Unremembered Rapture (images from north and central Texas) from Gurdonark on Vimeo.

Blue hairstreak fantasy, originally uploaded by gurdonark.

Today I could not resist the 35 dollar video camera at Big Lots. I love outmoded technology in all its lo-fi ways.

Tonight we went to the Market Street grocery for a fine meal (my wife: an exquisite-looking chopped salad; me: two slices of cheese pizza and fresh fruit). We walked around the little shopping area nearby. I held our soft drinks while my wife investigated a store devoted to the proposition that jeans should be more elaborate (and more elaborately priced) than the workaday. I wish I still owned a pair of overalls--and a yellow raincoat with a rain hat.

We stopped at Radio Shack for batteries and an SD card. The man who waited on us at the Allen Radio Shack, a former Marine, waited on us with interest and aplomb, though we were not big-ticket buyers.
I appreciate good service as one of the most gracious courtesies.

In our backyard, a blue hairstreak butterfly stayed on top of the black-eyed susan for minutes on end, leaving me the joy of my point and shoot camera in all its wonder and limitations.

Tomorrow I try out the new Chinese videocam.

Tonight I played with a new freeware softsynth named Felix, which is quite simple and fun.

Glow, originally uploaded by gurdonark.

( humility )

A Grain of Sugar, originally uploaded by gurdonark.

Folks get caught up in things sometimes. I remember once I had access to a baster full of peanut butter cookie dough. That sounds heavenly, but in fact I made myself so sick of this particular stripe of cookie that I could not eat that variety for years. When I was eating all that dough, I must have been telling myself a great story about how good it was to eat. That's the trouble with story-telling animals. They convince themselves that any thrill is good until it proves not to be--and then they pronounce a great moral lesson learned in an instant. Cookie dough turns into fortune cookie. The proverb is curled up inside.

Today the governor of South Carolina publicly confessed marital infidelity involving a rather absurd train of events leading him to Argentina in ardent pursuit of his ardent desires. Lots of talking heads are pontificating, and more than a few of the particular politician's own hypocrises are coming to light. Yet I think that folks who pontificate too much from some moral high ground act a bit too high and mighty for my taste. Everyone who is human understands what poor choices people make, and how human such errors are.
The robots may be exceptions. Leave the moralizing to them.

I have no great moral to present from the foibles of this fellow--other than perhaps to focus on one's hobbies, and try to live with as much
humility and simple kindness as one can. Everyone errs. I'd rather eat a grain of sugar than a feast of schadenfreude.

Justice, Peace, Compassion, originally uploaded by gurdonark.

That fellow Mr. Reagan failed to become one of my favorite presidents.
He did say one thing, though, that I liked. It went "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall". Now the citizens of East Germany live in a much freer country.

This week we saw another wall come down. Even though this particular unrest has to do with a choice between a very reactionary figure and an even more reactionary figure, the young people marching in the streets are people we recognize. A wall between people came down this month-perhaps not forever, perhaps even with a tragic end still very possible.

Yet I conclude that if we give ordinary people the power to create and distribute media, then a lot of oppressive walls will not be long for this world. As we watch the Iranian theocracy flail under its own weight of irrationality, we hope that the cameras continue to focus, and point their lens in and beyond Iran, to every place in which people are denied basic rights and dignity.

Explain nothing., originally uploaded by gurdonark.

I'm taken with the idea of the spaces in between. The words beneath the words. The mystical silences. The distant blue sky. The smell of a pretzel mingled with steam. The shared, knowing look. The ineffable and the trivial, all joined as one.

Can-jo, originally uploaded by gurdonark.

Everyone uses the term creative with a kind of mantra-like intonation that once was reserved for terms like "spiritual". I find something appealing in the notion of art-as-religion and religion-as-art. Yet I like the idea that people are inventive as well as, or in lieu of, being creative.

I like the notion that a kind of humility and self-sacrifice is necessary to invention or creative pursuits. I'm often amused, too, that people draw broad distinctions among different pursuits of invention or creativity, when the difference may be one of mode rather than substance.

I like, too, the idea that the true test of the value of creative endeavor is not money, or accolades, or even accolades by the *really insightful people*. The true worth of invention is and creativity and craft s the way that it gives life a kind of meaning. For some, it's unimaginable to live without those bursts of insight and direction.

I think it's an advantage, in a way, though, to enjoy creative pursuits but not to consider oneself particularly gifted or creative. To be second-rank spares one the burden of disappointment in oneself.

I read a weblog which made the well-trod point that perfection is the enemy of done. The key is not to be perfect--people are pretty much denied that by definition. The key is to do the things that matter to one--and to do them as tasks to be done.

Life should be user-friendly, originally uploaded by gurdonark.

I figured out how to get the computer back up in safe mode, although I have not figured out how to get my "My Music" folder files recaptures (and may have unintentionally actively dispensed with these files).

Nonetheless, I am grateful for each of the following:
a. I got an external hard drive which has captured my most fun files for the past x months, leaving only those music files I did not transition over to the external hard drive as potentially lost;
b. I regularly upload mp3s of finished songs and of photos to external hosting sites, meaning that I will not lose the ones so posted even in the worst extreme;
c. CPUs are so inexpensive that it's not going to be hard to replace this one.

I would have long ago switched CPUs when the current platform began to wear out but for the Vista introduction. I was concerned that a couple of my favorite bits of shareware would not work with Vista.
I wish, though, that I could make my system stay in operating shape (and recover the music files) until Windows 7 comes out. Its XP emulator might be just the solution.

I do wonder whether it is a virus or a system flaw that set me back these recent weeks. I had noticed that Mozilla firefox crashed too often, suggesting something was not in ideal order.

Still, if the worst thing in my life is this particular crisis, I'm all right.