Photos from the Roxy Chicken Jam, March 2007, Salt Lake City, UT

Roxy Chicken Jam, March 2007

Also check out the site I spent 4 long days keeping fresh and live: Roxy Chicken Jam 2007

Apropos Tunes

Music always has more meaning when I'm present. That is, when I'm me. When I'm not distracted by mental chatter or prone to complaint. What have I heard lately that made me sing, dance and generally smile (big)? Well, this time around it's Innervisions by Stevie Wonder. Last year it was Magic Time by Van Morrison. I'd like to say there won't be a next time. But Billy disagrees with me and I'm prone to agree with him.

You're Only Human by Billy Joel
It's not always easy to be living in this world of pain
You're gonna be crashing into stone walls again and again
It's alright, it's alright, though you feel your heart break
You're only human, you're gonna have to deal with heartache
(You're only human, ooo-ooo)

Just like a boxer in a title fight
You got to walk in that ring all alone
You're not the only one who's made mistakes
But they're the only thing that you can truly call your own

Don't forget your second wind
Wait in that corner until that breeze blows in

Pull the Wool by G. Love
Lies in the nest never ever let the birds know rest
Lies in the nest never ever let the birds know rest
Lies in the nest never ever let the birds know rest

I can forgive, but I never can forget and lies in the nest never
Ever gave the birds no rest
Bricks built without straw were so weak they crumbled
To mud, just as your excuse with truth left you easily undone
Dont you run away

Dont you pull the wool over my eyes
Dont you pull the wool over my eyes
Dont you pull the wool over my eyes

(Long) Gone by Kenny Wayne Shepherd
Don't cry baby, you did nothin' wrong
Don't ask why this stone keeps rollin'
It's just goin', goin', goin'
Long gone

You can think whatever you want to baby
Believe whatever you wanna believe
Deep in my heart I've loved you
But my heart's like a tumbleweed

Jesus Children of America by Stevie Wonder
Say Transcendental
Meditation
Speaks of inner
Preservation
Well...
Transcendental meditation gives you peace of mind

You'd better tell
Your story fast...
And if you lie
It will come to pass...

Don't You Worry 'Bout a Thing by Stevie Wonder
Don't you worry 'bout a thing
Don't you worry 'bout a thing, mama
Cause I'll be standing on the side
When you check it out...
When you get it off...your trip

Everybody needs a change
A chance to check out the new
But you're the only one to see
The changes you take yourself through

I am creating laughter for myself today and letting go of mental chatter.

Intent for Gratitude

I am leaving behind anger, regret, sadness and hope and creating gratitude for myself this week.

I have learned three important lessons in the past month and they are not only worthy of posting but worthy of integrating fully, with intent and purpose, into my life such that they are forever lasting and memorable:

1. I am a free and intimate man, growing and succeeding. This is not up for dispute, not a fact to be tampered with in the annals of history or changed over time. I am. I am enough.
   - Me
   
2. Winners never quit. And quitters never win.
   - Lisa Nichols
   
3. Standing in trust I let The Universe be The Universe as Me. Gratefully I let it be. And so it is.
   - Rev. Michael Bernard Beckwith

Thanks to my father for providing the following poem by George Wither, 1622.

Shall I Wasting in Despair

Shall I, wasting in despair,
Die because a woman's fair?
Shall my cheeks look pale and fair,
Because another's rosy are?
Be she fairer than the day,
or the flowrie meads of May;
Yet if she be not such to me,
What care I how fair she be?

Shall my foolish heart be pin'd
'Cause I see a woman kind?
Or with a well-disposed nature,
Joined with a lovely feature?
Be she kind, or meeker than
Turtle-dove or pelican;
If she be not so to me,
What care I how kind she be?

Great, or good, or kind, or fair,
I will ne'er the more dispair
I she love me, this believe,
I will die ere she shall grieve.
If she slight me when I woo,
I can slight and let her go;
If she be not fit for
me,
What care I for whom she be?

Shall a woman's virtues move
Me to perish for her love?
Or her merits value known,
Make me quite forget mine own?
Be she with that goodness blest,
Which may gain her name of Best;
If she be not such to me,
What care I how good she be?

Temporary Loss of the Light

I spent three long weeks planning
fanning out the cards for my life.
Thought i'd shaken the feeling
of the temporary loss of the light

And I smiled and I joked and poked
fun at the way things might have been,
Only to see the blood rush from me
as she sadly but slowly lost her grin.

