The Coalition Rocks Me Out

I've been putting off posting about this since it happened, since it makes sense to me subjectively but I think it'll make me sound like an idiot to everybody else. Heh. Like that would be new for this blog, right...

The last year I've had some truly amazing meditations. Many of them relate to what I've called 'The Four' since 1994 when 'awareness' of that kicked in. An oversimplistic way to explain The Four would be to say that I realized I am part of a deeper/larger identity. Its "primary components" are four identities (all living in different realities), one of which is what I know of as me.

I know 1994-2006 is a long time, but this concept was honestly so hard for me to get a grip on, just because it was so outside my belief systems, that I haven't progressed nearly as fast with it as I do most things in meditation. Earlier this year, I finally accepted it... I thought I had, but realized when it finally DID happen, that I had only JUST totally taken it in.

Shortly following that, I was introduced to what I semi-humorously dubbed The Coalition (also sometimes called the Consortium). It was a whole group of identities -- my mind seems to vary this from 16 to 32 -- a few of which I can see clearly (one is Nero, whom I've mentioned previously in this blog), but most of which I can't, which in my meditations means I am not sufficiently integrated with them.

I was so resistant to this expansion on the concept that even in the meditations, I clung to the chest of my mate of The Four like an intensely shy child, unwilling to open myself to that. It took many attempts before I could even begin to approach the idea with 'meeting' them and shaking their hand, never mind any kind of integration attempt. They are not the same as The Four. We are like the core, in a way. They are more like... an "extension" of that core; a larger pattern, which The Four are simply the central part of.


How this applies to my daily life, I can't tell you. I have no freakin idea what value any of this weird junk might have or not have. It just "is what it is." I don't know what most of it means. I don't know if it's some bizarre creativity, some sublimated form of insanity, some allegory for more practical things. Who knows, seriously. Long ago I learned to just take this kind of thing at face value as it happened, and not try to assign too many assumptions to things or fit them into what others talk about.


Recently, I got really into this new music from a group called Evanescence that I hadn't heard before. Although their album 'Fallen' is overproduced and a bit corporate rock in flavor, still I'm crazy about it. (I can give FTP info for friends who want to grab the MP3s.)

Early on while listening to this I decided to slip into a meditation (in the Tower, a part of my inner space that showed up [I didn't consciously create it, but was directed there by my Senior of The Four]) which was fairly novel, doing a meditation to something akin to hard rock, as I normally have soundtracks or something soft on. But the emotion/power that the music invoked in me, which has always been a major element in driving my meditations, must have been just right -- maybe that's why I had the sudden urge to do it -- and I actually succeeded in the first stage of truly allowing integration of The Coalition. Which is actually another way of just saying, working on my consciously accepting them. It isn't totally complete, but passed a major barrier.

It was just neat music before this. After this meditation, though, I think part of me just flipped out. It was as if I could FEEL that somehow, my primary energetic-body extended several feet farther outside me than is normal. Now I am not normally aware of it to begin with, so I don't know how I could be aware that it was many feet larger in diameter than normal, but that was my perception. I felt "denser inside" -- as if the energy of me was greater, and more "condensed".

The interesting thing is that, like the four, it's all "part of me." It isn't like I have this sense that these 'other' identities 'over there' are present. It's that I just "feel aware of a larger diversity of self inside". And it isn't like the diversity is new, that is the important thing. It is like this has ALWAYS been part of me, and I am simply becoming 'aware' of it whereas I never was before.

Since this recent meditation when I felt I finally integrated with them at the first level, for the first real time, and felt as if my energetic body was so much more thick and solid and larger, I've had a major personal shift in focus. Major.

Everything in my life literally faded into partly transparent behind a sudden obsessive interest in music. In singing, playing, songwriting, listening. Everything. Viewing, webwork, writing, all the things that are important to me, just dropped into near invisibility behind a passion for music.

The ironic thing is that music was my entire LIFE from 5th grade on, and especially from age 15 on. From age 5 I intended to do that as my 'life' and living. From age 18 on it was a major dichotomy that I wanted to do my music, but wanted to keep my 'responsible' job-life because that's what made my dad proud. The conflict internally was massive. Hours every day for years and years on music, it was my life.

