THE TRANSCENDENCE DIARIES

Gays at the Table

2013-05-14T22:15:00.001-04:00

It just recently came to my attention that a retired and rather infamous, more than well respected at the least, reverend and ethicist in the Methodist Church -- the Reverend Dr. Ogletree -- has been castigated and may face trial for officiating at a same sex wedding between two men in New York late last year. Coincidentally the exact date of this particular wedding happened to fall on my birthday. The New York Times wrote an article about the details, which can be had by clicking here

Not being gay myself I admit I can make no claim to understand the full ramifications of either the positive or negative aspects of the controversy of same sex marriage. For people like me life in the realm of love and marriage is pretty cut and dried. Meet someone you want to start a family and spend the rest of your life with and get to it. The world will celebrate with and praise you to the point that you'll feel like a king or a celebrity for a few months. All because you've announced you're getting married. It's an odd phenomenon really. I've always postulated that this has a lot more to do with thousands of years of cultural indoctrination than anything else. Civil societies need women to be married. At least they believe they do. As well they prefer children to have fathers. Thus the brouhaha over someone's announcement of a planned marriage. You'd think they announced they found oil or struck gold.

Truth be told I was never a big fan of the marriage myth for most of my life. I understood its creation and origin from the anthropological viewpoint and never saw it as truly necessary in the modern world. Especially because so many muggles and mainstreamers had it so inextricably tied to religion in their minds and religion was another one of those "not for me" things as well. My first twenty-five years were all about truth; hence running fast and far away from anything that reeked of manmade indoctrination. Of course that mission statement and how it showed up in the real world changed as I got older and wiser.

As already established I eventually found a surprising joy and comfort through the practice of organized religion in addition to being "spiritual but not religious". There is something mysteriously satisfying and fulfilling about throwing in 110% with a church community to not only worship the great mystery of the beyond but also as a means to serve others and make the world a better place. Now don't let my overly optimistic take on it cloud your predisposed view of traditional Christianity as its currently practiced in America and the rest of the world.

I'll be the first to admit that for the most part the majority of Christians are bat-shit crazy and the last reason they think they're Christians is to "help make the world a better place." Most will tell you they're Christian because they "don't want to burn in hell" or some other nonsense about saving their soul in the afterlife. But I can safely assure any reader that there is sanity to be found within certain circles in the Christian community. Especially within the Methodist denomination. This is coming from a very committed former agnostic.

But before we jump too far into the Koolaid pitcher, I must admit that I find myself quite stymied and even angered by this recent so-called controversy over the good Dr. Ogletree presiding over his son's wedding. (Yes it was his son's wedding... Imagine that.)

See, the thing for me, for people like me, is that the ONLY way you're ever going to get me to even dip a toe in the water of any kind of organized religion is if its members and leaders are honest, rational, filled with integrity and a desire to make the world a better place AND super-badasses intellectually. Character traits that admittedly we do not normally associate with organized religion of any ilk, especially not the Big Four. I thought I had found such an oasis in Methodism. I truly did. In so far as the way it is practiced and preached at my particular church in Manhattan, a church I am proud to be a card carrying member of no less, by all accounts reason, kindness, rational thinking, tolerance and open mindedness are not only present, they are encouraged. I feel safe there. There's no obligation to leave one's brain at the door so to speak.

I felt honored and proud when the church's head pastor, Reverend Stephen Bauman, wrote an open letter to the entire Conference back in 2006 defending the view that homosexual people should be allowed to become ordained ministers and as well should be permitted to get married if they so desire. It's a logical, rational and loving viewpoint for the modern times we live and love in. Why not? Fear of "degradation of the traditional vows of matrimony between a man and woman..."? As any intelligent person would suggest, if two same sexers getting married can scare you into believing your own marriage is at risk you've got problems that no amount of "defense of marriage" bitching is going to fix. Truly the only thing that's ever going to challenge or degrade traditional marriage between man and woman is a sick heart or a weak marriage in the first place.

One of the things I've loved about being a Methodist over the last ten years is just how open minded, loving and inclusive the official doctrine of the denomination is. We are taught that "all are invited to God's table" and that "God loves us all". Some of us take these ideas seriously. And literally. We've read the Gospels and other stories of Jesus of Nazareth and we believe his heart was pure and true when he encouraged us to serve God with all our heart and love our neighbors as ourself. We find it a helpful discipline. Challenging. But beneficial to the spirit.

I can't tell you how many times I have heard so-called Christian ministers recount the lessons of the bible stories of Jesus at the well with the Samarian woman, or with the woman accused of adultery where he forgave her, said "go now and sin no more" and "let he who is without sin cast the first stone"; or Jesus supping with the deceitful tax collectors of his day. On and on the stories go, brainwashed ad nauseum into the minds of planet earth's youngest people as powerful lessons about how open minded and loving and forgiving this Jesus was.

It is needless to state here that as Christians we take the lessons of these stories seriously, as sacred, into our own lives as good examples to follow ourselves. We are either practicing the ways and means of Jesus or we're not. We follow him and his example because it makes sense to us intuitively. Not because of anything a church or a religion or any so-called leader says. Peons and cretins perhaps do what they're told because they are told to. But thinking people do only what they feel in their heart is right, the world be damned. There is more to the Ancient Greek movement of Solipsism than mere selfishness. It's a mentality that makes rational sense. Let no man tell another what truth is. Each unto ourselves belong our beliefs about what is good true right or righteous.

For that reason I cannot in good conscience blame my fellow Christian or Methodist brothers and sisters for their anti-gay views just because they don't agree with my own views. I don't expect them to believe as I do just because I say so. But I do hope to help show them a different way of viewing things, influence them towards a certain direction. One that is more kind, more loving, more inclusive; more like the one Jesus himself took. After all that's the tie that binds us all if nothing else does.

After everything else is tried and tested and shown to be mere window dressing, the hymns, the false hierarchy, the costumes, the stories myths and legends, all we really have left is the real heart of the matter: just what was Jesus trying to teach us? I believe it was and is to be as kind and loving, tolerant and inclusive in our feelings and actions towards each other as possible. And then do it even more.

Judging others to be "wrong or bad" because they don't sexually desire or love the same kind of people we do just doesn't match up with that mandate. Plenty of people already tried that in order to defend slavery years ago. It was bullshit then and it's bullshit now in regards to homosexuality. It's time we faced this reality and lovingly welcomed all of our kind to the table, regardless of how uncomfortable it makes us.

There's real growth potential there for those who are willing to take it on. The Disciples did. Paul did. Jesus did. Are we willing to follow in their footsteps? Or are we just talking a good talk? That's the question each person who claims to be a Christian needs to ask themselves.

- Posted by The Ambassador using BlogPress on an iPhone

Music Streaming is NOT Sales

2013-05-06T15:16:00.001-04:00

ATTN ALL MUSIC ARTISTS: IODA & The ORCHARD have been attempting to secretly collect YOUR streaming royalties along WITH your digital sales royalties. No matter WHAT label you are on you need to contact SOUND EXCHANGE directly and fill out a bunch of forms telling them "We wish to collect our OWN digital streaming royalties DIRECTLY." It's a pain in the rear and it takes a few days of solid work to complete (and a lot of calls), but its worth it. Don't let the digital sales aggregators take your streaming $. It's YOURS. Not theirs.

Fight for this. Digital Streaming -- Pandora, Spotify, YouTube etc. is one of our last revenue streams and is quickly surpassing digital sales (iTunes, amazonMP3, bandcamp, etc.) as our main source of income. Now that The Orchard has bought IODA there is only ONE main digital aggregator (the mechanism to get digital music online for consumers to purchase) in the world today. All the other systems actually run your songs THROUGH THEM. This monopoly is not necessarily a "bad" thing. But this should ONLY apply to SALES. Not streaming. Streaming should be paid directly to YOU or the label you are on.

Call Sound Exchange AND your label and let them know you'd like to be paid directly for ALL digital streaming of ALL your songs through all formats -- audio and video. You'll have to write a legal letter. In addition demand that ALL BACK MONEY paid to someone besides yourself also be paid back to you.
More later.

- Posted by The Ambassador using BlogPress on an iPhone

Space Oddity

2013-04-30T17:27:00.001-04:00

During today's monthly hair multi-coloring experiment, PURE ECSTASY rained down upon me as we listened to Bowie's entire Space Oddity album for the first time (for me) since high school. I am meant to be rinsing now, but I refuse until I finish writing this. tempers flare at my stubbornness. But WHY ELSE am "I"? If not for this? This glorious and magnificent work of art; in so many ways. Fuck my hair. Let it fall out. Fuck time tables and deadlines and schedules; in light of this feeling.
Tony Visconti and David created such a timeless cohesive & passionate epic w this one. Bowie is still channeling a lot of Dylan here. Only hints of Ziggy can be heard, but only w the hindsight we possess now. His voice is still high nasally free & full of heart hope & passion. The lyrics as well. More pot and LSD than booze and cocaine. It's intriguing how we are able to discern things such as that. I miss that voice of his. I long for it to return; though intuitively conjecture it most likely never will.
The arrangement & production of each song perfectly fit what they are, what they were meant to be. No cynicism yet, none audibly or viscerally overt at least. (Personally this is, for me as an artist, the thing I detest the most about contemporary popular rock music and the scene that surrounds and creates it. Think any local music scene U.S.A.; or MTV's annual VMA awards show... How are we even meant to breathe freely in such small minded shallow competitive and materialistic confinement? Let alone feel free enough to create heart based or soul revealing works of art?)
These are simple songs; but no less impactful; innocence is still apparent. A raw human naivety and vulnerability in the songwriting and vocal delivery. Bowie's and Visconti's harmony vocals, child-like fresh, clear, clean; chill evoking. A strong sense of excitement innovation & experimentation to the production. Psychedelic folk pop perhaps best describes the genre or style of the songwriting -- but filled with a high-art occasionally near operatic drama in the production; (someone is taking risks here, excited, ambitious, taking a stand, attempting to leave their mark...) It hints of what will come with their arguably best album to date, Diamond Dogs, (and to this listener one of THE greatest musical albums of all time in the canon of human history). Nothing like this remains in popular music today. Nothing even close. The confines of popular music won't allow it.
As a child I listened to this album every single night before falling asleep for a solid year or two during high school. No one my age understood or could relate. It was old. Dated. Classic rock. Ancient. Bowie had long since gone dance-pop and worse by the time I as a boy had discovered him. But I didn't care. I heard and felt the same thing in his music as I did in Dylan, Bolan, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed or the Beatles and Stones. It was visceral, emotionally moving, life changing. Something was missing in the music being created while I was growing up. It still is.
Perhaps that period of time in popular music -- '59 to '79 -- will forever be considered the only moment that music was allowed to rise to its full peak potential artistically. There are many variables responsible for it, many reasons one could cite for this possibility. Or perhaps it's just me and the few others who feel the same. After all, this is admittedly an entirely subjective thing. Impossible to prove. Worthless to debate. One is aware of that. And yet still feels compelled to defend the point to the death.
One of the most fascinating side effects of the experience was observing the reactions and listening to the comments made by others while we listened (even as casually as was necessary because of the inherent focus required for professional hair coloring... They could ONLY listen casually, matter of factly; and it was their first time ever hearing this album). Their surprise at how similar the songwriting and singing sounded to mine. I never thought about it before. It happened before I became self aware as an artist. The influence and inspiration. It must have seeped in. Soaked in. Taken root. And then slowly oozed out. Sometimes overtly. I can hear that now. But only as part of a much bigger-picture amalgamation comprised of so many artists. Never deliberately mimicked another artist. There were always too many. And too much going on inside my own head.
But it did get me to thinking. Perhaps the music we crush on the most as children becomes the foundation of who we are as artists ourselves. We have the time and energy and desire to afford to do nothing else but obsess over music (if that's your thing, which for me it was, more than any other one thing... (Sports and athletics with others? Or science and technology...?)) And for the rest of our lives out it pours. All based on those most formative years of ours as children. Definitely worthy of exploring further. Another post though.
For now the most important thing is to acknowledge how incredible this one simple glorious collection of songs is, to place this flag solidly in the moon and pierce its surface for all time. Music is more than music. More than the chords or the notes or the shapes we randomly assign them. It is indescribable. It is the highest form of art. Art the highest form of human expression. The most sincere representation of human feeling and emotion. Space Oddity, one of the greatest human works of art, reminded me of that today. And for whatever reason I am left unreasonably and irrationally moved to tears, overjoyed, grateful and inspired.
We may turn out to be nothing but human in the end. But through music we are able to transcend whatever limitations we attribute to this confounding mysterious possibility.
More later. Your thoughts as always welcomed.

- Posted by The Ambassador using Blogpress on an iPhone

We the Human Battery

2013-04-28T18:56:00.001-04:00

Part I (first draft)
Everything in the known universe -- specifically things on earth that humans can relate to more readily -- requires power or energy to function or operate. When we think of automobiles or houses, offices, machines small or large, even simple things like flashlights or clocks require some type of power source that provides energy. Throughout human history we have been remarkably resourceful in inventing new ways to provide power to the objects in our lives that are most foundationally important. Hand crank radios, batteries, windmills or dams that use the power of running water, to name but a few, come to mind.
Oftentimes I think of these things when contemplating the larger question of what powers US. What energy source powers human beings...? We know of four primary forces in the universe -- electromagnetism, gravity and the weak and strong nuclear force. Then there are the more well known Newtonian forces such as centrifugal force and entropy etc. But none of these help to explain the energy or force that gives human beings power. From the moment we are conceived we exist as a living functioning operational system. Much like any other device. We breathe. Our heart beats. We blink. Our organs function on automatic performing thousands of processes as if programmed like a computer program. We move, able to move, in an infinite variety of ways. And yet we have still yet to discover what energy source provides us with the power to do these things.
Sometimes when i stop and just stand or sit and feel the life force within me, for lack of a better way of putting it, I become obsessively mystified by this question. It has to be something. From our tens of thousands of years of experience attempting to invent different methods to power external devices around us we have learned this. All things need an energy source to power them. All things it appears except living beings that is -- (for one could say the same thing about any other organic living species as well...) We, along with all the other beasts of the earth and living things seem to operate on some kind of invisible or undetectable energy source.
Yes, food and water provide us with energy which we label "calories" and time has proven that human beings cannot function properly or even live for long periods of time without these basic energy sources of food and water. By now though one realizes that we are speaking of something much larger than foodstuffs. This seems to be something more akin to a kind of electricity. An electrical power of some kind.
I think of it in terms of WiFi or Bluetooth or wireless technology. Things like wireless phones or computers that access the internet through WiFi. We don't have to plug these things into anything and yet we are able to power them up and operate them with no cables. What exactly are we as human beings accessing wirelessly in order to power us up and stay powered? What enables us to move? To think? To breathe? To have heartbeats? We have no batteries to speak of. (the human heart perhaps, but that's reaching and misses the point). Even if we did have some type of internal batteries to speak of, batteries have at least two distinguishing features that we simply don't possess internally to hint at such a thing: they need to be initially charged with energy from some external power source that they can then store; and they don't last for long periods of time without being replaced or recharged. Neither of these distinguishing features of what we know as "batteries" bodes well for any kind of battery theory internal to the human body.
One considers the so-called "breath of life" theories that have cropped up throughout human history in regards to theological ideas, deities and the like. It is no wonder that we have always felt an innate desire to create gods since we first became self aware. Who wouldn't? What wouldn't? We have absolutely no idea where we came from or when we got here, nor why we are or even who we are. No idea what our purpose is or how we are even powered. We just are. The myths and legends and theories abound. Of course they do. It is a rational reaction to existing and not knowing why.
(I am personally always amazed at other humans' ability to take on beliefs with such strong conviction about our origins and the various gods that we've created throughout our history. I prefer to keep things more open. Wait for it... Evolve... If there's one thing we've learned about ourselves through even a minor study of history it's that we are usually wrong in our theological and cosmological assumptions no matter how solidly held the beliefs might be at the time. (Tens of millions of us have believed in literally thousands of different gods and creation stories over the last few thousand years. So there's not much to stand on there empirically.))

Part II
At some point in the not too distant future human beings discover the power source which we are accessing wirelessly so to speak that provides the energy that enables us to function and operate -- just as common household items do with electricity or batteries. It is some kind of force, a power source, something self regulating and self sustaining. This does not imply it is intelligent as we are, nor even conscious or self aware as we are. Those ideas for better or worse are wishful thinking. It could be nothing more than the same kind of energy they powers stars like our sun. I would not call "the sun" intelligent, nor assume it is conscious or self aware. It might be. But I'm going to bet it's not.
Once we do discover this power source that breathes invisible life into all living things we will be able to harness it for a variety of things historically unheard of and not even thought of yet. We will actually use our own bodies to power everyday items and devices like our smart phones and automobiles. Of course our smartphones by this point will be internally implanted devices capable of myriad functions and automobiles will be more like hovercraft or small jets. But that jumps the gun a bit.
(Insert the inevitable and obligatory memory of the various Matrix Trilogy memes here...)
The real juice of the subject -- the thing to get amped up about -- is that the human body itself is a remarkably powerful energy source, albeit a mysterious one presently. But there is no reason we should still be debating which is the better option between destroying the earth through the use of fossil fuels, coal and fracking for natural natural gas or so called green energy like biodiesels such as giant crops of sugarcane or corn and the like. All have their place surely. Wind and solar energy seem to have potential. But not when considering the population growth of our species combined with the limited amount of space we have left on planet earth. The math just doesn't add up.
We must start to explore the inherent energy that is the human body. The living breathing magical battery-like organisms that we are naturally. We most likely hold more potential to power the world around us than anything else we know of. You walk into a room and the lights and air conditioner kick on. Step into your car and drive it as far and as long you want to by simply plugging yourself into it. Or you power it wirelessly. Take your pick.
One could go on forever of course. The idea of the smart-device implanted in the human body that does everything that a laptop and smart phone does now plus acts as a health monitor and healing device to improve health, ward off illness and extend life -- and furthermore is entirely powered by the human body -- isn't too far away. Five years perhaps...? (We will call this "getting augmented" -- like how being vaccinated is viewed now -- or perhaps even "getting jacked in" like the matrix (but I doubt that. We won't really be getting jacked into anything. We will actually be jacking things INTO us... Human batteries)).
I must admit I am more than a little excited to contemplate that many of us are well beyond young enough to assume that we will see the advent of such advances. And these are just the random and momentary musings of one man. I can only imagine what miraculously inventive and imaginative ideas in this field are being designed this very minute by more capable minds.
More later....

- Posted by The Ambassador using BlogPress on an iPhone

TO THE WONDER

2013-04-20T16:27:00.001-04:00

Why is America so inane and ignorant? Terrence Malick's latest film TO THE WONDER is as always a masterpiece. Deep, ponderous, thought provoking and featuring breathtaking cinematography. Yet it opened to less than a whisper and went straight to DVD and OnDemand. IRON MAN 3 on the other hand wi surely open with a half a million dollar box office on its first weekend.

The same for CHICKEN WITH PLUMS, the film based on Iranian expat Marjane Satrape's graphic novel of the same name. THIS btw is one of the best films one will ever see. Both movies are in french with subtitles and perhaps that's part of it. No where else in the world does one find a people so devoid of knowledge of other languages or cultures than in America.

