Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf

We’re sitting outside the Coffee Bean on State Street at noon on Friday. A taxi pulls up and an attractive young Asian lady with smart Samsonite luggage gets out and heads south. I was sitting here last Friday around this time and watched her do the same thing. I didn’t give it much thought ..figuring she just arrived for the weekend ..possibly on the Amtrak from LA ..caught a cab downtown and was heading to a nearby hotel. (I frequently meet friends from LA at the train station on Friday afternoon). Now I’m like wait a minute ..there are no hotels nearby. The closest one is the Californian two blocks away. Why wouldn’t she just take a taxi there ..? I point this out to Anna who suggests the possibility of a romantic rendezvous. I stand up to see where she’s going but she’s already disappeared. “That’s odd” I go “..she couldn’t have gone far ..and we would have seen someone pick her up, no?” Anna says she could have ducked into Pascucci’s. Sure enough, I pass through and spot her having coffee with another Asian woman. O.K ..I figure her friend will take over from here and return to the table. We revise our theory to “visiting her sister ..perhaps a sorority sister.” Every Friday at the same time though ..? Seems like something more work-related. We consider the possibility she’s an airline stewardess on a layover. 

“Why don’t you just ask ..(?)”
 “No way ..you ask.” 
 “Not sure I want to get in her face.” 
 “OK ..we’ll meet here same time next week and see what happens.”
 “Deal.” 
“Someone is probably watching us right now going ‘are they co-workers ..? husband and wife ..? lovers cheating on their husband and wife ..?’ ” 
“And what do you suppose that someone is up to?” 

Now we’re speculating on the subject of what aliens, looking at us through a high-power telescope, must think we’re up to.

Meg Myers

Hey ..!  I'm craazzzyyy

Scorpion Bay

San Juanico, Baja, California

Under my skin

and it burns,
burns, burns
under my skin.

da Vinci code

zen fortune cookie: I try and act as if everyone is a teacher who has something to offer. I get this from Leonardo da Vinci who once said: “It should not be hard to stop and look into the stains of walls, or ashes of a fire, or clouds, or like places, and, if you consider them well, find really marvelous ideas.” So, I know a writer  at UCSB. Her work is brilliant. Her ideas are fascinating and she’s hell of a lot smarter than me. Yet she’s a terrible speaker. She rambles incoherently and interrupts constantly ..repeating things like “uh, you know” and “like, I mean”  Now I’m not trying to be critical or anything .. it just makes me feel like I want to reach out and help. But I decide against it. I’m no great speaker or writer or anything. So I remind myself to clean up my own speech. Try changing that instead of her.

muddy waters

All I want is you / will you be my bride / Take me by the hand and stand by my side /All I want is you / will you stay with me? / Hold me in your arms and sway me like the sea.

Downtown

Breakfast at Pacific Crêpes then next door to the Lost Horizon bookstore. I find the complete set of diaries by Anaïs Nin. Score! Next we duck into ‘Just Play Music’ where I can’t find anything by Sigur Ró. Oh well. Now I'm chatting with Marcel at the Hemp Store. He says Serena’s sister went to visit her in Colorado ..and I’m thinking that it must have been a while ago since Serena’s living in Flagstaff now. The Territory Ahead has vanished and nothing appears in its place. The Church of Scientology is still around the corner though. Something’s missing. There used to be a colorful fountain with a waterfall at the entrance to Paseo Nuevo by Banana Republic. There’s a Brat House with German waitresses now. Admission is playing at a nearby theater. We duck in. It was OK. I enjoyed watching Tina Fey.

psychology of memory

It's a construction-site; revising the past based on present and future (predicted) things [link].

A moment of stillness

..brought to you by the folks at [aum]

American spirit award

It seems like self-promotion is one of America’s great national pastimes. People are constantly hawking their accomplishments ..myself included. I’m getting tired of it and try to catch myself when I do it. I guess this runs counter to the mantra that says: just go for it ..nothing ventured nothing gained. But saying whatever comes to mind, regardless of merit ..and expecting affirmation .. makes me feel kinda’ empty.

At sunrise

Cloud  Hidden
Whereabouts  Unknown

biosphere

Phoenix is more of a biosphere than other U.S. cities. Infrastructure is what makes it habitable on most days. It’s an air-conditioned city. Like other U.S. cities, its infrastructure is alien to the surrounding ecology. Masonry, concrete and asphalt retain the heat far longer than desert sand, which is why it doesn’t cool down as much it used to at night. Before, nighttime temperature rarely approached 90 degrees. Today 100 degree temperatures are more common.

Flexibility

I’m doing physical therapy exercises for flexibility. Stretching. They include yoga postures. I maintain correct posture by imagining a cord tied to my spine and pulling it through my navel. A visual Andrea my OT gave me. Today I realize I’m doing one for strength and not flexibility ..and I’m doing it wrong. It’s a bridging exercise meant for the abs and gluts. I decide to keep it but do it right. Instead of reps ..I maintain a posture. I also found that doing sway-and-arch back postures relieve my back of the tension that builds while doing yoga for the abs. Tomorrow I’ll do physical therapy exercises for strength and balance. Right now I’m eating lunch and preparing to water the great outdoors ..possibly do a walk-about locally.

