A Handful of Withered Leaves

camera repairs

2011-12-18T22:57:00.000-08:00

I've been kinda sick this week and last night I didn't sleep much. I was actually too tired to drive to church. Not cool. I did get some things done today. There's nothing like fixing something to make me feel better. Lately I've spent way too much time reading about photography. So I fixed my old camera today. My Nikon D40 has a stuck shutter mechanism problem that I've learned is fairly common when its wearing out. So I opened it up and oiled two gear shafts. Its the second time I've done this, so it may not last to long. First time was in Africa, a cactus thorn worked to reach inside to place oil. 60757 clicks so far, I've got to get a few more out of my first dslr! After that I finally got apart the two filters I had cross threaded a while ago. I was in a hurry and put a circular polarizer on top of the uv filter. Not smart! I took apart the polarizer, there is a retaining clip that holds the glass in, then pulling on it separates the rotating ring from the threaded ring. with just that cross threaded ring in the uv filter, I tried gripping it in various ways with padded pliers and a kitchen lid opener. Turns out the lid opener and my hand worked. The polarizer went back together and both filters still work. I sure am happy I didn't bend or crack something. These filters are 72mm, a Hoya HMC Super UV and a Hoya circular polarizer. Expensive filters and now they're back in service! When these where stuck I put on a cheap uncoated Quantaray UV I just happened to get in a box of misc stuff I bought on Craigslist. It was very obvious how much better a coated filter is, there was tons of flare with the Quantaray. I never use lens hoods, and multicoated filters make that work. After having the D7000 almost a year, I reacquainted myself with the D40. Its tiny! When I upgraded the D7000 felt odd in my hand, and now its the opposite. The pictures are smaller and lack the quality of the D7k, not that it matters for most pictures, I'll still be using it. The biggest difference was the three autofocus regions vs 39 with intelligent subject tracking. I set up a flash and was shooting the dogs, it was way easier to follow and frame the action. If I put in more practice the D40 would perform as well, a newer camera just has a lot more convenience. And the dials feel nicer.At the moment the D7k is the best balance of features and improvements though the more expensive pro bodies have a few things it doesn't. The next Nikon full frame camera will likely have the image quality and software enhancements to beat the D7k, but it will cost a lot more and doesn't exist yet. As all the best advice-writing pros say, go make pictures with what you have. One camera might beat another by some measurement, but it rarely effects the final product if you put in the practice to master your tools. My resolution for the coming year is to focus on practicing specific forms, mainly landscape and portraits. I'll keep working on editorial style shots of the farm as well. The other thing I keep looking at is making my own lenses. I made some measurements today, the Nikon f-mount doesn't look that hard to make!

Update: after using the D40 for a few days and thinking about why I chose the D7000, the only glaring deficiencies of the D40 is the lack of extra buttons for changing settings quickly and photo quality in low light. I'll probably just use the D40 for strobe work and as a secondary at well lit events. It still has the legendary 1/500th flash sync!

Can you tell which pictures came out of which camera? Lens was the same. A one year old camera doesn't make better pictures than a six year old one.

This was disappointing that I missed getting the focus right. I'm out of practice with the D40.

Boxes

2011-11-29T09:58:00.001-08:00

Finished a paperback novel. Its been quite a while since the time I read several novels a week. It felt about the same to read this one, since it was well written. What's different from highschool is my literary education that lets me see the construction and tropes within it. Read enough and you see the similarities between them. It was enjoyable. A world between covers, where I got to experience the emotions and actions of all the people. The experience is made by using compression, shortcuts, description. Its like putting ones consciousness into a box. The closeness makes everything seem more real. The author constructs the box, paints the scenes on the inside, but eventually you have used up the novelty and have to leave. Outside the box the world is not so trim. Looking back on a long term pursuit of fiction, I see the parts of reality I missed. Always climbing into a box, and too often using the methods of box interpretation out in the real world, which has not such walls and continuity. The world has its own boarders, entirely different than squared line-by-line pages. The world was not designed for our amusement and catharsis. My point is not that we should stay out of the narrow box worlds we create. Vacations have their utility. It is I who needs to inhabit a new set of interpretive constructs. The ones for out here. Because, I am coming to understand with my own warped methods, that this world is itself a box. A far more deadly and immersive one than fiction media. The world was created by someone with intentions and populated with characters. Where else would we have gotten the idea for our little boxes? Likewise there will be a conclusion out here. I have faith in the author of the truest of myths. Even my role here has meaning, and there is something within me more than a human who runs through his role and never exists again. There is wisdom encoded on pages. Wisdom that holds true across many a scene and worldly circumstance. Bits of wisdom, like math, are permanent qualities that had to exist outside of our knowing them. And so, even a misguided soul like me can pick up the wisdom I've found and use it on the straighter path. Our father, who is in heaven, hallowed be your name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.For thine is the kingdom, the power, the glory forever and ever, amen.

Alternate photo for drive poem

2011-07-23T22:06:00.000-07:00

Driving tractor earlier this spring.

a driving poem

2011-07-23T21:13:00.000-07:00

I switched to the classical music channel and wrote this on the tractor yesterday. I wouldn't rate this poem very high, but I enjoyed writing it.

I can drive
until the sun falls from the sky
and boils the ocean dry
and is left,
a hard cold coal of sun
and an albatross carries it back in time -
to start the day again.
I can drive
until all the aluminum is removed from
all the feldspar everywhere
and the stripes on the roads are
anodized.
I can drive
until you've learned every song ever wrote on piano.
and all the people
who ever existed have listened to it all,
live in concert.
until
every tear is cried
every tear, and all weeds are
gone from every field
with friends across every phylum.
until
all weariness is sated
and time is measured
as the space between then and now,
not from within
as we wait until.

rafting

2011-05-21T22:11:00.000-07:00

Today I did white water rafting for the first time. It was fun and exciting, enjoyable to propel the boat as a team, and had those nervous bits when it seemed dangerous.
As we floated through smooth and rough water my thoughts where on the experience of being on uneven water, and how that is so often used as a analogy for the function of thoughts themselves. The water is singular in substance, a tangible mass made of a myriad tiny pieces, hard yet splashing to drops, swirling mysterious currents turning this way and that, yet all going downstream. There is power in water, but in most arrangements it is harmless.

After all the reading I do, it was grand to experience the foundation of a metaphor.

camera stick discovery

2010-08-15T21:56:00.000-07:00

What good is a monopod with a ball head? Maybe I'll sell it.

But wait!

It's a keeper! I read about doing off-photographer camera and there's all sorts of ways to get unusual angles with a big stick! I can also use it for off-camera flashes once I buy some.

Bombed

2010-05-13T23:12:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to get this picture for a while. Hopefully I'll get it better some day. We live in a navy jet training run and all my life I've been bombed by these guys. They target our house, our barn, combines out in the field, and today our equipment shed. I was standing outside with the birds chirping, connecting a chemical pump. I heard the beginning of the noise and rushed to grab my camera. I had about a second and a half to pull it out and point it up and hold down the shutter button.

When directly in line with the sound it is such a short intense roar with the build up and taper off. Its a whole body sound.

I've always liked the jets going over. They are most always A-6 Intruders, sometimes they are low enough to see the pilot. As I've got older, I also think of how glad I am that I'm not Taliban or Iraqi hoping one of these isn't going to come by and blow me up. It leaves me feeling strange inside to be working on some farm equipment, three seconds of ZOOM and the plane is a dot in the distance. If this weren't a test, I'd be dead.

This one seems to be between 500-1000 feet up. They stay under the sound barrier.

Blog day 2010: want to buy a condo?

2010-03-27T15:14:00.000-07:00

I've been working on an advertisement for my condo in Bellingham. It was nice to have it for college, but overall it was not smart financially. I could pay it off over the next decade, but I don't think its a good investment with all the interest I have to pay. Its always best to buy things entire or not at all. As soon as I can get rid of this I'll have no debt and I intend to never borrow any money again. The "borrow is slave to the lender" and all that. Dave Ramsey is my main inspiration for being financially sensible. Second would be my parents.
Click here for to see photography of the place. $119k if you want it.

Listened to today:
some streaming praise music through Shoutcast
Buzz Goertzen - God Loves Country Music and Yodelers too!
Black Sabbath - Paranoid
Christsafari - Valley of Decision
Car Talk on NPR

Here is a guy in Lesotho building a house.

Book Review: War Cycles Peace Cycles - by Richard Kelly Hoskins

2010-03-27T13:20:00.000-07:00

So my dad was loaned this book by a neighbor, and since my dad has a phonebook sized EMT textbook to memorize, he passed on 'Cycles' to me.
This book is an economic history of the world, emphasizing historical causes for economic collapse and what individual Americans can do to prepare for the next crash.
My recommendation: Do not read this book!
It was written with engaging style and confidant authority. It does have some interesting ideas about economics that would be worth researching elsewhere. Anywhere else. But the only reason to read this book is to have a look at the reasoning of one of the respected sages of the White Supremacist movement. I started reading 'Cycles' with no knowledge of who Hoskins was. I as just judging the book by its cover, which is black with a bold font and a crashing stock market graph. The text of the book is a fixed width font, printed by some process that looks like a copy of typewriter pages, and somewhat blurry at that. It was a glue bound paperback. This styling portrayed genuine underground publication, cheaply done in someones basement with outdated equipment. Probably was, since no publisher would put there name on this.
Growing up here in the inland northwest there may be few colored peoples, but there is a population of White Supremacists. Even so, they are portrayed as violent nuts who hate Black people. I had not thought about their reasoning for believing themselves supreme. 'Cycles' holds a lot of that reasoning. Based mainly on warped interpretation of the Bible and inability to get over past grievances (mainly the civil war), Hoskins explains how Whites are really God's chosen race, how the current Jews are not. He also claims that the Jewish bankers know the system is flawed and use it to maintain power and get rich off the wars and revolutions they instigate.
The only point worth pursuing is that lending at interest always leads to economic collapse. I found Hostkin's explanations for this lacked rigor. What was engaging was his detailed account of how large scale borrowing-at-interest had caused the collapse of nations throughout history. Not sure if he was accurate about that, but it was interesting.

'War Cycles Peace Cycles' was too full of 'trying to prove a point' to be a valid source of economic education, but it is a detailed read if you want to understand the thinking of White Supremacists.

Blog day 2010: RV family

2010-03-27T12:02:00.000-07:00

Arrived at 49degrees North, my brothers preferred ski area. On the way here we where behind a slow RV for a while. It was an old dirty RV with what looked like a lawn mower on top. Written on the back in sharpie was "Don't Laugh, we found it in the Paleozoic layer!" There was a cardboard sign duct taped on that read "Homeschooling heaven" and in the back window was "Honk if you believe God made the Grand Canyon", and "Arizona or Bust". It appeared that inside someone was cooking breakfast. The kids waved at us. When my 50hp VW pickup was finally able to pass, I honked.
I wish I could have got a picture of that RV. What a great way to travel.
Snowboarding sure is fun. I should have started years ago.Its great just being up here in evergreen mountains.

Speaking of slow vehicles, here is an ox cart in Lesotho.

Tomorrow: Blog day 2010

2010-03-26T22:42:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow I'm taking my brother snowboarding. I'm glad to have learned how this year, but just not feeling like snowboarding tomorrow. So instead I'll sit in the lodge and catch up on some computer chores. Why not liveblog the thought stream? This might be fun. I'll try to update at least once an hour once I'm there.

It's always nice to put a picture up with each blog post. Blogging advice bloggers say its one of the secrets of success. I see blogs where the writer has obviosly went to a microstock photos site and found a picture that vaguely illistrates the the point of their post. It looks kind of lame when people do this on every post. I'm a photographer, so I see it as my duty to at least have it be my own photos I put up. Photos are like ideas; rather pointless unless you do something with them.

Here is a photo of me five years ago.

Lots of tractor driving to look forward to

2010-03-18T21:00:00.000-07:00

This week I've been riding in the tractor as it drives itself! Autosteer been working well. It makes the tractor driving experience new and strange. Now I can take notes, eat with both hands, wave my arms around. There is still plenty to keep an eye on, and I have to make the turns at the end of each pass, but now there is none of the fatigue of focusing on the GPS line all day.Also, the frogs have came out of hibernation!

Don't fly!

2009-07-28T20:38:00.000-07:00

It was late at night. The household was asleep, except the hamster and I was awake typing. On the floor above me suddenly dad starts stomping around. This is most unusual. "Are you awake?" dad asks, "there is a bat in the house."
Oh boy, what great fun!
Fortunately it flew into the bathroom instead of the living room with clearstory windows. It could dodge with far more skill than a bug! I chased it in circles with a waste basket and towel, but only caught it when it got tired and landed on the towel.
I put it in a makeshift cage (a bug zapper screen) to photograph it. The bat kept opening its mouth to echolocate. It was kinda cute.
Recently I was hiking across some pasture we bought, just to see what was there. It was close to our house but I had never actually walked through it before. While watching chipmunks on some rocks that looked like grave stones I heard a buzzing sound coming from a hole in the ground. Perhaps its a bumble bee I thought, they live in holes like that. So I waited and waited, and this is what came out!

I had never seen a hornet so big. If it flew at me I would have ran screaming across the countryside, but it wasn't disturbed by me photographing it. The hornet instead was digging in the loose debris scooping and pushing a load into its hole. Then it continued to buzz, probably making egg chambers.

It was an inch and a half long I estimate. Not all wasps are carnivorous but this one sure looked like it.

2009-07-27T08:41:00.000-07:00

Hello readers. In my life I have developed a habit of saying 'no' to worldly choices, but just as often I was saying 'no' to the work of the Lord as well. The result was an empty, dissatisfied existence. So I write this message only because I saw it, found myself able to articulate it, and thanks to technology of this age, can to display it for you.

2 Tim 1:7 “For God gave us a spirit not of fear, but of power and love and self control.”

Think of what this means fellow Christian, God gave us a spirit of power, love, and self control.
The spirit of power – to do and speak; the power to move our own self and to move others.
The spirit of Love – to care and sacrifice in imitation of Christ.
The spirit of Self Control – to refuse the body what would hurt it or harm the soul; to refuse the mind the pleasure of evil thoughts and bad advice. And also Self Control to choose the narrow way when the broad has every indication of superiority. It would be wrong to anthropomorphize these divinely gifted spirits as three 'angels' given to us, invisibly floating around working these virtues into our lives. We have no trustworthy explanation of how spirits, and the empowering of God, operates. But it does happen, though the method is beyond our knowing. An unattainable question of 'How?' distracts from the vital point of this verse, our living, loving God has given us what we need so that we can successfully do what is good and right. Our focus should be on what actions we have before us today that require power, love, and self control. This is following God. These are the 'all things' I can do through Christ who strengthens me.
Lord, help us, your servants, to remember and use these great gifts you have given, and to give you praise for the good that results.

2009-07-18T08:31:00.000-07:00

Found this weasel on the side of the hiway. Don't get to see them too often. The only other time I saw a weasel was many years ago. I was combineing wheat and the weasel was running through the stubble. I then saw it again the same way the day after that, in another part of the field. In a couple months this dead one should leave an interesting skeleton behind.

Yesterday and the day before I've driven tractors and while doing so, photographed these hawks. This one flew from one pole to the next as I was passing by.

I spent the day mowing weeds. There are few mowers more serious than a tractor pulled mower with three rotors, each having four 50lb blades. Four foot tall patches of thistles too dense to walk through are turned into a layer of pulp that smells like the definition of green. As I was hunting down thistles among the grass, two hawks followed me, dropping down on fleeing mice.
I also saw a little owl, various mice themselves running away, and a female pheasant with some chicks, but didn't get photos of them.

