Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Getting a GD Wacom tablet working in Windows Vista with a Keyspan USB adapter
It is highly likely no one will ever care, but it took me a couple of hours webcrawling and researching to find the building blocks that eventually allowed me to get my old Wacom tablet working in Vista, so I thought I would save the next poor soul some searching and put the entire procedure in one place.
Despite what Wacom would have us believe, a Wacom Intuos GD generation graphics tablet, which uses a serial interface, can be made to work in Windows Vista using a serial-to-USB adapter. In my case, the tablet is an Intuos GD1212R, a first generation Intuos that has served me well for years, the adapter is a Keyspan USA-19HS (available at Amazon for about $30 at the time of this writing), and the OS is Vista x86(32-bit). This procedure may or may not work with Vista x64, so your mileage may vary.
First thing to do is purchase a Keyspan serial-to-USB adapter. You can buy single or multi-port parts, but I picked up the single port solution, part number USA-19HS. This is a high-speed converter that receives predominantly good reviews at every retailer that carries them. Once the adapter is in your hands, head over to Keyspan's homepage and navigate to the appropriate drivers page for your OS via their downloads link. Windows Vista 32-bit drivers can be found here. The latest driver is 3.7 at the time of this writing.
Once the driver has been downloaded, execute KeyspanUSA19hsWinV37S.exe and allow the installer to do its thing. At this point, connect the adapter and confirm that it appears in Device Manager (Start->Control Panel->Device Manager) under COM/Printer ports. It should show up as Keyspan USA-19HS or similar, and should have an active COM port assigned(no exclamation marks)…Windows chose COM5 for mine. Now it's time to pick up both the v4.93-3 Windows 2000/XP, and v6.05-7 Vista driver files for the GD-series tablets from Wacom's driver database. The 4.93-3 driver can be found here, and 6.05-7 is located here.
All the necessary hardware and software are now at your disposal. Disable Windows Defender (Start->Control Panel->Windows Defender->Tools->Options->Adminstrator Options->uncheck the "Use Windows Defender" radio button) and restart the computer. Once the machine has settled in, connect your Wacom tablet to the serial port adapter, turn it on, and cancel Windows' driver installation wizard. This is the point where we Install driver version 4.93-3. Vista may give you a warning about unsigned drivers or unverified publisher, tell it to fuck off(literally, say it out loud), and forge ahead. Once the driver install has completed, navigate to your system32 directory (C:\Windows\System32 on most machines) and locate the "tablet.dat". Copy this to your desktop (Jesus help you if you don't know how to do this), and uninstall the 4.93-3 drivers (Start->Control Panel->Programs and Features->Wacom Tablet->Uninstall).
At this point, the only file you should have on your system pertaining to the tablet are its driver executables and tablet.dat. Cut and paste tablet.dat back into the system32 directory, then execute the 6.05-7 installer. Allow the installer to run, and verify that the Wacom control panel utility is appearing in the Control Panel menu (Start->Control Panel->Wacom Tablet). The tablet should also appear in Device Manager without any conflicts (Start->Control Panel->Device Manager->Human Interface Devices->Wacom HID Digitizer/Wacom HID Pen/Wacom Virtual HID Driver). Finally, grab your Intuos stylus and move it over the tablet surface. If it works, turn the tablet off and back on, then try again. Assuming everything is still functioning, reactivate Windows Defender, and restart the machine. You should be ready to rock and roll with complete pen/tablet functionality, you lucky bastard you!
Grab a beer and give yourself a pat on the back, as you've just saved $300-700 you would have otherwise spent on a new, USB-compatible tablet. Any problems or issues, do not email or contact me in any way. The web is a glorious and wondrous place to search and explore, so get to searching and exploring. Thanks for reading and enjoy your steak!
UPDATE: It appears that Vista SP1 has somehow broken my tablet's functionality. I have tried uninstalling and reinstalling all hardware and software, but to no avail. The tablet will be recognized for a few minutes, then cease responding, even though the tablet and USB adapter LEDs continue to show activity. My advice at this point is to get your hands on a copy of XP and be done with Vista forever, or buy a USB Intuos3 tablet. Vista is garbage, but my motherboard requires it, so it looks like I am stuck. Hopefully, you are not in the same unfortunate position.