Ask Alice

Oh, by the way, if you'd really like to know, he went that way / Who did? / The White Rabbit / He did? / He did what? / Went that way / Who did? / The White Rabbit / What rabbit? / But didn't you just say / Can you stand on your head? / Oh!   ~ Artwork by [ Claudia McKinney ]

Herbaculture

Nathan is an ‘herbaculturist’. He tells me he’s identified specific strains of pot that are good not only for pain but also conditions like ADD, neuropathy and anxiety. He’s even found one that suppresses appetite, which I find kinda’ funny, when I think about my own experience with the munchies. He tells me about a patient he once saw ..L.A. City Councilman Bill Rosendahl. Rosendahl had cancer that had spread from his kidneys to his lumbar vertebrae. The pain was so excruciating that the heaviest prescription painkiller OxyContin brought only momentary relief. He was incapacitated and doctors told him there wasn’t much they could do. So Nathan began visiting him weekly to discuss his condition. They developed a weed regimen that almost completely wiped out the pain and allowed him to go back to work. While some of his treatments are validated by medical studies .. none are recognized by the federal government, which still outlaws marijuana. So dispensaries experiment on their own, relying on herbaculturists like Nathan and feedback from his patients in order to develop product.

Cultural para-stimuli

“Repeated exposure to ‘what’s cool’ in a community can actually lower tolerance for ‘what’s appropriate’ in the nervous system. Things that may otherwise be considered shocking ..like lewd public conduct or major sex offenses become acceptable” [ link ].

In Steubenville Ohio last August ..frenzy over high school football created an atmosphere where players felt free to commit rape .. while other teens felt free to tweet, text and video the event without compunction. Without fear of reprisal [ link ]. What made them do such a thing and feel they could get away with it ..? I think it was the effect of cultural para-stimuli.  Atavistic community values ..placing football above everything else ..gave players license to commit rape and made willing spectators out of the partygoers. Hey, but ain’t that America.

Unlocking paralysis

Monday August 6, 2012 Rehab: One thing I saw when I first entered rehab was a video about ‘learned paralysis’. It was a lecture by VS Ramachandran that I found on the Internet [ link ]. Although my paralysis wasn’t learned in the sense he talks about ..it made me realize how much of a stroke is information-based. Transmission from the motor areas of my brain had been interrupted. Rehab was going to depend on me finding pathways around this. I needed to re-establish contact with the left side of my body. To me this meant flooding my brain with information. Tuning-in to internal (proprioceptive / kinesthetic) as well as external sources (visual / tactile). So, even though my paralysis wasn’t ‘learned’ ..I was going to have to re-learn and re-juvenate neural-pathways to unlock it. Gaining a better sense of ‘somatic awareness’ was the first step.

Online Comments

This morning I ran across a study that says inflammatory online comments are better at changing someone’s mind than civil comments [ link ]. Sounds intuitive enough. Provocation is more commanding than reason. However I’d like to see a study that shows how relevant these online comments really are. Most of the one’s I’ve read have little to do with the topic they’re commenting on and more to do with broadcasting whatever’s on someone’s mind. For instance, I bet comments on an article about Ben Affleck wining the Oscars will mention Jennifer Lopez almost as often as they mention the movie Argo.

whoa gotta go

Just another cool tune

Daughter In The Choir

cool tune from Tennessee

Serena Kali Devi

“Humans are always communicating something, whether physically or non-physically. When open to the nonphysical forms of communication, we are able to interact on profound levels with souls who are tuned into the same frequency of consciousness we are.”    [ Serena ]   Sedona,  Arizona

Interdependent originations

according the journal science [ link ]

out of bounds

In the language of the Huron Indians, “orenda” is a word that refers to the spiritual power that resides in all creatures and things. If you’ve got enough of it, you may be able to declare at least partial independence from your own past. You can better shape the life you want rather than being subject to the limitations of karma and conditioning. When I was visiting Santa Cruz a few years ago I met a guy named Charlie. Last time I was there I asked my friends about him. They said he wandered away and moved to a small town at the edge of the Mojave Desert. He liked living at the fringes of space they told me. Gave him a sense of being outside the boundaries of fate. Made me wonder how much orenda that takes.

Local talent

Warp speed

I look at the map of where I live ..the one inside my head. It’s warped. The angles are skewed and the distances are shortened. I can nail the directions to the County Bowl OK ..but the other side of town is a different story. This distorted image is like an icon that gives me an immediate sense of where I am and where I want to be. And it does a fairly good job. Consider the map of the London Tube you get at any station. It’s more like a schematic diagram than an actual view. Still it’s become an indispensable icon. In fact, I bet it comes closer to the one that’s inside just about every Londoner’s head these days. I ask for the closest Underground station and get a GPS-like reading. Mention Camden Town ..forget it.