Sleeping in the Woods: Day 3

2009-07-16T08:27:00.000-07:00

The storm blew the tents rain fly askew and made a nice puddle. I thought I could sleep on the cot with just the wool blanket (wool is supposed to be warm even when wet right?). Well, I woke up after a couple hours and just couldn't fall back asleep when cold and damp. I suppose I could have done it, but not when I had a modern insulated bedroom just a short walk away. So I started walking back. It was about midnight, and despite a low 3/4 moon and lots of stars I could not see well enough to walk over rocks without breaking something. Also, a damp t-shirt is very cold when its 50 degrees. In the dark the very remote possibility of being chomped by a cougar is no longer remote, it is right next to you. So I stumbled back to the tent and set out once more equipped with a dangley LED lantern, a .22 pistol that got in the puddle and would only be good for one shot until I could clean the rust out of the magazine, and wrapped in the wet army blanket. In all reality, to any hypothetical cougar, I would be the monster in the dark, a dark flopping shape casting shadows in all directions, clomping over the rocks.

But the next evening I returned with to find the blankets I had propped up with branches had dried and it was very nice.

Storm

2009-07-13T23:13:00.000-07:00

Instead of sleeping in the woods, I stayed home, we had this great storm. It would have been cool to experience out in the tent, but at any rate, I got pictures. We also got a useful amount of rain out of it.
What is harder to capture than pictures of lightning is the feeling of the storm, enjoying the warm dusty wind that blew before it, the early raindrops, the thunder that shook the house, yet I was unconcerned throughout.

Sleeping in the Woods: Day 2

2009-07-12T18:16:00.000-07:00

Chipmunk from yesterday.
There is lots of cool lichens out on the exposed basalt. This one was strikingly round.
Closeup detail.
I'm working on getting a better picture of this hawk/eagle, but so far this is the best.

Camping spot: Didn't get any great shots this evening, did see a Great Heron though. Read Jonah and Psalm 104.

Sleeping in the woods: Day 1

2009-07-11T08:22:00.000-07:00

I figured if I sleep out in the woods I'll be able to get some cool wildlife shots and become familiar with where and when the animals travel.

Moved out to woods. Tent full of mosquitoes. So I smashed them all. Mosquitoes all over outside of tent, they are making their noise in surround sound. Coyotes calling close. Forgot a flashlight, can't read. Road noise louder than inside insulated house. Moths thump against tent. Its quite cold. Must bring more bedding next time. Unexplained noises are far more surprising in the dark, but there isn't much chance of danger in these woods.

In the morning, woke up late. (7am) Saw doe and fawn out the tent door. It was a pretty good start.

All fireworks edition

2009-07-09T21:34:00.000-07:00

It was a good night.

Irrigation time lapse

2009-06-25T09:05:00.000-07:00

Its my first youtube video, and possibly my last since wind blew the tripod over and the lens barrel on my little digital camera got squished. I'll try to fix it though.

Changing handline irrigation sprinklers is a job I've done since I was little. Its not too bad, although at times there are clouds of mosquitoes, plugged nozzles and blow outs. Its good exercise. I hope to take better videos if I can get hold of a video camera again.

2009-06-24T07:31:00.000-07:00

The clouds float, bigger than anything else around, except the earth,
who's features are here loved by me.

Also, we pulled a combine engine yesterday. I was grateful for how trouble free it was. I took some pictures; before, after, and dangling. Its a Cummins, rain water leaked in the exhaust spout and froze up a cylinder or two. That's one reason to park your combines inside. Hopefully we will get this one up and running for this harvest.

As always, you can click images to view full-screen.

I also mowed the lawn recently.

It was the first time mowing it this year, under all the dandilions and other weeds there was actually some grass left.

Stay tuned for some time-lapse movies I hope to make!

2009-06-17T23:00:00.000-07:00

I'm really enjoying my return to the family farm. There are lots of mud swallows this year, and lots of the mosquitoes they eat. They are fast birds, I still have a lot to learn about photographing them, but I have been happy with my initial results.

I couldn't decide which of these I liked better, the balanced picture or the hi-contrast. Which do you prefer?
Click them for full screen!

Stuff like this happens in college

2009-05-08T10:00:00.000-07:00

Rain is not gravel plopping &
rolling
Not a child's bead
kit
somehow story-retold
spinning in the
air
isn't coins being sorted
uncleaned into
sacks by
loud machines, gray machines
like clouds.
Looking up, drops shine down
back the way they came
too small to see, the long long
fall
Size. Silent. Clouds.
You know
that noise on
boards.

A four-section poem of reflection after reading the 16th chapter of The 5000 Year Leap:

2009-01-02T21:25:00.000-08:00

Empire of Liberty
Where purpose ripples through
the laws incorporate
and kindnesses individual Each
fit for their spheres.

The rampart nation
steeled to a code
Resolute.
Within the channels of law / vast tracts of freedom are preserved,
Wherein men may act as good as gods sharing what they safe-ly possess.

It is man that is broken; needing a fence of rules at every turn,
Separated in his thoughts away from all around,
A selfish ingrown will.
Mankind - willing to tread on the fingers of his brother,
each reaching for individual satisfaction.
Even the best visions of law only show the callow colors of our motivation.

I await the perfect leader
healing he will bring
we'll act in righteous pro-duc-tivity
in hope for life of perfected thought - I wait
here speaking from the shadows.

Some food thoughts

2008-11-14T17:05:00.000-08:00

There is much for me to discover when pay close attention during my experiences. I have found it very hard to resist eating candy bars out of the vending machines at school. I try not to, since they cost 85 cents and are a part of an unbalanced diet. Buying cheap candy from stores is also ineffective, because it is then available all the time and I usually eat it up too quickly. Today I didn’t bring a lunch and subsequently spent 2.60 on vended items and 2.05 on frozen yogurt. $4.65 is a pretty bad score for what I got. The opposition to this is taking the time to make my own food. If I’m going to take the effort, I put in a little more and end up with toasted homemade bread, meat I prepared toasted cheeses, pickles, olives, and there are plenty of microwaves to warm up what I bring. And overall, its cheaper. To tip things even further, this last candy bar wasn’t even tasty, its strident sweetness and clumsy flavors made me glad to wash it off of my tongue with a bottle of drinking fountain water. So why do I like vending machines? It is the experience, which I need to find a remedy for. Vending machines only draw when I am hungry. They are both conveniently near, but not everywhere on campus, usually I have to go at least half a building or one and a half buildings to get to one. Then I need cash; not carrying any is a good way to make them inaccessible. Money as tokens (as opposed to plastic access cards) have weight, form, unique wear and markings for where and when they are made, so measuring out change is an information packed ritual. (I used to collect coins, and still look at them as items with a historical origin.) Then there is the participatory mechanics of putting the change into the machine, and pressing buttons. As a person who grew up in an age of personal electronics, pressing buttons means access, getting what I want, and having a voice. Button pressing is its own reward. Then the machine responds with a show, humming its motors, clattering the change in with the rest of its take, the spring shelving turns and down falls the brightly printed candy bar. I then get to push open the double flap and hold my prize. Having attained a Butterfingers, I can put it in my coat pocket and walk around until I find a good spot to sit and eat it.

Eating is the most disappointing part, it is not as enjoyable as getting. Afterwards I’m happy to be not-hungry, but other than satisfying a craving for sugar there is nothing else to experience, it all has passed. Perhaps what I need is to find better containers for my lunches. If they had a better experience than plastic tubs and aluminum foil, lunch could then rival the vending machines. Some container of porcelain, metal and enamel, something both functional and artistic, and complicated latches would be nice. Combination locks would be interesting. How about a temperature read out? Such a lunch box would be really striking. To be useful it would have to be a porcelain food dish that a metal lid latched around. The dish would be removable to be microwaved, and since custom made ceramics is beyond my knowledge, it should be a store bought dish. The metal lid could have a rubber gasket to transport wet things. The lid would have a band (links or a metal strip) that goes around the dish to clamp on tightly. The top and or bottom could be inlayed with wood.

Such a device would be limited next to the lightness of ubiquitous plastic, but if you can make such an item, do go for it.

Grady Houger

Allegiance

2008-09-27T22:48:00.001-07:00

If my body is my own, I can do whatever I want to it. But if it is not my own, if there are liens against it, or allegiances that transcend individual autonomy, then I cannot rightfully pursue any course of behavior. Inappropriate actions against myself are then just as wrong as when done against another person, and exactly what is prohibited is a choice for those higher authorities to decide.

This gives grounds for regulation in matters of sexual conduct, suicide, physical upkeep, and use of time.

Thus categorically, a Christian is not authorized to follow any impulse that comes into their head. We are "free", unrestricted in body to think, speak and move as our mind wishes, and therein is a great dilemma, we are capable of doing far more than we ought. What we ought to do overlaps poorly with what we can do. Thus we must decide what we will do.

We should even think twice before saying "I". Not because we need a bizarre new symbol in its place (such as "this one"), but just to keep in mind the insistent philosophy of personal autonomy attached to saying "I will do this or that." We should not throw away the reality that we are each individual agents controlling the body we inhabit. The whole point to this is to remember our allegiance comes with both benefits and a duty to perform. we Christians are not our own. We where bought with a price. Its not the sort of price you can repay, then go do as you like, free from any oversight or restrictions. Its a price as in a positive value necessary to bring a sum out of the negative. It is like a essential component given where the lack meant utter destruction.

Therefore honor God with your body.

Momentary Status

2008-09-26T20:07:00.000-07:00

How are my college classes going? Well, this quarter I got in ones that I didn't have specific expectations for. They are just OK picks. Without any strong preformed expectations, I don't have anything to evaluate them by. If I study thoroughly, I should find them quite rewarding.

Two realizations have been intersecting with my awareness recently. One is seeing my surroundings as a singular 3-D solid instead of a multitude of individual pieces. The other is the insight that my dissatisfaction with life has an obvious cause in my anti-social choices. Alongside those is my tendency to react instead of deciding to do things of my own decision.

Instead of going out and doing something new, I repeat the patterns of behavior that have been my M.O. throughout life. Of course you say. Habits are a common sociological pattern. They define us. Make us predictable. Obviously the issue is changing undesirable ones. Here are some that have came to mind today:

Collecting interesting projects and not completing them.

Collecting interesting objects and not putting them into use.

Avoiding social events.

Wishing for friendship.

Wishing for marriage.

Wishing something that demanded my loyalty and service.

But I asked myself, if you where married right now, what would I be wanting to do? Likely there would be the same things on hand, things like a sink of dishes, a bathroom to clean, video games to play, books to read, stories to write, floors to vacuum, a budget to balance, photos to edit, a website to enhance, emails to respond to, people to pray for, shopping to plan, meals to make for later, instruments to practice, gas in the tank to roll down the road.

As a single person I can look at all those things and decide without having to consider the interaction of another fully complex human being. So why does it feel that my life would have more meaning if I where married? Would having another sentient entity in tight proximity make my life better? If I am unhappy now, by what operations is the state of wedlock going to improve that?

I should ask my married friends. I'm sure they will have something sensible to say.

To avoid having to face the lack of prime motivation in my life, it looks like dusting my desk is the most compelling option.

Earlier today I wrote in class:

“I have the sudden perception that this crowd of students is a sea of grass in this specific pressure and atmosphere we survive in. Plants, a chatting crop of identical things that don't know it. In some cosmic sense, can we not be a mobile, socketable, vegetation compared with all possible higher entities?

We blow in the wind of the word structures we speak. The spewed communication is more than words – its motion – genuflection to the shape of thoughts. The thought moves the creature.”

Such words are of course, bizarre and disturbing. Such effects are bound to happen when one seeks to think up things that are, to some extent, unique. Why such an impulse? Its just one of the many things that fits with a lifestyle seeks a stable place in keeping with avoiding people. I find myself interested in popular things, but not held by them. If everyone is chasing after something, well then, what are they overlooking? Perhaps something equally enjoyable. Thats one of the reasons I find myself attracted to polka music. Its good stuff, AND totally opposes the styles of the ignorant masses I am aloof from. Christian fundamentalism is another thing I adhere to, for many reasons, but its anti-populist and exclusivity certainly feel good.

Yet fortunately, some ingrained sensibility stops me from giving in to misanthropic hate. I do want to be a friendly and personable neighbor. My tastes are no less stupid than those of people higher on the bell curve.

If resistance to other people drove me towards my current life of morose art, obscure forms of idleness, and deep philosophical study, is it any wonder that I haven't found satisfaction? No amount of negatives become positive.

Those times in my life when I was unable to avoid human companionship or secure enough to seek it out I have found quite enjoyable. Sometimes greatly so. And in fiction those times then everything works out, and people come to gather to do some great feat, thats awesome. I'd like to be apart of something like that. Maybe some day I can.

Two Poems

2008-09-16T22:54:00.000-07:00

Drinking tap water from a Ball Brand 'Mason' jar:

Lines on the side.

6oz it so happens.

Exactly.

Natural tremble holding it, gazing.

Water level shifts in this cylinder - circle

into ovals, constant variation with the tilt.

Breath rippling this mirror.

Peering through layers of transparent reflections - the room light, The molded bumps on the jar bottom, the mottled surface of the jar wall, fingerprints on the side. The water surface wiggling.

Rolling water, sliding back into itself, beads left behind.

Tilted upward now, a little river left in the glass valley bottom; breath fogging the canopy of heaven.

Path of words

Melodic. Clear sliding

Glass. Gifted synthesizers

Keening. Artificial brightness

In curled bulbs. I lost

Awareness -

Of neck pain.

Fascinating new trends in youth perception!

2008-09-15T23:20:00.000-07:00

Today my younger brother told me that purchasing that FamilyForce5 CD mere weeks ago was something he shouldn't have done.
“Oh?” said I, interested to hear his reasoning. Had he found them to be too noisy and vapid?
No such luck. While he still liked them, he figured it would be better for him to sell his recent purchase, “because if I look hard, all the same songs are on youtube.”
Thats it folks. For the sorts of young persons today who haven't the permission or discretionary income to get ipods and itune cards, youtube is the media library. The key is that its free. And convenient!
I told my brother that it used to be people would buy albums even when they already knew all the songs and had them in other formats. Just to own the real physical representation, I said.
“Thats stupid.” he rejoined.
I let it go, sitting back in my free hand-me-down stuffed chair, and musing on what the free content business model is doing to todays youth. He has none of the concepts of property and trade value that an older person approaches the internet with. The only limit to his consumption of free items is knowledge of how to get them. Things like music which he perceives to be identical across various media are equal products, so only the most easy to get are worthy. What's most noteworthy is that for him, online items have as much worth as physical ones. He reveres virtual reality ego items and arguments for the investment of his precious life minutes on lasting physical things go unheeded. With no preference for the values of previous generations, how will these kids operate when they age to the point of making important business decisions? For them, there's hardly a reason not to go for the free stuff.
While there will be plenty of individual exceptions as other generations impress on those they care about, the collective impulse will be one to watch, if their first thought is to choose free stuff so long as its convenient. How will that impulse be played against by marketing departments, and business model makers? What companies will gain power, and what sorts of people will be running them? Could virtual items and relationships be valued to the point of being acceptable wages?
Only time will tell, but until then, beware!

Borders of awareness

2008-06-21T16:38:00.000-07:00

With a ripping sore throat I walked to the store. I thought about driving since I have a vehicle again, but there is no reason for using the speed and sit-down comfort of a car when the short walk is so much better for my mind and body. The extra time propelled by steps clears the head. I managed to not buy doughnuts this time. They would have been unhelpful for a painful throat and snotty nose. I was there to get citrus. The limes looked interesting but I don't know what to make of them that doesn't involve lots of sugar. Oranges where sacked with a discount that equaled $1.37/lb, but I didn't think I wanted to eat nine pounds of them. At the checkout line I had three grapefruits, a cantaloupe, a cheap tin of water chestnuts and at an uncomfortable $2, the biggest available green Bell pepper. For a twelve lane Albertsons, there are only two lit up with a string of shoppers eyeing whichever lane they didn't choose. I got to stand and listen to people complain quietly as everyone stared at the magazines, candy and the TV displays that play ads all the time. The first tier of magazines featured lascivious celebrities and sexual how-to articles. The next tier of magazines claim to contain even more photos of overweight celebrities and details about their destructive relationships. There seems to be a progression to this: Get famous for being pretty and doing something or other, (some combination of living in LA, being pretty, knowing other celebrities, and possibly acting on TV). Get interviewed a lot while you are youthful, spend your money with carefree abandon. Then get old and let your life fall apart, since you where too busy being wild and famous to learn responsibility. Then the same in-group of news mongers that made you famous get to make money by reporting how miserable your middle age is.

