i noticed that i reached another blog milestone recently...10,000 hits. it took a year and half, but it makes me reflect on this whole blog thing. funny how something you never even heard of a few years before becomes such a regular part of your life.

i remember noting when i hit 1000 and thinking that was pretty cool and thanking everyone who visited my little corner of the internet - i still think its pretty cool and i would like to thank everyone who stops by for their time. i promised then that i would try and continue not to not make this just a diary of what i did during the day, but a place where i could put down my thoughts on important events (both personal and external), express my creative impulses, and always try to be at least mildly interesting - i will still endeavor to keep my blog this way.

in looking at my links to the left, i see that while some have come and gone, and some nice new ones have crept in, the best have been here from the very start of my blog. here are a few of my thoughts on the long standing ones;

banzai descent - this one rules. a very creative, funny, introspective, intelligent man in the Philippines updates us regularly about his life as a creative soul and his views as such. he looks at himself and his life with refreshing honesty - i always try to, but his unflinching gaze is way sharper than mine. odd, but there is an affinity i feel with this person i've never met who lives on the other side of the world.

eat a peach for love- another person i've never met who i feel that affinity towards. his lust for life comes thru clearly in his unique style - long, intense, rhythmic prose. like banzai, he writes of the events of his life without glossing over the warts as so many other of us tend to do.

so not cool - yet another long time blogger, this northern girl is not only a talented poet but an insightful photographer as well. her blog (along with banzai's) were what inspired me to try my hand at it. she spends a lot of time looking inwards and telling us what she sees (seeing a pattern here on what i like in a blog yet?) and has a huge fan base - for good reason.

cosmic photo of the day - never really considered myself an astronomy geek, but these pictures of the heavens are a daily jolt of awe for me.

radiopardise.com - i ran across this a few years ago and i almost never play cds or listen to the radio in my studio at all anymore. this guy's range of music and tasteful segues kick my ass. for so long i had such a hard time finding new music that i liked and now its an almost daily experience. as i type now i'm listening to this california based internet station play a song with joe jackson on the keys and singing back for william shatner on main vocals. now he just segued into the latest elvis costello. nice. plus, for every song you can view the wide variety of listener comments along cd and touring info. awesome.

thanks again to everyone who's dropped by and especially to those who leave a comment. blog on.

posted by bluematrix at 05/31/05 16:46 | link | comments (7)

i've felt the wind strongly again lately, and i'm reminded of something i wrote awhile back...


It permeates me as i run today,
tingling sensitive nerve endings
before penetrating the myriad of pores
on my exposed skin
i imagine positive ions recharging the cells beneath,
and i feel energized.
i see It brush the surface of the pond
as i jog by and i recall last night
where It quietly filled my sails and pushed my boat
through the oil-like water
a whisper in the darkness of carlyle lake.

driving on the freeway this morning i felt It envelop
the smooth lines of my coupe
quickly and harmlessly slipping past
in marked contrast to the news on the radio;
a small caribbean island that It erased yesterday
with a brush of It's curled fist.

It greets me this new dawn, playing with the curtains
around the open window near my bed.
i look out and watch the upper branches of the trees wiggle as they're tickled.

i can almost hear It laugh.

hardly aware of It i pull out of the driveway on my motorcycle.
in moments It keenly makes It's presence known as It begins to furiously tug
at anything not aerodynamically correct.
It's roaring voice softens somewhat as i reach up
and close the faceplate on my helmet.

and i listen.

the musician in me is in awe with the concept that
It, in all It's glory
continually plays mother earth like a vast orchestra:
her valleys and caves - the holes of an immense flute,
the forests - reeds in a giant oboe,
the powerlines vibrating and humming - a violin pulled
by It's unseen fingers.

i pull into the parking garage and get off my bike.
the cool stillness shuts It out entirely
and with It's absence,
i begin to feel,

disconnected.

