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.

Another Eve--- Another Eve My Love

Three years ago I sat staring at a similar screen to this one before me tonight.  I was reeling a bit from a conversation I had had with my parents in the previous week.  While talking to them I followed a common arc of my nature and described in somewhat ecstatic and slightly odd language the glowing quality of the world around me.  At one point I melded two simultaneous themes of my Winter: the long tail in the production of Plastic and the nearly catastrophic, yet abundant offers of the generative world which seems itself, judge and jury, to conclude that we're living in a party.  With plastic hats?  I shouldn't congratulate myself that I didn't mention the plastic hats.  For, my soliloquy went on a bit long and fairly strange even for a Shakespeare, whom I am clearly not.  I was staring at an arbor with my cellphone at my ear and staring at the underside of a woody vine sprouting the beginning of what I would hopefully tend as I had for a few years.  Originally, years past, I had been paid to trim the thing.  From that day I stared up, standing beneath, but wanting exactly what I had: understanding.  My posture and bearing and place in the world were generative.  Generative of my children; generative of Love; generative of the circumstances that proscribe the dreamworld of my imagination.  At least seven full books on plastics and their organic origins, their peculiar structures so reliant on surface tension (only the second time in my life I encountered, reading of the surface tension in polymeric phenomena, a child-like wonder about surface tension.  The previous time was as a true child encountering the surface of water in a cylinder.  Took me years to realize the forces implicit in what touches.  If I had a Geni.....  if only, I could touch the lamp!)

That morning, speaking what was three years and a week or so ago, I simply celebrated the blessing of my parents riotous intelligence and curiosity.  At one point, none-the-less, one of them was forced to admit aloud that it might be a case where I would not stop talking. I smiled at this.  I'd been accused, like many young men, of a great deal worse.  Besides! What had brought my torrent, my Johnsonville Flood to the earpiece in their ear was something more than nonsense.  Something from the book filled shelves that are my preferred domain.  Not a shelter from the world as it is, but, a formally quiet place that burrows to any location in the known Universe.  Probative... protected... primary to the philosophy that remains placental to our perspectives.  Not dinner table conversation.  Staring at the sprouting wooden vine I had so many times clipped for the elderly friend I now lived with... I realized I'd become reliant on the generosity of my favorite people on Earth, so I might sprout with the probative torrent that remains a secret gift from the small town library.  In the shame of losing it I smiled.  In what Temple can I share the generative?

And so it was---- three years ago this evening I was thinking about that.  Thinking and waiting for a subject to rise to my heart, not so much my brain.  I stared at the screen and fingered with the cursor on the screen the timestamp that sits at the top right hand corner.  To finger the face of a temporal idol seemed appropriate to the spaces in my soul just then.  Not entirely intentionally I clicked upon the time face that read 10:34 PM.  Clicked, as always, and now: tonight.  Click right now that face that says 9:27 PM and read a menu below, headed: "Tuesday, March 20, 2012" as well as a few other administrative concerns.  Three years ago, seeing that date, wow!  It's the Eve of Spring.  It's the Eve of Spring!!!  Is this my favorite evening in the year?  Spring is without doubt my favorite season.  Like the drive you took to your lovers home.  Regardless of what happens in the end.  The pavement that accepts the burden of your modern, metal steed is a view to a set of difficult questions and unspoken hopes until the day that it's a path you will never take again... or the day when it becomes your direction home.  Methinks the two might sing in different keys.  The Eve of Spring is the end indeed to the Gardens of Space... the unicellular, striving communities we used to be.  Flowers for the cemetery that holds those creatures who lived toward the gift we hold in our lungs and sigh: respiration.  The winter winks of beauties like these.  A conceit that explains how the grass might indeed be blessed by God.  Waves of grain indeed.  But, only beyond the Eve of Spring.

And so it is---- tonight I smile back to that night three years ago this evening.  That Spring brought me, indeed, my garden again.  My beloved work.  Some wonderful friends.  Some slow Mid-Western travels of dense humidity and firefly beauty.

The day... when the wincing, waiting of a woman ends as she smiles at and with her man.

Two hours of Winter and one minute remain, my friend.

What Day it is Can Sometimes Matter...

December 3 is the International Day for People with Disabilities.  There are no people on Earth who are not aware of the importance to love and support those who depend upon the able bodied for an extraordinary spirit.  More of us then we often realize simply stand beside the people we know who cannot stand easily at all.  You might sometimes ask, "How is it going?" You might even answer their questions first.

