There is a story that I frequently remember, when my life is moving slower than I would like.
Jermaine Jackson tells this story, and I heard him tell it around the time I was doing work in ‘write it down, and make it happen.’
Michael Jackson wrote a note to himself that read, “I will record the best-selling album of all time,” and he placed this on his bathroom mirror, where he read it every morning.
With time, Michael eventually released that album. “Thriller” remains to this day the best selling album of all time, the closest runners up lagging behind by over 45,000,000 albums. No other recording artist or groups comes close.
Unfortunately, the YouTube video I originally posted was pulled. I had two update choices: a live performance with an introductory note that I’d prefer not to see, or the official MJ YouTube upload that includes no video of Michael. I decided to embed the former with its personal dedication, but I’ve included a link to the latter. Both have their merits, for reasons that seem to me obvious.
Photo courtesy from the CSE department, University of Michigan. Taken from Poe Field, Princeton.
At precisely 2:12 p.m. est on June 7th, the moon goes full.
The June full moon is also known as the ‘Full Strawberry Moon,’ for according to the Farmer’s Almanac, “the Algonquin tribes knew this moon as a time to gather ripening strawberries. It is also known as the Rose Moon and the Hot Moon.”
As it is the beginning of June, the sun is in the constellation of Gemini, so the full moon is in the opposing constellation, Sagittarius. If you’re sensitive to the moon’s effects, expect to feel a little crazed until it moves out of direct opposition, and the effects dissipate, probably early Tuesday morning.
Until then, nurture your inner lunatic and smile.
We’re about two weeks away from the Summer Solstice, the year’s longest day, and the official beginning of summer.
I read this week about Mia Farrow’s hunger strike for the people of
Darfur, a little after the fact as life has prevented me from being involved with too much other than the day to day.
As many of you know, the genocide in Darfur has been an important issue to me, well beyond the few entries on this blog, the needless slaughtering of hundreds of thousands and the displacement of over two million while the world turns a blind eye unconscionable to this writer.
So in my little corner here, I’ve highlighted articles by Nicholas Kristof, and at times promoted Ms. Farrow’s blog and photos to raise awareness, as well as the things I can do behind the screen, in the world.
Here is where the two come together in an unusual way. (more…)
I would add to that entry, that my mother, as I tell people, “got on the boat to go back home,” the day after Easter, her favorite holiday, a day which gave her great joy every year, the celebration of Resurrection, redemption, and life, however one understands it.
I expect to offer more over time.
At present, I’m reorienting myself after a month unlike any other that I’ve lived.
My mother. What a character. She’s an odd combination, as are we all, but my mother’s dramatic predilections write her many idiosyncratic qualities in large letters.
Very large letters.
Through character and circumstance, she’s always been a woman ahead of her time, a pioneer in word and deed, rarely zipping her lip when it would have served her
She is also a quirky kind of Christian, fundamentally conservative for fear of fire and brimstone, yet socially progressive for love and compasssion’s sake. She was a very odd fish, for her time and place, for she early and enthusiastically supported Reverand King. “A prophet of God.” she’s always said. “We’re all God’s children. King taught that, he was the greatest of our lifetime, a prophet of God. God’s spoke through him. You could hear it every time.”
I’ve never have been able to convince her of Gandhi’s influence on Dr. King, hoping that the link between them might get her beyond that soteriological fear animating so much of her imagination.
And when I casually brought up Dr. King’s documented character weaknesses during a conversation, she nearly disowned her only begotten to honor the Lord’s chosen one.
I’ve since decided that bringing up Dr. King’s humanity is not the best thing to do.
Dr. King’s assassination forever changed this day, my mother’s birthday. It seemed unusually cruel for Providence to foist this on her, a single working mother with not much more than faith and hope to her name. Seemed she could have been born on the 6th or the 7th, maybe the 10th. The arbitrary nature of cruelty, perhaps that was the point, and why she so thoroughly embraced Dr. King’s message, and perhaps why she was able to fearlessly speak so, against the nice white bourgeios conventions that we lived on the fringes of.
She’s never forgotten that day, what it meant to those living on hope and the Lord’s promises, when that’s the best life has to offer.
