A friend of ours who has just about completed a house she’s building invited my little family over to be part of the blessing ceremony she had arranged. She’s a Buddhist, I can’t remember if she started with the Zen tradition and moved toward Tibetan or the other way around. Anyway, there are some visiting Tibetan monks in town, and it can be arranged that they come to your home to bless and purify it as well as anyone within it. (more…)

I just read an interesting article in Wired Magazine called The Critics Need a Reboot. The Internet Hasn’t Led Us Into a New Dark Age. It’s not one of their 20-page epics, it’s more of an editorial piece. The premise is that “the experts” are all atwitter about how computers and technology and video games are making us dumb.

I’ll spoil the ending; it’s still worth a read. The answer is that they’re not. (more…)

I’ve confirmed that a new generation of angst dreams have started. My family’s in them now, but I don’t know why it should change now as they’ve never been in them before. They still don’t cause the angst for the most part, just typical “But that’s not what I want to eat” type stuff. I’ll probably figure out something. (more…)

I’ve been a pretty enthusiastic outdoor cook for the last couple years; I’ve always loved it, but living in New York and New Jersey in apartments limited my opportunities. Not as much as I would have thought, but that’s another story. (more…)

I’m not a nightmare-haver. I’m not an ecstatic flying-with-dolphins dream haver. Most of the time I have dreams, they’re usually angst of some sort. I’ll have a dream where I’m back in college and miss the deadline for dropping classes and have to catch up in some class I never intended to take. Or endless long beurocratic lines somewhere, each of which proves incorrect. Or realizing I have left for a meeting or class, so I’m going to be 10 minutes late no matter what I do. Nothing terrifying, just not pleasant. I even went through a period where I dreamed I was awake all night. I’d wake up exhausted, and it took me a while to catch on. (more…)

I’ve been reading a compilation of Hopi stories called Hopi Stories of Witchcraft, Shamanism, and Magic. It’s mostly been a lot of fun, and the stories come straight from transcriptions of Hopi storytellers hoping to document their endangered oral tradition. There are some puzzling editing choices; I’ve come across 3 sets of stories that are almost identical and separated by a couple of chapters, but given the author and editor’s apparent qualifications and reverence for the Hopi culture, I’m reluctant to attribute it to any sloppiness, I just haven’t discovered the logic behind it. I haven’t spotted the important differences, but that doesn’t mean they’re not there. I hate to catch myself yadda-yaddaing through 20,000 year old stories, it may very well be that the little things that matter greatly in a context like this, so I will tiptoe around the idea that I haven’t been patient enough to A/B the similar tales to spot the important differences that justified keeping both versions. (more…)

As I do whenever I broach a not-totally-male topic, I must start by insecurely pointing out that I watch kung fu movies, drink lots of beer, and have fathered a human baby with a real woman, and I will only eat quiche if I’m allowed to refer to it as Egg Pie. I know the names of lots of cars, I like to start fires, and have more than one friend who rides a motorcycle. So I’m cool. Really.

That being said, I love hummingbirds. (more…)

It’s been a quiet afternoon, in that my wife and daughter have been out, but it’s been pouring torrents and thundering. We need the rain, so I actually enjoy “monsoon season,” as the locals call it. I had the bright idea that I should block off the back little garden area so the dogs wouldn’t go back there, it becomes a total mud pit with just a little rain and the dogs track it all over the house. I looked out my bedroom window, and sure enough, Sheba and Loki were just walking around eating grass and/or laying in the bog.  (more…)

I skipped my 20th high school reunion that happened last weekend. I had somewhat mixed feelings about it, but not 50/50 mixed, more like 5/95. Some small part of me was almost morbidly curious about it, but the rest of me has already been in Portland recently, and it’s hard to get away from work for stuff I genuinely want to do, much less a markedly ambivalent happening like this. I don’t remember the names of people I met last Sunday at our friend’s barbecue, so 20 years seems like a stretch. And the pragmatic part of me figures that if I haven’t been in at least occasional touch with someone during some tiny portion of the last 20 years, maybe there’s not much to talk about anyway. (more…)