Labels: miscellaneous
Monday, January 28, 2008
Ideas are viral
Ideas are viral. Good ones, bad ones, and the vast multitude of useless ones interspersed between, all have the potential to spread like influenza. A good idea can supplant centuries of bad ones, atomic energy, for example, and ultimately become a bad idea all its own. Sometimes bad ideas come good in time, Xerox giving away its GUI based operating system to Apple, who subsequently let Gill Gates and Microsoft have a look. For better or worse, Microsoft and Apple fueled the proliferation of personal computing, which made things like interweb access possible and navigating your computer via a GUI beats the living shit out of typing run, go, and change directory commands, believe me!
Ideas spread like diseases. I'm not the first to suggest it, not the first he think it, and certainly not the first to have the idea to write about it, but here I am, writing about it anyway. Going to the moon was an idea, just as entering ancient Greece through the pass at Thermopylae was an idea. The slave trade was an idea, just as all men being created equal was an idea. Ideas can be immensely powerful, even when their authors or credited orginators are intrinsically flawed.
When a slave owner writes, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness", one is moved to wonder what the fuck is wrong with our species, but the author's failing of character do nothing to diminish the power of his ascribed ideas. In this way, ideas are bigger than their creators, often times becoming something more massive and potentially dangerous than the original authors might have ever imagined. Eugenics seemed like a grand idea to its creators. Little did they know that the Third Reich would use such ideas as the basis of their extermination agenda during World War II. Money, the only tangible god modern Man knows, is nothing more than an idea.
Ideas can expand our minds, and send a chill down our spines. Ideas compel us, direct us, and ultimately control us. In a very real way, our physical selves are nothing more than ideas we conjure within our active awareness from moment to moment. We are little more than internalized abstractions floating somewhere between who we think we are, who others think we are, and who we want to be. Natalie Portman's character Evey Hammond in V for Vendetta ponders the power of ideas thusly, "We are told to remember the idea, not the man. Because a man can fail. He can be caught. He can be killed and forgotten. I've witnessed firsthand the power of ideas. I've seen people kill in the name of them; and die defending them."
Unfortunately, I have no idea why I felt the need to write this little blurb about ideas, but I feel better having recorded it. I have an idea for a self-portrait in graphite that I am waiting for some reference to start, so I had a little time to burn.
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Now playing: Alice In Chains - Angry Chair
http://foxytunes.com/artist/alice+in+chains/track/angry+chair
Labels: nonsensical rambling
Sunday, January 27, 2008
10,000 Years
According to scientists gathered by The History Channel to contribute opinion and theory for their Life After People program, it would take Mother Nature 10,000 years to completely erase any obvious evidence of Man's presence on this Earth. Were we to vanish tomorrow, most of our structures, machines, and mechanisms will be rubble or be reclaimed by nature within 150 years of our vanishing. By 500 years, most cities would be unrecognizable as cities at all, and 1,000 years after a sudden human extinction, there would be nearly no trace of our existence beyond massive objects like Hoover Dam, the Great Wall of China, and a massive sand dune covering the Great Pyramid.
It's an interesting coalition of theories. The show suggested that we might see lush wildernesses and even rivers where cities like New York and Chicago now stand by 5,000 years. The Hoover Dam would probably hold for nearly 10,000 years, but it too would eventually crumble, freeing the Colorado River to resume its natural flow. The oceans would flourish and thrive without our overfishing and depositing of billions of gallons of sewage into its seemingly endless waters. One scientist noted that humans simultaneously treat the oceans as a toilet and a food pantry and I laughed at the obvious and honest irony.
I have to say, this is one of History Channel's most interesting programs ever, which is saying quite a lot. They head out to the Chernobyl zone (outlying cities and villages, as I think the area immediately surrounding the plant is still too toxic) in order to get a feel for what 20 years of total human absence can do to a city. Already, wild life populations were exploding and plants were finding ways to compromise and destroy the cities buildings. Seeing the level of decay that occurs in only 2 decades, caused by an event I clearly remember watching on the news, is impressive, and in some ways reassuring.
