Electra Glide In Blue

I woke up this morning as I usually do, in the still hours before dawn. The eastern sky was just starting to turn to a pale shade of blue. Spring is not here yet, but I can feel it approaching. I love the sound of birds singing in the early hours of the morning, thought they haven't yet opened up with their full symphony yet.

With a cup of coffee and a few slices of wheat toast I decided to run through the list of upcoming movies on cable to set the DVR. While I was doing that I stumbled upon MGMHD which was playing the cult classic Robert Blake movie "Electra Glide In Blue". I remember seeing the film when I was a very young man, so it holds a special place in time for me. I settled in with my coffee and watched it, beginning to end. It is definitely a slice of time, firmly grounded in the era (1973).

When I find myself sliding into nostalgia I often wonder "dang, was I ever really that young"? The answer is yes, of course I was. There have been a lot of miles and adventures and misadventures between here and there. I have to confess to having enjoyed most of them though. A few I could have done without.

Anyway, if you've never seen the movie and you can find it, it is worth a watch.

My plan for today is to move easily through the day. I want to keep it nice and relaxed this weekend. Just ease through the pleasant late winter day.

Here is a link to a YouTube video of the end song "Tell Me" by Terry Kath (also very much a slice of the time and place).

An Unexpected Evening

I am sitting in the living room of my apartment with the patio door wide open. According to the thermometer it is 59 degrees outside and sliding down from a beautiful day. The evening was especially beautiful tonight, calm, balmy, with just a hint of a breeze. It was an unexpected evening.

I am sitting in the living room, mostly in silence. I can hear the ticking of the clock on the kitchen wall, the clock that is slowly losing time - a minute or so a day. I don't know how long I have had it, probably well past it's life-cycle, considering it was probably less than $20 when I bought it long ago. I have two other clocks visible from where I generally sit in the living room, both of them satellite clocks, so I really have the kitchen wall clock more out of habit that anything else.

There is the sound of the refrigerator kicking on, the compressor and the fan, not loud, but a soft white hum in the background. There is the sound of my fingers dancing over the keyboard here on my laptop, writing this entry. If I close my eyes and listen there are incidental sounds coming in through the open door, the sounds of traffic and distant, indistinguishable voices, some belonging to children, some to adults.

The evening seems to be moving slowly, which is nice considering that my principle complaint over the last year or so has been the speed with which time is passing by. I have adopted a mantra that works, at times, when I am feeling overwhelmed by the pace of this life and that is a simple "slow, slow, slow" to remind me that a lot of the pressure, a lot of the rush that I feel is self-inflicted and that I do have it in my power to take a deep breath and slow things down.

I wonder at the passage of time, I wonder at my perception of the passage of time. I haven't gotten any magical insights or penetrating observations - time passes and I experience it's passage at a variety of speeds. Evenings like tonight seem rare, when I don't feel rushed and I don't feel hurried and I don't feel like there are a dozen things that I should be doing instead of simply just sitting here. I am just sitting here.

I was going to go sit outside for a while tonight, but I learned to my amusement that I had put the seat cushions on my favorite chair out a little early - and it rained on them - and the only thing I would have gotten sitting down would have been a wet butt. I can pass on that tonight.

My beloved T.R. is traveling for work, and I always miss her when she is. Her work can be very time consuming, twelve to fourteen hour days, a quick bite, a hot shower, sleep and repeat tends to lead to the whirlwind passage of time, or perhaps to a sense of timelessness. When she is traveling I miss her and I practice patience.

So tonight, on this unexpected evening, I am practicing simplicity and patience and silence.

The Sound of Pebbles

When I find myself under stress one of the visualizations that I have found works fairly well for me is to imagine each item of stress as a stone pebble and then slowly, one after another, drop the pebbles into a tin bucket, listening to the clang of the bucket as the pebble rattles around inside of it. I am not really sure why this particular visualization works better than others for me, but it does.

I was working on filling the bucket up today. During the course of the morning I accumulated quite a few pebbles. At lunch, I walked down the street in the rain and had a bowl of so-so vegetable minestrone, a green salad, and a glass of iced tea. When I finished lunch, I walked back in the rain and then walked to the far end of the building and back, imagining those pebbles hitting the bottom of the pail as I walked.

I often speak in general terms of the stressors that I find myself under, but I thought I would take a slightly different approach today and show you all some of the pebbles I dropped into the bucket.

Pebble Number One: I exchanged texts with my brother this morning, god love him. He is one of those people that he cannot help but correct you, even if what you are saying is a simple statement of preference. I had mentioned to him that my preference was for black coffee – upon which he promptly texted back that my preference was wrong. Now think about this for a second – “I like black coffee”. “No you don’t.” What’s the point of that whole exchange. Other then getting under my craw. It’s actually a hot button of mine when you are stating an opinion or a preference and people tell you it’s not your preference or opinion? How the heck do you respond to that?

