Zona locale

“Hey, dude ..wusup? wanna’ smoke ..?” My first reaction to this generous offer is to decline, with gratitude. I’m so wrapped up in my workout at the track; it takes a few seconds to realize it’s over! Perfect timing. I circle back and they laugh and light up the bowl for me. Hey, mis compañeros. I’m good. I continue walking down and around to the lower athletic fields ..then up to the schoolyard where two guys are banging on the back door of the gym. As they walk away, a girl strolls up and yells “Kathleen!!” and the door magically opens and in she goes, followed by the guys ..and I’m like cool ..now I know the secret password. I cross the schoolyard, from where I get a view of the ocean ..the same view I get out my bedroom window if I peak ..and realize it’s only a peak because of these trees ..and those bordering Anapamu, which is either a sudden realization or just poor memory for something I already knew. I go down and around the tennis courts and back up the street to my house where my neighbor Amanda asks how my workout went. I go good, but shake my head and say “I think what I do afterwards is counteracting it tho’ ..competing with my system for oxygen ..” which she immediately gets and starts laughing. Now I’m sitting here writing and wondering if I just blew my cover.

21st century

Well, I dreamed I saw the knights in armor coming / Saying something about a queen / There were peasants singing and drummers drumming / And the archer split the tree / There was a fanfare blowing to the sun / That was floating on the breeze / Look at Mother Nature on the run / In the twenty first century

Photo of ~> [ Coral Reefer ]

Hopi prophecy

“A sign of the end of time is when people mistake the work of man for the work of nature”

When I first heard this, it made me think of things like processed foods, formica counter-tops and modern highways. Today it struck me how this prophecy also covers what I believe is going on inside my head. I often mistake artificial rules of logic for native brain waves. However, my thoughts don’t follow rules of logic. Left to their own device, they act more like heuristics .. and a heuristic is more like a convenient rule-of-thumb. The arrogance of believing that mental processes are logical processes puts me in a position of feeling overconfident and defensive about my ideas. I mean, after all .. I arrived there by commonly accepted principles. Disagree with me and you must not be clear on the fundamentals of rational thought. Needless to say, I don’t often get it right.

Yesterday's theories

“By all appearances, Ocampo had deep affinity for the homeless. He sacrificed for them and even put their needs ahead of his own. Those close to him say the killings do not match the character of the person they knew. ”

It’s a well-known phenomenon that people often interpret other people’s actions differently than the way others interpret their own actions. Typically observers attribute them to character while the observed attributes them to the demands of a situation. Friends of Ocampo, who recently returned from Iraq, say that he often gave what little money he had to help homeless people while members of his family went without. The people he was living with just before the killings say he was having paranoid hallucinations and seeing threats around every corner. This leads to my theory about Ocampo. I know that Marine training instills a show of stoicism in the face of threat. What others saw as a devoted brother picking up his kid sister from the library every day ..he saw as a military action through hostile territory. It’s not hard to imagine homeless people on the streets of Orange County resembling insurgents on the roadsides of Iraq to a returning veteran. His solution may have been to eliminate them to keep his sister safe ..as well as avenge the recent death of a close friend in Iraq. 

Revision: Today’s newspaper reports that Ocampo never saw action in Iraq. His job was to inspect the bodies of casualties when they were flown in from combat. Orange County officials have another theory. They say he was on a ‘serial thrill-kill’ spree ..enjoying the sensationalism of press coverage and increasing the stakes with each attack. Perhaps civilian life just wasn’t as surreal. Well, so much for yesterday’s theories. Shows how insubstantial they can be.

Happy New Year

Push That Knot Away by KT Tunstall