What is this strange fate of the Americans? Why is it? It is said that the United States is in possession of the best university education system in the world today. People from every country on earth travel to America to attend the colleges and universities and yet the majority of them then immediately leave once they graduate. This implies potentially at least that there is a high level of intelligence to be had in the States. And yet it is difficult to access most of the time in one's day to day surroundings unless one is very focused to do so, vigilant.

There is more. The struggles for the simplest things politically that many must endure here because of the large majority of ignorance. But I am alas still watching this glorious film TO THE WONDER. More later...

- Posted by The Ambassador using BlogPress on an iPhone

States Rights Vs. United States

2013-03-21T22:15:00.001-04:00

Was involved in a recent conversation on Facebook with a small crowd re what to do with the leftover pulp after juicing and received a variety of intriguing suggestions. From face masks to making paper to composts. One participant suggested we feed it to the worms in our worm bin. I'd need to acquire a worm bin first of course. And it might be a good idea to learn just what one needs a worm bin for in the first place before I do that. Case solved. Worms make excellent composters evidently.

Say what one will, but Facebook - like TV or a standing army for that matter - is an amazing tool if put in the right hands, just as it can be a useless inane or even dangerous weapon if placed in the wrong hands.

Got me to thinking. WA state where I live part time, just started residential composting for everyone. Every house now has three bins to put out every week. One for garbage one for recycling and one for compost. Very impressive. In the last year or two they have also legalized marijuana (seriously, as in yeah you can smoke it just because you enjoy it, imagine that), legalized gay / same sex marriage, and are now ardently working to outlaw the death penalty. What's next? Outlawing congressional lobbying and political campaign reform?!? (One can dream...)

These bold moved illustrate the power and effectiveness of States' Rights if a state and its residents so choose to act; and hopefully helps shed light on the overarching issue itself. More than anything one hopes it sets an example for others to follow and God willing encourages some to stop trying to encourage the Federal government to force national laws on the entire population as some of my more well meaning but short sighted friends insist they do.

The media and social networks nationwide are abuzz lately with blathering hyperbolic debates by both wonks and fools regarding a seemingly endless list of new laws some want to enforce on every man woman and child in the entire country in the United States. I've stated my case both publicly and to friends and lovers and thus am thoroughly tired of arguing about the issue. At this point I refuse to spend another precious minute debating it with anyone unless that person has the power to approve or veto a bill of law.

The way I see it, and this is only my opinion -- I am well aware of that fact, one of the greatest aspects of the United States of America is inherent right in its name. One just need take a few minutes, or hours if need be, and contemplate the words that make up the name of our great national experiment we call "a country". It's a fascinating exercise. We don't live in America. (as any central or south american will quickly remind you). Unlike people from most other countries, we live in a place called "the united STATES of America". One infers it is a collection of different areas or regions referred to as States that are all united behind a central theme or collection of values. One of the most endearing aspects of living in the U.S. is the variety of differences one can find by traveling around the country and personally experiencing each State and it's people for who they are as individuals and collectively as an independent state.

One interesting bit of history often forgotten about today is that the only way that the so called founding fathers got all the different states already established in The Colonies to ratify the Declaration of Independence and The Constitution (look this up to be exact...) was if the wording was changed to reflect that each state had its own inherent rights and would not be under strict control of a national government. Of course this has been almost completely done away with now. There are so many federal laws on the books now dictating what every state in the union can or cannot do that at times it seems that the only differentiating factor between one state or another is their state bird or flower. One can safely assume this is NOT what the founding fathers of this unheralded democratic experiment had in mind when constructing the general foundation of the country.

I have always asserted, since studying and pondering this issue, that the people who live in each state should be allowed to determine their own rules and laws as they see fit as long as they don't infringe on the safety or welfare or generally agreed upon human rights of others.

There are of course exceptions to every rule. Especially in extreme cases. Slavey was one such exception. But even today with all we've learned I personally am not totally convinced that the Northern states had a right to force the Southern states to stay a part of the so called Union or country against their will and abolish slavery. This is debatable of course. And perhaps it's more fodder for stimulating thought and debate than a worthwhile endeavor to be taken seriously. But scholars agree that the Northern states were motivated more by greed and economic concerns than by a desire to be of service to others or defend human rights. They would have never survived had the Southern states been allowed to start their own country. So they forced them to stay. There are a lot of lessons in that.

Perhaps it is an event we can lean from still. As we push and pull and morph in our ever burgeoning quest toward progress and further evolution we might be well served to allow each state to take responsibility for its own rules and laws jus this once, perhaps for a short period of time -- a year or two or three -- and see what comes of it. Certain compromises could be rewarded with benefits of being aligned with national or global consensus; and vice versa. This is a model that could be explored and expounded on for pages and pages.

In short I believe it can be summed up this way: if the entire southern half of the United States wants to be heartless sexist racist homophobic earth killing environment destroying gun-toting religious-extremist murderers, let's just let them and if one isn't happy living there they are free to move to a state more aligned with their own values. The fear and i believe it is a valid one is that constant enactment of broad sweeping national laws is a dangerous slippery slope that should frighten any forward thinking freedom loving citizen of the world.

- Posted by The Ambassador using BlogPress on an iPhone

Observations Re Modern Television - Fixes (1)

2013-03-18T15:01:00.001-04:00

Observations re modern television. This just occurred to me, but had been boiling just below the surface for months.

[as most already know, for the first 30 years of my life I did not "subscribe" to television. literally nor figuratively. not sure if there is any better way to say it; subscribe seems appropriate since most people pay a monthly fee for cable or satellite service. (a lot of people when television comes up say something like "I don't have a tv" but 9 times out of 10 they're not being honest. what they mean to say is that they don't watch that much tv or they don't subscribe to any service). regardless, i I was one of those people for most of my life. a little more than a year ago i started deliberately studying television. actively seeking out anything and everything that was suggested or recommended as being "good" or even just popular. for many reasons. the two primary purposes of this experiment though were, one, i had been, still am, working on a prediction/theory for the We Are the Revolution/Personal Expression Age book that American television was about to enter into a quasi-renaissance of sorts, which it was and now IS, without a doubt; so i wanted to explore the medium and its content more; after all, this was a theory based on intuition and research. I wanted to get a firsthand experience of it. So i began subscribing to cable television. I was right. It is. Two, i intuited that if i were right in this prediction, then "good writing" by smart people would be more in demand than ever before in human history. historically, good writers, smart writers do not go near television. in fact, smart people in general, not even as consumers of the product, do not go near television. but all that's changed. at least in my opinion. they do now. both to consume and to write for it. it makes sense. it was only a matter of time. i am writer. it is what i do more and better than anything else. music is another. but writing... is like breathing for me. (an extension of thinking really, when you think it through deeper, to its core. some might be surprised that most people do not spend as much time as others do "thinking". i am still amazed by how few people consciously and deliberately "think"... just a thought. perhaps more on that later. we're already three or four layers past our original point by now.) for many of my closest friends and colleagues, they too are addicted to thinking and writing by their very nature. television is a giant medium. it dwarfs the world of books, literature, journalism and the movie business. writers can eat and support themselves if they would only open up to television. the problem of course is that traditionally no writer worth their weight in copper even would dare write for television. at least not in their own name. but... if television were truly about to enter a renaissance and begin to allow good writing into it's bed and not exist solely as a cheap opiate for the masses as it normally had been since its inception, then worthy writers might actually find the task bearable if not downright enjoyable. so began my exploration of american television. this is not the place or time to post my findings. but suffice it to say that the theory proofed out. though american television is still primarily shite, for lack of a better word, pandering for attention like a toothless dime-store hooker in a broken wheelchair, it does possess a fair amount of decent writing. that's probably too generous actually. not a lot. not even a little. (pardon me if this offends. i am well aware that i am speaking to a very small crowd here. literati and intellectuals only perhaps. people who would never normally even consider "watching television" as a past time. a world that has almost entirely disappeared in modern times.) soon my experiment evolved from exploration to study. the question no longer lingered. i had my answer. but a new question arose. HOW does one write for television? what is the art (if any) or craft of it? the time limits obligated by archaic programming paradigms necessitate a very specific method and style, as compared to film or printed word where there is more freedom. and thus for the last six months i have been studying television the same way a marine biologist might study dolphins. most of the time it is an excruciating task i must confess. but occasionally it is downright pleasurable.]

But still there is this time limit thing. that's not the only problem with modern american television, renaissance or not; far from it. but it is the main reason i pulled out the iPad in this moment. to address this particular problem with a few ideas for potential fixes that just occurred to me. the idea goes something like this: consider LOST for a moment. that show ran for eight or nine seasons, once a week for an hour per episode, airing approximately 28 weeks out of each year. i only learned of this show a few months ago. sat down to watch one episode in October, found that i liked it, that it was relatively entertaining. from there i watched all nine seasons in a matter of a few weeks. one after the other. for hours and days at a time. nine years of television in a month. i did this because i sincerely enjoyed the show. (unlike most people i was not disappointed by the show's new age spiritual finale. i was fine with it. it is not my place to judge where the shows creators wanted to take their show. it was their baby). but here's the rub: if i had been the average person, waiting each week with baited breath for each new episode to air, I would have given up on it in season one. i don't live the kind of lifestyle where one can do that. nor do i possess the mentality to even want to.

Right now, as of this writing at least, television is very structured and formatted. rigidly so. unlike film where we allow the story to tell itself in however short or long a time it needs to, the creators of television structure the stories around the time slots they believe they need to fill. this creates numerous problems and limitations. and for no real reason. Idea one: let the idea of time-slots go. Let the stories guide the time allotted for each show. let the viewers decide on the worthiness of such a venture. similar to what we currently do with sports and tv. 60 Minutes has always run late on Sunday nights during football season. Why? Because we don't cut NFL games short just to jump to 60 Minutes.

Shows like ELEMENTARY or TOUCH or PERSON OF INTEREST (all semi-decent as far as tv goes) could do with episodes that lasted more than one hour. (One hour of television is actually more like 42 minutes due to the need for commercials). The idea that one particular story that might be better served by allowing it more time to open, simmer and eventually resolve needs to do all of that within the confines of 42 minutes "no matter what" is antiquated and short sighted. worse, it limits the work's ability for greatness. Similar to what the creators of DOWNTON ABBEY did in the third season. Several episodes were two hours versus one. Randomly and erratically and with no fair warning. But it worked. It was a pleasant surprise. for fans at least.

Idea two: would entail letting go of the idea of weekly instalments completely. for run of the mill sitcoms the weekly time-slot paradigm still works. there is usually very little story; more a series of running gags strung together to entertain in the moment and that's that. But for shows that feature a long running story line, like LOST, why not run a few shows not only longer than the rigid one hour, but also let them air several times per week; allow them to breathe like an expensive wine... open them up and tell the story, today, tomorrow, the next day, the next.... again, letting the audience dictate how often they want to see it per week.

The studios and creators of the shows (content) believe that the networks care about things like this. They don't. Their sole mission is to generate revenue by the use of the space they rent. (hence the inclusion of PAID ADVERTISING on many networks post the 11 o'clock time-slot. I've not yet discovered a taste for this particular show myself, but PAID ADVERTISING must pay better than most other shows that networks can purchase, or rent space to). If a studio or show creator comes to a network and offers up a proposal to air a show that breaks all time-slot rules, the idea can be easily sold to advertisers that are dying to break the mold of their own industry's limitations. My prediction is that it is only a matter of time before this begins to happen. Advertisers will come running. And in fact there is a good chance they would even voluntarily enter into bidding wars with one another for exclusive rights to sponsoring whole shows. Just a hunch. Of course this wouldn't be necessary. But it shows the potential for how powerful a paradigm shift this could be.

There is more. but let's leave it at that. this is good enough to remind me of the initial ideas. more later.

2013-03-14T13:39:00.001-04:00

When you find that special place you call home you FEEL it. No matter how much time passes or how many other places you go or live in your life nor what reasons may compel you to live elsewhere, there is still nothing that does it for you quite like home. For me it was and perhaps always will be New York City. When I'm away and I see it in a movie or a magazine I feel a pulling in the area of my heart. Traveling is one thing. A glorious thing. But all the trappings and acoutrimont of a well lit established and stable home environment still fail to fill that void that exists inside us whenever we're away from our true home. Not sure what it is exactly that draws us so strongly and permanently to one particular locale in the world, but it's a palpable tug toward earth, a grounding stable reference point that calms and soothes and whispers to the soul.... "you're home..."

2013-03-13T20:58:00.001-04:00

It's very difficult to explain. I am attempting to do something, usually something very intensive, just now I was helping a trucker move a very large and heavy suitcase out of the back of the cab and into this lavish island looking condo, perhaps his perhaps not. When I go to do the activity like this in this instance get out of the passengers seat of the truck and grab the large suitcase I cannot for the life of me see the entire spectrum of my usual line of site from left to right or from up and down. It is as if I am only seeing a small quarter of what I can usually only see. I feel paralyzed by this. I look left I look right I rub my eyes but still nothing. The trucker is talking to me. Trying to guide me thru maneuvering this giant heavy cargo out of the truck and down these big metal steps of the truck. I want to listen. I want to do well. I want to not mess up. I am thinking about swing Christmas cards this year. To the whole database. Everyone we know. But all that writing. God that's a lot. Thousands of cards. Maybe we can figure out a way to print out address labels and make it easier. Damn Christmas just passed didn't it. Should we do them late? I really cant see. I'm serious. This is no joke. I can seriously only see about 30% of what I usually can out of my eyes. I'm only seeing a small sliver of what's in front of me or to the sides. No peripheral vision at all. I'm not going to make it out of this cab with this suitcase and into that mans condo. Just can't see well enough. What the hell is going on? Why can't I see anything? Both eyes totally open. I'm literally staring at a suitcase with both eyes totally open and I can only see 30% of this damn suitcase. What is in my eyes blocking my vision?

This is when it occurs to me. This has happened before. Several times. Many times. I am dreaming. I must be asleep. This only happens when I am dreaming. This has never happened to me when I've been awake. It's some kind of a dream glitch. An inability to see fully panoramically or to see your self or your body or as much as we normally do when awake. We see half of things all the time. 1/3 of things of objects of ourselves of the works in front of us in front of our eyes.

I am instantly thrust into the condo itself. My mom is rushing around as usual raisin her voice about how important it is to get this done. A chubby black lady comes in and asks me if I need any help with things. I can't find that back door for the life of me. I'm supposed to let that trucker in thru there. Who is he again? How many places does he have? This makes no sense. Why does he live in so many places? And why here? Someone holds up a photo and yells to me across the room "oh I've heard about this. This is a picture of you when you were a baby. Your mother told me about it." she's going thru a box of old things it appears. There is a giant crowd of people walking slowly into the carport entrance way of this resort. They r all wearing raincoats dark ones and scarves over their heads. Using umbrellas. Going somewhere. Gathering together. For what? They're going to be in our way. Won't be able to move the truck. Can't remember.

I am now on the bed. Alistair is sleeping by my side. I remember. I can feel the heat and warmth of his body next to mine. I must be awake. I remember now. I just need to reach my phone. See what time it is. I wonder how long I slept. I'd I could get to a drink on my bedside table to wake up. But I still can't see. Only a sliver of the bed. I can see the red of the bedspread but not much else. This is odd. I am turning but I cannot see the damn table to reach my phone. I struggle for some time. No matter how I move my body I cannot see or reach the table right next to me. More struggle. Same as before in the truck. I must still be asleep. Wow. Intense.

Then I awaken for real. Seemingly. At least two different levels of dreams. Maybe three. There is something with either control full control and or sight that is either impossible fully when we are dreaming or signals that we are dreaming. I suspect the former. Somehow I have managed to jump to a deeper level of awareness where I expect full sight and mobility and become surprised when I cannot muster it. This then signals that I am dreaming. Interesting to note. Will need to have more memory of the exact phenomenon before i can conclude anything. Not much yet here except your site appears to be blocked as if blackness is in your eyes blocking a good chunk I your vision of things right in front of your face. Especially when attempting to see your whole body. Usually can only see bits and pieces of my body. Strange. More later.

- Posted by The Ambassador using BlogPress on an iPhone

Deliberate Dreaming Theory

2013-03-12T17:13:00.001-04:00

Just woke up from a deep sleep in the middle of the night in the land of Pacific Standard Time. I was in the middle of a vivid dream which I can still see clearly (split infinitive intended), almost perfectly. It's an ability I have been working on for a long time. As long as I don't open my eyes I can almost always still see and recall whatever I was dreaming just before awaking and usually travel further back a few dreams into the past to recall and recite those as well. The key is to not open your eyes, and to keep your mind focused as much as possible on the dream and what you are still seeing and nothing else. It is a powerfully effective technique and gets easier with practice.

A few important details and caveats before the moral of the story: As my infinitely patient and saintly wife will attest, I have been actively studying and doing experiments on increasing both vivid and lucid dreaming for decades, along with exploring the various benefits and potentialities of these activities. It is a subject I have written about sincere occasion since the inception of these Diaries. It is one of the many obsessive compulsive idiosyncrasies she claims to have been entirely unprepared for and know nothing about before we got married. God bless the wives of the artistic and insane or both.

Together we have been collecting notebooks and digital audio tapes over the last four years filled with transcripts of nearly every dream I've had during countless nights and afternoons. I am big fan and proponent of the afternoon (or late morning) nap for a variety of reasons; it's numerous health and anti-aging benefits, its wondrous ability to maintain and increase mental acuity and emotional well being (there is still as of yet no more powerful and effortless human activity to partake in to help integrate everything the mind and feeling sensors take in each day than a short nap) and, as many will attest to, the amazing power and ease with which one can enter a state of vivid dreaming during napping.

For clarification there is a stark clinical difference between lucid and vivid dreaming though the terms are often misused interchangeably in modern pop cultural exchanges amongst friends, during casual conversation or in contemporary media. A vivid dream is one in which the dreamer can see hear taste smell or feel everything in the dream so clearly that they may believe it to be real and occasionally be able to remember numerous details about it once awake. Lucid dreaming is the ability to dream while still being slightly awake enough to be aware that one is dreaming. The theory being that the dreamer may be able to have more control over the events of the dream through having this semi-awake awareness. This theory though appealing rarely proves to be the case in practice, but I admit if one practices it enough over an extended period of time (and equally effective uses certain Avatar Course tools) it can become easier and easier to control in the moment of a lucid dream what we do, how we do it and what we experience. Flying is one area I have become very good at being able to control. More on that in another entry.

I first heard about lucid dream research through the study of Leonardo DaVinci, Albert Einstein and Nostradamus when I was very young and it stuck with me. I was fascinated by the legends of these great mens' elaborate schemes and efforts to gain secret knowledge and or prophetic visions through lucid dreaming by hooking bells to their hands connected by string so that whenever they fell asleep at their desk their hand which would be holding up their head would shift in place slightly thereby ringing the bell a little which would then wake them up and cause them to jot down everything they remembered from the dream they woke up from. Supposedly Nostradamus used this method throughout his life to enable him to foresee numerous events that were to transpire in the future.