Pebble Number Two: I have an incidental table in my living room, near the door, where the odds and ends of things land – keys, wallet, pocket stuff. It has a tendency every now and then to catch things and become cluttered. As I was picking up my stuff this morning I noted that it was cluttered (largely because I knocked some small things off). That was just irritating. This pebble fortunately I can do something about – tonight, when I get home, I’ll quickly sweep the crap that has landed there into the trash can and that will be the end of that. (On a side note, I am obviously a pen kleptomaniac. I buy and use one type of pen, the Zebra 402 in medium black ball point, however, inevitably all kinds of pens end up on the incidental table. I have no idea where they come from, since at work, I also use the Zebra 402 exclusively.)

Pebble Number Three: Traffic. ‘Nuff said.

Pebble Number Four: I am working a small project here at the office and it’s a thing that causes me some level of vexation. There are certain questions in my line of work that keep getting asked over and over and over. The data that underlies the questions never actually changes, hasn’t in the fifteen years I’ve been in this specific line of business. But, every new leader feels compelled to ask the same question and then disregard the same data. I have been at this long enough that I always feel a tremendous sense of déjà vu when the questions get asked.

Pebble Number Five: The inability of probably ninety percent of the corporate world to run a meeting that actually sticks to the agenda. Everyone always wants to either hijack the meetings and talk about something unrelated “while we are all together” or drone on and on about something only peripherally related in order to get face time.

Pebble Number Six: People who complain about things, but never to the actually people they should complain to them about. In the work environment this usually involves something minor that they should talk to their manager or HR about, but they won’t actually take the positive step to seek resolution since, I suspect, they really just would rather complain.

Pebble Number Seven: Loud people either talking in the hallway or on their cell phones. I always have to fight the urge to go stand right next to them and pull out my cell phone and go “Oh my god! You won’t believe how loudly this guy next to me is talking on his phone. Here, listen!” And then hold the phone up toward them.

Pebble Number Eight: Micromanaging by managers who really don’t have the slightest idea what is going on, but feel compelled to be involved.

And when I feel that urge rising up, that is when I know it is time to take a long walk and let the pebbles fall into the pail. (Clank, clank, clank, clank…)

The Non-Sentient Gives Voice To The Dharma

I opened the Shobogenzo of Dogen at random today and my finger landed on the phrase “the non-sentient gives voice to the Dharma” in a section that told of a student who had been awakened by the sound of a stream after having heard his teacher tell a koan of the non-sentient giving voice to the Dharma. To often, when we seek to be awakened, we seek wisdom – perhaps the wisdom of teachers, perhaps the wisdom of scholars, perhaps the wonders of science, perhaps the beauty of nature. But, the voice of the Dharma is in all things.

Stop and think about that for a moment. The voice of the Dharma is in all non-sentient things. Your computer. Your keyboard. Your desk. Your chair. Your floor. Your roof. All of them are the voice of Dharma. Are you listening? Am I listening?

Piranha Eating Wonder Woman

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The Dragon Years

Last week I finished my last visit with the counselor for stress. I will have to say she was very good, well worth the time and money, and after six months of visits I am far better than I was before I began the process. As I've mentioned a time or two, I had been under a considerable amount of stress - some of which I wrote about here, some of which was private enough that I didn't write about it here. I believe in sharing, that is part of what writing a blog is about, but I can also be a very private person, a jealous gaurdian of my own privacy and the privacy of the people I love.

As part of that last counseling session we talked about the power of giving things names - one of the things I had given name to was "The Project That Nearly Broke Me". The high stress I found myself under had arisen from the rapid succession of that event, followed by the amputation of my toe. It was a wicked double wallop of life stress. The counselor suggested that I rename that time period when I refer to it and I've toyed around with a variety of names, but I have come to the conclusion (subject to change at any given moment) that the best way to refer to that time, for me - is to call it "The Dragon Years".

One of the things I relearned in stress counseling was how to wear my armor properly (to visualize it as armor to protect myself from stress causing events, to allow my resilience to rebuild). For me, it was a highly effective visualization. I would often pull my car into the parking lot at work and don my armor to start the day.

At the end of the whole process, at the end of the passage of time that marked "The Dragon Years", I have found myself - changed, different, but still alive, still thriving. Both I and my armor took quite a battering, that is for sure - but I, like my armor, can be repaired and returned to full service, and like armor, when repaired, I may be even stronger than I was before.

So, here I sit at the end of the Dragon Years, battered, knocked around, scarred, with a new limp and a few new sensibilities and sensitivities - but ready to enter the stream of life again, ready to cross through the stillness and the rapids and all the places that run in between.

