The need for good news and good info

We don't want to be sad, yet sometimes we are. And when we read the news, sometimes it makes us sadder. When we learn more about the state of affairs of the world, sometimes it makes us sadder. Sometimes we might start avoiding learning about the world just cuz we don't wanna know. Which sucks because then we're isolated and even more likely to be sad.

So I want to get in the habit of posting things that seem GOOD. Things I know about the world that seem GOOD are to be propagated. That's what God said about life one day, and evolution was born... Or maybe it's backwards, maybe the definition of GOOD is that which propagates successfully, like good just means evolutionarily fit or something. But there's a lot of things being propagated that don't necessarily seem good--war and hate and greed and slavery find ways of evolving and spreading and reproducing just like any organism. But maybe those things seem really bad in the short term, but are actually "good" in the long run in the sense that they teach us about themselves, and, ultimately, about ourselves.

Munching plants and learning science and bitching about vocab, oh my

I've been eating from plants that I find outside, some of them taste very bitter and some not nearly so bitter. I was trying to find out why...I think basically bitterness corresponds to toxicity, so if you want to avoid eating poisonous plants but you still want to go around carefree and try things without consulting a reference guide, that might be a good rule of thumb (but this is not advice for you to do so).

I found the following article while questing about--check it out. Says some sorta interesting things about the science of taste, as well as mentioning the toxicity thing I just talked about. But what I wanted to point out was something about the way we often use language when we are studying science. The figure on the left explains the parts within parts within parts, the grand mechanism that allows you to taste:

"The tongue is covered with bumps called papillae." So far so good. They always have to add some weird vocab though, don't they?

"Each papilla contains multiple taste buds." Fine.

"Taste buds are filled with gustatory cells." This is where I complain.

No one uses the word "gustatory". Never. But it means "taste". So the taste buds have "gustatory cells". Taste cells, cells that taste. But if kids study this in school they'll learn the big word "gustatory", along with the big word "papillae", instead of learning the simple, helpful concept that "Even though we all know we have taste buds that let us taste, it's really a hierarchy of big parts made of smaller parts made of smaller parts. There are bumps on your tongue--taste bumps. They have little budding things on them--taste buds. These are filled with cells that do the tasting--taste cells. So there's a hierarchical organization that has naturally grown along with the rest of you, in order that you may taste your food."

Learning more about music

Keith Jarrett is a crazy guy, he gets on the piano and freshness flows out. He had a fro in the 70s and was jammin on rhodes in weird ways, but mostly he won't touch an electric piano and mostly he's a big fan of Western harmony. He's got a very in-depth communion with harmony and melody going on, most pianists never get that fluent, but he's also not stuck in the mind--he's deep in the flow, no rambling thoughts going on while the music is in motion. Here's Eva Cassidy singing Autumn Leaves, slow and gentle, and now listen to Keith Jarrett Trio play the same song, sped up and swung, with all sorts of harmonic divergences and elaborations.

I want to teach more music. I like teaching music. And I think music is for everybody.

What does reincarnation feel like

Lots of people believe in reincarnation, and they say they know stuff about their past lives. And everyone has been going through a lot of lives and they keep having to come back and do another one for some reason. And the Universe is trying to teach you things through your many lives so that you will be ready to move on to something else that isn't so strange. And in the short term, this life seems so detailed, you can get absorbed in this particular job, this particular relationship, this particular hobby or situation, this particular way of thinking and feeling, but in the long term you have been coming back again and again, suffering again and again, and falling in the same holes many times. You are getting frantic because when you leave your human brain and body time doesn't exist, so you see the whole jungle of your thousands of lives all at once, all the pain and confusion, like Homer Simpson: "doh! doh! doh! doh! doh!", you are rushing through lives hoping you can get out of this mess somehow, but you're dreading that it is just an infinite loop of pain.

The Bitch Is Back

I have a block against writing in this blog. But maybe now I can just do it without even thinking.

Listening to Elton John's "The Bitch Is Back". (YouTube) (lyrics) These are interesting lyrics...quite challenging to authority:

eat meat on friday that's alright
even like steak on a saturday night
I can bitch the best at your social do's
I get high in the evening sniffing pots of glue

Elton and Tina Turner did this song together at one point! (YouTube) Notice what she sings instead of the sniffing glue bit...something like:

I can bitch the best at your social do's
I get high just thinking 'bout the things you do

Oof, just like that, a bold challenge to conventional thinking has been truncated into a gimp love song. A gimp love song is a song that pretends to be about love but doesn't have the power of an actual love song, one that comes from the songwriter's life experience. A love song teaches you about love, but a gimp love song just writhes around pathetically on the floor in front of you, trying to get pity. Don't give in!