(Again we are still caveating here): Like most people I have wasted hundreds of hours also studying the works of Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud in regards to their psycho-analytic theories of the phenomenon of human dreams and find almost all of it pedantic and of little worth. The same applies to the writings of the Native Americans and various other indigenous people's throughout history and to the works of history's most famed practitioners of what is known as witchcraft or High Magic. Interesting to be sure, but not much else.

One conclusion I've come to as of late is that for the most part human dreams are almost entirely useless except in a utilitarian way -- as a vehicle to gain a better understanding of our most basic current subconscious fears resistances hopes and aspirations. In other words dreams tell us what is most actively and present on our mind, what our primal beingness as expressed through consciousness believes to be most important in that moment. Or perhaps just more present. (this in no way implies that the subject matter or details ARE important. Most often they are not. It just happens to be what our conscious or subconscious (if one believes in this seemingly arbitrary academic exercise of splitting the mind into two parts (which i don't. At all)) BELIEVES is important.

Without concern for safety or about the criticism of others or even our own moral judgments, the mind is free to play and free associate to its heart's content and does so using whatever is closest to it, our most present or current reference points. This is a useful activity. But surely not as exciting or of the mythic proportion or import as the stuff one reads about regarding any alleged ability to astral travel or develop clairvoyant abilities through the dream state. God knows we try. But I must confess that after filling said countless notebooks with direct transcripts of thousands of dreams that have come from this radically overactive mind that this conclusion is the best and most plausible I've been able to come up with in regards to any helpful abilities one might develop from dreams or dreaming. We have taken notes of dreams where I have seen human female legs appear to grow mysteriously and miraculously out of the earth as if it were a flower to reveal a generic and apersonal spiraling vagina which I've then proceeded to have intercourse with for no other reason than primal urge. Twisted? Sure. Deep? Probably not. Psychologically useful? Unlikely. Just the mind having its way without judgment or default course correction.

I've heard it said that dreaming keeps us from going insane. I would agree with that idea. Through effortless non-thought based and judgment-free organizing cataloging classifying and categorizing millions of datum, dreaming helps the mind integrate what it takes in each day to prepare for another day of it. Any potentially clairvoyant experiences are few and far between and can most often be chalked up to coincidence or far reaching assumptions based on strong desire. Though I have experienced more psychic phenomena and telekinetic moments with others and or regarding world events through dreaming than I can relay in one sitting or recall without referring to notes, they are still infrequent and not the usual stuff of dreams for most. Another entry is needed to explore this other aspect of the dream state.

One can posit though that this one benefit of dreaming, a deeper understanding of one's innermost and current hopes fears longings and resistances is still a helpful one in its ramifications.

To get back to our story. A few minutes ago I was dreaming that I was in the process of solving a murder mystery involving Dwight Schrute the character played by Rainn Wilson in the American version of the TV show The Office in order to win some big music contest. These seemingly disconnected features when taken as a whole actually make sense, for i've just spent the last four weeks partaking in a mind numbing Office marathon watching way too many episodes in a row on a daily basis (dont ask) AND the last thing I did before falling asleep last night was watch a few minutes of the latest take on the perennial favorite Sherlock Holmes in CBS's new show Elementary, one of the few things on network or cable television that is actually good without being offensive in any way (another topic for a future entry). (Here one could argue that the UK's intense and understated Johnny Lee Miller has made a better recent Sherlock Holmes than Hollywood's pompous fop Robert Downey Jr. But they'd be risking countless hours of cat-fighting with thousands of rabid middle aged women across America with nothing better to do than defend the honor of their favorite come back bad boy of the month. I would conjecture it not worth the effort.)

So.... As soon as I awoke and recognized that my mind had fused my profession, music, with The Office and Elementary in a dream -- these aspects unrelated to me personally and yet in my dreaming state of consciousness it all made perfect matter of fact sense, I realized that I might be on to something. I have been working on a theory for the last few weeks. Based on an observation that ever since I started soaking my mind during waking hours with repeated viewings of numerous episodes of The Office that the characters from the show now regularly appear in my dreams on a daily basis. They show up as my friends, family members, bandmates, strangers in random interactions necessary for a scene to fulfill, pretty much anyone.

What are the potential ramifications of this I've been asking lately. My dreaming mind, that part of my consciousness that comes awake when dreaming, has absorbed these characters so thoroughly now that they have become a routine part of my day to day dream state. As if they are real. Of course to my mind when asleep and dreaming they are real. Just as real as anyone I know personally in my waking world when dreaming of them respectively. I don't think there has been one night in three weeks that i have not remembered dreaming of or with one or more of these fictional characters. We've all experience this with something. Perhaps a job project or excessive school work. But why? How? And what is its potential?

It would appear that when stimulated with or reminded of a certain subject matter repeatedly to the point of conscious level saturation that the subject matter then leaks into what is commonly referred to as the subconscious -- i.e. the dream state of consciousness so much so that we become unable to recognize a difference between how real this subject matter is to us in reality versus other things that are entirely real -- such as our mother wife brother friends etc.

The same paradigm may also apply to other things besides people. If for instance one wanted to absorb more fully the mastery of a certain subject such as wealth creation or feeding the hungry of earth then it follows that saturating the waking mind with sounds and images of these subjects -- such as through repeated viewing of films or listening to audio -- would lead to an eventual leaking of them into the subconscious in the same casual matter of fact kind of way that enables one to begin dreaming about them on a regular basis. Just as has happened with my mind's acceptance of these Office characters so readily and vividly.

Of course there isn't much I can do personally with being able to dream about Jim Pam and Michael every night. But if I were instead to begin dreaming about world transformation in a positive direction on a daily basis I would guess that the implication is that it just might lead to certain insights or ideas never thought of before, a secret trap door into knowledge that can only be accessed through the open vessel the mind becomes when dreaming. It only takes one. Of course our problem is never not having enough ideas, but instead it is usually not being disciplined enough to follow the ideas through to their most effective or powerful end result. And yet therein even is a seemingly taken for granted problem with the human machine that might have a solution waiting for it just on the other side of the waking-dreaming event horizon...

That in essence is the nature of the thought so far. Next step is to test it by deliberate saturation of the waking mind for a few weeks with something strongly desired re a subject for mastery or a desired goal or outcome. Another foreign language can always be useful. Consciousness exploration or cosmology are both topics that could always use more data, going broad. Plenty of universal mysteries still exist waiting to be solved. Success and wealth are interesting. Solving the problem of hunger on earth is also a biggie.

Will continue to experiment and take notes. Standby.

Posted by The Ambassador using blogpress for the iPhone

What Time Is It?

2013-03-10T05:11:00.001-04:00

We are all "supposed to" set our clocks forward one hour tonight. Those of us in the U.S. (excepting Arizona) that is. So what time is it now? Well that's the funny thing about time. So arbitrary random imprecise and uncontrollable for humans still that we had to invent the mind boggling and inane leap year whereby every few years we add an extra day to the 365 day calendar. Those unfortunate souls unlucky enough to have been born on this extra day, traditionally February 29th in the United States, only get to celebrate their birthdays once every four years rather than once a year like everyone else. The other three years it's as if they were never born. No birthday to speak of, point to or wake up feeling special on. It simply doesn't exist for them and there's nothing they can do about it.

But that's time. There are numerous reasons pointed to in response to why Americans still partake in this archaic exercise of what is commonly referred to as Daylight Savings Time (DST for short if you've ever closely examined the detailed small print on most clocks watches and smart phones). Our understanding of time and the methods that govern how we deal with it revolve around the earth's rotation around the star at the center of our own solar system. Essentially time is all about the great and powerful Sun.

Of course this only applies to solar centered earthly societies. Some cultures around planet earth use both the sun and the moon to govern how they deal with and interact with time. The Chinese use a calendar based both on solar and lunar cycles. God only knows (that I'm too lazy to run a Google search to remind myself why and) what year it is in the Chinese calendar.

In most so called Western cultures including America the majority of people casually accept that we are currently in the year 2013. Of course that's total bullshit. An arbitrary number. Jewish people don't believe this or subscribe to it. The Chinese don't. Neither do most Muslim countries. They all have different years they are currently living in. Just ask. The more you learn the more you'll begin to recognize how utterly random and arbitrary this figure is. Truth is we don't live in any year. Not 2013. Not 4711 as the Chinese people think it is (I looked). Not even 1434 as Muslim people all over the world think it is. Nope. We have no idea what year it really is.

In the bigger picture we are in NO year on any calendar. They're all made up. So much so that we can't even agree what year it is amongst ourselves. The worst part about the Gregorian calendar, the system we follow in the West that supposedly tells us it's 2013, is that the maladroit pope who created it got the whole thing wrong way back when and ended up dating things four years off of what he was originally mandated to do. So depending on how accurate one wishes to be in regards to the actual year it is we're actually in either the year 2009 or 2017; but definitely not in 2013.

Most people don't seem to care much about this little known fact, let alone that even if right on accurate the year is still a man made figure with no logical basis for its existence in the universe or mass consciousness. The same is true of hourly time. Right now my phone says it's 12:49am. But as I look up from my phone all the clocks around me emphatically state that it's 1:49. That's because I've already set all of them one hour ahead so we don't wake up confuse and an hour behind the rest of the world.

Time zones of course make the keeping and monitoring of time even more confusing and impossible to believe in. Again the time zone paradigm was created because the time of day is different depending on where one happens to live and love on planet earth; it is based on where the light from the sun hits the earth and when it recedes or disappears. The sun doesn't leave most of the land mass we call Alaska for weeks at a time, making it daylight there for days and weeks straight. That pretty much wipes out any logical reason to have a sun centered system for time keeping there. But that doesn't stop Alaskans from pretending to know what time it is or what day it is.

In real time it is now 12:58 am where I sit. But in an hour or so we are told that we should set our clocks ahead by one hour. Because I am about to go to sleep and need to wake up at a certain time tomorrow for all intents and purposes it is really 1:58 am now.

But that's just me. If you're in Hawaii right now it's about five hours earlier than 1 or 2 am. Dinner time perhaps. If you're on the east coast it's already early morning. You've already set your clock ahead so it's 5 am and you might be waking up already on Sunday. I'm writing this on Saturday night. And there's no way you can convince me otherwise. Of course if you happen to be reading this in the UK or Paris, France it's 9 or 10 am Sunday morning. If in Iran it's already 1 o'clock in the afternoon. And to really shake things up let us remember that for those reading this in Australia or New Zealand it's 1am Monday morning. You've already lived through the Sunday I haven't even gone to bed to wake up to tomorrow yet. How was it? Sunday? Did anything crazy happen? Anything newsworthy?

Frankly I hope not. I think we've all had enough with crazy newsworthy days. It would be nice to fall asleep believing that tomorrow is going to be just a quiet peaceful day with nothing much to report on except maybe the weather.

2013-03-08T09:45:00.001-05:00

After reviewing several different unrelated unfortunate situations or disappointing circumstances we've found ourselves in over the past year, some real messes, some major disappointments, we've discerned that almost every one had it's root in our assuming one outcome (what we'd prefer) would manifest without any guarantee of that predicted future happening only to discover soon after that it just didn't work out the way we planned. Though this can be a major bummer, and be quite discouraging, there's powerful learning in it. Just starting to stand up straight and tall again and wipe the dust off. Anyone who's lucky enough to be able to say I'm still here I'm alive and healthy has a shot at feeling tremendously happy grateful and blessed; and if we're smart enough and humble enough to learn from these lessons then we've still got a shot at achieving great things, grace and perhaps even a little slice of glory. The key is being honest enough to acknowledge where we went wrong and commit to not making the same mistakes twice. Life can be a drag sometimes. There's no getting around that. But over all it's all we know and it's an amazing gift, especially compared to the alternative.

One Battle Out of Many Abated

2013-01-20T17:15:00.001-05:00

It's 3:30 am. Slightly more than the usual insomnia. [Note: One conflicting aspect of the Personal Expression Age in regards to social media is the tendency and temptation for us to head for the immediate gratification of posting to a public site such as Facebook or Tumblr rather than our own blog or website, which is obviously a more permanent, and financially lucrative, place to sit one's deepest innermost thoughts and feelings. It's a phenomenon that I've just recently been observing, having noticed that over the last four years -- since the advent of social media gone mainstream -- there is direct correlation between how little I post to these Diaries on a regular basis now, compared to the seven years prior, and how much more time I dedicate to being actively engaged on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Tumblr. This is something we should explore in more detail later....]

So rather than "writing" -- that sacred act once studied and revered of sitting down to participate in the art and craft of honing one's ideas with the written word into something potentially coherent, permanent and hopefully even beautiful and admired for all the world to see for an eternity, something that I'd made a daily habit out of for more than twenty-five years, I opted instead for the more ephemeral and much simpler and easier (though perhaps more immediately gratifying) act of a lazy status update on Facebook. This is a trend, perhaps even a habit now, that I fully intend to break in this new year. The point was a simple yet major one. A very recent and profound victory over and breakthrough in my battle with ADD.

[I do believe in sharing, that it's important to "share", which is one of the primary benefits of the Age of Personal Expression, this new loving embrace for public sharing.... but for artists a balance must still be found between the two: this temptation to share instantly through social media, and the more tasteful and permanent art of writing. One cannot suddenly abandon one's occupation of the art and craft of fine writing and letters and replace it with social media posts that are not only inherently temporary but also obligated by necessity to be limited in scope and depth just because it happens to be easier and more instantly gratifying. Unless of course they want to and choose to. That's their choice. I know many a fine writer who has drifted off into these uncharted shallow rocks never to be heard from again except in little blurps and bleeps on Facebook or Twitter, their wit and wisdom once preserved for the ages now reduced to mere one or two sentence anecdotes, sarcastic comments or the occasional angry rant. As a fan of fine writing I've found the trend to be saddening. ...

Nonetheless, last night at least, I caved once more. There is something very appealing about that instant read that one feels they receive when posting to a social network that now feels lost even when posting to a popular blog, which theoretically and realistically is just as public as any social network. The irony is that feeling is the same feeling we used to get when we first started posting here over ten years ago. There were no social networks. So the idea of posting one's innermost secrets online in general -- knowing that within minutes or hours others would be reading them, was completely enticing, exciting and exhilarating. Just as posting to a social network like Facebook is today. And with instant links and feeds from one's blog to every social network out there available, there really is no reason why we should feel so torn and tempted. Perhaps it's the instantaneous part of it that is so tempting. Or perhaps it's the more engaging aspect of it.... Depending on what one posts, one can literally almost guarantee themselves some kind of response if that's what they're after. Frankly my honest appraisal of this strange phenomenon is that it just comes down to pure laziness. Status updates on social networks are like blowing bubbles. Here now, gone tomorrow. Or like thoughts never revealed in our roaming mind... Here. Gone. What? So there exists no need to perfect them or hone them in. The growing trend in communication amongst ourselves as a society is to focus far less on how we say things and rather just on getting them out, regardless of merit, form or function. This may not necessarily be a good thing. Let's end this train of thought now and venture out toward the open sea where we originally were headed.]

Where were we? Insomnia. Yes. In case that wasn't already obvious. But perhaps this time of day or night is best for this type of post. For any other ADD/ADHD folk out there, I am happy and relieved to report that after decades of struggling, maddening frustration and trying everything out there and then some (including brain mapping and even low frequency electromagnetic brain zapping therapy) I believe we've finally found something that actually works. Lo and behold it turned out to be the oldest, most obvious and commonly used treatment. Just took a while to get the nerve to try it. Anyone else out there still challenged by it, just know that it is real, it's not in your imagination, you're not crazy, it is indeed physical /chemical /biological and not just "all in your mind" as many people try to get you to believe; AND better still there may be a chance there's a solution out there for you out of the many that are becoming available. Keep trying. Don't give up. Believe in yourself. There's light at the end of the tunnel. -Fishy

And thus was the post. Which yielded a string of inquiries as to just what treatment was I referring to specifically. It wasn't something I had planned on revealing publicly truth be told. But if the sharing aspect of the Personal Expression Age cannot be fully expressed and utilised as we originally predicted it would be to yield full-on democratic revolutions of entire nation-states then it really doesn't hold much value at all. So privacy be damned we must at least attempt to embrace this growing trend honestly openly enthusiastically and wholeheartedly. So I replied.

OK peeps, I wasn't going to actually mention what was working for me personally, because I think it's such a physically personal thing, dependent on each individual's own biology, that I don't necessarily think what works for one person is guaranteed to work for another. Plus, there is so much controversy regarding meds for this condition, especially certain ones. But for me, it was Ritalin. But only 5mg doses. What they call "a children's dose". Old school. It's only been a week, but the difference has been intensely noticeable. First recommended by doctors when I was diagnosed at 4, my parents absolutely refused to put me on it. And ever since I've tried every other med and therapy that exists in my refusal to try that one. What changed? A close family member, Beaver actually, I found out was going through the same exact search attempting to deal with the same symptoms. Granted he had never been diagnosed with ADD when we were children, but after relaying a series of symptoms to his doctor it was suggested that he take the standard ADHD written test and sure enough he scored something like an 87 out of 100 on it. Damn close to my 93. [Being an avid and proud skeptic, not only did I insist on taking the test several times in different versions, I also demanded that my wife and several other friends and family members take it as well to see if "everyone" would have the same score if given the same test. I was quite surprised to see that after taking the test on two different occasions, Princess Little Tree scored less than 10 both times. This strange fact helped verify for us that perhaps there was some validity to the test after all and it wasn't just an over generalisation trap where all who took it would appear to have this popular new dis-ease.]

After a year of trying everything under the sun Beav's doctor finally said "we could always go old school and try a children's dose of Ritalin." His desperate reply, "Well it can't be worse than all the other things we've tried... fine." After a few months of surprised success and regular use he suddenly remembered ME, thank you (what took you so long?), and realised "Holy crap I have to tell Fishy about this! He has this a lot worse than I do! I wonder if he's ever tried this one." I resisted at first, knowing all about it, what it is, what it does, knowing that like most other amphetimines it could make me pass out in ten minutes OR worse cause me massive anxiety...

(Though we've still not discovered the genetic abnormality nor even the chemical problem in the human brain of those with ADHD, one very strange characteristic of those who are challenged with it is that speed for lack of a better word, or stimulants of any kind, work in the reverse on them. Thus coffee or tea or diet pills or amphetamines of any kind will usually make someone with ADHD feel sleepy rather than wired. And sure enough any sort of downers such as barbiturates or tranquillisers will make an ADHD person feel more alert, talkative and motivated. I have personally suffered but also benefited from this weird reality since I can remember. If I drink a cup of tea I fall asleep. If I drink a cup of coffee I begin to yawn and feel tired. If i take a valium I feel like I just took speed. It's crazy weird. But after a few years of dealing with it, one starts getting the hang of how to use it to one's advantage or else I assume one would just off themselves. Because frankly it's a terribly confusing and frustrating way to live. If you've ever noticed this about yourself there's a good chance you've got either ADD or ADHD and it just hasn't been diagnosed yet. Now you know.)

