now that it’s over…

i can talk about this without much, or any emotion. i could have written about this over the weekend without any emotion, of my own, but i was afraid that people would write emotion into it because of when i said it.

so this past weekend was a time that people in this country that i live in, call “thanksgiving”. it’s an excitable time of year. people get together. they celebrate. blah, blah, blah… i understand the importance of celebration and tradition. i studied anthropology, for goodness sake. it’s a world wide phenomenon, to get together and eat and “raise the roof”.

most people would jump at an opportunity to be involved with such activities. many people crave being involved with such activities. it’s almost like an inborn instinct, to get together with people at “thanksgiving”. but i suspect that maybe it is NOT an instinct and that it is simply a trained behavior.

this raises questions about desire, attachment, longing, separation for me. is it possible to live with detachment in this world? is it possible to live free of emotions of desire to have things that you cannot have? i desire to go to Paris, but as hard as i dream about going and as hard as i “want” to go, i have a karmic imbalance in my spirit-system that prevents me from ever having enough money to go to Paris. sure, i could change that. there are always things that a person can do to obtain the things they want, or so the saying goes, but after a soul has lived on this planet a certain period of time, they start to believe things they shouldn’t. i for one, do not believe that i have the power to overcome the obstacles that prevent me from being able to travel to Paris. so i let this whim of the idea of “Paris” float around in my head, but i chuckle to myself because i know that no matter how hard i wish, the trends of my life experience testify that i’ll never be able to generate the funds needed to a do a thing like “travel to Paris”.

one time back in the early 90s’s i was infatuated with the idea of travelling to, and living in India for 6 months. and i knew many, many other people that were able to do this at that time. this was during the years that my son and i were involved with the Siddha Yoga ashram in Oakland. people would constantly ask he and i, “when are you and your dad/son going to go to India?”, and they said it with expectancy and belief that we “should” go there. we had gallons and gallons of wish power available to us, and we tapped into it. in those days i believed that dreams, turned into wishes could come true. that all things that we need are available to us and that God provides. but we never made it to India. I’ve wanted to move back to and live in Santa Cruz, for 10 years now. Can’t make it happen.

i used to want to be a friendly member of the human race too. go to parties. have a girlfriend. eat dinner with other people more than i eat it alone. but i don’t. and i think i’ve gotten to the point where the desire to have/do those things has faded completely from my consciousness. i lived through last thursday completely on my own. no phone conversations. no house full of people to feel all sweaty around, nor any invitations for such pressured activities. i didn’t even open the front door that day because there was no mail delivery. and i was fine with it.

i did tune in to the other souls on this planet, in this country that spent that day alone and wished for them the strength that i was feeling, of independence, or separation, of not needing or wanting anymore. of just being. every day is the same. every where is the same. high is low, low is high… stasis. peace. solitude. detachment. amen.

angry bus driver

this evening i had an encounter with a local, Country Connection bus driver. i was out for an excursion in my town, San Ramon, California to take some experimental photographs with a new camera lens that arrived in the mail today.

it had just started to rain at 4pm and i knew i didn’t have much light left to work with. i drove off in my car hoping to catch some rays of sunshine brightening up autumnally colored trees against the black clouds of the sky. i ended up parking my car in the commuter spaces at the Transit Center in the Bishop Ranch office park.

i got out of the car with my umbrella because it was still raining lightly and i did not want my camera to get wet. i did not really know how to take photographs with this new lens so this was definitely a learning experience for me. i made a point of not walking into the transit center, although i did take some photographs of it.

i kept my attention on the changing lighting conditions fostered by the moving storm and the quickly approaching sunset. there were a combination of architectural and natural subjects that i concentrated on photographing. there were no people in the area at all. a few buses rode in and quickly exited the station.

so, eventually a very bright cloud burst occurred and there were gorgeous oranges and reds coming through the clouds, reflecting on both the office building and the wet pavement. i had been over to the side of the transit station taking photos on the Iron Horse pedestrian trail. i crossed back onto the pavement/parking lot of the office building to get a closer perspective on the reflecting light.

after i had taken a few photographs and the sun and clouds started to shift again, i turned around to walk back towards the hiking trail. off to my right, i noticed that a bus was coming quickly up the driveway. thinking quickly i thought that it might be interesting to photograph the bus blurring by in the light.

note that the Diana lens that i was shooting with is a special effects lens. it is made entirely of plastic and is in no means a high powered lens with zooming qualities of any sort. and i left my home without my camera bag that contained my better quality lenses, even though none of those are high powered zoom lenses either.

i took three photographs of the bus zooming by. then i turned around to see what i could shoot next. it was then that i noticed a big man burling towards me at a rapid pace.

