The snakecatcher

had been hired to remove all snakes from the king's vast palace garden. He labored for hours, searching the garden for snakes, scooping every snake found with a net. By the end of the day over a hundered snakes had been dropped into the snakecatcher's basins, and the snakecatcher was certain that he had searched all areas of the garden, had found all the snakes.

But then he noticed a certain nook he had overlooked, just into some bushes near a tree. Perhaps another snake might wait there. He went under the tree and looked into the bushes. He saw an enormous purple snake, staring out, so that its face pointed towards the kings palace. The snake was much larger than any other snake in the garden, larger than any of the snakes known to grow in that country, larger than any snake the snakecatcher had ever seen. Not having moved, it spoke, "There will always be snakes". Oddly calm, the snakecatcher said and thought nothing, turned, and left the garden.

His final clinic

had no real medicine. Neither did it have herbs, obsecure teas, or any exercises to be conducted. The doctor had concluded that most ailments can be treated through the application of water in its various states and temperatures: boiling, as steam, frozen into ice or snow, as a cold vapor, and so on.

Dialogue while walking to work

Me to stranger: We seem to walk at the same pace.
Stranger to me: It's our eagerness to get where we're going.

The reawakening

of the second mind, brings responses to things not here. A little jelly fish at ocean's bottom whispers.

When I was a child I actually imagined things. Now I just have thoughts, sometimes about things not here. A part of the mind withered.

We are

always chasing after phantoms and visions. The prudent tell us to ignore the call of ghosts and dreams, to attend to the present.

My wife says:

The oldest one is still alive. And he will be the last to die.

Headquartered

in the fortress, I survey my domain.

So maybe

you don't really believe in any particular religion, or maybe you do, but either way:

If you could choose which religion were TRUE, which would you choose?

The new simplistic

psychology, invented to replace or add on to Freudian id, ego, supergo.

I present three gremlins of the psyche:

1. The Negato, who firmly says "no" to thoughts, ideas, opportunities, and so on. Maybe you should draw a picture? No, says the negato, and you don't draw it. Maybe you should go out tonight? No, says the negato, and you stay home.

2. The Affirmito, or Creato, or some better name, who is the one who comes up with all those ideas of what you just might do. If you always listen to him you'll be constantly active, and constantly doing new things. Perhaps there will be no direction to your actions, and maybe nothing will get finished, because each idea must be acted on, each opportunity taken.

3. The Schmego or Shmego, who doesn't really make this a nice trichotomy, but has to be included anyway. A sort of internal guardian angel, who sometimes has the solution, does the right thing, when nothing ought to work -- the thing-inside that brings the dead-drunk home safely.

The idea was

that there was such a thing as a room of ultimate significance, though now it strikes me that a better name would be room of maximum resonance, but that's all a matter of naming.

About the room: It is a sort of final destination. Though you could leave, go elsewhere, and so on, the room would push some important aspect of experience to a maximum. Maybe that aspect of experience is significance, or maybe meditiveness, or maybe some feeling of resonance, but now I'm getting vague or iffy. Just combine a sense of calmness with deep significance, and that's the part of experience that the room is attuned to, or is so likely to bring you to.

Is that what I used to think the room was (or maybe there are several of them)? Or has the idea changed along the way. And maybe you can wonder, is it really a room? Couldn't it just be some other place, like maybe a field somewhere? But no, it is a room.

Do you know

the true meaning of Kitchener?

It's elusive, but somewhere a bit on the outskirts of the city I began to feel it, the meaning of Kitchener coming on me like a sort of emotion that will somehow transform itself into knowledge. But all I'm left with now is the word "ramshackle" and that can't be all there is to it.

Shinjo, you

say this blog reveals something about me... What?

This

is written in a room that seems devoted to dark brown, for it collects all the dark brown things in the house. Tomorrow, we'll come home from somewhere and somehow in the room will have materialized a large pile of dark brown corduoroy pants.

Ummm, ya...

...So how is your sense of totality? Cause, somehow it matters, even if you never stray far, that all that stuff is out there. That is, you may stay here, but that won't make everything else (and there is apparently so much everything else) go away. And even if you go far and wide, can you really take it all in? Maybe. I don't know. But even if not, surely we can have a sense of how big things might be.

Or maybe nothing matters too much but what is here around us right now.

Swamp mind

sets in. Better swing about like the swamp man, and trundle back and forth to the true swamp ryhthm. Get to know the swamp. Swamp things. Swamp stride. Swamp thought? No! Swamp lack-of-thought.

Listen, you'll hear it.

I

can't help remembering the William Blake quote: If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.

It spins around my head a bit, even though I'm not so interested in wisdow. And just because he said it, it might mean nothing, or mean something while being plain wrong. But still it spins around my head. Does it imply that we should seek folly? That prudence and good judgement are somehow not adviseable. That many of our good decisions are bad decisions?

So it means none of this. Barely suggests any of it. But something drives these skewed interpretations.

Suddenly last

supper, was the title of a lesson in an advanced ESL book for Japanese learners of English, who pretty much already speak the language. This lesson was the true story about a group of people who were evicted from an apartment. On their last night there they had an eviction dinner party, and left the apartment for the last time towards the end of the party, with the party still going on.

Some guy I told all this to mentioned that the name "Suddenly last supper" was a nod to the title of a movie "Suddenly last summer". But there also seem to be other "Suddenly last supper" things out there.

Time to clear out

the pickled head grime.

We called it

space based aqua pop. It was music from outer space, only underwater. Listening to it freed you, loosened connections, opened possibility. Soon to be a necessity for creative ventures.

And the rest of the time its the baroque certainty of Bach.

Some guy

at a party once told me that "Einstein on the Beach" by Phillip Glass was music from 50 years from now. This guy was somehow involved in the music industry, as a composer of movie music, or something like that. I went out and bought the CD, and haven't been able to listen to it at all, though some other music by Phillip Glass I like.

But the idea was the interesting part, the music of the future. Right now I've been listening endlessly to "Silent Shout" by The Knife, and half felt that it was from the future. As I listened to it the phrase music from the sterile world came to me, not as if it were music from a world where everyone was sterile, but from music from a place that is very modern, but also very under-populated.