THE BRAVE NEW LAND

Quite often, when I sit down to write one of these blog entries, I swear under my breath, since my laptop is almost 10 years old and has become somewhat of a ‘hated’ machine. I purchased the thing from Costco (when they still had the return policy intact on computers), but ended up lugging it with me to Israel when I moved anyways. This computer has been through a lot. I used to strap it to my back, while pulling Cody, my three legged dog, in a Burley trailer behind my full suspension mountain bike (another antique that I still use) in Boulder, on my way back and forth to work at my custom cabinet shop. I never fell, but Cody did once. He tried to chase a prairie-dog and pogoed out of the trailer, but since he was leashed in with a harness, the trailer just flipped over on top of him. When I looked back, I thought he had snapped the leash and run away, since he was thoroughly hidden by the turtle-shell of a trailer, running along beneath the upended red and yellow thing that was now ...

Now that we all know that we don’t really exist (assuming that you have been following along), we can move on to more important things, like how we can have the most joy in life and how we can avoid the pitfalls of poor decisions. Yeah, sounds just like a parental lecture; doesn’t it? Actually, I don’t really remember too many of those ‘parental lectures’ growing up. In a lot of ways, I grew up in a vacuum (not a dust sucking machine, but the vacuum of space). I didn’t get the ‘birds and bees talk,’ for instance, until I had already been singing with the birds for a few years and had been stung by a few bees too... Maybe it was the radical difference between my parent’s generation and mine. After all, they may have looked like hippies, with their long hair, beard and ponytail, loose clothing, and general ‘free-love appearance,’ but, for all practical purposes, they acted like they were on the set of Leave it to Beaver. My dad, beard and all, even drove this great, custom VW van (real...

 Space and Time: Finite Reality is Born into Non-existence... Having jetlag is like living in another dimension. I could swear that over the last week I saw rainbow trails in the air, as I turned my head this way and that. Often, my feet were behind me and reacted to my mind’s sluggish commands as if slung from a rubber-band-gun with all the sound effects reverberating in slow motion. I tried to work the day I returned from my emotion-filled flat-line adventure, only to find that it was like swimming under water fully dressed and wearing rubber galoshes. I know you have all experienced this—other dimensional feeling—whether from jetlag or other sorted endeavors; it reminded me of my youth, while exploring the cosmos from the confines of the straitjacket of physicality. It also reminds me of a few amazing occasions when I learned something about the Universe, while walking with a distant hazy view of the hills of Judea and Samaria, listening to Rabbi Ipod (R.I.P. Steve Jobs) an...