news 2011
On the plane, some read; others sleep. Both work.
Sudoku is a way of dealing with systems where one part affects all the others. It is a kind of solitaire chess.
Without a book or the computer, I hang, unmediated. I am like a man surviving in the vacuum of space. (I crave music)
No. I cannot die in a plane crash. I feel so valuable, much like all these other people, the ones I call "everybody."
Airports are a great way to people-watch, a huge cross-section of those who have enough money to fly. People from the city, people from the country. Selves that usually keep themselves separated. Hang in different crowd. The challenged who are up to fighting way around the country. No one wants to be here, except as part of a transition. A place to simians (and siwomians)
With all these people listening to music on their mp3-players, shouldn't everyone be smiling or toe-tapping? Or at least be moved?
Tom Jones takes on an orchestra – and wins!
I remember the first time I heard the The Django Rineheart part in in Greens Keepers' Low & Sweet. I laughed out loud in delight. I no longer laugh, but the thought still brings me joy.
And do I want to die without hearing the oeuvre of Fletcher Henderson?
In music, at least someone is talking to you.
I like the idea of "being with the family", forgetting it involves being with the family.
My 95 year old mother is like a Energizer rabbit, who keeps going and going in spite of her age. Planning for tomorrow meal, setting out dishes, putting the dishes in the dishwasher, checking everything. Part of me is in awe of her tenacity while part of me wishes she would do something else.
Everything has an indefinite number of handles.
Actually, we live in very common narratives..
Kids are like stupid adults.
If technology is magic, we are sorcerers' apprentices.
Idea: a cellphone with a rotary dial.
Our large scale projects, (solving the population problem, transitioning away from oil, even keeping our supreme army) is our version of the irrigation projects that engendered civilization. It results in a change of culture, governance and the human condition.
I say nature is beautiful but sometimes when I point my camera, say at a big Ponderosa pine, I cannot find a picture to take.
You should not die before your bodies.
What paper bag do I want over my head?
I look down upon simplifications, even while I want to simplify capitalism, philosophy or simplification itself. What then is the difference between a simple deep thought and a bullshit simplification?
Writing a book is a spiritual event. A place to speak and no one disagrees or interrupts us, a place carry out a chain of reasoning. We are King for a Day.
The river does not only appear. It also speaks
Down here, in the quiet area, the river breathes and comes up silently for air
Speaking with poetic mindfulness, the river, the birds, is the voice of god.
God is not unkind, as much as benignly indifferent
I hike in the woods for spiritual and well as physical exercise. I will leave the meaning of that statement as a homework assignment for the reader
On Tuesday I am leaving for a brief family trip. It puts me in mind of past vacations I tool by myself and now I see they were times of intense personal loneliness. And then, unlike now, nothing could be done about it. Today loneliness is not the only option.
Two things were my traveling companions at that time. An intense desire to connect with someone at a level I had not connected before, and a feeling of being protected, since I was chasing something that didn't exist anyway
Now as then, no one will come and talk to me, drawn in by my appearance, my inward nature, or my contemplative aura. But now, it does not matter
Maybe I am not learning to fly, but building better arteries around my heart. While I am at it, why not just grow a better heart?
How far down can we simplify a book? a novel?
What it is to be bored?
What it is to be lonely?
Why are people sad when people die?
My answers are getting worse but my questions are getting better and deeper.
I begin to wonder about my personal ur-narrative. Deep down did I want to be live like Dean Moriarity or at least Sal Paradise?
I am lonely because people can't talk.
Keeping Ourselves Occupied™: gardening (as fake farming)
We bathe in people.
Her body says 'Of course!,', but her face says, 'What are you thinking?'
Philosophers take the central essence of language, its constant allusions and illusions, and make it secondary to its use as factual description (which has it's use(s).
Don't Let Science Fool You™: the world has endless places to go and to be.
Don't Let Science Fool You™: the world is not an object made of atoms or mathematical formulae.
All Christian minister should have to state what other Christian denominations also assured its parishioners of going to heaven.
Human tend to think they are a special animal, and have a special relationship to God. We are a FOG [a Friend Of God].
What do we do with our will to live towards the end of life?
Without our present culture we don't have to agree on much. We are a culture of individuals. Agreeing is optional.
Casa Murilo ft. Kor Major – Show Some Restraint @ Majorstua Kirke
people gather now at the Spokane Waterfall as they have been doing as long as there have been people here. They see the water, so often gentle and forgiving, pound over the rocks and strike awe into the spirits.
You have the tools you need; a little imagination, your cultural tradition, and symbolic objects surrounds you.
What it is to be bored?
We can go on being ourselves forever — gossiping, shopping, having birthdays, watching sports, going to family meetings, being bored, driving to work, taking vacations, and so on. Is this not heaven?
'Mature Adults Could Be Gone Within 50 Years,' Experts Say
I scamper up the cliff. I forget how old I am. But wait! I have never known how old I am. And I have forgotten I have a heart problem, which is the whole point of doing this.
far-gotten
fog-gotten
Do you tell a friend they are getting too fat and they need help?
on stupid people: the trouble is that those who look down on them have no love for them
many kinds of intelligences implies there are many kinds of stupidity
In the woods
My human sense tingle.