Regardless of all this, I have still always resisted taking uppers of any kind. But Beaver sounded so encouraged and relieved from the agonising ADD symptoms he was experiencing that I just decided I had to try it. For the last few years especially, life has been more than challenging. It's been downright excruciating. I usually refrain from talking or writing about it publicly because number one it's extremely personal, and number two I don't wish to influence people in any way one way or another toward believing anything limiting about themselves. But yes if I was to be totally open and brutally honest with the world about this subject, I would admit that I took pain killers for years on a daily basis starting at the age of around 16 in order to manage my attention in order to just do the normal things in life that everyone else seems to have no problem with. This eventually led to a nearly fatal mental and physical breakdown in 2008 that was officially dubbed "exhaustion" to the public and I ended up in a rehab and then my parents' home to slowly detox and rebuild my health.

The only problem was that I was then faced with having to deal with living daily life with a severely screwed up brain and nervous system (that's in essence how ADHD feels) without pain killers, and as any doctor or patient will attest, nothing treats ADHD better than opiates. That particular combination of chemicals known as opioids just happens to work the best for people who struggle with the host of symptoms lodged under the ADHD mantle. Late 2008 early 2009 was the worst six months of my life. I was happy to not be always on the chase for pills, but the truth is that in this day and age with online pharmacies so prevalent it was never really a hassle finding or buying them. So it wasn't like I ever labeled myself an addict. And strangely enough neither did any of the doctors who began treating me. They instead said that I was one of those rare cases of someone who lucked into finding the exact drug that worked best for what they had and I was self medicating with it. It just happened to be illegal to self medicate your ADHD with pain killers. At least now it is. This I predict, and so do many professionals in the psychiatric industry, is going to change sooner than later. There is after all a reason why so many tens of millions of people reach for pain killers and once found find themselves more adept, more efficient, more functional and more productive with even small doses.

There are details to the story that should stay private. For now. Let us agree that it is challenging to wake up one day and realise that the rest of your life you are going to spend with your chest on fire with anxiety, that you can't focus your attention on anything for more than a second or two, that you are unable to finish anything that you start, that you feel a constant state of fear inside you that literally stings, so much so that you find it excruciating to do the simplest things like go out socially or even answer the phone, let alone have a job or take a shower, that you have a supernatural long term memory but you cannot remember why you entered a room or picked up your phone or a notebook, that you never know what day it is or what the date is, you don't know your age or anyone's age for that matter because there's "that thing with numbers...." Worst of all, you're always in pain. Life. Just. Seems. And feels. Unbearably painful. At least in the mind and body you are in. And God knows you've tried everything that exists or has ever existed on planet earth or anywhere else in the known universe to help or heal, but so far nothing has.

For me now it's been more than four years of regular visits to psychiatrists, psychologists, doctors, naturopaths, chiropractors, specialists, healers, gurus, psychics, mediums, soul readers, you name it. If it exists we've tried it. All in our quest to "find out how to fix Fishy." Princess Little Tree often recounts how crazy, courageous and resilient I am all at the same time because I often appear more like a lab rat than a human in just the sheer amount of medications that have been shoved into my body over the last four years in our attempt to help find a solution. Doctors have been stymied but vigilant. And slowly we've found some even ground to rest on. Things have gotten increasingly better. Though I do long to help others, and I think most people would attest to agreeing with that statement, the exact combination of medications that they now use to treat my specific condition I would prefer to keep private except for what's already been mentioned. It's been a long and very hard road. Not just for me but for the entire family. I believe Princess Little Tree has probably suffered the most second only to me. She had no idea when we got engaged that it would be this difficult. Frankly neither did I. But that's the negative spin. The positive spin is that it appears at least this week that we've turned a new corner and won a major victory here.

After hearing from Beav regarding his success with Ritalin, I talked to my doctor in New York and he was like "Hey, you're talking about a very small nearly negligible dose there... It's less than what we would usually give children. And you usually fall asleep with medications like that. Or they exacerbate your anxiety. But at this point I don't know what else to do for you and I know you're struggling bad right now Fishy. I'm willing to try it if you are." So we did. Worry Fear Anxiety Nervousness all preceded that first morning about one week ago. "Here we go," my wife's and my own eyes said to one another as I took the first dose on the first morning, ready for the worst. What would it be this time? A freakout? A massive anxiety attack? I pass out for hours with her hovering over me checking to see if I'm still breathing? An emergency 911 call, paramedics gathered around my bed while I lay there with my hand on my chest gasping for air? All possibilities and former experiences since this adventure first began four years ago.

But instead I felt intensely focused, motivated, energised and in control of my attention for the first time since I used to use Vicodin for the same purpose. After a 30 year battle, including years of self-medicating with both natural and unnatural, legal and illegal substances, ingesting things, not ingesting things, fasting, cleansing, vegan, non-vegan, and every spiritual religious pseudo-spiritual new age practice or self help course ever invented for spies like us I finally know what it's like to actually feel focused and not totally freaking distracted and unable to control my mind for more than two seconds. I've worked harder and smarter in the last five days than I have in years. The caveat: Ritalin IS speed. There's no getting around that reality. There are side effects. Like last night's insomnia. (I took my second dose too late in the day.) AND you are going to encounter the usual cadre of well-meaning but ignorant know-it-alls who for some reason misperceive that you've solicited their advice as they recount how unhealthy it is and how easy it would be for you to go au natural etc.

But the real message of this ramble is this: Only YOU know YOU and what you've been through. And only YOU know what's worked for you and what hasn't. It's really nobody else's business. And if they are all up on your shit for feeling better, it's most likely they who need some healing of their own. God only knows you've already tried anything and everything they'll good-naturedly offer you. I moved the majority of this post to the Transcendence Diaries in order to add more details and finish this just for the sake of privacy. Today I have tried to share more openly than I ever have before regarding my own personal experiences with these things, for I know how frustrating it can be for others after years of struggling with it myself. What has worked for me may not necessarily work for someone else. But it just might. You never know till you try. For now, I'm quite surprised that we found something that seems to help. It's one battle out of many that we are currently facing for some reason slightly ameliorated for the time being. And that's a damn good thing.

Does America Really Want to Succeed Economically?

2013-01-13T03:08:00.001-05:00

Someone posted a rant on Facebook today about "America's fascist corporations" and how they're greedily destroying the middle class and that by doing this they are destroying their only marketplace and are going to lose all these awesome potential consumers they need in order to exist... I found the short sighted nature of the comment sad. Passion is such a powerful and valuable force. But only when it is aimed at and used for the right causes and concerns. Not when it's just random bitching because you're broke and angry. And especially not when it's ignorant passion of the masses.

That concept -- of losing the great consumer middle class -- used to be a valid one and a real concern for big business, but pre-globalisation. Unfortunately now the United States is no longer the largest economy in the world, nor even the primary target market for the attention of many of the world's largest companies. Things have changed. The Pan-Asian Pacific and Chindia now hold that coveted spot. Apple for example, an American company, claims to make more money from China than any other country, including their homebase, the U.S.

Worse, the majority of their products are made in China, hence God only knows how many people they employee in other countries besides the United States. AND they are NOT required to pay any corporate income taxes on the income they earn in countries other than the US. They can exist here. House their HQ here. Enjoy the glitz and glam, press and prestige, and freedom and liberty of being a "United States company", but their focus isn't on the American market anymore.

If our concern is truly to boost the American economy -- as opposed to just ranting against "fascist corporations" (of which I and many others I know happen to own a few of) -- we need to start INNOVATING again, educating and training better; not just better, but INTENSELY, COMPETITIVELY. Most importantly we need to make the business environment here more friendly, as so many other countries are actively doing -- both to boost our economy in order to increase available money to be spent (imagine the US becoming a primary target market again...) AND to make our citizens not only viable employees but INDISPENSABLE employees that no company can go without.

Until then we will continue this downward economic trend into mediocrity, with angry poor people complaining that it's the "big fascist corporations' fault". Can't blame business for being business. THAT's what made America great and rich and powerful and prosperous in the first place way back when. No one was complaining back when we were kicking butt. Let's do it again. I believe we can. But we need to decide if that's what we really want. In the current political and social climate we are in today, I am not so sure.

Today I reviewed the incoming Obama corporate tax rates and dividend tax rates and capital gains rates AND the increases he wants to add, and frankly if Americans accept these new rates it deserves to fail economically. The incoming and proposed rates are so damn anti-business that it's almost as if the current administration WANTS the country to fail economically. If we're going to start getting real we need to accept that this is a world market now. A GLOBAL economy and global business market. Anyone who wants to succeed -- especially nations, states, countries, whatever you want to call them -- needs to compete fiercely and fearlessly, tooth and nail. They need to claw their way to the top.

Things aren't going to change all of a sudden with the wave of a magic wand. We need to compete. We need to bring corporate taxes DOWN to encourage big companies to do more business HERE. We need to encourage wealthy people to keep their money here and spend their money here and invest their money here. Not in China, or India, or Dubai, or anywhere else. Between the peoples' obsession with maintaining the status quo with entitlement spending and defense spending, and earmarks and other pork, and with the national debt now hitting the GDP (which is one of the most frightening aspects of the current state we are in) and so many people's casual attitude toward it, and now with all these rates increasing, not to mention a growing trend in unfriendly business regulations on the rise, I am sincerely concerned for our welfare over the next two to four years and even well into the future.

More later, so much more.. Especially regarding the unprecedented power that these two behemoth corporations that call themselves political parties, namely the Democratic and Republican, have over all of the above... THAT seems to be the main block in the artery of our economic health.

Bummed

2013-01-07T20:17:00.001-05:00

[Bummer Warning] Talking with The Poet... Texting actually. I never talk on the phone truth be told. Which is fine it seems because no one else i know does either. We were discussing our recent ASCAP royalty checks. Fucked up and low-balled as usual. Music is the greatest art form in the world to be a part of but it's the worst f*^king business. I love making music more than anything else i can think of. Nothing gives me more pure unadulterated joy than the simple act of making music, whether alone w just a guitar or piano, or with the band; whether writing and recording new songs and albums, or performing live. There's nothing like it. But financially it's a nearly thankless career choice.

We made more $ last year than any other year in the last 25 years of our career and it's still not enough to make a decent living. Added all up it seems like a large amount. But considering how hard you work and how much money you spend it's just peanuts compared to so many other careers. Not much else to say. Just bummed. Has to be a better way than this. How much longer can or will Princess Little Tree hang on under these circumstances? I know she had no idea it would be this hard. Frankly neither did I. You would think by now... After all the... But it's just seems to be an all or nothing kind of business. You're either making big bank or barely getting by, and nothing really in between. Bummed.

- Posted by The Ambassador using blogpress on an iPhone

God Conscious or Mere Energetic?

2013-01-06T17:36:00.001-05:00

The question is, if one accepts the premise of the existence of a divine force in the universe, does "God" have the capacity to possess intentions, or even understand them..., or is HeSheIt just a powerful force that happened to have been the impetus for creation And continues to be? It occurred to me a few hours ago while in the middle of a few seconds of prayer. What if what we call God, what we innately and internally feel as God, is not as much a rational thinking source of intelligence capable of granting favors based on people's prayers and intentions as much as it is just a force or energy source that one can harness towards the achievement of said prayers or intentions...?

Many people are raised with an assumption that not only a God exists but that God is capable of hearing -- and sometimes even psychically knowing -- our innermost desires through our prayers. I must confess that at one point a few months back I had this thought that occurred to me that I should start praying out loud so that God and angels could actually hear me; it just occurred to me in the moment that with all the psychic noise being generated around the universe through potentially billions of sentient beings all praying at the same time that one would have a better of chance of being heard. And besides, what if God isn't even capable of hearing our thoughts? But only what we speak out loud? I mean where and when do we get this idea that God can just hear us if we pray silently in our minds? I figured either way it can't hurt.

Then this morning while engaged in a few moments of quiet prayer this thought came to mind: what if God is less a conscious favor giver than more of a force that we can harness. We already know through countless academic and scientific studies that prayer has proven to be effective in helping us achieve certain goals or intentions. Reports of miracle healings and the like are numerous. But what if the real mechanism at play is not so much that some intelligent being in another dimension is listening to every prayer that people are uttering in every moment and choosing which ones to honor or not, but rather that there's this energy force somewhere out there -- perhaps even in plain sight, like the Higgs Field for example -- that we latch onto through focusing our consciousness on a particular goal or intention.

As comforting as it feels to imagine a conscious kind and loving GodForce whose sole mission in life is to honor our every whim and prayer because HeSheIt has so much love for us, this second theory would make more sense in lieu of all we've learned over the last few years regarding conscious creation through vibration and or vibrational energy, something that is gaining more and more credence and scientific evidence in recent years specifically in the arena of particle physics.

Something to think about. Plenty of implications to still explore...

The Moment Fishy Became a Writer...

2013-01-04T05:52:00.001-05:00

Heard a more than decent song this evening during the ending credits roll of an old TV show I am currently having a mild obsession with, a little something called The Riches starring Minnie Driver and Eddie Izzard. Yes you read that right. Turns out the pair teamed for a one hour drama for the FX network back in '06 to '08. Though it only ran 10 episodes per season and only lasted for a season and a half. Seek it out if you're a fan of either actor. They're both better great at what they do in it. Minnie really shines. That's a different story though.

The song started off with the lyrics "the fox... the fox..." I liked it immediately. Wanted to know who sang it. Sitting right there while the credits rolled, I picked up my phone (at this point it doesn't even matter what phone we use. They all do the same thing give or take...) and Googled "Who sings the song with lyrics the fox ... The Riches..." Within less than a minute I discovered the song was by the band Nada Surf, one of the few acts on planet earth I've never explored, let alone purchased an album by. With this new found information I then headed to YouTube and ran a search for the song. At least five uploads were available, whether I wanted to hear the original or the band performing it live in concert, there it was. I selected the one that seemed to appear the "most legit" and clicked play, placed my phone in my shirt pocket and went about my business of locking up the house for the evening -- all the while this fresh new great song accompanying my every move, the music emanating clearly and cleanly from somewhere within the confines of my clothing. Like a walking jukebox.

When it was over, I hit play again to grab another listen. I also added it to my Favorites Playlist, which not only acts as my own personal music collection now, say goodbye to needing iTunes, but also alerts roughly fifteen-thousand of my closest friends on Facebook and Twitter about the song's awesomeness and a link where it can easily be found. For free. And again it hit me. Walking around the house to turn off all the lights, the music still blaring out of my pocket, I casually asked my beautiful wife, "Babe we just heard that song on a TV show and had no idea who it was. How long did it take me to find that out?"

"A minute... Less than a minute" she replied as she let Alistair out for the night.

"Exactly. And how long did it take me to find it so we could listen to it?"

"Another minute...."

"And how much did it cost us?"

"Zero," said she, letting said dog back in the house.

"Yep. The business has changed, changed forever. For better or worse the glory days as we used to know them are truly over for us in this business."

"You keep saying that honey. What are you going to do about it?"

"Less than five minutes after hearing a song we like on TV and we're listening to it. And we're not paying a dime for it. I know I keep saying it lately. I just can't fully believe it..."

"Maybe you don't want to believe it..."

"Maybe... I hadn't thought about it like that... But if 2012 was about anything, it was all about my denial of how quickly the music business has changed... and how nearly every single one of our income streams has dried up in the last few years. I mean, we worked harder in the last two years at making it than I ever have in my entire life..."
She smiled at me and patted my chest, implying I just might be overstating things a bit.

"Okay perhaps I'm exaggerating... the truth is I've been working like this non-stop for the last twenty years is more like it... But we REALLY kicked into high gear this year, and we achieved incredible things! Bigger and better and faster and more than at any other time in my career. And yeah we made great money from it... But it's not enough. And no wonder. Look how different things are. It's one thing reading about these changes in Billboard every week. It's another thing to actually see myself doing it... participating in the exact activities that are tearing apart the whole freaking system."

"Well it's become real to you now. You've switched roles with the audience and now you are seeing things how they see things."

"Exactly. And it freaking SUCKS. I don't want to be doing this. Listen to this!" I exclaimed pointing to the music playing in my pocket. This is insane. These guys aren't going to to get a fucking dime from my standing here listening to their music. And that sucks for them. And their label. And the producer if he's getting points on the record. It's all so wrong..."

"Well you could always stop doing it. But you won't. No one will. Like you said, the business has changed... So have you as a music fan, just like everybody else. You want it now and if you don't have to pay for it you won't argue with anyone about it."

"Yes. Exactly. That's the thing. See? I don't MIND paying for music. God knows. How many songs or albums do I buy each month?"

"More than you should. More than we can afford. Especially if you're only going to listen to the song a few times and never listen to it again. Which is what you usually do when you find a song you like. You'll probably never go seek out this song again to listen to it now that you've heard it a few times. That's why people don't want to buy music anymore. It's not rocket science."

"That IS the flipping point, isn't it? The only difference between now and before is that unless a person wanted to sit around and make mix tapes or burn CDs from their friends, which was a royal pain in the ass, people were forced into buying music if we liked it. Now we don't have to. And that's that."

"Honey I'm tired..."

"I know. Me too. What I'm trying to say is that this my love is why I need to start writing," I said, giving her a hug before she went upstairs to prepare for bed. "More than ever before I now understand that it's time for me to seriously become that rockstar turned writer we keep talking about."

"You already seriously are that rockstar turned writer we keep talking about Baby Joon," she said, her eyes drooping but still looking into mine. "You just need to finish one of the ten thousand books you have started. No amount of writing in the world, no matter how good it is, is going to help us if you never release any of it."

"I know honey. I get it. I more than get it. It just keeps hitting me in different ways all of a sudden. I mean here again tonight it just really hit me. I need to shift gears fast and start actively focusing on the writing. Like a job."

"No different than you already do babe. You already ARE a writer. You write more than most writers. AND you can still do your music. But what I don't like is we keep talking about it and not doing anything about it. I think you're afraid that it's going to affect your music career. But I don't think it will. If anything it will help...."

"Yeah I get that too actually.... you know what it is babe? I always saw me becoming "the writer" later... Like after the rockstar thing was over... you know, when I was older and married and had kids and all that. more like a retirement thing..."

"Honey you are older. I hate to tell you. And you're already a writer... What are you waiting for?"

"Nothing I guess. I already told you my plan. The first book, When I Was Twenty-One will be completed and released by the end of January. For sure. And while we continue to work on the We Are the Revolution book, I can easily get the Casanova Diaries finished. That one's already done. I just need to edit it. It'll be easy. I can do this honey."

"I have no doubt you can do it. I just want to see you START. And I'm not talking about making your little notes all over scraps of paper that just pile up all over the house... You have to approach it like any other job. The same way you approach your music when you want to get a new album recorded. You've got to actually sit and work at it till you finish. And you can still make time for your music. What do you do all day anyway?"

"Write or work on music...." I smiled. "I know, I know. I know what to do. You want to know what my biggest fear is?... Okay, two biggest fears actually..."

"One, what if I am not meant to stop music right now? What if now is not that time?"

"We aren't talking about you quitting music honey. We're talking about you working on only one book at a time instead of twenty and releasing them. And continuing to work at your regular job too. Just stop working on so many things at once and focus on one book and get it out."

"And what if people don't buy it? I mean what if people don't buy me as a writer? What if I'm fooling myself?"

