Elmo's Love

From clamor to stupor
in no time flat.
Why?
Because Elmo loves you.

Two year-olds transfixed
By soothing sanguine cooing
Because Elmo loves you.

Elmo loves you redly,
As redly as the scarlet light
Of translucent womb
Tethered to the gurgly-high pitch
Of mother tongue in amnion.

Before you were born,
Elmo loved you.

Lip-synch, precious wide eyes,
To your rock-a-bye babe
To your own sweet mother,
But, hush--did you hear?
Elmo loves you.

Gestate further,
Premature joey.
Go back in.
Return for a while
To your bean chair home.

So long as Elmo loves you,
Suckle with consanguinity the boob-tube.

Mr. Rogers abides likewise, near your mom,
In a red cardigan.

Breast-feed in the land of make-believe
and imagine, child,
The red flame
From within your mother's belly.

And when grown,
Or imagined grown,
For want of burning bush
Do not despair.

A cardinal in the thicket,
A tanager on the bough,

And back to your mother, repair.

Memetically Speaking

I've been summoned by my friend, Mike, to complete a "meme", which is, to be honest, an internet thing-a-ma-bob I'm fairly unfamiliar with, though the general idea of memes and memetics I'm at least acquainted with. But I'm going to do my best not to let him or my other compatriots down. So here it goes...

The best movie sequel in SF/Fantasy is: Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back.

The best “bad” movie in SF/Fantasy is: Planet of the Apes (1968).

The best flavor filling in PopTarts is: brown sugar cinnamon

The best remake in SF/Fantasy is: Planet of the Apes (2001).

The best character in Sesame Street is: Super Grover.

So, that's it. I hope I didn't screw it up or cheat in any way. I guess I'm supposed to pass this on by 'tagging' someone so that my 'idears' might propagate. And I suppose the more people I tag, the more likely that one of my idears might succeed in propagating.

So, I tag the entire internets--WARNING: If you have a slow connection this link may take a long time to load!!

Brownian Motion

The jittery existence of
Stimulated particulates
On jagged paths of random-walk

Would tell the world
Of happenstance
And of the Branch that Adam (Atom) stalked;

Would hold the days accountable
By the hours,
The hours by the minutes,
The diminution nested
Solemnly in itself.

The invagination of existence,
So pregnant with chance,

The invaginated, jittery-being
Would hum the white-noise in my ear;

Would counteract its own fact
So that patterns might appear--

As if to serenade itself
With movements of cricket, wood thrush, and bullfrog--

But not being filled on that scale--
Comes the inevitable Mozart.

The crazy twitch in my eye is a homecoming
of sorts--atomic self-awareness

The motion pops on the celestial frying pan.
Here we discern a world,
There, a super nova.
And yet there, the outlines of a black hole,
A singularity,
A nick in the glass of the ethereal continuum
Where the accretion folds in on itself
And the particulates do a new type of jitter-dance.
But the jazz is the same.
It finds itself again in the improvised scaffold.

And the bubbles babble (Babel) up that tower.
They effervesce and then coalesce;
They ascend, they aspire to meaning, to totality.

Then that dragon, too, will swallow its own tail.

Nebuchadnezzar has always been one of my favorite words. I really like the way it hinges around the middle syllable 'kud'. It's almost palindromic in its sound. And it's the smallest distance--a mere iota--away from "Nebudchadnebba", which reminds me of my probably misheard and mispronounced eighties song lyric which sound to me like it goes "sarah-kah-sarah" at the end of one of its lines. Also, for me, it sounds like "s-erica-sarah" and "sarah-kuh-sarah" at the same time, bringing a strange and special delight, but also some confusion.

It is the sensitivity to this (and other language tricks) which facilitates its synthesis in writing.

Super-Cool Tool Library in Berkeley

It's been a while since I've posted something here.

Well, I've finally got something worth posting. It's a tool library. That's right. A tool library--in Berkeley. Residents and owners of property in Berkeley are eligible to borrow up to 10 tools at a time from this library: http://berkeleypubliclibrary.org/tool/

I think this is one of the best ideas I've heard in a long time. I mean, this could be a great community resource almost anywhere. If I were a rich man, that's what I'd do--endow a library with a collection of books...AND TOOLS!!! Talk about building community! I'm excited about this.

Crankshaft Serenity

Motion itself contains the stillness we seek. Where but through motion do we once again gain our selves? If ever we are brought to absolute stillness, still, we are brought to it. The blues legend, Robert Johnson, in a plaintive wail which still haunts the unquiet soul today, makes it plain with, "I got to keep movin'/I got to keep movin'/Blues fallin' down like hail/Blues fallin' down like hail."

'Anywhere but here' is the refrain of agitation that creeps in and takes hold of a neglected spirit. And so medicine is sought. Drugs, alcohol, sex, violence--all play their role accordingly. These things are desirable to the despairing mind, and are motions of a sort. But it is motion itself which fulfills the prescription, not the medicament. It is the reaching for the pill bottle or the pouring of the drink or the procuring of the substance which brings momentary relief from the here-ness of a tormented self. For the moment, the mind is occupied with something other than its own dreadful existence.

Fortunately, at this stage I know enough about myself to recognize the signs and symptoms and I take to my bicycle with the sort of sureness and steadiness that a man might take to his axe when he apprehends the coming winter--splitting wood as insurance and with assurance. Likewise, I seize the bike in my hands. The cold is all around me and closing in. But I go. And I keep going until I get where I need to be.

