The old woman is circling around the flame like a demented moth.
What drives her now? Is it Death? No matter what we call it, there’s nothing I can do about it. Her lungs are a pneumonia-ridden mess. She’s probably had it for a long time, low-grade, and now her chest is filled with secondary [...]

In a very real sense, absolutely!
Today is my “actual” birthday (from AstroDienst), with the sun lining up precisely with where it was when I was born in 1945 (!) at 9:25 p.m. tonight, rather than tomorrow, my calendar birthday. This has to do with the imprecision of the numbers, things slipping, the impossibility of our [...]

“The planet is asleep and it’s the fault of musicians who are untrue to themselves.” (Sun Ra)
Is that COOL or what? I grabbed the quotation from the comments section of an article by ex-Fug and founding member of the False Prophets, Steven Taylor, at Reality Sandwich entitled “Is That a Real Reality, or Did You [...]

Oh, what a grand few days…
We look at another place I know I won’t like — I’m one of those who know — and I’m not overwhelmed. Expecting the deal to crumble in the end regardless, I stay on my best behavior and pretty much keep silent. (Mistake!) But right away, in the absence [...]

Well, crank up the worry machine. (Or not! read on…)
What I find most interesting about using the Internet for finding news is how much of what the rest of the world sees never makes it into American media consciousness. For example, all but a rear guard of 800 Australian troops just came home from Iraq [...]

That’s what she called him, “Lumpy.”
For the two or three people in the whole world who might understand what I’m talking about, that’s what yet another Maryland friend emailed me when I told her who had died on Wednesday. I didn’t even know he had a nickname, but then she might have gone to [...]

The previous post has a comment by someone I didn’t recognize. He lives in the Cascade foothills and writes at a blog you need to visit, The Farmer de Ville Chronicles. Outstanding writing, as usual a wake-up call to me to stick to what’s real and all around me. He must have a regular writing [...]

Something is changing deep inside.
There are many, many clues. The biggest one is where the sense of calm expansion lies, a realm where nothing matters except trust. I’m doing things that “make no sense” but feel like openings or signals. A natural strength arises, outside of intellect and culture. I must have more of this. [...]

That takes in a lot of territory, so I’d better be more specific. I’m talking about something that happened at ZoukFest, and right away that makes it tricky to describe.
There’s nothing quite like ZoukFest. Not only are the instructors all world-class musicians, but we all eat, sleep, and share bathrooms together. There’s no special physical [...]

Oh man, Bo Diddley died today, and I’m sitting here with tears running down my face. What joy that man brought into this world. I finally got to hear him play in Santa Fe, back in January of ‘04, and wrote about it in one of my old GRACK! columns that I later developed into [...]