"Well you're never going to know until you try honey. Talking to me about it isn't going to get you there..."

"I know. It's the new year. Plan B is working incredibly so far. You know I haven't missed one day of studying Farsi in three weeks? You hear how good I'm getting?"

"Honey! I was going to tell you that when I came in this morning. I was laughing so hard! You have to be careful with some of the words you are learning. Some of them aren't polite if you mispronounce them. This morning you were saying a bad word instead of "bowl" but I didn't want to interrupt you..."

"No. Babe don't do that! If you hear me pronouncing a word wrong, tell me. You know how hard it is to try to learn this freaking language? There's no english alphabet. I have to stare at the pictures of objects and just keep hitting repeat over and over trying to learn and memorize it like that because I can't read the freaking letters... It's like music."

"Well you're good at it. You're great at it. You're doing it honey. I am really impressed."

"I am getting good huh?"

"Yes my love. I'm proud of you. You have no idea how much it warms my heart seeing you practice so hard everyday.... Thank you honey."

"No thank you for being so patient. I told you I would learn your native language. It just took me a lot longer than I thought. But it's working out now with my new plan. I'm actually doing it."

"So now just apply your plan B to your writing. Schedule a time of day you're going to do it and do it. You're good at that."

"I think I'm actually horrible at it."

"Not really. Not compared to everyone else. When you set your mind to something you go after it more than anyone I've ever seen. You know this. We've talked about it. You're going to be teaching me Farsi soon! You just need to approach completing the books the same way you're doing with learning Farsi or your music..."

"I know. I will. I am. I don't have a choice at this point. I know it. I have to..."

"Honey I'm going to go upstairs now. Can you make sure all the doors are locked? I'll see you upstairs."

"Okay. Yeah...."

For the next hour it's all I thought about. While getting ready for bed. I made over $9,000 from my music in the first quarter of this year. Just from radio airplay. It was a good year. But it cost three times that to get a song high enough in the charts to where you're making that kind of money. That's the catch 22 of the whole damn thing. This is nothing compared to five years ago. Because sales are now almost entirely out of the picture.

But the thing I keep thinking about is all these new indie bands that come out every month. They get a hit song in a movie or a TV show and then Bam! THEY do get sales. So sales haven't dried up completely. Not for everyone. Frankly I think the conversation should be more about what leads to sales than how they've dried up. Because they've clearly not dried up for everyone. And sure I may not be buying as much music as I used to, but I'm still buying a ton of it. And so are others obviously. That's really the key to it... How to stay in that top bracket of the rare few who actually still sell a ton of songs or albums... Second quarter pay outs are going to come any week. And they should be even bigger than first quarter. Thank God. But it's the sales we are after. How to compel people to not just want to go on YouTube or Pandora and listen for free or play the songs on the radio...

Don't get me wrong. There is NOTHING like having a hit song on the radio or in Billboard. But there is a very broadly drawn and large line in the sand between those who actually sell music and those who don't. And that's where we are waning now that the industry has changed. And I refuse to believe that it's because we aren't good enough. I went down the path a hundred times over the last twenty years. Until I finally realized through just sheer quantity and quality of fan feedback that it's bullshit. It's an excuse we tell ourselves because we don't know what the hell we're doing wrong. So we start questioning the merit of what we do, regardless of how much we like it or think it's great.

Frankly I think the missing piece, the thing we're doing wrong, is not touring regularly. Not that any of the Top 40 artists tour very often. Most of them are singles oriented. They DON'T tour. They do these big shows here and there. Morning TV, late night, festivals. We're getting close to being able to do that now. But we're not there yet. We need one more big hit. The other thing is that we're a band. We're not a Top 40 artist. And bands notoriously tour their asses off. So that's something else to think about. What's the resistance? Okay well we know what the resistance is... We don't have enough money to tour or better put we don't make enough money from touring to support a real tour. At least not yet.

But what if while I'm taking the time to finish writing one of these books in order to get more money coming in, we continue to work on the album, promoting and marketing, and if there's a God in heaven or a sliver of luck anywhere near me with this, something will pop that will lead us into an opportunity to tour as we used to. It only takes one. We already know that from past experience, time and time again. What I'm hearing is that I'm just being impatient. Spoiled by how things used to be. The new album has only been out for less two months. There's plenty of time for it to continue to rise in the charts AND for a song or two or three to get picked up for something that can lead to enough money to support a tour. And demand one. That's the other thing. The demand... It ain't easy. There's no way around that. But it's fun. Hell, I don't even believe it's fun any more. It's more scary than fun. But it's my life. That, really, in the end, is what it's all about.

Okay, so that's what we're going to do. Here it is 2:44 am and I'm writing in the Diaries. So maybe that's something that needs to change. The Diaries are free. Like the music now is. (insert loud laugh here!) We need to turn our attention and the writing towards other things that are NOT free. Other vehicles. We'll see. This isn't going to work. There's no way I'm going to be able to maintain the Diaries AND make music full time AND finish a few books. It's impossible. Unless I start writing super short blog posts. Which actually might not be such a bad idea. And with that, let us end. Tomorrow we apply Plan B to the writing too. We will add it to the schedule. And we'll play it by ear with what happens to the Diaries... Until then.

Learning Farsi

2013-01-04T01:05:00.000-05:00

Farsi study time. Everyday now since about two weeks ago for at least an hour I've been diligently pursuing mastery over this damn language. With an alphabet that looks as beautiful as the world's finest art, it is hard to fathom, ironically, just how utterly displeasing the sound of the Farsi language is. Worse yet, it is as displeasing to the mouth and tongue to speak as it is to listen to. It's truly unlike any other language I have endeavored to learn. Not only is it extremely difficult to speak physically, in terms of forming the words properly -- plenty of glottel stops and gutteral formations in the mouth and back of the throat, but it's also completely grammatically confusing. More on that later.

We're at the deep in point now and I have to note: attempting to learn a foreign language withOUT learning to read and write it's alphabet may just be impossible. (UnLESS u just immerse yourself in that country for six months and r forced to that is.) Other than that this is getting harder by the day but I trudge onwards.
I make occasional updates to social media regarding this new endeavor. Freinds have offered a variety of potential solutions to this quandary. Everything from alternate language programs to memory improvement courses. Rosetta Stone is the best program for learning a foreign language out there second only to formal classes IMO. It's just the first time I've attempted to master one with a totally different alphabet. And because I'm NOT in a class (as I've been in the prior four I've learned) and perhaps due to some slight laziness and fear on my part I am focusing on just speaking rather than reading. A side advantage of doing it this way is that you r forced to hone your listening and memory skills razor sharp. Because you can't read the letters right in front of you -- as one would with french or spanish for example. That's a plus for the old brain for sure. But at this point where I've "milestoned" into Unit 2 and the sentences I'm learning are becoming longer and longer it is obviously becoming increasingly difficult to do it all by ear without being able to read even one letter that's staring me in the face. Of course it would be the same if I were learning Japanese like James or Russian or any others... (I think u already know I took the easy road to start and learned all the "regular alphabet" languages first way back when (except Romanian -- the secret-closet stepchild of the 5 romance languages, because I just feel no desire to learn it). But I've run out of those now. So... all that's left are "different alphabet" languages for me.

As I'm writing all this to you (pardon it's length) I'm just realizing that I'm really cutting myself short by having chosen this method. I can feel the limiting belief operating :: learning that alphabet is going to be too flipping hard! I'm going to seriously consider discreating this idea and perhaps go back to square one and take on learning to read and write. Sheesh these r just beliefs. Why struggle if you don't have to right?

And I'll tell you -- on another note -- two other things that have occurred to me, 1, connecting with others through social media like Facebook about what's really going on as opposed to just jokes and links and pix an bs can be very helpful to us in a variety of different areas of our lives. You guys here have taught me plenty and inspired me. And 2, staying in touch w fellow Avatars has a similar effect on us but just amplified by a google. We create a no bs allowed zone so to speak. Because you and Dan and Annie r in this loop it's forced me to really look at what's going on. Not just w this but you know, all around I think it's very helpful and beneficial to us all to be connected potentially on a daily basis.

Goodbye 2012 You Miserable Bitch

2012-12-31T21:17:00.001-05:00

Goodbye 2012 you wicked evil ugly wench.
Goodbye to your financial woes and economic crises.
Goodbye to never having enough money.
Goodbye to your ugly wars and ruthless invasions.
Good bye to your mass shootings assassinations and virgin suicides.
Goodbye to your vile hate-speech bigotry racism and Islamaphobia.
Goodbye to your war on terror war on drugs and war on anything not heterosexual or in the missionary position.
Goodbye to your partisan bickering and political gridlock.
Goodbye to your over the top hyped up and dumbed down gorno journalism.
Goodbye tsunamis and earthquakes tornadoes and hurricanes.
Goodbye to your heartless wrath of wicked lies rumors and tabloid gossip.
Goodbye betrayal and backstabbing.
Goodbye to your duplicity and deceit, to your mendacity selfishness and greed.
Goodbye banal contrived predictable and repetitive trash TV.
Goodbye to your shitty music.
Goodbye to your false gods and celebrity whores.
Goodbye to your strawmen and false flags.
Goodbye to your nuclear reactors oil spills and fracking mishaps and goodbye to your payoffs.
Goodbye to your sickness disease and plagues.
Goodbye to your famines and droughts.
Goodbye to your murderous heart and treachery.
Goodbye to your silly vampires wearwolves serial killers and zombies.
Goodbye to your Mexican gun running torture and bloodletting.
Goodbye to your Jersey shore and shahs of sunset boulevard.
Goodbye to your unreal and desperate housewives.
Goodbye to your exploitation of mafia boss madmen.
Goodbye to your wretched and wanton singing and dancing competitions.
Goodbye to your coiffed out idiot fools dressed as anchors.
Goodbye to your worthless opinion disguised as news.
Goodbye to your violence.
Goodbye to your smells.
Goodbye to your malfeasance.
Goodbye to your military juntas and puppet regimes.
Goodbye to your forced abortions.
Goodbye to your glad handling.
Goodbye to smiling the enemy in the face for more loans.
Goodbye to your petty land grabs civilian casualties and unnecessary brutality.
Goodbye to your security checkpoints and occupation walls.
Goodbye to your Britneys Lindsays Gagas and Kardashians.
Goodbye to your bachelors and bachelorettes.
Goodbye to your vulgarity.
Goodbye to your Hannitys and O'Reillys to your Coulters and Crowleys to your Limbaughs and Becks. Goodbye to your unfair and unbalanced Mormons and morons.
Goodbye to your filthy riches and health care scams.
Goodbye to your entitlement reforms.
Goodbye to your endless pointless pompous Primaries, and to your insufferable presidential election. Goodbye to your pretending to be Christian Muslim Hindu or Jew.
Goodbye to your GMOs and poison foods.
Goodbye to your soldiers of fortune and terrorist thugs.
Goodbye to your crooked banks and skyrocketing health insurance costs.
Goodbye to corporate corruption and deadly pharmaceutical side effects.
Goodbye to your trading guns for money and lives for oil.
Goodbye to your pirates and genocides.
Goodbye to your executive orders petty squabbles and filibusters.
Goodbye to your phony dramas your hype over nothing and your ignorance of the facts.
Goodbye to your baby killing and child murdering.
Goodbye to your friends who are only there when they need you.
Goodbye to your calls for austerity when your pockets are full.
Goodbye to your high unemployment budget deficits and national debt.
Goodbye to your bloody battles and civil wars.
Goodbye to fake boobs phony YouTube views and Honey Boo Boos.
Goodbye to cynicism being cool and cruelty being acceptable.
Goodbye to violence deceit and revenge as entertainment.
Goodbye to the ends that justify your means and goodbye to your meanness.
Goodbye to your secret invasions and collateral damage.
Goodbye to your threats of war and unilateral actions.
Goodbye to your midnight raids heartless sanctions and drone strikes.
Goodbye to your citizens united and tea parties.
Goodbye to your voter ID laws campaign finance coffers and earmarks galore.
Goodbye to calling bribes and blackmail lobbying.
Goodbye to holding Congress hostage.
Goodbye Grover and goodbye Elmo.
Goodbye to governance by the lowest common denominator.
Goodbye to your Mayan prophecies doom prepping and profiteering.from the end of the world.
Goodbye to your unexpected deaths unsuspecting victims and unwarranted suffering.
Goodbye to your unwelcomed pain mourning grieving loss and sorrow.
Goodbye to your cancer stroke and heart disease.
Goodbye to your smoking guns and rocket launches.
Goodbye to your inane press conferences and goodbye to your conspiracies.
Goodbye to your lack of loyalty and trustworthiness.
Goodbye to your deregulation blues and corporate bullying and bulldozing.
Goodbye to your union bashing freedom bashing teacher bashing and worker bashing.
Goodbye to your aches and pains and goodbye to your buzz killing.
Goodbye to your gray skies without silver linings and your miserable rain on our parade.
Goodbye to the bitterness hate resentment discontent and sadness you inspired.
Goodbye to your confusion lack of direction and confidence and fuck you for taking it out on us.
Goodbye and good riddance 2012. You will not be missed. May you return to the hell from whence you came and never return, leaving not a trace of your memory in our hearts and minds.

Implementing Plan B - Take Two

2012-12-29T17:39:00.000-05:00

It's time to implement Plan B. But first a little background...
Yesterday I spent a little over an hour studying Farsi using Rosetta Stone. Though I am constantly learning the language from being married to Princess Little Tree now, this was the first time I had opened my Rosetta Stone Farsi pack in almost two years. One would think that once a purchase that expensive is made there would be no stopping you from making full use of it. But such is human nature. In business it is common knowledge that nearly 90% of all purchases are impulse buys (all except the very basic necessities) -- which makes it easy to sell almost anything to anyone (this is the key to success in sales); and furthermore that most people do not purchase things to use them half as much as they purchase them for the initial rush they get out of the purchasing process (another key to success in sales). Another well known fact in the world of business, sales and consumerism studies is that less than 10% of people who purchase any kind of non-essential luxury items, these might could include educational or improvement courses, books, magazine subscriptions, timeshare resorts, clothes and shoes, etc, actually use the items purchased; less than 1% make use of them more than once. No matter how much they spend. The cost of the item is never a factor.
I heard these statistics early on in life and made a promise to myself that I would never fall into that 99% group who buy things and never use them. I've purchased every course Anthony Robbins has ever released (and countless others) and completed every course several times from start to finish. Some of those babies are 30 day courses. Not necessarily easy. At the age of 25 I set out to learn how to speak and understand as many languages as I could until I felt satisfied. When pressed, I consider the practical application of how many would be truly necessary or useful and a rough estimate for me personally usually comes to about ten when I consider every language that I currently am aware of and how many I have a desire to learn. As many already know (this is contextual), presently I am moderately proficient in five, including my native English. The reason? Because once I decide to take on learning a new language I continue with all of the steps in the system I designed many years ago to learn any foreign language proficiently. It's a simple system, but contains many steps, and usually take about one solid year, or two. It isn't easy. But I enjoy it. And that's what really counts.
People who say they "can speak a foreign language" and then only know a few words is one of the few things I find un-pleasurable in my fellow human brethren. There is also that pesky habit some people have of jumping in at any opportunity they get when a foreign language is mentioned in casual conversation among a group of people just to announce that they "used to be able to speak that language" or "lived in that country and spoke that language" but they've "since forgotten it all now". Hey, we all have our pet peeves. That just happens to be one of mine. The reason I bring it up is because having learned these statistics about impulse consumerism early in life, I have always made it a habit to master as much of everything I set out to do, or at the very least attempt to. Unless upon further examination I decide to abort the mission because it no longer interests me or I decide it to be no longer useful. With learning foreign languages, once I established that goal, I created an efficient system with numerous steps based on research and studying the various methods that people have used throughout history. That system I have already written about and mapped out here in the Diaries. No need to go into it again here. But suffice it to say, it takes a lot of commitment, dedication, effort and hours; as anyone who has pursued the same goal can corroborate. At times in the past I have found it excruciatingly tedious to keep on once I commit. But I do it anyway.
That is until the last two years. I have failed miserably in my quest to learn Farsi. I decided and committed to learning Farsi seven years ago. It is the first foreign language I ventured to learn that did not use what we commonly call the English alphabet. I put a few years into learning Hebrew as well, but never approached it wholeheartedly using my system. With Farsi, the process was going to be much more difficult than any other language I have attempted to learn thus far. Learning to speak and understand it is one thing. Learning to read and write in it is another entirely. The former being my goal, not the latter.
Purchasing the Farsi set of language packs through Rosetta Stone I felt would offer considerable help in my goal -- normally I use Pimsleur's system in terms of the audio portion of it. I also make sure to take at least one-hundred and twenty hours in sit down classes with a teacher. That's how I usually begin. (Again, I've already written about all of this in prior posts years ago.) Being married to Princess Little Tree enables me to get the classes portion in on a 24/7/365 basis. And for the last seven years I have been attempting to slowly learn the language through audio and books and studying as I always do. But over the last three years I have fallen behind in many different pursuits I have committed to. Not just in my goal to learn Farsi. I almost completely stopped writing any and all the books I have been working on over the last twenty years. I stopped blogging daily in the Transcendence Diaries. I stopped going to the gym and working out. I don't even check email anymore. Which people still find impossible to believe. But on and on it goes.
I have been pondering this odd shift in my behavior a lot over the last few months. Wondering why all of a sudden I became such a muggle, or slug, or buffer... terms that perhaps only a few might be familiar with. In other words, where the hell did my relentless ability to commit and follow-through beyond normal-human go? Well for one thing I got married. And in the process I not only adopted a wife and all the accompanying responsibilities that go with that, but two step daughters as well; in addition to the fact that I have way too many jobs and twice as many hobbies. We've also been living bi-coastally for three years (something I don't recommend unless you have the money to afford a decent sized full time staff to help with the sheer giant sized quantity of extra work involved in that sort of lifestyle), and along with all of that we've been actively trying to have children of our own.
Making babies may be easy for some, especially when you're young, which is part of the problem with the rampant pandemic of unwanted pregnancies among the world's young people. But as women get older it becomes more and more difficult to accomplish such a seemingly natural task. Without getting too personal (one of the reasons I have not been regularly posting in the Transcendence Diaries on a daily basis as I used to do since I started it in 2002), let me just say that baby making turned into a full time job for us very soon after we made the decision to start our own family; it has included numerous doctors all over the country, more "procedures" than I can count, and more heartbreak than anyone should permit themselves to endure in one lifetime. Needless to say we have still not achieved success in our quest to have beaucoup offspring, but we've also not given up. I am still very confident that one day we will be proud parents and grandparents of a large brood of little Ambassadors and Little Trees.
To get back to the point, I can now clearly see and understand why I have fallen behind in so many of the things that in times past used to be daily routine for me, such as blogging, writing, exercising and learning foreign languages. But that's just the "reason". Discovering the potential reason for something does not necessarily mean that one has to succumb to it. For me personally this just might be one of the single most important keys to success that I have learned. There may be a very good and valid reason why we are not able to do something; but that doesn't mean that we have to succumb to the limitations of that reason. We may just need to re-engineer our systems and shift a few things around.
Welcome to Plan B. Once I felt comfortable that I had discovered the real foundational reasons behind my sudden lack of being able to accomplish as much as I was used to in the past, i.e. I inadvertently took on a variety of numerous other new duties and responsibilities, I spent the last two months analyzing what possible solutions there might be available to me to still be able to maintain my current lifestyle and all of its itinerant jobs and duties AND add the usual number of extracurricular activities I am normally accustomed to being able to accomplish. I've been thinking about the year I spent in military school. Greenwich Military Academy (not the real name for obvious reasons) taught me plenty. The majority of the stories and lessons from those days are in The Adventures of Fishy book. That one, though it was the very first book I started, is presently in position number 5 or 6 on the conveyor belt in terms of completing and releasing the books. For multiple reasons. Just an fyi for me as well as you whoever you are.
The aspect of military school that I have found most useful over the last few months in attempting to find a solution to my current quandary was how regimented and disciplined every moment of every day was. We may have had a few hours off on Sundays; I don't remember now. But other than that, from 5 am all the way through till lights out at 10 pm during the other six days of the week, every single minute of every single hour was accounted for with a very set and specific task or duty. No, it did not suit the lifestyle of an artistic personality type such as mine, hence my only spending a year there; but it did show me the potential for how much we could accomplish in a day if we set our minds to it or were forced to. In my current case, I both desire to and thus have set my mind to it, AND am being forced to, for a variety of reasons. Not the least of which is because if I don't, I am never going to continue to grow into the person I have always hoped I would be and always known I could be. This is a change that needs to be implemented.
From my current vantage point, how I see it is that I need to made a conscious decision what my top priorities are both short and long term and set aside time to partake in activities that will lead me towards achieving those goals on a regular basis, either daily, weekly, bi-weekly, three times a week perhaps, etc. We spend much of our time during each day doing things that are not necessary to our general advancement, nor that lead us towards any specific goal. Casual conversations. Group dynamic activities for the sake of the group. Herd activities so to speak. Some of it is sheer laziness. Some of it is resistance to change; or resistance to the seeming enormity of a project, i.e a project seems so damn big that we don't see how we'll ever complete it, so we never start it; or perhaps resistance to learning or attempting something new that we've never done before. There are a variety of reasons why we do things that don't serve our bigger picture goals, or don't do things that would. The key is to just START. Start to make the change.
For me that change is two-fold: limiting the amount of time I spend doing things that do not serve, and this is most easily accomplished by filling our time up with doing things that do serve. If as soon as I wake up each day I jump right into 30 to 60 minutes of studying Farsi, I will eliminate the usual hour or so I spend drinking coffee and chatting or checking social networks etc. From there a work out. Then a shower. Then work. People have no idea how much work-work is now involved in being a rockstar/recording artist. It isn't like the old days, all sex drugs and rock'n'roll. Lord knows I wish it were. But it just isn't. Our job has changed tremendously. There is a huge amount of what one might call office work involved in the job now. There is still every bit the need for song writing, practicing your instrument, recording, rehearsing with the band, fashion and styling, making music videos, album production, schmoozing marketing and promotion, etc. etc. There are just a boatload of other jobs and duties that have been added to our plate.
Let us say we spend the better part of the work day -- post morning activities -- doing actual work-work. We can then take a break. For me a break, preferably in the form of a 30 minute nap, is imperative to my mental and emotional sanity. No sense in fighting it. If I push my way through, by jacking myself up on something to minimize the tired feeling, I still end up feeling like a nervous wreck by 6 or 7 pm. So I have come to honor my own body's need for dark quiet time to do nothing but relax and recharge.
Just after break time, we jump to either a few hours of writing and working on one of the books, or blogging. Then a limited amount of family quality time. Limited being the operating word there. The need for quality family time is essential when you're an active member of a healthy functioning family. There's no getting around it. Dinner time and an hour or two after that should suffice. But if the fam wants to watch Glee or X-Factor, there should be absolutely no reason you (or I in this case) should feel obligated to do so too. It's an activity that does not serve. Perhaps the key is to make the family time we do spend with our loved ones as fulfilling and high quality as possible, limiting the hours, but not the quality. That still leaves plenty of hours left in the evening for studying and learning, reading or watching things that are both enjoyable and educational. If you dig learning, then anything educational is going to be enjoyable anyway. So that part is easy. And then once everyone goes to bed I find to be the best time to blog and/or write. That midnight to six am time period when all is quiet and the whole world is covered in darkness.
Today is my second day on this new schedule. I am still working it out, working the kinks out. I spent a bit too much time learning Farsi and a bit too much time on this blog post. But that's okay. The key is that Plan B has officially started. Time for a work out and shower. I'll keep you posted.