In my early 20s, 22-24, I took a couple years to really focus on hypnosis and such, self-therapy I knew I needed. Between my work and school schedule, I had no time for anything. I wrote jazz songs in the car acapella, commuting 4.5 hours a day mostly on the 405 in Los Angeles... if anything could make a person insane...! During that period I gained a really sudden and major amount of weight, which in retrospect is not all that surprising. By the time I came home a couple years later, I was horrified, having been so sleep deprived and stressed out I was kind of half-oblivious about it while it happened. I went on a formal 'diet' to the extreme. And, because it turns out I am genetically very sensitive to carbohydrates and intolerant to gluten, a typical diet composed of high-carb and whole grains did nothing but make me gain more weight and feel lousy. (Most people are clueless about the things that really make people fat. It isn't nearly as much about calories as about how your body reacts to what you eat, at least in some people's case.) Half the women in my family are huge and have spent many decades chronically dieting to little result.

After just barely getting over the urge to put a bullet in my head over how this annihilated all my music plans, because I wouldn't get on stage anymore (I didn't want to leave the house, let alone go to the mall, let alone perform!), I finally decided to accept it rather like someone who'd lost a limb in a car accident or something, and move on with the life it left me. I became a workaholic in a major way, and I pretty much put a hard suppression on the whole music thing that had rushed through me like a river up until then. I couldn't do it halfway. I can't do anything halfway. So it had to just cease entirely. That was what, 17 years ago. A lifetime.

So recently (13 weeks ago) I went on lowcarb, and have been very steadily losing weight. It's just stupid how I could have not known about this 17 years ago. Talk about giving up your life for ignorance. The minute I quit eating stuff I was mildly allergic to and dropped my carb intake, the weight just started falling off. It will be a long time before I'm anything like the weight I want to be, mind you, but it's a start. And I suppose it's possible that this part of why I am digging into psychology that I haven't touched in a long, long time.

I'm obsessed. With music. For the last... ten days, I have done almost nothing but listen to music, and sing a little, and as of yesterday when I finally got one of my guitars cleaned up and re-strung, playing. No webwork. No viewing. No writing. Almost no communications with friends even. I don't even visit my web own projects except like once a week for 2 minutes. Everything, but everything, just suddenly became... well not unimportant, but "unimportant within the larger scheme of things." And the only thing that feels important in that larger picture of me is music.

And I think it's The Coalition's fault. I think this is essentially the much larger picture of what I am inside, and that my hard suppression of music was partly a suppression of energies they are composed of -- and when I accepted that into me and it "came into manifestation" as part of me, all those parts of me I'd buried were there again. As intense as they were when I buried them. Like a suppressed memory that when it comes back, is as strong as if it just happened... this like a suppressed drive-focus that is as strong as it was when locked away.

Of course, after 17 years of not playing or singing, I suck. :-) This doesn't really bother me. Music was always my primary talent, and I'm sure I can pick it up again.

Why I would want to even bother picking it up again at age 41 is beyond me. That's way too old to do anything with it really; particularly for women, the industry is geared to youth. But even if it's nothing more than fun, than local coffeehouses and street singing at some point, even if I don't pursue it the way I intended when young, I don't think it would be possible for me to suppress this again. I'm just going to have to trust that if this is what I really need at the moment, that I'll let it carry me forward and expect that there will be some value to it, even if only health and state of mind.

17 years ago I gave my dad my Fender amp and 'loaned' him back the old original Les Paul signature guitar he gave me for my 18th birthday (it had been his guitar) and all the other various music equipment I had, save for three other guitars (Goya 6 string [division of Martin, not as nice as Martin but good tone, dreadnought]; Degas spanish flattop, and Takemine 12 string). He uses the Paul for some of his gigs (he's C&W, the one kind of music I am not, ironically-- he plays steel too, and vocals, but specializes in lead guitar and chet-atkins style) so I don't want to take that back yet. So yesterday I went online to Musician's Friend and bought a decent iBeam acoustic pickup, a little Roland 30W cube amp, a decent Sennheiser vocal mike and stand, and some misc. things. Cost too much money but there you go, I'm obsessed and broke -- a real musician, HAHA.

Two things I found I'm dying for now but won't be able to afford for a long time: A Dean 12 string bass -- you can play guitar as well as bass on it, it looks awesome -- and a 'pocket' trumpet, shortened length, over-wound more like a french horn, looks SO cool. OK, my trumpet playing even at its height sounded like a camel in heat I admit, but trumpet is the best and fastest vocal warmup on earth.

