a whole lot of things

so where two now, the world wobbles a little more, the stochasticy increases in leaps and bounds, the lows become lwoer the highs become higher.. and No that is not just the stock markets.

we are entering interesting times...

So I apologize to myself and those few who read this, about not spending time on this aspect of my persona, it is not that i have not been thinking about this a lot?
I have put my effort to one side to start on my other Blog  365 , most if not all of you would be aware of it in some sense or another..

It is all about that picture and so much more, and most probably relates to a couple fo things I am thinking and were thinking about over time. It has to do with visually observing the things around us, we expect to have a status Quo, we expect a static life and world and surrounds, us as afriKans (yes I went to a justice of the peace yesterday, boy this is a long sub-thread so bear-with me, to have copy of my ID DoCument certified for FICA in South AfriKA, and the JOP asked me to fill in a questionaire and one of the questions was, o yes BTW this was ata free Law clinic which explains some of it, what my race or ethnic type was.. and to be honest i chose African other, Does that make me a lier and a traitor leaving the roots of my should behind me) are now part of one of the worlds great SPora's cant really say Diaspora, think that has more specific meanings.  ?Dam that was a long train of thought and had to put down with one breath and should be read as such? This is becoming a little absurdish or abserdist, but to get back to my point. We walk we look we see, sometimes we see, which brings on another point -- go look at this dudes pics, one would imagine he altered the way i look at things a long time ago. But that is a story for another time. To get back to the stream, we carry on with our lives with a lack of urgency, No i am not saying we need to suffer the perils of over anxiety and rushing, urgency is something else. Urgency to live and see and experience within the bounds and confines of our minds and bodies and spirit and cicumstance, there are no limits within those bounds even though that seems oxymoron~ic.  It may seem like I am Digressing, but I am not.. The point being you wlak down the roads, or drive or whatever there in your city and along the streets are trees with the most amazing colours and hue's that tomorrow we may not see,,,,
No this is not a doom and gloom, for tomorrow you may Die.. no that could happen to anyone, that is not the thread or intent, but rather that appreciate things within the constraints of the life you lead and have chosen, but appreciate them tot he fullest, mine happens to be a tapestry of rich colours and hues and shades and textures and shapes and the most amazing inane yet interesting things that walk buy on a daily basis. The little things, the mosaic on a floor the shape of a building, tomorrow you may never walk that way again, enjoy, experience and see them..
The images are a celebration of  the route i travel through on a daily basis, oft they may seem totally arbitrary, but there is always a reason behind a posting, it is also an attempt at being forced to take more pictures to increase photographic fitness and to allow better expression and develop a clearer identity and style... Something which through the whole uprooting and Spora has tended to be the most unsettling for us.. the apparent lack of identity that we have as immigrants, other than being immigrants and Saffers .. which by nature we are not, by origin we are.. man it is a complicated scenario :-/
That was a silly side rant..
but back to where we are and what we do ..

expect more changes through time, things are moving faster than we can prepare ourselves for, all we know that the event window is moving closer and closer to us. Quicker and quicker and wilder and wilder swings ...

Here i moved from a situation of clear and present danger to one  of clear and present other danger? Go figure, but at least it is pretty here and the danger is on a very different way..  Strangely the longer we stay the more we like, the more we miss things, well people more than things. It comes to the fact that we do not realize how much of us is merely a reflection of those who surround us, even those who stand alone, still stand alone from all those that are familiar and are either the reflection of what others are not or are the spaces between the people, filling the gaps, here that disfigured self has no reference or relevance..

So what does  this all mean? not sure, I look at somethings i see on the web, some by people I  know and some by others I don't know and I am amazed and moved
at times by how others see and express them selves in the simplest ways ..

So my aim for the near future is to express more .. the 365 is a simple and humble start

koos, the ipad, and a whole ot of things and something else

Like memories


this is unfortunately a bit of a mix of pieces, yes i have been slack and have not really got to this.. But I will endeavor to be more committed over the course of the next couple of weeks, no I will not try and get committed, the other word..  It has been a trying and busy and challenging time. Not for any reason other than it has been a time to adjust to our new status. 


part 1: 25 june

where do i begin with regards the damn ipad, other than I wrote the last blog in a airport, a good one, a long one full of meaning, joy, mirth, wisdom and a whole lot of other things, only to have it taken away from me ..

Technology, our saviour and failure ..

a small bit about the ipad.. a clever piece of technology, and no this is not mine.. it is the works and i need it to do some demo's of software..

would I buy one? not unless I could get it for a steal..
it is nice to type on, you can play angry birds, you can play shark attack you can browse the interWeb.
you can view you tube  and all of this on the train .. BUT
it is still Steves evil spawn..

Yes it is a I-device which actually is not an I-device .. it is a sheep device, all those individuals who follow form before function, image is everything view of life, constrained by the shackles of the eVil SteVe.

Ok so now is it at airport once again with the spawn of evil Steve, having lost all train of thought .. I will have to start again.. But this time I am trying to type directly onto the website and rather not on the tying app wherein I lost all the work that I was busy with ..

So where does this lead me down the garden path, a million thoughts mowing through my brain, each one carrying over and destroying the previous ones ..

As a complete side issue I wanted to tell you all about a most amazing book, no not the same one again, which by the way I managed to procure for my self over the Internet .. Yes the black swan one , bout. No this is another book, this is a cooking thesaurus, or should I rather say food thesaurus, it is not s massive book, but a very interesting concept int hat it does not actually have recipes but rather documents possible and proven combinations of foods, like for example broccoli and anchovies, butternut and rosemary and the list continues on and on..

It is something worthwhile poking out for ..

So this brings me back to a question about religion and spirituality.. I must admit ihave gone through a large number of really contradictory thought processes about the validity, necessity or even benefit of religion or I should rather say in the plural. I do think we sometimes contest things that are an inherent flaw in our makeup, like a lisp, ip do believe that many will disagree with the frankness of my approach, but I do believe us as humans require some form of divine belief system or religion. I think we require this as part of our makeup, we require a belief in something that is not real and does not exist, albeit sea monsters, dragons, I have to ask if you dream of dragons
And if you do is it a bad thing, I do believe in faeries, because if ip don't they will die, every time I say or think bad thoughts they die .. Rather pi believe in garden gnomes, I have a belief that we should have at least one in the garden, if not more, and I do think it is mandatory for al of us to carry pocket gnome with us wherever we go .. You may ask what the frig for, has he now seriously lost his marbles, is he leaching marbles through his nostrils. No I must interject, there is a reason, albeit selfish. No that is not shellfish,
They are good and taste good.

Part 2: 11 july

in between losing this blog a handful of times and just being to pre-occupied ...

Where to return to, a lot has happened in the last while (about a month and a little), we have eventually got the point where our PR (permanent residence) has been approved.. Which is a strange thing, coupled with the fact that our house has almost been sold.. what a weird experience ..

It gives this whole journey and adventure more of a finality, we have now landed, things have panned out strangely in some ways, the house has been a cauldron of emotions around things and people we miss. Lucky for us we have all been out of synch. 

On other things,

So many thoughts have been rushing through my brain, but i suppose the PR has been in the back of my mind and has really been occupied with that and the house. But it opens so many doors, yet on the other hand it closes some others. It is a strange thing..

It drives us to wonder about the importance of everything in our lives.. In terms of maslo's hierarchy of needs where do friends, family, support and history compared to safety and general peace.. There are things that are brilliant here, but there are things that are missing and sometimes our hearts are torn into a thousand pieces when we miss the things we miss, for everyone there are different things..