Something I continually rediscover about grocery store magazine racks is what surprising things can be seen when you look away from the mass of checkout isle consumables. Above these checkout stands is a big flat surface that says 'thanks for shopping'. I had never seen it before. There are painted wooden wall hangings depicting food and some stylized pillars that flank the store name. Beyond the checkout stands, there is a wall of windows, that has a huge panoramic view of the parking lot, which is full of medium-small leafy green trees. It's actually almost impressive. I've seen this phenomenon in other stores too. One time above a magazine rack I looked up to see a gigantic ceiling area, full of thin cables and ducts, all painted in yellow. It was an enormous space I had walked under never seeing, because I was always staring at the shelves with their tiny products all lined up. If you ever want to hide something in plain sight, just put some racks of candy and magazines off to the side, no one will see your hole in the wall, or giant teddy bear balloon. Whenever there is something you are expected to stare at, look around to find what no body else is seeing.

Grady Houger ~ The grapefruit was very nice, and on average each contain 440mg of vitamin C.

Dancer

2008-05-06T00:05:00.000-07:00

There is a good view from the top row of this amphitheater. More than just good, it's a fabulous view picked personally two thousand twenty two years ago by Herod the Great, ruler of Israel for the Roman Empire.

Stretching out in front of this stone seating is a disconnected jumble of items with the the sea not a hundred yards distant. Plastic bleachers along the open side for more seating, scaffolding for stage lighting presumably, a field of ancient carved bits; edges of buildings, pillar tops and a tomb. Broken stone columns lay in a heap, they are ancient, but what can you do with them? There is a groomed walking path with interpretive signs set out from a mass of ancient stone foundation. It juts clean out into the sea, the lowest stones are one of Herod's palaces that got built on by subsequent fortifiers. The ocean flattened out the ambitious parts it could reach, except for one hunk of old wall out in the surf. On top of it a romantic pair lean into each other. What makes the sea such a beautiful color? Blue-green, and white breakers rolling in, this is a mood of the ocean writers try to describe, but how do you really know how that looks till you've seen it? What makes it so different from other ocean scenes? Water quality, bright noonday sun at this latitude? It would certainly be satisfactorily diverting if the toga clad theater troupe fails to entertain.

Our group gathers at the top. Thirty tiers of seating lets us see down on ruins; what had been buildings are now a nonsensical mass of unearthed walls. The hemispherical bowl of benches catch the quiet test phrases of my fellow tourists standing down on the floor. Nate, our singular leader, teacher, and guide begins to explain the history of Ceasarea Maritima
. Various harbors were constructed over the past millennia, Paul the Apostle was imprisoned here for a time, and which international conflicts left each new layer of stone.

This being the twelfth of nineteen days on our tour-vacation-college-class-worth-one-credit, we are used to Nate explaining everything. He does an excellent job of it. But today, perched up here with the blue sky drawing breezes over the seaside, it can be a little difficult to focus on a lecture.

Multicolored wood sheets of varying sizes make a strange but smooth stage floor. We sit there, Nate stands, gesturing, expounding, sharing the fruits of his college degrees, some analysis of race relations in the neighborhoods of first century Caesarea, but that may have been later on in the day, or earlier, I don't remember exactly.

Down on the stage crisp snatches of conversation float up from other tourists in little clumps strolling by at ground level.
A red bikini wearing woman didn't just walk past. She stepped out to the center of the stage, performing ballet moves! That is no silly tourist clowning around; no normal person moves with such balance. I mean, I've never seen a ballet live, but it's obvious from tv commercials even, that such kicks, spins and toe standing done in an air of casual fun must be from years of practice. Normal people wave their arms in the air with natural clumsiness, not poetry.

We didn't say a word. Nate was facing us teaching, oblivious to this peril of such an exotic classroom setting.
It didn't seem appropriate somehow, to interrupt a passionate instructor, everyone sat there, waiting for someone else to make an exclamation, which no one did. We just watched. Such a spectacle was just what this place was designed for; a moment more engaging than the ocean view that framed it.

She walked away with a little laugh – a dedicated creature of the stage unable to go by without being able to say here too she danced.

Uncommunicative

2008-04-22T23:31:00.000-07:00

I haven't written anything in way too long. This quarter I'm writing a lot for class, so I haven't been too motivated to edit things up for here.

Here's a picture instead. Check it out full screen.

Grady

step

2008-03-30T00:45:00.000-07:00

Here's a picture. Click for full size. Isn't it awesome? I would like to know what you think, maybe I'm just too enamored with my own ideas. Its just that this picture has so much detail, it has clear shapes and lines, it has life and motion but no faces or personalities to overpower the plain ordinariness of it. Best is that this photograph was an accident! I had been snapping away at an eagle and just waved the camera at this cat and triggered the shutter. I totally missed the cat, I wasn't even looking the viewfinder. There is nothing of 'artists intention' in this shot, no skill of mine. My intention had been to lazily snap a cat portrait, and if I had been successful, the result would be average and forgettable. I have lots of cat portraits I never look at they're so boring.

But I wonder if my enjoyment is also accidental. Does anyone else like this picture, or it is good for me because I know what lies outside the picture: My parent's farm. And I know where the cement came from, why it has white stuff stuck to it, what the cat looks like, the source of the clod of asphalt and the straw. Is the eye appeal in those specifics and what they symbolize, or is it in the image itself; the hint of cat, the geometry of beveled and stained cement, decaying straw mixed with gravel?

Only you can say. I don't know. There are many things I don't know, and as such lack makes itself aware, I must address it somehow. How does one live with unfinished, incomplete, unproven concepts? Sometimes we use worry. Sometimes we ignore it. Or let anxiety destroy our abilities. I don't know how to approach the unknown. But I'm going to try to be calm about it. - yet I can't imagine how it must be to not have God to trust in. Must be horrific.

Grady Houger ~ It will be very interesting to see how long it takes to get tired of looking at this picture.

Mental Shifts – Interlude: Masked Moon Rising

2008-03-28T18:31:00.001-07:00

Are philosophy and fiction writing conflicting interests? I am interested in pursuing philosophical truths, reaching for accurate theoretical models and glimpses of absolute truth. With fiction writing, I occasionally have to blink myself awake and remember that the individuals and their concerns I'm dealing with are not real people, that none of their existence is real, yet I can immerse myself it it to the point of forgetting.

Getting lost in a manufactured world ... striving for true understanding beyond illusion; It is a careful mix to be had. In fiction it is easy to create statements about reality that have little truth value outside the made-up world of the book. Well crafted books present themselves as identical to our human reality. Fiction can indeed illustrate truth, but a model of untruth can be indistinguishable. Well made stories play on human emotions so well that their truth message can be internalized before any analysis of its accuracy can be done, and many people seem disinclined to analyze what they consume as entertainment. Analysis generally disrupts that entertainment.

This issue makes it easy to see why Plato's writings are so critical and suspicious toward fiction. It's moral value is problematic, in practice easily promoting vice.

I have only my inclinations to speak from, and as I have stated, they are divided. Even so, I do not think fiction should be rejected in pursuit of a firm understanding of truth. An individual should practice judiciousness in selecting fiction that will be beneficial, and those who create fiction should do so honestly striving to write truth. In saying this, I'm really only speaking to myself, since there are many conflicting reasons people write, and my 'ought to' doesn't go very far against them.
***
I wonder about the dynamics of my making statements, which are my synthesized conclusions put down and shared as somewhat inaccurate text. My personal experience is the source of what I say, but life experience is quite unique, and despite being almost impossible to communicate, it's somehow general enough that people can relate. My experience of returning to this university, going to buy books, urban driving, listening to non-mainstream indie music on the radio, constant rain and snow today, sitting in my condo typing and looking out at the raindrops landing in the puddle on my deck: That's a few of my current environmental influences, but you can only think of them by remembering similar memories of yours. It's not the same. My understanding of the dichotomy between philosophy and fiction isn't the same as yours, but that doesn't matter, because our understanding of the English language and cultural background is similar enough that people reading this are likely to understand what is written here even if they do not write fiction and have not read Plato. The meaning is attained by a shared understanding of language. The language itself is only important in that we have a sufficiently similar definition for the word 'beneficial', and that our understanding of grammar is the same.

Since the particular language could be a different one and this bit of writing would still work between members of that culture, this sort of explanation puts the power of meaning onto the string of signified elements that the words represent. Reading and processing those symbolic textural units builds a concept in your mind similar to the one I intended to write.

What's the point of all this? I do not know. I'm just talking about the recent thoughts I experienced concerning fiction and philosophy, and then used that in a nebulous bit of textual analysis theory. Almost everything I stated was based off of what I learned or had to read for the literary critical theories class last quarter. But why am I writing? Somehow it seems important to talk about what I think. But writing about why I'm writing and about what I'm thinking is confusing. It leads to my current college malady of seeing everything as symbols and then connecting those to each other and everything else. Its a mind crushing mess, but fortunately I can always choose to stop writing. Also, I got Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Wererabbit from the school library to watch as soon as I'm done writing this.

Grady Houger ~ done!

Text as fuel for Whatever fire you throw it in

2008-03-19T02:45:00.000-07:00

This is an essay I turned in for a college final. It will maybe get a good grade, mainly because this teacher grades most graciously. It is written to a professor having spent the whole quarter discussing the definition and function of literature, so it's referencing a lot of theory. I think the general point is clear though, and slightly controversial, so see what you make of it and drop me a note of how you disagree. This is also an example of how much my essay writing sucks. It's barely passable for this class, but the structure and clarity are not professional.
______________

Literature can be any written, or just printed work, because any sort of printed material can be defined as literature under specific theories. There are just so many diverse opinions about literature that somebody can find meaning in things others overlook. The back of my dry erase marker board cleaner bottle says this:

Directions: Erase marks before
applying cleaner. Spray surface.
Wipe with soft cloth

Are these intellectually, philosophically meaningless industrial directions, or can they be a satisfyingly ambiguous poem? The physical placement of those words matter; are they on a bottle or in a poetry book? The readers receptivity matters, and their education. The social institutions of publishing and taste determine whether this 'poem' comes to view at all. The original anonymous Message Stor employee who authored the directions doe not matter, but the person who prints it as a poem becomes its author, contributing the aesthetic vision; or at least they are the one who takes the effort to bring this passage into an existing aesthetic community.

Some other people, existing in as contemporaries to the person who would remix cleaner directions as poetry, are not at all a part of that community of poetic appreciation, and will give no meaning-valuation to the poem if they saw it. This other person belongs to a separate community which has no vocabulary or consciousness of textual interpretation or the function of poetry. This person is watching a YouTube video: the techno remix of the weeping Brittney Spears fan saying 'Leave Brittney alone!' This watcher is enjoying the work of an author who added music and blinking colors to clips of the original speaker's rant to produce a result that cruelly mocks the original author and is simultaneously a hilarious pop-culture social commentary. Now both the YouTube watcher and the found poetry person are bringing knowledge external to the text in order to appreciate the construct. So arguments for 'anything as literature' require the reader to contribute much of the meaning, and this can operate without the participants awareness.

A more traditional definition of literature makes it out to be only the most exemplary of a societies texts; the texts that are bold, unique, unparalleled in communicating (with artistry) the values and ideals of that culture. Such texts function by telling the reader the content more than requiring the reader to provide meaning. In other words, the text contains an internal logical pattern of conceptual units rather than the reader taking the textual elements as referents to external structures. Traditional texts where generally designed this way, by authors for readers, both agreeing that this is how the text should function. The works that last (having to be repeatedly recommended across generations) have a deep complexity and/or representational authenticity new generations recognize. With this definition of literature there must be a category for what it excludes; hack writing or pulp fiction. These texts are derivative, sensationalist without skill or artistic quality. But such unlauded texts remain in demand alongside 'better' ones, both the antique and newly written pulp. Is this only because there is such a shortage of literary murder-mystery detective novels?

Since both high and lowly rated texts have popular appeal, it is hard for me to think there is much validity to any one persons definition of literature, particularity my own. It becomes a preference based on specific goals. There are just too many systems of reasoning and too many different reasons people read and comment on texts. Literature is just communication people value. I personally find myself valuing texts for wildly conflicting reasons. While I could talk about the particulars of why I read the Bible, and also a comic strip about a girl who gets turned into a zebra demon, I think the real distinction between definitions of literature is that exclusive ones seek to find a unifying element that solves the question permanently, and inclusive definitions are based around the lack of knowledge and lack of fixed points of reference. By points of reference I mean things like our society no longer evaluating things on the basis of their compatibility to Biblical teaching, or Marxist doctrine, or a particular academic authority. (Nor is there any agreement on an established aesthetic quality.) I think this is all right, because instead of reflecting some sort of group unity, it is based on the natural lack of agreement people have.

There are many reasons for writing and reading things, thus people create their reasons why they do so. What is key is that the defense of personal selection comes AFTER enjoying those selections. Or, in a more serious academic context where enjoyment may not be a highly valued quality, it is a logical and/or ideological constancy that predates building a theory. Interestingly, only in specific contexts do people produce defenses for their choices:

academic settings where the construction, workings and effects of textual communication are studied.
cultural debates considering the moral fitness of texts.
publishing industry discussions of texts as business opportunities.
These three settings are occasions where texts are used in conjunction with some other purpose. The people purchasing commercial fiction or writing texts aren't usually doing so according to a theoretical framework, nor are they required to defend them. Instead there is a desire to consume (or produce) a particular sort of construct, and if doing so necessitates an explanation or defense, a person will get one.

Texts are as disparate as the stars in the sky. All quite different, in placement, of various types but little of that is important to people who look up at the night sky. Most people just enjoy the lights, or perhaps use them for navigation. Its the same for books. People study and categorize texts, or just read them without any formal purpose; everyone according to the use they will put the text to.

Any use can be fitting, effective within that persons personal and cultural situation. A person may be interested in the history of some time and place, so the concerns of that place and the beliefs and experience of the author will be useful in understanding a text produced then. After all, people create texts for their own reasons and since the text survived it must have some relevancy or merit. If the persons use is to illustrate the state of society, then a text can be analyzed for a particular viewpoint; gender, race, economic theory. Text itself is just fodder for where ever a persons mind wants to go. Like the trees much text gets printed on, texts get ground up or cut apart and shaped into many uses. The original tree does have an effect on the product, just as the text can only say so much and no further. Wood quality, strength, biological structure (thus color and sound), limit what the results can be. Texts, as trees grow according to their own biology of existence, wild according to the weather, or carefully planted and pruned ones. What is done later with their lumber does not always follow the occasion wherein they where originally formed.

Grady Houger ~ 1184 words.

Lemon tree

2008-03-12T12:15:00.000-07:00

Thus far in my university experience (6months, 6 classes), I have found the faculty to be fair and knowledgeable when it comes to Christianity as an influential world religion. Being exposed to favorable attitudes toward Christianity from non-believers (most of whom seem to be devout pluralists who will treat any other religion with equal respect) I have noticed how limited my own religious knowledge is outside what I specifically believe.
For instance, when discussing a book’s religious references in a small class group, a Mormon classmate knew quite a bit, but wasn't familiar with the specifics of Catholicism. I knew a little bit of that, but for a separate class project (which I got to use my religious beliefs in) I found I didn't know how to spell Protestant and didn't know what it meant!

Do you know the origin and meaning of Protestant?
Seeing as how I am one, this was a problem. There’s a good article (meaning well designed and understandable) in the online Catholic encyclopedia if you google Protestant.
Basically, during the Reformation the groups formed around teachings against Catholic Church practices of the day were ‘in protest’ to it, so they where the protest-ants. I didn’t realize till I had to spell it that the regional pronunciation of is Prod-ist-ent not Pro-test-int. It’s became a label not a descriptive word.

