It's been 9 years since I first posted here...

 ...and it seems sometimes like it should have been longer. But in perspective 9 years is a fair bit of time and it's true that a great deal has gone on. Illness survived, projects began and completed. Tragedy endured, changes made, moves accomplished and throw in a pandemic quarantine for spice. 9 years, and we didn't hurry things either, life takes it's course. Many surprises along the way. 

https://youtu.be/RpvXnrJ7Nxc

I remember 50 years ago trying to record at home. Some big artists had home studios but it was a big dream. Using any method possible to record a demo tape. The technology wasn't up to the challenge. Oh I had made a cassette tape at one time of sessions I had done in a pro studio in California, or copies of experiments I had done on reel to reel. But everything was analog. I was ahead of my time, and I was a Head of my time. I'm blogging to you now from 2021, I can record a 15 minute rhapsody on 16 tracks with mixing on this device in my hand. Many instruments are at my disposal. 50 years... it was worth the wait and what a journey!

9 years since starting this blog, and beginning the chemotherapy for stage iv mantle cell lymphoma. I could've died of suffocating in my sleep and not even known why. I guess I was not done yet.

https://youtu.be/RpvXnrJ7Nxc

No, indeed, I had a wonderful part of my life yet to live, hard at times, almost fatal. Sickness, exhaustion and panic were major obstacles as though it was all work and rest was at a premium. Finally, just before the lock down of 2020 I think we had a bit of vacation... well it depends on your definition and perspective. Did you sleep last night? That was vacation.  Hahaha, no, now it's all retirement and it's fairgame. "No rest for the wicked and the righteous don't need it," I've heard. Thanks I'll take mine over easy... 

So now it's November 1st, and for some the Celtic New Year begins and it's a busy, cold, restful, rainy day. Got the new windows installed which is a notable event because they were bad when we moved in here, and so this is 3+ years in the making. Just to find someone willing and capable of doing the job. I did say it would take 5 years to get moved in here, so we're a good way toward that goal, a lot has been done and there is much to do. Ultimately I don't know what it will come to, do we ever really? I had no idea 20 years ago, I mean such an adventure since 2001, it's quite extraordinary. 

This is the foggiest 24th of June I've ever seen....

...and I've been seeing better (enough to navigate this), the weather is being very weird.

Beautiful, but mysterious. 

Nonetheless, my one month post OP is today... so far so good, driving in Seattle is as lovely as I remember.  I can't hardly wait to get home (see photo above).

 ... over a year later, yes it was worth it, I see fine for the most part, this is easier with reading glasses,  print these days is so small but at least I can see it... I may try short video blogs, live, on my YouTube channel, which I recommend you visit if you're at all curious, about my musical journey. I don't do it for the money, it is just art for art's sake. I'm a professional * amateur. That is, my pay is the satisfaction of doing what I do, selling what I create actually diminishes it's worth. Because there is no purchase, there is no implied expectation of value. It becomes what it is to you.

No more and no less.

Nearly time to dust off that 2016 calendar someone sent you...

...7 months ago. In what dimension is it necessary  to be so BOLD? (Formatting options). Thanks. 
Point is: here we are. Already. Halfway through January and one wonders, "well, what did he DO with his life?"

So I'll allow that as fair enough, as it is at least thought provoking, and I am retired from anything that requires extreme labor of body or mind...

1: began before starting school studying many subjects. Writing, poetry, art, imagining, gardening, zoology, physics, mechanics, fashion, and social networking. 
Then I went to kindergarten....

2: that induction into indoctrination and regimentation was more of a debacle than I care to recount, except that it taught me so much of the truth of modern humanity under the theoretical ideologies I had been exploring up to then.

3: as I finally began to gain back some of myself after nearly losing it all to the continuous torture of my mind known as k-12, during which time my only escape was music, chemistry, more experimental physics, and psychology. Activism, criminology, pharmaceutics and biology. Science fiction fed my motivation for the what ifs of hypothetical questioning and I was the lab rat...

4: bear with me here, I also included theology and metaphysics and nearly arrived at "42" as the answer, yet I knew there was more. So I went to college to formally learn a trade so I might support the family I had created, and continued adding data to the previous subjects as no discipline is completely isolated. Parenting and animal husbandry, culinary arts, and wilderness survival, interpersonal espionage and outwitting an unseen adversary whom I had no idea of identity. 

5: getting paid (however small) to have analyses of your health seemed a wise and profitable sideline so I occasionally rented myself out to medical science. In an effort to establish a baseline and improve my health profile while helping to provide data toward the health of others. It was at times painful; that 7th core sample (of 6) for the prostate biopsy was that little bit extra...

