magic is never perfect.

assembled this over a year ago. found just now.

i can still feel how it felt in that moment

because i have a similar feeling today.

an echoing echo echoes ) ) ) ) ) )

does it do anything for you?

the binary schema iii.

Concerning the Constitution of an Onto-Political Anomaly...
(the binary schema, cont.)

This abnormality of feeling and of development of the character is often apparent in childhood. The boy likes to spend his time with girls, play with dolls, and help his mother about the house; he likes to cook, sew, knit, and develops taste in female toilettes, so that he may even become the adviser to his sisters. As he grows older he eschews smoking, drinking, and manly sports, and, on the contrary, finds pleasure in adornment of person, art, belle-lettres, etc., even to the extent of giving himself entirely to the cultivation of the beautiful. Since women possess corresponding inclinations, he prefers to move in the society of women….

In cases of completely-developed contrary sexuality, heterosexual love is looked upon as a thing absolutely incomprehensible; sexual intercourse with a person of the opposite sex is unthinkable, impossible. Such an attempt brings on the inhibitory concept of disgust or even horror, which makes erection impossible.

~Richard von Krafft-Ebing

According to nineteenth-century medical category discussed by Foucault, the homosexual was categorized, “less by a type of sexual relations,” than by “a certain quality of sexual sensibility, a certain way of inverting the masculine and the feminine in oneself.” Being a homosexual was “a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul.”¹ The nineteenth-century notion of “contrary” or “inverted” sexualities is related to the notion discussed by Butler that intelligible gender identities are those in which desire follows gender toward “the opposite sex.” Being a man requires that one’s desire be directed toward “the opposite sex.” But since being a man is understood as an expressive attribute and a consequence of being male, the maleness of the homosexual’s body becomes questionable (a questionability that is taken up in today’s anatomies, physiologies, and etiologies of male homosexuality). Thus a “male”/“man” whose desire is directed toward “the same sex” is not male/man in any full-blown sense, but is curiously in between male/man and female/woman.

But the nineteenth-century ontology that made the homosexual into a species made ‘homosexual’ a misnomer: because the homosexual was not a man per se, “his” desire for men was not directed toward “the same sex” per se. And such is the case with the twentieth-century gay man. But cannot it be said that the gay man’s desire is directed toward an “opposite,” either. For there to be an opposite, one must have a stable gender identity that lacks the features of the gender that one is not. But being curiously in between male and female, the gay man (as well as the nineteenth-century homosexual before him) is neither heterosexual or homosexual. The former would require that he not be the gender that he desires, the latter entails an absurdity (namely, that one be the gender that one desires).

Now because the sexuality of the gay man (like the sexuality of the nineteenth-century homosexual) permeates his being, he possesses the inclinations of a woman, not simply in terms of sexual desire, but in terms of cultural/aesthetic sensibility. The popular appropriation of the term ‘metrosexual’ to denote a straight man with gay sensibilities reflects this notion that homosexuality is a consequence of gender inversion: a straight man with manicured nails is like a gay man, who is like a woman (as manicured nails is a womanly thing). But there is a crucial ontological difference between the (heterosexual) metrosexual and the gay man. Where the gay man’s delicate, feminine sensibilities accord with his nature, the straight man’s metrosexuality is contrary to his manly, heterosexual nature. For the gay man’s gayness not only expresses itself conspicuously in his bodily outwardness, but his homosexuality, being “consubstantial with him,” drenches the entirety of his physical substance.