It was kind of disappointing to be named in opposition to the existence of some other group. I’d rather have a group name that stood on its own principles. Oh well. What I should be more active in is learning the formal positions of other sects and faiths. Within the specific band of Christianity I adhere to I feel well educated. There is lots of historical teaching and evidence to be learned for other positions as well. Some education minded Protestant Evangelical American Christians may know our own beliefs and doctrines well, but it would be good to know other things, such as the religious history of America’s Revolutionary war. I heard an interview on NPR of a book on this topic, and it sounded quite interesting in that a lot of common assumptions about the constitution, the founding fathers, and England aren’t correct. Should I believe that author’s analysis of the origins of religious freedom in America? Not without reading his book, and looking for myself at the original documents.

We should be carful in what we say and believe if we haven’t studied a topic in depth.

Grady Houger - know thy origins

views

2008-03-05T23:06:00.000-08:00

Can we see our self? Only one narrow prospective directly, the parts our eyes can reach. I can't see my back. I can only see it reflected in something external to me. Fortunately our mirror technology is quite accurate. But for what we are as a nation, or a society, or as human creatures; Stories are that we can look at to see a reflection of what we are.
But how distorted is that story-image of our nature? It may be beautiful, maybe enjoyable, but not accurate.

Grady Houger

Mental Shifts 2.5

2008-02-27T17:32:00.000-08:00

In MS1 I started with how surprising it is when an aspect of consciousness changes. The experience current to me is education - bringing new ideas into my awareness - causing me to experience amazement and wonder at connections between symbols and levels of meaning. The perceptual shift leads me to wonder about what exactly are the parts of the mind and how do they operate.

In MS2 I systematically describe the mind.

Memory, senses, thought/imagination correspond to past, present, and future respectively. This is all we have in our heads to work with.

The mind resides in the physical brain, which is biological and chemical, so health and drugs directly affect the mental state.

The metaphor of ‘Mental Space’ is useful to think about thinking. What is being attempted with this writing it to build a model of the mind in words, so that our minds can ‘see’ itself. Because the mind is intangible, and it’s only easy to talk of things as physical, physical-sensing metaphors and language get used.

The whole point of [write/talk]ing about this is to put our thinking quality, which is insensible, in terms that can be sensed (and traded) and thought about. This is so funny that we don’t know how our minds work, so we have to sketch its function in spatial words, then feed that back into the mind to process.

Lastly, if consciousness is ‘space’ then ideas are ‘structures’ within it. Those ideas can be concerning physical objects we sense, or abstract concepts invented by our self, or invented by others and communicated to our mind through symbolic communication. These idea structures get valuation that can be inaccurate and can change.

MS2.5

Now for some clarification.

When we think, we don’t have awareness of our thoughts, we don’t feel them the way we feel a cold swallow of water sliding down the throat (as apposed to a bitter pill which, being broken in half, is also jagged), the mind has no physical senses within it. What it does have is emotion, which is somewhat attached to thought, but thought is also disattached from emotion in that we can think on sad things when we are happy, and remember annoying work to be done when we are feeling relaxed. Emotions only suggest, they do not force the mind into particular thoughts. (This is one reason against recreational drug use which induces overwhelming emotions artificially to the point of impairing judgment.) So while we do not normally think about the mind we are thinking with, if we want to think about how it works, some symbolic model is needed for it to exist and be operated on ‘within mental space’. All we see and sense physically is in this mental space, along with our thoughts. This aspect of everything you experience being ‘in your head’ has a lot of preexisting ideas attached to it, mainly:

‘how do we know anything is real’

and

‘how can any absolute truth exist or be known if everything we know or can know comes to us in the form of thought and sense impressions, which are variable and untrustworthy?’

These two questions are answerable, but I’d rather ignore them for now. Some may see them as necessary to be answered first before going on, but I would rather not question my own “perception of internal accuracy & validity” for now, later these can be addressed.

My model may be inaccurate, and what I’m proposing is definitely disagreed with by other theories, specifically Freudian Psychoanalysis, which has its own special words for things and says the mind contains unconscious thinking elements. I am no longer convinced of this, but such a discussion will have to be for a later time. Despite possible failings with my model, theoretical discussion is the only way to think about this sort of issue. It is not telling you what is, but conversing about a topic. Essentially, I am writing to see what I think, holding little attachment to it. So if you have additions, corrections and comments, please write.

The last element to be addressed in the mind’s parts is spirit. Physical brain matter and its construction is accurately (to a point) learned about through the scientific method. Logical reasoning, physics and chemistry let us know solid facts about the brain, but many problems arise from ‘Science’ as a cultural institution not telling where fact end and theory begins. That boundary is present for those who look for it, it’s just not spoken in any of the popular sources most people get their science info from. So the spirit is not ‘findable’ and testable using the scientific method. There almost seems to be a limit to logic, and spirituality is somewhat beyond that. I’m not sure, but I’m thinking that spirituality is fundamentally not logical, and a different system must be switched to as some point in understanding that which cannot be observed and evaluated physically.

At any rate, we can say that a moral concept is not a physical object.

So at this point, we have to define the anatomy of an abstract mental concept, one type of those concepts being moral truths.

There are several major current beliefs about the nature of such concepts.

These beliefs can be wrong, having a understandable shape in mental space, but no truth or function in reality.

What is the field in which these things interact?

Physical reality

Spiritual reality

Within mental space we are working with concepts which make claims about how elements of reality relate to each other or other concepts.

One belief system says concepts have some absolute valuation based on how well they describe/explain the operation of reality.

An opposing belief is that any concept exists only in mental space, and can’t be tied to reality.

So concepts are either: true, untrue, partly true, or that no truth exists, all is a personal preference.

But, science provides a method for proving the truth of certain kinds of concepts within a specific framework. Math is the easiest to do this with. Pure concepts that operate reliably in interacting with the physical world. Such tidy examples are rare with other fields.

Can there be a science of moral truth? Not so much. It’s a realm that does not correspond the same way in terms of data collection, data verification, theory validation, experimental reliability, and algorithmic synthesis. This brings up the degree to which scientific principles are engrained and believed in our society. Is morality just too complex to figure out for us, but if we could would it operate on a basis that would fit a scientific framework of equations and repeatable processes? I don’t think so. Physical operations are in relation to physics, chemistry, and mathematical logic. Moral concepts are in relation to God, and or other humans – personally and as institutional groupings. If God or humanity where a force that always acted the same in any identical situation, then a science could be devised, but interaction between us and God is not of formula but as thinking entities interacting according to the attitudes and actions of each other. For us, there is the element of communication, which by the limitations of our physical frame, is inaccurate. Now if God exists, than absolute truth must exist. I’m going to work off that is a given, because I haven’t the capability to prove it at the moment.

So for next time (That being Mental Shifts 3, which may/maynot be tomorrow) the anatomy of a concept and how that relates to our knowledge of morality.

Grady Houger ~ word count: 1271 :-p

Fame

2008-02-26T17:34:00.001-08:00

Nowadays, many published authors have blogs. It keeps them in touch with fans, and provides place to say things more wide ranging, casual, and frequently than in novels and book introductions. Blogs can also function as a community meeting place, like a conversation in the corner of a church lobby.

The one author blog I read commented on the release of Anne Rice's new book The Road to Cana, and mentioned how Rice plans to write a new vampire Lestat novel.
There was lots of interesting issues in this blog post in regards to how Anne Rice is practicing her faith, interpreting theology, and how the media reacts to her, but my reaction was to think how kewl it was that Anne Rice may write a vampire story from a Christian prospective. Her historical fiction portraying the life of Christ is interesting, but I don't read those sorts of books.

Now, when I first read and thought the above paragraph, I was going to post a response on that author’s blog, but didn't have time before class. Six hours later, I return to find Anne Rice herself had commented on that blog! Suddenly, I didn't have anything to say. How could my comment about what I think of Anne Rice's work have any sort of place in a forum where the author herself is active? It struck me in that moment what fabulous roles I was giving to authors as a social entity. The blog I was reading is Forensics and Faith By Brandilyn Collins, a successful pro Christian suspense writer. I've posted on her blog for years, fearlessly offering my comments without much thought of my status in the writing community. But status is exactly the issue here. Being in the same 'room' online with Anne Rice is like accidentally finding myself standing in a hallway conversation with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. What would you say to the most powerful persons in the US government? Would you feel comfortable commenting on national security or the Iraq war?

That may be a unrealistic depiction of the fame of Anne Rice, but that's how I perceived it. Yet she is as mortal as anyone else, and apparently follows mentions of herself within the writing community. What is fame anyway? Anne Rice has it, I know about her through news articles and pop culture references to her books and I felt I knew enough about her to decide I didn't want to read any of her books and haven't yet. In reality I know nothing about 'her' as a human being, and I don't know anything about the literary qualities of her books. All I know is 'her' as a social entity, a brand. I can't talk to a brand name, I don't have that status. If I was a well known superstar novelist what would be the actual difference in me?

I'm not trying to suggest that all people are equal although they are as human beings. The lesson in my mind is to remember the humanity of people and not just their social image, but also be circumspect about what I blather about on the internet. This isn't a meaningless place where adolescents find new combinations of obscene words to label each other. The internet is our social visibility, as real as any conversation in physical space. I don't want to be the 88th youtube comment saying 'cool vid!!!!1!' The people around us, online and in shoes are our colleagues, friends, neighbors. Wouldn't it be good to talk with care and insight, depth of thought, educated concern? Seeing someone famous shouldn't have to remind me not act like an idiot.

Grady Houger

not cloudy today

2008-02-22T15:24:00.000-08:00

I’m working on Mental Shifts part 3, which looks like it need a part 4. But the topic of human consciousness is complex, and I’m thinking up new considerations I hadn’t thought of before. They are all out of order, and are taking a lot of work to connect properly, and fill in the holes. But I am working on it every day, thanks to Kjell’s Facebook response to it. That’s all it takes to get me working, just show some interest and pose a question. It’s just that quality writing takes a level of organization and refinement of argument that I’m not capable of writing in one shot. So daily revision is necessary.

What can be done in one shot is talking about what happened on the bus. I got in and there was a snappily dressed fellow playing a ukulele! It was quite cheery.

Grady Houger

Hi Mom! (and other potentially existant blog reader(s)! ) Remember you can click the word COMMENTS under the post there to leave your 2 cents. Actually, there's a new blogger feature where I an add a button for you to directly phone-call/voicemail me. I don't think I'll bother. I'm terribly inarticulate on the phone and I tend to expect other people to be as well. Writing should be good enought right?

[insert musical riff here]

2008-02-21T15:58:00.000-08:00

I want to get past these difficult times in life.
But what’s more valuable or important, having achievement or being in the experience that teaches us what’s necessary for that achievement?
Maybe this one or the other isn’t something to be decided between. I ask because how should we react in the difficult moments of life? Should we flee and try to remove ourselves from them, or try to understand and appreciate those moments?
The difference is sitting down and crying or climbing the elevator shaft with a broken hand.

Grady Houger ~ sunshine and frowning

future

2008-02-20T15:58:00.000-08:00

I see a woman collecting pages from the printer; she’s carrying a bag that says “I’m carrying the future in this bag”.
This is true, and interesting to look at the future potential in all our bags and other containers of information. Her bag does contain future thoughts, ideas and work she will produce, but no guarantee that it will be influential or even noticed by a larger population. Everyone here in this computer lab is working on something, and who knows what those individual results will amount to.

The thought of potential effect comes from our base belief about the word Future. The words ‘the future is what I carry and make’ has whatever connotation you give to it, positive or negative.

Grady

2008-02-20T15:32:00.000-08:00

I see a woman collecting pages from the printer; she’s carrying a bag that says “I’m carrying the future in this bag”.
This is true, and interesting to look at the future potential in all our bags and other containers of information. Her bag does contain future thoughts, ideas and work she will produce, but no guarantee that it will be influential or even noticed by a larger population. Everyone here in this computer lab is working on something, and who knows what those individual results will amount to.

The thought of potential effect comes from our base belief about the word Future. The words ‘the future is what carry and make’ has whatever connotation you give to it, positive or negative.

being a part

2008-02-19T19:01:00.000-08:00

If I take action, I am participating in human society. If I just watch, I remain lonely outside that society. Short periods of rest are good (we all sleep), but prolonged lack of participation makes one irrelevant. People don’t reach outside their society. You could make a case for more inclusiveness, but it’s better to just enter the general community and learn to interact on its terms. There plenty of people will readily turn and talk to you.

Grady Houger ~ talking to myself

multimedia!

2008-02-15T11:56:00.000-08:00

I was going to write a third part to the Mental Shifts discussion I’ve been doing, but reading through the past two was too boring. I’ll have to continue that some time later when I’ve got more interest.
What is interesting to people in general are stories. At a simplified level the most compelling stories are about characters (the more well made the better) in conflict of some kind. It can be people against each other, against ideas, against nature, against monsters. There are many lists of these sorts of things; one of the classic ones is the 36 Dramatic Situations. If a teaching of moral philosophy or description of the mind is put into a story that necessitates that information, it will be far more engaging than an essay on the same topic; at least for most readers. I need to learn how to write those. Anyway, today is dancing robots.
First, watch this video:
http://www.youtube.com/v/jZmNc-rshWw&rel=1

Then read this comic (be sure to come back, there’s lots of interesting stuff there!):
http://simulatedcomicproduct.com/2007/02/18/mk4/

We will have useful humanlike robots within the next 25 years. Possibly even within the next 10 years.
We need to be ready. This development will probably be a bigger deal than anyone expects. Because we are going to like them. A robot with the same coordination and range of movement as a human will be able to do certain jobs humans had done. Basically, we’ll have expensive, obedient slaves. The other important aspect is bonding. People already like their pets, stuffed animals and cars. Robot integration into society as a servant class is going to be a big deal to the first generation, and once a generation of kids grows up with robots, there will be even more strangeness compared to now. Don’t you like dancing robots? If you had a robot right now, what would you want it to run and get you?
Currently, many people deny a the existence of soul. If a robot can mimic humanity well enough, a portion of people will accept them as equals. On the other hand, they won’t be as mentally capable as humans, I don’t see advances yet in useful artificial intelligence. So these social considerations likely won’t develop into a problem with interaction with another creature, but one of how we will view each other in relating to a new and powerful machine. It is like our views on the treatment of animals. Cruelty is illegal, eating certain animals is not, and many people treat their pets just like people, and project onto their pets emotions and thoughts the pet does not have. The same thing will happen with robots. The technology is currently available to make robots look exactly like humans. Now, pets don’t do much economically. There are some working dogs, and some breeding trade. But for robots, they will be economically valuable, cleaning, picking up trash, functioning as security guards, solders, working in nursing homes, stealing things, selling drugs, and being waitresses.
This is all theoretical now, but you should start thinking about how we will treat robots and more importantly, how we will treat other humans who have different ideas about how to treat robots.

Grady Houger ~ I want one & will be disturbed by it

Mental shifts 2

2008-02-14T16:39:00.001-08:00

Of the past we have only memories.
Memories fade, and are modified by later memories and concepts/considerations put upon them. Memories have status, in relation to how often we dwell on them. Memories are linked together by association, and/or chronology. Memories are primarily, so far as we know, stored physically/chemically in your meat brain in patterns or arrangements of according various theoretical structures.

Of the present –which is a most narrow slice of always fleeing awareness – the now instant, for this we only have our senses. Sight, touch, smell, taste, hearing, and the sixth which is a variable, debated, denied sort of intuition or spiritual awareness.

Of the future, our minds can only guess, which is done by an internal function of extrapolation/imagination, which also does many other things. Our minds hold a mental conceptual space, not a physical space but a mental quality that can be described as a space. This is where we actually ‘are’ where we do our thinking, although the actual processing is done by your meat brain. But you don’t have any physical sensation of your meat brain. Blood flow cannot be felt, chemical balances have no dials and readouts, none of the physical aspects of the physical brain are directly sensed by us. The brain has none of the nerves that let the skin sense touch, heat, pain etc. So the thinking operations of the mind are in what we call consciousness, and I use the idea of an imagined space to describe it, but other non-real but metaphorically accurate systems of description can be invented.