Now it's six long days later and
I'm richer than I'd really hoped to be
spent my hours resting in a setting
that makes my soul yearn to sing.

Hey mister, where did you find the light
and hey sister, you surely are a sight
But whoa, listen, I'm not so sure that this is just alright.

Just eight short hours ago I found
the four laws that I think I should have known,
and I wrote them down on paper
just to savor that I'm really not alone.

There's existence of suffering
and no smothering can make it disappear.
The cause is overwhelming and the
ignorance can make us live in fear.

And there's a path to cessation that's
elation when you surely see the light.
An illuminated pathway eight-steps
long that sure feels like it's right.

Hey mister, where did you find the light
and hey sister, you surely are a sight
But whoa, listen, I'm not so sure that this is just alright.

I'm a hungry raven who's just yearning
to pick up the scraps of my soul.
I'm a strong and driven hero
with zero care that I am growing old.

Or a single thick blade of grass that's crass
but can waver in the wind.
I'm a shimmering blade who was made to save
but whose strength will not rescind.

Well in the days before us I will
try my best to manifest no sins;
and be a man with judgment who does not judge
because judgment never wins.

Hey mister, where did you find the light
and hey sister, you surely are a sight
But whoa, listen, I'm not so sure that this is just alright.

Mrs. Potter's Lullaby by Counting Crows

Well I woke up in mid afternoon cause that's when it all hurts the most
I dream I never know anyone at the party and I'm always the host
If dreams are like movies then memories are films about ghosts
You can never escape, you can only move south down the coast
Well I am an idiot walking a tightrope of fortune and fame
I am an acrobat swinging trapezes through circles of flame
If you've never stared off into the distance then your life is a shame
And though I'll never forget your face sometimes
I can't remember my name

Hey, Mrs. Potter, don't cry
Hey, Mrs. Potter, I know why
But, hey, Mrs. Potter, won't you talk to me
Well there's a piece of Maria in every song that I sing
And the price of a memory is the memory of the sorrow it brings
And there is always one last light to turn out and one last bell to ring
And the last one out of the circus has to lock up everything
Or the elephants will get out and forget to remember what you said
Oh and the ghosts of the tilt-o-whirl will linger inside of your head
Oh and the Ferris wheel junkies will spin there forever instead
When I see you, a blanket of stars covers me in my bed
Hey, Mrs. Potter, don't go, I said
Hey, Mrs. Potter, I don't know, but
Hey, Mrs. Potter, won't you talk to me
Well all the blue light reflections that color my mind when I sleep
And the lovesick rejections that accompany the company I keep
All the razor perceptions that cut just a little too deep
Hey, I can bleed as well as anyone but I need someone to help me sleep
So I throw my hand into the air and it swims in the beams
It's just a brief interruption of the swirling dust sparkle jet stream
Well I know I don't know you and you're probably not what you seem
Aw, but I'd sure like to find out
So why don't you climb down off that movie screen
Hey, Mrs. Potter, don't turn
Hey, Mrs. Potter, I burn for you
Hey, Mrs. Potter, won't you talk to me
When the last king of Hollywood shatters his glass on the floor
And orders another
Well, I wonder what he did that for
That's when I know that I have to get out cause I have been there before
So I gave up my seat at the bar and I head for the door. Yeah.
We drove out to the desert just to lie down beneath this bowl of stars
We stand up in the Palace, like it's the last of the great pioneer town bars
Aw, we shout out these songs against the clang of electric guitars
Well, you can see a million miles tonight
But you can't get very far
Aw, you can see a million miles tonight
But you can't get very far
Hey, Mrs. Potter, I won't touch and
Hey, Mrs. Potter, it's not much but
Hey, Mrs. Potter, won't you talk to me [3X]

http://www.geffen.com/artist/player/default.aspx/mid/2224/aid/83

Expiration date conspiracy

It is my not-so-firm-but-just-nuts-enough-to-blog-about belief that Expiration and Use By dates are a conspiracy by supermarket companies and food manufacturers to convince people to by new products even though the old products are just fine.

Now, as a caveat to the conspiracy theory one must keep in mind that it ONLY applies to condiments. I do realize that milk goes bad and eggs get rotten. But what about condiments? WHY do they have an expiration date? For the love of God, vinegar has been used as a preservative for thousands of years! And yet horseradish (consumed yearly in mass quantities by Jews every year for Passover and at Christmas for prime rib dinners) expires about 1 year after purchase. That's right, it expires JUST in time for the holidays! And who would feed their beloved guests something that is expired? Nobody, that's who. So we all throw out the old horseradish and buy new horseradish.

