Playing Publicly

Been playing music publicly since Santa Fe.  Once I returned to Bloomington, despite the huge difference between Hoosiers and the people of The Land of Enchantment, I simply floated around playing music (and feeling pretty foolish!) until I became as accustomed to playing in my home town (these days) as I was in Santa Fe.  AND, became as recognized by the locals as I was in Santa Fe.  It's been lovely.  Though, people in Indiana (even Bloomington) DONT want folks on the sidewalk performing.  Even if you don't accept tips, they call you a panhandler.  I have been harassed a bit.  I tell myself to be pleased that I have not been outright abused, generally.  And that I should be pleased folks like the music.  To say the least, I am pleased and delighted by the folks of our odd Hoosier town. 

It's been a big delight sharing with people of every description.... music makes a man seem a warm apparition of sensible delight.  I have been slow to appreciate the social rewards, spiritual rewards and other sorts of rewards the disguise proffers me.  Joy is not so terrible, I suppose.

In any case... it's nice to share a bit.  I shall try to remember that.

Holdin'

Holdin'

(play song)

Sittin' in your very own chair

Theres probably a very nice moon up there

But right now, Lord, I really

Need that roof

I've takin my share of

The good and the bad

Still got the scars

From some awful blows

I'm still sittin, but

Sometimes it's time to go

Sitiin' near somebody

That needs my ear

They been watching my

Disaster, now, for years

But they're closer than the blood

In the veins of the folks 

Who left me

Reachin' for the simple things

That any man might need

Driftin' from the fact that 

My heart's controlled by greed

I guess a losers got to do

The very thing he wishes

He doesn't need

Cookin' for this crowd of folks

Who'd rather be alone

Asking after every broken

Soul I've ever known

Praying while some smiling

Fool spins some cherries 

Into Gold... Baby that's a fortune, sure

One I've never known

Holdin' in the middle of the night

The hand of  you, honey,

Cus' you crossed my mind

Why'd you whisper in my ear

The sort of thing some folks never hear

Why'd you whisper in my ear

The sort of thing some folks never hear

You'd be surprised the non-sense I'll endure

Just to have my baby near

You'd be surprised how much I don't 

Deserve you dear

Holdin'

Holdin'

Holdin'

Holdin'

Near the Graveyard Where Chestnuts are Gone

River valley farm fields

Early spring time

Cus' you can't help but stare

You drown the engine 

To the soft purr of barely goin'

Hardly anyone wants to get somewhere

In this place nobody knows

You broke my heart when we were

Barely grown

But baby somehow I could see

So I begged you not to leave 

One day, honey, could we lay

Beneath the stones?

Hand in hand, down the street 

Once again, around the bend

Sometimes these days you simply 

Turn to me and grin

We're too damn old to need to 

Pay someone to watch a babe

So our joints can creak us all the way

To our same old place for a date

I know I'll never be as good

As you were dreamin'

One day you could be in love 

But the stars are stuck in 

The same damn constellation

As when we fought in Paris

As when we kissed in Louisville

I'm sorry you're on the ground here 

With me... instead of far above

You broke my heart, love

When we were barely grown

But baby, somehow I could see

So I begged you not to leave

One day, love, could we lay

Beneath the stones

Your Mamma used to look

At me and sigh

She knew that she had nothin' much

To worry with this guy

I guess she asked you why you were

Willing to waste your beauty 

On a fool

Man it took a long long time

To prove the cruel

Way I begged you home

You broke my heart, love

When we were barely grown

But baby, somehow I could see

So I begged you not to leave

One day, love, could we lay

Beneath the stones

Guess I'll finish my water

Honey, you done with your wine?

We'll take the long way home

Near the graveyard where Chestnuts are gone

You know I love it when you scream

Big ole kiss... from the same

Son of a Bitch,

Who couldn't fool you in his dreams

The woods is reachin'

Straight over the road

Through the winter trees

We can see the fog on the gravestones

Somehow I got to spend a little time in this life

With a stranger who one day was called my wife

We'll be there soon, but hon, not alone

You broke my heart, love

When we were barely grown

But baby, somehow I could see

So I begged you not to leave

One day, love, we will lay

Beneath the stones

You broke my heart, love

When we were barely grown

But baby, somehow I could see

So I begged you not to leave

One day, love, we will lay

Beneath the stones

"Have not" Ain't a Grammer I Can Hew To

It would surprise most people little that there exist opportunities in the land of opportunity.  Perhaps it would surprise a person born in the US that under different circumstances they would regard being in the US and living the life of a struggling normal US citizen as a benefit worthy of some effort.  Until I lived in a town bisected by the Rio Grande, I had a habit of saying, "I know which side of the river I am on."  I turns out that my habit made some sense philosophically, but geographically was ignorant.