So this mental conceptual space is larger and less limited than our senses. We receive sense data, not like computers receive data, but as living creatures receive it, seamlessly jumbled imprecise input. We then project 'out' onto the reality around us our world awareness concept. All we experience is really in our heads. I might see someone next to me shopping for a TV at the bestbuy website, but that image is being processed and made in my brain. Have you ever seen someone sleep with their eyes open? Eyes don’t stop seeing, but when asleep the brain stops processing images, and instead displays dream images it mysteriously creates. Hearing doesn’t stop when we’re asleep. All that info still comes in, but we only wake up when it becomes too loud or certain words are said. One of the evidences of our consciousness of the world being an internal representation is in how easily it can be disrupted chemically. Drugs affect the body, and the mind is a function of the body. All the drugs classified as psychotropic are the ones that strongly affect the mind, causing hallucinations that can be visual, audible, kinesthetic etc. Even getting sick with a bad cold can make a person ‘loopy’ and confuse the senses. Depression, and more severe things such as manic states are not just physical but mental. Even a healthy person within the bounds of ‘normal’ finds their mind affected by the chemical process of emotions. Tired, angry, happy, physically struggling with something, think about how your thought processes are in those states.

When we learn something, those concepts are forming neuron pathways in our brains. (at least that is a main theory believed to be true.) This is the physical connection with concepts, thoughts and the physical body. We understand mentally what has formed there physically, from repeated exposure. But the brain is very plastic, it forgets, and deforms ideas. It can also generate similar structures (if consciousness is a ‘space’ then ideas are ‘structures’) by imagination. This thought creation, synthesis process can be freeform, playful, creating dreams. It can be logical, procedural and also create dreams. Given the forgetfulness factor, repeated constant exposure needed to maintain and fix concepts. The mind ‘space’ we think from can be a blank slate, but usually isn’t, being fulled with immediate concerns and thoughts of what we are about to do.

All that to say that when changes happen, that is when new thoughts and concepts form in your mind through the instruction of others or your own recombination of knowledge, such change is interesting. Positively it is enjoyable, or it could be distressing, but that change is in the consciousness, the virtual workspace of your mind. That’s why people use sayings like ‘expand your mind.’ Society has discovered drugs didn’t work for that; instead drugs encouraged crime, homelessness and mental breakdown. Education is a more traditional and consistent way. The feelings of wonder and seeing everything around in a new way like I described yesterday is the result of a shifting/ destabilization/ enlarging of mental space. Because, those things I see and sense around me are really all in my head, in the mental space where I have concepts and values attached to objects that really have no capacity for emotion. Saying ‘that’s an ugly poster’ is about your valuation of what you perceive as the poster, not the physical object itself. “There is a pretty girl” is a mental concept you may revise depending on what you observe, the change may be in her actions or in your perception, but the place it happens is in your head.

This is an incomplete contemplation. There is still the element of spirit to consider, and a deeper look at how understanding this system of mental makeup affects how we understand reality and our awareness of it. But that will have to be for another day.

Grady Houger ~ Will interest outweigh the boring essay format?

only 924 words!

Mental shifts part 1

2008-02-13T13:35:00.000-08:00

Eww~! I just saw a guy with his hands in his mouth, then he types on the keyboard. This isn’t his keyboard; it’s in the computer lab. These keyboards are filthy. Any amount of typing makes your fingertips feel GRIMEY. That was the most disgusting thing I’ve seen in a long time. I usually wash my hands after being here, now I always will. And never touch my eyes. Ack.

I have some thoughts; but instead of putting them out as a loose conglomeration of ideas I’ll save them for tomorrow, hopefully I’ll be able to put them in good order.

Today I’m feeling the effects of having learned a bunch of difficult theoretical concepts about how to interpret literature. In general there have been a lot of these moments in the last few days, plus I got a new renter, so mentally life is just shaken up and perceptually shifted. This leaves me with a phenomenon that can be called ‘tripped on knowledge’. It goes like this:
“Woah there’s paint on the walls! Paint is thin! The walls aren’t flat! I’m writing words! Words are symbols! Symbols signify meaning! Meanings of words are a cultural function! “Walls” can be a metaphor for boundaries! If walls are boundaries what is the paint? There’s dust on top of my computer! …” and so on. All the images we see are open to reinterpretation during a perceptual shift.

Such moments are one of the rewards of education, and can contain for more important revelations than what I describe here. I’ve been thinking about changing my minor, and assessing what college really gives a person. You see, much of academic learning is oriented towards learning-as-an-end-in-itself. Knowledge for the sake of knowing about the world. As opposed to knowledge so I can be an expert at a particular job - knowledge to be used for a function. The functional application of knowledge is up to the student, much of academia tries to pretend and keep the image of learning to pursue an ideal wisdom. Learning to make money is opposed to that concept, or at least people feel they are incompatible.
Now, while I would like to sit and consider these lofty concepts, I can’t I need to hurry to run some errands around town before offices close. Conceptual knowledge must bow to necessary chores!

Grady Houger

why shoot fish in a barrel - barrel and fish are bigger than you

2008-02-12T12:50:00.000-08:00

There is very little wonton, random malicious wrongdoing. Many settings contain a margin of trust that is not exploited except for personal benefit. The opportunity to do something damaging may be present, but it isn't done because it would either give no advantage or harm the setting.
The Example I noticed was here at college. Teachers have mail boxes and also bins on their doors. Many important papers pass through these. Stealing any number of them, either all or a few randomly, would cause stupendous havic for a lot of busy people. No one does this because those who know about it and have the most opportunity are sympathetic parties and wouldn't want the bother it would cause.

People who are truly at odds with the a cultural system and desire to do damage are rarely calm, subtle, and successful. The unhinged and do things like arson, school shootings and suicide. They don't just bend all the unused library bookends. There is a range of anti-social behaviors, with a wide gap between throwing trash on the ground and pipebombs.

Well, I’m not studying sociology so I don’t know what sort of conclusion can be made from this observation. If you have some ideas of where this line of thought can go, please speak up.

I’d like to say thanks to the friends who’ve left some comments recently. It warms the cockles of me heart it does! Thanks for reading!
Now, I got some denials to my statements that ‘I don’t really know what I’m talking about’ and ‘I’m not good writing’. To illustrate my points I’d like to point you to a blog I just found, http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/ There’s an ideal example of insightful commentary and clear, readable arguments! Stanly Fish is no beginner like me; he’s 70, and the most famous theorists of literary criticism still alive. I had a whole class build on one of his academic essays!

Grady Houger ~ I don’t have a cool name like Fish, but hopefully I can make something of mine.

Stream of Consciousness

2008-02-11T09:37:00.000-08:00

The possessing of items is enjoyable. This is the same for physical objects, like a coin, or mental objects like this idea.

I was looking at a hi-rez, pdf map of Tolkien’s Middle Earth. I was struck by a feeling of confusion; this place is almost as real as any in physical space. That's disturbing. I know the geography of Middle Earth better than many places on my earth. It's hard not to say that Middle Earth is real.

Plenty of stories use the idea that our perception of reality isn't reality. That perception is groomed and spun, that anyone with power and true info transmits the messages they want people to believe, not what they believe or what reality really is.
Does this happen, is this true, is this possible?
Do we have any accurate data on a successful conspiracy? Any data on successful public deception?
People may try to lie, cover and market, but the resolution of public perception is too fine grained to wholly believe the screen is a window.
Of course I am ignoring those people who I see in the computer labs, I read over their shoulders, observing them look up articles on Brittney Speers latest news, and equally vapid other media-sluts with less valuable names. These people are the unthinking cannon fodder of our information age.

On related note, I'd like to admit I struggle with feelings of superiority. Really, I'm very interested in reading about celebs, and I like listening to the latest pop music. It’s just that I don't like liking popular things; I haven't given up fighting against my interest.
Hip-hop-pop sounds good. That doesn't make it good. It may vary well be, that is I'm operating on the assumption, that it is candy poison.
Interesting that appealing style is separated experientially from moral content.
I may believe in certain principles, but they are not a strict action protocol. I am not compelled to act what I believe, there are other appealing forces demanding to be participated in; like a mashup tune of Daft Punk and techno, the one with the Nietzsche slogan in it.

Then I just heard these guys:
"we're not sayn were better than anybody, we're just iller. there’s a difference." - Iller Than Theirs

Isn't that what most of us believe about ourselves? Grady's not better than you, He's just totally cooler. I don't believe this. But I feel it occasionally.

Grady Houger

feedback

2008-02-10T15:58:00.000-08:00

I've heard tell thar's actually some people readin' me blog.
Hopefully it's apparent that I don't know much, but in case you are reading a different interpretation into these texts, let me tell you: I barely know what I’m talking about, most of the time I just make something up as I go along. The rest of the time, I have I idea to communicate, and mumble through it poorly. So if you have any comments, corrections and disagreements I’d like to hear it! Saying something would also let me know someone’s actually there; I run this blog on Facebook and Blogger, and neither of them tells you traffic data. Some day I may move this blog to my personal website for statistics and advertizing, but that would be when I get closer to economic popularity.

A lot of blogs are written with reader awareness in mind; they talk to the reader and are open to interaction. I’ve been writing this without any of that. I didn’t want to sound like all the other chatty bloggers talking about what they’ve been doing. I especially didn’t want to be saying ‘hi folks! Well today…’ if there wasn’t anyone there. That would be pathetic. Like a live TV show but nobodies watching. Well, TV doesn’t allow viewers to respond, that’s why the internets better. So if what I say makes you think of something, don’t be afraid to say it!

Writing this is fun, even though I disappoint myself with poor English composition and hazy arguments. I have the basic ability to think up ideas, and the desire to write about them, but the quality aspect is what writers call ‘the craft’. I’ve never liked that term much, mainly since Wiccans call their magic ‘the craft.’ Writing isn’t magic. The quality aspect is mainly in the mechanics of grammar, structure, and description. Anyway, that stuff is boring and to be avoided by most people.
At any rate, I plan on saying something provocative tomorrow, so I’ll go work on that and hopefully you can comment on it.

Grady Houger ~ needs to earn his fans

its not enough to like stuff

2008-02-07T15:13:00.000-08:00

It’s not enough to like stuff. Stuff doesn't do anything. It’s just a starting point, what you like seeps in to you, and has to come out. Feeding aptitudes isn’t enough. More has to come of it. Make things. Being a fan is no good. Participate!

There are so many interests that prove this false. But not really. You can enjoy reading about mountain climbing and enjoy the stories without ever climbing maintains. True. But you are not mountain climbing, your a reader. that’s what you’re doing.

I like unpopular music. I need to make it. I like reading. I need to write. What I realized is how lousy I'm doing as a writer. I'm not committed, I’m learning how to write, and it takes ALL a persons effort. Doing well at something usually means devoting yourself to it, letting it consume you. I can't be a vapid consumer of interesting things. I have to give up stuff in order to make something. If I be a writer, I won't be something else. By being something you give up the other things you could be.

Grady ~ isn't anything at the now

draft on coping

2008-02-06T09:41:00.000-08:00

A theme in science philosophy and science fiction is a humans inability to fully comprihend reality; particularilty the vastness of space, the enormity of humanities frailness and limitations. Now, scientific thinkers discount religion fo various -sometimes fair- reasons, but authentic Christianity is what I believe enables a person to face those enormous concepts without going mad. The scientific consept that we are insignifigant, small, fragile creatures in a vast and pearilous universe is not herisy. I can honestly say I am a weak and inconsiquential individual who does not matter. All sorts of statements can be true, it just depends on what your solving the equasion for. purpose and meaning in life is going to be a bit bleak in a humanist system. Scripture definately teaches human frailty and how vast other forces are, most particularily God. Its alright though. Instead of being small and weak in a system of nature that is unthinking, uncareing, and ready to destroy you; a Christian can be weak and small in a world overseen by a supreme power who personally cares. God doesnt remove problems, He redefines them into understandible processes. A person is insignifigant only in relation to what a person considers important. If thats fame, power and such, its easy to not matter. I believe purpose can be something more attainable, like knowing God and obeying him.

Grady Houger

refining thoughts about capitalism

2008-02-04T14:35:00.000-08:00

Been thinking more about post-capitalism. The fact is, I know very little about the elements of capitalism, and less about systems that may come after.
I think what I am really wondering about is not all of capitalism and other economic systems (though I want to know more, if I can make the time to read such.) it’s the issue of purpose in economic pursuit.
Capitalism does include concepts of private ownership, trade between private parties without restriction, non-regulated supply and demand. I like these ideas.
What I don't like is the idea of earning money for its own sake, becoming wealthy just to enjoy an expensive lifestyle. Also, the idea of a corporation being its own self serving entity, who’s only object is growth is -in my opinion- a dangerous creature; there needs to be humans with a moral agenda in control of a corporation. If it is guided only by appetite, it will be a monster, not a beneficial organism.
Likewise an individual (myself) should have objectives beyond earning and enjoyment.

With this in mind, there are many interesting corporate and personal goals that to consider beyond escalating consumption. Without profit as an objective, consider a company that spent its earnings on its employees. Improved health and benefits packages, nicer offices and perks such as a free employee restaurant.
Or a company with a finite lifespan, designed and chartered to close in 40 years. At that point all assets would be liquidated, the value divided between the influential employees. They would have an interest in providing continued service for customers, and would likely reform immediately, and that would be the point. Revised leadership and rules. Like the idea that if an individual moves every few years, they become efficient at packing and don't own extraneous stuff. A company that had to die an be reborn every ten years would likely have lively and competent office management skills. (A little like term limits for politicians. It would be wishful thinking to imagine such a system for bureaucratic offices.)

I do think there will be more to say about this!

Grady Houger ~ purpose beyond money

post-capitalism and beyond

2008-01-31T15:51:00.000-08:00

Theres a componant of doing somehow missing from education. I think it's the space between thinking you knowing something and actually knowing it. Much info can be known about, but those consepts aren't fully known. Not 'till the've been tested and lived from multiple angles.

The reading material in two of my classes has concerned slavery. One of the articles I read was an interesting one that discussed a slaves ideals and longing in terms of capitalism. Slavery was based on the idea of owning people, you protect and manage your slaves, and they do the work in gratitude of being cared for. But people are evil so this didn't work out for most slaves. Capitalism is based around volitional contracts and market economics. You mutually agree to work in exchange for compensation. Or trade goods for money. This has worked better, but is still hampered by the human desire to cheat others. I think that the problems are mainly moral, but it will be interesting to see what economic system will replace capitalism. This seems to be in progress, only time will tell.

What I have realized is that people who become famous for influential works create them from an environment that is ripe for that new idea. Darwin wrote Origin in a climate that was discussing those issues of biological and social change. So look around for what you are in place to suggest!

Grady Houger ~ wants to earn money

memory

2008-01-30T14:14:00.000-08:00

I've been reading a lot of depressing science fiction, for class and in what I've had available for fun. One topic that came up was how a person, when suddenly bereft of their computerized tools, isn't the person they where before. Their identity and skills are tied to those things. So yesterday one of my classes was canceled. This was nice since it gave me more time to finish a due project, but since I wasn't in that class, I couldn't remember when my next class was! It didn't take long to remember, but there certainly is a part of memory that gets stored not in facts but in procedures. This is a known phenomenon where place memory isn't accessible to random access memory. It's probably because of how much info we need to remember these days. I can't really say if its bad or not.

What is bad is not getting enough sleep! I got nine hours today, and feel much more capable than yesterday.

Grady Houger ~ lots of carefully scheduled homework

bleh

2008-01-29T18:18:00.000-08:00

What's there to say? Nothing seems interesting today.

Grady

did you know outside the sun is shining

2008-01-25T11:27:00.000-08:00

Well, I was going to write more about cigarettes and government roles, in that people use things like cigarettes and alcohol to kill themselves, and it is a fairly standard belief that government is authorized to make decisions about mortality. Homicide is illegal, it is a direct ending of life. That aspect of direct and purposeful death by another is why I believe the government would not be out of place to make abortion illegal. Cigarettes and alcohol on the other hand, are gradual and self inflicted personal choices, which do not necessarily end in death. So something dangerous, but gradual and variable should remain a personal freedom.

Should a woman have the personal freedom to choose abortion? I do not think so. To end someone elses life is not for a private citizen to decide. Would you support a beauroh of murder permits, so that people could apply for permission to kill someone they did not want around? That would at least be under the law. Instead, I think having a child is a role only available to a woman. If a woman does not want to participate in bearing a new person, then she should not participate in creating one. But if she does, it is a person, or will soon be one, and she has no right to kill another person.