posted by bluematrix at 05/28/05 01:25 | link | comments

it is rare that you meet a person who is truly dedicated. when you do you find that he is almost always very successful. dedication is the warriors prayer to himself. it is a mode of fierce concentration. one becomes so attached and devoted to the cause that eventually one's desires materialize. the world is full of obstacles. if you review the lives of the great men and women who have walked this earth, you will find it was dedication that made them special. they persevered despite the odds.

dedication is vital. you have to live your life like a warrior and breathe your ambitions. if you are half-hearted the Universal Law responds spastically. if you lack courage, the energy around you lacks courage. if, for example, you want to be an actress, you have to get in the program. you have to train, go to auditions, be a part of the industry. there is no point in living in a field in the middle of nowhere and saying, "I am a great actress and the only reason I am not on Broadway is because I prefer this muddy field."

the Universal Law will give you anything you want, but it cannot deliver it to you like a package service. you have to be in the marketplace. and you have to be ready to take advantage of a situation as it arises. perseverence allows you to hold on while the Universal Law delivers. so many allow themselves to be bumped off course by setbacks. then they complain that the Universal Law does not provide for them, which is rubbish. if you don't have what you want, it means that you are still on the journey. you might be close to your goal, yet being close to the best restaurant in town is not dinner. press on to that final glorious conclusion.

can you go past limitations? can you still be there when others have quit? if you can, your success is assured. - affirmations, stuart wilde

posted by bluematrix at 05/25/05 09:22 | link | comments (5)

ok, the whole thing with my sister Jacquie dying (or not as it happens) is just way too frickin weird. there are enough oddities for me to blog about for the next year. but, right now, i just can't. so i'm doing what i always do when life throws me a curve - i bury myself in work. the familiarity and the routine is reassuring somehow. i take comfort in the fact that i there is something i do well and it keeps the outside world at bay for awhile.

its hard though. i want to wallow in the pain. i want to continue to distract myself in other ways - drinking, reading, organizing the closet, reading blogs. but i've found that just forging ahead in what i've been trained to do is usually my best way out of the funk. just treading down a familiar path without questioning (for once) why, or if its the right path, while the rest of the world takes on an unfamiliar look.

i remember a passage on work from a great collection of essays called Ordinary Magic by John Welwood...

'I sense a kinship between the words 'work' and 'worship'. I begin to suspect that man is physically organized in exactly the way he is, just so that he will need to work in order to live; and it seems possible that the substance required for his own transformation and for the maintenance of his universe is created as a direct result of his work.

'"In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread," God told Adam, and if man did not actually need to work to feed, shelter and clothe himself, perhaps this essential substance, whatever it is, would never be created. and Father Robert Capon writes, '20th century Adam is the priest of Creation. His truest work is to offer up reality itself, not just a headful of abstract thoughts about it."

"To take what there is and use it," Henry James wrote, "without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived-to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that-this doubtless is the right way to live."

back to work now before too many images of my once beautiful sister's now disease-racked, 78lb body returns to haunt me...those eyes, as i left her sunday for perhaps the last time. those scared sunken eyes, frighten me. death itself lurked behind those eyes...yes, back to the comfort of my work, quickly.

posted by bluematrix at 05/24/05 16:19 | link | comments (1)

i received a call yesterday.

it comes

she was my spiritual librarian.

shed the mortal coil

she has suffered long. it is time. but it still hurts.

inevitable

she was my early music, indeed life, shaper.

the way of the flesh

my little sister and i leave tomorrow morning for a 10 hour drive to say goodbye to our older sister.

213 euphemisims about death - some more poetic than others, all abstract.

friday at the hospice will not be abstract. she says she is not scared. i will see for myself soon enough.

posted by bluematrix at 05/19/05 00:39 | link | comments (6)

A beautiful girl can you make you dizzy... like you've been drinking Jack and Coke all morning. She can make you feel high - full of the single greatest commodity known to man - Promise. Promise of a better day. Promise of a great hope. Promise of a new tomorrow. This particular aura, can be found in the gate of a beautiful girl... in her smile... in her soul... and in the way she makes every rotten little thing about life seem like it's going to be okay. - Taking Back Sunday/ Beautiful Girls

posted by bluematrix at 05/16/05 09:26 | link | comments (2)

this was one of the lead stories on yahoo news yesterday...
'NAIROBI, Kenya - A stray dog saved the life of a newborn baby after finding the abandoned infant in a forest and apparently carrying it across a busy road and through some barbed wire to her litter of puppies, witnesses said.