April 4th has never been the same.
My mother’s birthday.
And the day a prophet and one of this country’s greatest leaders was murdered.
From Dr. King’s last speech, given the night before his death.
I have Liddy and Congress on this afternoon in the background, in between writing spurts.
I have to admit, though I may be tarred and feathered for this, that I’m feeling pity for Liddy, after a particularly scathing examination by a Democrat whose name I didn’t catch, but has repeated about 40 times that he is “a contract attorney.”
The amount of posturing by our “public servants” all for the good of the “American people” is really underwhelming and grating at best.
On one level, these hearings are ludicrous . . . the inbreeding between big business and American government has been so deep for so many years now, it’s obscene.
But you wouldn’t think it to listen to these hearings.
The public servants arise anew, reborn for the good of We The People.
<yawn>
I get the public’s anger. I am one of those who understands that the money is one tenth of one percent that weighs in at 50 percent, given our current economic hardship.
The money is symbolic, gets to the heart of what most Americans live in everyday, the most invisible layer of culture, because unlike race and gender, its markers are elusive: class division, in a culture devoted to to denial through acquisition’s narcotic effects.
Making Liddy a scapegoat is just wrong; he jumped on the boat late in the game, and many in Congress are more than happy to crucify this man to make themselves look good. He’s no angel. But he’s no Devil, and Congress members ought not feed the hate for their own good.
And Liddy’s having to stand in for the incompetence, greed, and class entitlement of all the AIG executives, though his term there has been relatively short, a fact that many Congress members choose to ignore.
Very little moral high road here, in this viewer’s opinion.
Just more theater, on both sides of the aisle.
With a few exceptions, a self-serving debacle for our elected officials.
Though this stream is a bit dated, it deserves attention.
The photos later in the stream are the most poignant, in my opinion.
View Ms. Farrow’s photostream at Flickr. Please note, the “snapshot” feature on the preceding does not show the Darfur pictures, you must click on the link and go to her Flickr album to view.
Ms. Farrow has given permission for the use of these photos, by anyone who wishes to raise awareness about the 450,000 slaughtered and over 2 million displaced.
A link to her blog can be found in my blogroll, to the right.
I lived the first twenty-one years of my life in the nation’s most populous state, and was no stranger to its subcultures.
I have never understood why the obsession with marijuana as a drug as opposed to alcohol has blinded vast swaths of the population, as though marijuana carries an intrinsic bogey evil eluding distilled spirits.
I think that bogey evil is called “ignorance.”
So now that hard economic times have fallen on California, some folks are suddenly weighing the economic benefits of legalization versus their own bizarre, shortsighted moral stance.
Shocking, isn’t it?
To think that economics might influence the depths of our morality, well that certainly takes the wind out of the sails of my idealism for today.
Years ago, the conservative writer William F. Buckley, Jr. argued that all drugs should be legalized and taxed; I believe his argument ran (but please don’t quote me on this) that it was the most morally consistent position and that if people chose to use recreational drugs, well that was their decision. They should be free to make such a decision, no matter the demon. Most important, the government should be able to control and tax such substances, including heroin, just as alcohol was controlled and taxed.
Of course, at the time, all of this starkly contradicted Ronald Reagan’s “War On Drugs,” though the right had melded the two figures as inseparable ideological mastheads for the party. But Buckley recognized the futility of such government machinations on human behavior. Not surprisingly, the “War On Drugs” has proved to be a fiasco about as cost efficient and effective as our invasion of Iraq.
Perhaps if Reagan had listened to Buckley on this issue, and not just on the cold war issues of freedom, we’d have made progress on the biochemical and genetic markers for addiction predispositions with those tax dollars we’d have pocketed. Moreover, we’d have not thrown billions and billions down the toilet in some of the most futile spending of our government’s money, second only to Vietnam and Iraq in the past decades, or so it seems to this armchair observer.
After all these years of mostly failed drug policies–quite different from the alcohol bogey, which apparently isn’t a serious drug to these woefully well-intentioned folks–and the practical wisdom of letting people choose their own demons with which to live . . .