It is no wonder that a couple of bicycle makers were the first to perfect flight; for it is as close to flying as a soul can get without actually flying. I imagine it was the freest thing a man or woman of the time could do, to ride a bicycle. Today it is still the simplest means to visceral freedom. To go.

Automotive charlatans give the illusion of motion. Planes, trains, automobiles. But witness the disquietude and ill temper of the commuter stuck in traffic. The difference is--and this is paramount--the difference is that with a bicycle you are the engine and the conscious operator. You are driving it, as opposed to it driving you.

Taking control of one's life through a tangible, simple act of the will is perhaps the most liberating thing a despairing soul can do. Deliberate motion. There is, I am convinced, no therapy which can be matched in its efficacy and which has withstood so many trials.

My favorite time to ride is late at night on my way home from work when I have the road all to myself. The town is silent but for the whir and hum of me on my bike. I have my thoughts. But they are tempered by the task at hand (or rather, the task afoot). Lately, I've been taking a little FM radio with an ear piece along and listening to public radio. Soft classical music at a cool 15 mph on the darkened streets of the hometown with the wind in one's face under the power of self-propulsion. Crankshaft serenity, the mechanics of bliss.

--George Czar, © 2007

My Conscience Compels Me To Share This...

Hey Guys and Gals,

What was that old saying? 'That character is who you are when no one is watching', or something to that affect...?
...In the "Information Age" it is truly "not so much what you say, but how you say it"...
...As you can see, the powerful elite on all sides of any national "debate" care little about actual, honest debate, only about the appearances of a debate. Democrat and Republican parties alike have been undermining democratic institutions for some time now--both in front of the camera and offscreen:

http://www.brasscheck.com/videos/spin/spin.html

If you want a news source that does not hold its viewers and listeners in the same sort of contempt that corporate media does, try this viewer-supported daily show, "The War & Peace Report":

http://www.democracynow.org

Most of us want basic healthcare for our families, and basic education and nutrition for our children. We don't want our tax dollars spent bombing innocent civilians and ruining whole societies in order to enforce the economic policies of powerful elites in Western countries and their ruthless accomplices across the globe.

Get informed. Decide for yourself:

http://www.chomsky.info

Get involved. Or, if it suits you, refuse participation when necessary. Don't be manipulated by the periodic conjuring of boogymen, witches, and evil-doers (or immigrants, Communists, Drug Warlords, and terrorists) by men and women who strike heroic poses in front of the camera but who live behind gated communities and whose children do not have to suffer the consequences of their narrow-minded, short-sighted policies.

There is no authority beyond what you grant. Get involved by getting out of line. It is a matter of class when you've raised your hand patiently and have not been called upon that you raise your voice. Find common ground with those around you and work toward common goals. Your daily actions are defiant elections that are tallied--without fail and without fraud--by time itself.

Take Care,
George

Come Travel with Me

Today, ladies and gentlemen, I, your host, Jor "San Pedro de la Velazquez y Toro Rojo" Jazzar, will be taking you on a curious little tour to some curious little places....

But first, to fully enjoy this pleasure cruise, you must download Google Earth from Google at http://earth.google.com

Now then, if you would all open your Google Earth program and enter the following location: Charcani Grande, Peru

In one of my many meanderings I discovered this little gem of a spot tucked snuggly between two huge volcanoes, El Misti and Nevado Chachani. It seems to be a resort of sorts. I would be inclined (especially if I were there...yuk-yuk!) to call it the "last resort", given it's precarious location.

As if it weren't enough to find this little hole in the world, I was delighted and intrigued to find various messages written into the sides of these mountains, large enough to be from these satelite images.

What could they be, I wondered. One of them reads "DIOS PATRIA LEY". Another reads "ESCUELA TECNICO SUPERIOR AREQUIPA". And there are others, too, some legible and some not. My best guess, as a naive cyber-world traveler and budding anthropologist was that these must be some kind of prayers or pleas to the volcano gods begging not to be destroyed.

I had good evidence to support these conclusions. For instance, I knew that "DIOS" is spanish for "God". And when I looked on the other side of the volcano, I could see that much of the neighboring city, Arequipa, had been destroyed by a relatively recent eruption. So these must be messages stemming from that basic cultural impulse of a people who have had to contend with these supernatural forces for millenia--messages of a religious people, powerless over nature.

Then came the research to confirm my rather hasty conclusion.

To my humbling bemusement, these were not the primitive sort of archeo-religious relics that I thought they were. Instead, I found that they are no more than nationalistic slogans and advertisements!! "DIOS PATRIA LEY" means "God, Mother-Country, Law". And "ESCUELA TECNICO SUPERIOR AREQUIPA" seems to be no more than a rough-hewn billboard saying "The superior technical school: Arequipa".

And I'd also found more in the neighboring city. One says "LA NESTLE LECHERA [large space] CAFE VALENZUELA", which I take to mean "Nestle milk [at] Cafe Valenzuela". Another one, in a rather action-packed font reads "TOL[-not clear, maybe 'EO'] ZAMA". This one is a mystery to me. It may be interesting though. Bonus points for anyone who can come up with its meaning.

Next time, come with me to Fallujah, Iraq, and see from above what a city under siege looks like. Or maybe we'll visit Caracas, Venezuela, in recent history a city with perhaps the starkest contrast between rich and poor, a trend slowly being reversed by the vast social reform undertaken by the villified Hugo Chavez who has nationalized most of the oil resources in this country to provide social services like health care and education to the poor.