Enough of that.. melancholy, I was going to use melodrama, but am reminded internally that i was reminded that this is the incorrect word.

Part 3:

On art, creation of art, appreciation of art and where we stand in this milieu ;-) I now follow danGerousMinDs.. It is a very interesting blog/media/information portal. The point isn't actually about this website, but rather a conclusion that myself and a friend both made..  which was, how is that people can come up with magnificent mental gymnastics. In some terms we can call it art, in other terms we may call it an iSm, But the key being that we don't all seem to have the same ability or propensity to create acts of visual, intellectual or artistic gymnastics, this does, however, in no way say that we do not have the propensity or even ability to judge, appreciate or even pick it out of a line up? How is it that our brains are wired differently in this way?

Part 4:

On looking at piles of Kelp on beach it made me think of a number of things:

1. an irish movie about a farmer who packs kelp into wheelbarrow everyday and then puts it onto his land to fertilize it .. a very depressing movie where the old father lands up killing his sons to protect his pocket of farm.
2. the weird crap that gets washed up from the sea? I saw a bird house being washed up in the kelp, pieces of plastic, glass, bottles and any number of things ...

part 4 will continue down the line..

Is this part of natures way of showing us count zero


 Part 5:


a Thought on adversity and innovation, is it a driver or does it inhibit, that I would suppose is pending the eye of the person who is being adversetized .. yes i KnoW that is not a word .. but it fits into what I am trying to say here. When we look at life through the pale glass of an immigrant, their are shades of rose, red and blue. It is all about perspective. How do we measure our success. Can we....

but what is evident, or should i say became evident, was there is inherent values we carry with us like a lunch box brought from a home a long time ago, almost like  the elven bread frodo carried with himself through his journey to the ends of the earth to get rid of the ring.... something that feeds us from within.

How important is the cocoon of individuality we wrap ourselves with? At times it is a burden at others a crutch and sometimes it tends to distinguish us from the rest...

we sat last night and realized that we are different, but not in the obvious ways we thought

It is strange,  we wont ever know where our next piece of inspiration comes from, somehow it seems better that way..


Part 6: Why do we comodify mystique



A moon hangs in an amber sky slowly burgeoning the new day in, but it is with sadness i realize we have forsaken the mystery of life, yes this is nothing new, there is nothing new in what i say. But, there are times it saddens me ...
There are slivers of hope, breaking through, I sat on the train today saw a guy with a beanie on with "stark enterprises" on the front of it. Event he comics have lost their mystique, baring a few, the bulk have been transformed, albeit sometimes brilliantly, into celluloid replicas of the imaginations of others and ours, removing the mystery and magnificence and replacing them with a cheap celluloid replica. Granted this is inspiration from something I saw on the interWeb recently that spurned this on. the thing that stabbed me straight between the eyes was when i picked up the book i was reading again on the train this morning, I am fighting my way through a Neil Gamon book,  not because it is hard to read, but because life has been rushing past me a little over the last few weeks.

I Digress onCe again from the essence of the topic i was hoping to shed some light on.. I should rather not say topic, but rather fleeting moment of inspiration that somehow gets lost somewhere between thought and electronic transferal ....

Why is it through technological advancement we are losing our essence as humans, I cannot say..

But thing we are destroying more rapidly is our mystery. There is little joy in the celluloid and mass media recreations of unique creativity, yet peeking through this milieu and noise generation somehow humanity shines through in the strangest of places..

what they dont tell you

there is so much they don't tell you about the things you should know..


Yet a new days dawns, I will not be afraid ..

and i survived the rapture

To rapturous dismay to some nothing happened and to others with happiness and still to others laughter and then there are those who did not even know.

How insignificant we are as humans, and thought, in a flash we are here and soon will be gone. Well if all goes according to the way we are throwing this planet away, eventually like a bowl of bacteria in a petri-dish we will use up all the resources and will either escape the confines of our dish of life or it will all end, a rather uns acrimonious (yes to those lexophiles, maybe not a real word, but it portrays my thought).

And where does this take me? No where actually, the rap-ture is just a side thought to our existence.

I must admit the mornings are no longer so Christian now that the Christians no longer pray at the station, every morning I peer around the corner and they are gone. One wonders how fickle life is, especially my perception fo them. They are most probably sitting in the McDonalds drinking hot chocolate and huddling around the table. It is only I who is in the belief that true enlightenment comes through personal self flagellation, well I suppose that is being catholic for you ;-). No seriously I always imagined that through hardship and self imposed struggle comes a form of enlightenment. But I am most probably wrong with regards all of this. It is true, this is a strange land and without a grain of doubt a complete stranger. This does not in any way denigrate the experience, but it is a strange place. Yet at this juncture I stand facing the distinct possibility of an imminent spora (one wonders what the singular of a word like diaspora is?) that our family could face if either my medical or the Pumkie's Medical is not acceptable to the immigration authorities. So where does that leave us? Not happy in any way, even though I am in the strange land, note not the promised land, I stand and await the future with baited breath.

So I sat wondering a day or so ago how to best describe our lives and the paths they take. It is somewhat of a case like trying to juggle glass balls, it looks absolutely amazing, the light reflecting and casting amazing colours all over the place, yet if a ball falls down it crashes and makes a huge sound and splinters into a thousand pieces, but all we do it sweep it up and toss it in the bin and start again.. Strange thought that.

I saw an interesting short movie a week or so back, It was called the butterfly circus. It is a preview for a movie. This movie was a winner of a number of short movie festivals. It is worthwhile watching, albeit schmultzy it is heartwarming, but the key to me is that the visual quality is just great.  So you decide for yourself ;-)

On third and fourth thoughts after I have progressed a little further through the Black swan book, I must admit it is losing a little of its shine, not because it is bad or because the writing is specifically bad, but because he does not really get to a point, somewhat like a Blog a number of you may read on the odd occasion. What is the most striking about it at this stage is how he highlights our general  lack of understanding of statistics and the impacts it has and does not have on our lives.  Strangely we do live our lives not always on the direct impacts of stats or probability, but more often on the perceived impacts and outcomes. Nasem goes into a lot detail about gambling and luck and probability and why you cannot win because it is not only about probability, but also about the casino's which monitor trends against trends and you pop up as an outlier if you deviate from the current trends. He also goes through a whole lot of other really confusing statements, which i have resulted in me saying once again that I will have to reread this book a number of times, which do not give us specific answers rather more questions.  He falls back on a very familiar, to me, argument of not actually committing all that much and falling back on the randomness of it all. In some sentences he flouts that it is better to be an outlier, because if you are not an outlier you will not win, but in the same breath he says being an outlier also gives you a greater chance of failure, which when stated like that sounds a lot more obvious, but this is done through a milieu of arguments and paragraphs that rapidly bleed into one argument and back to the original. So at this point i am not convinced, but I am not unconvinced.

Not being unconvinced, could that be any less commital ;-)

So another day, more clouds and rain ..  and at this point I am not convinced if it is as bad as it is or not? It rains, it winds, it suns, it tains, the wind blows, first from the North then the South...

the view from my soggy standing point on the train this morning, oh how i hate soggy socks.. I am sure dr Zeuss could have done something with that...

when faced with one own mortality

Yes this is stereotyped, but is not a treatise to having a MLC...

I got a thinking sometime back, it could have been days, minutes or hours ago, but it recurs. We often make statements like, if i was going to, if that happened, and many others (*&* and the comma makes sense here ). But the point being we tend to live our lives based on riders and axioms about conditional activities, granted it does make sense in most cases. But you have to question if the world is not divided into those who take the pictures of the amazing things and the others who live their lives vicariously through the images transposed through either the printed or electronic media. Yes there is a grey or is that gray, could never figure that one out, view on all of this? Yes there is and is not, and there is a distinct randomness about a lot of this, to which we have no answer to.