I started by saying I was going to write about this, and did despite the reason that was going to dissuade me, which is still a present problem to this moment. You see, all the normal computer labs where full, so I am at a computer in the language lab. First, someone started watching the movie "Shall We Dance" on the projector, and now, a class has started, and it is not in English.

I do not like awkward situations sam-I-am!

Grady Houger ~ is preparing to flee

smoking

2008-01-24T17:58:00.000-08:00

So how about cigarettes?

It's nasty to walk through someones plume of exhaust.

Some people think smoking should be banned in outdoor public areas.

While I would personally enjoy that, I can't get over the issue of personal freedom.

Should the government make it illegal to use a legal product?

Should people be allowed to make individual choices, or should social preferences be enforced on everyone?

What do you think?

Grady Houger

sick

2008-01-23T11:47:00.000-08:00

I got nothin'. I feel terrible.

Came down with a flu, but thankfully I'm not throwing up.

Grady

remembering to live well

2008-01-22T16:11:00.000-08:00

It was worth spending a $100 on gas to go see a group of the people who made me a better person. I immensely enjoyed the alumni reunion. It reminded me that people and interaction are what's necessary to fight of grey depressing hopelessness. Relationships give context and purpose: space in which to act on lofty abstract principles. Both are necessary, without reasoned understanding, there is no purpose to interaction, just emptyheaded silliness. With no interaction there is no context for principle to be meaningful. By itself it can only be empty madness or highlevel math.

So Together therein lies a meaningfull and satisfying life.

Now, if I drove a car that got 40mpg instead of 19, It would have cost $55, even though 40mpg cars are often desel costing 30c more.

Ah well, can't enjoy life if I live for money.

Grady Houger ~ getting sick, and reading Descartes discuss the mind's separation from the body

limits of comprehension

2008-01-18T11:30:00.000-08:00

If someone understands something, it is a gift from God. Whether they know that origin or not.
Nor can thought be separated from the biology of the moment, but concepts must be carried through many cycles - seasons and the tempers of the blood - to be fully understood. Like trees and ermines, seeing them in one season is not enough to know them, you must know how they are in all the seasons. Likewise for the concepts that exist most wholly in the abstract -in God- we cannot know grace, mercy, and judgment except in how it is in the various seasons of life, in good times and foul.
Doubt is one of those transiant humors, but to be a doubter is a conclusion presented too soon.

Grady Houger

Blogger now has right-to-left text capibility, if you switch the language setting to Arabic, Persion or Hebrew. This is great, because changing prospective is beneficial; It lets you think about ordinary things in a new way. This is one of the fundimental goals of poetry. I don't have poetry to show you, but I can make this prose look funny!

Invocation

2008-01-17T16:07:00.000-08:00

Whats it take to be a really great person?
You have to be above and beyond the efforts of most other people.
While I don't know If I can be great I have to try. To try and strive is the least we can do, it is our duty seeing as how we have been permitted to exist.
Being great is also something we cannot expect to attain. It should be our intention not to be disappointed. The striving is the object, not the destination. Where we end up is out of our control, God and nature* decide our end.

If we cannot find satisfaction in the results of our labor (for it is a fiction to think so, and such illusionary satisfaction is far off and will be brief if it can be attained) that what should we rest our mind in? Let them rest in the goodness of God. Trusting in God is not the end but the place to hang our hopes.
So if we need not strive and worry in life seeking after hope and rest, what should we do with our time? Pursue greatness. Not for pride but to create something worthwhile.
After death can we say anything better than "I was useful."?
This does not oppose what a Christian should seek in life. Look again at what the Bible recommends we do: It does not say to rest in any sort of spiritual satisfaction. Nor does it say that believing is our goal. Believing is the beginning; our instructions are to obey. The activities of obedience are all the things at which we can strive for greatness.

So smile on those around you, that they may learn to smile as well, invite in strangers, fellowship with friends, learn deep that you may be useful and amazed, build for joy, work with all your might for that is the most noble thing to do.

Grady Houger ~ You really need to read Pensees

*God and semi-random chance (nature (chaos, which we glance into with chaos theory and imagination, it must be a natural function subservient to God along with the rest of nature. Certainly a identifiable category which seems to gain its own quality due to its size and power)) decide our end.

Worried about function

2008-01-16T14:26:00.000-08:00

It is distressing to find that I cannot think clearly. There is much work to do, reading philosophical and literary works, writing about them, but I am distracted and tired. I want to think my way out of his problem but haven't the strength. Times like this are when I wonder if I'm fit for scholarly endeavors. Just because I like reading the books assigned for my English major classes, doesn't mean I'm good at understanding and writing about such things. But I'll just keep working on it, can't say I'm done for yet just because I've never succeeded in the past.

This may be a problem that is not intellectual, but physical. If I get a bread maker recipe then I can take sandwiches to school instead of going hungry. And even though it bothers me to take caffeine pills every day, I can't afford drinks, and have yet to find some alternative to alertness.
It disturbs be how people laugh and joke about caffeine, coffee and energy drinks. Maybe that's just their mechanism for not being disturbed themselves, laughter negates and covers the fact that most of the nation is on a stimulant drug. While there are no obvious side affects physiologically, its a statement that I, as a human being cannot be at my best capability without some external agency. If you can't trust your mind, how are you going to figure things out?

And there lies the problem, and I can't think well enough at the moment to rethink this issue, and edit it to become a more clear, orderly argument, following the implications and results of each clause. We'll see what I can do tomorrow.

Grady ~ bleh

Something to try eating

2008-01-15T12:54:00.000-08:00

I have been experimenting with breakfast foods. A batch of waffles turned out very dry and hard but not burned. Not much fun to eat, but the taste was fine. What would happen if I used such a waffle as bread for french toast? The result was edible, but needs to be refined to become delicious. I've learned to make waffles where their consistency turns out the way I want, which is a function of heat and timing and making the batter in a fit ratio. But my french toast batter needs work. Just beat up eggs isn't quite right.

The french toasted waffles cooked without burning, but where a bit tough. The heat does not cook the inside at the same rate as the surface - might need to use a lid. I wonder what sort of flavorings would work for french toast; cinnamon and vanilla are the traditional ones, but there must be others that would be fitting. I've been putting ginger in waffle batter, it takes the plainness out of them, but is not unobstructive.

More experimenting should produce something worthwhile. Any suggestions?

Grady Houger ~ enjoys the useful science of food

You should try it yourself!

Wondering about writing

2008-01-14T14:46:00.000-08:00

Literary theory is an interesting class, since the questions of 'what does literature do, how does it operate, what should it do, ' raises larger questions of belief and morality.

Plato found the telling of 'untrue stories' to be suspect, generally lacking in knowledge of the truth and encouraging unhealthy emotions. Yet Plato's purpose for writing was educating citizens and kings to become philosophers like himself. We now have a good many more reasons to write fiction, but his purpose influenced all of Western society. It is hard to argue against the idea that 'fiction' is only good if it illuminates higher truths.

Plato's great example is the people trapped in a cave where all they can see is shadows on a wall, and this is what they believe to be reality. Leaving the cave to see real things is a shock, and going back the people still inside will not believe what you have seen. Plato's elaborate philosophy of the world being unreal and the true reality being beyond it accessible by math and philosophy is not one I believe. But it is a good story, and illustrates his difficult and abstract philosophy very well.
For a great version of the story told in cartoon style, look here http://www.tailsteak.com/archive.php?num=32 , ( on the page, use the single arrow with the red circle to advance)

If fiction is just talking about the shapes of shadows from a campfire, instead of real things under the sun, then fiction is pretty worthless, except for distracting you from pursuing real truth. But I don't want to stop reading and writing fiction. In its defense, the creation of histories can contain just a much erroneous information, given its lack on documentation and inability to get answers to why things happened, or why people acted the way they did. There is a fixed vagueness to all of human writing. Which is why Plato suggests writing itself is suspect, and a person should stick to oral teaching face to face, where a person can know with certainty their ideas are transmitted and remembered correctly.
It's too late for going back to the precise memory of an oral society, nowadays we only have to remember where we left information, not what it is, or what it means.

I will have reasons for supporting fiction, and will be writing about them, at least in class, but that's not the point. I will find convincing arguments just because I don't want to live with out it. It's has positive social value after all, and somebody has to write stuff.
Perhaps the day will come when I don't hardly read anymore. It's hard to imagine, with how populated the world has gotten, it may be that a person has to read, not for enlightenment, but just to keep up.

Grady Houger

I would be a different person entirely in an oral culture. Would you?

the importance of how stuff works

2008-01-13T14:51:00.000-08:00

The best example of beneficial mechanistic knowledge I can think of from my skills, is computers. A better example is what walls are made of (paint, nails, clay-in-paperboard, wood sticks which once you have torn apart and build one alters your perception of all buildings you go in and reminds you how fragile it all is) but computers have been my hobby and job for years. Really, knowledge of computers is quite unnecessary, as they are just tools for the rich and vacuous, and have only been useful to consumers for 20 years. But for all the time we spend with them, it is frustrating to see people so ignorant of what they are doing. Computers just doing a lot of simple things really fast, and does so with parts that are very small. And the computer operates in moderately difficult arithmetic on its base level. On top of those layers of calculations and lists of logic statements (things like IF the key “F2” is pressed, launch help window, OTHERWISE, do nothing. IF “help window” launched, load “poorly_written_and_frustrating_help_file.hlp” into “help window”.) are a bunch of pictures, which the user things are controls, but are really just a bunch of pictures of things called buttons and links, put there to make the user think the computer looks easy. When something doesn’t work, or the user does not know how to do something, there is nothing about what they see that has given them any useful information about what is underneath that could be the solution.

Oh-Kaaaayy, I don’t want to talk about that any more, I’d really rather talk about how Reason and Rapture seem so hard to have work together, but instead lets look at grocery store reader boards. The ones that are huge and outside and make a ‘shrakkk’ sound each time the display changes. The way those work is that they are just a box with lights inside, and each dot on the sign is a flap. Each flap can be switched separately, black or orange. That grid of off or on flaps is controlled by a tiny computer. It has a file that contains a grid 1:off, 2:off, 3:on, just like that, and so the computer turns each flap to match the setting indicated in the file. That’s also how an LCD computer screen works, except instead of having mechanical motors and flaps; it has thin sheets of plastic and liquid mineral that change see-through or block-light when an electrical signal energizes that spot. The light behind the liquid is always on, the computer just signals which spots to switch, each pixel contains a red, blue and green spot, All activated makes white (see through all), no energy makes black (see through none), a mix gives you color.

So what use is knowing that? Not really much at all, if you where to confidently repeat it to a friend it would help to know more, like how you can see the pixels under a magnifying glass, or more specifics about how the computer signals the correct voltage to a pixel by a grid of conductive traces printed on the sheets of plastic. You might want to learn about conductive traces which is easy to do by dismantling a keyboard, and seeing how that works, and this desk is made of plastic sheeting glued to particle board which is basically large pieces of sawdust glued together, and the glue is probably petroleum based but synthesized (cooked and filtered) to be a particular stickiness, and stickiness is a relation of how the molecules of different kinds cling together, sometimes making different molecules, which is why when you remove stickers from some things, the finish is ruined. The glue either held on to it and ripped off whatever the finish is, or it changed the finish into something that comes off instead of staying on and looking nice.

None of this helps yesterdays statement that knowing physical reality helps improve your life, except hopefully you will be a little more open to looking up ‘why’ and remembering the answers. At least so you can tell others and sound smart! Learning about computers is lucrative, at least in being efficient at something else. The more you can manage to learn about computers the less likely you are to think they can think. So don’t be mad at your computer, realize it is a brainless bunch of readerboard images and poorly written display instructions that’s all based on 1980’s calculator chips. (Actually, there are some more advanced systems out there, but nobody seems interested in writing software for them.) So please don’t talk to your computer. It’s not sane.

As I think about it, there are many fields that can claim to improve you if you learn them. If I had applied my writing skills better when writing this, it would have made sense and been a real argument instead of a ramble. You should learn to be a professional writer too, along with being a scientist, philosopher, Bible scholar, and computer expert. Everything I’m interested in seems so vitally important. But it’s not really. What’s really important is to believe in Jesus and obey God. People can go around making up ideas, and building objects that are useful, but knowing God gives life a purpose that brings about true success. Plus God likes you - well, God likes everything - but you, as a unique entity that thinks, God has a standing offer to help and love you. No great knowledge or reasoning required, just believe, obey and talk to Him.

Grady Houger

peace in solvibility

2008-01-12T14:24:00.000-08:00

Complexity needs a payoff. That it's not just complexity but a mystery or puzzle that has a solution. Otherwise it’s just frustrating and contemptible. The puzzle's solution may not be known by you, but the fact that one exists makes it acceptable. This is the prime problem with naturalistic theories for the meaning of life; most end with there being none. All this complexity in life and no meaning or purpose to it? Terrible! Thankfully I don't believe that.

I can tell you that because of my great education, and clear thinking, I don't immediately believe the conclusions scientists give. But without having read the books I have, you only have my repudiation or charisma to believe, not that I actually know anything about science. It's natural to do this, I do for lots of issues, like what movies are good, what businesses to avoid, and how to vote. I trust other people who tell me they know what’s the right choice. Not so much with religion and science. (And religion basically contains all of philosophy as well.) These subjects are so important I believe you should know them first hand, as completely as possible, rather than going on others opinions. Things like restaurants and voting are about how to sort things, but topics of God and physics are about how reality is! Doesn't it seem reasonable to know for yourself how the matter that makes up our reality works and acts? And what our purpose in life is as creatures that exist?

Without and understanding of how the world turns, and what is under our feet, a person is prey to all sorts of delusions and misinformation. Tomorrow I'll look at some examples of how accurate knowledge will improve your existence as a human being.

Grady Houger ~ 70% H2O

Knoledge puts control of your mind in your own hands!

science is just a word you can't define

2008-01-11T13:41:00.000-08:00

To continue yesterday’s discussion of science threatening religion; I want to look specifically at what I mean by "Science".
The study, research and speculation done according to the scientific method of testing and theory making get applied to many different subjects. The results of chemistry are hard facts; we can say with certainty that matter is made up of the atomic elements, which are different from each other, and interact in regular specific ways. Aerodynamics of wings can be tested and formulas can be found that are absolutely true when wind flows over a shape at specific speeds. There are many provable facts that can be proven true within their set of conditions. Math is full of this. What gets confusing is that each field has its limits, beyond the edges of fact which is only reached by great study. You have to know all the known aspects before you get to the known ones and by that time you are so far beyond what the average person knows that they will believe anything you say. This is the authority problem for scientists, and also priests. (I'll be using the term priests interchangeably for any sort of religious leader.)How can you trust the conclusions of the scientist or the priest? It is really because of their community status and your great ignorance of their field. If you don't know how to understand the content of their top level theory’s that you have to assume, that since they have mastered all the entry level and advanced info, then they must be able to build the great conclusions. Essentially, you can't check their work until you become one yourself.

So experts go about telling you what to believe. But some branches of science don't have the hard facts that are present at times in math, physics and chemistry. Psychology contains very little hard data, and lots of talk. How do they interpret the data on human behavior? With theories, which can seem to fit the data at times. But nothing can be proved. The whole things a sham really, because psychologists are humans and don't want to admit their lack of answers. What they have is interesting, and sometimes plausible, but in the end they end up handing out answers just because people are expecting answers, not because they really have any, and who wants to disappoint the people who think you're the expert?

Really the human desire for certainty throws off all of science, so most everything is a temporary answer, just a place holder till a better one can be devised. A math formula may be absolute truth, but the inputs going into it are from measurements that may or may not be accurate. For example, the distance between stars. It seems fairly accurate, but there are several key measurements that can be questioned, although they haven't been corrected for quite some time. Such possible variation underlies much of science, and it's normal to just make note of the issue an carry on, and then if later info proves it wrong, just go back and revise everything. This is a good and useful procedure for doing science, but the problem is for the average people, who don't do science. They just read about the conclusions and believe them just like religion. Then when disagreements arise, there is anger and fighting, and people distrust each other for believing this or that. The fight is all in words, believing not in the science data but the reputation of the scientist who told them his conclusion.