It looks like the housing bubble affected the birds as well.
I find the illusion that I am still hiking like I did when I was young helps the illusion that I am still young, and that makes me feel a lot better.
Some nonfiction books are to be read with the heart.
They are also written with the heart.
But the heart is a blunt instrument.
The manly parasol: a large baseball hat on a stick
(I see): a man is taking his bass guitar into the pawn shop
Do you need to feel sad to die?
It takes both a vivid imagination to let us live on this overcrowded planet, as well as the ability to get by without one.
(as one commentator wrote: stop making sense)
We want to change the world as long as we don't have to change ourselves.
If political activism were not about money, what would it be about?
The world is over-run with the human spoor.
Exercise is a selfish thing.
I like to exercise in a place I can keep going up until I don't want to go up anymore.
It's not Walden Pond. There is a steady roar of the cars going going, wafting up the mountainside. But I am with gentle beings who do not care much about me. I am safe.
Essay question: What lessons do we learn form the ecology?
It would make for good conversation to ask: What is the drama going on in your thoughts right now?
You can spend all your time trying not to think mean thoughts about people
Shadows blanket the soft spring ground.
The lack of light plays upon the thrusting sprouts
moving forth and back,
teasing, darkening the hues.
No more a sprout,
but more the late spurt,
I fail into a brown anonymity.
aging
I no longer exercise to get in shape,
but to slow down the fall.
Falling toward an inevitable conclusion
I flap my arms as hard as I can.
wisdom that comes with age
It takes a little time.
The streams of watery wisdom
must first seep through
the dark dirty landscape.
Sometimes I think
everything is a poem.
Every flower.
Every woman in every room.
Every room.
everything is a poem,
except this poem, of course.
Some times I am aging, some times I am younging.
I am old, older than Papa Hemingway
You don't wind up with secret of the universe, you wind up with a woman who loves you. That is the secret of your universe.
Fiction is a kind of non-fiction, and vice-versa.
Fiction and nonfiction gives us privileged information
I seek the opposite of every thought not thought.
lindagra
I do not exercise to get in shape, but to slow the fall. Having fallen, I am flapping my arms as hard as I can. I've always wanted to fly.
The silly things we call news (Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dominique Strauss-Kahn) are there to distract us from the news.
and always the Greek chorus of Internet comments - sanctimonious and hypocritical
Some people dress not to be looked at.
You wouldn't go too wrong thinking that every person walking around is carrying a little drama.
Let's cut down nature and make the world look natural
When you are praying there usually isn't all that much you can do.
Early man could not get his mind around death either.
It's all people.
Who says we need to be forgiven for sins we did not commit?
Why doesn't god just forgive us? As we forgive those who trespass against us.
There is not a woman alive that can keep me from coming to you, but there are yard sales.
Jesus, that one way
sunflower shades
Linda saw an old canvas tent and she laughed as it reminded her of the tent she went camping with mom when she was young. Later I saw a white butterfly with ocher tipped wings and it put me back in Norway
Since The Pet Shop Boys consists of Neil Tennant who is 57 and Chris Lowe who is 52, shouldn't they be renamed the Pet Shop Middle Age Men.
What would it be like if people only said something when they had something to say?
Some people assume their gab is a gift.
.. at some point, the endorkins kick in
The health of my heart is not a simple slope but a cycle. And no doubt the cycle has its own cyclical slope. And so one.
One goal of my life is to fully live in the midst of the society in which I exist. How can they not to bring me down, and I them.
It irritates me I can't understand the world. Why does it not irritate me that I can't understand chemistry?
I need a philosophically nuanced theory of religion that ties in with a philosophically nuance theory of language. I am not comfortable with the simplistic world views that historically delineate it.
To say the problem lies in the structure of the human brain, or in how we talk about the world in linguistics, is no solution as all. This is who we are. We can't change this without becoming something else.
Is it better to see nature with a camera, or see nature without a camera and wishing you had a camera?
At the top of Tubbs Hill a group of forty Christians were conducting some kind of service praising Jesus with songs, drums and guitar. But the brisk spring wind, even as it filled their banners, carried the poor words away and made their gestures small and foolish. Perhaps all such ceremonies are a bit awkward; they work only barely at times and depend how seriously the participant take them.
I hate it when people praise Jesus. What are they praising, the number one god?
Racism will end when people no longer feel discriminated against because of their race.
What kind of things prove that material things don't make you happy? You need unhappy rich people celebrities. We love those.
And on top of everything else – here comes spring!
Take care to surround yourself with the proper delusions
We almost make almost a religion onto holding on to life – a religion of self-regarding prudence. I would like to see some people fight for the Going-Out-With-a-Bang Award.
Go gentle into that good night
old age should smile and steer at close of day;
Enjoy the beauty in the dying of the light.