Man's time here is temporary, both in the micro and the macro context. As they mentioned in the show, if the entire history of the planet were to be condensed into 24 hours, our species time on this planet would account for less than 30 seconds. All of human recorded history would be a fraction of that and the modern era would be shorter still. We often worry, or at least let other worry, about the long-term effects of our perpetually adversarial relationship with the world around us, but in just 10,000 years, most, if not all, of the damage and work we've done as a species could be totally erased. In geologic time, 10,000 years truly is nothing.
The irony is, people championing the cause to save the planet should really be talking about saving the species. The planet will persevere and continue its monotonous march around the Sun until the start burns itself out, or a massive object knocks it out of that orbit/obliterates it outright. But our species does not have the longevity or collective potential to last that long. We reproduce like bacteria and show no signs of slowing down, even with famines breaking out in numerous locales around the globe. We play with weapons that could literally erase nearly all of the planet's larger life forms in a matter of minutes, and show no sign of giving them up. Honestly, there are serious questions surrounding the next 100 years of human habitation on the planet...10,000 more almost seems absurd.
So eventually the species will no longer be able to maintain its many creations. Eventually, 6,000 or so years worth of work will be completely erased or overrun by Mother Nature. Ther's something beautiful and completely amazing in that. Mother Nature's patience is near limitless and really, in many ways, she is simply biding her time at this point. I find the idea fascinating and even a little inspiring.
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Now playing: Tool - Ænema
http://foxytunes.com/artist/tool/track/AEnema
Labels: life or the lack thereof
I need to get out more
Nothing much to say today, so I'll throw some bad poetry against the wall and see what happens.
low they will crush us
with heavy hands,
boot heels stony steel.
they will smash and grind
these fragile bones,
smooshing even those genteel
spirits high and hopeful;
and they will smile
like children plucking eyes
where once they pulled wings.
they will blow down the flies
as if this were a birthday celebration,
all the while grinning broadly,
toothy Hollywood grins
pearlescent in the raging sun.
they will smile and smolder
as it all returns to dust.
Anyway, here's an interesting vid I found about some "high" art stuff that went down decades ago. De Kooning was a huge name, Rauschenberg wasn't, but after he erased one of de Kooning's pieces, he became one. Enjoy!
And here's a link to a World War I soldier's sketchbook. I haven't looked at all the images yet, but what I have seen was very compelling.
Labels: huh
Friday, January 25, 2008
Hopeless romanticism? Bleh...
One thing I have not ever had much skill with has been inserting myself into a female's awareness, i.e. introducing myself to a strange girl I'm interesting in. It's not that I'm shy, it's just a skill I did not ever fully hone. The crux of the problem is in that moment when the decision is made to force yourself into a girl's attention. I am not capable of using lines, but I always wanted to avoid coming off as "just another guy hitting on a girl". Unfortunately, I haven't ever been able to come up with a more clever way of making a first impression. On extremely rare occasions, it is as simple as walking up and introducing myself, but normally there are problems with time and place and circumstance. Labels: nonsensical rambling
For instance, a new face appeared around the office recently; cute girl, 20-something, no obvious signs of marriage. We crossed paths a couple of times, she smiled, I smiled, that sort of thing, but I just feel no motivation to stop her on her travels and start a conversation. Maybe it's just that I am getting old, but something tells me the real issue lies within my perceptions and attitude. I have not ever been an aggressive pursuer of women, so I haven't ever done those things our elders talk about...like repeatedly asking a girl out who keeps refusing or stopping into somewhere I don't have to be, just to see a girl. That sort of thing just doesn't fit into my sense of reality. On top of all that, there is a pronounced scarcity of women I would want to pursue, so you have a recipe for lots of shoulder shrugging and social retardation. I am finding that, as I grow older, I am becoming more and more comfortable being alone and the very idea of the chase is becoming completely unappealing.
