Buds

The day is growing ever more beautiful.  While dead leaves lie about in the spaces where the snow banks finally melted just feet away buds are appearing.  In the trees outside my office the buds are wearing that pink toward purple color.  Nailing a perfect descriptor of the color really doesn’t matter. What matters is that the color is not grey or brown.  Grey and brown are dormant winter colors.  There is promise in these buds of at least one more spring and possible one more summer. 

Walking outside at noon into warm sunlight is like listening to a radio jock playing a string songs that just flow from one to another.  From Howling Wolf to Suzanne Vega to a word jazz from Ken Nordine to a silent meditative piece by Bill Evans each song hitting themes or rhythms that just make them fit.  Feeling that sun pour down on my face is the perfect segue from the cave and hibernation existence of winter to real life.

April Rain

April 13, 2015/April 1972 

My life began in 1972. Who I am came to be just as the Grateful Dead band was touring Europe on their legendary Europe ’72 tour. Funny thing that I was touring Europe myself. The Dead were a rolling ball of complete and utter anarchy. Playing wild solo guitar jams and getting gritty singing old blues tunes they were ripping through a wall between what is and what could be. 

Just as consciousness altering for me my travels were part of a prepackaged tour of Austria, Germany and Switzerland. Me, I was my own ball of rolling clusterfuck even if I didn’t know it then. My head was so screwed on wrong it is amazing someone didn’t beat my ass to death in the years before I got on board for that transformative airplane flight. 

 Why do I remember this? It is the smell of April rain. As I walked out of my office today I found the clouds grey and spitting little bits of rain. There is nothing going on out there they would stop a long walk about. It is warm and the grass is greening. Yeah, the smell that comes with rain and green grass screaming an affirmation that life exists and winter is dead that is the smell that pervaded Europe when I was there in 1972. 

Austria, Germany and Switzerland can be gloomy in the rain if you are not ready for change. And while I remember a great deal of rain it was no bother. Those showers brought growth. 

You may wonder how it was I came to life that 10 day period we traipsed from castle to beer hall to museum after museum. Over that seeming short period came a moment of separation from everything I thought I knew. Torn from the social role I lived at home there came a moment where I had to take account of myself and my own actions. I could have fucked up colossally but I didn’t.

 

For Christ’s sake I made some friends. I interacted with women. I got drunk. I found a group on that tour bus that was as confused and befuddled as I was. Every single person on that trip was as lost as to role and social order as I was. We had to reinvent who we world for 10 days. 

Maybe you had a seminal event that showed you what was possible for you. It could have been a grave situation. Maybe it was somebody mercy fucking you. Maybe it was that trip to boys or girls state. Perhaps a ’la American Pie it was a stint at band camp. For you the smell that trips you back to that moment of transition might be the stale smell of steam heat in a public building or the humid verdant smell of the woods near the lake’s edge. Who knows maybe it is a song or a sound. For me it is April rain. 

It was on those days I spent on that trip that I realized I didn’t have to be what my parents wanted, that I was a being separate and distinct from them. It was on those days looking at the Lions Monument in Lucerne that I realized I could be someone different from everyone I knew. Damn that was a good thing. Sometimes I think I should have kept going constantly reinventing myself. 

Enough of this I have to take a walk out and savor what the April rain has to offer.

Sick Day

When I awoke this morning I felt like corrugated crap.  My throat was raw and my muscles ached everywhere.  I called in sick to work and slept until 12:15 p.m.  Feel a tad bit better now.  With a little spark in me I have been doing some light, and I mean really light, cleaning.  Into the wash went the bed clothes.  After you have been sick everything has that tainted off smell.  Yeah, well thus it had to go into the circling swirl of All.

Funny if I was feeling better and if I was younger I would be nursing a beer outside as I picked up some of the debris winter has left.  The sun is out and the temperature is flirting with sixty degrees.  Such weather and the feeling better from the cold has put me in a space that could best be called “near acceptance”.  

When not sleeping or doing that one load of laundry I have been working on my computer. All day I have been at it trying to get it so the two year old machine to run somewhat faster.  Some useful videos were there on Youtube.  Following their advice seemed to help me clean up the startup and the registry.  With a little more jump in the old operating system I personally feel better.  I am accepting of the system’s limitations but I am delighted it still has life.  Gee that kind of applies to me too.