Today I climb Tubb's Hill in Coeur d'Alene, in mild pain, no worse than walking, and I am ecstatically happy. Perhaps I should expect roller coaster days from now on. Good days and bad days. Worse bad days and worse good days.
I climb and walk, enjoy and feel, and mediate on the situation.
Maybe streams of wisdom first have to seep through the landscape.
There are many ways to age, and things to forget
Call it what you will, but there is no need to call it "old".
Compared to the age of the mountain, I am but a May-fly.
My doctor told me that people can growing new arteries to feed its need. I do not think this is true but I believe it anyway. My heart must not stand in way of fulfilling itself.
Kudos to the Rolling Stones Between the Buttons CD. 
I think that listening to the Rolling Stones loud in my car with the windows open will light up a sex memory and a smile in a fellow aged person. There is no evidence whatsoever for that.
In today's world a mountain should have a dedicated Twitter feed on top.
One kind of happiness is planning for happiness.
I can no longer plan on being here again
What parts of an extended arguments can you not simply quote?
Fundamentalism gives people the right to be know-it-alls. This is wrong.
Amazingly you CAN create your own religion. Just sit down and start writing.
Without gender, is God then like Pat?
Yesterday I climbed up the side of Lookout Mountain on the Little Spokane River. I had worried I would never get to hike with my memories again, but here I was.
As I hiked in these untrammeled woods, I had a fantasy of coming across a dead body. Are all human beings so nervous? Have we always been so nervous? (We are, after all, timid rabbits with machine-guns.) Our imagination is a force that is constantly putting images and ideas together. This is what we do, and this is how we confuse the shit out of ourselves.
What if a politician were to say "The problems facing us are very complicated and there is a lot of partisan and self-serving politics going on. I hope to work through that to provide the best solutions for the electorate."
Today the copyright law forbids doing something you can easily do.
Overpopulation, to the extent that it leads to misery and death, is a form of suicide.
Weapons of Mass Destruction don't kill people; people kill people.
There are whole subjects where they don't tell you what you want to know, like the study of language, or of philosophy. The academic fields have hijacked the enterprise into something perennially unsatisfying.
My memories are sometimes called education. They constitute things I have learned.
Aging it becomes easier to believe I must be in the moment, because I could die tomorrow, or even today.
In what sense is this design intelligent? In what sense is it a design?
You actually cannot get your mind around concepts like capitalism, religion, philosophy, banks. There are too many things that fall under these words, so you often take hold of a nice poetic confusion and you go, yes! that's it. (The difference between understanding and truth.)
We are no longer a slash and burn culture. We now slash and subdivide.
We look for single causes for effects, we might seek a more ecological tao, which, apart for its ineffability, is more suitable to the world.
In poetry club I am the one who always asks: Why do we like flowers? Why do we like the moon.
In most life situations I can always take a book and sneak off into ecstasy.
I am amazed you throw your pearls before me.
The internet always sends us off on tangents, on meta-knowledge. And this is good for what?
What is the difference between reading a book and reading the Cliffs Notes?
If you expect a relationship to be the only ground of happiness in your life, you will never get over a bad relationship.
Philosophy talks about the things we don't know how to talk about, in a traditionally incomprehensible manner.
What does it say about our society that you can't let a perfect stranger live in your home?
Is there anything we cannot say by being politically correct? (It does make it harder to slam someone with a traditional insults.)
There is the illusion is that there is a history leading to progress, but it is equally an illusion that there is NO history. Lack of change is an illusion.
useful idea: a "tenting" mechanism for your trousers (to show how much you care)
Being retired there is no Friday.
Every day is a Saturday morning.
A young person cannot understand death since they will never die.
Looking at brain and thinking you understand the brain is like looking at the parts of a CPU (and nothing more) and thinking you understand it.
Science get its validation of its procedures from the community preoccupation with such procedures.
The charge of hypocrisy is an ad hominem.
When I payed the Pulp CD Common People, she said, "Magne, you have been holding out on me."
Before movies and television, how did stupid people waste their time?
It looks more and more like I am never going to be a grown up. Never.
You desire what you want. When young, there is a chance you can get this, because (you think) you can get or do anything. You have all the time in the world. Perhaps one wisdom of aging is that by limiting your possibilities you can concentrate on the tasks at hand.
In thinking and talking, we are often unknowingly engaged in multiple entendres
When I touch this object with a stick, I have the sensation of touching in the tip of the stick, not in the hand that holds it. [ Wittgenstein, PI 626 ] When I touch say a Pepsi can with my finger I feel the cold, moist smooth metal. I do not feel nerve impulses, or the data entering the brain. I do not see my perception untranslated. Language is like that. It is as invisible as our nerves.
Having so much knowledge at our fingertips, it is easier to look something up than to think it out. Thus we read in the Wikipedia that there are five kinds of prayer: Petition, Intercession, Penitence, Thanksgiving and Adoration. That sound understandable and definite but is it true? Are we missing the word that would be a sixth kind of prayer. This is not easy to discover. We need to be trained to do this. The short list, the top ten, like the metaphor, illuminates as it obscures.