So making an introduction almost seems pointless at this stage. I'm confident enough to believe that getting past the initial "hello my name is" with a single girl means I will almost certainly get her number, with a better than average chance of getting a first date, but then what? Another date, learn some more about her..another date, learn more…then another, learn some things I probably don't want to know and here's where things usually start to derail. On one hand, most girls seem to be expecting at least a kiss and/or grope attempt by date 3. By date 4 or 5 or 6, I'm still trying to figure out if this is someone I want to spend more time with. In this enlightened age of Wal-Mart sex where the most sacred of physical acts is cheap and getting cheaper
At some point people decide they are boyfriend and girlfriend, thus beginning what more often than not seems to become an endless string of drama, fucking, fighting, complacency, splitting, getting back together, and so on and so forth. Very rarely do two people come together, gel, and stay together in what I understand to be a happy, healthy relationship, which is to say, a relationship where both people are equals enjoying each other's mental, physical, and spiritual company. No cheesy "happily ever after" nonsense, I'm talking about two people connected on those three fundamental levels who are simply enjoying each other. That seems like a happy outcome to me, but it so rarely happens(never?) that most people seem to have dismissed the possibility of experiencing it outright.
At some point, I started to look at the situation and think to myself, "what the fuck is wrong here". It was hard to see waiting and getting to know someone as a bad idea, so I became pretty confident that I wasn't the primary antagonist in these particular life dramas. Once I crossed that Delaware, it was only a matter of time before I started questioning the value of the whole process in general.
I suck at Photoshop, but I'm learning:
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Possibly the coolest thing I have seen all week (no pun intended)
Ken Block is making a name for himself with his Subaru Group N rally car. This video, which is tied to some DC Shoes promotion, looks like an assload of fun...until the end. Apparently he ruined the car and fractured a vertabra. D'oh! Still, definitely good enough stuff for me. :)
Labels: video
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Built a new PC, bought Vista, not unhappy about it
So I built a new computer this past week, complete with a fresh install of (the infamous) Windows Vista Ultimate. The computer components came from Newegg.com, and the OS was sourced from a buddy who had a hook-up on legit, OEM Ultimate discs. It had been over three years since my last PC build, so it was time for a refresh. Of course, with a new OS install comes some hassles, i.e. having to rebuild registry information for the programs you had previously installed, finding compatible drivers for any hardware you carry over from another system, etc, but all told, this install went relatively smooth…once I got it started.
I ended up making the leap to Vista not because I wanted to, as I would rather hit myself in the face with a hammer than abandon my rock solid install of Windows 2000, but the motherboard I am using required XP/Vista to function, the Vista upgrade was the same price as a XP upgrade, and the DirectX 10 graphics cards I'm using needed Vista's reworked graphics subsystem to perform at their full potential. Thankfully, I remembered my friend's connection…after wasting 2 hours driving around town trying to find a decently priced Vista upgrade disc and failing miserably. Thankfully, it all worked out in the end, since I was able to pick up a full version of Ultimate for little more than I would have paid for a retail, Basic upgrade. Exciting, right? F*@K YEAH!!
Funny, related story: I was reestablishing my bookmarks in Firefox (before remembering that I still had access to my old bookmarks file) and was visiting some of my favorite/daily sites on a mission to get them all added back into my bookmarks list. Unfortunately, I miskeyed one of them, namely www.gorillamask.net. I typed www.gorillamask.com, which is a porn Wiki of some kind, apparently. When Hardcorepedia's homepage, which features a large image of a girl seductively caressing another girl's naked ass cheeks front and center, appeared in my browser window instead of Gorilla Mask's familiar front page, I was just a little surprised. What was more surprising was mom popping in the room to give me an update on her computer's network status. It was a priceless moment and I couldn't help but laugh.
I'm a guy, once in a while I have to look at naked chicks on the internets, but having mom think that I am sitting in my room, casually browsing porn in the middle of the day, creates such a simultaneously amusing and pathetic image that I could not stop myself from laughing out loud. There's no certainty that she even saw anything, but the potential that she might have was enough. Renting a room from one's parents is massively destructive to one's dignity. lol
So what are my initial impressions of Vista? Well, things certainly appear to be much better now that the OS is a year old. I have only one driver problem, and that really isn't the OS's fault. Intel abandoned a serial-to-USB converter I use to connect my Wacom graphics tablet to modern PCs, so there is no longer any support available from the manufacturer. Otherwise, the install and initial setup went off with no real hitches. My biggest problem was getting the motherboard to POST, but a quick CMOS reset cleared the way for things to proceed.