The dog apparently found the baby Friday in the plastic bag in which the infant had been abandoned, said Aggrey Mwalimu, owner of the shed where the animal was guarding its puppies. The seven-pound, four-ounce infant was taken to the hospital for treatment on Saturday. The child had not yet been claimed.'

i try not to judge people without trying to really understand their situation - but abandoning a baby in a plastic bag out in the woods is so not right. starving to death or being eaten by animals is not a way a baby should have to die. i can see how a mother in parts of africa can be desperate and do desperate things, but at least she could have left it near someones doorstep. and then to have a stray dog accept the responsibility that the human mother could not...

sometimes i am proud to be a human being, and sometimes i wonder at how we can consider ourselves superior to animals. for instance, do you know how veal is made? a baby calf is locked in a metal cage so small that it can never stand up, ever, so it won't develop much muscle. it never eats grass, or goes outside and feels dirt under its hooves or the sun on its back, ever. it never comes in contact with another living thing until it gets carried to a machine that kills it by putting a big steel bolt thru its brain. it spends its short miserable existence being fattened with chemicals in a cage next to hundreds of crippled animals just like it in a harsh, factory-like setting, the smell of its feces below the bars under it's never used feet, overpowering all other smells.

now i'm not going to get on my high horse and bitch about how everyone should be a vegetarian, because even though i don't eat much red meat, i still really dig the occasional burger and wear leather and all that. but i'm sorry, the whole veal thing makes me ashamed to be a human. i mean eating a regular cow is one thing, but subjecting a baby animal to those conditions for its entire life just so our meat can be a little more tender seems...immoral. yes, you could argue that it is (as in most matters of morals) just a matter of degrees of what one deems acceptable - industrial bred chickens are not much better off and i eat a lot of chicken. but as a human being (even the most fucked up psychopath) we have to draw a line somewhere. genetically, there is a very strong instinct in us to protect the young. so, at least for me, putting babies in plastic bags and leaving them in the woods to die, or subjecting a calf to a life of torture, is crossing over that line. even more so now that i am a parent.

posted by bluematrix at 05/11/05 18:58 | link | comments (3)

sometimes its all about confidence. (or lack thereof)

usually we don't even care about the truth of the message, only that it is delivered with confidence. when she looks in your eyes, she doesn't care about strict literal truth, she wants comfortable truth spoken with confidence.

'he says that with such confidence, he must know what he's doing.'

if we're sick, we don't want our doctor to say, 'beats me', we want him to cure us. how much of getting better is our faith in what he prescribes?

in order for our favorite actor to suck us up into the fantasy, he must deliver his lines with confidence. if we detect hesitancy, he is unable to keep up the illusion.

i have been trained to question everything. how can i deliver my lines with confidence and keep up the illusion that i know what i'm doing?

i want to project confidence. sometimes i can feel it and then project it. and if people are looking to me for it, expecting it, its usually much easier. when my 9 year old son asks me right before a big storm if everything is going to be ok, he doesn't want me to tell him that the chance of a tornado tearing the roof off and killing everyone inside is statistically insignificant. he wants me hear me say with confidence that i would never let anything happen to him. i am being strong for him. i am acting like i know. he can hear confidence in my voice. but when the sirens go off, and the lights flicker, and wind begins to howl, my faith in a positive outcome (confidence) wavers a little. and he can sense it like a dog smells fear.

when i show a client a design, he wants to hear me tell him how confident i am that it is good and current and well executed and will help him sell more product. he doesn't want to see the self doubt that has plagued me on every single creative project i've done since mom put my first drawing up on the refrigerator.

but how does one gain confidence? if you do something over and over again, you gain familiarity and experience. you can begin to expect to be able to make a free throw after you've shot a thousand free throws - but with the game on the line, will you be confident that you can make that shot, in front of thousands of screaming fans, and win the game? and if you miss the shot, and you were confident you were going to make it, how can you be confident you can make the next one?