This, it turns out, is a useful door, as narratives go, to the purpose of my typing today.  Number one, happily, opportunities exist.  Number two, not so happily, ignorance of universal rights and spiritual grace can pollute and degrade even the most earnest individuals spirit... rendering, someone gesturing at beautiful light falling on all of us, into a canny survivalist with dreams barely discernable from a grindstone.

Cute discussions of people in the US often treat numbers and physical descriptions of people like they are Stanley tools: practical and symbolic devices which will get a job done.  It seems a barely noticable side step from grand concepts like "majority rule" to step into a flatland of spreadsheets showing who is being ruled and to what extent they will rule.... live... establish the morays of culture delightful and humanely unpredictable.  Running the numbers, unlike running the bulls, is no paradigm of unruly ecstasy.  Running the numbers is more like running blood, running sweat and tears running down faces of beings who share what I have always been allowed to enjoy... but, have been nearly broken due to an awareness of a range of mountains soaring proudly between the travels of people in their valley and the sun.  Shadowed by an otherwise beautiful display, the conventional world rockin in the USA, you know the profane and sacred fact of our Western emergence:  random actors, groups of unusual dissent, churches of conventional and conservative souls with an open door to the most foolishly living people passing through. The range of mountains between the sun and shadowed valley, cast their shadow due to a subtle lack of reason.  The sun is ius naturale; natural light.  The sun belongs to the whole of terra firmas activities which depend on any phenomena that occur above absolute zero.  For the happy alternate universe where everything is at absolute zero... ius naturale can be treated as over exposure indeed.  However, our hands probe in the entrails of the principles of natural light.  Holding a fading Geranium blossom we inhale the musk of the leaves pressing one between two fingers and bewildered simultaneously by the cardinal optics and the airborne hydrocarbons.  For what purpose this?  One flower can do that.  Men do not bear flowers.  Men do not open the genetic machinery and truly reach the foreman level of engineer with the simplest of plants machinery.  Men depend as desperately upon the tissue of a cell wall as the rubiks cube of a cells genes.  Every part of every plant and animal is held in the gentle hands of some creator.  Call the creator whomever you wish.  She/He/It--- Our Father, tangle with the simplest of creation.  Tumbling from the phenomenology of the spinning planets and patient urgency of the Sun's Hydrogen is a wreath running through everything, everyone and all.  Through the sink to clean your dishes, just as through the glass that holds your mold brewed beer, just as through the pipes that are there by necessity, just as in the Pond where you only cast for orange gold.  The scales and quick anxiety of the fish hold natural light... your hands move with no more thought than the blood in your aorta.  It has simply been the practice of man to amble toward a target of natural life and register surprise with the aid of a ruler.  What is nice to tell your friends, need not be thoughtful to the wreathe of our temperate networked realm.  The circles come off our fishermans cast lure, in the plane of the ponds surface a nod to the fishermans unerring tendency to avoid depressing shadowed valleys.  Circles like the Earth describes, but with an odd way of every part of the circles being related to every other part of the circle, even as the parts travel and broaden the circle--- hewing to a fixed speed, distance and shape.  Just a cast of the lure, might say the fisherman, "what's the point... they ain't biting today."

Opportunity.  Some say it knocks.  Any scene can be seen by a vast diversity of perspectives.  Take your face.  Maybe you have never much enjoyed a mirror.  Maybe you enjoy mirrors too much.  Perhaps you think you are old... odd.... ugly.... or you have lost a morphological equity that when you hadn't lost it you appreciated hardly at all.  Then again, maybe you just think you are God's gift to the human race... and kittens and puppies too.  Good for you.

