Back at work this week, but it's Saturday, one son is at a friend's, and the other is napping....with his Mom! Sweet manna from heaven. Got two stacks in today.

The first I call:

She's a Brick...Da, Da, Da...House....Da, Da, Da, Free Porn Movies 2: I Like It On Top







The second is titled:

Thank You Africa For All These Great Concerts 1 - Don't Leave Me This Way

Today's stack. I call it:

Free Pornstar Download Cheap Travel Rock Make Money Now With Gravity 1 - Inspiration for the Damned

Well, I am trying to up the difficulty and the aesthetic of the stacks by throwing smaller rocks in between larger ones, instead of the usual biggest up to smallest. Here is my first attempt. I call it:

Diamonds Are Forever Free Porn Movie Download Rock on Mind Control 1: Ohhhh James!

Today's balance...I call it:

Brick and Lick Free Games Online Porn Download 1: The Rise of the Teardrop Egg

After what took longer than I thought it should have (?), I have responded to the challenge of compiling the ten best songs of all time, and what you should be doing while listening to them (aside from seeing them performed live)


TOP TEN SONGS OF ALL TIME:
(In no particular order)

LA Woman - The Doors (Comes on loud throughout the room as you wake, you scratch yourself in the nether-regions, slide on the leather pants, hop on the old Triumph, and head out on the highway)

More Than A Feeling - Boston (It's dark, there's a pipe and an air guitar involved, the rest is up to you)

Smells Like Teen Spirit - Nirvana (It's semi-dark and dizzy with a serious mosh and simultaneous peaking occurring)

Carry On My Wayward Sun - Kansas (Driving off in a real-life denouement, the protagonist victorious, in a convertible)

Enter Sandman - Metallica ( iPod - during anything requiring tremendous physical strength, stamina, excluding sex)

Do It Again - Steely Dan (On a moped, with your honey, heading out for a night, somewhere in the Carribean)

Joshua Tree (All) - U2 (On a couch in a dusty record store- vinyl - chillaxin with a fatty, talking music)

Comfortably Numb - Pink Floyd (Lying in a field, tall grass, sky ablaze, slight wind shifting cloud formations)

The Messenger - Daniel Lanois (When you've messed up with your partner and simply must make amends)

The Grace - Neverending White Lights (Upon realizing that you are simply energy and that you can float away from yourself)

Managed time for two stacks today in the backyard...

Today's stack...


Working on a series of three paintings, not-so-originally titled, "Red, White, and Blue." Each is composed of an iconic image related to the myth of America (meat, milk, and cotton candy, respectively) and accompanied by background text that works in opposition to the myth. Below is the first of the series, Milk.

The associated text reads: black, lumpy, infected, terrorists, filter, monopoly, vinegar, muslim, additives, error, oil spill, brown, blood, pickled, cayanne, subsidies, Somalia, rap, acid, speed, corrosive, blue, peasant, Arab, red, heavy, Japan, organic, French.

...and a TOP TEN list, in a effort to begin posting regularly.



TOP TEN THINGS I REALIZED LATER IN LIFE THAN I SHOULD HAVE:

1) Toilet paper perforated squares do not have to be used individually.

2) Fire doors should be kept closed, but you can still use them.

3) The cotton doesn't need to be stuffed back into the pill jar.

4) A pickle used to be a cucumber.

5) Chocolate truffles don't actually have mushrooms in them.

6) Islands aren't floating.

7) There are more than three types of people in the world.

8) We ARE stardust.

9) Your attitude, focus, and the types of questions you ask yourself on a daily basis DETERMINE your reality.

10) Our sight really consists of an hypothesis - an interpretation of the data we see.

Ahhhh, feels good to grab my big rocks again! Scrounged some from the front garden while landscaping, so I can finally get back to stacking in our almost-finished back yard. Also on the rock vein, below are some screen grabs from video of a recent gig by my band, The Mid-Life Crisis.

Thanks for your emails. I will definitely get back to stacking shortly. The photos below show the state of our back yard at present. We have removed the sloped concrete driveway and will be landscaping shortly. I'll be able to bring in some rocks once our patio has the pavers in. In the meantime, check out these rocks! Our new view from the back deck is awesome.

