moved to wordpress

just picked up and went there = check it out =  http://themeanderingmushroomman.wordpress.com/

hope to C U there

tryin wordpress

maybe this will be batter ?

a funny thing happened on my way to Google+

having just joined a "circle" ~ hey I'll try anything once ~ appreantly all my images a no longer available here = what to do? well there's all ways this:

Asking a good question is better than having a good answer.

justin case (as opposed to Bieber)

"When the truth is found to be lies
and all the joy within you dies ~ then what ?"

unintended consequences and the big uneasy

in the middle of harry shearer’s movie there’s a description of the economics behind the canal they call Mr Go down thair in na-or-lins (New Orleans) and it kudda bin the exact same description of the mortgage backed securities that torpedoed the global economy and it got me to thinkin that maybe it’s not about systemic failure at all but an intrinsic part of our shared humanity.

Ya see this canal was supposed to cut through the rangy way the Mississippi Delta wiggles out to the Gulf and chop a whole buncha nautical miles + time for the barges floatin in an outta there. Trouble is they, the Army Corps of Engineers that iz, hafta dredge it like constantly since it’s dug into soft bottom wet lands that don’t necessarily like to hold their shape. Well, it turns out, it also kinda lets in a whole bunch of salt water too, that kinda kills off the cypress trees that kinda hold the wetlands together that kinda act as a naturally absorbent barrier to the destructive forces of all them hurricanes they have down there ~ but I digress.

What got me going was this statement: (and I paraphrase) “the cost of the canal was spread out among a broad base while the profits accrued to only a few and at the same time all the risks were hidden” ~ which sounded like an exact description of these brilliant financial instruments we all bin hearing so much about since the Fall of ’08.

Now how is it that a nearly identical description could be so fitting for two separately distinct human endeavors? We all know about the greed on Wall Street especially after Michael Douglas told how good it is and all, and systemic failures, and lack of oversight, and the complexities of the modern global economy, and federal jurisdictions vs local control, etc. ~ BUT ~ i wonder now if they aint sum thin a lot more basic and a whole lot less sinister connected with this whole bizzyness and the nature of human creativity?

What I am tryin to get at is this: what if there were some innate flaws in the human psyche that also allows for us to become more “civilized”? And if so maybe we are destine to always be the victims of the unintended consequences of our collective “improvements” to the point where somehow some way it can make perfect sense to go ahead and destroy the village in order to save it?

I dunno how about U ?

These certainly are uncertain times ~ we can be certain of that. maybe we crave certainty because we want to be certain of the things we depend on ~ or maybe we create the illusion of certainty to shield us from the unpredictable nature of nature?

I am certain that everyone will stop at stop lights, not cut in line, use prepositions correctly. I am certain that the ground beneath my feet is solid even tho I live in EaRtHqUaKe country. Certainty certainly seems like a grand illusion now doesn’t it ? ~ yet how can we live without it?

“ah there’s the rub” like our favorite psycho prince says. After I check my remarkably accurate 10 day weather forecast I start my day and start my car.  But if the weather poops out 5 days hence I think, “well the weather is pretty unpredictable ya know” but if my car doesn’t start that morning then, “well . . .

we live in a continuum of nature that has no beginning (unless yer a religious type or a big banger) and no end tho we ~ us hue beans ~ do. unkle george says: someday the earth will just shake us off like a bad case of fleas and at the rate we’re going it’s certainly hard not to see how he’s not right. But the earth, and whatever comes after, will just keep rollin along no madder watt we due ~ we can be certain of that.

connect with your inner landscape

Mismatched vacation pictures intermingled with old letters and restaurant menus with a sprinkle of distant camping trips and family fights thrown in for color. It is more than our view of the world but a skillfully crafted hodgepodge of sensory impressions along with memories and our thoughts and feelings that arise from all of it. This is our inner landscape.

Intriguing, or as the Germans say (at least the ones that eye know), making more curious. Until we have explored a few of the darker nooks and crannies of our personal inner landscape we are hopeless to roam the fields of another. This is why we need to first connect with our own inner landscape in all its seasonal breath taking beauty and the parched heat waves of drought, the sudden terror of floods, or the laconic blessing of our own boredom.

