THE BRAVE NEW LAND

A lot of stuff has been going on in the world, but since it hasn’t been much of a pretty-picture (to-say-the-least), I have an unrelated and extremely trivial question for you. Do you know where the word ‘blog’ came from? Well, I didn’t, but I looked it up and it turns out to be a squished version of ‘web log,’ becoming ‘blog.’ You know, I think I learned that once, a long time ago, but I guess I just forgot it. That, my friends, was my segue into this week’s subject: Why is the buzz in buzzwords light-years away from reality anyways? The problem, it seems, is that some of these ‘buzzwords’ out there now-a-days take on a meaning-of-their-own and then, regardless of whether we know what they mean or not, we use them until we are blue-in-the-face; um... maybe just to sound like we’ve been-around-the-block once-or-twice.    Honestly, it reminds me of the clicky school-yard, where you had to be part of the ‘in-crowd’ or you were ‘a-nobody.’ I remember, back-in-the-day, that I tri...

Life seems, sometimes, to be manifesting a friggin war... on so many levels. Analogously, it’s getting to the point that skipping rocks in the sea of life is close to impossible. I mean, to skip a rock the ‘right’ way, you need to have perfect glass conditions. Nowadays, the sea of life looks like the surface of Venus, having been green-housed into highly pressurized toxic methane heat storms, swarming across the surface of our collective consciousness. Think about it; when you throw a rock, intending it to glide and, hence, skip across the surface of the sea, it makes all kinds of little calamitous catastrophes every time it contacts the water. The ripples from the rock expand out and the more skips, the more ripples there are. The more ripples, the less glass. The less glass, the more confused we all get, and the more desperate we all get for a breath of fresh air, without all the hot methane ineptitude of our perceived realities! As a kid, when I would paddle out on my custom shaped...

I have been having some trouble sleeping at night. It seems that every time I dose-off, for multiple nights in a row now, something wakes me up, whether it’s the dogs barking at a potential intruder or a random shocking thought that rolls through my subconscious mind. There is a lot going on in my life now, in terms of relationships with people that are close to me, so maybe that’s what it is. Things like my eldest son going into the army this week and my youngest son having been away at technology camp for (going on) two weeks now (I miss him a lot). Things, as well, like, having to take my eldest son to the hospital to check out some kind of stomach pain and a swollen something-or-other to be ultra-sounded and things like my mom, who lives on the other side of the planet and has been battling cancer, collapsing and going back into the hospital. This later complexity really seems to mess up my Zen; or let’s just call it, for lack of completeness to the whole eastern philosophy thing (...

I tried to explain to some of my work colleagues, the German Christian Zionists, the other day, how it is that God could have created both the ‘good’ in the world as well as the ‘bad’ in the world. I know you are all enlightened and don’t need such a simple explanation, but for the sake of the title of this blog alone, I feel I need to elaborate. I used the simple analogy of God holding his hand in front of a light bulb, causing shadows to fall on a wall, where we, simple two dimensional ignoranimuses, happen to live. It was a difficult analogy for these folks to catch, since they believe that there is a kind of duality in the world between a malevolently black evil and a brilliantly white good and they tend to discard completely the grays and sloppy moss covered joinery connecting the two. At the end of a somewhat exasperating conversation, they seemed to comprehend, but the next day I found myself beleaguered with questions... and unremittingly so. I think that ultimately, I seemed t...