it was the bus driver that had just drove past me. he had stopped his bus and was storming at me as if he were angry. i had no reason to think i had done anything to upset him. he didn’t shout, but he said quite demonstratively “Do you want to take my picture?” My first thought was, “Well, yes! You are quite an interesting looking fellow.” I was thinking that he’d make a good subject for the old “100 Strangers” project that I used to work on, and that it might be fun to start it up again. I saw him and his burly features, wrinkled bus drivers shirt, and tired face in a faint sepia print.

anyway, he was not offering to pose for me. he jumped right into an angry rant that “you can’t just stand out in the middle of the street taking pictures of people driving by”, and that, “one day you are going to piss someone off and get your strap wrapped around your neck and your camera shoved down your throat”. i swear to god, that is what he said.

so i dumbly stumbled for words to defend myself. “i’m just a local artist. do you want to see the photos i took of your bus?” i showed him the three blurry photos and that seemed to calm him a little bit, to the point at least that he did not touch me or my camera.

he went back to his bus and drove off. i was not frightened, but was slightly ruffled. i had never been verbally assaulted like that by anyone before. the time i was told i could not take photos at Graceland Cemetery in Chicago was different. there was no confrontation.

i meandered slowly back to my car, waiting to see if the driver was going to take his bus back into the roundabout where my car was parked. i didn’t see the bus appear until i got right up to my car. i waved at him, but he did not smile. in fact, he parked his bus and approached me again. this time he had a piece of paper in his hand and wrote down my car’s license number. i said, “would you like my card too?”. “no, its just that there was an incident here last week and i’m a little spooked.” i asked, “what happened?” he said, “it’s none of your business.” then we both walked away, got into our vehicles and drove off.

i know i was doing nothing wrong and that i simply crossed the path of a suspicious man that has probably been on the job too long. i’m not afraid to take photos in my town, but i will be careful of taking photos of these buses now in case i come across this driver again.

so that is what happened to me today. just thought i’d share.

 

(as a side note, i finally learned that i need to shoot in manual mode with this lens and i need to stop down my aperture 1-2 stops to get properly exposed photographs. more photos can be seen here: Diana Photo Experimenting - Flickr)

no cemeteries in switzerland.

I had a dream this morning (thank you half dose Ambien!) that i was waiting for a model and her sister to get ready for a "Cemetery Girl" photo shoot. i was at there house in Berkeley. it was one of those big, classy mansions that you find in the neighborhoods on the north side of the UC campus. there was a feeling of age to the place, of many, many lives having been lived there. there was just something in the air of the place that made you feel like a lot of souls had passed through the rooms, doing the sundry activities of their lives.

the house was warmly lit from the afternoon sun shining through the windows, filtered through the autumn colored, decaying leaves on the large trees in the outer yard. this worried me. it was getting late. a little bit too late. in the afternoon for our shoot. i do like to take photographs in the afternoon light, but since the recent ending of daylight savings time, afternoons get shorter and shorter every day. thoughts about this kept racing through my mind. i was calculating how much time there would actually be left if the girls kept moving at the pace they were moving at trying to prepare their outfits for the shoot.

i don't recall saying anything out loud to them in the dream about this. the conversation was internal, within the constraints of my own mind. but it intensified as time passed. they wanted to introduce me to their mother; something i never quibble about because my endeavor is a strange one; seeking out young ladies to take to a cemetery to photograph. they brought her to the hallway just as we were leaving the house and i gave her a polite handshake, but told her we needed to hurry because the light was fading.

we got into the car and i started to drive "to the cemetery". the only problem was that i did not recognize the neighborhood we were in and i did not know which way to go. that we were "in Berkeley" to start with was only a feeling. some sort of blind, internal recognition of "place". whether it was Berkeley or not i started to debate. in fact, i wondered so strongly about this confusion i spoke aloud in the dream for the first time, "maybe this is a dream". no one offered any consolence, or directions to "the cemetery".

so i kept driving. after awhile, it seemed to be an ongoing and eternal "5pm" to me, according to the fading brightness of the afternoon light we came to a park that could have been a cemetery but was not. there were no monuments or gravestones. i did not recognize the place but thinking about it now it could have been a cemetery anywhere in the midwest that i have visited before in Illinois or Ohio. i still thought i was in the Berkeley area and that i was heading to Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland. this was not the place though.

the girls saw some people that they recognized in "the park" and asked to get out of the car to speak to them. i allowed them to, thinking that maybe i could get directions from them. they were a man and a woman, very Berkeley looking in appearance, in their mid 30s or early 40s. they had an Australian Shepard on a leash that they were taking for a walk. no words were spoken that i can remember, so we got back in the car. ALL of us; the girls, the couple and the dog. THEN the man started to offer directions. "That way..." he kept pointing.

