Friday, March 31, 2006

bukowski


bukowski was the real deal, kind of doing a lot of drinking and womanizing, but you get the feeling that he wasn't faking anything, and that he really was who he was, and his poems and even his speech have an originality and a kind of truth to them, so I would recommend his new documentary to all you poetry fans out there.
I've been having a problem with youtube, in that my videos upload okay, but the audio is out of synch, but other than that, the sun rose today, it is a bit cloudy but it is not raining, and one can think that on every particular day it is possible to begin again, to drop all of the little things that might have been holding you back, and to just change the mind and delve deeply into the high thoughts and impressions of this day, but also of the high thoughts and impressions, and the intense and perhaps unusual thoughts of all the thinkers that came before you.
So I'll probably put on my shoes and wander over to the osu library, see what they have in the poetry section, and then have the privelege to take more time out, to just sit in the coffee shop and contemplate the lines of writing, the letters on the page, and maybe transform that into something lasting of my own.
Bukowski and Whitman were womanizers. I prefer to think of myself as a Rilke, a guy truely possessed of a talented edge, and yet not greatly involved in the day to day life of drama and whatnot, but a producer of something lasting and then again, who am I to think such a thing? I write what I write, it may or may not be good, but what the heck. Like B said, he sat down with a pencil and paper and started writing and he realized he liked it, and that was about all there was to it. That's about all there is to it for me too. There is a world out there, full of impressions and transformation, and yet the same in many ways from day to day, ...


beginning my studies, the first impressions pleas'd me so much
the mere fact consciousness, forms, the power of love....

so i sit and think and ponder, having the gall to think that things will come without making a special effort to find them.

Then again, I might go for a little bike ride, which would also be a lot of fun. I generally go out decker road and out around philomath, but what the heck: maybe I'll do that.

Thursday, March 30, 2006

A guy in town told me this story: I made a poem out of it

A guy in town told me this story: I made a poem out of it

some bearded guy, feeling suicidal
went down to the library fountain
the water was making concentric circles
like the circles of the pythagorean music theory
a ladybug was sitting on a leaf
he picked the leaf up
the ladybug flew off
and a voice said to him
"you are well loved"

Saturday, March 25, 2006

me playing jackaroe

me playing stella blue on guitar




By the way, I haven't posted in a while, and it's because there's nothing to say that I can think of, just reading the news, eating a lot of chocolate, doing a few drawings, washing dishes, and the usual stuff. I should do more, I know, and putting a few videos on the web of me playing guitar has me thinking I might want to do more of that, because it is always fun. I had the idea of writing a novel, because that seemed as though there are a lot of cool and interesting things going on out there, but who's to say? I tend to have a real tendency to hide myself away from the world, but there is a lot going on out there, more than I usually really want to deal with, which is part of the problem.

I've played guitar for many years, and it is a real joy. This was recorded on a digital camera, so the sound could use improvement, as you might imagine. If you can't hear it too well, that's why.

Friday, March 10, 2006



my beautiful wife, Kelly Posted by Picasa


guitar and chair drawing with color Posted by Picasa

this n that

i have a cold which is driving me up the wall because I was supposed to be doing a lot of stuff. I was planning on driving down to eugene, but going to have to skip that. I usually go for long walks when I'm bored, but that's obviously not going to work either.
Luckily I have my beautiful wife that I am madly in love with to take care of me. Without her, I'd just be a little oil spot on the garage floor. No, actually, I'd be like only less than half of a little oil spot on the garage floor, if even that. No, .....but anyway, Kelly is beautiful and lovely and charming and basically the greatest thing that ever happened to me.
Now if only I could get over this cold, everything could be going back to normal. There's a karate tournament coming up next month and I am in terrible shape, so i'll not probably be doing that well.
I guess I'll head over to the interzone and read a paper or something. I sure hope I feel better before I have to work again.

Monday, March 06, 2006

how come nobody reads my blog?