This truncation, this censorship, muffling, gagging phenomenon, of a song's beautiful difficult message being smothered, of a wild animal being defanged so he's not a threat at the circus...this thing reminds me of what Ani DiFranco says about hip hop in her song Serpentine: (YouTube, around 5:45) (lyrics)

and the music industry mafia is pimping girl power
sniping off sharp-shooter singles from their styrofoam towers,
and hip-hop is tied up in the back room with a logo stuffed in its mouth
cause the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house

But the point of my writing this is not to bitch about censorship. It's to meditate on the change in the lyrics, and the underlying change in the meaning of the song. The first lyric, "I can bitch the best at your social do's/I get high in the evening sniffing pots of glue" is a brave confession that all is not as it seems in society. The eccentric genius who's the life of the party and everybody's darling is very often sought after precisely because s/he has taken a very different path than most people in society. But the new lyric, "I can bitch the best at your social do's/I get high just thinkin' 'bout the things you do", seems to me almost a complete non-sequitur. It seems strange because love doesn't make you more egotistical, it destroys your ego the more you let it...and these lyrics seem quite egotistical, so why suddenly act like the whole verse is about love? That's why it becomes a gimp love song instead of a real love song.

By the way, I just realized that Can You Feel the Love Tonight has super-awesome lyrics. That's an example of a real love song. There are tons of real love songs, but they just seem cheesy or superficial depending on how you listen to them. When you're in love they make the most sense.

Time to write something

It's oily in the morning and I'm spending the night at Michael Palma's grandpa's house.  I slept for a bit but that changed to raiding the fridge for things to sip on (milk, oj, sweet tea), which in turn changed to reading an autobiography of Osho, and now I am listening to music softly (myself jamming with Aaron Allen on bass) as I write.  I really enjoy the stuff we recorded that day, it is very playful.

The Osho autobiography is making me laugh out loud, hopefully not loud enough to wake anyone.  I'll go ahead and wager right now that whoever you are, it is in your best interest to go thumb through several books by Osho as soon as possible.  They're all essentially the same, just transcripts of him talking off the top of his head.  There's a man with a sense of humor, and as William James pointed out, humor is one and the same as consciousness and understanding ("common sense", as he called it).

Don't worry, be happy.

Poem

People are afraid.
They want to make sure they will be covered
in the event of a fire.

Don't they know that the world is already on fire?

A fire is a process of turning cold materials into heat and light.
For an eternity the materials are cold, then for a brief instant they are warm, radiant.
The fire is life, you do not try to force it to keep burning.
And as with life, you can smother a fire, crush it, kill it,
but you cannot destroy the beautiful natural laws
that promise us that warm, brilliant fire will come to us again and again,
whenever given the chance.

Like a strange, rich fire we are also burning,
also turning cold materials into bright, ephemeral glimpses
of the otherwise dark world around us.

Because we are a fire we are not for hire.
Looking at life you can understand its ways, and understanding will bring immeasurable benefit.
But in almost every interaction I see
people trying to change fire, trying to force it!

People are playing God, a God who doesn't understand anything about life--
but all you have to do is play.

A beautiful, creative, 35-year-old woman sits alone in a cubicle, seething.
She has been trying to help someone do something impossible,
because it has been documented that it is possible.
She is under the gun, she faces hours of toil without compensation.
She drags her feet through a life that is no longer hers, and dreams of the past and the future.

Perhaps moreso than helping customers do impossible things that no one understands,
she would be better suited to helping her husband and children to see
what is possible.

But the natural law of the fire of life is banished from this house.

A couple cubicles from this woman resides a descendant of a great U.S. president.
This man is burningly brilliant; his mind is a perpetual motion machine.
Unlike his sad colleague he enjoys his work, and he's very good at it.
Closing tickets from dawn till dusk, he focuses his brilliance
on helping his company save face.

Get this man alone and you can get a glimpse of what his mind really wants to do.
When he has a free moment he spends it learning everything!
But as things are his mind stands shackled,
trading a precious brilliance for a salary and "encouragement".

My friend, you are a fire, and if you are allowed to burn
then we will have another Sun.

But the natural law of the fire of life is banished from this house.

People are playing God, a God who doesn't understand anything about life--
but all you have to do is play.

from Wikitaba

Everyman

I'm in my 2nd day of adopting the Everyman sleep schedule, a polyphasic schedule designed to be a little more accommodating to those with jobs and other commitments. Here's my schedule right now:

• "Core sleep" from midnight to 3 AM.
• 3 20-minute naps at 8 AM, 1 PM and 8 PM, give or take an hour or so.

That's 4 hours total, which doesn't sound like much, but so far I feel great! I'll try to update every once in a while as I continue to sleep this way.