To see how pervasive this understanding of the gay man is, we need only to recall popular and scientific etiologies, anatomies, and physiologies of male homosexuality that (tentatively, thus retaining the mystery of his physiology) locate his homosexuality/androgyny in his DNA, in the effects of hormonal “imbalances” in utero, in the shape and size of his brain, and so forth. Moreover, this ontological notion that his sexuality affects “his total composition” has phenomenological and epistemological consequences. If the gay man’s sexuality pervades the visible, as well as invisible, parts of his substance, then gaydar is no mysterious thing, but merely the perception of a gayness that is on display for all to see. For the gay man’s sexuality is not simply reducible to an invisible, inward reality (desire), but is “everywhere present in him,” “written immodestly on his face and body,” “a secret that always [gives] itself away.” His gayness radiates from his body. He carries it in his limp wrist, in his lisp, in his very manner of carrying himself, with its overall wispy quality. It seeps through his pores² and falls off his tongue.<sup>3

1</sup> Foucault, Michel. Trans. Robert Hurley. The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction. New York: Random House, 1990, 43

² There are scientific studies claiming that gay men emit different scents from straight men.

³ The perceptual-phenomenological givenness of this gayness thus answers the epistemological question of whether and how one knows that a person is gay.

just handle it.

them dudes pull out their guns...


"all my ladies get it up"


"i'm so hard"


"take it, take it, baby, baby"



"y'all don't fuck us. nigga, we fuck you"


"can you handle it?"


4:33 and 4:39

never be waiting.

if not walking then writing.
and if you don’t write then
you must get to work. work,
or collect alms on the walks.

write then and whistle,
as a surfing surfer surfs,
as a fishing fisher fishes;
just to do and be doing
that very thing, not to be done,
and never to be waiting.

exercise the skill, but
first exercise the moment.
ride each wave knowing
it can never be repeated
and will never rise again.
assuredly there will be
other waves - forget them.

play each line like your next
meal were hook’d to the end.
you won’t chop the string even
if the fish made a small dish.
the line must be reeled in -
perfection practiced in the present -
tomorrow, you may or may not catch
your leviathan but a hungry man
is grateful his bait has baited supper at all.

don’t wait for inspiration
in the next sunrise,
the light falls now:
it runs between your fingers;
so thickly, you can taste
the colorful smell like a velvet bell.
on your toes, tap the moment
swish an inky dagger;
swim, paddle, balance;
pull, tug, lead out, reel in.
let the words fall in place,
don’t chase every wave,
free every other fish.

- cjs. 7.20.10.

come with me.

Come with me
And you’ll be
In a world of
Pure imagination
Take a look
And you’ll see
Into your imagination
We’ll begin
With a spin
Traveling in
The world of my creation
What we’ll see
Will defy
Explanation
If you want to view paradise
Simply look around and view it
Anything you want to, do it
Wanta change the world?
There’s nothing
To it


There is no
Life I know
To compare with
Pure imagination
Living there
You’ll be free
If you truly wish to be
If you want to view paradise
Simply look around and view it
Anything you want to, do it
Wanta change the world?
There’s nothing
To it
There is no
Life I know
To compare with
Pure imagination
Living there
You’ll be free
If you truly Wish to be

missoula two.

Every day is brand new. Everything is new. Time infinitely gives.



An open mind, a freed mind, a new mind, a beginner's mind, a child's mind, a zen mind, a Buddha's mind.

See infinity, know infinity.

A Hare Krishna walks up to you one day and asks "Have you heard of Krishna consciousness?" You reply only by reaching down to the ground, grabbing a blade of grass, holding it in front of you, then, letting go, watching it serenely get carried away in the breeze. The Hare Krishna looks at you with a knowing smile, turns around and walks away.

Love is anarchy, anarchy is love.

- Missoula, MT

Yet time infinitely takes --> every moment --> Is --> Infinitely --> Significant.

III. what we seek.

It’s not a moment of clarity that which we seek, but rather it is the idea of that momentous occasion that we regard so highly and with such reverence. Tilden walked calmly through the forest, dully noting the wanderers like him he would intermittently come across. They all seemed weary in contrast to him, he was following what he thought was a path of righteousness and light, but all of those he encountered seemed to be stigmatized by the journey and wore titles such as “vagabond” and “drifter”. He felt so detached from that image, for in his heart was a silver feather, warming him and encasing him with hope that at the end of the journey he would find what he truly desired and the emptiness of his being would be satiated at last.