Next time you stand in font of your bathroom mirror.  Whatever you think of the mortal you see on that flat apparatus, do me a favor.  Take your index finger and hold it up to the stranger that is the part of you you never chose.  Sign, not the bird, but the wait a minute index finger universal gesture.  And, whether the mirror is conveinently fogged, or crystal clear, touch your reflection lightly.  Once, then again.  First you held your finger up to get the attention of this chariot for your soul.  So much on our mind!  This is no joke.  First ask for some permission.  Then, touch that bodily reservoir of natural lights phenomenons.  Phenomenology.  Lovely word. In short, in a word "phenomenal."  Why say I this?  Because there is so very much you do not need to take trouble learning about that reflection.  True, it, the reflection is pretty close to a description of the tempting neighborhood in a good school district called [your name] Heights.  And true, you know a lot about that saint/ sinner, scoundrel, ect.  That being who deserves privacy as much as anyone.  Either a locked door and some private concerns or the Saint/Sinner might simply jump off a cliff.  It is nothing to be embarrassed about.  We need a little distance from the prying eyes and hand cupped ears of the (why call it this?) nosy.  Eyes ears and noses!  Well, in that mirror are yours.  But, really, who cares what you got there.  What is there is describable, sure, to some extent by science... and to a broader, intrusive and frequently pathology generating extent, is described by the Stanley tools I mentioned at the beginning of this torture session.  You know, societies aesthetics and the zeitgeist of valuation, independent of humble logic.  "She's Hot" is a statement meant for accord.  An instrument for power and spell casting.  Rarely is the statement "I'm Hot" made in the bathroom where you stand there with your index finger against the strange newtonian physics of your avatar.  "I'm hot" generates no accord, except in instances where the dynamics are being monitored by social rules coloring straight through the lines which are usually a common boundary between people and the rutting animal.  In a sense, of course, in America and in the heart and mind of a practical citizen, its nice to know you are hot.  Most folks could never know or bother with such a thing.  It none the less happens in the narratives which we keep our Stanley tools within and ready.  As pathologies go in the grip of man, it is deserving of some attention, sure, but as the normal people of the world say, "big deal."

With your finger against that mirror, you are not going to actually experience as alluring an experience and useful a lesson as we always wish for when we imagine a reflection.  The believing of seeing is just that. The content of such an encounter as the inspection of your reflection, is surely as close to an exciting zero as possible, to the curious mind.  Provided you were to set aside the sad facts of what we generally make of ourselves, you might play a little game with that image in the mirror and brook some inquiry into what the image, after all, is an image of.  You might learn that the chariot of the soul, which while hardly being the whole description of the body of one's self, is a hell of a canvas.  Oddly enough, even the leaders of agreed upon knowledge... Scientists, forget interesting details when they scale their investigations of the orgin of the reflection you have just removed your finger from.  You only need touch it twice or so.  And, I don't mean the orgins, as in Creation.  I just mean what the body is.  Who the body is.  Just as surely as a pizza could never come to your door if all you told the employee at the pizza joint was your preference for pepporoni and extra cheese, then hung up to wait while rolling your eyes that things could ever take so long for a damn peporonni pizza... the pizzeria needs to know something about you.  True, when your stomach rumbles and your mouth waters, and a wad of cash has miraculously avoided the reality TV of the terrible economy, it really isn't the greatest time of week, day or circumstance to get real real talky and figure stuff out... but, none the less, one of the strange facts of life that has nothing so much to do with the birds and bees, is the fact that in the modern world you got longitude and latitude and you got you.  You always gotta tell someone where you at.  You can't check the movie listings, swipe a credit card, call your Mother on Mother's Day or savor what could coincidentally being considered pretty savory without saying somehow, to some thing or some one, "right here.  Not there."  Your adress.  A specific thing.  If you get a number wrong, that is going to destroy the whole shebang.  So we become accustomed to simply providing our address with every phone call, donut purchase, and job application. Sometimes autonomically, sometimes with the tongue.  But all the time.  It is a fact of life.

