3/13/99
Played with the camera, blessed the springs and creek and let them bless me.
3/14/99
The rain still patters on the roof, and it's cold, the wet cold, where 35 degrees f feels just as cold as 10. It was a good day to stay inside.
The expression "Beware the Ides of March" comes from Shakespeare's _Julius Caesar_. The admonition to beware was directed at Caesar himself, and it was indeed on or near March 14-15 that Caesar was dispatched by a conspiracy of Senators led by Brutus.

3 15 99
Early in the morning snow fell, then the day turned fine.

3 16 99
Everything in the known universe can be described mathematically as a wave function of a set of characteristics existing in a finite area of space-time. And everything changes according to the laws of probability, which is another wave-form.
Everything is a wave function and everything has a frequency, timbre, and amplitude. All the wave forms change each other, become chords, resonate, harmonize, and occasionally crash into discord.
Everything, then, is music. Each of us is an instrument in an orchestra, making the sound we make when struck, rubbed, stroked, or blown through. Each of us is also a player, trying to harmonize with the other players. Each of us is a songwriter, dreaming new themes and trying to steer the melody toward them. And each of us is a song, our song which is our life.

3-18-99
Last night was the New Moon. Tomorrow, if it's clear, I'll be able to see a tiny waxing Moon chasing the sunset in the West.

3-19-99
And there she was, round and delicate like an egg shell, above the
mountains. A waxing moon carries hopes to fruition. To the right of
the moon are Venus (the bright one) and Saturn (the darker one.) I'm told that Saturn is moving Westward (down) night after night
and I believe Venus is still moving East (up.) Still retrograde. I
must find out when she's due to turn...

3 22 99
The Mountain Trip is scheduled for this weekend. The Weather Channel is predicting rain, and a low temperature of 45. That would be warmer and wetter than it's been before. I'm hoping the rain won't come just then, and that Friday will be fine too, so the walk up won't be too slippery.
The Mountain Trip marks the start of Spring, the season of beginnings.

3 29 99
The mountain trip went well. I will write something about it and post the pictures soon.

PICTURES

Small Miracles. Nimue (Lazy Kitty) had her first kitten yesterday. I found the two of them on the couch the, kitten still attached to the sack of... whatever. Nimue is very immature to be a mama cat, and as often happens with first litters, she was ignoring it. I tried to encourage her to do something motherly, but to no avail. The kitten was alarmingly cold. So I put it in with Nuit Cat's litter, a few days older, and made it clear to Nuit that I would consider it a favor if she'd adopt it.
This evening the adopted kitten was still alive and thriving.

Looks like I will also have a Manx Tortoiseshell (three colors and no tail,) and a white Manx Siamese. There are currently four litters. Venus is doing the "team mom" thing again with one of her daughters, where they combine litters and take turns dealing with the lot. The daughter is on her first litter, just like last year.

All Fools Day:
4-1-99
A friend has suggested that I write something specifically addressing the
"Hi Tech-Lo Tech" quality of my life. Trouble is, I'm not sure what to say.
I guess it is strange that I have a computer, (and in fact I make my living working on them, these days,) but no indoor plumbing....

In some ways I have lived life as though it were an experiment, and I was both scientist and subject. I ask myself, "What will happen if...?" And then sometimes I go and make it happen in order to find out. So in a sense my lifestyle is a laboratory in which several experiments are happening simultaneously.

As a child, and even now I have an unquenchable fascination with how things work. So I discovered very early on that

what you saw on the outside of just about anything was usually just a cover for the far more interesting workings underneath.

So a cutaway view of a car, showing all its workings, looked way cooler to me than the car itself. Eventually I developed enough imagination and knowledge to see most every-day machines and buildings and other human artifacts in this way.

(I'm not saying I'm always right about what I imagine is going on inside most machines, but I usually have an idea.)

Eventually I came to see myself with this same penetrating view, both physically and emotionally. This was a real shocker, as it is for most people it happens to, I'm sure. A compulsion to find out how things "really" work can land a person in some funny places when it is applied introspectively.

Seeing others this way is not always appropriate.

Paganism and Magick are an experiment.
Report on progress so far:
there's something to this stuff, but it's not for everyone.

Living at various stages of urban and rural primitivism and poverty is an experiment.
Report on progress so far:
There are different kinds of comfort. They all have value, and are appropriate in their seasons.
It's hard to get all of the kinds of comfort at once. Some of them seem mutually exclusive.
 
 
 

Money.

The value of money exists in people's minds and nowhere else. From an anthropological point of view, the money system functions in modern society the way state religion functioned in ancient civilizations.
We have freedom of "religion," but nobody is free of the money system. In ancient times, the tallest building in any city was the temple. Nowadays, the tallest building is usually a bank, brokerage firm, or an insurance company. Bankers and brokers have an almost priestly function interceding between people and the money system.
Soon
folks will be betting their life savings that their Wall St. god will never die.
(I
believe the market is being driven artificially high by all the capital that's fleeing Asia. I suppose that might mean that when Asia starts getting its act together again, then that same capital flow could begin to run in the other direction...)

But Spring is springing and the flowers are flowering; leaves fairly spew out of the branches of the trees. Got the first Real Spring Rain today and last night: gentle soaker with that Smell, that Spring and Summer Rain Smell. (Make me want to lax wyrical, it do.)
The green always comes shooting out on the first sunny day after a rain like this.

Work is working, and I'm looking for a car.

Life is good.

Well I guess my life looks so strange because I have designed it to look that way.
 

4-21-99
Hope everyone had a happy 4/20.

I find the war very upsetting.
It seems the world has tilted into a surreal landscape where the Twentieth Century never happened, and all the lessons we thought we had learned in this warped century were not learned at all.

One such lesson
would certainly have been,
Don't Get Involved in a War in the Balkans!

These people's hatreds have already shown they are stronger than any kind of "counter irritant" that the US has the stomach to deliver.
Whatever we do, sooner or later, we will leave. And when we leave, these people's hatreds will rise again as they have this time and they will begin to avenge and counter avenge all of the atrocities that ALL SIDES have experienced at one another's hands.

Can't help thinking about _Wag the Dog_, and _Primary Colors_, and how life imitates art.
Maybe someone needs to make a movie
about an honest man becoming President
(or woman... whatever,)
or about the US actually doing something fairly noble on the world stage,
and not just being
Cop, Banker, Boss and Arms Merchant
to the world.

I'd see it.

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