See you over on the ToneWay Blog & TV.

First, take fifteen seconds to guess at what you’re looking at above.

Last week I was tasked with putting together a fire for a BBQ. Our neighbor (and long-time AFB reader) Bar mentioned that there was a log on the sidewalk just down the street. I had seen it earlier, and figured the neighbor’s tree-pruning service left it there. (They’d just had a massive pruning job done on the massive jacaranda in their front yard.)

So I went around and picked it up. Man, it was light! Looked ten pounds, probably weighed five. This log will burn good, I thought, as I carried it back to the fire pit.

Five minutes later, I picked up the log again—yeow! I dropped it immediately. Suddenly, there were fifty tiny, white spines in my hands.

This is one fingertip.

After five minutes of pulling spines out of my fingers, I took a closer look at the log. Half of it was just a normal tree, with some bark missing and some bark intact. The other half was a different story:

Click for a larger image.

Needless to say, my next thought was: “Blog opportunity!” So I grabbed the camera.

My next thought was: “What the heck is this?” I had assumed (probably in error) that the branch came form the jacaranda tree. So the spines must be another plant; perhaps some sort of “porcupine lichen?” With “quills” that come loose when brushed against? There are lots of crazy life-forms out there, so I didn’t rule anything out.

As I write this blog, however, I’m looking at these pictures very closely. And I can only conclude that the spines are part of the tree. Look at how they’re coming out of the bark, almost like hair out of skin follicles. Most telling, look at the area around the knot in the tree.

So maybe this is a cactus after all. Still, if so, this is the most tree-looking cactus I’ve ever seen.

Here are a couple more pictures… it’s a rather beautiful thing, I must say. In a cold, spiny way.

Unphotoshopped. Click for a larger image.

A less-spiny part of the bark. Click for a larger image.

The word brassiere and bra have a different feel. Brassiere seems so 19^th century with visions of formality: ladies in corsets etc. “Bra” (short for brassiere) is so modern and bland. There must be a better name? Over the shoulder boulder holder is good but so passé .

When I was young lass, before I even had a bra, my friends and I stuffed (maybe taped) waded Kleenex in our shirts to give the look of maturity. We went here and there like that. One afternoon our vision enlarged; We decided to put oranges in our shirts. There weren’t any in the house so I went next door and asked our neighbor. I told her I’d return them after. Now I wonder what she thought I was up to. Somehow we adhered the citrus to our flat chests and walked to the movie theater to watch Pollyanna, my favorite movie. But while standing in line to buy tickets, one of my oranges slipped out and rolled.  This red faced Jane Mansfield in training was beyond embarrassed!

I got my first bra in 6^th grade in Berkeley.  Even though I hadn’t developed much yet, I told my mom I wanted one. She replied, “Is that what the girls are wearing now Dear?” She took me to Hink’s department store where a warm middle aged stout veteran fitter brought me a training bra! That was very disappointing.

Mass developed and life in the undergarment world seemed fine until the age of 13.  I had another embarrassing, rather mortifying experience. My brother, 9 years older than me, went away to college in Vermont. While visiting him, we went out for dinner. He brought some of his cute friends. Around the table the guys started laughing but I wasn’t in on the joke. I began to feel self conscious and went into the ladies room. In the mirror I saw that my very stiff pointed cup bra (think Madonna) had one cup pointing to the north and the other dead south! Oh those were the days!

Nowadays many women are having breast implants. At this time in my life, that doesn’t appeal to me at all. I have that all out of my system!

I’m glad to laugh at all this now.  I’d love to hear some of your adventures while growing up.

However, ever since a recent upgrade, my computer’s decibel level dropped considerably. So much so, that Luke’s computer became the noisier one. Finding that the noisiest part of his ‘puter was the CPU fan, he decided not to just hammer the final nail in the coffin of Sound, but he decided to drop a big heatsink on top of it to dissolve any chance of the lid being lifted.

Meaning. . .  he bought a really *!sailor talk!* big heatsink. It even need bracing on the back of the motherboard to keep it from snapping.

I must say, it is quite quiet (though a cinder block would probably be cheaper, and just as effective and heavy). The heatsink would’ve done the trick. . . if I didn’t start constantly humming to make up for the lack of non-silence.

• Her: I apologize in advance if I barf on you. [She said it kind of like a joke, but I could sense she wasn't all jest.]
• Me: Oh…are you that dizzy? [We'd been doing a fair amount of turning.]
• Her: No.
• Me: …Are you…sick?
• Her: Kind of.
• Me: Oh.
• Inner thoughts: Oh, great. Thanks.

Context: I just had a cold two weeks ago. Needless to say, though I finished the dance out of politeness, there was much hand-washing directly after.

The unedited CNN story (nothing special, really) can be found here.