Finally, after weeks of walking, Tilden lay dying in a field of ivy, his skin ruined by the scorching sun and his eyes yellowed by the elements and dehydration. He spoke calmly to himself, embracing the closing moments of his short life. He was still empty, though, he noted, and his feather-heart was still burning ferociously. As his condition worsened he begin to hear voices speak to him. Not one voice, not the voice of God, not the light of Heaven, but many voices.

“What is it you seek? Is it freedom from this existence, for that you have surely found,” begin one of the voices, to which Tilden shook his head. “What brought you to this point? Of course, you cannot hold an object like a feather accountable for your actions.”

Then another voice began to talk. “The feather took you on a journey, this is true, but what journey is that? You are here dying for the sake of something you felt in your heart, but it was not something you should’ve followed. You followed something and that is the problem. You must not take a path, but allow a path to form before you, the real path, the only path, not a deluded, ill founded alley out of the dark, for this is not a path, but a construct and your emptiness and longing will only be assuaged for a short time before the waves of hollow existence crash upon you again, and suffocate you with their might.”

“I did what I felt might be right,” He choked out through his operatic breath.

The third and final voice spoke to him, “Go easy now, Tilden, and let go of all you have, for this journey has lead you to the ultimate release, it is only in death that most can ever truly release that which binds them, those connections to what really isn’t. For in your passing, you will move through everything that is, and everything that was, and everything that ever will be, and you will see, my brother, that you were always one with that, so nothing was ever wrong to start with.”

With that, Tilden slipped into a coma and soon died. The voices mumbled something inaudible and then left that place. As time passed his body turned into what all bodies do and the Earth embraced his bones, churning them into soil and where he once lay dying, there was a feather, released finally from his heart.

missoula one.

it just is that it isn't...



"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."

-Marianne Williamson
A Return To Love: Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles

there is nothing to fear. let go of fear and LIBERATE THYSELF! Moksha, Prajna, Bodhi TRUTH, the infinite, tathāgatagarbha are all ours when we let go and be ourselves, THE INFINITE ONE. your presence liberates me, and in turn, liberates the world.

does it matter who said a quote if the words are alive and resonate with your entire being?

from Somewhere in space & time, this beautiful existence, the knowingly unknowable universe, and infinitely BEYOND -

Love,

- Missoula, MT

p.s. Be the change, always.

p.p.s. or perhaps, inter-be the change, always.

p.p.p.s. we are all one. Love, universally, infinitely.

you shall not pass.

tend the light.

opportunity: lay aside the static & dissolve into this sound.

Frederic Chopin - "Nocturne No. 15, Op. 55, no.1 in F minor"



optional opportunity: nothing more than chopin & colors are needed, but if your eyes insist to roam, fix them on these humble lines of distilled ponderings...

what light you have must not be kept for yourself but shared with others. it's not your light, tho it appears to come from you - do you understand? your skill, confidence, & persistence act as magnetic beacons attracting the universal intention, the support of others, and the precise alchemical circumstances . if your light has the warm glow of positive vibrations - that is, if it's pilot is fueled by love - it attracts people to it and their attention and energy feeds both you and your light. your light becomes a little brighter and your persona rises in recognizance. your name becomes heavier. opportunities multiply. people in nice suits with gym memberships will approach you. they'll feel like the best friends you never had and they'll know exactly how to market your dream. listen to them too closely and you'll be comfortable the rest of your life. dreams of wealth & glory are the easiest to be made true. what dreams you had of liberation & salvation become lost in the confusion of how wonderful your new life seems at first. stay true, light-bearer.

there's no such thing as innocence. everything gets covered in blood. remember why you first aspired to light fire and stay steady. the love you have will know what to do with itself. trust in that. do what this love asks of you, sacrifice your empty time to practice creation in any form or to learn of the world, and (aloha!) the spring is sprung...