To get off that point and onto another, Btw an Awesome book to read (NOTE: I have taken this out of the Bibliothecke.. and will never finish it in the mandatory 3 renewals, it is a book that needs to be bought and ruminated over), but I must warn is in the same vane as Malcom gladwell's books, but requires a whole lot more commitment and rumination as it is in my mind the thinking mans version of MG's books. Oh yes the book, I mentioned it before, is the black swans by Naseem N Taleb.

.....wikilink to Taleb's book.


As a phrase "Pictures from the end of the world." could mean so much, could it mean the literal end of life as we know it, does it mean the end of society as we know it, does it mean the figurative ends of the earth?


But what do we do when we get faced with our mortality? I don't know as I am not there, in the real short term? Well in a way we are, we have to redo our medicals for our damned PR. But there are others who have more concrete implications, but we do live our lives in a perpetual hedge. We always have a predefined event window of living. We don't seem to be able to escape the continual re-evaluation and hedging of life against the external constraints that in most cases we put there, but sometimes are put there by situation.

But to get the actual point of my thought process, well there are two, the first being; we are now faced with the distinct, albeit slim, possibility that we could be forced to return to the Z of A,  which in a way is very confusing, in some senses it is the familiar, in other senses it is scary. The second being the way we do not live our lives. We spend an inordinate amount of effort and bind our selves to the way we live our lives and not nearly as much to how we do not live our lives. We ponder and ponder but often, granted there are those who do, but don't. This at best sounds entirely ambivalent, at worst it is a reality, the event window of reality is pure ambivalence. So where does that leave us?

What can we be clear about, in general there is not a lot that we can be sure of, especially in the light of Black Swan events. Somehow according to Taleb they are outside of our current frame of reference and thinking. So what do we do in these cases, die, survive, live, rebuild, rise like a phoenix. Soemthing we cannot be sure of is what is next, we stand on the brink of a rapture,  a swarm of earthquakes where there should be none, a massive earthquake where there should be one, all we can be sure of is change and at a magnitude that we cannot be prepared for. But Naseem does remind us that being aware of random events does not mean we must eb afraid of them, i am paraphrasing significantly here ...

So where does this take us or put is in the light of swarms of great black swans which currently circle this small insignificant 3rd stone from the Star we call SuN.  I must admit that we have to continue on as best as possible within reason one would assume...

But I do suppose we cannot really change who we are and how we live without the fear of being ridiculous, but it does seem like a good idea to at least challenge some of the levee's we have put in place around our lives. I suspect keeping levees around us is not a bad thing, the question being when is the fear of the black swan realistic and when is it paranoia and is there value in protecting against the cygnet or not?

On a different note it has come to my attention that the Christians have once again deserted me in my morning solace, the rain and cold has limited if not totally removed their presence from the position of their prayers. Like the seasons causes the leaves to fall off the trees the people no longer gather in the bus shelters to do their early morning prayers, but rather they have been blown away, it may not be the wet, the cold or the wind... It could just be the dark.


But All I say ToDay is go forth, gather the sand bags but not to protect you lively hood, but rather the boat you are storing to go forth and explore the unknown ...

nostalgia and the things we love

seems like this did not save it self...??? bizarre here it is reposted

I got a thinking the other day. That is sounding a little contrived, it seems like i think to much ..
And I wonder if random thoughts going through my consciousness actually count as thinking ;)

But to indulge myself I will continue, that is what this is all about, self indulgence and expression of the nothing between one ear and the other.  To get to the point I was wondering about why we look at square images and immediately fill with nostalgia and admiration for retroviews on the current. When did Kitch become cool, when is it still Kitch! Why is lomographics cooler than realism and HDR, which both to an extent bleed into the unreal, is lomographics the edge of the new impressionism? Or has that been covered a few times, I am sure it has?

I was walking ...

just to interrupt, I watched something on youtube, then something else and another and another, slowly moving myself into a spiral of nostalgia and melancholy, as i view our lives as shadows on a wall, the translation cannot compare. The specific version by van Coke Kartel drives home like a huge wooden stake through my AfriKan heart.  Rapidly spiraling me into deep nostalgia about times long past and memories flashing past like an 8 mm film reel, holding back the tears as the soundtrack of my life plays quietly in the background.  It makes me think of things unrelated, Tretchikoff paintings hanging in the wind under the African sky, dust, rain, the smell of pipe tobacco and standing ankle deep in powder dust.

It is not a bad thing to capture this all in a square image on screen alone on an island a far way away from everything that I remember and have notions to have called my home. Like a gypsy the wheels on my bicycle carry me from day to day. I question if I have returned to my root or am I on the route to discovery? Yes a silly rhyme, but it holds true. As I mentioned in one of my previous posts is it the phylogenetic or social intertia or meme that drives us forward, is it the present, the past we know or the past we are unaware of that drives us along the dream  tracks in the sands of time.. Bla bla bla, But I sit here isolated with thsi question inside my brain?

Dust stained faces track the tears as I remember a past, yet knowing full well It was I who went looking down the rabbit hole.As I mentioned before I was deliberating what effect it has on us when we look at square format image and how that relates to the inner kitch we all have. "the other day I had a genuine illumination" .. A very cool line from a preview of a move that is not out yet. I go on, one day after the other waiting for the flash of inspiration, tempting inspiration all day long, exposing my mind and eyes to all that I can in the time that is available, yet I stand and glance into the emptiness at times, other times I stare down a psychedelic rabbit hole of insanity, at other times the pastels and hues flow like the patterns in carefully poured coffee. Where does it start where does it end, why the resistance against social crutches I ask myself daily? Each step is a step closer, other days it feels like every step is in the wrong direction.

Kitch neo-african art is not the word or phrase that i thought it might be, based on the cover of a book that I saw in the borders closing down sale. Then again neither is neo-kitch african art either? Is aw a book cover on sociology that showed the most amazing picture. words would destroy what i saw and the images and thoughts it put forward into my grey space. It illicited a thousand ships, many little sub images and conflicting thoughts burrowing through my brain all searching for an answer? The question it raised, not answered as one of the millions of side shoots was; why do i get more hits on my Flickr profile when I post photo's taken on my mobile phone than when I put my better pictures on there? Is it all perspective? Do i have the wrong perspective is it skewed?  Where else did this flight of fantasy take me, it took me to the singularity that we will face as a human race within the next 20 years. Sometimes I am amazed at how far technology has gone and is going, flexible paper mobile phones, a burgeoning and ever present sentience surrounding us in the cloud of computers, do we harness them or are they harnessing us? Is this the Terminator effect? Is this skynet.. who knows?


More or less later we will know, what we will know, only we will know. A line gets drawn in the mud, my finger caked with sticky brown earth. I have traded the dust bowls of afriKa for the wet and mud.

Enough self indulgence for the moment.

there are things on heaven and earth that move me

what are these things that move me,
trace bundy
kevin O,

they are new or in the general scope of humanity very small ..

have a look, things of beauty, moments in time, more so than before they suddenly move me. It must be the golden syrup of nostalgia and memories seeping into my ever existence. I realize my life has become fragmented through the motions of my thoughts, slowly slicing and dicing and placing memories and future dreams and current events, binding them like a broken mosaic.

