felt the need for some insightful thoughts and randomly turned to the last page of the tao te ching today...

Truthful words are not beautiful.
Beautiful words are not truthful.
Good men do not argue.
Those who argue are not good.
Those who know are not learned.
The learned do not know.
The sage never tries to store things up.
The more he does for others, the more he has.
The more he gives to others, the greater his abundance.
The Tao of heaven is pointed but does no harm.
The Tao of the sage is work without effort.

funny, but this reminds of the 'chili' character travolta played in the hip flick i enjoyed last night, 'be cool'. he took everything that came his way very calmly and just seemed to know that all the weird shit that was unfolding was going to work out just right, as if predestined. both the movie and this passage makes me feel a bit better about things right now. breathe and move forward without fighting.

posted by bluematrix at 07/29/05 20:55 | link | comments (4)

i hadn't been this unplugged in quite some time (meaning no blogging and little email while on the road). at first i was like a junkie jonesin for a fix, but over time, the need, while always there, faded enough to allow me to resist logging on.

a full week of hitting the beaches along upper michigan. i didn't know the state has more national parks than any of the other lower 48. fine white sand, lots of large sand dunes - some up to 450 feet high, no humidity, clear lakes and rivers everywhere. we took a ferry to mackinac island, which doesn't allow cars, and rented bikes for the day and dodged the horse drawn carriages (and horseshit) and explored what has to be the prettiest non-tropical island i've ever been on.

we camped on a beach near a lighthouse on lake michigan's eastern shore that i could have stayed at all summer - near the little town of pentwater, centered around a big marina, it made me ache for the sailboat i sold to fund my rock opera 2 years ago. someday, i'll make the cash to snag another. maybe this new alternative ad agency i'm starting with a friend, or the texas patent venture with another friend will someday bear fruit. big juicy fruit would be nice.

'hope is the best and last of all things - without it, there's only time.'

posted by bluematrix at 07/26/05 10:03 | link | comments

When i was a wee tike, i discovered, as every child does, a great power that was totally in my control. this was an amazing discovery because at 2 or 3 years old, you don't even have control over your bladder more less a great power. i discovered that i could grasp utensils that would allow me to make a mark in the world.

following the ancient footsteps of the french caveman 15,000 years ago in Vallon-Pont-d'Arc, France, i scrawled out symbols of power on the wall of my parents home (they of course did not see my decorating of the dining room in such important historical terms). even at that early age, i sensed the potential of this ability to communicate silently with my fellow men. i grasped the crayon in my pudgy little hand and let the creative lines flow. i was rewarded not only with the visual gratification of my handiwork, but (when i confined my work to the supplied paper) received one of the ultimate forms of acknowledgment available to me at that tender age - prominent display on the great metallic wall of art known as the refrigerator door. from imagination to hand to paper, my expressions were put up where all could see.

this positive reenforcement led me to draw more and more complex subject matter. no longer was i content to depict my family as little stick people with the big heads, i graduated into rocketships and race cars and airplanes with bright flames shooting out behind them. my boyhood fascination with transportation had begun, and the margins of my english, math, and history notebooks filled with fanciful inventions.

drawing classes followed where, following in the footsteps of a more recent artistic ancestor, Brunelleschi, i was taught one of man's greatest artistic inventions, perspective. which was good because increasingly i had begun to get more and more frustrated with my inability to accurately depict objects. finally here was the rosetta stone unlocking a great mystery. i learned in order to draw an object like a square, i had to unlearn the fact that though i knew the 4 sides of a square were equal and parallel to each other, i had to draw 4 unequal lines, none of them parallel, to make it look realistic. very weird. notebooks and early paintings filled with crisp lines as i realized that art, as is life, is all a matter of perspective.

then came the coup de grace...i stumbled upon a CAD (computer aided drawing) program. holy frijoles, batman. what a long way this was from my first drawing machine in a box - my long discarded etch-a-sketch. here was a magical device that would do all the hard work of perspective and shading for me. sweeeeeet.

i've been a computer geek ever since.

posted by bluematrix at 07/15/05 04:17 | link | comments (2)

more thoughts on hope...

most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed little hope.

As long as we have hope, we have direction, the energy to move, and the map to move by. We have a hundred alternatives, a thousand paths and an infinity of dreams. Hopeful, we are halfway to where we want to go; hopeless, we are lost forever.

If you assume that there's no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope.

All human wisdom is contained in these two words- "wait" and "hope".

posted by bluematrix at 07/11/05 23:29 | link | comments (3)

sometimes, its all about hope.