    For probably strange leftover sacred concepts of our physical selves, we are less comfortable looking at our avatar in the bathroom mirror and coming to any kind of "natural" conclusion with any sort of honest inquiry.  One of the first frustrations attending our reflection, is the seeming fact that one's reflection is of one's self.  There, in the mirror, in my case is one man.  A somewhat skeletal, bald very slightly pot bellied once upon a time blond, but now red bearded middle aged individual.  Props go to modern genetics since looking in the mirror I know I can be called a homo sapien, or have a sample of my blood sent to a lab to determine what I am.  One name, human is shorter than homo-sapien, which is far shorter than the labs very very long genetic reading of my blood.  However, there is a problem when we look at that individual and call him a species.  For there are in the genes something you never guess in the single man standing in the mirrors frame.  Ancient lifeforms have their genes in all human genetics.  Some of the lifeforms were illnesses.  Some of them lived in human cells as collaborative lifeforms who's habitat was a human body cell.  Eventually, the single celled creatures, with their own DNA became part of the whole shebang.  So mitocondria, with their own DNA, to this day are simply composed through the bodily lumberyard of human history and where mitocondria once had their choice of creatures to reside within, for humans, a fraction of that ancient organism where once it lived in independence, today it's a huge part of our power over the realm.  Respiration would be impossible without creatures created seperate from human kind.  What we were when we combined with mitochondria is an extremely interesting question to think about.... but the list is long.  And we have this mirror to consider... right?

    So, amongst the easy mistakes to make is to consider the single, white, bald, bearded skin and bone male an individual of singular qualities, independent from the taxidermist prey.  The avatar of the reflection does not so easily tell the fuller story.  The subject is a bit of a long winded tale.  Eventually a realization occurs where you feel you are questioning harmless assumptions and rewriting some hard won truths.  It's true you tell your friend over coffee, "I was never good in school.  I could care less who I am.  I just wanna have some fun."  Completely fair.  I think you are unlikely to have read this far should that be the breadthe of your curiosity.

    Outside of your cells, but inside the frame of the mirror our so called individual has an identity that also includes a few other species.   Sometimes the viruses hidded in our DNA and old single celled creatures comprise a physical fact of our physical cells... literally WHAT we are.  Other times creatures simply enjoy the giant canvass... for the least artistic reasons imaginable.  Your face, every face, enjoys between six and ten small animals that live in your eyebrows, ears, nostils, hairline and in your mouth.  Some of these animals could never be seen by the human eye.  Others are simply small enough to defy simple measures of identification.  The armpits, groin, areas of privation and excretion and the feet have dozens of lifeforms which feed off the shedding and exothermic heat of the human organism.  The fungus on the feet, and bacteria in the pits and cracks and crevices provide a competitive environment which is not friendly to more malicious micro organisms.  Changes in PH and aromatic compounds inside and on the surface of an adult human are part of the elaborate mechanism to evolution over the millions of years humans have grown in complexity.  In truth, as you might have garnered already, we cannot be described with much accuracy, and to an intelligent observers taste by the contents of our DNA.  While DNA is a fabulous phenomenon that, as a binary language carries certain binary facts through our past and into our descendents and future in a manner suprising to find in the flesh of lifeforms--- the asset of our DNA in some ways is more a tillable realm in the cells of we species, where, like the difference between a few yards of soil into which the roots of corn grows and the kernals displayed in the produce department...  a lifeform or two or three must intersect with the groceries eventuality and the soils harbor of entropies sirens.  So much to do.  In the same sense, where DNA has been given the heraldry by the default devisors of the natural history of human beings, it is a stunning portion of our bodies.. as beautiful and elegantly vulnerable a part of us as we got------ but, we are protected by and attended to in the company of and owe great respect for the things that crawl on us but are hardly noticed within, or without.  I probably, as a six foot slender man have seven to nine pounds of micro organisms in my gastro intestinal tract.  While it is true that I had to pick those "bugs" up after my mom delivered me, it is without doubt that I would neither be a man with my name nor survive for any length of time here... on Earth, without the three quarter trillion within me and the one  quarter trillion upon me.  Andy Coffey, as his reflection might not always reveal is a miraculous collection of sometimes more cells with no human DNA, than the cells with human DNA.  Most of the time the community of me, might not rule with executive skills granted to the majority.  Though it would be hard to determine the extent to which sensorily affective substances and health rewarding processes are provided and driven and rewarded to me or destroyed due to my ignorance... ect.  There are well known rules that suggest our diets should be as we have for so so long known not the conventional American one.  When you consider that our food is processed partially by billions of organisms... transforming what we eat into something as seperate from our food sources as imaginable.  The realm of true phenomenon in the colony and community of a man or womans self hood is a far cry from tired traditional views driven by fear and those Stanley tools I mentioned at the begining.  