I am really disappointed that nobody is interested in what I have to say. My karate post got like zero clicks and I thought that was a really important subject. I guess if you don't do karate or know anything about it it doesn't seem important.
Anyway,
Life in Corvallis is good and here I am at the osu library again using their great computers. I need to get their antivirus experts to come over and configure my computer. I was still having a few problems so some guy who seemed like he knew his stuff came over and installed F-secure, but that seems to be taking a lot of processing power.
In other news, I've been listening to Aaliyah, who had a pretty tragic story. She was totally hooked into the new york r and b scene, sponsored by R kelly, second album produced by then-unknown Missy Elliott. Her stuff is pretty smooth, very very smooth as a matter of fact, so it's tragic that she died because of an incompetent pilot. I'm listening to her second album. Good stuff.
I need to go for a long walk because all the junk food and lack of exercise has been noticeably adding to my waistline, and I don't seem to have the motivation to go home and do a lot of kata (forms).
The interzone seems like a pretty silly scene recently, like just a bunch of young people. Hard to say. The beanery types are older and remember the sixties, so it's hard to impress them at all, the the young types running around the interzone have whatevers going on with them going on, but it's really not connected to anything going on with me, so I feel like I go over there, look around at the art, but the people are in some kind of other space, but I might go check out a book on classical chinese and go wander over there and practice writing some Hanzi (Kanji). There is something about ancient Chinese, maybe because I think it actually the oldest written language ...but I'm not sure about that. The really ancient Chinese characters have a really otherworldy alien kind of look, as if aliens came down and gave these characters to the Chinese at some point, and maybe they did. Who knows. That may be true of the Egyptians too. Nobody can say for sure that it didn't happen.
Just a little thought for the evening.

Sunday, March 05, 2006

Stuff happens

went to the library. It was a nice night for walking around. They really need to get the computer fixed down at the 2nd street bean, ....I like to sit in there and drink coffee and send emails, but the thing was not connecting, so walked up to the library and had an espresso down in the downstairs cafe, but that seemed kind of dull, went upstairs and found my friend Zebekiah (not his real name) who doesn't really do much at all but sit in the library and play world of warcraft. He used to do karate but lost interest. He said he was headed down to our class last week but had just eaten a big meal and didn't want to exercise right after eating so he missed that class. I asked him if he was winning and he said he was surviving (at the game), so surviving is not as good as winning but better than the alternative. it's cool that osu library lets non-students come in there and just play online interactive video games endlessly. It doesn't seem like a very productive use of the computers, but I'm not making the rules. Got a good email from my old friend from Berkeley, and another related to karate politics and organization, and that kind of thing, but sometimes I get really tired of email. I think I'd rather just have actual people around.
Japan night was Saturday, and there was the standard calligraphy and kimono wearing. I should have stayed for the dancing and other exhibitions, but I was feeling a bit claustrophobic. The food prep for it was fun. I got to cut up some peppers and some sort of dried mushroom and other things, for use in chirashizushi, which is sort of a dish using sushi rice and other elements. It turned out pretty good. It's nice to hear people speaking Japanese, because I've been pretty out of the loop. I think I'll make an announcement at the next meeting of the Japan Club that I'm interested in studying Classical Japanese poetry and prose, and actually classical Chinese too, since I also studied a bit of that in college. It would be good to meet people with similar interests, and the texts are difficult and I need help to decode them.

Saturday, March 04, 2006

American Dream

I worked at the campus location ten years ago, and it was a fun place. The owner of that also owns big river, and part of the downtown store, so he knows what he is doing. My boss was a good guy, but some of my fellow employees started to get on my nerves, so I ended up quitting, but it was a fun time. I had low rent, so I didn't have to work many hours, and spent a lot of time playing my guitar, strolling around, reading, listening to music. In 95 there wasn't much of an internet. That was the year somebody told me about lynx, a text-only browser, and yahoo.com. Yahoo was mostly just good for getting jokes and a lot of useless information, but the osu library had computers hooked up to unix, so that seemed fascinating. With unix you could get a list of everybody logged into osu, and then "finger" somebody, to get their profile, and then type "talk" to start an instant-message type thing with them. Email also worked then, using pine, which is probably still around. I remember hearing first about email in 1992, because my mom, a professor, was already using it, but back then, at UC Berkeley, you had to be a real geek to figure it out. I went down to the geek lab, and said I wanted an account, but they were like "go buy a book on unix." I just wanted email, not to learn the whole system...But pine was easy enough to figure out. As a matter of fact, going back to unix might be good, and be done with all the spyware and viruses....
For years I was happy with text-only browsers, ...
But anyway, that was life ten years ago: pizza delivery, playing music, poetry, and unix

Friday, March 03, 2006

Nathaniel Blake is an idiot

I wrote a letter to the gt saying something about head-up-their-youknowwhat intolerant Christians, and I'm not sure if I want them to publish that or not, but that whole Blake article was outrageous and appalling. I don't think they should print stuff like that even if the "facts" are right, because its just hate speech, and doesn't help with anything.