Strange when we look back and across we somehow see different things and the pieces somehow don't really line up.  I look back in time, well not really i stare at fleeting images in my mind, I get starkly reminded by images I see around me; printed ones, electronic ones. Something inside me wells up, something unbeknownst to me. I see images of a past that is vaguely reminiscent of my own life, I see images of a life I do not recognize, I see faces and places filled with memories, some mine, some others and some belonging to a social consciousness that I am only a small part of, all these fragments are floating slowly together and others are drifting into the haze. The purple glazes our existence, our consciousness taking shorter or longer dips into the un-reality of this state.

I wonder if the path we choose is it the yellow brick road? Sometimes our mind wants us to believe we have taken the wrong route, other times we know we have, sometimes we know ti is the right path, but most times we wonder around in abject confusion, into the grey mists of our human existence we go, slowly unraveling the past and origins. I apologize, but I do have to return to a previous point where we do have to consider what is it that builds the fabric of our existence? Can this be likened to the nature or nurture debate in evolution? I suspect for some of us the threads used to weave our existence and grubby with the lives of people who are long gone, at other times the tapestry of our lives is woven with new threads.

And the internal welling of emotion never  ceases to amaze me, is this something that was locked deeply inside behind a stone wall. How i have slowly chipped away at that mortar, only to find tightly wound packages, each day, each week, each month
I open a new piece of my life, why did I lock this off, or did life lock me within the confines of these walls.
I stare at photographs, strange memories come welling back. I know full well we are the object of our own actions, but sometimes we feel bound by the cords of life, these long sinewy threads that run through our lives. At times they are broken at other times they stop us failing, yet on the same hand they confine us and give us that most fancifully stated  inertia. How is it that we can start living once again? Do we live in tranches of year bundles. Is it wise to move in 10 year bundles to make changes in our existence. Is it time for a new career if possible, somehow we stand on a knife edge of responsibility and adventure in life, I suppose we have to start with the small steps towards the door, without that inertia we will never leave the room let alone the house.

On something more material, why does brown flour bread really struggle so much? I suppose it is obvious, but it just gets me every time I bake the damned brown bread ;-) So where does the adventure take us next, firstly within the mind, the recesses of the mind, the ants go marching one by one huraa..  don't stop, don't fall, It could be that we have to live within fragments of the life we have created and called our own. How do we achieve these small and fantastical things without embarking on the voyage of our lives, what si it that binds some of us to the material, the ethical, emotional and does not free us from the chains we have bound ourselves with. Yea though i wonder down the road of uncertainty give me the strength to take the next step, to not be scared of the dark corners and ghouls, their chains rattle in the corners of our minds. I walk towards the end of the road, not knowing or seeing the path nor the destination.
I just have to remember the words of marshal m^3 .. I'm not afraid to take a stand, its been a ride I guess i had to go that place to get this place .. yes it is cliched, but I would at least want to keep a common thread throughout this journey of my life.

In general the fantastic still amazes me, the unreal, the existence of an alternative reality that does not really exist other than in our minds.  But all we know is onwards and upwards.

We stand once again at a cusp of decisions, now not later, more not less, live not cower in the shadows we fear so much, hold onto the the light.

"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."
--- Frank Herbert, Dune - Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear



"Fear makes the wolf bigger than he is."
---- German Proverb

We get drawn down the rabbit hole of fear, at times we revolt, other times we cower and hide, paralyzed like a dear in headlights.  It is difficult to determine why we are bound to this primal and debilitating emotion. I will walk along this path I fear and go forth into the unknown world.

and of all of them Banksy always moves me most :-)

A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step

So it does,

to paraphrase, this has taken more than one sitting so it will be disjunct and confusing, more so than normal ;-), sorry i should say post-pre-phrase

I walk, I cycle the kilometers

Every morning as I open the garage door, the characteristic crunching of my battered steel cleats on the cement floor makes me cringe in anticipation for the cold and crisp air that hits my face. Some days the multitude of small splashes hitting my face as I exit the driveway into the road, wondering why I have not sorted out the shower cap for my helmet yet? This morning not unlike any other, the air was crisper, hardly a breath of wind in the air, no rain. Yesterday a howling southerly met me outside the door, lashing me with pelting rain drops. All I know is that every day will be different, that is something I can be sure of. I digress, I fear from what I had set out to discuss on this day that is so different. The day started simply like every other, except it was different.

and then i stopped writing ... for days and days, and now the words come back.

But like always the words are milling around, less so the words, but more so the concepts the thoughts, concerns and questions.

I keep coming back to one starting point, finding it difficult to make a departure on something that has been plaguing me for days,  or should I rather say weeks and months. Something that will just not go to rest. Due to my self created exile I expend a more than normal time alone, or at least in the company of my own thoughts. What, I, (yes) and most probably a million others around the world, have been pondering relates the reality of human constructs, however weird that sounds. I sometimes sit and wonder if something like the Harley riders, the weekend warriors, is more or less authentic than any other phenomena. You may ask what the Crap Am I talking about? But in reality why would an artificially created reality that is subscribed to by a large number of people be any different from any other realities. Is it real? I know we often look and laugh at the instant nature of this sub culture and many other similar cultures. But the question that still stands, is whether or not it holds any validity or not. Yes it exists, and has little or no erudite or even philosophical basis, well there is debate around some of it? It is real, it exists even though it is as made up as Foucault pendulum by umberto eco. The additional realities then get created on this dubious starting point and the eventual interactions and manifestations are subsequently then real. Does this invalidate or validate the existence and reality of something. Where is the truth? What is  the truth in this situation, it is a self referencing and fulfilling construct. How much of what we experience and exist within is made up of the same fabric? Where the reality and artificial nature of our existence collide, we are thrown into a large grey mess.

At this point I doubt there is a lot of clarity where the truth starts or stops with regards most things in our daily lives.

So where does this leave us? Do we rely on classical representations or even historical truths or manifestations or can we live within the reality we create for ourselves? Which is better or worse.


Well that is enough of that for now,  following on this path is bound to lead your thoughts astray.
ashtrays, buckets and the sound of tinkling Zamaleck bottles.

the relativity of sound, they things sound now and then and how we remembered them and how they sound when we feel different and the same.  If this sounds like gobildeegoop. Yes it is, i was thinking about something i had thought about to many times before but always disregard as nothing?  Have you ever noticed how different music can sound on different music systems and locations, yes this is obvious we know there are differences, we can be sure of that, but somehow our preconception and bias tends to, in my case, alter the sound and experience tremendously of the sounds i experience. Thsi could change something from beign amazing to poor to brilliant and bakc and forwards again.

I saw something yesterday, it made me sad, it related to friendships.