Now is not the time for passivity. Now is the time to go deep and make connections ~ while we still have the chance.

spell chex and other annoying cereals

Thawt eye'd spread this won out a bit since it comes up more often that eye'd imagine.. Not just trying to be annoying with the fun key spelling thang here.

Maybe it's mainly my fondness for run on sentences. Or it could be that I just kinda like to pack a bunch of ideas into too small a space (oar two small ova space as eye wood like to say) Or for example: eye wood makes me think of heart wood, or even heart would, but wood eye? Eye deally U wood take it in yer own way up to a point.

So hairs the poynt. We all use the same words (or werds witch is close to weirds) and we vthink they all mean the same thing ~ but they don't. Sew my wacky spelling is partly due to an acknowledgement of this phenomena.

Also it helps to generate some forgiveness, perhaps, for pervasive typos.

But back to the multiple meaning thing. It grows I suppose out of my interest in abstract art. Eurocentric art reached a pinnacle of technique around the mid 19th Century beginning around a hundred years earlier with the Dutch Masters (them dudes was the original freaks). At that point the whole idea was the ideal that the image depicted in a particular painting was "best seen" from a single point of view (usually 10 feet back & directly in front). The implication was of course that since there was that one and only spot to view the piece from ~ so there was one, and only one, way to "see" the painting.

What the abstract ladies and gents (yup there was some ladies) were getting at is that (basically) reality is completely subjective (I think Buddha was in that camp) so that you can never look at the same painting twice (like steppin in that same river).

N E ways part of my warped spelling aesthetic is tryin to loop back into suma that. Besides eye will be much happyer wen english becomes a completely fo-netik language (lang wij) kinda like Tibetan or Swahili.

There's this friend of mine who, btw, is almost as crazy as me (as most of my friends are ~ but like THEY say  ~ I take the cake <chocolate please>) and she started this project called Art2Heart which involved bringing art from artists in the good ole USofA to developing countries along with a bunch of easy to transport materials. Then she'd get the kids in these remote areas to make some art and send it back to us. This photo is one she took on wonov her trips.

The idea as I stood under it was to get a kindov art pen pal thing going and so maybe there'd be a way to keep these kids in art materials ona sort of ongoing bases ~ and then after that who nose what might happen.

Anyways, when I was in Nepal in 1979 there were two things the kids there then always wanted (I imagine it's all different now) besides "one rupee please" ~ and that was paper and pens. I remember watching young kids scratching in the dirt or rubbing rocks on flagstones just trying to make a mark and all this made me think of graffiti. It's as if there is an innate human necessity to "make our mark" on the whirld (like that movie sally fields was in).

But that's not what I was goin for with this pic. I recently came across some kindov NPRish type story about people raising their kids in a "gender neutral way" like letting them decide for themselves if it was time to play with dolls or trucks and how there was all this brew HA HA about messin the kids up and societal norms and all the stuff that generally gets some fowks really twisted up in their knickers.

And then I came across this image from my friends flikr account and it made me wonder ~ do these kids look confused or abused ? ? And I betchya no body kin tell which is the girl and which is the boy.

firecracker

"Hot enough for ya?" There are places I've bin where fowks just thinks it's plain strange to be talkin about the weather. I get the whole bit about bein' a conversation starter common experience etc but that has got to be wonna my least favorite questions.

How about a few of these as delightfully fresh alternatives: "Pavement hard enough for ya?"; "Man is sure is 2:37 right now aintit?"; "Dude, got any diction or grooming tips?"; "You know any wacky seamstresses?" Itid get my day started like good cuppa coffee.

The other won thatz givin my some challenges lately is the old stand by: "How are you?" again ~ i get the whole let's have a polite interaction at the cash register thing ~ but for some reason i now find myself taking it personally. I know no body wants a complete inventory, ya know like when somebody says "How are things?" and i say i dunno cuz i haven't finished checking it all yet. But now I just get all perpendicular on it and so some how it seems like I oughta be more sincere.

Just the other day I remembered this nugget from my mom: "Better than I was, and not as good as I will be."  I really liked this won when she told me but then I kinda for got aboudit tillit recently got rattled up from the basement of my brain. I've tried it a few times over the last coupla daze. gonna keep trottin it out for awhile but i suspect I'll soon be gowin back to my old standard non-sect quitter mixed metaphors. Have a nice day.