The OS interface itself is much more visually attractive than anything I have seen in Windows previously. The Aero theme mimics Mac's glass backed/clear windows from OS/X forward. I must admit, the visual effect is pleasing to the eye. Control Panel was totally reworked, and my first impression is that the new control modules are easier to use and more intuitive, though there is definitely a learning curve after making the jump from Win2k. Along with a lot of bloat and fluff, Vista Ultimate does give you access to one particularly interesting extra not available to Basic, Premium, and Business users. Dreamscenes, which are animated desktop wallpapers - think mpegs instead of jpegs and bitmaps - that provide a strangely impressive element to Vista's graphical presentation. Instead of a static image, the desktop displays a looped animation, so you can have a waterfall or a shimmering Aurora as your background image. I'm not big on useless filler, but this particular extravagance really does add some value to the whole experience of using Vista.
Of course, the OS is a resource pig, but assuming you have a machine with moderate-to-high hardware spec, it's really not a problem. On my machine, I typically see 600-700MB of RAM being occupied by general OS operations, but most of that is due to Vista's reduced reliance on swap files, which necessitates a larger RAM footprint. With the hardware in my machine, which is aggressive, but not bleeding edge, I have no trouble running numerous apps at once, including games like Half-Life 2 while other apps run in the background. Losing the swap file and using more RAM actually speeds things up, so I wasn't sad to see the old way of doing things finally removed from the OS.
It almost pains me to admit it, but I have to say that Vista actually impressed me. The biggest beef I have with the OS is its constant security nagging and confirmations, but those can be turned off. I've only been using it for a few days, so I haven't had a chance to dig too deeply, but so far, things seem to be at least as stable and responsive as my old Win2k box. After some tweaking, things should only get better.
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Now playing: Tool - You Lied [Live]
via FoxyTunes
Labels: computers
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Influences schminfluences
I am taking a crash course in identifying my influences. Being an aspiring artist means having artistic influences, much as being alive means having life influences. Everyone who makes marks, sculpts, writes, etc has at least one influence. For most of my life, I haven't given any of mine much thought. For the most part, art has been something I have not taken very seriously in a long, long time. Drawing and writing were always just things I did to vent or pass time. The thought of being an artist disappeared from my priority list around the time I turned 18, and so went any focused interest in artists and their work. When I look back, I think I will have many reasons to regret my 20s, my near abandonment of art being one of the most glaring.
So I haven't given much thought to who I would consider influences for over a decade. I know that I would like to make images like this and pull it off successfully, but a part of me is drawn to stuff like this and this and this and this. I'm all over the place, and the feeling is simultaneously freeing, in that I like who I like from every end of the spectrum, but troubling, in that my interests are everywhere and nowhere at the same time. More troubling is that I am not getting any younger, and the idea that my best creative years, if I ever have/had any creative years, may very well be lost somewhere in that decade-plus spent away from art. People say I have talent, but nothing I do impresses me and that seems to be the core of really enjoying art, impressing one's self. You never really know if people are just patronizing you, or just being polite. After all, praise is just words and words are fleeting things. I think the key to really creating something, to really feeling good about something I've created, will be that moment when I look at a piece and get the undeniable feeling of satisfaction that comes from being certain you have achieved something.
So far, in art and in most of my life, I find that such a sense of satisfaction is usually lacking. Nothing I do impresses me, because anything I can do just doesn't seem impressive. The situation is a paradox of sorts, or maybe it is a sign that what I do is nothing worth talking about. I am always more impressed with other peoples' work than my own, but I am not sure that this isn't the natural state of affairs. After all, what we do is rarely, if ever, going to seem impressive, because anything we can do is going to seem less impressive for the simple fact that we have done it. Unless you are at the absolute peak of your field or profession, there will be someone whose work impresses you. The ironic twist is that once a person reaches the proverbial top, the only place to go is down. But where was I going with all this…
Oh yeah, influences…most of my heaviest influences as a youth were from the comic book world. Names like Todd McFarlane and Marc Silvestri were much more familiar and dear to me as a child than Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, or any of the other American giants of the 20th century. I enjoyed Dali's work, but most "serious" art people do not take Dali very seriously, so it would seem that I gravitated toward "low", or even "low brow" work. Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, and Donatello were just Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles(as drawn by Eastman and Laird, not the hokey, cartoonish crap that would later take the proletariat by storm) to me until my teens. Francis Bacon, whose work I am becoming more obsessed with, was not a name I even knew, outside of Sir Francis Bacon, who was quite a different man than his distant, contemporary namesake. I enjoyed looking at the work of Van Gogh, but always thought of him as the 'crazy artist that cut off his ear for some girl', and missed the power in his work as a result.
