Maebius Musing

I’m not sure how to articulate it, so I hope the following short muse-rambling makes some sort of coherent sense. 

Do all you folks seem to constantly have a soundtrack going in your head, usually quiet and behind the usual random brain-mutterings?  When you look at a beautiful artwork, or see the sunrise, does your internal symphony crescendo with instruments appropriate to the medium?  (harmonizing crickets even, if not harps and trumpets)    Mine does.

When I seek out moments of solitude to center and think, and even when I am attempting to meditate in an eastern- null-thought method, the hardest thing to quiet is that internal melody.  The inner-thought is hard enough of course, but if I manage to get that wrangled, there’s usually some sniglet of tune or ear-worm of melody that is nigh-impossible to cancel out.  The best I usually get to is to shift the song to something like Enya or a soft “meditation music” instead of something from the 80’s rock or modern alternative scene.

When I work nights, and am alone, or am driving to visit friends and relatives in Pennsylvania, I almost have this burning NEED to have the radio on.  I go slightly nuts if it’s totally quiet beyond the sound of a car engine, or printer spewing paper.   It’s wierd.

Likewise, nothing gets the emotions fired up and makes time pass quickly like good tunes.

I’ve joked with my wife once about using my “time-warp” ability while driving, since if the radio is on while she sleeps in the back with the sprogling, we seem to make the trips in short time with no traffic. I can attest that even during these trips the spedometer and cruise-control are set appropriately, (no police-chase velocities are used), yet we always “make good time”.   With the radio off and quietness around me, my own sense of time goes sluggish, and the clock just.  stands.  still.

On a related note, I think this is why my favorite places to sleep are are festivals and camping.  At the former, there is the ubiquitous drumming, which I’ve mentioned a love for often here.  Even at regular campsites, there’s always some drifting music from other camper’s radios, or at least the summer buzz of crickets and katydids.

The really amuzing thing is that I can’t really consider myself musically inclined.  I don’t sing (other than fun kareoke games), don’t really play any instruments except the hand-drum at festivals (and even there, not well compared to the “Real Drummers”), and dance like a fish out of water.     Yet, music is in my blood.
What about you folks?

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NOTE: seems adding imaged borked the post.  Summary = kid loves kindergarden. Will try to re-write and upload pictures that won’t corrupt themselves.. Grr….
The sprog went to the Big House School yesterday for the first time. Kindergarden class!
The first day was a half-day, where parents got to follow along, meet & greet big brothe ..the teachers and administrators.
When we arrived, there was the usual large collection of milling kids, parents hovering nearby, and the staccato strobe of a zillion cameras every few seconds.  I’ll willingly admit to adding to the light pollution here.  (pictures below).   Some kids were crying, some were stoutly ignoring the others in leu of the newfound class-toybox, and such.  Our guy proceeded to hit the cubby-spot and hang his backpack, then go find some toys to play with and chatter to one of hte kids from his Pre-K class like old friends.

Second day was great, he was excited to eat “cheesy pizza” at the cafeteria.  (More details to follow once I figure out why Wordpress is acting up lately…. )

Firstly, is at school the first day, where parents got to visit. Doesn’t he look so big!
Here are a few small images I had to manually crop and fiddle with for some odd reason.

Second, waiting for the bus on Friday, excitedly telling “papa” all about the fun he will be having today!

Lastly, sprogling is getting on the bus for the first time.  He did manage to look back through the window and wave, but otherwise, it was “See ya folks, I’m going to school!” in his mind.

At the end, a close-up high-res shot of the big boy from the “schoolyard” image, because it came out so well.

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As a catch-up post on mystical musings, I offer a dream from last night.  Usually, I don’t really remember my dreams except in odd fragments.  This one, was semi-lucid and really wierd!

It began with myself, (though a younger and not-looking-like me-at-all)  walking with some unknown friends along a sort of paved walkway through some outdoor “commercial park” or modern college university-grounds. The grass at the sides of the walk was replaced by garbage and a few scraps of ruined chain-link fencing, composed mostly of black shingle-like things, and random other “back alley trash”.  Otherwise, the buildings around me were clean and modern, somewhat heavy on domes or semi-austere roof-patterns (such as a university campus with separate classroom buildings and labs)

We were chatting about something random, when I tripped and stumbled onto the black shingle-stuff, and my companions were greatly worried about stepping from the path.  At this point, a large towering figure rose from the shingle-trash (cartoon anime style).  It looked featureless, just a rounded pillar of matter, with glowing, non-threatening and cartoony-yet-irritatable-surprised, red eyes.  Clearly, and with a tone of warning, the ‘monster’ boomed “It has seen me?!!” and rattled back into a pile of lifeless junk.

Suddenly, colours were clearer, my friends vanished, and I felt elightened.  I knew how the world worked, vividly, and unquestioningly, In that fuzzy dream-logic of Truth.  I stepped back onto the walkway and noticed that as I stepped into a nearby building shadow, my footprints left faintly glowing marks which faded, like walking on damp soil where the water shimmers momentarily before drawing back underground.

Then, the dream shifted and I looked more like myself in real life.  I was on a wide marble tile hallway, reminicent of the over-highway pedestrian bridges, and inside some huge sprawling complex.  Outside, the sun was setting through large windows, and I was desperately trying to find something.

In one are of this impossibly large convention hall/mansion, there was a group of toga-clad practitioners of some yoga-like rituals.  I glanced at them briefly, acknowledging their efforts at enlightenment while knowing in my dream-heart that is was wrong.  There was no judgement in my thoughts, only a mental note that that works for them, but there was so much more under their reality.  I knew The Answer, but could not articulate it to that group easily, and attempting it would only harm their own search with my ineptitude.