then dedicate all you do with this same energy of love. in your full time engage your constant consciousness with an outward flow of loving energy so much so that you find it impossible you're not burnt, immolated in passion. pass on your light, not so to become great and eternal, but to let the universe teach you what is true. be a beacon, an antenna attentively attuned to receive a message of beauty, hope, and correct evolution. order is a poem on a page and a ballet of numbers. celebrate this to inflate the fringe of fractals. blur the border with nowhere. beyondness has been here the whole time and it resembles everything. order is a spark in the dark. tend this light.

don't worry about the world burning. don't fret for genocides or holocausts. don't follow the rhetoric of economists. don't buy the hype. don't fear the reaper. you have a job and your job is to be here, ready & able to catch the moment as it falls. to pick the tripped up off their knees. to shout loud our right to be here, spinning & thriving in the darkness. to steal a better opportunity from the black bag. score one for love.

focus on being not becoming. draw from the same raw sources of dreams & love you did as a beginner. employ new skills acquired & learn from new inspirations. use the positive energy you attract to enhance the process. make a sound. once finished, let it go and move on. repeat process.

the binary schema ii.

Concerning the Production of an Onto-Political Anomaly
(the binary schema, cont.)

Butler argues that it would be a mistake to think that a discussion of personal identity should proceed independently of a discussion gender identity “for the simple reason that ‘persons’ only become intelligible through becoming gendered in conformity with recognizable standards of gender intelligibility.”¹ When we consider those who fail to conform to the gendered norms of cultural intelligibility, we see that even though such individuals “appear to be persons,” they emerge the domain as “‘incoherent’ or ‘discontinuous’ gendered beings,”² for intelligibility as a person requires that one be an intelligible gender. But these individuals – these “specters of discontinuity and incoherence” (of which the gay man is but one example) – emerge only as such through “the existing norms of continuity and coherence.”³ The norms have a productive, as well as prohibitive, function: creatures such as the gay man are created by the very same onto-cultural laws render their existence a logical absurdity. Heterosexual normativity does not stand unless it had something anomalous to stand against.

Thus the question of how the gay man is accommodated by institutional heterosexuality is somewhat misleading: the gay man does not exist prior to (outside of) the cultural laws only to subsequently gain (or be refused) accommodation. Rather the gay man is a product of the very laws that prohibit his existence. The paradox of the laws is that the anomalies that stand outside them are inevitably produced by the mere existence of the laws are thus only conceivable within the domain of the laws. The question of accommodation, therefore, is this: how is the gay man given place within a domain that does so by outlawing him?

We can see how this accommodation has been achieved in actual practice by looking at the history of (the production of) the gay man. Foucault situates the birth of the homosexual in the late nineteenth century, and here we can see the roots of today’s ontologies of the gay man. Foucault contrasts the Victorian psychological/medical category of homosexuality with the ancient juridical category of sodomy:

As defined by the ancient civil or canonical codes, sodomy was a category of forbidden acts; their perpetrator was nothing more than the juridical subject of them. The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology. Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality.⁴

Thus the crucial distinction is that, where ancient category pertained to a species of forbidden act, the modern category made a species of the homosexual. Whereas the category sodomite was derived from the category sodomy (which was a type of act), the category homosexuality was derived from the category homosexual (which was a type of creature). The ancient status of being a sodomite, unlike the modern status of being a homosexual, reflected no deep ontological fact about the person in question. It meant simply that one was a perpetrator of forbidden sexual acts. By contrast, the fact of being homosexual ran deep, permeating the individual’s being, becoming (in Foucault’s words) “consubstantial with him.”

Now despite pockets of protest, the basic contours of this ontology have stuck with us. Foucault’s words about the nineteenth-century homosexual could very well be said about the twentieth-century gay man: nothing that goes into his total composition is unaffected by his sexuality. Take the transformation from ‘homosexual’ to ‘gay’ that occurred in the twentieth century. How is it that a word synonymous with ‘festive’ became synonymous with ‘homosexual’? Where ‘homosexuality’ wears its ‘sexuality’ on its sleeve, ‘gay’ does not. But as the sexuality of the homosexual was “everywhere present in him,” having implications “for even the ostensibly least sexual aspects of [his] personal existence,”⁵ the fact of his being festive became an outgrowth of his being gay (homosexual). Or, rather, festivity became an essential part of his constitution, becoming a visible marker of the pervasive, body-wide ontological fact of his homosexuality. It is thus no accident that Truman Capote’s urbane wit made him the life of the party, that the biggest and best parties in town are at parades events and gay clubs.