Long ago when the world was young, I played acoustic rock -- this combines lead and rythym and finger picking in one approach, so you can try and express the larger potential of a song in a solo acoustic performance -- it'll be awhile before I can do much I figure, I can't even remember my own songs (I had *hundreds* of them -- I remember a few, that's all). I managed to remember most of the simple finger-picking songs I used for tuning for years (you know, the guitar basics -- blackbird, dust in the wind, blue finger, classical gas, etc.) although my clarity sucks. (At one point I bellowed in disgust, "Oh my GOD. My FINGERS are FAT!" sending my husband in the other room into peals of laughter. I was too grouchy to see the humor until later...)

But there it is. I've abruptly dropped everything else I've been involved in for years, and I totally don't care about much of anything anymore except my kid, my music, and my job. I assume that since Remote Viewing is so much a part of my life the last dozen years, that this will come back in once the initial obsession with music mellows a little, but who knows?

Gotta get back to work here.
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"I'm so inspired, I think I may kill myself."

Sometimes, when I see a session in the TKR RV Galleries that is so good it makes my eyes pop out, I am torn between being delighted ("heh! they're in MY software playing!"), inspired ("wow! you see? another reminder it can be done!") and depressed ("oh my god. I should give up now and leave it to people like this.").

I was laughing my butt off this morning at a video series a friend sent me. It's 3 videos but they are just 3 pieces of this kid playing the Led Zeppelin song 'stairway to heaven' (it's a long song).

The first part is the typical finger picking-style intro, the second is more of the same, but the third is the rock lead guitar solo and the kid, casually sitting there in a long nightshirt, nails it. He's like... maybe 7 years old.

The videos were good, especially the last one, but it was the comments of the visitors that literally made me laugh until I was crying. All these adult guitarists -- having the same reaction to this kid rocking Zeppelin as some people feel about some viewer rocking a session beyond belief. Utterly hilarious!! Although I don't play much anymore, guitar, singing and songwriting used to be "my whole life" so it struck a chord with me... pun intended. ;-)

The three videos are here: Part 1 [slow] - More of the same - Rock lead solo

The Warder

I was saying earlier about the Warder thing. I have a post from a few months ago called The Warder, about my best friend, whom I am coincidentally passionately in love with, but really, that's a completely different subject.

I think people have more of the psychic bond of Warders than our society recognizes, at least, depending on the people. I certainly seem to with him.

He thinks he's been demoted, after reading my last blog post. I threaten to announce my undying love for him publicly and demand he make a commitment to me. The latter of which would probably send him into some kind of allergic reaction.

In any case, I think one of the more interesting aspects of psi is the relationships between human beings. I pick up a lot more about people now by voice, email and chat and so on than I ever did before. I'm willing to bet most viewers do, as a side effect of awareness or something.

Body Double

I've been paying attention lately to this concept of my body as an Earth Elemental that I essentially "conjoined with" in order to be a player on this planet.

After reading the 'Wheel of Time' book series (by Robert Jordan) I thought a lot about this concept of a Warder. It really appeals to me on many levels, though not quite so one-sided as it seems like in the books. It's nearly a sort of psychic-spiritual fantasy: wouldn't it be awesome to have another entity with whom you are so close that you are psychically conjoined? Not so extremely as to interfere with individual identity of course, but closely enough to serve as each others' protector, in different ways.

Essentially to have one entity with whom one is so bonded that there is really no issue of romance or commitment or uncertainty: already, you're inseparable. They are a deeper part of you than could spare any room for question. (Some part of me off in the corner is smirking that maybe this is my 'biological clock' griping about not having a person that I have that committed a relationship with...)

The more I think about my body, the more I feel convinced that this is very literally the relationship that we have. The irony of it... All these years that I wished I could commune better with nature spirits. All this time feeling so fascinated at how another lifeform might exist and perceive reality and experience. And all along, I've been as intimate as one can be with an extremely advanced, sentient earth-elemental being... so close to me I couldn't even see it.

Back in the Bewilderness days I had an experience where, briefly, I had a complete out of body experience except the sense of "I" awareness stayed with the body instead of going with the part that left. That was completely disconcerting. I'd had OBEs my whole life and thought it was normal, but I had honestly just never even thought of such a thing as staying with the body while some 'other' part of one leaves before!

I observed how different it was. How trying to use 'logic' was nearly a linear process that made a normally split-second thought process into an agonizingly tedious step-by-step progression. How my eyes could see things, but I understood that my brain could not evaluate it clearly because I lacked the normal more-advanced perceptual faculties to process it.

