I'm in the woods, almost sleeping, in my portable woods-womb, a mummy (ha!) sleeping bag of prodigious insulating capability.  Trees creak in the middling wind, icy puffs of air blow across my face, but my body is sublimely warm.  It's one of the most sensual of experiences, the juxtapositions of warmth and cold and the sound of the wind through the trees.  The tactile and auditory wham-whispering "You're alive, you're alive!"  In a sudden moment the ice-air is replaced with moist warmth, kind of living smelling.  Then a tongue, I know it's a tongue, slides slippery rough across my cheek.  I think it's either a boyhood fantasy - I'm with boys after all, maybe I picked something up over the aether - or else I better open my eyes and explore.  I choose the latter.  It's Patty, the neighborhood black Lab who occasionally visits us to practice her wilderness skills.  She looks at me, looming black and huge in the dark, but I see her tail wagging in the starfield.  She licks my face again, then backs away an inch, scrunches herself up, and full-on sneezes in precisely my direction.  I now have a fine coating of dog-goo on my woodsy stubble.  She licks my face again, by way of apology I guess, and asks to join me in my bag.  She does this by sticking her nose in beside my head and trying to follow with the rest of her body.  I convince her that there isn't room for a gerbil in my bag when I'm resident.  She sighs in inevitable surrender and curls up next to me.  I throw my arm over her and cover her with my fleece.  She's happy about this and we cuddle the night away. 

It's 02:30 and I think of other things as I drift toward my dreams.

I think sometimes that sirens are other than metaphorical, even when they are intended as metaphor.  I thought 'more than' at first but that leads down the wrong path.  Funny how a 'siren' is a Greek mythological creature who lures men to their destruction, a temptress, a mechanical device that screams 'get out of my way,' and a  pelvisless amphibian.  We confuse and illuminate with language at the same time.

Writing is like shouting into a dark room.  You never know who's listening, and if they are, you don't know if they understand.  I think about the difference between 'having to' and 'wanting to' write.  Those who 'have to' don't care if anyone is listening, but if they believe someone is listening the writer obsess over the quality of the communication.

The universe is folded over on itself, nothing but geometry.  It gets a little fuzzy when you realize that 'space' doesn't exist, only spacetime, because that means that time is folded over on itself too.  Writing taps experience (write about what you know about), and experience is gleaned. Writing then pulls something from the past and plops it down smack dab into the now.  It's an iterative process, a giant feedback loop, and sometimes the loop is sticky and you get caught like a fly in amber.

I wonder about obsession, and watch the tendrils of me unwind.

I sleep.

In the dim morning gray I hear growling.  I sit up to see if Patty is okay.  She's sound asleep, still chasing dream rabbits, and the growling is just my stomach.  I'm hungry and get up to start another day.

This little something is cool, way cool, über cool, whatever, just look at it.  Pretty please?

See, this little globe is doing more than just rotating around to show you who posts what from where, although that bit is interesting all by itself.  I see a world spinning twirling whirling about, community expressed by flashes of input, the density matching the position and passion of the day/night demarcation, social climate, and political tensions.  It makes the world seem so small, the community so large.  I see us bound together, being alive, in love with being here.  I see a good gig.

But I want a whole lot more.  I want buttons added for other inputs: buttons to select postings to Gaia or WordPress or Rethos, to mark battles or love-ins, buttons to point out random acts of kindness, first kisses, or first 'I love you' utterances, ones to show the dark and the light in us, the suffering and the joy.

And I want yet even more.  I want the fanciful.  I want two-way buttons.  Click a button to send food here, talk to a dolphin here, change the wording of some leader's war speech here and transform it into a peace speech, buttons to free Macedonia from sand sharks, spark uncontrollable laughter, hugs, and horniness, or squelch anger, buttons to just let us be.  And I want it now.

On the other hand we have this.  I never knew that 'large' meant so many things, from the obvious 'big' or 'immense,' to the improbable 'eleemosynary' or 'adipose.'  Why Romania provides the English-speaking world with a comprehensive thesaurus I have no clue, but I'm glad they did. 

If probability theory doesn't make your eyes glaze over this probably (hehe) won't be all that amazing...oh what the hell, it's amazing just the same.  At some point within the transcendental number Pi lies the exact wording of this post, of a love letter you wrote in college, of the Bhagavad-Gita.  The exact point at which it lies depends on what base you use, and the conversion algorithm, but they're all there...somewhere.  For example, Jeannie's dog Willow can find her name beginning at binary digit 56,338,972 (character, 5-bit).  Am I nuts or what?  I mean, how cool is that?

Lastly, I want to expand on Dryad's blog post on global orgasm.  I mean, that's pretty cool in itself, and anything associated with Tantricksta's rumpy-pumpy is okay by me, but again, I want more.  Well...yeah...but I mean the other more too.  I want organized efforts to stop dumbshittedness.  A global antidumbshittedness campaign.   We do this by replacing dumbshittedness with an alternative activity. Think of the world as a cruise ship, and we can all play at being cruise directors.  This would, by definition, include the original GO site, but let's play with our imagination too.  How about days set aside for Global Picnic, Global Sushi Eating, Global Paint a Picture of Your Mother, Global Dress Up, Global Globalism, and more?  I figure that if we can get people involved with anything other than dumbshit activities we're moving rapidly toward Global Chill.  Just 365 events of not shooting, bombing, stabbing each other.  Ahhhh.