Yet I needed to find something.  The place I needed to go.  The room, the field, the Spot where my Answer fit, and could be contemplated by like-minded others.  If only I could find it before morning.    I was hurried, but not out of worry, and merely due to wishing to share the joy as soon as possible.

Other areas were passed through.  Oudoor circles of dancers, prayer-groups, and academic scholars.  All had a fragment of the Answer in their own way, but were not the groups I searched for.  Indoor classrooms of Afro-cuban bonfire dancers, caltholic masses, aboriginal tribes, and whirling dirvishes were passed, with the same smiling acknowledgement of Truth-in-part.

There was more, and I remember wanting to write down my thoughts while semi-lucidly in-dreaming,  but first I had to find the place I could sit down and be “home”.

Unfortunately, the sun set outside of the windows, and the final image from my dream was one of pausing to look outside and wonder at the sky.  It was filled with rainbow clouds of nebulae, flashing meteors, and sparkling diamonds, like some sci-fi backdrop from the center of the galaxy.  Then, funny enough, I know my dream-self laughed out loud as I muttered “My god, it’s full of stars!”

Even as I write this in the afternoon at work, I can almost still feel and accurately imagine some of the dream sequences.  Specifically the glowing footprints, and the final imagery of walking through the halls and seeing hte satars.  I was serene, yet driven, calm and yet energized with the clarity that a good night’s sleep and a good book gives you.

I’m not sure what it meant, but any dream that wakes me with tears in my eyes, my fingers tingling in that ‘Wow’ way, and a smile on my face, without any real reason to explain them, has to mean something…

What do you think?

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Hey there fellow Muse-meisters, I am here to let you know I have not vanished into some twisting nether.   I’m sure some (one?  Maybe at least one?!) of you has been waiting for an update from the last post regarding my vacation plans. I went camping.  It was fun. (more to follow, maybe).

Lately, I have been having a wonderful vacation-streak, and thus relatively offline for large expanses of time.   I realized that even though I seem to only browse a few websites at work in between things like watching status-bars inch leftward on computers, there is apparently a LOT of internet browsing and blog-stuff going on while I’m earning my wages!
The last two weeks I have been off work, and either playing outside with the kid,  staying up reading Neil Gaiman’s “Neverwhere” book, or working around the house doing stuff like canning 12 quarts of tomato sauce,  a gross of green beans, plethora of pickles, mountains of mint, and a batch of berries for 1 GALLON of elderberry cordial!  (Grandma elder and I had quite a lively discussion I’ll be blogging about once I get more time online next week, probably for the missed moon musing)

Last weekend we stayed at the beach (Long Beach Island, NJ) with my parents, which was relaxing and fun!  As a result of the trip, we now have three hermit crabs in the kid’s room.  Poppi, Shango, and Cucu-Lacha.  They are funny!

I’ve been tracing out my labyrinth (seen from google earth!) in brick to make it more permanent, and next year to become a mound-walled herbal work of natural art and mystical power!  w00t!

So, I’ve been busy with Living, life taking priority to my usual work-induced webbrowsing, and thus this blog has lain idle for the past few weeks.   I’ve not been. 

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Hmm…You’ve read the media-mongering stories of ‘gamers’, you’ve sighed sagely at the ‘victims’ of an over-reactionary drug-war, and you’ve shrugged off the chocolate cravings as a healthy part of diverse eating habits.    They say the first step is a river in egypt (Denial), and of course our natural inclination to react negatively to thoughts of being addicted to anything.  That can’t be me, can it?

So, the deeper question then becomes:  am I?

Background: This past month has been utter and unrelenting HELL at work.  Forced vacations have meant that when I am not working the night-shift for half-weeks, my co-worker is.  When I’m not on vacation myself and catching up on sleep and house-stuff like mowing the lawn, I am working alone in my office, furiously trying to stay ahead of the oldest backlog and squeek by our SLA timeframes for all projects. (SLA= Service Level agrement: the contracted timeframe that work NEEDS to get done without incurring penalties)
My brain has either been mush, quivering in hyper-alertness, or a foggy amalgam of the two.  Yes, that third stat is strangely possible.  No, I can’t really describe it better.  I don’t think I blogged too much about it, as I tried to avoid long sleep-deprived rants on such a public forum.   Leave it as: Work sucks, in a completely honest, sincere, and deep manner right now.   To the point I honestly had the compulsion when ANOTHER big project landed on my desk to just slowly pick it up, throw it away, and go call the local Burger-joint which had “Now hiring” posted.  It is that bad right now, and I actually stood up to tell off my boss, then sat down not a moment too soon.   (Hope remains though, as September is the cutoff of the mess, and things will return to normal in October.)

Current Muse: My in-laws are camping this weekend, at a vey nice place nearby.  we were invited to crash in their 5th-wheel camper overnight and go hiking, eat S’mores, etc etc.

My lovely wife also asked if I wanted to stay home, and just lounge about the house playing video games while she took the sprog camping with “Amma & Papa”.

Initially, my gut reaction was one of elated and guilt-tinged joy.  Sleep, YES!  Whole bed, YES!  World of Warcraft until 2am, YES!!   But then the guilt set in a little deeper.

I like camping a lot, and I would probably be just as mentally relaxed if I went.  Outdoors is refreshing and grounding in a way no video game can be.  I’d be spending time with the family, and poking around a bonfire at night, which is soul-food of the highest caliber.

Yet the compulsion to just retrest from the world, and be alone at home for a full 24 hours is rather large.   I know myself well enough that while there WILL be much game-playing, I’ll probably wind up doing something like starting to wheelbarrow loads of dirt to the labyrinth garden (which is getting started officially next week), and generally wandering outside in my yard with no goal in particular except what strikes my fancy at that particular moment.  I will drink a homebrew beer, and life will be good.

Hmmm…..

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