Silence Toasted

Man, it gets tough to just move sometimes. A rise, then a fall. Pleasure with a side of pain to follow. Ebb, flow - the cycle continues and on and on we go. Maybe this time........... I'm not quitting. The game grows tiresome, but I think I can see the finish. I feel the rising of something that I asked for, but wasn't ready to receive. Be careful what you seek, for it may bee seeking you out as well. It's hard to hold on to those feelings of freedom and simple joy that came with taking off and driving around experiencing new places and faces. It was heaven to be with my wife and kids all day every day, surrounded by the mind-boggling beauty that is Northern California. Back to the Bible Belt and the old routine, the dream of something better fades with the light of our shorter days, and hunkering down for winter is the order of the day. Returning to our home and finding dozens of tomatoes and peppers rotting in our garden ( I told the neighbors to please help themselves, b...

Greetings to all and any who happen by this little corner of the Blogosphere. Time for another little exercise in public expression designed to do something – what, I’m not sure of, but all the cool kids are doing it so in this case I’ll follow the herd. I suppose blogging is somewhat dated, what with Twitter and such available to post up-to-the minute details of our lives for all to see, but that just proves that I am never as cool as the coolest, and always lagging behind the latest trends. That probably explains why my guitar rig is completely state-of-the-art circa 1985, and the car I just took halfway across the country just turned 16 years old (and turned over its 144,000th mile). Hey, if you find something that works, why rush to replace it? Even the things that work great for awhile get old and maybe less functional, and we are seeing that trend in many ways all around us today. In the rush to replace things that work just fine with things that appear to work “better”, many th...

Hey, it's back-to-school time, and what do we have on tap for young minds hungry for new information and tools of discernment? How about some skills that can be used to see the real purpose of the media and advertising? Oh, and a (not too) short bit about the holocaust. This came home yesterday for me to sign off on (not signing means points deducted from my kid's grade). Dear 7 th grade Parent or Guardian, This year your student will have the opportunity to participate in a semester long course focusing on Media Literacy and Persuasion. We live in an ever-growing media and technology culture and there is increasing national concern that students of all ages are not trained to correctly interpret all of the media messages that are saturating our society. The Persuasion class is designed to teach students to analyze and evaluate a range of the different media and persuasion techniques so that they can learn to be more critical and thoughtful about the me...

If anyone truly admits the scale of our impending adjustment to themselves, then inaction turns into something worse than denial - one becomes an accomplice in their own hardship and possible demise. We need to recognize that fact and either go into further denial or take action OURSELVES, rather than wait for some "critical mass" to gather or just-the-right group to form to properly deal with all the challenges we face. Sure there is strength in numbers, but where are your allies? Where is the posse? I hate to say it, but while we're all in this together, we are also very much on our own, too! Going to work and paying taxes while still shopping and supporting the structure that threatens to topple and crush you doesn't make sense, at least to me. There is a certain lack of obvious (easy) alternatives and many obstacles to truly detaching from this Beast, but one has to ask why that is so and what you are trading for the "security" of the current system. Sur...

Veering further away from my usual frank, conversational approach to doing whatever it is that gets "done" here, I'd like to get some reaction to these gems I ran across. Some creative captioning, perhaps. One of these is not like the others, and all 3 carried strong messages for me, enough so that they are taken as signs and kept as reminders. I am frankly just curious about the initial emotional reaction to any of these images. Thanks in advance for sharing should you be so inclined. My best to all, Z

Wow, that was quite the spread. It was piled up as far as the eye could see, and it was all hot, fresh, and smelled yummy. If you couldn't find that certain item to satisfy your craving, well I contend you just didn't look hard enough. And thanks to the wonders of modern technology and good innovation spurred on by healthy competition, everyone can afford to join this party. How could so much be laid out for so many different tastes, and sold so cheap? I mean, it was an endless parade of item after item all there for an amazingly low, low price, and it seemed to be limitless. The constant parading of the help from where it was all being cooked up for our enjoyment never seemed to stop, and it was all being replenished even before anything got half-empty. Man, what a deal! Whoever thought this angle up was certainly a very savvy business person, don't you think? (burp) And look, it is for everyone! I look around and see all walks of life feeding here, no one is excluded ...

It seems unlikely that 2 months have passed since I last did whatever it is that I find myself doing at present, but the system by which we have agreed to mark our voyage insists that it is so. A great number of things have occurred here and everywhere it seems, and yet it feels much the same as it ever was, just further along and with better weather. My mentioning the weather in the first few sentences is probably very indicative of how much I have to say that has any substance, but there was something that compelled me to drop into this seat and I don't have the energy for argument right now. I last wrote about the process of hacking away the shackles of the American Servitude System that I had become enmeshed with, and hopefully emerging with some sort of fresh start. That process, overall, is pretty cut-and-dried, and pretty impersonal unless one chooses to get caught up in the emotional aspects of losing "stuff". The past 2 months have been about another sort of ...