The smell of hospitals in winter
And the feeling that it’s all a lot of oysters, but no pearls

what makes us get out of bed every day? what makes us open our eyes each morning face the loneliness that we all truly have because no one, no one will ever really know us. 'but i've been with bob for 30 years now and we're soulmates and my sister lives next door and my mother down the street and i'm never lonely' you say. and i say sorry charlie, but no one, not bob of 30 years, not your sister, not your mother, will ever really know what goes on in that 2 lb. piece of jello locked up inside the bowl of bone in your head that is home to whatever you want to define as a soul. what you feel, what you see, what you think, what you aspire to - no one will ever really know. i'm happy for you if you've found a way to not lift up the veil of ignorance and to not pay attention to that man behind the curtain of your intelligence. that you have found something to mask the knowing, much like the mother in labor for 24 hours and almost dies in childbirth turns around a year or two later and says 'it wasn't that bad' and wants to have another kid. maybe while we sleep there's a big eraser that dulls the bad lines on the internal chaulkboard of our overextended primate minds.

And it’s one more day up in the canyons
And it’s one more night in hollywood

and while friends and lovers and family can push away the shadows for a few minutes or hours or days, it can all be gone in a heartbeat with a poorly chosen action, or random act of unfortunate coincidence. so lets not kid ourselves here, in a very real sense, we are all truly, and if examined closely enough, heartbreakingly, alone on this rock hurtling thru space.

Drove up to hillside manor sometime after two a.m.
And talked a little while about the year
I guess the winter makes you laugh a little slower,
Makes you talk a little lower about the things you could not show her

so i ask you again, why do you get out of bed every day to face the world alone? well, you say, i have this killer job or billy needs me so much or, or, or...

I can’t remember all the times I tried to tell my myself
To hold on to these moments as they pass

or maybe its just hope...

A long december and there’s reason to believe
Maybe this year will be better than the last

hope that this morning will be better than the last. hope that there will be some happy external stimuli pop into your life that triggers the pleasure center in your brain to release endorphins (which funny enough are pretty damn similar chemically to the compound that makes heroin float your boat). a new brush with money or love or power or nature that makes it all seem better for awhile.

if not, well i'm sure you all have found some way to stimulate your brain's g-spot to offset it's eternal yearning for wholeness - or you wouldn't have made it this far in life.

It’s been so long since I’ve seen the ocean...i guess I should

posted by bluematrix at 07/07/05 21:16 | link | comments

is it still a secret after it's been shared?

posted by bluematrix at 07/05/05 14:20 | link | comments (2)

I was reading the friday entry from one of the blogs I link to (lazycrazy) and the topic was decision making. the article she referred to argued that decision making is not so much an internal process but a social thing where even simple decisions involve complex negotiation with others. i'm not sure if my decision to put sugar on my cereal this morning required complex social negotiation, but the author made some interesting points and it got me thinking about how we make decisions and just how important this skill is.

from the minute we wake up we are faced with an almost infinite amount of choices about what to do next. we have to have a pretty serious system of prioritizing and analyzing data in place in order to function in todays world.

i have a friend of mine who often is incapable of making even the simplest of decisions and i think it must be something interfering with the decision making part of his brain.

'should we turn right here to get to your place?' it seemed like a fairly straightforward question to me as we were driving down the freeway towards his home.

'hmmm. wellll. i'm not sure' in his mind he was probably jumping ahead and wondering about construction, or traffic, or whether we needed to stop and get beer somewhere, or a weighing a thousand other variables. which is perfectly legitimate, except for the fact that i drove past his exit while he was deliberating and we ended up having to double back.

which leads me to think that there is an optimal window of opportunity for any decision. my decision to put sugar on my cereal this morning took less than a second...a quick inner check to make sure that i believe the sugar will add to the enjoyment of eating the cereal was all it took. at the other end of the spectrum would be decisions that have a lot riding on them and how important it is you get enough information to make a good choice. deciding whether or not to pull the life support on a loved one was a big decision covered in the media recently - it took schiavo's husband years to make it.

life change constantly - its important to have the ability to make a decision before the situation changes so much that you don't even get to make that decision now, because the window has closed on that option and now you are forced to make a new decision. kind of a nasty feedback loop for those with high anxiety.

balancing the amount of information to gather with the optimal timeline for the decision making is often pretty damn hard.

after we missed the exit, my wishy washy friend and i were in the store to buy something to drink for the later that night. and again he was paralyzed by the amount of variables and had great difficulty making a choice...'this beer is too much, but it tastes really good. i've wanted to try this one, but it might suck. this one's on sale but then again so is this one. maybe we shouldn't even get beer and do jack and cokes for a change.' and on and on. his paralyzation became almost comical, c'mon dude, its just beer, - except that the decline in his ability to function in society makes me sad for him.

wikipedia lists Analysis Paralysis as an informal phrase applied to when the opportunity cost of decision analysis exceeds the benefits. opportunity cost is an economic term meaning the cost of something in terms of an opportunity given up, for instance, the opportunity cost of spending a Friday night drinking with your friends could be the amount of money you could have earned if you had devoted that time to working overtime.

for me, i'll try to do a quick summary of the possible outcomes to the decisions, weighing the pros and cons, take in consideration how important and/or the timeline, then just do it. if i narrow it down to just two and can't decide between the two, then rather than waste more time on the decision making process, i'll just flip a coin. its worked pretty well so far.

posted by bluematrix at 07/02/05 14:14 | link | comments (1)