So, that's a good start.  I was intending to discuss more on the subject of natural light and law.  Those subjects are what caused me to begin.  However, the person in my mirror is ultimately who people mean when they say my name.  Entralled by the phenomenon of self hood, I forget continuously my miraculous community.  Saying things like, "I enjoy being alone!" it is easy for me to forget how hard it really is to ever be alone.  My reflection might reveal a middle aged bald guy, but my body is a miraculous wonderland none the less.  I'll be tapping the mirror twice when I can manage to forget the tools of power and remember instead the gifts curiosity can square with my shame. 

Carl Isaacson's new book, The Innovators, begins with a chapter on Ada Lovelace.  I learned about Ada years ago and was Gobsmacked by learning of her origins and influence, all those years ago, as a founding parent of information science.  Isaacson seems like he's got himself another book that is hard to ignore.  Ada Lovelace sits at the top of the cover of The Innovators. Apparently, Isaacson's daughter introduced him to the subject of Ada, years ago.  This is for all the girls out there who have told me over the years what they're, "not good at.". Sorry, looks, girls, like your good at just about it all.

Quicker Than Usual (as opposed to dead)

Well....  anyone who wonders where I've been should be congratulated.  Most of the time I have had this blog (between four and five years) I've kept my subject matter on the abstract side of the balance... which, given the feedback I have received, is certainly going to continue. That said, I feel that this blog is a fine way to communicate certain personal views during this particular slice of my life.  I've made an incredible friend, found freakish tools in the creative toolbox (the one, that is, that we all might access if our ignorance should be breached) and came to realize I have a tendency to worry far, far too much about serving people and the commonweal in general instead of enjoying some fun things that only happen to amount to great times and vast resources.  Ahhh... the mandates of privilege ought be ignored    !

I live now in  Santa Fe, New Mexico.  I made the decision extremely recently due to an amazing human being who lives in the proximity of Santa Fe.  As you may remember, my parents live in New Mexico.  They are the central reason for my not being in Indiana (which I will always visit and love immensely.)   It is, to my shock, quite interesting what a difference between Santa Fe and Albuquerque New Mexico's ecology and weather there is.  Geology, tree varieties, and animal life follow very strange rules around here.  The dictates of the "desert," alpine run off and atmospheric fluid dynamics are simply nothing remotely analogous to a Mid-West sort of typicality.  You can drive a hell of a long time out of Indianapolis and more or less know what to expect.  Don't try that around here.  It's a great deal of fun as long as you don't mind sounding like a small child more or less all the time.  Wonder Bread might be nearly out of business... the garden variety wonder seems to be thriving.  My in-joke on the subject of wonder is stretched between the poles of my brain surgery (1.25 years ago) and a possibly real... though debatable mental illness which drags in my stead (and heart and head): a somewhat continuous  joy which cannot be explained by personal accomplishment or good fortune.  Don't try it at home--- share it with friends--- write best-sellers on said subject.  Somewhat better head problem then the garden variety bi-polarism.

In the interest of not using this post to sprinkle absurd self celebrating (or desecrating) personal crap ala Facebook et. al.   I a going to finish up with one last thing.

Had a conversation with a musical genius today.  He wants my help for reasons that probably don't square with me (even were my dreams to be real.)  He blew my mind and has given me a somewhat new paradigm involving a percentage of my reasons for being alive.  No big deal?  That's about as Facebooky as I'm willing to get.

More later... if you can believe it.

 











      

The Mind Puts An End To This Play

Could have been dreaming
Could have been down
Out with a feeling
Off with this crown

Oh, that fortune believed me
In the sun and the hay
Where the mind of a woman
Puts an end to the play.

That beautiful object
Still sitting where it's always set
At least twice as much, twice
As the other guy gets

It pretty and fine
Has the features you know
Though its up sitting high
Don't a guy reach too low?

Lord, I could still be dreaming
Could still remain bound
By the heat of the question,
"Boy--- hows that girl you found?"

Oh, I tell them I'm fine
The moons still up to it's things
And talk to myself
Where I once only dreamed

Looking deep to the ceiling
In the black room at night
And conjuring feelings
Of her face in my mind

Could have been dreaming
Could have been down
Out with a feeling
Off with this crown

Oh, that fortune believed me
In the sun and the hay
Where the mind of a woman
Put an end to the play.

The sweet child in line
Stretches the group to the last
And who in the front
Doesn't slow those too fast?

It's strange to have seen
The gorgeous, intelligent and fine
But turn to hold joy
Far away from her mind.

It's strange to have seen
The gorgeous, intelligent and fine
But turn to hold joy
Far away from her mind.