Initiating Plan B

2012-12-29T08:06:00.001-05:00

It's 3:34 am saturday morning. At least where I am in the world right now. I add this last piece of relatively insignificant information because every time I spend extended periods of time on the west coast (of the United States) I just cannot fathom how people manage living here in regards to being three hours behind everything. I still cannot shake the feeling of being caught in a time warp. I've still not fallen asleep after an hour or so of laying here in between worlds and so decided to pick up the phone to do some writing. Went on FB for a minute to post a question -- Facebook is an amazing resource when you need a quick answer to almost anything -- and most of the status updates I saw are people who are a starting to wake up. To them it's Saturday. To me it's Friday night and I haven't even gone to sleep yet, let alone woken up inside of Saturday morning.

I don't think my mind or body will ever get used to the west coast time zone. I just don't feel comfortable in my skin here, being so far behind everyone and everything going on. If you want to watch the evening news on the west coast I've learned, say something like the McNeil Lehrer Report or Situation Room (I know, why bother with anything CNN at this point -- see an upcoming entry regarding the decline and fall of CNN in the near future) you have to stop what you're doing smack dab in the middle of the day and watch it at 3pm in the afternoon. Seriously. Right in the middle of your work day. It's so frustratingly off putting. If by chance you're working, and why wouldn't you be, and you must wait till the more traditional post work 6 or 7 pm end of day timeframe to watch the news, you're going to end up in the world of cable news gossip shows -- things like Anderson Pooper or Piers "I have no business being on a news network" Morgan. Because the networks are running live. Which I will readily admit is probably a good thing. They can't after all delay the news for west coasters. But certainly something could be done to accommodate the other half of the country... Like run the NEWS at night too; instead of these crap personality talk shows.

What the hell has happened to just good old fashioned traditional news reporting in this country? Why the fuck is it so hard to get some? Even if you are lucky enough to catch a more traditional or standard news show like the aforementioned Situation Room or OutFront or Shepard Smith et al., what you end up with is hearing about approximately three to five stories tops each accompanied by a cadre of so called panelists and non-experts, talking heads who spew opinion about other taking head's opinions. It's a televised gossip column is what it is; using news topics (occasionally important or worthy) as celebrity. And when one show is over the following show begins, albeit with another dolled up host (not anchor) who then proceeds to repeat the exact same three to five news items the show before it spent an hour reporting on. The actual news, the thousands and thousands of interesting and important news events that transpired all over the world that day go unreported. And with a station like CNN, which a decade ago used to be a real news network, or Headline news -- which used to be an even better more traditional news network, this mind numbing process repeats over and over again all day and night with only the talking head behind the desk changing. The news items don't. The same damn three to five pieces just get cycled and recycled over and over again until you think you've either lost your mind or are thoroughly convinced everyone else except you has.

I think the question that millions of people are asking right now, at least those who haven't allowed their brain or intelligence to fall into a deep hypnotic hibernation or permanent hypothermia, is what the hell happened to good old fashioned news reporting and journalism, i.e. a news anchor man (or woman) sitting behind a desk reporting the most important and or interesting global news events of the day, one after the other, without opinion or commentary or panelists or round tables or guest celebrity experts? As in one hour of watching the news would catch you up on at least fifteen to twenty different news worthy events of the day. At least.

Instead we are bombarded ad nauseum by overly dramatized and hyped up shock-talk radio like commentary and gossip on a handful of worn out stories that border on the inane and remind one more of a primetime sitcom about a bunch of uninformed high school kids who don't have anything better to do nor know any better than to ramble on for hours with their opinion about what they believe to be hot and trendy; as if switching to a different subject could mean the death of their reputation as one of the cool kids.

Ted Turner we all know you've drank more than your fair share of the sauce in your time and you've got the crazy eyes and complete disregard for propriety to show for it, but for the sake of all that is holy in the world of news journalism and arming an informed populace with the data they need to stay informed and actively engaged with the world they live in -- we need you to take back control of your brilliant little pet project that once served our needs so well in days gone by. My guess is that Ted can't watch more than three minutes of CNN now without throwing a shoe at the TV in between retching and cursing the day he sold out to Time Warner.

This post was supposed to be about implementing Plan B. but as we can all see I've instead gone ahead and written the piece about the myopic idiocy that is now called reporting the news. That's not a bad thing. I've already begun to implement plan B. I promise to return soon and fill you in on it. It's now past 5 am here on the west coast and I need to get some sleep.

Seeking a Silver Lining

2012-12-27T13:48:00.001-05:00

It took a while but it finally happened. IT happened. Maybe it's a good thing... When it happens to us it often hurts... So we resist it. We often label it "bad" and thus put it off, or even when it does happen we continue to label it bad, which then prevents us from seeing the good in it. A little backstory...

Last night we saw the film Silver Linings Playbook. I had no idea what the film was about, but was sucked in from the very first minute. See it. It's better than good. Due to this new trend of infinite potential greatness in art all happening simultaneously, I found it easy to exclaim that Silver Linings was the best movie of the year, beating out even Speilberg's Lincoln, before settling back down into recognizing that we are now in an age when it's possible for there to be MANY "best movies of the year" all at the same time.

[This is a fairly new and exciting trend, due to many factors; globalization being one, another being the continued decline of the cost of the tools and technologies of all the various fields of art. Whether filmmaking or music making or just about anything else, the cost of entering, the entry fee, has come down to a price point making it possible for anyone to make a movie or an album or whatever else the heart and mind can imagine. It's one of the Signatures of the Personal Expression Age and has both good and bad ramifications. It's not the purpose of this particular post, but in the book I've been working on for the last six years, we elaborate on it in much more detail. Suffice it to say that this Signature has created a world where there is more "Best Of the Year" projects being released simultaneously than any one consumer could possibly take in -- unless you make being a consumer of art your career.]

So towards the end of the film, during the end credits roll actually, we hear this song, an amazing song, an incredible song, sounded like the Stone, or the Faces, maybe Chris Robinson's new band. As always I waited till the very end of the movie to see who the artist was. It turned out to be a group called Alabama Shakes. The song was called "Always Alright." I took a note of it in my phone in the usual file where I note music that I plan on purchasing later. The film ended. We exited the theatre, talking idly about how great the film was, how believable, how real, how moving; our dialogue occasionally interspersed with my excited exclamations of "how fucking great that song was, wow!"

In the men's room a few minutes later I was still thinking about that song, fantasizing about that moment when I would be able to go home and buy it and listen to it over and over. And then it hit me, just standing there in front of the urinal. I didn't need to wait till I got home. I could pull out my phone right there while still taking a piss and download the song using iTunes and listen to it immediately. So i reached into my pocket to grab my phone. But then another realization. I didn't need to go to iTunes. I could probably just go to YouTube and do a Search for it. So i did. Sure enough, ten to twenty different versions of this particular songs came up and I began to listen to each one until I found the one I was looking for. (I never did. Instead I listened to a few live versions of the song, never finding the actual recording of the song itself.) But that was enough. I got my fill of it. At least for the moment.

When we got in the car to drive home, I took it further and plugged my phone into a little quarter inch jack we've rigged into our car stereo so we can listen to our iPods and iPhones through the car's stereo system. I didn't think much about this experience truth be told. For whatever reason, IT didn't happen then. But it did this morning.

This morning I woke up with the song "This Guys's in Love with You", the Herb Albert version, in my head while I was dreaming. With eyes still closed I fumbled my hands around the bed seeking my phone so I could check my iTunes library to see if i had already downloaded the song. I wanted to hear it. Right then and there, before I woke up fully and the day started. And THAT'S when IT hit me. I didn't need to check my iTunes library to listen to the song. Who cares if i had already downloaded the song. All i had to do was go to YouTube. Sure enough, there it was. In hundreds of different forms, uploaded by hundreds of different people. Within less than a minute I was listening to this haunting and beautiful Burt Bacharach song over and over again and not paying a dime for it. And THIS is when it really hit me.

For the last six months I have been struggling like a mother fucker to make ends meet for my family. My last big hit was in May of this year. The checks from sales and royalty checks roll in eventually and that's always a great thing. But they aren't what they used to be. Not even close. Something has changed. Many things have changed. You can have a song that goes to #1 in cities all over America and even jump up into the Top 30 on Billboard and still not be able to support yourself as a working musician. It's not something we talk about. Call it denial. No one wants to talk about it. But it's happening. Access to music has become so easy for all of us as consumers that it's become impossible for those of us who make music for a living to make an actual living at it. It's no one's fault per se. It's just the way the industry has shifted.

Sure we make money every time someone downloads one of our songs or albums. We do. And it's good money. If it's done in the traditional legal and above board fashion, ala going through amazon.com or iTunes, we get paid for that. So the first thing is just to continue to encourage friends and fans to buy our songs and albums. Because that is still our primary means of making a living. But this morning I watched it happen with my own eyes. Not as a working musician, but as a consumer and lover of music. I just wanted my fix in that moment of this song. And I went to the fastest way i knew how to get it. YouTube. And the sad truth of the matter is that we as artists don't get paid when people listen to our music on YouTube. It doesn't matter that "Gangam Style" has become the most viewed video on YouTube in terms of the artist making any money from it. He doesn't. It might feel good. And yes, surely it leads to other potential money making opportunities. Maybe. But the act itself does not make any money. Nor did it help Herb Alpert or Burt Bacharach when I listened to "This Guy's in Love With You" ten times in a row this morning on YouTube. Hell, I even Shared the song on Facebook and Twitter to spread the joy with my friends and fans. And that led to more people listening to the song on YouTube. For free.

And that's the operating word now in our industry. Free. People that like having easy access to music and listening to music for free will jump at this point in the discussion to point out that artists DO get paid if people listen to our music on Pandora or Spotify. But let's yank that cat out of the bag once and for all so the whole world can feel the shock and pain of it as much as we who make the music do. You ever wonder how much we get paid each time someone listens to one of our songs on Pandora or Spotify? It looks like this: $00.0001. That's what it looks like. On the statements we receive each month or quarter from the various different companies who collect and distribute the data and money to us. Hundreds of pages comprise these statements. And we do get to see each and every time someone listens to (streams) or downloads one of our songs or albums.

Sometimes it's in the millions. Or even tens of millions. "Scene in San Francisco" has been streamed more times than I can count at this point. But at that rate of pay, it amounts to less than enough to make your mortgage payment. Which is why most working musicians rent. And worse, that's ONLY if people are listening through very firmly established music services, like MOG or turntable.fm or Spotify or Pandora. Most of the places people go online to listen to music, like YouTube for example, don't offer a way for the artist to make even one-one-hundredth of a cent from that experience. Not a penny. Not half a penny. Not a tenth or even a hundredth of a penny. Zero. Combine that with the fact that most people have stopped buying music -- why WOULD you BUY music when you can listen to it for free anytime you want to from a device that is literally in your hands 23 out of every 24 hours in a day? -- and what you end up with is an industry where 99% of the people working in it aren't able to make a living from it.

This was a huge realization for me this morning. For months I have been struggling to decide what to do about this. I have never seen anything as heart breaking as my poor new wife crying her eyes out in fear that we are already broke and penniless because my well ran dry so fast after having two Top 30 hits this year. I've never seen anyone so frightened. "I'm not used to this like you are," she scream-mumbled in between big sobs and moans... "What are we going to do???" she asked me. I had no answer. Only, "I'll think of something honey. I promise. Our new album just came out. We'll get money from the sales of that."

But i knew I was kidding myself, being delusional. Those days of big sales numbers from a new album release for most of us started drying up in '05. Sooner than that for some people. Adele's last album, 21, just topped the 10 million mark I believe, making it one of the few albums in decades to sell that many. Albums that now sell a million, what we call Platinum, are few and far between. It's a small earthquake in our industry when it happens. Selling half a million, what we call Gold, happen a bit more, but we are talking about maybe five to ten artists a year now. For the most part, the large majority of working music makers sell in the thousands. The last stat I read was disarmingly sad and sobering. It showed that out of the 5,000 albums a month that are released each year, less than one-thousand of them sell a thousand copies or more. Most of those are in the classical music genre. That's 60,000 albums a year that get released, with less than 1000 of them selling even one-thousand copies. Don't bother doing the math. It's so far below the poverty line that it isn't even worth considering how much those artists make. It certainly isn't enough to support a family.

For me the big realization happened towards the end of this year. We were convinced that with all the hype and sales and radio airplay and Billboard hit making that we were doing earlier in the year that it would lead to bigger and better things, i.e. more money. At least enough to live comfortably. Or live, period. But it happened fast. The money comes and the money goes. Whatever you make usually goes right back into either making more music or marketing and promoting the music you've already made in an attempt to reach more people and make a bigger splash. It's throwing money after money is what it is. It used to work. And for a very few it still does. But they're few and far between.

We are supposed to make money every time our songs get played on the radio. This is true. So with a song like "Scene in San Francisco" where it received tens of thousands of spins on radio stations all over America and eventually the world, you would think we would have received tens of thousands of dollars from it. But it doesn't work that way. There are three companies in the entire world that collect all that money for every musician on planet earth. ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC. And they collect hundreds of billions of dollars each year from our music being played on the radio. But their systems are crooked. They don't pay per spin. They claim to have a proprietary system that they can't reveal to anyone. Not even Congress, who has been breathing down their backs for nearly a century to try to get them to conduct a more honest and transparent business.

So big hit or not, two big hits or not, what ASCAP wanted to pay me personally came to less than $3,000. I went into a bloody apoplectic seizure when I found out. See, it isn't that they didn't collect the money. They collected the money alright. From every single radio station in America and beyond they collect plenty of money. And it's not that they cannot see how many times each song has been played. They can. The system is all computerized now. It's easy to discover how many millions of times your song has been played on radio each year. That's not the issue. The issue is that they "cannot reveal their proprietary system" to the artists that shows how they calculate how much money they are going to pay out for all your radio spins. It's a fucking nightmare. They're the mafia of the music industry. Pirates. Raking in huge sums of money on behalf of every working musician in the world with no intention of paying it out.

That's radio airplay. Sales is a different matter. Coldplay's record label spent five million dollars just on promotion of their last album (the one before this latest one) in their attempt to get the sales they needed to pay for the recording of the album. I never bothered to check to see if they made the money back. I just couldn't believe that they spent five million dollars on marketing and promotion alone. It was an astounding figure. A huge risk. But for a very established act.