'go confidently in the direction of your dreams.' thoreau says. but if i've only dreamt it, how can i go confidently towards it? it seems more like faith in one's intuition, or just good ole optimism.

marcus garvey tells us that 'If you do not have confidence you are twice defeated in the race of life, but if you have confidence you have won before you have even started.' but tell me mr. garvey, what is the difference between confidence and over-confidence? if i am over-confident the race is lost before i have even started. i can have confidence that i will try my best to win the race, but how can i have confidence in my winning the race? again, it seems more like faith to me.

i just looked it up and the first thing webster's dictionary says under confidence is 'firm belief'. the first thing under faith is 'unquestioning belief'.

looks like i'm going to have to work on my firmness, because that unquestioning thing doesn't go down to good for me.

and faith seems like an ironic gift to return to the Creator of human intelligence.

posted by bluematrix at 05/08/05 23:33 | link | comments (2)

i sing the body electric...

▪ Every human spent about half an hour as a single cell.
▪ Seventy percent of the dust in your home consists of shed human skin and hair.
▪ One human hair can support about 5 pounds.
▪ The average human scalp (brunette) has 100,000 hairs.
▪ The tooth is the only part of the human body that can't repair itself.
▪ One human brain generates more electrical impulses in a single day than all of the world's telephones.
▪ Human thighbones are stronger than concrete.
▪ Most tropical marine fish could survive in a tank of human blood.
▪ It takes the interaction of 72 different muscles to produce human speech.
▪ Humans are the only animals that cry tears and blush.
▪ The grain and soybeans fed to U.S. livestock could feed 1,300,000,000 humans.
• Number of people who will starve to death this year: 20,000,000
• Ratio of livestock to people on Earth: three to one

and some more...

• Your heart beats about 100,000 times in one day and about 35 million times in a year.
  • The aorta, the largest artery in the body, is almost the diameter of a garden hose. Capillaries, on the other hand, are so small that it takes ten of them to equal the thickness of a human hair.
• Your body has about 6 quarts of blood and circulates through the body three times every minute.
• There are 206 bones in the adult human body but 300 in children - as they grow some of the bones fuse together.
• The world record for time without sleep is 264 hours (11 days)

posted by bluematrix at 05/05/05 00:24 | link | comments (1)

'All I can say is I hope this isn't a real emergency because I only brought one bottle of vodka.'

1/3 of all American adults have at least one panic attack in any given year. below is an ode to anxiety (and a cool old song by cowboy mouth i just learned to play)

Got no reason for the things I fear
the things that plague me when I see and hear
a dime's a nickel and a nickel's none
I throw myself into the Sunday sun

Summer Sunday when you went insane
You said you're going but I said I came
I'm throwin oranges in an apple cart
the ties that bind are tearin me apart

Jenny says, turn off the radio
Jenny says, turn off the light
Jenny says, turn off the video
You beat yourself up, to bring yourself down
Let it go, let it go, let it go
Let it go, let it go, let it go
When the world is coming down on me I let it go

I got no reason for the things I say
She turned toward me then she turned away
There's lot of forces in a modern world
That take a toll upon a modern girl
I got no reason for the things I fear
The things that plague me when I see and hear
I'll press my finger on an itchy trigger
What once was small right now is so much bigger

I got no reason for the things I do
The dealer deals and then the dealer's screwed
You throw your cards upon a playing table
My name is Cain and I am now unable
I got no reason for the things I fear
The things that plague me when I see and hear
A dime's a nickel and a nickel's none
I'll throw myself into the Sunday sun

Jenny says, turn off the radio
Jenny says, turn off the light
Jenny says, turn off the video
You beat yourself up, because you LOVE it!
Let it go, let it go, let it go
Let it go, let it go, let it go
When the world is coming down on me I let it go!

posted by bluematrix at 05/01/05 16:08 | link | comments (1)