Back in January of '06 I had some of the most amazing meditations I've ever had in my life. We are talking total virtual reality, total "autonomy" on the part of the archetypes and aspects etc., and visuals that were so utterly astounding I still feel awe just thinking about them. I could have sworn I blogged about them but apparently I didn't (which seems very odd). As just one example:

I found myself in a cramped, dank cell, with the barest hint of some metallic immpression, and definitely kind of wet. A frog-creature with a flat face and huge eyes met me, moved across the room in the kind bizarre way only a human-sized frog could, reached up impossibly high and pulled down this chain that opened up a part of the ceiling and folded down as steps to the ground. I thanked him, and went up the steps. Down a hallway with more weird things than I can recount, at the other end there was a doorway. I knocked, it vanished, and this lizard-like creature made entirely of ice -- but dry ice sort of -- stood there. He led me through a big room, around and down as if I were in a very complex house, and finally to the door of another room, which opened. A man, who seemed respectable and vaguely British (that part cracked me up), with a neatly trimmed beard and wearing a suit, opened the door and let us in. He thanked the lizard-ice-creature who promptly melted into nonexistence. Then he had a conversation with me.

He said he was "representative" consciousness of this part of my body. We were in this really big room, and over at the far side were these low walls and some big open area they were bordering. He took me over there and I looked down over the wall -- it went down quite a ways -- and was simply stunned into speechlessness by the vision. Below, there were zillions of these buckey-ball-shaped "panels" is all I can call them, each of them independent, and zillions of them in a circular shaped pattern. There was a slow 'swirling' motion that they all were in. There were other things too but those were the ones that really caught my attention. For some reason I had the overlay of the panels used to make satellite dishes. At one side of the vast opening with this swirling zillion-piece thing some ways down, was this fluid reservoir kind of thing. He told me, "This is one of your eyes. You are seeing it from the back, in a way that you normally could not." I had to spend awhile simply stunned at the complexity and beauty of it.

He told me that water was a problem. That my whole body was in competition with itself for the rare resource of water. The sinuses, the eyes, every organ, the brain and spinal cord, that they all had representative intelligences, such as himself, that I could talk to if I wanted. I realized it was because I'd been chronically dehydrated for eons, as some researchers suggest our whole culture is to the cellular level thanks to a lifetime of drinks that aren't water. He said that he was giving me this tour because they were really having a serious problem: they were so water-deprived it was causing severe issues with the continued operation without degradation of that part of my body. He wanted to ask me to see that 'his people' -- his area -- got enough water. I thought about it a bit, and then I meant to pull out a paper and pen which somehow became a scroll and inked quill, and I wrote out something like, "First dips on all incoming water to the body, as much as is needed," and I signed my name, and I said, here, will this help? And he seems pretty happy and he says with relief, "This is wonderful. Yes it will help. Especially with the politics of it." I looked at him in some confusion and said, "Politics? My body has politics?" He looked like he wanted to laugh out loud, but he just said dryly, "You have NO idea."

I looked over the edge at the swirling mass of independently moving, shifting buckeyball panels, which seemed to be reflecting these orbs of light that were shooting up from somewhere yet farther below, as if each panel could move so it could reflect it as needed. Then I thanked him, and the stiff un-cold but ice-like lizardish creature grew out of fluid again, led me back to the hallway entrance where he had met me. I went back down the hall, ignoring all the openings, doors and distractions, and down the stairs and into the dank, vaguely metallic feeling cell where the giant frog with huge eyes awaited me. I thanked him and bowed and ended the meditation.

The two most profound parts of it were that first, the visuals were AMAZING. We're talking "3D with Dolby Sound" as a friend used to say of her visions. The "reality" of it was stunning. The second was that everything was a surprise. When you really get the meditative world down, you are not controlling it, nor totally passive, it's almost like you are feeding it a stream of creative energy but then you are allowing that energy to autonomously be what it will without your interference, so the interaction can be just as novel and astonishing as things can be in real life (sometimes, oddly, moreso).

I hadn't thought until then about the fact that if a small copse of flowers is filled with consciousness that is its own identity to some degree, with 'representative' earth-nature spirits and devas and so on, well then, definitely, the highly complex human body is as well, especially when you consider how it is intertwined with our consciousness.

I had other meditations during that period that focused on things in the body, but I didn't go back to the eye -- I didn't go there on purpose to begin with, it was a new kind of meditation and that's just where I ended up -- but it's an experience more striking than nearly any I've had in my life, even in so-called "real life", so I'm not likely to forget it.

And that was just one little part of my body. The overall body is surely even more 'aware'.