Most artists don't have that kind of established reputation in the industry, nor access to a record label with enough liquidity to be able to afford to do something like that. For their last album, just a few short years had gone by, but by this point their record label had gone bankrupt, gotten divided up and all the little pieces sold off to a variety of different other players, and so the money for marketing and promotion wasn't there. Instead of throwing five million dollars around for marketing and promotion, they chose a different path. They teamed up with Google Music and put the new album up for sale for .99 cents to try to market it. They sold an 250,000 units through that stunt. Which was considerably more than they had sold up until that point. And that's a huge artist.

But again do the math. If the artist only receives ten percent of the net proceeds.... Yikes. Split that 25 grand four ways if you're in a band and you better be married to Gwyneth Paltrow, because you aren't eating if you aren't. Personally speaking, I'm not. So I need to come up with a different plan of action to make a living and support my family. And fast. It doesn't mean I don't love making music. I do. I've already written a few thousand songs. So for me the whole mission is to just try to record and release as many of the songs I've written over the last thirty years as I can before I die. The fans I do have deserve it. I know that. And I deserve it. I want to. There is nothing more painful than having thousands of songs sitting in notebooks unrecorded. Nothing I can think of. At least not for an artist. But I also need to make a living.

After this morning's experience, after watching how easy it was for me, me, a working musician myself, someone who has always resisted the trends of accessing music or free for fear it might jeopardize the livelihood of the musicians I love the most, even I found myself taking advantage of this new system and simply heading to YouTube to spin a few songs I love five to ten times, knowing full well that the men and women who created that music that I love so much wouldn't make a cent from it. It's just not the same industry anymore. For all of us. Yes, something CAN be done about it. YouTube could enforce a law that ALL music that gets uploaded to their servers MUST go through a database that tracks the airplay, the spins, the views, that somehow cycles back to the musicians themselves. But who knows when that will happen.

In the meantime, the Ambassador is going to have to find another way to make a living that permits me to still be able to make music at the same time. It won't be easy. The trick with being a musician is that every cent you make from whatever it is you do you want to take all that money and put it back into recording and production and marketing more music. So one needs a job that pays you twice as much as you need to live. Either that or you starve as you spend every cent you make from your job on making music. I did that all through my teens and twenties. As everyone already knows. You get used to living without a car or a phone or electricity or even food. Your teeth fall out one by one because you can't afford to go to doctors or dentists. But you're making music. You're fulfilling your life's purpose. You're happy. You have fans who love what you do and it makes you happy thinking about how your music makes them happy.

But things are different now. And I know it. I finally took the big leap I had both dreaded and wished for my entire life. I got married. I have a wife that I love. I have step daughters that I love. We've been trying to have children of our own for years. Eventually we'll achieve that goal, either naturally or through adoption (which I have started to see only recently is a very cool thing). And children are expensive. I have to stop trying to change the music industry to go back to the way it used to be. I also have to stop living in denial. I either need a HUGE break, as in times past, one that propels me to a place where a backflip into poverty once more could never happen again; or I have to invent or devise or discover some new way to make a fortune from continuing to make music for a living.

Or i need to choose another way entirely to support myself and the family. I've been meditating and praying about it incessantly. And miraculously money has been flying in from all over the place. Loads of it. So as we gratefully and graciously have been able to pay the bills as of late all of a sudden, I've been scrambling to try to figure out what the hell I'm going to do. Perhaps that big break will come. Perhaps it won't. Maybe the industry will change and musicians will begin to get compensated commensurate with how much their music is enjoyed. But until then... I cannot help but feel that somewhere around the bend is this silver lining. There always is. Perhaps this waking up and recognizing how the music business really is now was a good thing, even though it felt like a bad thing. Perhaps it's one step closer. I hope so.

The Most Important Article of 2012

2012-12-26T15:29:00.001-05:00

What is now being called the Newtown Massacre was surely the most disturbing event in America for 2012. But was it the most important in light of all the other events that transpired around the country and the world that involved the United States. At face value certainly not. But upon closer inspection, after reading numerous articles about the tragedy like the one pasted below, it becomes painfully apparent that the tragedy of Newtown is not just a sad moment in American history because 28 people were killed, many of them children. The shooting at Sandyhook Elementary in Newtown, CT appears to be yet another confusing tragedy with multiple story lines and narratives and numerous trails of misleading information and misinformation; one in an ever increasing long line of mysterious lone-gunmen covert operations that unfortunately and terrifyingly all seem to lead back to local, state and federal government at their source. Either that, or the American media should not be allowed to exist in its current form any longer and instead be completely dismantled and restructured to better serve the needs of responsible news reporting. Like Aurora before it and harkening all the way back to the events of September 11th, Newtown is a fact-checking disaster with no valid or verifiable official story. The implications more than obvious and not necessary to spell out yet again.

Sandy Hook massacre: Official story spins out of control
Published on December 20th, 2012 in Veterans Today
Written by: Niall Bradley

The massacre of 20 children and 7 adults at the Sandy Hook elementary school last Friday was one more in a long line of atrocious mass murders committed in the USA. By now, five days later, an official version of events has more or less solidified to explain the chain of events. The familiar ‘lone gunman’ narrative has once more stoked the hot-button issue of gun control and left the general population as clueless as ever as to why people suddenly ‘go postal’ and target the most vulnerable members of society.
On closer inspection, however, there is clearly more to many of these mass shootings than meets the eye. Very often the earliest reports present information that directly contradicts key foundations of the final ‘official’ analysis of events. Granted, confusion is natural when a story breaks, but some of the initial reports conflict so completely with the lone gunman narrative that I’m going to compile them here and then try to put this tragedy in a more objective context. In his speech at the Sandy Hook Interfaith Prayer Vigil in Newtown, Connecticut on Sunday night, President Obama quoted the following biblical passage:
“So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”
~ 2 Corinthians 4:18
The traumatised Newtown community deserves the facts without the spin. Everyone touched by this brutal event deserves to know what really happened, so let’s fix our eyes on what remains unseen…
A 20-year-old ‘tech geek’ named Adam Lanza is supposed to have snapped early last Friday, December 14th, shot dead his mother Nancy Lanza, loaded her car up with her guns and ammo, then driven it across town to his former school, the Sandy Hook Elementary School, shot dead 27 people in two classrooms and an adjoining hallway, then turned one of his guns on himself.
That’s how most will now remember the shooting, but is that actually what happened?
All the child victims were first-graders between the ages of 6 and 7. If there’s any saving grace to be found in this event, it’s that it was all over within minutes. Police were reportedly on the scene “instantaneously”, according to Connecticut State Police Commander, Lt. Vance and by then the shooting had ended. Listed among the slain school teachers and administrative staff was the school principal, 47-year-old Dawn Hochsprung. Right here we encounter our first problem:
The Newtown Bee
December 14, 2012
Sandy Hook School Principal Dawn Hochsprung told The Bee that a masked man entered the school with a rifle and started shooting multiple shots – more than she could count – that went “on and on.”
© The Newtown Bee
How could the principal have survived to give this statement to local press describing what happened … if she was one of the first to be killed? Incidentally, The Newtown Bee‘s article was taken down on Monday December 17th. Of course, a plausible explanation is that a reporter mistook another teacher for the principal.
We were initially told that two handguns – a Glock and a Sig Sauer – were found next to the body of the dead shooter, while a third weapon, a .223-caliber rifle was also recovered “in the trunk of a car” later, in the school’s parking lot. All of the weapons were allegedly legally bought and registered in Nancy Lanza’s name. The car was later identified as a black Honda, also registered in her name. More weapons have since been introduced to the story but we’ll get back to those later on.
Besides anonymous ‘law enforcement officials’ telling the media that Adam Lanza was a former pupil at the school, they also said his mother was currently a teacher there, that she was found among the dead and that her son had specifically sought out her classroom first. But when it emerged that teaching staff at the school had never heard of a Nancy Lanza, it was suggested that she was a substitute teacher whose name therefore mightn’t appear on staff lists.
But this claim too has disappeared down the memory hole because it’s now known that Nancy had no connection with the school. Adam Lanza was in fact home-schooled. Nancy Lanza has since been painted as a “survivalist” who loved firearms, taught her sons how to shoot and was “stockpiling” because she was “worried about economic collapse.”
Daily Mail, UK
December 16, 2012
Last night it also emerged Nancy was a member of the Doomsday Preppers movement, which believes people should prepare for end of the world.
Her former sister-in-law Marsha said she had turned her home ‘into a fortress’. She added: ‘Nancy had a survivalist philosophy which is why she was stockpiling guns. She had them for defense.
‘She was stockpiling food. She grew up on a farm in New Hampshire. She was skilled with guns. We talked about preppers and preparing for the economy collapsing.’
It’s not difficult to see that their efforts to insinuate that Nancy Lanza was somehow responsible for this massacre by being an irresponsible mother also serve to rile the large contingent of gun owners in the country, particularly the far-right who see a conspiracy on the government’s part to “take back our guns.” More on that later, but for now I just want to note that all of the Lanza family members seemed to live more or less normal middle-class lives. Yes, the parents were divorced, but it was apparently amicable and both put their own needs second to those of their children (and anyway, divorce in the US these days is decidedly ‘normal middle class’).
Despite “family insiders” claiming that he was a “deeply disturbed kid”, Adam Lanza, like so many other alleged ‘lone(r) gunmen’ before him, does not fit the profile of a mass-murdering maniac. His 24-year-old brother, Ryan Lanza, said he hadn’t seen his brother since 2010. This fact brings into question Ryan’s claim that his younger brother may have had his identity card on his person at the school shooting. Although perhaps the question that needs to be asked here is, why would a person bother to carry identification with them after going to the trouble of dressing up in a bullet-proof vest, mask and black camouflage gear and going on a killing spree …
The live emergency services audio feed from the scene reveals some interesting observations from first responders that have been completely overlooked by the mainstream media. Note that the unedited version lasts over two hours, so the abridged version I’m going to quote from has a compressed sequence of events that are not in real time. In this abridged version, we hear at 1.38′ a report that gunfire is still being heard, even though the shooting was supposed to have ended by the time police arrived. The next report at 2.35′ says that the shooting has stopped and the school is “in lockdown”. At 3.23′, the police relay a teacher’s report that she saw “two shadows running past the gym”. This is followed by another officer on the scene who says, “Yeh, we got ‘em, they’re coming at me! … [inaudible] … coming up the driveway real slowly!” That same officer at 5.40′ says he has them “proned out”, which presumably means he has apprehended them and they are laid out on the ground, before another officer comes on to say, “be aware that we do have a second [inaudible] …”
Later on, at 19.10′, an officer who sounds out of breath, like he’s just given chase, reports what I think sounds like “these guys” followed certainly by “multiple weapons, including long rifles and shotgun”. If these were found so early on, why were they not included in the initial press reports which stated that three firearms had been found – the above mentioned Glock, Sig Sauer and Bushmaster AR-15 rifle? Further conflicting, and possibly planted evidence was thrown into the mix by ‘law enforcement officials’ when they published video footage of a long weapon being retrieved from the trunk of a car. Look closely and you’ll see that it’s a shotgun, not a rifle. In addition, this ‘discovery’ was made late in the day (it’s dark outside), while the Bushmaster rifle was first reported found “in the trunk of a car” much earlier in the day. This would logically suggest that the rifle and shotgun were found in the trunks of two different cars.
Besides the above two suspects “proned out” in front of the school, another suspected gunman was apprehended after he gave chase, this time in the woods next to the school:
YouTube - Veterans Today -
The police are clearly chasing someone whom they appear to apprehend in the middle of the woods next to the school, a fact confirmed by several eyewitnesses:
YouTube - Veterans Today -
This fleeing suspect, wearing camouflage gear, a bulletproof vest and armed with four guns, has since disappeared from media coverage. Who was this person and how did he know what “it” was when he protested that “I didn’t do it”?
Perhaps most astonishingly, this suspect arrested in the woods was named in an Associated Press report as 24-year-old Ryan Lanza. The original report has long since vanished of course, but you can see it referenced here. This was despite the fact that Ryan had already been named as the deceased suspect inside the school, lying next to two handguns.
Ryan Lanza was actually at work in Hoboken, New Jersey, that morning when his name and photo began circulating in the media. And so, for most of Friday, the ‘lone shooter’ was erroneously reported as “Ryan Lanza, confirmed dead.” At the same time, we were being told that Ryan’s girlfriend and a room-mate were reported missing, also from Hoboken, New Jersey.
So this isn’t just a case of mistaken identity, as later claimed when it was suggested that Adam had a piece of identification belonging to his brother on his person. Not one, but BOTH Lanza brothers were being placed by ‘law enforcement officials’ at the scene of the shooting. It could be that Ryan’s quick reflexes to leave his workplace to get on a bus to go back to his apartment while protesting innocence via his Facebook page may have saved his life.
Now remember, all of this confusion somehow resulted from a single guy going into a school and shooting children and teachers and then shooting himself, all within three to five minutes. Surely it should have been fairly easy to rapidly and concretely identify the details of such a crime and a rough layout of the scene?
What it’s starting to look like is that the Lanzas were framed for this mass shooting in advance. Long before any suspects were named, and even as we were being told that Nancy Lanza was among the dead at the school, we were told that police were investigating a murder in … Hoboken, New Jersey, where a body had been found at the home of … Ryan Lanza! An older “confirmed” version of events had RYAN, not Adam, travelling to Hoboken that morning to murder his father before going to the school in Newtown, Connecticut. Other variants had Ryan OR Adam going to both their divorced parents’ homes and killing them before going to the school.
The narrative has now settled on the younger brother killing his mother in Newtown then going to the school. So what about the rest of it? Do we just put it down to ‘keen’ journalism that was having a field day last Friday as media outlets sought to bring us the latest ‘breaking news’? Confusion and ‘Chinese whispers’ undoubtedly play a part in the early stages of national media events, but I think back to those news anchors reading scripts about Osama Bin Laden within minutes of the first plane being hit on 9/11 and I think, ‘Wait a minute!’ All these misleading reports had to have been issued by someone or some people “confirming” to Associated Press and other media outlets that the Ryans’s father had been murdered [he wasn't even aware that the shooting at the school had taken place until journalists turned up on his doorstep], or that Ryan’s girlfriend had gone missing from Hoboken, or that either Ryan or Adam were pulled out of the adjacent woods in handcuffs yelling “I DIDN’T DO IT” to assembled parents. These aren’t just ‘little details’ that can be confused for other details, these are detailed narratives. So how, or why, would any member of the press come up with such details? They strike me as a set of alternative scenarios that might have found their way into the official narrative had facts on the ground turned out differently.
Watch this snippet of State Police Lt. Paul Vance at the press conference he gave the day after the shootings. His answer is as bizarre as it is revealing. When asked whether Nancy Lanza had any connection with the school, he replied defensively about something that is both unrelated and arguably the most significant fact that completely undermines the official narrative: the arrest of a second gunman in the woods:
YouTube - Veterans Today -
Most of the initial mainstream media reports have since been rewritten to fit ‘new’ facts proclaimed by ‘law enforcement officials’. Here’s an example from Business Insider. The following excerpts are the opening paragraphs from the ‘same’ article, one earlier original version, followed by the later revised version:
The massacre [...] was reportedly perpetrated with a .233 caliber rifle, a Glock pistol and a Sig Sauer pistol.
The Bushmaster rifle was found in the trunk of the shooter’s car. The Sig Sauer and Glock pistols were the only weapons used in the shooting, according to CBS. Now the question is what kind of magazine would allow a shooter to fire “100″ rounds in such a short period.
Indeed, I was wondering the same thing. How could two pistols do so much damage? The report was updated as follows:
The massacre in Connecticut that’s taken the lives of at least 26 people was reportedly perpetrated with a .223 caliber rifle, a Glock pistol and a Sig Sauer pistol, according to NBC:
The shooter was using one Sig Sauer and one Glock pistol, according to CNN. Later details emerged that the primary weapon was the Bushmaster “assault-style” rifle.
Altogether, though, it doesn’t matter what type of weapon the shooter used. The bottom line is that it was likely a magazine fed, semi-automatic, with enough rounds to shoot “100 shots” in a matter of minutes, as quoted in USA Today.
What actually happened may not matter to some, but surely a journalist’s role is to at least try to find out?
The three guns Adam Lanza is supposed to have brought to the school with him. © New York Daily News. The rifle was left in the trunk, leaving ‘Adam Lanza’ just the two handguns to let off “hundreds of rounds”… firing .233 caliber bullets that belonged to the rifle… which was left in the car
This Associated Press/Newsday article on Saturday, December 15th, reported that “Only the rifle was used on the victims“, a statement that is supported by Dr. H. Wayne Carver II, Connecticut state’s chief medical examiner. Of the seven autopsies he personally performed on Sandy Hook victims, all of them had “three to 11 wounds apiece”. He also said that the ‘gunman’ used a military-style rifle rigged to quickly reload, and that the ‘shooter’ was able to reload so quickly because he had “taped two magazines together.” Even before the State Chief Medical Examiner had given these statements, it had been stated that spent shell casings from .233-caliber (rifle) bullets were found inside the school.
So all the victims’ wounds were the result of rifle-fire, specifically from “the rifle”, the one we were told in early reports was found in the trunk of a car in the parking lot! This is simply not credible.
Remember that only “the rifle” was used on all the victims. If only this rifle was used, and if we try to make this claim fit into the (admittedly fluid) official version of events, then the alleged lone gunman would have had to leave the school, place the rifle back in his trunk, then return inside the school and shoot himself. No one reported any such maneuver on the part of any gunman or gunmen. What we do have, however, is live emergency services radio feed in which we hear that two men have been apprehended and are “proned out” AND live video footage supported by eyewitness testimony showing what appears to be a THIRD man being arrested by police in the woods.
We can see how the authorities’ hands are tied because they need to fit all the facts into the usual ‘lone gunman’ narrative. For that, there can only be ONE rifle and a couple of handguns. The problem is that they have already claimed to find that solitary Bushmaster rifle in the trunk of a car in the school parking lot, so the earliest police reports of a cache of long arms being found inside the school will no longer fit with the lone gunman narrative, especially as they’re now saying that he had already opened fire as he burst into the school.
Could “scrawny” 20-year-old Adam Lanza have stormed the school, solo Rambo-style, while carrying “multiple long arms, including rifles and shotguns”? Only one person was wounded. Everyone else who was shot was killed. How could Adam Lanza achieve such deadly accuracy, in such a short length of recorded time?
Initial reports put the beginning of the shooting in the school administrators’ office, where someone, reportedly the school principal, had a confrontation with the gunman(men). We know this because someone supposedly turned on the school intercom system, alerting the teaching staff to the loud swearing and commotion in the principal’s office and probably saving many more children from being gunned down as teachers took measures to hide the children in closets.
Similarly heavily armed men wearing black combat gear from head to toe… their job is to kill ‘terrorists’ to keep us safe, which they do by terrorising us all
One brave teacher, Kaitlin Roig, bundled a bunch of children into a bathroom and locked the door. What’s interesting about her testimony to ABC News is that when police arrived and asked her to open the door, she refused, saying that “if they were really cops, they’d know where to find keys to open the door.” In addition, she requested that they slide their badges under the door.
Now, this is generally a smart thing to do in any and all interactions with the police, especially in the U.S. But to have the wherewithal to do so under such traumatic circumstances strongly suggests that Ms. Roig had logically deduced by that point that multiple perpetrators were involved, and that they were either impersonating police officers or were indistinguishable from SWAT team police commandos, either in the way they dressed or the way they behaved upon entering the building. It also reminds us just how narrow the time window of the actual shooting was. The shooting appears to have barely ended when men knocked on that bathroom door and told Ms. Roig they were police.
There are also conflicting reports about how the gunmen entered the building. We were told initially that they came in through the main front entrance and proceeded straight to the administrators’/principal’s offices. But Sandy Hook elementary school has a security system with a video monitor, which allows staff to screen visitors before buzzing them in. A “masked gunman dressed in black tactical combat gear” from head to toe would kinda raise red flags, don’t you think?
Another possible anomaly is that Victoria Soto, one of the teachers killed at the school, appears to have had an ‘in memoriam’ Facebook page created in her name four days before the shooting.
Regarding this alleged ‘LIBOR scandal’ connection between this shooting and the Aurora theater shooting, there is as yet zero evidence to support the claim that either father of Lanza or Holmes were going to testify to anyone about anything, so for now this must remain just another rumor. I rather think that this is being spread to create the impression of a direct link that can be easily refuted, as in a straw man argument. The obvious and direct link staring everyone in the face is that the official accounts of these events are hocus-pocus. The glaring connection between these two shootings, the Sikh Temple shooting and the Fort Hood shooting is that multiple gunmen were reported at the time by eyewitnesses, but they are now all officially claimed to have been carried out by ‘lone gunmen’. This logically tells us that the real perpetrators are being protected with cover stories of what really happened because if the truth were known, some section of the U.S. government would be implicated.
Wade Michael Page, the ‘lone gunman’ in the Sikh Temple shooting in Wisconsin in August this year, was a highly decorated U.S. army psychological operations specialist, according to the Pentagon. But what happened to the three other gunmen seen by witnesses? It can’t surely be coincidence that Wade was (former?) military psy-ops. The thought has crossed my mind more than once during the aftermath of the Connecticut shooting. Others too have suggested this was a ‘false-flag’ event, or that Lanza was some sort of Manchurian Candidate.
But maybe there’s a simpler explanation (albeit more outrageous) than that? Was that really Adam Lanza they found inside the school? Do we even know for a fact that one of the gunmen was found dead inside the school? What we have instead are reports of two or three masked gunmen, apparently all dressed similarly in black tactical gear from head to toe, being wilfully forgotten about at best, or protected by the Federal Government at worst. Based on the authorities’ persistent but futile efforts to connect the Lanzas to this school, the multiple eyewitness reports of two shooters, the Connecticut State Medical Examiner’s report that all the victims were riddled with bullets from a rifle that we’re simultaneously being asked to believe was in the trunk of a car the whole time, similar reports of multiple shooters in previous mass shootings in recent years and the media focusing the emotional outcry onto the hot-button topic of gun control … I’m left wondering if this was actually the work of some highly trained professional hit team?
Was the massacre at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, a psy-op, using what amounts to a ‘death squad’ and a carefully planned mission to terrorise people on behalf of the government, in combination with perception management to shape the narrative and vector the emotional fallout?
Gun control isn’t really the issue here. Control – period – is the issue. The U.S. government would long since have taken measures, quietly, to limit the supply of weapons, the 2nd Amendment of the constitution be damned (it’s “just a goddamned piece of paper“, remember?), if it was really concerned with limiting civilian access to weapons. That we’ve seen gun sales increase in the last few days to the point where Wal-Mart is all out of assault rifles is wholly unsurprising.
The psychopaths in power have absolutely no compunction about using state terrorism, in this case organising the deliberate massacre of innocent children, to control people. In effect, this is little different from what the U.S. government calls counter-insurgency or counter-terrorism in foreign countries, where it attacks innocent civilians to create the impression that they were killed by ‘communists’, ‘terrorists’, ‘insurgents’ or ‘militants’, with the aim of generating public support for the illusion that the common people need a strong, ruthless government to protect them from the ‘evil-doers’. When the common people buy into this manipulation, the end result, as history shows repeatedly, is an overt and brutal police state.