Catsup/Ketchup also expires. It's 'Use by' is a bit longer than horseradish but despite the fact that it is left, unrefrigerated, on restaurant tables for days upon end because it has a natural preservative (again, vinegar), it needs to be used by a consumer within 18 months. Why? Does it taste different? With mostly sugar and water and vinegar I would think it'd probably taste even better over time as the water evaporates and sugar content goes up. I'm not a chemist, I'm an IT geek. So I could be wrong on that. But does it matter? The reality is that pickles preserved in vinegar will stay edible through the next nuclear holocaust. Vinegar is what the cockroaches will be drinking in little martini glasses when the world ends. So how does it magically 'expire' in my fridge just because there is a spicy chopped up root floating in it?

The answer: it doesn't. But the grocery store loves it when I come back every year and buy more horsey sauce for my gefilte fish. They love it even more when I 'recycle' my pickles (yes, they expire), mustard (yes), catsup (yes), salad dressings and marinades (yes and yes). So for now I'll have to rely on my girlfriend, the cleaning lady or possibly my mother to come over to take condiments out of rotation. Because I won't replace them. I won't provide Heinz, Hellman's and Kikoman the joy of 10% year-over-year growth in a static industry. The buck stops here!

Now I realize, in summary, that the use by dates for condiments are for 'ideal freshness' or optimal flavor. But you know something? If it ain't true why are Americans so paranoid about expiration dates and anti-bacterial sprays and mists and decontamination and ... you get the idea.

If you're still not convinced but you hate throwing out all those bottles every year, check this link out and make a horseradish-soy-sauce-caper-Étouffée.

Holiday Photos

I've switched to Picasa officially. The new Yahoo Photos is possibly worse than the old one which I thought was absolutely impossible. I gave Flickr a brief try but, having been purchased by Yahoo, it now sucks too. The Yahoo Mail is still in beta but it's so slow at times I'm also thinking of permanently switching to Google Mail (GMail).

Now I have my blog with Google (you're reading it, Blogger is owned by Google) and my home page and search are all Google. Yahoo... better watch your back. When IT guys abandon you it's all over.

12-06 - Channukah Time

12-06 - New Year's

No Hallmark Occasion: In Remembrance of Maya Lauren Penn

No Hallmark Occasion
December 20, 2006

There is no Hallmark card made for such an occasion.
There is no adequate explanation of feeling nor summary of emotions.
There is often a struggle to let go, to gain understanding.

So our minds wander, wax and wane,
And though we may feign to “know” how to act, how to be, how to support
We only follow the patterns of those before us with our own dash of zest.

Many explanations can be given for what happens now…
Christianity would say that a comfort should lie in that a soul is in a place of peace.
Modern Judaism follows the same pattern of belief: that the soul is immortal.
Buddhists would grant that a life of innocence is one of a truly open mind and therefore the equivalent of the enlightened being, moving infinitely through time.

None of us can make the choice of how another perceives life. The one known entity, the one commonality between all of us is that we have a choice to make for ourselves that can make the soul soar. The universe has provided that alone as our private consolation.

During times when there is no sense to the jolts that come with experience
And no logic or reason to change;
Here is the opening for clarity. For meditation and expression.
For mourning. For candid dialectic. And finally for finding our inner smile again.
How it’s found is up to each of us, uniquely individual, bonded together.

So now what? We find the intangible of love expresses itself in ways not seen before.
And we’ll start down a new path, saddened and slow at the start, trickling and winding;
then gaining agility. Gaining velocity. Gaining strength. Starting anew in the body, the mind, the soul.

It is precisely when no Hallmark card applies that new paths and connections are formed,
old bonds are strengthened and new ones take shape.
Lao Tzu said, “When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.”

Dispute a Despot

Has anybody else noticed the severe lack of fair voting democracy in so-called democratic countries lately? It's downright frightening. Here I thought that the election of female leaders would lead to a new world order and it seems that instead we're approaching a big-brother world order.

Not sure what I'm referring to? I suggest a brief review of recent fraudulent elections the world over:

• United States of America: The good ol' USA had not one but TWO fraudulent elections in 2000 and 2004. They were so fraudulent that there are actually proven individuals who swayed the results and decision made that purposely threw the election to the people already in power (i.e. the government of Florida and the conservative Supreme Court)! This is the home of "freedom" and democracy, right?
  