But we change as we age. I still love those old comic book artists, but I must admit that I do not see myself as someone who will one day be in the comic book or illustration field. I still have no affections for the work of Warhol, Pollock, or most 20th century, American artists, but that's not to say that I do not have a better appreciation of artists like Michelangelo, Da Vinci, and Van Gogh. Some of my tastes still venture into so-called "low brow" art, but I see little differentiation between low and high art. We live in a world where folk art is breaking into major museums and galleries. The difference between high and low art is being blurred, which is a good thing. People always seek to establish hierarchy in an effort to stroke their own egos, but in the end, hierarchy and superiority are little more than figments of our collective imaginations.
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Now playing: Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - Upon This Tidal Wave of Young Blood
via FoxyTune
Labels: art
Sunday, January 13, 2008
The new Corvette ZR1 is going to be NASTY!
GM is really impressing me with what they have done to the Corvette. The new Camaro looks cool, though I think it has lost too much of the attitude displayed in the concepts, but this ZR-1...good golly Ms. Molly this sumbitch looks to be wicked fast and for tens of thousands(if not hundreds of thousands) less than similar performing Porsches, boutique builds, and Ferraris. Looks like I'm failing my would-be Buddhist lifestyle once again! :)
Labels: cars
Thursday, January 10, 2008
I am monotony
Sticking with the "I am" trend I have going on lately, I wanted to take a second to recognize the fact that I am something of a monotony machine. Our friends at Mirriam-Webster define monotony thusly:
1 : tedious sameness
2 : sameness of tone or sound
I do not feel that it is a self-defaming or demoralizing thing to recognize and admit that I exhibit largely monotonous tendencies in both my choice of topics and the tone in which I address them. The things that bother me when I write about them very likely bothered me for days, weeks, and years before I ever typed words in their directions and will almost certainly continue to bother me for days, weeks, and years to come. There will always be fecked up people, places, and things in our lives, which means there will always be something digging into the tender flesh between my fingernails.
Thankfully, there are also sources of goodness in this life. The past weekend saw my brother, the SIL, and The Twins come into town and we had a great time hanging out. Ava and Evelyn were a year old this past Saturday, so the family gathered up for a birthday party. The Twins partook in presents and Evelyn managed to smash her cake so thoroughly that it was barely recognizable. Ava needed a little help, but her cake was adequately demolished in short order. The SIL put together a nice little shindig, complete with a pinata for her sister's sons. Good times, even if I was hungover from partaking in a little too much whiskey the night before.
A little touch of randomness...this video morphing Van Gogh's self-portraits in a series
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Now playing: Sly & The Family Stone - Dance To The Music
via FoxyTunes
Labels: life
Tuesday, January 08, 2008
I'm probably becoming an art asshole
What is an art asshole? I would define an art asshole as someone who sees, or claims to see, art in nearly everything, then feels the need to share what he sees with others, as if what he's seeing is somehow more important than what they see. For instance, I watched the below video on Boing Boing and thought to myself, "What a beautiful metaphor for the general state of modern Man's social conscience. The bottle works nicely as a visual representation of some significant social problem facing humanity today, say the AIDS epidemic in Africa, or the growing national debt. Some people ignore it, others kick it away (unconcerned that it will become someone else's problem), and a few play with it, even try to put it upright, but generally the problem persists and continues rolling around amongst them."
Then I thought to myself, "No asshole, it's a bottle rolling around an L train in New York, set to an admittedly beautiful song. Fucking world problems...get over yourself."
And so it goes. I may be losing my battle with my own pretense(in reality, I fear I probably lost it years ago). Hopefully the two or three people reading this will forgive me when I eventually collapse completely into myself and become a virtual black hole of artistic pretentiousness, sucking in information through my senses, then spouting overly intellectualized bullshit from my mouth and out my proverbial ass.
All that said, I really do think this is a nicely done short film. Seeing New York from the floor and windows of a subway car makes me dread the thought of living in a megalopolis. What good could a backward thinking, wannabe-guru from the suburbs be in a place where trash rolls around at peoples' feet? No one has 3 seconds to pick it up and throw it away? Fucking hell...