¹ Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge Classics ed. New York: Routledge 2006, 22

² ibid 23

³ ibid

⁴ Foucault, Michel. Trans. Robert Hurley. The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction. New York: Random House, 1990, 42–43

⁵ Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990, 2

ride the waves.

consider the waves that carried the Polynesians to Hawai'i so long ago. what it took on their part was the courage to disconnect & float on an open current. they embraced the wave and rode it as best they could and the flow brought them to paradise...



an islander's survival depends on their resourcefulness & adaptability. once marooned it might be "some-time" before they're discovered again. foreigners will forever follow. people need people to push and be pushed by. there's no knowing what will push us but some-thing must...

when waters seem completely still, there's motion occurring on an unseen level. the stillness may provide you with clarity enough to see through new depths. but if you aren't constantly vigilant to control your mind, the silence will give audience to your louder fears and the ensuing madness will become further complicated by your isolation. your survival depends on this: be very mindful of the content of your thoughts. the quality of your life, your happiness, and your ultimate liberation depend on this. courage, wave-riders, courage. waves will occur. embrace & ride properly.

note to self:

how you ride the wave determines if you'll find paradise or hell.

old habits must die. learn to dance in public. share life.

give light. listen. submit to the grand moment.

aloha always.

an expert transplant.

Consider the heart frozen in ice, unable to pulsate, tho still completely capable of it. This heart, at rest, cannot perform its function, which is to beat & pump blood & continue life, as it awaits a careful transplant. A heart cannot be frozen indefinitely because all hearts are prone to perishing. decay proceeds unseen however slowly and eventually it will die. To have the best chance of surviving the heart must be thawed, the environment must be sterilized, and expert hands must replant it expertly before a jolt of electricity (a connection) re-inspires it to beat on. To give life & live on.

Our heart has been frozen long enough. The General Collective has been mended accordingly.

at the cost of mobility.

Northwest Indiana, January 2009...

Your apartment’s walls are transparent You look through them, as if through windows, at the January outside Three hundred and sixty degrees of surrounding neighborhoods, populated by transparent homes with transparent walls, with interiors visible from your second-floor apartment, with its useless electric heaters mounted on the walls You look down on dinners cooked with lovers, on discussions about what to put at the top of Netflix queues, on plans to visit the lake-shore dunes (you hear they’re lovely covered in snow) You look into homes where winter makes no difference, where human bodies keep other human bodies warm, where the warmth of conversation, shared projects, and mutual involvement make the low-lying sun a puny superfluity.

You wrap yourself in a fleece blanket, layered atop your long johns and flannel shirt, worn like a woman wears a towel, tucked under your armpits, covering you from chest to ankle, wrapped tightly, a makeshift, but functional, strapless dress Warmth via tight dress, like sexiness via tight dress, comes at the cost of mobility, which means that you unwrap and leave your spot primarily to take shits and showers, but the latter isn’t so much of a worry, as it’s too cold for sweat, and there’s no one around to impress You turn off the lights so no one can see inside It’s okay if you peek into others’ homes, but your place is off limits.

You thought your lethargy was the result of some defect of yours (depression, laziness, insufficient vitamin-D) But recent voyeurism simply reveals that others would be the same if they didn’t have others to prop them up, to circulate energy from body to body, to keep their bodies moving You only have your strapless dress, which keeps you warm at the cost of mobility.

the binary schema.

Concerning the Accommodation of an Onto-Political Anomaly...



