Voodoo Time Dot Com

Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against one of your people, but love your neighbor as yourself.
Holy Torah / Holy Bible, Leviticus 19:18

The one who practices the truth comes to the light, so that it may be plainly evident that his deeds have been done in God.
Holy Bible, John 3:21

Whatever good works ye send on before [death]… ye shall find with God.
Holy Q’uran 13:20

I envy no one, nor am I partial to anyone. I am equal to all. But whoever renders service unto Me in devotion is a friend, is in Me, and I am also a friend unto him.
Bhagavad-Gita 9:29

Let a man overcome anger by love, let him overcome evil by good; let him overcome the greedy by liberality, the liar by truth! Speak the truth, do not yield to anger; give, if thou art asked for little; by these three steps thou wilt go near the gods.
Dhammapada 223-224

Be unjust to no man, and show all meekness to all men.
Be as a lamp unto them that walk in darkness, a joy to the sorrowfull, a sea for the thirsty,
a haven for the distressed, an upholder and defender of the victim of oppression.
Let integrity and uprightness distinguish all thine acts.
Be a home for the stranger, a balm to the suffering, a tower of strength for the fugitive.
Baha’u'llah - Prophet of Baha’i

If I took all of my clothes off and started walking downtown, I wonder how far I would get before The Man intercepted me. And I wonder, if I painted a face on my rear end and was talking to myself, would I get any farther or would that get me picked up even faster?

I’ll let you know.

When I was out for lunch the other day, one of my coworkers picked up a penny. She was pretty pleased about that because she had been having a rough week, and found pennies are supposedly good luck. That is, pennies are good luck for the people who find them. But what about the all the people who lose pennies everyday? Is losing a penny bad luck?

Then I wondered if luck is karmic. What if our fortune depends solely on our ratios of found money to lost money?

I do know one thing though. If that is the case, I’m screwed.

Bye for now.

In previous posts, I’ve touched on my Buddhist leanings. And while I have no hope of enlightenment in this lifetime, I really think that guy was on to something. One of the central themes of Buddhist practice is to see things for the way they are, and stop getting caught up in wishing things were different.

I think about this a lot, because I often catch myself wishing things were different. This is because I am an idiot idealist. I really get angry when I notice people acting selfishly. So, as you can probably imagine, I feel angry quite often. This happens a lot while I’m driving. Everyday someone cuts me off and I get angry. Nearly everyday, some jerk drives down the left turn lane, only to swerve back into another lane in the middle of the intersection, just to race ahead of the rest of us who obey traffic laws. (That is, except that bit about speed limits. I never could get the hang of speed limits.)

The problem with this is that I end up letting other people affect my happiness, which is dumb. A Buddhist forest monk from Thailand, called Ajahn Chah (”Ajahn” means “teacher”) taught an interesting lesson about this kind of thing. Apparently, in Thailand, the forests are chock full of monkeys (or at least they were when Ajahn Chah was still alive). Monkeys make a lot of noise, and they are forever swinging around and throwing things or stealing things. As a monk, one spends considerable lengths of time everyday in meditation. With monkeys making a racket, it could be hard to achieve tranquility in one’s mind. So the natural human reaction is to be angry with the monkeys.

One could try shooing away the monkeys, but they would just come back, or worse - attack. You could yell yourself hoarse, telling the monkeys to “shut up”, but monkeys don’t understand Thai (everyone knows monkeys only speak Dutch). If you’re angry with the monkeys, you’ll never achieve any kind of peace, because now there is a racket outside, and on the inside as well.

A wise person knows that this is simply the way monkeys are. There is no point wishing they would act otherwise. A wise person will relax and let the monkeys be monkeys.

So next time you’re angry at someone for being an ass, just remember that this is only human nature (or at least the nature of that particular human), and let it go. Let the monkeys be monkeys.

Bye for now.

Whilst shopping at a fine boutique last week, I happened across a disc for the Sony Playstation 2 containing several games ported from the original Atari 2600 game system. State of the art in 1984, these games are hardly recognizable as such after these twenty years of non-stop innovation. Nonetheless, these blocky eight-color images blipping and blooping across the screen are part of my childhood. I tend to get really excited about these kinds of things, so I bought it.

In the early days of video games, the technology was pretty primitive. The earliest example of a mass-produced home video game system was Pong - introduced by Atari and distributed almost exclusively by Sears in 1975. For a retail price of US$200-$300, the first units played only one game - a modified ping-pong in black and white. It was a phenomenon. Soon after, in 1977, Atari introduced the VCS, later known as the 2600. If Pong was a phenomenon, the 2600 was nothing less than a cultural sensation. The 2600 was a bit more complex than the clunky Pong units, but not by much. Most 2600 games consisted of vague, blocky shapes chasing, or attempting to escape from other vague, blocky shapes. Dragons were indistinguishable from ducks without the aid of the small manuals that explained everything. The graphics and sound were poor. The bad games looked just like the good ones.

