching moment for one whose heart goes out to the trivially naive and defiant underachievers.
Gawd, at least I'm not trapped in somebody else's footprints.......................

Well at least that was successful

I realized that I have to stop trying to optimize life. And that's easy, except for the trying part.

You tell me, because I have no idea.

Did you notice that Blog rhymes with Flog, which is Japanese for a common amphibian living in still waters throughout the world. Always jumping in the water with a little croak when you don't expect it, the amphibians I mean, I suppose…though in the spring time those little peepers made a lot of racket but were impossible to find tiny and camouflaged as they were and hiding in the dead weeds that lined the swamp so that you could not really find the edge and would get your feet suddenly wet as you stalking the small peeps from the invisible enticing little Flogs, errr..I mean Frogs stepped unwittingly into the muddy bottom through the clear waters of the swamp. This swamp, which was behind my boyhood home, what kinda word is boyhood any way, was always filled with leaves just beneath the surface and in the winter you could ice skate among the swamp maples it was like skating in a forest, which as a young boy I used to dream about simply proving that dreams are replays, with some artistic license, of the previous days and weeks memories. So as you get older I suppose your mind begins to fill up with leftover tracts of half deleted memories till that time when, exceeding your bandwidth, you either stop dreaming, or begin to lose your memories to make room for more replayed dreams, because there is not a little warning window that pops up to tell you, hey fool you are remembering too much and are running low on virtual memory and had best shut down some applications before your body steps in and deletes the programs as it sees fit. How bad can that get when your body's registry entries get corrupted?....well you know there is a bit of a problem when you accidentally poke your self in the eye and then wet your pants in automatic response.... being reminded instantly of stepping into swamp water while chasing frogs, not that I have wet my pants recently though I have chased frogs like the one big green frog, which people often mistake for bull frogs, that my son found at his grandmother’s (on his mother’s side), the real one, grandmother I mean and not the X wife’s boyfriend’s mother whom is sold as a grandmother to trusting children, this past summer while on vacation and which he took to the river and jointly with his sister tossed to freedom amongst the soggy tumble weeds that having blown in the water during the past weeks windstorm now clogged the shoreline like so much spiky brown seaweed. Tumble weeds, and apples of course, being the major exports of this state seeing as how the local folks won’t allow their local grown transuranics to leave as a result of a misguided politico’s attempt at notoriety by shutting down the incoming transport of low level zoomie infested trash which coincidently prevents the removal of the nastier and even the nastiest stuff on the planet. Such helpful buggers these politicians, some of whom are to no one but themselves beholdin, you can bet they have forgotten how to dream long time passin now beyond a Frogs age ya sure. They Flog the fledgling minds to suit their own needs (“yes she’s your grandmother ”) , and well at’s aright then to bloody Blog which incidentally rhymes with Flog and of course that is, as noted earlier, the Japanese word for a common amphibian.

Rain on the roof

I close my blog to go and see
I am refreshed
Rain wash over me.

One........

............needs only to read some of the blogs out there. To be assured that there is life on other planets......and to realize that some of them are among us.

The farther away...... the more detail I see.