so we drove down this street that led away from the park into a downtown city area. not a large city but a village type city with maximum height two-three storey buildings. it was a very colorful district though with somewhat elaborate architecture and painted with very bright, rich colors. it didn't seem fairytale like to me, but it bordered on such a look. and over the roofs of the buildings to the left i could see very large mountains in the horizon. thus, i announced to myself, "we must be in Switzerland". what made me think this other than the sites, i do not know.

continued driving down this thoroughfare until we reached the end of the street and drove out of town. then we could see the mountain range in full view. there were fields and a river, and the mountains. we continued driving to the end of this road until we came to a mansion at the very end. strangely enough it looked very similar, or felt similar to me to the house back in Berkeley. i parked the car in the gravel driveway and the girls got out and demanded that we all go inside to meet their "grandmother". strangely enough, the woman looked exactly like their mother back in Berkeley.

it was at this point in the dream that i became frustrated because we had not found a (or "the") cemetery and my whole day's plans seemed dashed. i spoke out loud, and woke myself up. it upset me that the dream was not going to continue because aside from my discomfort from the plans being disuaded, it was a lovely dream. i enjoyed the scenery and the company of the girls. i wished upon awaking that i could have continued and figured out a proper ending to the activities.

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an afternoon in a hallucinogenic garden...

catch up, re group, pass away…

haven’t written in awhile, but soon, oh soon, i will be writing oh so very much more. why you may ask? well, because November is only 5 days away and that is when Nanowrimo begins! yes, i will be fooling myself and the world with speculation that i am writing another novel. what happened with the novel he wrote last November, you may ask. and that is a very good question.

i am just too busy/lazy/distracted to bother with finishing it. pity, because it is really pretty good. i came very close to creating a self published book out of it, and i still really should finish it but it is so hard for me to do all the things i want to do/should do/could do with the freeform way that my life/mind works. if i had a close associate that would monitor my activities/inactivity and manage me, i could be a lot more responsible about finishing all the things that i want to do/am doing.

does anyone else feel this way? if you are in a close partnership with someone (relationship or business partnership) does it help you act more responsibly? do the things you need to do? act more seriously about finishing what you start? taking on new challenges/projects? dreaming big? who i have to answer to is a cloud. i have spectators, but no one in my immediate proximity that monitors my activities or counts on me to complete my activities. if i do, or don’t, the cloud just hovers and sometimes pays attention and most time doesn’t pay attention. i am the brain/heart at the center of the cloud and anyone out there in the universe/internet/neighborhood are the water particles in my cloud. some of you rain on me. most of you just react innocuously.

i need to live in a thunderstorm though. or a hurricane. yeah. especially now while i am well and alive and feel like doing things, creating things, playing games because one day i will no longer be able to participate. it will be too late. the air will be sucked from me and there will no longer be a cloud surrounding me, but a field. of dirt. of memories. or wanting that cannot be fulfilled. while i become a haunter because i left this world unsatisfied? beware, because i just might!

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Zappa unites us all...

So i meet the tow truck driver this afternoon and he sees my Zappa Plays Zappa t-shirt. "Zappa Plays Zappa, eh? Pretty good show?"
"Yeah, amazing show, but sad..."

Well, it turns out that this guy used to play in a band with former Zappa guitarist Ray White. And he fills me in on the history of this guys career on the way back to my house.

You just never know what a day will bring, and how important what you choose to wear is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_White

things pass away so new births can occur...

well, i've pretty much become resigned to the fact that it's possible to live life without an automobile. pretty much. since i don't have a substantial form of income to pay for autorepairs, i can't get my car fixed anymore. so until my fortune changes, i will have to find other means of transportation to get to the places i want to/need to go to. as for getting around my town, i'm fine with walking. i'm not crazy about riding my bike in this town because it is a city made for cars, not bikers, but i will adapt.

so right now i've made my first adjustment. i am sitting in the nearest starbucks to my home. it's about a 30 minute walk away, not too bad. also, i'm using my netbook, not my laptop so the weight of what i have to carry is bearable. were i to carry my laptop here it would be a real pain. and since i only have the netbook, this means that i am unable to edit photos here. i will be restricted to strictly writing. good thing, eh? considering that November and Nanowrimo is almost here!

the one thing that is a real problem for me though is that i have sooo many photo shoots scheduled over the next two month and i don't know how i will get to them. this may become a death blow to my cemetery girl project.

this weekend in particular was full of plans too. photo shoot saturday afternoon, Sarah Vowell talk saturday night and Adrian Belew sunday night. bummer.

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