More lastly, I'm not writing much these past few days because I'm reading a bunch of books.  Trying to catch up, make up for lost time and all that.  One even has sentences like "Is what Freud called the unconscious actually the latent metaphrand operated on by the manifest metaphier?" and "...the synthesis of the separate hypostases into the unitary consciousness of Phase IV is a different process also."  I'll say!  It's actually a very good book (and here), despite its dense language, and worth your time.

Somehow all this stuff is related.  Somehow.

A primal thing sometimes happens in the middle of the city in the middle of the night and a tribe is formed, if only for a wishful while, if only in a wishful place.  Sometimes, that is, if you're very lucky, and the karma goddess is wantonly smiling your way and the moon is just right and the air caresses and you let your hair down far enough to tickle the small of your back.  This is where it comes from, dyads and triads of ephemeral might, the tribe of them added together, dancing in an asexual ecstasy that cues the sexual, banded together against the common threat, heads bobbing, breathing like the air is too thick.  We are the multitude and those who have not come to us we will represent in a voice loud and true.  Do they trust us?  I cannot decide.

By way of forming our tribe we prayed, first to Dionysus, then to his Bacchus incarnation, all in good time.  Last and best we prayed to goddess Moon, and, I'll admit, bayed to her a bit too, we in the frenzy of bakcheia. 

This modern day watering hole has a purpose not far removed from those of the Savannah, and the place itself, the guts of the building, not so different from the caves of Magdalenian art.  We tribe sit on the raised deck behind, a fortunate place to watch for marauding bears and lions, and keep each other transcendent company.  We kiss with words and caress with looks and dare anyone to ken our craziness.  There are maybe forty of us, a goodly size, and we are in this moment the center of the universe.  Many of us don't know each other, being brought together by friends of friends, but this is an advantage, the glue for our society.  One, a dark and hard-eyed Wiccan of guileless art proclaims leadership, and we obey.  I am shaman, others become story-tellers, observers, messengers, hunters, and priests.  We are all warriors, young and old, women and men, warriors for the night.

There is music, loud, the kind you feel in your chest.  I don't know the tune, but it doesn't matter, the driving beat an echo both of a mother's heart and the urgency of creation.  Thump...Thump...Thump...  Anton Mesmer is at work here, he of mesmerize fame who coined "animal magnetism" as a tribute to the gravity of the Newton he loved so well.  Ah well, mesmerized it is then, and I am...Thump...Thump...Thump...animal magnetism...Thump... Thump...Thump...

Even in this place, in this state of my doing, I think.

It's said that if you had an imaginary childhood friend and regularly attend religious services that you are more easily hypnotized.  I tried this on volunteers but don't have enough data for verification.  Actually, I don't know if I genuinely hypnotized anyone, not truly, except for one.  There was this man I plied with my trickery and afterward he sat quietly amidst us, disturbed in some way unknowable to me.  But I envied him his belief and looking at him I thought of Jaynes' words: "We are learned in self-doubt, scholars of our very failures, geniuses at excuse and tomorrowing our resolves.  And so we become practiced in powerless resolution until hope gets undone and dies in the unattempted.  At least this happens to some of us.  And then to rise above this noise of knowings and really change ourselves, we need an authorization that 'we' do not have."  "Well then," I thought, "fuck you gentleman Jaynes, I authorize myself, I have that, I always have that."  And I went back to my studies of living.

The tribe thrived for a few brief hours, and things went to and fro between and among us, weakening our fear of the bears and lions.  Brothers and sisters were met and made, love kindled, flamed out, and then rekindled more times than an outsider might guess.  A taxi came from out of the dark and transported a few away, the rest walked of a sort to a nearby park, there to await both the sun and the inevitable chemistry of intoxication to run its course.  This is where I went, glad for the chance to see Ra with a fresh eye, glad to see Moon slide to her bed, glad to sit heads on shoulders with my tribe for a few fleeting last moments before the return to the ordinary.

It was a good night.

This is not my work, although I wish I could claim it.  One of my students, who had come to my school with multiple diagnoses that would make the following impossible to predict no less expect, came out of his shell.  I've been asking him for several weeks to write about how he feels.  Late Wednesday night, softly crysmiling, he walked up to my sleeping bag, dropped a piece of paper on it, said good night, and then crawled into his bag and went to sleep.  What was on that paper, a poem to a girl he has a crush on 'back home,' is reproduced here at his request, and exactly as he wrote it.  Oh, and by the way, this is his first poem in English, which is his third language, one he began to learn only six months ago, and he's 13 years old.

Every day.

Sometimes every hour.

I mean, isn't it all just crazily wonderful?

Isn't it all just stupendously beautiful? 

How could I not?