I stand here in a quagmire of thoughts, ruminating and running through my brain and veins at the speed of a radioactive isotope.  I sit here a stranger in a strange land, surrounded by the endless unknown, I saw this in a book the other day, someone standing peering into the unknown. Yes it was visually portrayed.  To continue, I listen to Gogol Bordello transcontinental, it fills me with happiness and sadness and a longing to a past that is not mine and is only the past and drives me forward into an unknown future.   A few days hither I was watching LOR, the third movie and it was so absolutely amazing, but it saddened me a lot, when i looked at the wonder and awe that had been created by the media and the story, but it only pointed to me how we have taken away the splendour awe and mystery out of our lives. The Western society has removed the underlying mystery that surrounds our humanity. In no way do i suggest we should all abandon rationality and immerse ourselves into a form of romantic non-reality or a dream realm, what I do however lament is that the mystery of our existence has been removed, we no longer dream of dragons, i cannot dream fo the long line of green ants marching along the ridge of the red sand dunes, the Lion roars in Africa has become literal, the chameleon is no longer a spiritual animal, nor is the praying mantis.  I am not saying we have to depart from the rational and san, what i lament is the loss we have. Our reality is created on top of countless memes that contain these half truths and images bound to the human race. These memes are surgically been removed from us before we have had time to replace them with reasonable facsimiles or new incarnations thereof. We have replaced the mystery of symbols and hedgerows with WWW , you have to question how we can let that happen, we have replaced bread the source of our origin with Big Mac. We cannot go back, time is fleeting it passes on, but I can lament the loss of this reality.  In a way I am not taking a step backwards tempting the salt pillar, rather taking a breath a long the journey of life, search new yesterdays in the unending sea of possibilities. Sometimes the weight of the self imposed yolk bears me down, the added weight of the past soemtimes slows our ability to plough the lands to plant the new crop. Without the Yolk we would be nothing, without the memes which have become plaited into my veins it would not be me, those plaits sometimes strangle, sometimes allow new pathways for the blood to flow through my veins. These are things in my past that are not of me, but are as a result of things I had no part in and that happened on another continent that I have never seen, slowly the sands of time mingle with the sands of my past creating solid ground at times creating a sinkhole a quicksand trap i set for myself. Other times, I run across the hot sand, through the pine forests past the Amanita through the dark glades search for the line of lost green ants. The paua shell giving me the illusion of a silver lining on the long white and grey clouds, I search for Ganesha, the tarrot cards lay open on the plaid tablecloth laid open int he glade, splinters of sunlight highlighting the cards that have been drawn for me. I know not what they mean, but I do know that eventhough I chose a new deck a number of the old cards are still represented.

Just remember we need to break the daily bread, drink life and imbibe the suns rays when they shine on us, appreciate the moisture and rain. We remember the jade coloured light that is thrown over everything here carries a tinge of darkness with it eternally. The sun shinning from without, sometimes strongly from within, but the cloak of darkness hangs like a shadow across the view. Lucky we are that the winds of change blow strongly removing the boughs causing the shade, yet at times when the wind fails to blow and the sun hides behind it blanket of greyness to create dark recesses we have to slowly search for those inner lights. Somethings we are prepared for, others not.

To conclude the discussion, read this like the wrapper of a bright yellow chappie, sometimes silly, nostalgic. hard on the outside, slowly softening with a taste that lingers.

the things you never thought you would miss and other strange beasts int he night

Damn that was a long title, but it needed to be said. I may be re-iterating something I have said in the past, go shoot me.. allow me a senior moment.

oh the first word of the day is Tableau..

Where to start?

Somehow our lives are judged, or should I say we judge our lives and or any combination thereof.  The things we miss, the things we do, the things we wished we had done, the places we want to go, the places we have been. These are all choices, fleeting through our lives. I was going to metaphor-ze that statement, but in flight realized that would be overkill. I read a book recently. I think I may even have mentioned this, BUT interestingly i read a blog of a random person yesterday and they were discussing the same book. Oh yes the book. It is outliers by Malcom Gladwell. I found it terribly illuminating for a number of reasons, but one of the interesting points was the 10000 hour scenario where it is implied that to master anything we need to practice or do or action something for more than 10000 hours. Without this magical number of repetitions or skills development it appears that no one can excel at anything. It is a strange thing.. but the book appears to be well researched, or at least it gives that impression. Albeit that it is rather soft-science-ish and all social science and the n! efficient strategies to do x and y the best. I enjoyed it. But my point being? The blog i read actually pointed to this article and related this to the "art" or process of writing and most specifically blogging. It is sad, the blog is nice and natural, the author could actually have carried on, but has not for the last few years. You may ask or even intimate, what the FRIG is my point. Eventually this blog may actually become readable. I suspect there are only about 100 hours into this blog so we are a couple of orders off the mark. So be patient, is all i ask. One day this may or may not actually sprout some value and wisdom. I may also fall into the category of the room full of monkeys and typewriters. Apparently this anecdote is actually called the infinite monkey theorem . 

Given enough time, a hypothetical monkey typing at random would, as part of its output, almost surely produce all of Shakespeare's plays. In this image a chimpanzee is giving it a try. (from wikipedia)

 

 

The last note on the monkey is that through this I have learnt a fantastic new word, namely dactylographic. But I do see that the person who tabled the infinite monkey theorem was a definite strong anti-creationist.

Oh yes and here is the other monkey:

To get back to the original train of thought, or rather the actual human condition that I wanted to raise. This point being the process of being through the expression of our existence through travel, discovery, production, art and general social condition.
We measure ourselves via the external representation or even internalization of these factors and the consequent diatribe and verbosity or lack thereof that we exhibit. Have mind will travel, have fears we are held back. We have a physical manifestation, we have a physical form and space we inhabit, whereas our minds travel backwards and forwards in time and across space, physical space.

What is it that inhibits our travel in all these manifestations; physically, emotionally, temporal-y and intercontinental? Is it the amount of gadjo within in me that attempts to find roots like a strangling fig? Sometimes the roots break loose, I fall into a dream state, I watch the line of green ants. The wind blows from whence I cannot say, it is not a foul wind, it is a wind driving us forward into the unknown. Is this what I dreamt of in my youth. I hope not, but if it is then it is.

 one of the many sights I saw today on my short traveling through the streets of wellington. Is it a UFO, not sure but it was pretty Wired

 some more sights in an around wellington, and for all those doubters .. look the sky is Blue ;-)

  My favorite urban decay, well actually not really this is a building site, where an old building has been pulled down to make space for something new.












So where does that take us or leave us? There is no absolute or even grey answer to this. But I do still pose the question around how our ability to move and travel reflects on us as beings on this planet. I look and ponder when I view the various photos of people I know and don't know on the interWeb. How much are we constrained by our inability to let ourselves go and experience the flows of life through the interactions of others and our physical location and in contradiction how little others are bound by their inability to be constrained to one thought or the other. In the eventual stream of global consciousness are we better or worse than those who do or don't?  Is it the vague reference to me having eastern european blood or even vaguely germanic with  blue eyes could point to some Viking or even possibly Gypsy blood, but not enough to put me a wandering, I wonder a lot about wandering though! But i suppose being an immigrant makes me part of the global mixing of society, is this our last ditch internalized effort to maximize our survival on this planet?

Have we as humans reached the eventual end of the rope?

Yes things are falling apart faster and quicker than we would ever imagine. But where does that leave us? In a state of anarchy, or does it require something else? at this stage I am without thoughts on this.

todays words

In no particular order other than they appeared to me in conscious thought

Kapow,Steve from iSys ,RAP and CEP,That darn Cat 1965, Tron Evolution 2010,Arthur - 2010, Source Code,Christopher Brookmyre

There were no fossils in New Zealand till a while back. That is there were no Vertebrate Fossils. But they found them. They found arrow heads in North America, that changes everything. Japan has to little Electricity and have been plunged into a dark age.


It is still shaking here, but not so often near us, but Charl did say it shakes to much in CC .

No not in this pic, but this is a picture of me running nowhere in particular.

this is in its rawest form CZ 3, there will be more, particularly this was untouched by my hands, baring the piece of pua shell that I flipped to show the sheen. It is amazing, that the Maori made Lures out of these shells hundred of years ago and caught a wide variety of carnivorous and bight-y fish. They even trawled behind their canoe's.


and here is Ronnie... just because I  miss my chikins..