What is the ontological status of the gay man?¹ What is the political status of the gay man? The circumstances in which the gay man has arisen as a human category have been such that these ontological and political questions have been (and continue to be) matters of how to accommodate the gay man within ontological and political schemes that are stubbornly heterosexual. This has made ontological and political accommodation of the gay man both awkward and hesitant. It is important to consider these questions in conjunction. The ontological question simply asks what the gay man is. The political question, which asks how the gay man to be politically accommodated, presupposes some sort of answer to the ontological question: if an entity (in this case, the gay man) is to be accommodated (given place) politically, at least some sort of understanding of what that entity is is presupposed. Moreover, because a given ontological scheme (that is, a given picture of the kinds of entity that make up reality) arises in concrete historico-political circumstances, an understanding of the how the gay man fits (or doesn’t fit) within a given political scheme is relevant to answering the ontological question. Socio-political arrangements, after all, influence how a given entity is to be placed within a culturally dominant ontological picture (arrangement, scheme).

Because these questions of accommodation touch fundamentally upon matters of how the gay man is, has been, and is to be accommodated by ontological and political schemes that are stubbornly heterosexual, a key question concerns how an ontological and political anomaly be given place, when by nature of being of anomalous that entity cannot be given proper place?² Judith Butler discusses how institutional heterosexuality’s binary gender schema “presupposes not only a causal relation among sex, gender, and desire, but dictates as well that desire reflect or express gender and that gender reflect or express desire.”³ Put simply, this binary schema makes it a matter of necessity that one desire women in virtue of being a man and that one be a man in virtue of being sexed male. Thus, according to this schema, one’s desire toward “the opposite sex” follows from one’s gender, which follows from one’s biological sex. Because the onto-cultural laws dictate the a man (insofar as he is a man) desire “the opposite sex,” the homosexual man becomes unintelligible with the domain of the laws, and hence anomalous.

Now, within this heterosexual binary schema, the masculine is defined in opposition to the feminine, the male in opposition to female. Thus, one is a man insofar as one is not a woman, a male insofar as one is not a female. For a man to possess a feminine attribute would compromise his ontological status as a man. Thus, the requirement that one’s sex/gender be defined against an “opposite” sex/gender enforces the binary by leaving no room for those who are not discretely on one side of the binary. Those who possess the attributes of “both” sexes and genders become logical (and thus ontological) impossibilities (as is in the case of the homosexual male, who possesses the feminine attribute of desiring males), for this binary scheme only gives room to those who are discretely on one side or the other of the binary. The notion that masculine/male attributes cannot co-inhere in the same person/body as feminine/female attributes facilitates the heterosexualization of the social body, because it is through practices of desire that the genders are differentiated and enforced, and it is through such enforcement that compulsory heterosexuality emerges as a social institution.


Just as one is one’s gender to the extent that one is not the other gender, one is one’s gender to the extent that one desires the other gender. Married to this binary heterosexual ontology are norms governing gender development, norms according to which sex, gender, and direction desire are linked in a developmental (causal) sequence in which desire for women follows casually from being a man, which follows from being sexed male. But what about those for whom sex, gender and desire are not so linked, as in the case of the gay man? Granting such causal and expressive links between sex, gender, and desire, the ontological and political problem at hand becomes that of accommodating the gay man when, within such a heterosexual onto-political domain, the homosexual cannot exist. Within this domain, the expression ‘homosexual man’ becomes a contradiction of terms (notwithstanding common usage of the expression, usage that makes it appear that it is not oxymornic): to be a man, to be a real man, is to desire women (that is, heterosexual) (the homosexual is thus an anomalous quasi-man). The onto-cultural laws dictate that sex and direction of desire (toward “the opposite sex”) be incorporated into the very notion of manhood. The gay man thus represents a causal (developmental) and expressive discontinuity between sex, gender, and desire, and is himself an unintelligible creature, as sex, gender, and direction of desire are linked analytically in the concept of manhood.

¹ We often see this question cashed out reductionistically as a question of the ontological categories into which the gay man is to be placed, the categories to which the gay man is reducible.