I changed the background on my desktop.  It now looks like Norwegian fjord.  I find it peaceful.  When I went to Norway I saw lots of snow and lots of ice.  I did not really see the fjords.  A friend that lives near me tells me that Oslo is so different now that it was twenty years ago.  If I were willing to fly I might go back and see what the place is like. Norway was really quite to my liking when I was there before. Maybe this time I might see the fjords.

Why Worry

Sunday, February 22, 2015

Murrow.  Murrowww.  A calico cat stares at me. I am her God of food.  Murrow Murrowww is a cat prayer; she is offering up her plea, her desire is that I trek to the basement and put some food in her bowl. The persistence of the petitioner may also mean that she wants me to refill the water dish.  

McCoy Tyner is playing “Summertime” on the radio.  Summertime?  It is anything but.  While it is 40 degrees warmer than it was two days ago at this hour the temperature outside is just 26 degrees F.  Nothing is moving very much as I look out the bay window.  The relative stillness means there are no wind chill worries.  26 F doesn’t mean much if the wind is at a sustained 20-30 m.p.h.

I have been up for an hour.  It was dark when I came down to get the car warmed up for my wife and son. On this early Sunday morning they are off to an all-day robotics event at the university. Time has passed, they are gone and light has returned to the sky but it is a grey, grey day.  Snow flakes, large ones that take their time as they find their way to the ground making leisurely circles shifting ever so lightly this way and that.

Coffee is brewed and awaits the pouring of the first cup.  Bacon is in the oven at 400 F heading for perfection.  When those slices of dead cured porker are done that will be combined with a poached egg on an Asiago cheese bagel.  The oven is adding its notes to this morning’s symphony.  Beep, beep, beep.  Time to turn the bacon and give it another ten minutes.  Once I have turned those strips that I will respond to the murrows and go check out the feline food situation. 

The music has segued into a quiet reflective piece with a strong bass line.  It sounds like the kind of bass Eddie Gomez played back when he was working with Bill Evans.  Who knows this might be Bill Evans.

(Break)

The cats are fed.  My coffee cup is filled with dirty brown water and another piano based jazz tune is playing in the background.  With my youngest not yet awake I have time to write before he commandeers my computer. Fingers align properly on the qwerty keyboard and I continue.

Yesterday I went to my office even though it was a Saturday.  Tomorrow, Monday we will be migrating to a new computer system.  My why for going in is that I had a couple pieces of work that I did not want to get lost in the process.  Invariably when the IT guys come in and promise to “move everything over to the new machine” tons of stuff ends up just simply gone. When I had gotten what I needed done on my computer I pulled a volume off my desk and commenced to read.  

The first piece I came upon was from the Greek philosopher Epicurus.  Epicurus was an interesting figure.  He was one of the earliest proponents of the scientific method. His philosophy was influential. 

To quote the Wiki on him “For Epicurus, the purpose of philosophy was to attain the happy, tranquil life, characterized by ataraxia—peace and freedom from fear—and aponia—the absence of pain—and by living a self-sufficient life surrounded by friends. He taught that pleasure and pain are the measures of what is good and evil; death is the end of both body and soul and thus should not be feared; the gods neither reward nor punish humans; the universe is infinite and eternal; and events in the world are ultimately based on the motions and interactions of atoms moving in empty space.” Kind of nice approach to the world, truth is beauty and the like.  

Epicurus was also a proponent of the ethics of reciprocity.  What is that you say?  Well the ethics of reciprocity posits, “One should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself and one should not treat others in ways that one would not like to be treated.” It is the golden rule with an imperative to not act as an ass to someone else.  I kind of like it.

I had read some Epicurus in college and with a couple of minutes of down time I figured what the heck let me refresh my mind on his thoughts.  (As a side note it seems kind of bizarre to me is that a modern drug maker would take Epicurius’s talking point and brand a sedative with it.  Atarax is one of those bliss drugs you get when things need to be made peaceful and when you need your fears allayed.)

I digress.  There was a quote in the text which struck me as interesting:  

“So death, the most terrifying of all ills, is nothing to us, since so long as we exist, death is not with us; but when death comes, then we do not exist.  It does not then concern either the living or the dead, since for the former it is not, and the latter are no more.” 

Even if you don’t buy it completely it is an interesting starting point for thought.  Why worry about your end?  If you have breath then death is not here yet.  If you are dead well the game is over and you are no more. I mean I was not in some Thanatos focused moment when I opened the volume but a quote like that gets you thinking.