FYI relative sunshine hours from wikipedia
Wellington            2065 hours
London               1461 hours
Basel                   1599 hours
Johannesburg       3130 hours
Edinburgh            1405 hours
Cape town           2993 hours
Sydney                2480 hours


enough randomness for now.. more tomorrow

Random things

I was browsing flickr (me on flickr )the other day.. well yesterday and the day before and many others, I always look at the new and "explored" pictures and came accross this picture (this link):

No not one of mine.. but it got me to think about a book I had read a long time ago, something I think i remember, but will have to go and re-read again. The book is called count zero written by William Gibson, I am not sure if this technically still fits in the cyber-punk Genre or not, as this was after the inital neuromancer and other books that brought this into common cutlure. But I do digress, the aspect of the novel which fascinated me was nto the hacking and all the other intricate dealings in a virtual reality, but rather a couple of scenes in the book where there is an "installation" of objects that is in space, in a random orbiting collection. My memory is most probably clouded.. but I still would like to re-read the book just for this piece. My reasoning, strange, as it may be, is an internal fascination with collages. More than collages though, Collages tend to be one dimensional and at best 3 dimensional when the artist attempts some dimensionality. Here is a postcard from an exhibition i went to recently in Wellington.

 It was at best disappointing, why you may ask? It jsut was, it showed little dimensionality, it had some temporal distortion, some lapses in generation and mixed media and days, but it was childish and he was trying to sell it as ART. But that is neither here nor there.

I think it relates more to these random collections of objects that we as humans gather over time and place on our desks and mantlepieces and all over our existence. Yes this does sound a lot like the social Cairns concept, which i see has now been superseded and destroyed with Geocaching. but there are elements of insane originality and amazing conceptual art. For example the drop boxes, the USB devices that are mounted in places all over the world.

Ok so after a quick reccie over the googleweb if find this artbasedoncountzero 1 2 , not what i had expected. notquite  ... alotcloser  

Gets me a thinking about the media that would best represent the images inside my head, most probably at the end of the day the written word is all that can represent the thoughts in our minds, the more we try to abstract them into physical or visual representations the more we fail, or do we? Can we ever do any justice to what we envisage, or is that part of the challenge to cement our multidimensional thoughts into a single digit dimensional representation, be it an electronic image a 2 dimensional canvas, a sculptural representation of an aspect of something we visualize.

I look i see, I think I am lucky because I have not seen this before, I can see everything with young eyes, it is simple because I am not of this land.

Slowly the sun sets on the past, the silhouette of a life past fades into the dusty red sunset....

a new dawn, a crisp dawn I keep expecting my beard to ice up on the way to work, somehow unlikely but it is starting to feel that way. Every day  heralds a crisp dawn.

well enough of that for now..

time to go and enjoy the weekend

vunerability

So where to restart again,
(and once again this is fictional and not relevant to anything in particular,
for email recipients you need to actually look at the website)

things return to a semblance of normality, the Christians are back at the station. The sun rises the sun sets, the earth shakes a lot, the sun rises it shakes some more, the waves pummel, the tears flow down our cheeks.

I wonder do we have an internal compass guiding us back to a past known or unbeknown to ourselves?  Is there a part inside us which holds a direction to true home? When we are separated from our home, albeit if generations pass. Is there still an internal song line inside us caucasians taking us back to the route of our origins? Is there a song drawn across the globe calling me back to my roots, is the route back to my home? Does my spirit have a home or will it drift endlessly in this mortal existence that i call my life?

I find my self being pulled and pushed and drawn all over my surrounds searching for a glimpse of a  petrosomatoglyph, could it be that this which i had seen as social cairns could not maybe be the afore mentioned?
The only consistency is the change and time fleeting like wind blowing through my hair, I stand atop a large hill viewing the landscape of my existence.  I listen closely but the songs are confusing, pulling me back to a home (s) that I do not recognize and a home(s) that is not the one that my physical form has ever visited. My dreams and spirits flows through time and space being pulled towards a land on another continent.
Would it be a path it should follow, a journey along the path of my forefathers, to see what?

I stand with the brisk wind howling through my short hair, wind so cold and strong it brings tears to my eyes . The waves of wind creating visual poetry in motion as the boughs of the grasses sway and weave intricate patterns apon the side of the hill. I walk slowly through the forest and with little more than a sense of fascination and awe of the splendour, but I cannot yet call this my home, it happens to be the location that my physical form enhabits. Strangely at peace I walk faster and faster looking to get to the top of the hill, to break out of the forest and seek the air and the space and see the sea in the distance.

what will tomorrow hold for me and you?
I do not think we need to worry, the world continues with or without us,

I stand with my eyes affixed to the north staring to a location at this point unbeknownst to me. All i know is that this is where the roots of my current seedling made roots.  For the time being this is where is call home. More like a bough visciously ripped during a storm, only to be washed a shor ein an unknown land, sprouting and trooting to give a new home to its vicariously transported thoughts and tenants. All I know is that there is an internal song calling me to the origins of it all. Time will tell where the song takes me, what beacons of home I shall find on my journey forwards. There is no knowing what language that song is sung in, all I have to hope is that the internal rhythms guide me along the path that the dreaming totemic animals call me on my path forwards.

To say this is anything but true, is to say anything else is not. Irrespective of the truthfulness or validity of  this outlook.

So where does this take us, through a winding route through the dreams and thoughts of my mind on roads paved with good intentions and loaves of bread. I stand hoping to leave a trail behind for someone to follow as i seek the path or route back to my origins.

The words fall through the spaces in my thoughts rapidly falling swirling and mixing to create strings of meaning about the past future and present. What is the truth of the dreams we dream? even if they are not our own dreams  or words, does that make them any less fantastical. In this day and age of rationality and absolute truth is there any space left for the dreaming of our lives within the confines of our minds, knowing full well that the stark reality of life lies outside, the soft and melodic story that is woven inside my mind, in certain cases I could say my soul. My soul is transported to a land of memories, mingling with words of others, mixing with the tears flowing from the corner of my eyes, running down my angled and aging cheeks into the corners of my mouth illiciting a salty reality which momentarily returns me back to the present. 

where does this fictional story start? Does it start in the dust or the forests under an Acacia tree, an Albizzia an Artocarpus or whichever one and in a really absurd notion that the future is before the past it could even be a Podocarpus totara. There is no knowing where the dream of the lion and multitudes of beetles will take me.  As I walk down the wondrous pathway with Alan on my side, the call of the Tui rings shrill in my ears, carefully i make sure not to break the line of  green ants dreaming of red rocks and beetle fruit and jack fruit and my mind slowly but surely enters the dream plane. Slowly the rhythms combine to push me forwards on this journey we call dream time traveling. Long lines of green ants are silhouetted against the dusty red sky.

For the answer to this you will have to wait and dream the dream with me.

Yes in retro and even introspect the cheese slowly cakes against the side of my mouth, but it is not a reality, neither the words I write nor the experience illicited by them. The life as beautiful as a a tretchikoff stands before us ;-)

On mortality and living

How our mortal coil unwinds
like a tightly coiled clock spring it sits and unwinds slowly
sometimes jumping of its carefully mounted ridges, exploding
we run, we think we can hide
another day presents itself
from one peril we run into another
all we know is that this is finite

suffering is not relative, but it is seen that way
media sees and sensationalizes
flooding, quakes and global climate change

the plight of the 3rd world
carrying the burden of the 1st world on its fragile shoulders
no one sheds a tear unless it is you
standing a moment we gaze forward into nothingness
tomorrow is here
we stand
we look
we know not what now holds

into the darkness

"exit light,
enter night
take my hand
we are off to never never land"

"Deep into the darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before."

I shall not tread lightly as i enter into the darkness of life, i shall enter into the dark spaces with a spectrum of bright colours blindingly i move forward, nay i say shall fear no dark space, nay i shall not fear injustice, nay i shall not fear the unknown.

