1. Definitely disappointed that Viking’s QB Christian Ponder had a bum elbow (seriously?! a bum elbow?), but happy that the Green Bay Packers finally look like a team to contend with. It took them all year for their team to heal up (minus the massive amount of players on IR), and for them to play a relatively complete game, but at least they’re finding form in the playoffs. Some players just rise when it’s needed most. I suppose I can relate to that.
2. I going to miss the show “Fringe”. I’m impressed with the range of scientific topics it covered over its five seasons. Most of all, I’m going to miss Anna Torv, who I really grew to appreciate with the show. I do have to admit that I hate the show tactic that has become common among Sci-Fi shows these days, where the transition between seasons sometimes jumps 6 months to multiple years into a future state of the character and plot. This tactic was used mostly terribly in the show “Heroes”, but recently encountered it in both “Supernatural” and “Fringe”. The end of the fourth season of “Fringe” was exciting and interesting, but the fifth season branched off of episode 19, not the final episode of the 4th Season. “Fringe” is done in the next few weeks, and I must say that I’ve enjoyed the ride.
3. “Art is the queen of all sciences communicating knowledge to all the generations of the world.” (da Vinci)
4. This is a picture of me last year on Miami Beach. I was down there for a show called “Ultra Festival”. It was my full-on immersion with Dubstep and Electronic music, and it was awesome. I’ll call it life-changing; I’m sure I’ll reference it often. It was an amazing trip; a very lonely trip, but amazing. I got a shitload of great photography, but focused much of my time on the beach and enjoying the sun, surf and beautiful solitude.
5. One Direction? Seriously?
6. I do not watch mainstream TV. Ironically, I don’t like the programming of everything in between what you’re there to see. So much good air wasted on convincing you that you need something that you really don’t. Most of the time. Or, it’s an ad for another TV show, which you probably shouldn’t watch anyway. You should be up, doing something. Pushing away atrophy more than checking into the shutdown ward. But it hurts. I know. I know the pain. I feel it, and know it well. As someone that has suffered with two chronic health conditions for the last eleven years, I’ve had far more bad days than good ones. But I’ve learned that if you don’t fight, if you let the programming tell you what you want, instead of defining your boundaries and learning how to evolve, you will be lost to their stream, not your own.
7. I know I’m strange. I suppose my way of thinking is based on my past-life experiences. Spent most of my childhood living in Germany and Belgium, away from the grand ol’ USA. I don’t fit or fit in well. I smile well, I suppose, but there’s much about the society that I returned to that I never fully understood. Honestly, I still don’t. And, I suppose it is because I am honest. I think evolution will comes from tracking our patterns, living outside of the normal, understanding and redefining what it means to be human, without the straps of myth.
8. But I appreciate myth, and religion. While I equate all religion as formalized, centralized myth, I appreciate the power both hold on the human race. As an evolving creature, it was necessary for us to develop genesis stories, endtime stories, heroes, legends, gods, goddesses, we have recycled them all throughout time. Plotlines rewritten with each rewriting of human. Themes remain the same over a long timeline. Lessons unlearned as a species will someday be our reckoning. I’m not going to subscribe myth to that prediction; I’m not going to suggest a timetable to that statement. We’re fundamentally unable as a species to find an equilibrium outside of the orbit of greed. Myth and religion keep greed spinning through our creature, necessary and dangerous at the same time.
9. People need myth and religion to calm their fears, when passionate belief ultimately replaces one set of fears with another. Faith itself doesn’t require myth or religion to survive; it need only the absence of fear. We may never have answers about the reality of what happens after a human dies. Many will say that they know, but there is no replicable proof. That’s why I’m a Secular Humanist.
“I’ve looked at life from both sides now,
From win and lose, and still somehow
It’s life’s illusions i recall.
I really don’t know life at all.”
(Mitchell)
10. For some reason, spent today thinking a lot about my “Blackhawk Rising” project that I started with Dwight Brakel five or six years ago. The goal was to write a “Apocalypse Book” involving 2012. To be honest, I think he just wanted to write a book, and I was too all-over-the-place in my life and on that concept that I eventually got lost in where I thought it should go, and the book project never went anywhere. At the other side of the dreaded 2012 date now, I look at the concept differently and have found some very enticing pieces of the story concept that I may be able to reversion into something that works. Long-term goal, but something I want to consider.
11. Blackhawk Rising general concept: Fifty years into the future, mankind is struck by a debilitating avian influenza virus that destroys most human life on the planet, and sends the survivors into hiding. Over time, the carrion creatures on the surface of Earth that feed off the bodies of diseased humans evolve at a mutated rate, a side effect of a virus gone wrong. Eventually termed the “Blackhawk” virus for the creatures that became the next dominant species chain, mankind fights survival against an avian world that has turned against them. And hunts them. But Edwin Lazarus just can’t seem to die, no matter how hard he tries, no matter how many nests he has to clear from skyscapers, and no matter how many antidotes he finds. He knows he is more like them than his own race.And that doesn’t scare him. More often than not, it’s the humans that scare him. Hunter and anti-hero, he takes on Blackhawk while trying to find the cure in a world that has shut down and hid itself underground, as a dark-winged future unfolds and takes hold.
12. Headaches today.
13. Black Coffee Commitment Day 7 Complete