Creating Gods

2012-12-24T22:51:00.001-05:00

Seated in a little red brick church in a non-descript little town in the Great Northwest for a Christmas Eve service. We watch as a pastor calls all the children up from the pews to come sit down in a circle around her in the front of the church for what she calls 'story time'. It was already well past 7PM on Christmas Eve. One could only imagine how impatient the children were feeling, being so close to the midnight hour when Santa Claus is supposed to come barreling down their chimneys to drop off all the presents they'd asked for this year. As adults we could still feel the excitement of the children as they were asked to sit very still and participate in a 'raise your hands when I ask' question and answer session. Nonetheless, excitement and all, the kids did a decent job of trying to remain quiet and listen, speaking only when they were called on. They sat on a carpeted floor in a circle around the female pastor, surrounded by decorative wreaths, christmas trees, burning candles, colorful stockings and other holiday knickknacks.

The stated purpose of this children's moment was for the kids, ranging in age from 3 to about 11, to open various wrapped presents that would act as hints while the pastor asked them leading questions in order to prod the traditional birth of Jesus story out of them. Of course the children were much more interested in what was inside each successive gift that would get ripped open than they were in any story telling, but the pastor stayed firm and persisted in trying to prod the story and all of its details out of them. One assumes the moment was for the pleasure and benefit of the adults in the congregation who had children with them. Little by little the pastor, a non-descript female appearing to be in her late thirties with short dark hair and glasses and wearing a solid black robe, was able to guide the children to work their way through the entire story; from Mary's first angel visitation to the great hejira from Nazareth to Bethlehem to the eventual birth of the baby Jesus to the climactic visit of the three wise men (or Kings) who had traveled from the far off Middle East to come pay their respects for the newborn. The process took close to forty minutes, or so it seemed.

Observing the moment objectively, from the stands so to speak, I could not help but feel for these kids. Christmas is confusing and stimulating enough what with all the strange myths and legends that surround the big day, not to mention all the contradictory information and media hype that compete for our attention during this strange holiday.

On the one hand Christmas is all about a fat white man with curly long hair and a beard who wears a red felt suit and who goes by numerous different names, Santa Clause, Kris Kringle, jolly Saint Nick, Saint Nicholas, who mysteriously jumps down off your roof and into your family's chimney in the middle of the night to give you presents; save for those children whose homes don't happen to have fireplaces or chimneys. Christmas Day is all about the enormity and excitement of that incredible early morning when you awake to find boundless and bountiful presents under a tree your parents have placed smack dab in the middle of your living room. The tree is usually never explained. Neither are the flying reindeer or the miraculous ability of this one man to know exactly what you want or how he manages to sweep through hundreds of millions of chimneys in a matter of less than a few hours. No. As long as you're a good person, as deemed by the ostensibly jolly and all seeing fat man, you'll get the goods. And for many years that's all that matters when we are children. When we don't receive everything we asked Santa for, the story begins to break down in our young minds immediately, but we do our best to build up defenses to rational thinking about this fact and try our best to keep believing.

On the other hand the adults around us seem very keen to get us to believe that Christmas is all about the birth of this little baby half way around the world who we are supposed to worship as a god. Despite his humble and meager beginnings, or perhaps because of them, we are led to believe that this odd little baby who we know next to nothing about is not only the son of a god, but is a god himself, but in human form. God of the entire universe and everything in it. He is all powerful, knows everything, and is capable of reading the minds and thoughts of everyone in the world. He is also in control of everything that happens to us throughout our entire lifetime. THAT they claim is the true meaning of Christmas. Not Santa, not presents, not Rudolph the red nosed reindeer, not Frosty the snowman and not that strange tree in the living room. Why else would our parents make us go to church every year on the evening before Christmas day and recite this odd story of the little baby's birth... He's the reason for the season. And just in case we forget that fact, we are repeatedly asked to recite the story of this child's birth and all its strange and contradictory facts and details, both in private and in public, until it appears we believe it wholeheartedly and without a shadow of doubt.

Somehow this seems to tie in to our being entitled to receive a lot of presents each year. It isn't difficult to understand how and why we as children are so eager to memorize the details of this story, nor why we so readily profess to believe it. It isn't just about presents and toys and clothes and stockings stuffed with more goodies, it's also a matter of approval. We are never asked how we feel about the story, or what we think about it. Rather we are blanketly advised that regardless of how we might feel about it that it's what we believe. Why? Because it's what our parents believe. It's what our siblings and neighbors believe. It's what the whole world believes. Or so they should.

The only problem is that as we get older, and not that much older, we begin to learn that the whole world doesn't believe this story. Nor do they believe that the little baby born in the barn is a god. In fact most people in the world don't even celebrate Christmas. They have their own holidays. With their own stories and their own gods. They too are tempted with gifts and approval if they memorize these ancient stories and profess to believe them. Perhaps they too go to churches as children and sit in circles around men and women in black robes and are made to recite god stories by candlelight in order to receive love and attention and approval and the material things they want most. Just like us.

As I watched the children finally let loose from the front of the church begin to slowly walk down the center aisle to rejoin their parents in the church pews, I recognized with sadness and dismay how small, cute and innocent these children were, how young and vulnerable, how eager they are for attention and approval. They'd profess to believing in anything as long as it meant home, security, safety, acceptance, camaraderie with others and love. What choice do they have? They're dependent on these adults in this room for their very survival, for everything from the clothes on their bodies to the food that sustains their life, from their education to the bed they sleep in each night. What else are they to believe about life and the universe except what their parents teach them? So it goes for these beautiful children in this small wooden church in the middle of nowhere USA. And so it goes for nearly every other child on planet earth, albeit with different gods and different stories. Who is to fault them?

Yet who are they? They are us when we are children. All of us, no matter where we are born or grow up. All wanting the same things out of life. Love, compassion, empathy, acceptance, safety and security, smiles of approval and gentle pats on the backs, little hugs and big hugs and someone to tuck us into bed at night and give us a few kisses. It's no wonder we claim to believe what we are told to. We continue to perpetuate the creation of these gods not because we believe them to be true, or believe it to be necessarily a good thing to do, or a right thing, or a just cause. But simply because our very survival seems to depend on it.

How I Can Believe

2012-12-18T04:33:00.001-05:00

You asked me how I can believe that any good can come out of teaching "human sacrifice" to children... referring to Christmas. Such is the nature of rampant Personal Expression on social media. Personally I don't mind it and 99% of the time find it a helpful new aspect of our collective evolution. Inquiring minds want to know. Critical minds want to criticize. Somewhere in between most all of us surely exist. It's a valid question. Christmas is after all one fucked up if not groovy scene. A buffet table of the best and worst of humanity's confused collected consciousness. All mashed together, one giant mind boggling mass of culture clash and historical inaccuracies. It's no wonder younger generations have no idea what or why Christmas is other than parties and presents. How can anyone believe? That should be the question. Just what the hell are we believing in at this point anyway? Christmas trees, Christmas parties, Christmas songs, Christmas presents, Christmas concerts, Christmas music videos, Christmas Music Channels, bell choirs, White Christmas, angels singing, sleigh bells ringing, Midnight Mass, Santa Claus, the First Noel, Advent, Yule, reindeer, stockings filled with trinkets hung over whatever you've got, egg nog, fruit cake, the Grinch who stole Christmas, Frosty the Snowman, Rudolph and his red nose... And then there's Hanukkah. Indeed, Christmas is a mess.

And at the heart of all stands a dead man strung up and hanging on a cross of wood; or an angelic little baby sleeping on a bed full of straw in a barn full of animals and a few kings, or wise men, depending on who you believe. So yeah, I hear you. Loud and clear. Christmas is as fucked as it gets when it comes to human invention. Never mind that Jesus the man wasn't born anywhere near December. That will only make it worse.

How I can believe... That's the only way that I can begin to answer your question. I cannot speak about the abomination of confusing symbolism, hyperbolic materialsm and commercial exploitation that Christmas has turned into in the public eye. But only what this "human sacrifice" angle means to me. But before we venture too far forward, permit me to correct the very heart of your query without dismissing it. Christmas itself, at its core, has nothing to do with the "human sacrifice" element of Pagan-Christianity. That's Easter. Just a fact check. Christmas as it was originally designed, as I am sure you already know, was a celebration of the birth of Jesus the man; put in the place of Yule, the Winter Solstice and several other Roman and Pagan holidays that took place on December 25th. It has nothing to do with his death, or "sacrifice" as you call it.

An intelligent man wouldn't throw a kitten into a den full of wolves (at least not a kind one), as my entry into this public admission will be akin to, but I've never claimed to be as intelligent as I am crazy. So with mild trepidation I am going to answer your question as openly and honestly as I can.

In short, I can offer this as a practicing Christian myself, I've been on all sides of the debate, from agnostic to Hindu to Islam to Jew and everywhere in between. So I know where you are. Human religion and spiritual thought has always fascinated me for some reason. But then again everything fascinates me. In regard to your specific query my friend, I too had the same ruminations early on, which led to my abdication of the Christian title as a teenager (like most). Tried on all sorts of hats and titles. Some search. Some don't. Those who search are obviously looking for something. I was. Clearly. Searching for what we arbitrarily call God, though we could just as easily call it Source or The Force, The Great Spirit, Infinite Intelligence, Awareness of All That is, et al. Something deeper. Try as I might to stay far away from the wickedness which I dubbed the Catholic Church and Christianity in general, God -- the Christian God-- just wouldn't leave me alone.

I was deeply spiritual anyway. There was no escaping that. So after 25 years of absence and abstinence, and a whole lot of public rebelling against the whole lot, I decided to take this Force up on it's numerous offers and invitations. I entered a typical Christian church on a typical corner in Manhattan after hearing a voice in my head or heart whisper an invitation for me to do so and I sat down without expectation. Within a minute or two I had drifted into some kind of altered state, hypnotic, akin to the deeper stages of an LSD trip one could say. I had never felt so good before. Had never felt so loved. So blissed out. I wasn't praying. Nor asking for anything. I thought I was there to see the architecture to be honest.

When I came to a few minutes later I realized I was smiling from ear to ear. Like a silly fool. I felt embarrassed at first. But was feeling too ecstatic from the feeling to care who saw me. I just wanted it to last. I sat perfectly still. Afraid the feeling would leave me too soon for my own liking. "This is God's love Ed," I heard. "What you feel is God's love for you Ed. God loves you so so much..." This went on for ten minutes or so. Who knows. Time in those rare instances of grace... Well, I couldn't deny what I had experienced. Ten years prior I was the most devout Buddhist/Hindu/Krishna devotee a God could ask for; abstinence, chanting, vegetarian, you name it. But I had never experienced anything close to this new experience of spiritual transcendence I'd just had in the church before in my life. I had to admit I was caught by something much bigger than my incredible mind.

As an agnostic, the combination of my intellect and my collected knowledge of all things philosophical and theological made me any religious person's worst nightmare. But this experience had me by the balls. It was beyond my perceived power of intellect or intelligence. I finally discovered what all the fuss was about. And it didn't take waking up at dawn to do yoga and meditate everyday. In fact from what I was hearing on a regular basis from that point forward (yes, voices in the head egads -- hearing/feeling/intuiting if you will) this God force didn't care if I ate meat or had sex or chanted or shaved my head... He was after something much bigger than any of that. There was only one problem. What to do about that Jesus character... That was going to be an issue for me. To be sure. How could I attend this church and commune with these people and continue to take hits off their smoking bowl of ecstasy when I knew damn well that I had a host of problems with the primary figure of the whole foundation of their system? After all wasn't Jesus the guest of honor at these glorious celebrations that I was now regularly participating in?

Well the story is long from my first dip in the pool to my eventual full dive head first. I struggled with it for years. Reading didn't help. (It never does). There was only one thing to do if I were ever going to get to a real stage of complete integration and understanding of what Jesus was all about, if anything at all. Pray. And I don't mean in any specific way according to any prescribed or preconceived manmade methods or rules. For me it was a very personal connecting with the original Source of that love and bliss that I was feeling closer and closer to everyday. And the prayer was simple. "God it's me. If there's anything to know about the Jesus thing please grant me access to that knowledge. I just want to understand. That's all I ask. If there's nothing to it and there's nothing to know then so be it. You've still got me."

I wish I could say I saw lightening followed by an apparition of some type three minutes later. But I didn't. Instead mine was a slow coming to understand. It wasn't of the mind -- for its beyond comprehension in a literal temporal sense of the word. So there's no sense in trying to look for proof of anything remotely related to the life and legends of Jesus' short life on earth. It's a feel thing. You either get it, grace, or you don't. That's why the graceful man never enters into debate regarding "the god delusion illusion". To rally vehemently against it is just as foolhardy as to rally zealously for it. Both paths are un-provable extremes carried out by small minds, even among the most noble among us (Hitch for example). Nope. The paranormal, the miraculous, the transcendent... for now at least, all exceed the mind's ability to understand in concrete linear fundamental terms. They're experienced.

I eventually got the hit, or hits, I was searching for regarding "this Jesus thing". On an Easter Sunday no less. And it was every bit as experientially impossible to relay with words to the mind as it was transcendental and fulfilling. To me it came down to a simple man who tried as hard as he could to wake the world of men up to the fact that they could live in peace, that they are loved beyond measure and unconditionally, that their perceived sins are forgiven by and through this miraculous love, and that they didn't need to live in fear or shame or guilt or envy or selfishness (the root cause of many if not all of our problems here).

When it became apparent that this world of men were more interested in wealth and winning (defeating the Romans), he took a different route, a plan B if you will, a much harder road. He allowed them the honor of believing if for a brief few days that his mission was for naught and that his power was small by showing them the ultimate act of sacrifice and courage: nonviolent pacifism and surrender. No matter what they did to him he did not fight back or attempt to hurt them in return. So the story goes. And this is where we must bid adieu to the thinking mind (and I don't fault any man for not being willing to do this). Jesus knew something the rest of them didn't. That through this divine connection with this Force, that he would transcend death itself, that his death would be short lived. And that very soon they would believe in a way that even they wouldn't be able to fathom.

At that time in history sacrifices were the way of the land. If you wanted to get to God you sacrificed something. Jesus taught these people that these sacrifices were no longer necessary. But being a stubborn bunch they just could not bring themselves to believe him. So as it was predicted in their holy books of old (old testament) He became the sacrifice himself; so not only would they have a better understanding of who he was -- through this culturally normal practice -- and how they might be able to get to their God faster than sacrificing a lamb or goat every few days, perhaps they would also understand that they need not sacrifice at all any longer. It was a brilliant act. Shakespearean. Through his example of non-violence no one could ever again say we need to take up arms and go to war; and through his sacrifice no one would ever need feel so bad about themselves or their misdeeds that they would feel compelled to do themselves or another any harm.

I felt the reality of that notion for the first time that Easter Sunday. Felt it. Not thought it. It was only a few minutes later did I begin to think about it. What a feeling. What a miraculously clean and joyful feeling. To shed all that baggage. To let go of all that asserting my rightness because I felt so buried in all my wrongness. Freedom. The message of his act was a simple one. You are free. You are loved. Enjoy what you have and who you are. God does. And so it was. For me at least. Hope this helps. Now I must sleep.
Peace, Fishy