Go forth he said, search for the flicker of light in the darkness that abounds, find the truth, find the happiness, find the colour, even it it means a 30 second exposure.  


Something had changed, he stood there staring at the wall, it was different today, the same yellow sandstone wall covered by lichens and moss. It just seemed so different, he felt the inner connection he wondered about it, how come the patterns looked that way. He had to come back and take a picture, a picture of the pattern, no one would believe him. The butterfly had flapped its wings in Malaysia, more specifically KL. Everything would be different tomorrow, the weather, the patterns the sunshine everything would change. All for a little Carbon Dioxide he imagined, the weather was changing, it made him think about the Bob Dylan song that he had heard and loved and hated and all of the above at the same time. 


Slowly he took another step up the worn pathway, glimpsing thought he fine rain drops gathering on the hood of his raincoat sending large globules of rain down his cheek. would it ever be the same again, he kepot pondering over and over, there had to be something he could do, almost instinctively he dodged the lady with the pink hair, he was wearing an emerald green dress today. The water slowly started seeping through the seams of his shoes, he felt the ever present squelch, first on his left foot then on his right. He had always been limping, he could never understand why. There was no reason for him to limp, but he did, waiting for the traffic light, he knelt to tie his shoe lace, out of the corner of his eye he noticed the on coming traffic, how he had wished he had bought a car instead of spending his money on that book, or he should rather have thought books. Slowly, yet deliberately he stood up and sidled closer to the traffic lights insidious beeping, he knew it was for the blind people, but it irritated him so. from a distance he got his first aroma of the coffee filtering through the wet blanket covering them all. something to look forward to he thought, life is full of small joys he kept telling himself. Suddenly his dream state was shaken by the loud buzzing of the traffic lights, the frentic bustle of people around him, rushing to cross to the other side, it flet like he was standing at the Styx, crossing this, imbibing the city it would change everything, unlike the Styx it would not last for years, or would it. He paused a moment longer, irritating a rather large lady behind him, buslting through she mumbled angrily under her breath. Without waiting he jumped forward as if he had been awoken from his dream state, something inside, a song a dream was pulling him forward towards his fate for the day, or was it just the flapping of a very small grey butterfly with lightly coloured blue flecks on a remote hill called the heads that pushed him forwards? Unto this day he will never know, i doubt he will ever know why he walked that way, on that morning, why he stopped to buy coffee, why he lingered a minute longer than before, but he did and that is what formed his life going forwards.


And the train trips become more familiar, the faces are becoming more and more familiar. I recognize the lady with the pink hair and thee green dress, the members of parliament, the political analysts. the computer programmers, the testers (yes!.) and all the others. Yes there is a comfort int he familiarity of it all. At times there is comfort in new things, at others there is despair. Oh we are an enigmatic and chrono-dis-synchronous anachronistic beings. Or maybe some are and others are not. But there are things that make us happy at times and not at others, frigin weird. Maybe when I come back as the supreme ruler and master of the universe i will re-engineer humans into something a little more predictable or at least less predictable.. but this mix and match is wholly confusing.
But there is a light at the end of the tunnel and yes that is the train and somedays it is the sunlight streaming through.

Life is like a stained glass window, multi coloured , multifaceted and surrounded by heavy lead boundaries.. :-)

next maybe something on the sensory experience of food... either that or a potjiekos recipe ... maybe if we record these blogs and play them backwards we might just get soemthing LOL

meaning

lost faith, an imaginary tale base don the fact that i no longer see my station Christians..
(totally fictional :-))
this is what happens if you read a happy death on the way on the train ;-)

He was a lonely man, his faith was his strength, his strength was his faith.

Every day he stood their eyes closed beneath the bush shelter on the southern side of the station in the shade. He stood there with a purpose eyes wide shut praying to a God that gave his life meaning. Other days he just sat there reading the Book, over and over the words flowing in him creating meaning in a life that made no sense. What was this elusive thing he called happiness, come rain come shine this was his spot, every day he stood steadfast like a soldier imbibing the spirit. That was real he experienced it, he did not falter, he did not fall, he stood tall, he was one of God's soldiers. Nothing could shake his faith, this was his life, his life had meaning, this was the meaning, this was his life, it was great.  Everything was grey, people had a grayness and darkness around him, yet his inner light shone through all of this without faltering. He had purpose in this dark and godless city, he was in praise of the glory that was and is and always will be.

He had forgotten about the flowers along the way, they had always been an inspiration, a mirror of the glory that radiated around him. Things seemed different to him today, he could not really figure it out. These feelings came and went, the glory ebbed and flowed like the tides on onehunga bay. How he wished he was standing next to the radio masts, immense in size and structure. The wind whistling through the cables, the crazy fractal patterns that were created by the wind creating wave apon wave of movement, neigh standing waves. This was good, but he could not go there, it was with sadness his mind went back to that day.

IT is not he who questions who wins the race, it is not he who wonders, it is he who races who wins. He stodo there standing looking at this piece of text etched in the marble base of the statue, its weathered and lichen pocked surface was a mere smidgen of its past glory, but somehow the new natural patina created by the elements did something to enhance and change his view of this sculpture. Every day he walked past he was captivated by the beauty of it, but inside he could not reconcile the idolatry, the thoughts it brought up inside him. This was wrong, these were Pagan idols, demi Gods. Why he questioned, why did he have to walk this way every day, be faced with this thing of beauty, this thing that tested him. He would be strong, he would not falter, his faith would be strong or would it?  How could it be that he found such solace staring at this heretical beast, he then slowly and deliberately started repeating the mantra that helped him through these moments, it had always explained and given meaning to situations like these .... "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist. And like that, poof. He's gone." and he wondered was this real, he knew he had heard this somewhere and there it was gone again. He stood their staring lovingly, not knowing why the vision of Pan, neigh the evil looking abomination spoke to something inside of him. He knew not what this was? The vision of the water nymphs, the hedgerows.. What he had never seen a water nymph let alone a hedgerow. What si this thing he called reality, something had happened.

He cleared his mind of these heretical thoughts, comforting himself as he grasped for the book on the inside of  his jacket, the hardness of its outer cover and backing comforted him in his time of need. As he turned the corner he knew he would see the cross peaking through the trees from the small anglican church, No a truck was blocking his view, slowly it moved, he craned his neck and all was back to normal again. He could continue along with his walk to the depths of a life he could not understand nor believe in, but was forced into. Inside he knew he had the strength to continue this day, and the next and the next.

the life of a bread

This is the life of bread in our kitchen

from humble foam beginnings

we get yeast captured from the "Wild"

a symbiotic combination of yeasts and Lactobacili, in combination the digest the flour turning this into Carbon dioxide and Alchohol. You can see the asymmetrical pockets of yeast, quite different from the homogeneous commercial yeast which creates a very uniform froth.

an extended rising period to allow the development of the flavours and the  asymmetrical bubbles and the rubbery texture

the final outcome

some details of the fractal surface

some more details of the fractal surface 

a detail of the based of the baked bread with its fern like patterns

the eventual texture of the bread

when you have a choice?

What is it you do when you have a choice?

Do we all have choices, or are we bound inextricably to the existence and future destined to us by our pseudo Calvinistic mindset.