So I've been working and working with this brick to balance it over the last few days, for what seems like hours, to no avail. All the while, the process has still been purposeful, intense, meditative, cathartic. Then during our garage sale this weekend, I looked at it again (in between bartering with old ladies over $0.25 or $0.50 for the paperback novels). within fifteen seconds it stuck. Freakish. So all said - a few hours and fifteen seconds, but I like it.

Have just finished reading "Breaking Open the Head", by Daniel Pinchbeck. He started a journey as a result of having internalized the modern scientific view of a world lacking a sacred or transcendent dimension."

After seeing "What the Bleep...", after experiencing the death of family members, after connecting with others with psychic abilities, after reading from authors with supposed knowledge from other "realms" (e.g. "Seth", "Abraham" series, Pinchbeck) I have begun a journey towards a different kind of understanding of the world around me - both physical and metaphysical. So far, this journey has produced little in the way of answers, but a wealth of interesting questions. So many disparate sources have been pointing to the "thought creates reality" paradigm.

From "What the Bleep do we Know?" (via Daniel Pinchbeck at http://nonprophet.typepad.com/nonprophet/2005/11/guest_blogger_d.html):

Amit Goswami had a lot of interesting commentary in this film: "Everything in the material world around us are just possible movements of consciousness, and you choose moment to moment out of those movements to bring your actual experience into manifestation - this is the only radical thinking you need to do. It's not easy because of our conditioning (that the world is already out there, independent of our experience) IT'S NOT - Quantum Physics has been so clear about this. Atoms are not things, they are only tendencies. Instead of thinking about things, think of possibilities. Possibilities of consciousness."

Others have argued that the rules being discussed are applicable only at the subatomic level, and can't apply to the macrocosm, but to disregard the possibility is suicidal.

I am going to be searching out new stone after we move to our new place. It seems that you can start off with combinations that seem impossible at first, but with patience and intention, it happens. I'm challenging myself with this set when I get the time.

Well, the chaos of buying/selling a home has subsided briefly, and I have snuck out back to stack.

Please scroll down to see photos of recent rock balancing sessions.


Some more from "One River" (Wade Davis) in a chapter referring to the incredible masonry feats of the Peoples of the Andes at the time of the Spanish conquest/genocide.

For the Runkana, the people of the Andes, matter is fluid. Bones are not death, but life crystallized, and thus potent sources of energy, like a stone charged by lightning or a plant brought into being by the sun...when an Inca mason placed his hands on rock, he did not feel cold granite, he sensed life, the power and resonance of the earth within the stone. Its transformation into a perfect ashlar or a block of polygonal masonry was service to the Inca and thus a gesture to the gods, and for such a task, time had no meaning.
If stones were dynamic, it was because they were part of the land...the earth is alive and every wrinkle on the landscape, every hill and outcrop, each mountain and stream has a name and is imbued with ritual significance.

Man...it is impossible, I mean im-possible to escape a conversation about real estate in this city. I am absolutely sick of people's obsession with this topic. It reflects the immaturity of the city as a whole when every cafe, water-cooler discussion is about the 'ridiculous' price of homes these days. Those who own a place and bought before the 'upswing/bubble/hot market' are almost masturbatory about their new-found equity and wonder what to do with it all - "...a place in the burbs?" "...sell and rent?" Those outside the bubble looking in are awaiting the inevitable 'pop'. At which time they will swoop in and scoop up homes at bargain basement prices. They also await the interest rate rise, where those who are maxed-out will be driven to the poor house, unable to carry their own debt load....blah,blah,blah. Owners and renters alike scouring realty porn web sites nightly. Building starts statistics, property tax increase statistics...Is there nothing more important going on in this town besides buying houses and preparing for Olympic games?

And then there's the realtors. If I get one more pad of paper/recipe postcard/pen/metric conversion fridge magnet with a head shot of some bloated salesmachine on it, I'm gonna.....I....I....I'm going out back to do some rock balancing.


BTW- We just bought a new house! I'm so excited.