Let me direct you to the scene that my eyes took in as I stepped outside to the back porch.

You can probably guess what the first words that came out of my mouth were—besides, “…do I really need to ask?”

*What doesn’t go good with food?**

**Watching a birth?

Finger Rock, Arizona

I was one troubled teenager for a time. I’d go off to the mountains for some peace and solitude. I wasn’t all that concerned with my safety either, life didn’t seem to offer much advantage over death. For instance, one year I climbed Finger Rock (photo right) without ropes. Going up was easy; going down was terrifying. Yikes! Was this a latent suicidal death wish? I guess not, primarily because I am not all that emotional by nature. Although, neither am I drawn to rock climbing or thrill seeking in general, so who knows. As a kid I heard stories about a guy falling off Finger Rock and breaking so many bones that his body turned to the consistency of Jello. Recalling that probably got me to turn around before reaching the top (and so saved my life, no doubt).

Singing Wayfaring Stranger the other night reminded me of those difficult teenage years and of Finger Rock(1). As with many Christian Gospel songs, Wayfaring Stranger promises a Heavenly after life, e.g., “I’ll soon be free from every trial…” and “I’m going there to meet my mother, she said she’d meet me when I come…”. This promise of a Heavenly afterlife is one of the sharpest difference between Judeo-Christian-Islamic religions and Easter ones. Sure, the Easter ones promise something as well. However, with Karma you are merely promised an ‘upgrade’ (or downgrade), and while Nirvana sounds more Heavenly, the path to it can be a winding road of countless lifetimes.

The Eastern paradigm agrees more with the phenomenon of non-locality (a form of entanglement observed in quantum physics); although granted, you really need to read between the lines at times. The evidence of entanglement suggests that at the most subtle and fundamental level, everything (and nothing) are inextricably connected. Oneness is real despite what our biological senses tend to tell us. This suggest that the biologically induced sense of a separate self (ego in humans) underlies the illusion of life and death.

Considering all this, I can’t see how suicide or a promised Heavenly afterlife accomplishes its goal. There is no escape; destiny is eternity. Of course, you can’t tell emotion that. Those needs and fears drive us to do what we do regardless of non-local reality (i.e., emotions determines our ‘local’ reality).

I sometimes feel down and out to this day. Nothing specific, just a general weariness with life. I am now certain that ‘pure’ consciousness(2) is continuous, perhaps which accounts for some of my weary feelings (I sometimes feel like I have been / will be alive forever). Knowing that consciousness is eternal also makes any hope of ending that weariness through suicide futile. This also makes any hope of gaining or losing the advantage, what ever it might be, futile.

So, what to do, what to do? The idea to ‘be as careful at the end as at the beginning, and there will be no ruined enterprises‘ is pretty good place to begin dealing with the ‘enterprise’ of living. I’ve found the joy in living lies in giving my utmost care to the enterprise of living. Giving, however, is not as easy as it sounds(3). The survival instinct drives us to take as much as we can get (gain – win – succeed). We fear loss. Indeed, our fear of death is really about the fear of losing the pleasures to which we cling. We are locked in a life and death tug-of-war: our need to let go and give in order to enjoy life verses our fear of losing what we cherish, or not getting what we desire. No wonder the sage desires not to desire and does not value goods which are hard to come by…

(1) An old friend from my teenage years read this post and remembers more which I’ll now add below. I don’t think back on my past very often so I’ve forgotten much of it. (Although I don’t really know; I can’t recall how much I forgot.)

I just read some of your Tao blog, I was with you when you climbed finger rock, I waited at the bottom of the rock, you did not pressure me to follow, thanks for that. I did not see you as a troubled teen at all, you were very happy and excited about life and had many interests. You were a risk taker but were confident in your actions, like walking on your hands at the edge of a cliff in Sabino Canyon near the top of Thimble Rock.

I think you were so good at walking on your hands plus had no fear, (like a French tight rope walker) fear kills. Our many trips in caves I had no fear also because I couldn’t see how far I would fall, your lack of fear made me think everything we did was reasonably safe.

I know you were cautious when you needed to be, I remember many cases of testing before acting.

(2) ‘Pure’ consciousness is the foundation upon which living things ’see’ a personal identity and ego. The foundation continues; the illusions of personal identity and ego cease when biological function ceases.

(3) Giving is not as simple as it sounds either. For example, chapter 81 says, ‘The sage does not hoard. Having bestowed all he has on others, he has yet more; having given all he has to others, he is richer still.‘ It is important to note that the ‘bestowed all he has’ and ‘given all he has’ is not literally giving things to others. Such overt gross giving is out of sync with the natural balance of give and take, and thus unintended consequences inevitably follow. As they say, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions”. The giving referred to here is a state of mind and emotion, an approach to living and not the handing out of $100 bills.