So, once again I failed to be specific, and write a mess of vagueness. I don't want to look at unprovable and controversial theories and fields like evolution, global warming, psychology, earth and universe age, those things are fun and/or frustrating to discuss, but what we really need to consider is the parts we do accept; how do they change our thinking about life, the world, and religion? Let’s think about the changes in thought caused by real, factual science, and how we ascribe authority to ‘science’ in general.

In other news, I walked by a tree today, heard churring sounds and looked up to see a tree full of black and grey squirrels! There where at least six, and a few more in the next tree. It was quite surprising.

Grady Houger ~ wishes he could think better

So there is too much information out there to learn it all right? Some of it's incredibly useful, particularly the history of science over the last 350 years. For a child to have an advantage over the next tv watching slob, girls and boys should be taught and encouraged to learn real things rather than empty headed kiddie nonsense. There are lots of age-appropriate biographies and science books that are interesting, and then when they grow up, it's money. Real money, people! You don't get money for knowing tv trivia.

Can Religion adapt to Science?

2008-01-10T17:14:00.000-08:00

Christianity is a coherence of ideas, from events, words and thinking. There is a whole system of understanding that it existed in.
All through history humans have lived in groups that said “this is how reality is”. Religion is a part of that. Change in religion, history and science shows beliefs of the past to be based on falsehood and ignorance. Thus it is the thinker’s lot to question his own current beliefs. Christian teaching and its underlying assumptions is a coherent entity, but what can be removed changed and proved false before the entity is destroyed?

I think these things because of a class in which a historical prospective on scientific discoveries was discussed. Modern science has been around for 350 years, before then, what did people believe?

The stars are just points of light when the sun is not present. Nothing about orbits and the solar system was known. It was believed by many peoples hat above the earth where the stars sat and the ‘wandering stars’ (planets) moved was the place of the divine. What moves things, comets for instance? Well for something to move, doesn’t some one have to move it? Thus it was a general belief that spirits moved such heavenly objects. They do so at the order of those higher than they so angels and God. The age of the earth was the age of however long people have been here, and the stars where in a sphere above, no notion of great distances where present. It was a common idea that humans where the most important creature and the main reason for which events happened.

Now, science has replaced, reexplained, or rejected most of the ideas about reality previously believed. There are controversies and debates to be had over specific teachings in science, but the overall fact is that we think differently now. Christians have came to accept and believe that nature has logical properties such as gravity, cause and effect, processes that do things as a matter of elements reacting rather than at the impulse of God and angels. God is no longer thought to live up in the sky looking down. Now that we know the physical universe is full of stars large distances apart then for God to have created all that he has to be outside of it looking in. For God to be greater than all the phycial laws of space and time we have learned so far, then he must be out side all that, controlling it of course. These sorts of concepts have to be added and adapted to religiously. Instead of saying ‘God did that’ when volcano erupts, it has to be said ‘God caused that mountain made of tectonic folds to be under pressure from magma and steam underground that expanded and exploded when the pressure reached beyond what the rock matrix could hold.’
As we discover how the parts of physical things work and interact, such as the process of disease and immunity in a human body there comes a idea that physical explanations can be found for all things and spiritual reasons are suddenly hard to accept with this new system of proof and evidence that makes science so verifiable. Science in many ways gets used as a new religion, such that it is important to separate actual facts that get discovered using science, from the way people talk and order their lives around what they think of as ‘scientific truth’.
Also, where people put their feeling of certainty changes. In a religion, one can say, ‘rest assured this is the how and why of your soul’. In science one can say ‘many things are unknown, but his is the how and why of this physical world you can see.’ Think about the shift in meaning. In a religion meaning is assured, though how things work is a mystery. In science, physical causes and such can be determined, but the meaning of those is unknown. “What is the propose of human life?” A Christian can say it is to enjoy obeying God. But someone who only believes science is true would have to say that the meaning of existence is to reproduce, and find something you like doing until you stop existing.

It is important to NOT go crazy in either direction. I have spent my life, and now consider it the purpose of my life to study science and religion (as it turns out there is little that does not fit under those titles), and both contain more than can be easily spoken of with authority. That is, scientific conclusions that lead one to think life is a random struggle and the soul does not exist are really beyond what science can prove. Nor does it work to take religion to heart and refuse to believe anything can modify religious meaning. Science and religion have their limits. Sometimes they overlap, but the only thing about them that is exclusive and opposite is what people do with them.

All this I have said is very vague and perhaps odd and unclear. What I am really trying to say is the most important topic I have thought of in a great long while, and I don’t know that what that is is even clear. Let me try again; “Do I stop believing in God because of what I see in science?” Or “Do I stop believing in science because of what I want to believe about God?”
Really, neither.
I think that both can have their place and properly coenside, and still leave room to acknowledge that there is much I do not know. So for the next while, I will continue with more specific and detailed topics that illuminate this subject.

By the way, if you actually read all this, then please leave a comment, even just to say that I didn’t make much sense.

Grady Houger ~ man who feels that everything relates to this

College sure is a mind expanding experiance. By virtue of learning so much new information, what and how I think are changing! When a person stops learning, things get set for life.

I hope you find something interesting to read

2008-01-08T16:26:00.000-08:00

Well constancy didn't last long, only 6 days in and I missed posting two days in a row! But that's no reason to quit. My excuse is that I didn't have net access when I was moving back to college.

Recently I conversed about Bible codes, where people try to find anagrams and such in the original languages that spell out some sort of prophecy. Today I read that this sort of research has its roots in the theology of Jewish cabalists. Their theory is that if the scriptures are the work of an absolute intelligence, than nothing would be left up to chance, thus the placement, number and count of all the words, characters and lines would be placed exactly, and may contain hidden mysteries just as the meaning contains hidden mysteries.
I have my faith that God is absolute in all attributes. Since here have been no clear messages to be found encrypted, lets us make conjecture about how God uses chance and variable elements. One reason would be the principal of faith alone being our way to God, not external mathematical proofs. Or perhaps God does not have an inherent love of cryptography, and only intended scripture to have word meaning. Also, the very idea of worshiping text instead of meaning is condemned by reason itself. The truths of the bible where transmitted orally, and that is good enough. The convention of writing is not sacred in itself. The argument could be made that gardening is. (and shepherding, and raising children.) Even with a list of divinely utilized jobs, it is not the job, but the obedience and character of the individual that is important, and the use of physical activities as metaphor of truths spiritual and abstract. We should consider all the things God didn't do, nothing forceful or insistant to compell us to believe in him. This is not so exciting for those who do not believe, but for those who do, I think it is worth considering how the things we think up to force obediance are not methods God uses.
These are my thoughts, putting what I read skimming through a book into my recent considerations. That book is Labyrinths: selected works - by Jorge Luis Borges, particularly -The Mirror of Enigmas.

Funny story: I'm sitting in the library, and everything is silent. Then ringing out someone crunches a chip. Then behind me, someone starts crunching an apple. In stereo I hear them! Hungry I become, and leave to go somewhere It is permitted to eat my sandwich that promises to be particularly crumby.

Grady Houger ~ I must enjoy homework

By saving money at the rate of $30 a week, I will have saved about $3000 at the end of two years. What would you do if your hands could hold an extra three thousand dollars?

I will walk bravely into the dark, and not stop!

2008-01-05T23:46:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow I will be leaving the ancestral mansion for another term at the university. Slowly I am moving furniture and books from the room I grew up in to the college house I bought, and so I look upon all the half finished hobbies that had filled my life.

While I still like all the same hobbies, I don't have time or money to collect rocks and bugs, make ammunition, buy guns, build electronics out of scrap parts, carve wood, study chemistry, track animals, and read old magazines. Plus there's the two model airplanes and the model ship I never finished, and the bobcat skeletain that I didn't mount. I wish I had my childhood over again so I could actually finish some of those things. But all I have is memories of how cool it would have been to do this or that. All I have is a little sadness, and a room full of junk. Fortunately, my college home isn't large enough to hold the ghosts of my past, so I won't bring them with me. And hopefully I'm adult enough to take that remorse and actually go out and *finish* something!

That's my goal.

Grady Houger ~ The time has come!

Yes, it's time to run while I have the spirit, and when that's gone, at least walk.

a vague walk around a seemingly large issue

2008-01-04T23:05:00.000-08:00

This morning I woke up and wrote down an amazing philosophical theory. Then I forgot it. Really, it's the end of the day, and here I am trying to think of something interesting to write, and I can't remember. I can't wait to get back to school so I have something urgent to do and this endless vacation can end.
I'll have to go find my notes.
So. It appears that what I thought so interesting this morning was contents of the human mind. What do we have? Only memory, the sensation of a body and the present moment. From these inputs all human thought is generated.
All human societies value great thinkers; those who taught the religion and philosophy that influenced billions of others. All the abstract concepts like goodness, truth, and injustice have to be learned and defined by what's in our minds.
What would we have without body, memory, and senses? An active mind would have nothing to act upon. There would be no symbols with which to do math, or label and arrange thoughts. All the most technical and ‘high’ abstract topics could not be reached without the more basic elements of each field. The edges of math theory where equations are created and proved is an extension of our need to count and measure physical objects. Philosophical concerns that seem strange and pointless are built from pursuing questions of why the world is how it is and how can we make sense of great difficulties? Strange science concepts in quantum physics and plasma research that have no currently known practical use are looked into by those who have already learned the other sciences and want to look further than making improved plastic molding equipment. And lastly, there are those crazy amazing musicians who play technical music beyond the skill of anyone else, yet they aren’t enjoyable to listen to, unless you are one of those who knows what they are doing and have tired of the less complex stuff.

Perhaps this concept of abstract great thoughts being built on the simple immediate things of life is not a great revelation. I think it captures my curiosity because for so much of my life there has been the influence of a preference, that the great moral concepts where to be revered and the base things of life where not worth notice, or where negative elements to be ignored. But I now see there is more of a connection between the two. Now isn’t unimportant just because it’s passing away, and the afterlife I hope for needs something that can only be created here. There is a mystery here, at least for me. I need to think other angles to this.

It will be interesting to see what I remember tomorrow.

Grady Houger ~ man who expects awkward surprises

When thinking about such difficult ideas, I tend to frown and tense up my face. I wonder if it helps or hinders me from thinking clearly?

wanting things bad enough to cry

2008-01-03T23:11:00.000-08:00

I have a younger brother. Today he believed it was the last day to get something he wanted, and being without a credit card, he made a heroic effort at wheedling it out of the taller people in his life. It was really quite the display of new and creative methods of persuasion, for him. He wanted what we considered to be a worthless toy so badly he was willing to modify his behavior in hopes of getting it.

My brother went to bed disappointed; which builds character though I didn't tell him that. I used to want things that badly, but now that I've thought about it, there isn't much I so strongly desire these days. I've had my toys that broke or became boring. The few things I would like to own I can comfortably live without: $1800 cameras, $3000 lenses, and a titanium spork. I expect as I age even more things will become silly and unnecessary. I hear tell that past 90 years old, just waking up and getting to breath air is satisfying enough.

What do I really want out of life? Nowadays I think of bold abstract concepts like a job that will be useful, happy marriage, justice, tranquility, understanding, wisdom. But now, I have reservations about my desires, unlike when I was a child and could not imagine living without the big $100 lego pirate ship. I hear people say wanting things like justice and wisdom will be just as unfulfilling as the toys where. We'll see. A man has to have something to dream about, just like the boy does.
Though I did survive with just the small lego ship. And justice can wait till the end of time if necessary.

Grady Houger ~ man who no longer has time to play with legos

I wonder how I should feel about wanting things? What should I really get out and try to get? What will I wish backwards for when I'm 60?

lying down expecting to sleep - while the world spins round

2008-01-02T20:54:00.000-08:00

What's there to be said when there isn't a statement I have to be said, no message of life change and reform?
I just feel tired. I want to lie down and sleep. Today I did alright. Last night I was awake reading science fiction about how machines that could duplicate anything would destroy a civilization. Sleep is worth skipping for a good enough story, but not every night. I learned that.

Tired but fairly well satisfied, without much cause to be. Sometimes I wonder why I'm not more bothered by my lack of remorse for poor performance. Maybe that's a separate issue, but I would be more worried if I felt I had earned that right to be satisfied. I'd rather think my enjoying life was a gift from God.

Sometimes the only idea that makes life interesting is that I know the world will end. But will it end soon, or after I am dead? Sure it's an uncertainty that could be disturbing. To me it's an excitement that just can't be bought some way else.

Grady Houger ~ man of occasional thoughts

Why yes, I did just listen to The Postal Service - Sleeping In.

2008 resolutions :-/

2008-01-01T21:32:00.000-08:00

Its been a year since I put up a facebook note, and of those resolutions I only managed to loose weight, which was easy once I had to buy and cook my own food. Candy and cheese are expaensive! Eating in out is no deal when 25lbs of rice is $13.
This years resolution is to write something here every day. Now that I'm back in college hoping to be a professional writer, its unpleasant to discover that I actually am a lousy writer! Practice is the key according to all the advice I've read, so I'm going to do the blog thing like every other boring yaker on the internet.
Since facebook pops up notices of friends posting notes I have a build in audience for at least the note titles ha ha!

So happy new year all you friends, relatives and acquaintances! I look forward to having my text past through your vision soon!

Grady Houger ~ man who knows he is foolish

but wait! this is not facebook! For you few, happy few, you non-social networked readers of my blog you get these extra lines. Thats right, special content, just for you! and if you don't have facebook, don't bother signing up for it. It's only the best of the popular social networking sites, but there's a hundred more worthy ways to spend your time. And you can always email me.
:-)

favorite photograph

2007-01-18T23:45:00.000-08:00

My favorite picture happened at home one snowy winter evening. I held my pocket digital camera to shoot through binoculars, and got a picture of a coyote walking through the storm. It looks forlorn traveling between the edge of the woods and the snow covered marsh grass. Has it found enough mice to survive? Does it have anyone to go home to?

! 2007 !

2007-01-02T11:05:00.000-08:00

These are my resolutions, but I know it is ineffective to say 'I will do this' then try to force myself into it and spend my time feeling bad when I fail. Instead, it seems better to say 'these are the things I want to do', and developing attitude of encouraging myself.
So instead of absolute rules, this is my list of behaviors I will focus on. I know that to doing them will improve who I am and have fulfilling results.

intercessory prayer / scripture meditation

As a Christian I seek to live to the full potential God has for me. Praying for others is more effective than my trying to tell them how to live better. And deep prayer is wonderful. I need to practice this regularly. Likewise, learning God scripture is the primary way he speaks, so I must study it asking "How do I live this in my life?"

write to schedule / work toward goals

I feel compelled to write many stories, and recently I have turned to books about writing for aid. If I am to achieve my goals, a short scheduled time of writing every day seems to be an effective method.

eat/exercise/body tone

This is the classic new years resolution, but I am not interested in regimens and specific pounds. I want to avoid eating heavily, thus learning restraint. I want to seek out and reform the habits and attitudes that keep me from exercising and having a capable body.

Be awake. Practice complex difficult thinking tasks and social interactions rather than simple fun.