The Left Side of the Brain

It is about 2:30 p.m. Pacific time and I am just slowly coming out of the left side of my brain. I went very deep into the left brain while trouble-shooting a technical problem today. I am not sure I have the right answer, but I do seem to have pointers in the right direction.

However, this entry isn’t intended to be about that problem, but rather about the way I feel right now.

I feel very unimaginative. I feel as if my imagination fell into a very deep sleep and it is, grudgingly, waking up due to persistent poking on my part.

I am kind of curious to see what is going to wake up. I am equally curious to see which method of right-brain-nudging works best for waking it up. There might be some longer term insights in there for me.

While I was deep in my left brain I got to thinking about writers block. Since I re-adopted the habit of writing regularly in a small journal, I have felt my desire to write more slowly reawakening.

With that reawakening I’ve also started to turn out better, and slightly more prolific, bits of poetry and prose. Perhaps the sleep was deeper than I realized.

In Your Time

Today I was caught up in the observation of the multiple universes we live in. I've often said there are two things that truly stagger my mind.

If you take a dark night and an area without artificial light and lay on your back and gaze up at the stars and contemplate the vastness of space/time, I often find myself at the very edge of what my mind can comprehend and it induces a tremendous state of smallness and awe.

The second observation is more prosiac but no less awesome. Sometimes, when I am walking through a quiet neighborhood, I will look at all the living spaces I walk by and realize that, in each of those living spaces there are people whose web of life is as wide, diverse, and complex an interweave as mine. Invisible lines of connection reaching out to touch hundreds of people, who in turn touch hundreds of people, who...well...you get the picture. It is a totally awe inspiring sensation.

I am, by profession, an analyst. I count things and I try to figure out what the meaning of those numbers and relationships. I always run the risk of being totally drawn into an analytical task, of total surrender to the elegant beauty of the underlying universe of experience that each individual moves through.

So, that kind of describes the “chart of the territory” the next observation is laid upon. We’re already seven week s into 2011. January and most of February have already flown by, here, in California, in a gray and rainy winter with a few incidental days of sunlight. Spring, though still distant, is coming rapidly enough. The first day of spring is March 20th, a little under four weeks away (twenty six days).

Against the background of the swift passage of time I was listening to “Bob Seger’s Greatest Hits” during the morning commute and one of the song on the album in “In Your Time”. Perhaps at a later window I will add the entirety of the lyrics as an entry here, but right now I wanted to capture just that part that struck my imagination and has also been riding with me for the last couple of days.

In Your Time
by Bob Seger

Feel the wind
and set yourself the bolder course
keep your heart
as open as a shrine
you’ll sail the perfect line
and after all
the dead ends and the lessons learned
after all
the stars have turned to stone
there’ll be peace
across the great unbroken void
all benign
in your time
you’ll be fine
in your time.

(http://www.lyricsfreak.com/b/bob+seger/in+your+time_20021924.html)

Wet Stones

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About The Winter Sun

I snapped the previous picture this morning, sitting on the Leigh Avenue, looking toward the south-east. The sun was a diffuse whiteness against the stormy winter sky and I snapped the photo with my Blackberry. It turned out well I think. A lot of times photographs are like that - the subject is only there for a fleeting moment and if you don't have your camera, all that remains is the memory. Memory is, I think, the perfect photograph. All other photography is a pale imitation of memory.

It was a nice day. I started the day with T.R., then went from there to breakfast with my friends T. and B. at the Hickory Pit. My breakfast was a green chile omelet and an almond danish. (Actually, I ate half of the almond danish at breakfast.) After breakfast, we drove down to Summit Uniform on Meridian so T. could replace his work boots, then from there, over to AMC 14 in Saratoga to see "I Am Number Four".

The movie was enjoyable, if a little heavy on the teen angst for me, but it was well done and entertaining. It was a beautifully shot movie, so kudos to the directory of photography. After the movie I went to a shoe store and then a sporting good store looking for a pair of urban hiking boots. My old pair of boots was about a half a size too small for my foot, with the insert. Neither store had my size - 11 Wide. I may try another store, but then I may just resort to ordering a pair via the web.

Following that, I came home and settled in for a lazy and rainy afternoon. I watched an episode of Dateline, I watched an episode of Fringe, and now I am watching an episode of Bones as I write this. Lunch was chicken noodle soup and a ham sandwich and dinner was a cup of Greek God's yogurt and the second half of the almond danish.

Oh, I almost forgot the long hot bath that occupied part of the afternoon. It was excellent. Today was a good day, the very quiet afternoon was exactly what I needed and sliding into the very quiet evening is also very much desired and enjoyed.