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Now playing: Jeff Buckley - Hallelujah
via FoxyTunes
Labels: video
I'm just as lost as anybody
For some reason, I can't stop thinking about the fact that, no matter how high we rise or low we sink on life's imagined totem pole hierarchy, we are all equal in the end. Some of us will go peacefully, some of us will be taken horribly, but in the end, our bodies will all eventually fail. Buddhism uses this as evidence of the insignificance of our physical incarnation. Physical life is temporary and any perceived significance it might have(as a product of the egotistical mind) is illusory. Taoism tends to look at death as more or less a non-event, since life and death are essentially irrelevant to the spiritual truth of the Tao.
The idea is that oneness is the only truth, and the divisions we experience in life are muted by its cessation. How did the old poem put it? Something about Kings and peasants all being same when they are put in the ground...I can't remember off hand and I am too busy to look it up, but the concept is pervasive across all of human spirituality. The Judeo-Christian god does not care about a person's station, wealth, or power. His judgment comes down based upon the soul's actions and deeds in life. A good man can struggle in rags or riches, but his fate will be determined by how he lived and what he did…seems fair and logical to me.
So power, money, station, material wealth, etc are all trivial in every major religion I am aware of. Unless the materialist pagans were right, what you have in the physical world will ultimately mean nothing in the spiritual world. Sounds good, on the surface, but the problem is that most of the people I know believe no such thing. In fact, many would consider what I believe to be trivial, if not outright ridiculous. Their god is money and material, their spiritual mantra is ownership, and their prayers are transmitted electronically via credit card and debit transactions. There is no place in their worlds for day-to-day spirituality. The gods need edgier logos and better marketing reps. Someone call Saatchi and Saatchi!
It is an age-old divide, on one side the materialists, on the other the spiritualists, but in the end we are all ultimately unified, so even the idea of sides is ultimately meaningless. While a materialist will spend their entire life pursuing things, acquiring stuff, and seeking superiority, he or she still ends up in the great stillness, eventually. The spiritualist, recognizing the uselessness of pursuing things, lives a minimalist existence and one day too, finds their physical body being recycled into the Earth.
Will all the materialist’s work and struggle have been worth it? I suppose my answer is obvious, though I still have a few things that I struggle and strive for. While I try to reserve my genuine efforts for things that move my heart, mind, or (on lucky, rare occasions) soul, I am little more than a partially reformed materialist. In actuality, I may be even more materially deluded, in that I recognize the lie in material ownership, but willfully choose to chase specific material things anyway. The idea that what we own ends up owning us is real, and one of life's most obvious truths, yet I still work to own things. It’s a bizarre, paradoxical way to live, I suppose. Maybe I’m not ready for monkdom just yet, but I'm working on it.
Everyday People
Sometimes I'm right
And I can be wrong
My own beliefs are in my song
The butcher, the banker
The drummer and then
Makes no difference
What group I'm in
I am everyday people, yeah, yeah
There is a blue one
Who can't accept the green one
For living with a fat one
Trying to be a skinny one
Different strokes
For different folks
And so on and so on
And scooby dooby dooby
Oh sha sha
We got to live together
I am no better
And neither are you
We are the same whatever we do
You love me you hate me
You know me and then
You can't figure out
The bag I'm in
I am everyday people, yeah yeah
There is a long hair
That doesn't like the short hair
For bein' such a rich one
That will not help the poor one
Different strokes
For different folks
And so on and so on
And scooby dooby dooby
Oh sha sha
We got to live together
There is a yellow one
That won't accept the black one
That won't accept the red one
That won't accept the white one
Different strokes
For different folks
And so on and so on
And scooby dooby dooby
Oh sha sha
I am everyday people
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Now playing: Sly & the Family Stone - Everyday People
via FoxyTunes
Labels: life, spirituality
Sunday, January 06, 2008
I'm a hopeless dreamer
I like to daydream about an utopian existence. Reality is often so tiresome and mundane, I find small moments of relief in letting my imagination wander off into what could be, or more accurately where I would like to be. These imaginary worlds are not much different than the one we live in. Mother Nature knew what she was doing, so there's not much I would change about the stage on which humanity plays out its repetitious dramas. Even the people there aren't drastically different. For the most part, the only difference is that people are more in touch with what I understand 'good' to be. They speak more honestly, act less selfishly, and behave more courteously. They sincerely care about each other and themselves. They recognize that the differences between us are little more than trivial details and that the divisions caused by those differences are purely imagined.