How much can we leave to chance, how much freedom do we have in shaping our own destiny? Is there an inertia akin to the phylogenetic inertia that binds us to this fragile phenotype we call Homo sapiens?  What is the distinction or difference between the phenotypic plasticity displayed this race we call humanity. Why call it a race, simply plunging head forward into the abyss of the unknown known future we are creating for ourselves as a race or meme. Why is it we cannot make good decisions as a collective. As individuals we stand tall, speak out and rage, but as a collective we are weakened by the indifference and ambivalence of the race we call humanity, should I rather say called. As we move headlong into this the new millennium, who holds the torch high guiding us into the night, silently into the night I shall go, I fear not for I have my  belief and inertia, it will carry me on through the days and nights of endless doubt and into the new day. My spirit is my guiding light, i know not which guide stands before me? It could be a slight flight of my imagination, it could be a dark and harrowing view on the reality  of our existence as humanity. I stand tall, i creep through the boughs of reality. The stark, grey sleek view that humanity is tabletizing on us.

et tu my human companions you sell me down the river
as i stand before the abyss of the river of life which spans that which is lying before us
will i ever know the pink dolphin, will i see the fluorescent glow of the bio luminescence of the beaches of my life
the waves crash harshly onto the rocks of stability
my continent burns
We stand back and watch it burn to the ground, like a candle burning from both ends, no one to blame
a collective uncertainty
a collective insanity
is there a path forwards?

hey for those who worry, this is not me .. this is just societies unhappiness not mine ...
i cannot stand and not see, but i cannot stop what is inevitable and not see what is unfolding in front of us

look forward

how fragile we are ..

us humans
we stand we fall

we get up we stand
we fall
we lay die down and die ..
what makes us stand up every time what makes us stay down
what gives us belief in tomorrow, when there is nothing
is there something,
for some there is....
for others there isnt

Don't be afraid stand tall......

add two tablespoons of flour to two tablespoons of fruit juice stir and let stand keep adding and stirring for 3-4 days till it foams.

Life starts from nothing, bread has meaning, light, the sound of a cicada, the blue sky, the sound of the wind whistling through the line on my fishing rod, the crashing of waves sending spray onto my shades, invigorating sea spray.

It begs the question is despair a first or third world emotion? Where does it fit on Maslow's hierarchy of needs?

But stepping aside from that where do we stand?

A good coffee, some decent bread, some fresh sea food what more do we want.

maybe some time next to the sea ..
where do we draw the lines between what is essential and what is a luxury


oh back to the bread thing.. once it has been standing for 3-4 days you should have bubbles and froth ..it should have a pleasent smell not a vile smell :-)
.. this is sourdough after all

alternativily we have tried taking two or three apples, blending them and adding them to flour and water  .. this gave a fantastic rise to the bread as well.. The standard approach is to take flour water and hope that you get a culture going... or is that have culture? LOL
Does sourdough give you culture or is the belief that the culture gives you culture?
 
Oh and about the slashing of the bread ... interesting.. that is to allow the bread to rise .. often the yeast does not have enough strength to lift the mass of dough above it ... Thus we slash it to release the pressure.


here is a nice resource http://sourdough.com/links 

another very important term: Bannetons
http://donssourdough.blogspot.com/


But there is so much more .. and that si enough of that for now.



maybe a collection of bread photos next?

True insight methodology and the loaf of bread

How dissimilar to the watch the favor and the very large fish, my life has moved from something along the lines of ..... to something more in the lines of the sour dough loaf and the strangely small little fishes I try to catch.

But we need to find the truth of the matter.

How the world is changing, a cloud is no longer just a cloud a cellphone is no longer a cellphone or a mobile phone is is a mobile device, the sea is empty of fishes and we have to pay someone for a piece of sour dough starter? A maori man stood up and told a whole lot of people that he had a vision, no one cares, they stare and ridicule. It is not that he was/is wrong or right, but that they dismiss his words without respect and with contempt. What has happened to the day that people that people listened and revered the prophets of old. No not the prophets of da city.. that is a kettle of a different fish.

But back to the epic tale of the Sourdough starter, 3 weeks and at least one bag of flour later it appears, wait and about 5 attempts. We seem to have a moderately active and fairly pleasant smelling yeasty bacterial symbiosis. It is an interesting thing this, the development of a sourdough culture. I would equate this to something similar to make roti, in principal it is so simple, but try as you may it just does not work as advertised.  The general principal is to take flour water, or flour and fruit juice or potato water and flour or something similar. Leave it for a few days and hope that a "natural" bacteria and a lacto-bacili lands in the muck and flourishes and grows.  The list of suggestions is endless regarding the ways to promote the bacteria (lactobacillus) and Saccharomyces or Brettanomyces. According to wikipedia (when wheat flour contacts water, naturally occurring amylase enzymes break down the starch into disaccharides (sucrose and maltose); maltase converts these sugars into glucose and fructose that yeast can metabolize. The lactobacteria feed mostly on the metabolism products from the yeast.^[5] The mixture develops a balanced, symbiotic culture after repeated feedings.) .. Bla bla something like that for those of you are not really all that interested in the chemical reaction albeit that it is very interesting and worthy of the number of books that have been written on the topic.

So why all this harping on sourdough you may ask, well it highlights a conundrum or pivotal point in the development of humans, or should I rather say ambivalence. We live in a culture that has, or should i say species,  diametrically opposing value measures. On the one hand we have the need and drive to be technologically centred or advanced, yet on the other hand we have the notion of slow food and living which in many ways are contradictory and they of course we should not forget cultural biases and most importantly the impact of the breadline on this perception.  Where does that leave us as a human race?
We seem to have a multitude of memes around our approach to food as a species. I suppose that is what makes us rather unique in that we don's have a consistent set of foraging and feeding behavior within a contiguous range?  There are numerous other species which display cross range memes in terms of foraging, the most colloquial being the milk/cream  stealing tits in England;-) I do digress, let me return to the notion of slow food and living. This is something I find very appealing, but that is for my subcultural meme. From an evolutionary perspective I doubt this has much in the way of selective advantage or disadvantage in the short term, most profoundly due to the rapid mixing of memes and behavioral patterns.

To get back to the whole sourdough starter issue, what did we try? We tried the flour and water left outside in the elements, I tried chopped up fruit, raisins, potato water and and and.. After leaving each of these Bio-experiments standing and fermenting on our kitchen counter for a good few weeks, much longer than intimated by the authors of various articles books and colloquial comments. The kitchen was filled with the aroma of fermenting flour, but nothing substantial. We then started getting fruit flies and fungus .. But it does appear that we have developed a moderately active culture, with the foam and all. This is after Anita had taken a sub sample of the last  few attempts. So where does this lead me? Phase n! of sourdough bread making.  So what we did before? We made sourdough, but decided that we needed a new culture because there was a fear that we had contamination with commercial yeast. One imagines we should have left best alone, but now we have started culture, which i will give away.. dont worry we wont sell it :-)

what else have learnt, wonderous things about the "science" of breadmaking, bla bla this would all be repetition of easily available resources on the Web. But one or two things i did discover was something to do with the percentage water/flour ratio and what impacts this has on bread making and the magic 60/30 rule. The thing i did however discover was something more amazing.. how the frig they do this ...

And the other thing is why bread is scored or cut like this?

 that is quite interesting, we have also discovered more about flours and types of flours and the misnomer that it means a tremendous amount..



It is all a learning experience, not altogether different from growing veggies in pots on our porch, learning to fish with bait in the sea...  Part of my life as an ex pat. No I did not say my name was pat or that I was a Patsy.. ;-)


So what next, more photos, more things to do and see.

oh here is a nice pic of mine that is in a gallery on the web .. no nothing that fancy, just a collection of images about the interislander ferry in Kiwiland :-)

it is here if you wanna see the bigger version HERE


oh well enough of all things exiting and random for today. You may ask, why the sourdough bread? Why the slow food, just randomness and limited meaning to another day on the slow hamster wheel in kiwiland.