Background
Memories become dimmer as the years fly by. Many are even too misty to write down without filling in the voids with poetic license (fiction). Still, I’ve set out to fetch what memories remain before they fade any further. See: The Further One Goes for background on this ‘Times of Yore’ series.

And here’s the story behind the video, and why I was happy to watch it again after having dropped the routine for a few months…

This past spring, I turned a friend on to GTD, and she jumped in with both feet. Hearing how much she was enjoying the process inspired me to have another go at it—”it” being, simply put, to keep track of all my projects, obligations, to-dos, etc., in some external “system” where they can be stored, tracked, and managed.

Since I last wrote about my adventures in implementing GTD nearly two years ago, I’ve had many ups and downs with the GTD approach. I had some big successes because of it, but the system always seemed to fall apart for some reason, and I had some long periods of apathy toward the whole thing. It’s definitely “easier” to just “let it all hang loose” and not keep track of everything. But it has it’s downsides too; it’s harder to keep focus and direction, you get nagging feelings of “forgetting something,” you feel more scattered and disorganized… sometimes you don’t know what to do with ideas, other than just implement them, which may not be the best idea at a given moment. So, now that I had a friend starting fresh with GTD, I thought I’d have a fresh start at GTD as well.

Key to my success in this most recent round of GTD has been the morning routine, where I basically review everything on my plate. Having such a grounding routine at the very start of the day put me on the right course for the rest of the day. It was wonderful!

And then, I went to teach at kids’ music camps during the summer. Alaska for one and a half weeks, Hawaii for three weeks… both experiences were wonderful, and left me refreshed and inspired, but by the time I was back home in September, I was starting over from scratch with no daily rhythms to fall back on. And no morning routine.

Since then, frustration at my renewed scatteredness and lack of focus has been building inside of me. I’ve tried reimplementing GTD, but it hasn’t “stuck.” Just then, I came across this video that I made four months ago (which I hadn’t gotten around to blogging yet) and thought, “Yes! That’s what I’ve been missing!” So I thought I’d finally blog it now. And tomorrow, I’ll start my new morning routine.

(Apologies for the likely double-digit Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level score of this post.)

But now we move ahead hundreds/thousands of years later. Just like language and traditions, this method of devising Whom Is The Most Worthy got condensed into one qualifying requirement: speed. Whoever had the fastest tongue would be granted the owner of the treasure, whether food or friend (haven’t we all wanted to have sole proprietorship to our friends?). Let’s face it, if we didn’t verbally stake our possessions by screaming, “I call that last cupcake!!” or “Dibs on the free caaaar!!”, we’d just pee on everything. That’s what separates us from animals and drunks.

Whether you call it “dibs” or “hosies,” it’s just that magic word that gives to the almost-unspoken-yet-uttered right to bear only your paws on the item desired by two (or more)  parties. And just like “Manwich”, there are many different words referring to the same… emotional outburst. In our case—starting in the late ’90s—the word was “claimed.” If there was only one instrument or foodstuff that we both wanted, whoever called “Claimed!” first would be able to get the rights. After about 5 years, “claimed” evolved into the more common exclamation, “dibs”. Nothing new though.

However, come 2005, our run-o’-the-mill “dibs” evolved into something greater. On one particular day of the year, when the recycling bin had to be emptied, one of yelled out, “undibs!” Just like that. With no warning. Just like when Christopher Sell dropped a twinkie in a pot of boiling grease and called it, “Food!” both words stuck. (Though obviously, more stuck to the deep-fried twinkie.)

And man oh man, “undibs” is much more quick-draw than dibs, as there is more things to “undibs” at. You never know when the opportunity will arise. Generally, it’s when the doorbell rings, when a general household chore has to be done, or when somebody calls our phone and we know we should answer, but don’t want to. Very simple. And what’s more, if two people “undibs” at the same time, whoever calls “double-undibs” gets the favor. This is where high reflexes (of realizing that “undibs” was called in unison) comes in.  After at least a year of undibsing, it’s rare that we don’t both snap out a “double-undibs” at the same time, which means we “triple-undibs” is next. If it hasn’t been resolved by then, the final call, “Undibs Infinity,” “Googol Undibs” or “Unlimited Undibs” seals the deal. It’s never gotten to the point where we’ve both “tied” at that level. Having the choice of three responses slows the mind enough to offer a chance for just one of us to call it.

I never thought it’d happen, but the other day, as I was spreading a middle-aged caterpillar sized length of toothpaste on my toothbrush in the bathroom, the phone beeped. (Don’t worry, that’s happened before.) Almost immediately, thinking it was the front door, I exclaimed “Undibs.” Like a superhero using his power without realizing it, I thought to myself, “What just happened?” Just from hearing the beep, I executed the “keyword” like a reflex.
Could this be getting Pavlovian??