I see myself falling into sluggish unthinking entertainment. Or worse, times when I just can't think clearly and have no interest in anything. Why? I must carefully monitor and record what I do and think that puts me into an unproductive mood. Also, what choices motivate me to an opposite and preferable place; being mentally awake, curious, engaged in complex things that require a mature and lively mind. If I want to become a mature thinker and productive adult I must consider how I live and pursue those things that encourage such, and thus avoid practices that make me a lazy bum.

at school again

2005-10-23T18:51:00.000-07:00

I was brushing my teeth and was seized with the longing to sit in a living room and have a quiet conversation with my witty wife. I guess that's what I get when I start reading Pride and Prejudice, and listen to classical music instead of the punk/metal the other guys play.
I am now living at Ecola Bible School, in Cannon Beach Oregon. Four Bible classes each week day, one less on Wednesday. Two topics per week of one week duration. I like the classes.
This is a vacation town and I overheard the school's nickname: Ecola Bridal School. It is the end of the second week, and it is apparent to even an unsocial geek like me that people are starting to date. I don't know how to date. Over the last few years I have been thinking about marriage and consider myself unready for such an endeavor. I'm getting closer though, and listening to Ride of the Valkyries right now adds a nice touch. Marriage is much more than the happy-blissy-sexy part that gets entirely overemphasized. I learned back in my teens that finding a girl who will stand with you through thick and thin was of utmost importance. The resulting question has taken much longer to answer: How do I develop a likewise steadfast character? There are many other similarly hard elements to be considered.
How to approach the matter with the right motives in the first place. How to earn a living to support a family. How to prepare to care for and support another individual, and before long, some number of untaught smaller individuals. I see in myself numerous habits and attitudes that are not congruent with a loving husband. And lastly, the big two: getting the theology of the whole matter right, and overcoming the fact I am a computer geek with communication deficiencies.
Marriage is something to puzzle over and work towards, but there are more fundamental considerations here. What to do with my life? Learning to grow more Christlike and follow his leading instead of my own efforts, which are obviously lacking to get me anywhere worthwhile.
I can hear people talking and laughing outside, I can hear a symphony play Liszt's Hungarian rhapsody #1 in F minor on my headphones.
I wish I knew how to converse with somebody. I'd better try again.

Just scraping the rust off the top so it won't look completely abandoned

2005-07-25T20:04:00.000-07:00

Hi you who may wander by!
I'm far from home, interning, doing computer work. Still writing. The big question is what to do with my life.
I have more updates on my website: www.gradyhouger.com

I do have one short story to share with you. (Yes you random visitor! And also you five people who know about this site.)

WRITING DERIVED FROM PENCIL MARKS ON THE WALL
About

While falling a sleep I wrote on the wall. Writing on the wall is a great joy, made possible by a injudicious comment uttered by the apartment wall's owner, who, while on the topic of painting the room said; "You can do anything."

On Board the Pirate ship Lulliby

The realization hit me like a load of sodden casks. The ship was doomed to sink. Rocks where everywhere, scraps of vessels between them and mines had already damaged ours. An explosion sounded behind me, I whorled to see a ploomb of white smoke jetting off into the sky, lofting a star. My eyes swept from the scorch mark on the deck to the recieding point. Yes, the rats had launched their space shuttle. They knew when a ship was doomed. And now I was without any technically skilled crew.
"Hai Priest, show ye present!"
"Wha, how it be?" The man of the cloth came out of the forecastle, where he was given to laying in his hammock all day.
"We're done for truely, the ship be fated to sink here."
"Ah will ye tell what cargo we be holding now at last?"
"Tis no matter if I do; It's metal floor plates, union made, for the Banzii Spider Company, to be delivered to Prince Dust, at the destination I failed to reach."
"Ah Captain, now you wish to talk. What's the value of the gold you would have received? Is it no the same as the value of the cargo you carry? And now what's it worth?"
"I know the dogs all taste the same, what be your point?"
"There is value in things beside the things you might trade or steal."
"Agreed, although I wouldn't have before; yet I knew."
"What's the value of prayer?"
"Well if my gold, my cargo and my hull when empty be all worth the same, how about your prayer, when mirrored by a magic spell, or any of the warm fuzzies ye feel during the happy moments of life?"
"Fair, but you know, there's one that lasts no matter where it lies."
An explosion cut our conversation short, and cut the Priest off entirely, the blast from the mine cut straight up through the deck and there wasn't any left of my sole passenger. I heard the sound of water filling the hold, the end was a sooner one. I peeked in the hole.
"Whell God, my ship has a hole in it. This be a prayer I be making. A captain's soul is his ship tis said. I understand yer name be Jesus and ye be after souls. So here be one for ye."
From my pocket I drew a gold piece, smelt it and tossed it in the hole.
"First Mate!"
"ya" he answered faintly from the aft cabin. I found him seated in my chair.
"We be sinking. Not much to do. I've a suggestion, though, as yer Captain, you could make your peace with God. Tis worth it I find."
First Mate Dragon Waste was not the type to do much. As far as slackers go he can give Falannigan a run for his money. Yet now he pulled out his heavy pistol and shot me. I looked up from the floor as the smoke cleared.
"Sorry Captain. That wasn't as enjoyable as I thought it would be."
The ship was starting to tilt, and quickly it slid into the water, front first and hit the shallow bottom. I had fell on the wall, I looked up at Dragon Waste climbing above me through the rear window. My chest leaked as the ship did as I climbed after him. We sat on the windows. Stuck. "Gold is money, but have ye ever thought about the value of gold?" I rasped.

Open Source Medicine

2004-12-18T02:12:00.000-08:00

Ever go to a Doctor and have them say "You'll be fine in a week or two, just take it easy and drink plenty of water. Call if it gets worse." Or worse, they don't know what's wrong with you, but they tell you not to worry about it. Maybe you don’t have the money to go to a doctor in the first place. Maybe there aren’t any doctors around to go to.

Every industry has history, tradition and practices that are built on what came before. Sometimes this makes things less efficient, being stuck on a rut that doesn’t allow for innovation. Being a medical doctor is expensive and takes many years to achieve. Even nursing takes a lot of education. Some jobs in medical industry pay very well, and overall health care is a solid influential business. And it works. America has the best healthcare in the world. Doctors know what they are doing and are effective at healing people.

There's also an entrenched attitude both with doctors and the regular people they work with; medicine is mysterious. It's hard to learn and you should really leave it to professionals. After all, you don't want to make a mistake and kill yourself do you? Well, I have a different attitude. I'm a computer guy, in hobby and profession. I'm a collage student; I can learn detailed and complicated information. With a couple computers and an internet connection anyone can teach themselves to be a professional computer builder/repairman, programmer and administrator. Another thing you can find for free online, or for a small fee, is weapons instructions. How to build and use all sorts of bombs, guns, and blades. What I wish I could download is a manual, a simple, easy to use training guide for how to be a medical doctor. Start with first aid, and explain as you go how the body works, and how increasingly more serious injuries are dealt with. How bacteria and viruses work, and most of all, how to diagnose common illnesses. How more serious problems differ from common ones. Tables of medicines, what is used to treat what, and most importantly, how the drugs work, what they are actually doing with your body. If all this information was tied together in a simple format where the 'how to fix' parts are tied to how the body works I think a document could be created that would allow the common 'man on the street' to take care of simple and recoverable medical problems, and be able to go to a doctor well informed when a more serious issue arises.

The reason I think this way is because of doing computer tech support. Amongst ourselves computer people complain about 'idiot users' who need to use computers to do their work, but don't know how their computers work, and don't want to learn how. It's very frustrating to answer the same simple questions, and those who have the patience for it try to teach users as they go along so you don't have to fix the same problem again. Information for important things should be freely available, or at least easily accessible. Just like many people have computers and need to learn how to use them responsibly, everyone has a body, and should know how it works and how to do simple diagnostics and repair at the least.

There is medical info available online, you can look up diseases and symptoms. It's not always easy to know what's backed up by traditional medical science and what's just guessing. There's no solid training manual checked and ok'ed by doctors and nurses. I think we really need one. Anyone can learn. People who are poor, or who happen to live in 3rd world countries need medical training. It could mean people don't need to go to the doctor for 'easy stuff', leaving the medical profession to concentrate on serious and complex cases. It would help people see if they are interested in medicine enough to want to learn more and become a MD. And finally, an accessible manual of medical knowledge and people who are familiar with it will help people be better prepared for mass disaster. We really shouldn’t be ignorant.

Winter Poem

2004-12-06T21:20:00.000-08:00

White snow, smoothness covering the dead nakedness of the earth.
Hectic busyness like sleep interrupted by constant phone calls.
Beautiful events filled with holy meaning. Then;
Pay with plastic. You're obligated to make someone happy.
Happy times with family. Or will they speak to each other?
Cold and wet are all around. The ground stores water for a year of green.
The lights are so pretty when they blink. But can we see the stars?
Tired tires spin pointlessly. a ton of steel, plastic and flesh slides into a tree.
Black branching branches against a grey sky.
Nature shows us less, and it is beautiful.

winter drive poem

2004-12-01T14:21:00.000-08:00

Snow
Cold
VRAAAA!
Motionless

I sit
Noisily
Suspended
On a slope

Kind hands
Push behind
I creep up
And drive away

Strangers
Kindly helping
Kept me from backsliding
Into their stuck cars

Bringing Back Soap Operas

2004-11-09T16:49:00.000-08:00

No, I don't want a revival of low quality relationship dramas; I'm remembering the origin of the term. Soap Operas came about by soap companies funding shows for women which included ads for their product. So:
1. Get a corporate sponsor
2. Write some entertaining fiction that mentions their product, and some themed ads
3. Profit!

This does happen in various forms still, and is a controversial topic in some circles. There's the argument that sponsorship corrupts your artistic vision. I think your personal focus is the issue, not the way you get paid, and a well made and revisable contract can keep both parties satisfied.

Think of the benefits. A company large enough to afford sponsoring something will already has a marketing department that could play agent for you. The point is to join mediums; a companies products and someone's fiction, the company helps get you into the market, where you make their product appealing.

The trick is getting the right fit, a company with products you can support, and you having the talent to make their venture worthwhile.

An old media opportunity like this has came, gone and could be again. I like the old radio stories. Wouldn't it be great to hear "And now..." "...Brought to you by..."

TV, radio, print, comics; come on, who's game? I'd like to sell some soap!

A Friendly Reminder

2004-11-03T17:38:00.000-08:00

This is addressed to those of you who are over 30, or 40, who are in the news media, those of you who don't understand why those punk kids wear shorts and stocking caps the year 'round.

Don't tease us. Sometimes what you see can be pretty stupid, I can't speak for everyone in the preteen-to-young adult culture. We aren't unified. We aren't the new enlightened generation. The current youth culture is divided into a wide variety of subcultures and I only subscribe to a few. I watch the other ones, because they're like neighbors ya know? What I'd like to address here is a couple underlying issues that are widespread and basic, and ultimately flow over into other areas of human life as well.

One of those fundamental issues is respect.

I was listening to a lively young talk show host; female, 40ish, she had a good style to talk politics and news. I was wondering what she'd say if she ran into a news article that mentioned one of the youth subcultures I'm involved in; furry fandom. Basically, it's about playing games and reading media that has humanlike animals instead of human characters. I doubt she could handle the topic well; it's too far removed from the interests of "responsible" adults. That's what started this whole train of thought. There is a good many similar examples, and actual cases where the adults of the status quo misunderstand, misinform and misrepresent the interests and practices of youth culture.

All people tend to belittle things they don't understand. To use an example older adults will understand: In business and government foreign policy, and when considering dealings with foreigners it is understood you need to be considerate of their differences. You may not understand them very well, but you know that the foreigners you are dealing with are honored or important in their country or business, and therefore you need to accommodate them and be understanding.

Just looking at youth culture examples and not many other areas, we most often learn about other people's culture and interests from negative press. The day to day happenings of a subculture don't get noticed. So if you hear about furry fandom it will likely be because of something inappropriate being peddled to children, some bizarre crime, someone's embarrassing mistake, some example of today's decadency or weirdness. So Ms. Status Quo reading the newspaper is likely to think we're a bunch of looser freaky kids and dangerous adults wasting time on the internet.

Much could be argued about the merits and problems of one person's lifestyle over another. This isn't the place for that. What I would like is to find - sometime before you're all in nursing homes and my peers and I are running the mainstream culture - is a news article, a comment, someone's statement that treats some youth culture item with respect. That's what most "kids" want. You don't have to like our hobbies, fiction and music, we'd just like you to recognize that what you just heard about is liked and enjoyed by people, not "mindless punks". Don't assume the worst until you've researched and understand the field. The strangeness of youth culture isn't going to go away. It only changes amongst itself, and spreads in influence as those involved grow older. No matter how much you disagree and/or dislike something, if you show their side some respect, then it gives them the opportunity to respect you. Common decency isn't gone; it is the backbone of most all subcultures, hobbies and lifestyles. It's just communicated differently. This communication problem can be quite difficult between some subcultures. In this modern era, geographic and language differences are greatly diminished. With transportation and a handful of common languages, you can interact with anyone. What we have now is steep subculture differences; so the suit wearing professional on Wall Street has a very hard time understanding his blue haired raver son. But both desire respect.

The new and old generations ultimately want the same things. We want people to like us. We want to pursue our interests. We want to create valuableness of some sort. So please don't tease us. We will be where you are one day, and I don't think you'd like it vary much.

Comfort

2004-10-27T20:06:00.000-07:00

Rain drips from the eves like tears.
The sun is setting, hiding its face from sorrow.
Why do the drops sparkle in the fading light?
Don't they know the pain here?
They twinkle white.
Rain tears.
Why do they have to be so beautiful now?

I don't write poetry. Exsept when I do. I don't think I could if I tried, and the stuff scares me, so I don't. Exsept. This time I was sleepy, sitting in the dark, listening to sad celtic music, and chatting online with a sad person. So like, yeah.
:-)

Grey-Blue Lounge

2004-10-25T20:41:00.000-07:00

“I got done talking to Manuel; the plane’s fueled and ready to go by sunrise.”
“It’s eight hours till then.”
“How do you want to spend it?” Michael grinned.
“We could sleep, most people do that.”
“Eh, I did that last night. I don’t know how you got into this game - thinking like that. A guy can only take so much boredom. There’s a decent little bar around the corner. Let’s go.”

After an hour of sitting in a smoky bar, watching a Latin girl sing backed up with fragments of a jazz band;
“You consider this fun?”
“No. But it’ll do.” Michael said, lighting another cigarette.
“You have problems with disturbing dreams don’t you?”
“Shut up! No. I don’t know how you make it in this game saying stuff like that.”
“That’s why I’m in it. I can see the truth.”
“Whatever. Shut up. Yer ruining the atmosphere.” The tip of Michael’s cigarette glowed red.
“I don’t think it’s fair to leave Manuel out of his share of the gold certificates.”
“Never talk about business in public!!!” Michael hissed.
Dusty stayed silent a while. He then picked up a coin at his elbow and twiddled with it, twirling it and dropping it on the counter.
“That’s mine.”
“Um humm.” Dusty flick-threw the coin towards the singer, it hit her silk wrapped breast with an audible smack. She stopped with a yip, the band’s song fell a part a moment later.
“What’s your problem?! You said everything was fine!”
“I’m sorry; I told you how I work.”
The furious lady stormed towards them.
Dusty leaned against Michael, removing Michaels’ auto as he whapped his arm around his partner. With a shout of Yeah-ha-haaa! Dusty fired a half dozen shots into the ceiling. He then shifted back to his own seat and slumped forward on his arms; dead asleep from all appearances. Angry voices and people overran the singer, crowded hands grabbed Michael.
“I didn’t do nothing!! He did it, you saw him!”
“He has been sleeping there all evening senior. You are going with us to the police!”
“You there! You were looking at us! Tell them! Lady, you saw! I was just sitting…” Michael saw their eyes. They didn’t believe him.
“Dusty! Dusty! Dammit; take him for questioning too!”
The mass of locals and travelers hanging on to Michael moved him toward the door, telling him to shut up and leave an innocent man alone. They where carrying Michael now; he was looking back, shouting at his partner.
Dusty looked back at Michael.
Dusty spoke, his quiet words seemed to project through the crowd and noise. “I’m sorry; I told you I follow orders. You never specified whose or what skills not to use. I’m sorry.”
The last thing Michael saw of Dusty was human features melting to dark grey fur, solid black eyes and muzzle.

In the morning Dusty was still asleep when Manuel flew the plane a different direction.

This story is 495 words long. I wrote it in less than an hour, which was surprising to me. It was inspired by instermental music I heard on a Winamp internet radio station: Secret Agent: The soundtrack for your stylish, mysterious, dangerous life. For Spys and P.I's too! It's listed under the genre of 'Downtempo Lounge Spy'. It's not a station I frequent. Let me know what you think.