Time for the Salt Lake shuffle again. My bi-weekly run from Pasco, Washington to Denver. There is something liberating about flying. As you lift off the ground your responsibilities just fall away, and in the air you have no other place to go and nowhere else to be. You are achieving a goal (going somewhere) just by sitting in this plane and reading. I find it a good place to take a short respite from my never ending search for unclaimed guilt and regret to acquire. I'm a guilt sponge, I will suck up some spilled guilt like you wouldn't believe. And a regret magnet, can't forget that. I'm probably the only person in the world that can walk out of a restaurant and experience guilt and/or regret for the amount of the tip for the next two hours. I regret everything from being away from my children, to ever meeting my exwife (the obvious ironic dichotomy), to not joining the crew team in college, to taking that loan on my 401K and cashing those savings bonds, to not pursuing a degree in forestry, to throwing up at lunch time when Dishman laughed and that yellow stuff came out of his nose....wait that was in the 3rd. Grade...I suppose it's time to let that one go...whew, it's finally over. I regret never having a new bike when I was a kid. I regret never having a mentor in high school. I regret never being the subject of applause, (wait a second if we start going there this list could get way too long etc. etc. ought to cover it). I regret this inability to not regret. This entire posting is making me feel guilty now. I can't eat potato chips without hating myself in the morning. And French fries-Gawd don't get me started-the new cigarette of the 2000's. Thank heavens I'm not susceptible to commercial guilt/regret. I'm don't worry about body odor, yellow teeth, an inferior cell phone, male pattern baldness, paying to much for my ISP, incontinence, my inability to chose the right wine, cutting through beer cans with my steak knives, blemishes, snoring, an inadequate hard drive, bloating, or limp pasta.......well maybe I do regret loosing my hair...yeah that sucks. I feel guilty when I don't go to the gym. But in the plane.........the ground is so far away the rough edges of the world smooth out. Have you ever noticed how much better everything looks from the air. Even Toppenish Washington looks good from 30,000 feet. In this instance this loss of detail, the smoothing of the noise on the curve, does not produce a blandness, a "sameness". Rather, it opens an entirely new perspective where larger patterns are perceived. The Noise is on a much vaster curve now and I can perceive my existence as larger than my day to day spike on the curve. There are always new mountains to see and the straight edge of a barren banked river in eastern Washington becomes a grand and graceful curve descending from green mountains--which one tends to forget from down on the ground in Pasco.

The last full year our marriage was intact we spent in the UK, as I was working on the design for a job in Idaho from there. We flew back as a family but didn't appreciate the same patterns, I guess.
I miss my kids........these flights are like a drug and now I'm addicted.
I wish I could reach out from the plane and line up all the pieces again.

Fuzzy logic? You bet !

There's little water in the Spokane river right now (08/2005). It is interesting to see the basalt lined channel that the river runs through in downtown Spokane. The basalt utterly smooth, as it is, but with that chipped surface that makes it look as if it was carved with focused artistic intent. As if, form, as well as, function were considered in it's creation. Which implies that nature may desire form at least as much as it rewards function. A twist on the old, If you want a bird with a bigger beak give em 10,000 years and a harder nut to crack, theory. But then basalt isn't alive, can't evolve and is merely a medium that has been worked by water wielded by time to nature's design in accordance with limiting physical and material properties. But let's assume that nature desires unlimited artistic expression. The physics of water falling on rock may in fact have limited potential outcomes at the creation wide level of observation.

The low head turbines are quiet now what with no water. But when the water is up it's a rushing by of whiteness over deep greens that makes your eyes flicker back and forth as you focus on some fleeting sub-image beneath the unchanging overwhelming surface image of rushing water; and loosing it in the rush your eyes sweep back to find another foothold in the white array. All rushing water looks the same from a distance, doesn't it? Your mind not being able to isolate and interpret the real details where all the chaos is exposed, you never see the noise on the curve, just the major summation of all the figures, the averages of the motions and the colors the overwhelming line of mediocrity. (And almost, but not quite of course...Sit down all you therapists..This is fiction, you feel like jumping off into the chaos).
Which means, having chosen not to leap into chaos, one is forced to follow the overwhelming line of mediocrity, accept it and live in it. We can't all be heroes. But nature can not abide this narrow band chaos. A reactive chaos limited by the inert materials it is acting upon. Nature desires to be a proactive artist. Nature wants to exploit the noise on the curve. Nature desires proactive chaos. A construct can be limited by the constructors personality. So, there is a difference here between nature's constructs and nature's wild child, life. Nature's invention of proactive chaos.

In the deeper remaining pools of the Spokane River, trench and concrete work from years ago are still visible. The remains of some city dwellers construct incorporated into the riverbottom. The original artist's intention is disfigured but still recognizable. Many city dwellers (created by proactive chaos remember), responding to their inner artist, attempt to adorn the river in random and impulsive ways. Mostly by decorating it with bicycle frames and the odd sneaker from convenient points of access. The rough equivalent of a compulsion to try to put lipstick on the Mona Lisa...... If you don't look nature directly in the eyes you can see her smile also.

But being part of the noise on the curve of creation....(and I mean all of "us")..Well it's a start.

The way it is

A cricket's chirp
admidst toads
is frequently followed by more silence.