The Activision Anthology package includes more than 45 games - and not a single instruction manual. Some of the games are fun, and some are completely lame. After spending a couple of hours running my square protagonists aimlessly around their little square worlds, I came to wonder if maybe I had been a little too excited about this find. Somehow I remember these games being absolutely fascinating. But after all the years, I’m having trouble seeing these little marvels as I did then. I tried to cut a small slice of my childhood. And it was sweet, but it just didn’t taste the same.

These experiences usually fall shy of my lofty expectations. Much of the magic is gone from those sights and sounds. They say you can never go home again, and from what I’ve seen, I suspect they’re right. Those things and those places aren’t magical anymore, because they’re not mine. They belong to this little freckled kid with a ridiculous cow-lick. He has his pants tucked into his socks, and he’s running around with a broom handle he’s calling a “lightsaber”. He’s the king of his world. He wakes up at dawn and never wants to go to bed. He’s a being of pure energy, and as such, he’s completely ethereal and inscrutable. I can see him only in moments, but can never grasp him. There is magic there, but the magic is in him - not in those things that surround him. The wand is only magic in the hands of the sorceror.

Yet, I continue to haunt those places he used to walk, and I sometimes try to find just a little bit of magic in the things he left behind. Sometimes I get lucky.

Bye for now.

Wow - looks like it’s been a while since I’ve put anything new up here. I have a good reason though. I didn’t feel like it. Honestly… I just couldn’t be bothered. But I know you’ll forgive me, because you’ve all come to expect this kind of flaky behavior in these nearly two years I’ve been doing this. If you’re angry, blame it on The Real World, which has a way of cutting into my goof-off-online time.

Speaking of The Real World, I’ve been spending a lot more time in it lately. Recently, my wife and I have been lamenting the ever-increasing sizes of our respective asses. The first step in realizing our goal of achieving smaller asses is to spend less time sitting on said asses. Less ass time means less time for writing on this weblog. After all, the journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step. There is wisdom here. Call it derriere Taoism.

Today, for example, we spent the day at the Los Angeles County Irish Fair and Music Festival. This is one of those things where you head out to a fairgrounds in the middle of the desert and drink over-priced (but quite good) beer and listen to raucous neo-celtic rock bands, cheered on by legions of revelers wearing newly-purchased kilts in honor of their 1/16 Irish heritage. But it was a good time, and I didn’t get sunburnt.

This new cultural awareness movement is interesting. It seems that after 200 years of the “melting pot” mentality in which long Polish names became short anglicized names with a more favorable vowel to consonant ratio, there is now this drive to reclaim all this lost ethnicity. Just 100 years ago, “No Irish Need Apply.” But now Americans by the thousands are attempting to rediscover the history our grandparents worked so hard to put behind them. It can go too far, certainly, but overall I think it’s healthy enough. Anytime I get to eat sausage and drink beer, how can it be other than a good thing? Still, it’s probably also a good thing that St. Patrick’s Day and Oktoberfest are half a year apart.

So, anyway, I’m back from the dead. And hopefully, I will be spending a bit more time on the site from now on. And maybe I’ll even come up with something funny to write about soon, but I’m not making any promises. Either way, I’ll talk to y’all soon.

Bye for now.

I was thinking today, as I was trying to do about four different tasks at the same time, that it would be really great if there were some kind of distributed computing system that could network all of our brains together for extra mind power.

If you’re familiar with projects like SETI@home or grid.org, then you can probably guess what I’m talking about. For the uninitiated, distributed computing works on the idea that not all computers are using their full computing capability at all times. For example, while I’m writing this entry, my computer is not terribly busy. All it has to do is keep critical systems up and pay attention to my typing. Even while I’m browsing three or four Web pages at the same time, my PC is still well under maximum load. Distributed computing applications use this unused capacity on multiple machines simultaneously in order to make calculations or interpret raw data in the background. If I were to start playing a video game, the application would adjust itself accordingly and use up less of my resources, or none at all.

If only there were such a network for human brains, I could get so much more accomplished. At any given time there must be millions of people who are barely using their brains at all. Just look around next time you’re at the mall, or the grocery store, or sitting in traffic. Everyone around you is probably just floating around on auto-pilot - their minds spinning up just enough to keep those critical systems running and their feet landing one in front of the other. While I was nearing my cranial capacity this afternoon, someone somewhere was daydreaming and burning up precious synaptic discharges. I am absolutely convinced that for every one of us struggling to muster up enough grey matter to get through the day, there is some high school student daydreaming in chemistry class. That is prime processor time being completely wasted on sexual fantasy.

If there was a distributed mental network, I could have tapped all kinds of unused brain power. Just thinking of how many people sit at home in the afternoon watching soap operas, makes me lament the lack of such a network all the more. The unused 99.99% of some General Hospital viewer’s mind could have made all the difference for me today. And likewise, while I’m stuck in traffic, or Web surfing, or watching Spongebob Squarepants, some poor soul in need of a few extra synapses could benefit from my low CPU usage.

Anyway, I’m done for the evening. If anyone needs my brain for anything, go ahead and log on. There’s no password.

Bye for now.

‘Tis the day before Christmas
And all through our flat
Not a damned thing is ready
What’s up with that?