6: did I mention archeology, world travel, languages, mountain climbing, starting a rock band and recording an album which required all the previously learned skills and some new ones, guerrilla survival jobs, urban camping, extreme metaphysics, leadership responsibilities, and submitting to authority....

7: while everything was going SO well, remedial guinea pig, er... being tested and diagnosed with cancer. Subsequent treatment of stage 4 and climbing virtual Mt Everest, traversing the fires of Hell, the vertigo of space, the Limbo of dementia, and the slow recovery process after a stroke while navigating the wilderness of what you'll do next...

8: various trades not previously known, real estate marketing, and so on, end of life logistics, catastrophic medicine, too many more to list vaguely or obliquely the entirety of which no degree is given and only the rarest of recognition. (my fan club is small but sincere). One must be the blower of one's own horn for the sake of sounding a note for posterity. It's a hard act to follow, the monetary rewards are considered minimal and not worth the effort to most...

9: in conclusion, it is/was a life, many lifetimes all in one, frankly it's not common for anyone that I know of to have done so much with so little for so long in so short a time. From here, I intend to continue as long as possible and I have little doubt about knowing what. I don't have any idea...

Sitting by a small cooking fire, a little sausage roast...

For me and the cat. The Divine Miss Fluffy Tail, or simply "Fluff." But, yes, she's a known character. She makes her presence known, especially when she wants something, which is a regular thing. She's a sweetie, though, when she wants. But... you know how they are.
Standing in the light of glowing embers, I have a sense of the slowness of the passage of history, how it has taken so long since so many centuries of small fires, and the people who stood around them. It was the only source of light, and warmth in the night. We keep going back to that motif, taking vacations to places where we can stand around and roast a something, get drunk, and act like island dwellers. I never have, but people do. It might've been my thing 40 years ago...
How do I feel right now? Okay I guess, I've been through a lot. I'm seeing scenes of a medieval movie... nothing has changed since then although many things have changed since then. People, not so much. In places, yes, but fundamentally not so much.
Seems like someone tried to bring civilization to the "planet of the animals," we were here too, just animals. There was only one ethic, eat. Our technology is not animal, our behaviours on the other hand....
I'm not sure technology is meant for this planet. It has an innate inability to coexist, one must beat out the other even as it is dependent upon it for survival. It seems like we can't live here without destroying it, and each other, and all living. 

(Originally drafted in 2017)

So I'm publishing this thought out-loud as a precursor to a few drafts I had laying around, as a way of saying "hello again" and saying too, "I've changed, and still haven't changed," all in the same breath. A little technological housekeeping a catching up to moving on and getting on with it. See you later...

The end is indistinct from a distance that is uncertain...

 Yet impossible to gauge until it is upon you. Nonsequiters are us... hey you get these thoughts at 4 in the morning, whatayagonnado? Dark, and winter is always coming... it may be better this year. This heatwave stuff is no fun for anyone. Seriously. Half the world seems on fire or smokey, the other half, flooded. Swept away, look out folks, and the insanity is worse than I expected. It's almost a new brand of intelligence - how crazy can you get? I thought it was nuts growing up... they took it to new levels.

We don't know how long we've got, ever. Certainly not forever. But, extinction is. No smoking gun to determine the exact cause, like a firing squad, impossible to tell, maybe they were all loaded. Live. No joke, a ton of everything. Plastic? Fallout? Plague? Famine? Thirst? No, this isn't funny, I did say it was Dark.

Look... if we aim to survive this mess, we've got to figure it out. It may already be too late. But, I've always been an optimist, in spite of the evidence to the contrary. You do the best you can until you can't anymore. Harsh reality. Some people had it made until they didn't. Someday we'll all be gone.

Just like the Dinosaurs 🦕 or our alien 👽 ancestral civilizations, no way to tell how it happened. Where did it come from and where did it go? Meanwhile, it all happens on an inconsequential speck of space dust floating in a single galaxy out of billions of such galaxies of which there are also many other kinds, each more significant than the last and our little dust ball is lost in the shuffle. Humble yet?

Yeah, I'm maybe overly sarcastic 😅 but it's a cheap distraction. You get up and it's Groundhog Day all over again and again and before you know it Deja vu too. Call it quarantine fever, it's a good thing I like staying home. I'm trying to revive this blog if I can, barely 9 years from its inception and my own cancer battle of which you may* be aware. Start at the beginning, this is my Book. The one I was going to write... no place like now, eh? So we'll see if thing still works and pick it tomorrow or, is it the next day. Which ever.