Of course, these are only daydreams, and the world as I live it always finds a way to interrupt, but I feel better having let my imagination take a stroll through another pseudo-fairy tale. Of course, that is not reality. In reality, people quite often treat each other like shit. Being treated politely and courteously in this world is rare enough to be noteworthy, which is only noteworthy because it has always been this way. People being nice to people is as rare today as it was eons ago. Again, I am baffled by our species inability to make real progress in our collective sense of kindness and empathy.
Whatever this place is, it sure as hell ain't utopia, but songs like Lennon's Imagine and Richie Havens' Freedom ad lib from Woodstock always put me in the mood to get lost in imagination. If not for these occasional escapes, I would think things might become unbearably depressing. Between the liars, the cheaters, and the outright crazies, you have to focus on the exceptions to avoid being overwhelmed by the rule. I have this theory, or rather I have adopted my own version of other peoples' theories, about fear and how powerful it is as a motivator, but that's something for another time. I'm not sure it is within my intellectual capabilities to express said theory in a coherent, concise fashion anyway...
Oh, for the strength to stir them!
The power to cure them, or heart to soothe them,
so that we might bask in the glow of angels' eyes
beneath skies unburdened billowing obstructions;
all of us bladed grass nourished together as one
in a place unknown to these lost generations -
free to grow straight and strong.
Free - to love Earth, Sun, and Moon unconditional,
to love Life and to live Love unencumbered
by the failure of words uttered aloud
with only the fields, trees, and insects to hear them.
Sacred, subtle sentences that fire the conscious
describing a vision, a heartfelt faith in possibility -
what could be, what might be, elegant wishes
without fear to restrain their beautiful conjurations.
With no gods to divide and conquer such tiny musings,
only the powerful alchemy between heart and soul,
the unstoppable momentum in mind and body,
these parts find freedom to form mystical wholes -
something more, something less, complex simplicity
in the meandering vein of a leaf, limb, or land.
United, aligned, and willing to brave the maelstrom.
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Now playing: Richie Havens - Freedom (Live at Woodstock)
via FoxyTunes
Labels: life
Thursday, January 03, 2008
Thursday thoughts...I should be working
I have been thinking a lot about spirit these past few days, trying to get myself refocused, trying to get back to something resembling balance. There seems to be an infinite number of possibilities, where the spirit is concerned, but I find that having any original thoughts on the matter are almost impossible. Finding original thought out in the wild is just as difficult and finding people I have something in common with is as challenging as ever.
Through all of this, I have been reflecting on 2007. Despite how badly it finished for me, the year was largely a very good one. School went near flawlessly, I almost escaped the year without getting sick, and Audrey came into my life. Not bad, all things considered, but the year ended with a limp and a stumble, rather than on a gallop. I seem to have learned the lessons of 2006 well, as I kept my emotions safely contained, so there were no heartbreaks or dramas worth mentioning, my car made it through the entire year unscathed, and I completely avoided annihilating myself with drink. My mental health would appear to be holding steady and I certainly didn't gain any weight, so things could have certainly been worse.
Why then is there this lingering sense of dissatisfaction? Much of it has to do with work. There simply is no joy to be found there currently and things are only getting worse. We are short staffed and seeing a steady increase in individual workload as a result. Nearly everyone is starting to make mistakes and experience stress related maladies. Given enough time, prolonged stress begins to have adverse effects on your basic functionality. Pieces and parts start to break down, to the point that you start forgetting little details like when classes start next term, and that you needed to get some new tires for your car. You start getting sick, then have a harder time than usual fighting off whatever is ailing you. Everyone seems to feel physically drained, and no one seems to feel good about their work any longer. I find that even my sense of spirituality begins to suffer, so that I sink into a generalized state of malaise, losing sight of the things that define who I am.
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Now playing: Sufjan Stevens - Seven Swans
via FoxyTunes
Labels: life