  
• Mexico: Close on the heels of the USA 2004 election was the awesome Mexican election dispute of 2006. What a debacle. We're talking fraud on a grand scale and, unlike the United State of Apathy, people actually camped out in protest! There was talk of forming a second government alongside the first because the leading opposition candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, was so convinced that no good could come of the current administration.

• Zambia: the 2006 election just occured and was not only disputed but then marked by extreme violence. The pattern continues... What happened to a vote that is a vote? Seems to me that in elementary school the way to fairly settle something is to vote as a class. That's pretty basic. If the teacher swayed things and made the vote fraudulent wouldn't you supposed the children would lose faith in the practice of a democratic election? Fair? Who said anything about fair.
  
  
• Yemen: September 2006 Voting was suspended in a total of 140 polling centres that witnessed violence, according to the country's highest elections panel. Elections-related violence killed five and injured 45 during polling 20 September.
  
  
  
  
  
• Need I go on? Ecuador 2006 is coming up. People are already alleging fraud and nobody has voted yet! Does this disturb you? It should. The only right you have in this so-called free-will world is a vote on who becomes the next "man". If "the man" is so corrupt that he won't even cede power in a certified election to an alternate, wealthy, corrupt & immoral "man" than what's the point?
  

Will I stop voting? Hell no. I have some inkling of an idea of what it's like in China for people who have no true vote. Hell, even China's local elections are marked by fraud and violence. But I will use my vote to try to get the fraud OUT of office.

An Ode to Audio Tape

Within the past 2 weeks, by sheer chance, I've kissed the audio tape goodbye. I was never one to linger on old technology. I'm a geek at heart and a gadget lover in the wallet but I had the stock stereo cassette player in my car and a dual-cassette deck on a mini-stereo system that I used as my alarm clock.

The car was purchased in 1996 so the cassette player was 10 years old and it still worked. With my commute being 35-40 minutes I was utilizing books on tape quite regularly and I still had 2 or 3 of my favorite mix tapes and a few live shows of Jerry Garcia and David Grisman at the Warfield.

The stereo was purchased in 1992 when I left for college. It was the all-in-one mini system from Sony that had a CD player and dual-cassette as well as a tuner and remote. What a barn stormer!

But who was I kidding? The transition was inevitable. I've owned 3 iPods in my life so far (currently a 4GB Nano). I have an iPod dock on my computer at home, at work and had one on the very same mini-system that had the tape decks. I have a full-function media center PC in my living room so I can stream audio to my amp and high-fi speakers. So when the opportunity presented itself to have an stereo in my car that has integrated iPod control I jumped. I'd waited years for true integration to be available and I'd be damned if I'd let a little red-tape (or black tape... har har har) hold me back.

Then just a few days after I made plans for the purchase of the car stereo I was given the opportunity to test-drive a clock radio with iPod integration. It seemed too good to be true. Suddenly all the draw-backs of my stereo with iPod dock were removed: I could wake to the iPod, there was a nap function, it charged the iPod when docked and it was about 1/8th the size of my stereo (did I mention the remote control with the snooze button and the auto-time-set to the atomic clock?). I wrote a check.

I'm an audiophile, gadget-geek and reader of PC Magazine. I admit it. But now that the tapes are gone, the books on cassette are back to the library (I'm moving on to Overdrive audio books through my public library) and the cassette players are sitting in the garage or have gone to Goodwill, I miss the magnetic wonder. It has a few benefits, after all:

• CD's hold 80 minutes of music. Audio tapes hold 90 (on average).
  
• iPod's have all kinds of digital rights management (DRM) to deal with. Audio tapes had none.
  
• Digital files can be misplaced, deleted or moved with no proof of ownership. A tape always had a tape case!
  
• CD's and iPod's have no room to decorate when making mixes. Tapes allowed for artistic license on the insert.

Of course, instance-access, no winding, no flipping, no quality degradation and the ability to hold thousands of songs on CD or iPod is a nice bonus. But I'll always have fond memories of my brother and I buying 10-packs of Maxell XL-II (chrome, type II) and MX (metal, type IV) high-end audio tapes and dubbing the entire Led Zeppelin collection of a friend or the latest Grateful Dead recording from a tape-trading forum.

Audio tape is dead! Long live the tape!