Friday, January 09, 2004

Posting on this blog is not exactly an easy thing to do. I think it's because I don't know how to code my entries into HTML. The biggest problem I have is with word wrapping. All these programs I use just to get there are a hassle. Many times when I am responding to an e-mail I get carried away and decide that my post is too large to post to a group discussion. I decide to put what I've written in my blog. Especially if I think it is extensible. But, my e-mail program has a wysiwyg editor that is adamant about word wrapping. So, when I copy and paste what I've written in my e-mail program into a program called w.bloggar, which posts to my blog without me having to log in and out at Blogger.com, it keeps it's original e-mail wysiwyg formatting, and I have to manually unformat it line by line so it will look right when it's automagically converted to HTML by the Blogger.com digital mechanizations. Even then, that laborious line by line cesspool of meticulousness I've undertaken to make things come out right ends up looking rag-tagged and amateurish. Imagine that!

I've had the same problem with using NotePad. As uncomplicated as NotePad is, there is still a pulldown menu to turn word wrapping on and off. I used to just highlight the text, turn word wrapping off, and the e-mail formatting would detoxify. Poof! Then, for some reason, that didn't work any more and I ended up having to unformat line by line again. Some time I just say "Screw it!" and refuse to write for my blog at all. That'll show 'em! HAH!

I've found a somewhat happy medium. Lee created an e-prime editing program for me to use as a tool to check my writing to see if I was adhering to the e-prime principle of omitting the usage of the verb "to be" in my writing. All I had to do to find out if I used the 'to be' verb was to copy and paste what I'd written into Lee's little program, and it highlights every usage of the verb 'to be' where it appears. This feature allows me to correct or rewrite any words or passages of that ilk, and then, another button allows me to retest my editing. Eventually, when I get the piece copacetic with the e-prime gods, there is a button to paste the edited text back to the Clipboard, and then to wherever I want to paste it from there.

One particularly anguishing day, after I'd gotten several complaints about not posting for some ridiculously short time, like a month, and was sanguinely attempting to remedy my remissitude, I remembered that Lee's program didn't do page wrap. Inspired, I booted it up and wrote a piece, pasted it to the Clipboard, then pasted it inside of wbloggar, and it worked just as easy as eating mom's apple pie. I had to do a minimum of line by line editing.

So, now, due to Lee's generosity, I am no longer intimidated by the thought of struggling through the redundant process of editing and re-editing just to write a bunch of crap like this. Yippee!

Monday, January 05, 2004

I keep imagining this novel about a crazy old woman who lives outback and who is kind to animals and a menace to her neighbors. A virtual crackpot who sees the world in her own way and lives her own dreamtime.

The only images I get about the appearance of the main careactor is a little too bag-lady to give this ol' gal her due. She is very smart and can be quaintly amusing. I wanna surround this central careactor as though she were the center of a zodiac, and then go around through the signs and houses to reveal a perspective of this central careactor from the angular view of each sign or house. I wanna explore what might happen if this woman allowed the various opinions around her to be reflected in her outlook on life, and if she did, then to create a history of how acting out these various astral mandates juked her around. Maybe even go for the gold, and describe this careactor as she might be if she reflected all those opinions back to their source, and like the fabled Emperor was, indeed... nakid!

Maybe I could even put the mojo responsible for her present condition on a sequence of flashbacks that pointed out how special she was as a young girl, even in her formative years, and how despite those graceful advantages, the only person her neighbors recognized her for now... was a crazy old woman from a far off island... and the girl she pretends to be still... is now 'fare gone'. A little bonkers... but harmless.

HAH!!! The fools! Kathy/Norman Bates City... mark my words!

The only visualization that seems difficult is what she would wear to a catered affair. Would she wear flowers in her hair? Or display disdain with the aloofness of some mythical and ancient Despair. I'm thinking that she might dress up a bit differently than usual. At least for the sake of possible evasive tactics and the universal immunity granted to overt eccentrics. A fact of matter given form for her wacky birdsong ways.

If I can just figure out how this woman would dress herself socially for this occasion I could tell this tale and have the entire plot unfold in an elegant private banquet hall where annual awards were being given to the top breeders of the best foxhounds that season. I could place the different cliques (signs and houses) at separate tables around the room, each with their own assigned point of view, and move the story from table to table to expose how each group saw this woman from their biased, but natural perspective.

Cross-table conversations could segue to each part of the story as it moved around the room. The story line would require me to describe how the fixed central careactor looked from the various cliques around the room.

I refuse to imagine her without a hat. She's gotta have a hat on. But... what kind of hat? Big, small, floppy, crisp... onions, extra cheese? Moreover, would that hat have a solid or variegated color for a hatband? Plumage?

Sunday, January 04, 2004

I'm getting posts telling me it's time to write a bunch of unsubstaniated crap again. I realize I have been amiss. I have been having too much fun lately. I have been stoned on good indica and other sacraments for over a month now. That's the way it is with me. I have weak careactor. Saturn in Aries, whatta ya expect.

I studied astrology for a good long time. At the beginning it was difficult for me to get an image of exactly what I wanted from this study. I had learned how to read Tarot cards previous to entering this study and had run a lot of spreads for people. I didn't wanna take a magical approach to astrology either black or white. The woman who was helping me to learn what I could was not much help in me finding a direction I wanted to go with this study. I gnew from other pursuits that the direction I started studying would prevail over anything that came to light during my studies, so I waded through a bunch of different authors to see what they offered. Finally I was given a gift from a stranger that allowed me to proceed. It was a book by a Danish composer who had taken an interest in astrology. His name was Dane Rudyar.

Once I found the direction I wanted this to go I started learning to make charts. To make charts I had to have a bunch of books like ephemera to look up information to figure out what went where. The first chart I figured out was my own natal chart. Everything I studied about astrology related to my natal chart. After all, it was me that I needed to understand.

As I studied the various interpretation books I began to accumulate I realized there was some sort of informal standard astrologers used as a measure of where they were at with this hobby. To claim any proficiency at all a student of this way had to make at least a thousand charts and interpret them. I was studying other things besides astrology at the time, and it took me about five years to create a thousand charts. I guess this was a sort of apprenticeship. During that time I came to understand what was really going on with this study. It was really just a system for thinking about things, and as I understood this, I began to realize that most all of the things humans study is system thinking. Formal education included. Maybe, especially formal education.

There does seem to exist a limit to what one can learn through systematically wading through randomly generated data that depends on presuppositions of doubtful bent. We "see" what we think is there, and that's what we act like is so. But, what we see is determined by symbols of categorization that confines our ideations to a very limited perspective in a very huge universe, and our presuppositions are constantly changing, even as we ourselves are changed.