² But this notion of the gay man as anomalous has been complicated as of late. If the gay man is allowed to be legally wed to another gay man and has been given place within a given legal scheme, is he still an anomaly standing outside the legal norm? And even if a particular legal system hasn’t yet granted him the legal right (the place, the arena) to marry, movements to grant him this right are based on the presupposition that he does have a legitimate claim to place, regardless of whether civil law has recognized this claim. Moreover, such cases can be seen as civil law lagging behind social practices and norms in which the gay man has ceased to be anomalous, but has been more-or-less fully integrated with respectable social life: whether or not civil marriage is granted to the gay man, his church and immediate community may very well have embraced his love for another gay man.

³ Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge Classics ed. New York: Routledge 2006, 31

starfish prime.

2010: the sun illuminating the layer-cake of earth's atmospheres...



this remarkable photo, taken by the crew on-board the international space station
gives us a unique perspective of our globe (source: Gizmodo).
how very much like a bubble we are. well, check this out.



Back in the summer of 1962, the U.S. blew up a hydrogen bomb in outer space,
some 250 miles above the Pacific Ocean. It was a weapons test,
but one that created a man-made light show that has never been equaled
— and hopefully never will." -NPR Article

QUIZ: the H-bomb detonated in space interacted with
a) earth's ozone/atmosphere,
b) earth's belt of high-energy particles,
c) earth's magnetic field,
d) all of these.

D is correct. Hmmm. How was your fourth of july?

gravity control.

so, imagine your on a tiny boat in the middle of the ocean. you can stand upon its planks confidently with balance despite the gentle lapping of weightlessly small waves. the water is a deep royal blue that sinks into a black vast depth beneath you, as if you were floating over a gigantic pupil.all around you is the horizon bending in a wide arc and as you turn completely in a circle you can even see how the curvature completes itself in the most perfect of planetary circles - and you, standing there in your boat are the highest point within that single degree of the finite degrees our world is shaped of. you've never felt so high in your life and yet your altitude couldn't go much lower. you're not worried about anything because you don't need anything more than what you already have. the sun is masked behind a filmy fleet of gray clouds and a cooling breeze relaxes you, but a distant tempest announces its coming and you've nothing to do - no preparations nor means of protection - nothing to do but watch the sky darken, shade by shade, as the squall inches closer. the first drizzle seems innocent enough, as a light tropical mist, but become moderate in a second's flash. the storm does not rock your boat any more than before. as the storm becomes more intense the infinite plane of water around you becomes increasingly more pacified. the raindrops now fall as thick as rich theater curtains and the light is lost behind it. you look out upon the water and behold a billion rain drops meeting the sea's surface per second. an infinite field of colliding ripples. wave interference on a cosmic scale, creating designs so intricate so brief, so remarkably transitory in nature, that the fractals cross beyond beyond the fringe of order the chaos math is incomprehensible and yet the surface of this plane is in appearance from just a ways away as being smooth with stillness sheets of rain roll across it like smoke on a mirror...

people are as those rain drops falling on the water, so infinitesimally small, contributing such delicate ripples, passing among an ocean of countless others. we get so wrapped up in thinking we're individual rain drops, separate from each other as we fall, perhaps even forgetting that we're all just vessels of water. only when we cross from sky to pool, at life's end, we meet the vast sea and we cease to be drips. we instantly know, as if remembering, that we are the entire ocean and this colossal reservoir of seamless energy is our first home. avoid the interference of competing ripples, they are lost among one another, and while swells can grow to be massive waves and cause a mighty splash, the ocean does not hold on to the memories of such and such a splash - ever changing as it is the sea can only completely experience itself as the moment occurs. time does not honor memory. we do because we wonder where we're going. but where is the ocean going? it circulates around the world, but it doesn't go anywhere. it rises and falls but doesn't ponder its precise depth. all the water exists simply so - in a state of being, movement, and rapture. moisture is evaporated as water particles rise skyward, to the clouds, to prepare to fall again & relive the cycle. dear friend, please know that as you fall, though the life of a rain drop is brief, an infinite ocean, made of everything that you fundamentally are, is waiting to catch you at the end of it - and even now, you are not separate from it. enjoy the plunge.

where otters are.