A day for others will place you on a footpath that is unmistakably "Spiritual."  Funny how often it's breakfast, lunch or dinner as well.

Be well today... whichever you are.  The supposedly normal, or the technically disabled. All of you sit beside of beautiful light that only reaches to the recent past.  We, whole and broken, are the real world.

Be well.

Domain/ Hope/ Intention (With Ada)

The sound of the oars against the ring-bolts of the fourteen foot boat reminded Ada that she'd let go of them.  How thoroughly she'd looked anticipating a sight of this water.  How glad she'd been to see it finally.  The first two days it had blown her past clear away… but now, she could not help but admit it was more than water, the sea, but she could not see beyond that.  She wasn't even a dimple on the surface of this areola. Not a dimple.  Not an afterthought, not a consultation.  Just a wrinkled up piece of litter, perhaps.  Though, yes, she knew the whispers of its sentience.  She did not believe that it was dead.  Ada feared that she was.

Was it far to the horizon?  Ten miles? Twenty?  There was a circle that she had fantasized about.  Saraheim had said she needed to cast a circle, and Ada had little notion how to do that.  The flatlands were full of hicks who might no longer hang her from a tree, but she could not bear to bid them hello or goodbye.  "Good riddance" was her mantra to the certitude of the land.  Goodbye and good-day to the world.

And, it was gone.

Ada stuck her hand in the warm embrace of that penetrating, probative god of salt, mystery and terrifying patience.  She was reminded in the distracted manner of a school-girl by a window, of a hand she'd embraced a long time ago.  Emilio.  "Nothing to say, about him," she'd answered to Saraheim's inevitable questions.  

"Nothing?" Saraheim had answered quietly in shock as much as exasperation.  

Ada had held his hand.  As Emilio's fingers softly slid into her own she had sighed and looked at him startled by the sound she was making.  It embarrassed her and she'd laughed.  Emilio looked at her with the awkward questions of inexperience in his eyes.  She thought she'd embarrassed him.  She could not tell Saraheim, the jay-walking tantrum of appetite and satiety, this.  So, she simply waited her out.  Here, in this empty boat, in the limpest grip of this water she felt the strange perils  she'd ignored all her life, as keenly as her efforts at concealment had meant them dull.  

Ada drew her hand from the water, looked at the horizon and chuckled at her weakness and poor imitation of the willful persons she'd always envied.  

"Second fiddle to the living, Saraheim?" she asked aloud.  Looking at the water dripping down the oar she now gripped, she knew that what she did not know then-- she'd never forget.

Old women, she supposed, in any case shouldn't dally too long on the subject of little boys.  She hoped so.

Domain/ Hope/ Intention (With Arachnid)

The light of the sun runs through the sieve of the sky and slams in myriad short blasts of violence into particles of dust that are the size--- if you can believe this--- of the color blue.  The size of the color blue?  Let's just say it's true--- they are not the size of the color red.

The remainder of the sunlight continues to the terminus of its prior (or current, rather) self--- and sprouts wings as some relative of itself.  A trivial quantity heats the air itself--- especially its water vapor--- which causes the patch of air to become a balloon without its parachute--- unbounded it rises, catching a few carrion birds along the way.

As it reaches the edge of the ceiling of the troposphere it spreads, attempting to remain in its habitat of choice, but with the support of such an engine as the sun, it breaks into the rarified cold atmosphere anyhow.

Eventually the air becomes extremely cold, and water vapor forms around dust creating hail.  The hail becomes heavier than the air and begins to fall, pulling air along with it.  The cold mass of air eventually achieves an enormous velocity and hurtles toward the ground, a rather disasterous atmospheric animal.  It hits a carefully tended woods with quiet paths all around it, and snaps a hundred trees, some of them two to three feet in girth, like twigs none-the-less.  The limbs, leaves, twigs, and trunks lie in a wet ruin throughout the evening.  In the morning there is an absence of the usual chatter of songbirds and the call of a dozen or so raptors but, from the broken darkness of the many fallen trees, a spider creeps from a shadow and climbs up the skinned trunk of a tree.  The smooth dead wood runs thirty feet high and the spider climbs, pausing at intervals and where another fallen tree's dying branches touch another tree, the weaver begins her nine inch orb.  By the time the risen sun penetrates the disordered woods, the orb is completed, the weaver sentinel at it's center.  From the chaos of violent attention from the sun crawled the undistracted intention of an unintelligent spider.  Broken things darned with protein filament?