Lucid

 I've read about "lucid dreaming," which is when the dreamer realizes he's dreaming while in the midst of a dream.

Apply the same concept to waking life, and it's called "enlightenment."

Hoverin' By My Suitcase

I love how stripped-down his version is.  It allows the beauty and emotion of the song to shine through.

There's something I call "John Denver Syndrome."  John Denver's early albums were very simple, featuring just his voice and guitar, but he seemed to add two instruments with each new album.  By the end of his career his albums were just a cacophony of sounds that completely buried his voice.

A lot of musicians fall prey to that syndrome.  

But not Boz.

Full lyrics HERE.

Jones for this, jones for that…

Some artists are better live than in the studio, and Boz Scaggs is on that list.  

Full lyrics HERE.

A Nice Example of Karma

 Via Yahoo Entertainment:

Although (Jerry) Falwell Jr. had helped his father save Liberty from financial ruin in the past, he claimed, becoming president of the evangelical school presented a unique challenge. 

"Because of my last name, people think I'm a religious person. But I'm not," Falwell Jr., 59, told Vanity Fair in the interview, going on to call the period after his father's death "the worst three months of my life."

"There was so much pressure on me to become somebody I wasn't," recalled Falwell Jr.

He seems to consider himself an innocent bystander, but the pressure he felt was a direct consequence of the choice he made.

He wanted the power.  He wanted the money.  He wanted the fame.

What he didn't want was to pay a price for it.

Thich

 

“I said this was not suicide, because in a difficult situation like Vietnam, to make your voice heard is difficult. So sometimes we have to burn ourselves alive in order for our voice to be heard so that is an act of compassion that you do that, the act of love and not of despair.  Jesus Christ died in the same spirit.”  ~Thic Nhat Hanh (source) 

The quote above does help me understand his motivations of Thich Quang Duc, who set himself ablaze at the age of 81 in July of 1963.

But it also sounds a little like spin to me.

Folly at the Extreme

A Dream of Governors
by Louis Simpson, ©1959

"The deepest dream is of mad governors." ~Mark Van Doren

The Knight from the world's end
Cut off the dragon's head.
The monster's only friend,
The Witch, insulting, fled.
The Knight was crowned and took
His Lady. Good and gay,
They lived in a picture book
Forever and a day.

Or else: When he had sat
So long, the King was old
And ludicrous and fat.
At feasts, when poets told
How he had shed the blood
Of dragons long ago,
He thought, Have I done good
To hear that I did so?

The chorus in a play
Declaimed, "The soul does well
Keeping the middle way."
He thought, That city fell;
Man's life is founded on
Folly at the extreme;
When all is said and done,
The City is a dream.

At night, the King alone
Went to the Dragon's cave.
In moonlight, on a stone,
The Witch sat by the grave.
He grasped her by the hand
And said, "Grant what I ask!
Bring evil on the land
That I may have a task!"

The Queen has heard his tread;
She shuts the picture book.
The King stands by the bed.
In silence, as they look
into each other's eyes,
They see a buried thing
That creeps, begins to rise,
And spreads the dragon's wing.

Robots

 Excerpted from an article by Thomas Wells arguing that waiters should be replaced with scan codes:

For example, at least some middle-class people, especially in America, seem to want to keep waiters because they enjoy having someone perform the emotional labour of making them feel like they are more important than they are. It is as if they are LARPing as a rich person from the 19th century by renting a footman to give them lots of obsequious attention. There is something disgraceful about such a desire…

I used to like chatting with the man who pumped my gas, the lady who rang up my groceries, the college kid who brought them to the car. 

Now I ring up my own groceries, silently and alone; I take them to my car myself, silently and alone; I pump my own gas, silently and alone.

This hasn't made my life better.  I don’t think it has made anyone’s life better.

I like human interaction.  I never once felt superior to the people who helped me.

I valued them, was grateful for them, and I miss them.  We don’t need fewer people in our lives, we need more of them.

You can read the whole stupid article HERE, if you want to.

We Can Make Each Other Happy

You can climb a mountain
You can swim the sea
You can jump into the fire
But you'll never be free

You can shake me up
Or I can break you down
Whoa-o-o-o-, whoa-o-o-o-…

We can make each other happy
We can make each other happy
We can make each other happy

The Art Of

 I read The Art of War by Sun Tzu.

I thought it was stupid; if he were my leader, I’d frag him.

You can read it online or download it for free from Project Gutenberg, HERE.  It’s short.

In Either Case,

"Usually when we hear or read something new, we just compare it to our own ideas. If it is the same, we accept it and say that it is correct. If it is not, we say it is incorrect. In either case, we learn nothing."  ~Thich Nhat Hanh

Rude

Excerpted from Humans by Brandon Stanton, ©2020:

A lot of people will turn me down before they even know what I'm asking. This can come across as rudeness, but it's not. It's just a natural defense mechanism honed by years of urban living. And it's almost always driven by fear. It's quite rare to find a person who enjoys being rude. Rudeness is almost always a reaction to stress. It's a means of protection. It's a shield. And getting past that shield has always been my biggest challenge.

When I lived in Plano, Texas, the Mormons used to cruise the mall parking lots on bicycles looking for shoppers walking alone. I actually quit shopping in certain places just to avoid them.  They would pounce, and declining politely never worked.  They were persistent, they were aggressive, and the only way to get rid of them was to be rude and vaguely threatening.

I still hate that they did that to me.

Word Will Get Around

I went out before breakfast
to fill the bird feeder.
So far only jays come,
but the word will get around.

~May Sarton, in Journal of a Solitude ©1992, via Jules of Nature