Boy did Christmas ever sneak up on me this year. We barely have our tree up. Until this week, it’s seemed like Christmas was still a month away. I am so not ready for this.

Most years (this one included), I am so buried in work and day-to-day minutiae that I feel like I’ve hardly digested Thanksgiving dinner by the time Christmas comes around. The whole thing rolls right past me, and despite my best efforts to the contrary, I find myself standing in an enormous line somewhere on Christmas Eve, angry for the half hour of my life I just wasted trolling for a parking spot.

In my adulthood, I’m becoming jaded with Christmas - or “giftmas” as I’ve taken to calling it. It hardly seems worth the trouble; trading greeting cards by mail that no one really wants to write, worrying about what to buy people, the stories of parents fighting other parents for this year’s “gotta have” toy… I’m not saying I don’t enjoy giving gifts (quite the contrary) but it seems that more and more, we’re all just going through the motions. Christmas is supposed to be about peace, but there’s never a moment’s peace for most of us this time of year.

At this time last year, I had been unemployed for two months. We were draining our savings and racking up credit card debt just to pay the bills. We were about four to six weeks from completely broke. It sucked. Needless to say, there were not many Christmas gifts. But for probably the first time in my adult life, I noticed the cool evenings, the lights going up on houses, and the carols on the radio. And there were no last-minute trips to the mall to sour my love for humankind. My wife and I spent several evenings just driving around the neighborhoods looking at light displays, and drinking hot cocoa. The night we drove around lost in the hills with the rain pouring down is the greatest Christmas memory I have since childhood.

It came without ribbons! It came without tags!
It came without packages, boxes or bags!

Next year - don’t buy me anything. Spend that time going for a drive, or making eggnog, or watching that corny “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” cartoon. Celebrate and enjoy yourself. Be at peace.

Buy Bye for now.

As I mentioned here previously, my wife and I have moved into a new apartment. This was the primary driving influence behind my recent hiatus, and I took off last week from work in order to commit as much time as possible to getting us moved out. Ordinarily this would have been plenty of time. But this time there was a hitch. Our old apartment is in the small foothill town of Stevenson Ranch, CA. Perhaps you’ve heard of it in the news lately.

Everything we own smells of smoke, and I have probably inhaled more particulate matter in the past week than is wise or healthy. If you’ve never been that close to a major fire, it’s hard to explain the density and pervasiveness of the smoke. It is absolutely everywhere. Keeping the doors and windows shut and the air conditioning on worked pretty well for most of the first day. After that, the inside started to smell more like outside. At first, it smelled almost pleasantly like a fireplace, then like a bonfire. Then as the fire came closer it began to take on a scent that was just unnerving - as the sweet smell of wood fire gradually gave way to a heavy odor of danger. It’s a smell that makes one feel instinctively like it’s about time to get the hell out of Dodge.

On the second day, the fire crested the hills above our building. It was more than a little unreal to watch the fire line coming down the mountain in the evening. It came down in a long glowing orange dividing line between the sage color before it, and the black behind it. It looked strangely like the way the lit end of a cigar creeps slowly toward your lips as you smoke it. Late that afternoon, the light changed. Everything turned orange - illuminated by the pumpkin glow of the smoke-obscured sun. It’s something you have to see to really appreciate. We took a few pictures during the move, and I’ll post them if they come out.

The whole time, ash was raining down like snow. I know that analogy is pretty cliché, but it really does look that way. It gets caught up in the wind and floats down in the same way snow does in a flurry. I considered trying to catch some on my tongue, but thought better of it before it was too late. Like the smoke, the ash is completely omnipresent. It collects on any horizontal surface in no time at all. It is down your shirt and under your hat. It is in your nose, in your mouth and often in your eyes. It’s in your carpet, and in your food. It’s probably still in my lungs tearing apart my delicate tissues. Is it normal to cough blood?

The Stevenson Ranch fire ended well - as far as things like that “go well”. There were no mandatory evacuations, even at the height of the action. Most of the flammable brush has burned away, and no homes were lost. Many other communities were not as fortunate. Regardless, we’re out of there now. Since we moved to a nice place closer to the coast and away from mountains and brush, hopefully we won’t have to go through that kind of thing again. We have a new nemesis at our new place. Ants. I’ll be telling you about them soon, I’m sure.

Bye for now.

There is an article in the New Yorker about people who choose to end their lives plunging from the Golden Gate bridge. This happens at a rate of about once every two weeks or so, though these events rarely make the news, as law enforcement and the media have mutually agreed to play down the incidents so as not to encourage suicide by glorifying the act.

The article includes a story by a Dr. Jerome Motto, who recounts a particularly sobering bridge suicide occurring sometime in the 1970s.

Dr. Motto:
“I went to this guy’s apartment afterward with the assistant medical examiner… The guy was in his thirties, lived alone, pretty bare apartment. He’d written a note and left it on his bureau. It said, ‘I’m going to walk to the bridge. If one person smiles at me on the way, I will not jump.’”

One smile, one “hello”, one door held open might not save someone’s life.

But it might.