I think our tendency to think as our body as "us", even though that's a good thing in a way, is also the reason we don't always recognize it well; my body gets punished for being 'me', hahaha! When I think of my body as a beautiful, incredibly sentient nature spirit that is totally bonded with me, part of me for this journey on earth, I feel a lot more respect for it and awareness of its needs.

Illinois central, Monday morning rail

Been on trains, planes and automobiles. Nearly home now. In a few hours I get up and catch a plane for home.

I like the train, with a couple exceptions; in general, it's neat. Below is what I was blogging earlier, but couldn't get online to post until now.

o0o

just after dark, 3rd December 2006, somewhere in Illinois

I am nearly alone in the dark. A few minutes ago it was light, and the train was rocking and rolling along, and everything seemed normal. Then all the lights went off, and in a sudden eerie silence, we slid to a stop.

Not a planned stop. It's dark outside, yet somehow the trees are recognizeably black-on-black as figures in the night. A very odd, muted wailing-whine has begun, two strands of anti-harmony that made the other few people in my small train car giggle nervously. They say now that the power has gone out and the engineers are working to restore it. The world outside seems like a lonely planet, with not even a moon to reflect on the featureless snow.

My novel is no fun in the dark, so I turned on my computer to blog.

I'm feeling a bit entranced today, maybe following on my attempt to seriously meditate last night in my sleeper car. Today I feel as if I am a halfling, caught between two worlds. One world is Mundania, as Piers called it, where all things are logical, the 'real' world as we pretend to know it so we'll feel better thinking reality is really that small. The other world is something else, something filled with shapes and shadows, with astronomically improbable convenience of circumstance showing up just on time and then receding into the unmanifest like that is normal. It feels as if there are vague but living energies reaching right into my body, yet somehow a few steps toward the astral part of it, tugging on me, calling like a destiny I recognize as part of me but can't seem to remember its name.

All day today, thinking about returning to my 'normal' life at home, it has felt like something in a dream. I have the oddest sense, as if all of reality is a total illusion, a game that we are all playing, supporting each others' delusions, psychically arranging to only meet or talk about the points of reality we think we have in common for the most part. It feels as if there are two very distinct worlds: one on the surface, that we think is the normal one, but is actually an interesting veneer, woven like a group dream out of the strings of time. The other, the 'real' world, a vastly deeper, infinitely more complex world, is what is really 'real', but which the liliputians on the surface of my reality dismiss as dream and fantasy. I try not to pay too much attention to it. I don't want the Lilliputians to know just how different I am from most of them. I don't want them to know I am not a character on their safe surface world. My deeper roots only frighten people. My adulthood is a testament to my dedicated attempt to learn how--and successfully--convince the people around me that we share an agreement about reality.

I felt the pull today. I haven't felt that since... 1993-5, my Bewilderness phase. I felt the pull of "coincidence I can count on." It was pitch black. "Give me light while I type the password," I thought, only to instantly have a light from some engineer outside flash in my window on my keyboard. The moment I finished typing it was past. Are those precognition... the arrangement of the present to fit the impending... or? I wasn't surprised somehow. I have been talking with my body today. My beautiful friend. My earth elemental that has been so unrecognized and unthanked most of my life. It is indeed the ultimate Warder: the strength that carries me, defends me, anchors me in this world. My body has been my best friend lately. Ever since I nearly poisoned it by taking that medicine I was allergic to... I have been suddenly more aware of it, aware that maybe I am a selfish shallow brat not to have realized that my body has its own destiny, its own life, its own joy in living, and my ignoring it and abuse of it is so unfair. Body and I have become much closer the last day or so in particular.

Today I'm distracted. I want to know truth. Back in that bewilderness era, I knew it. I could feel it, because it was so strongly inside me that I could recognize the distortions, distractions, confusions and evasions that stripped truth of its natural beauty. Nobody would believe. It doesn't matter. I could feel 'the red thread of truth' as I called it, in what people said, in anything I read. I could separate truth from intent, another subtlety. It occurs to me to wonder why it is that the moment I launched into remote viewing well over a decade ago, the massive conscious psi that I had accepted as simply novel and inexplicable, actually went away almost entirely. It is as if a person who dreamed throughout their entire daily experience, suddenly was told, "Look here, how fascinating--you can dream when you sleep!"--and suddenly, something about the mental model of that, caused dreams to cease except during sleep.

Did it wake my ego left brain up to protect me? How did I go from being impossibly psychic as thoroughly as I breathed, to studying psi yet having almost none of it manifest anymore, except in occasional dreams or experiences?

I think... I think that is what I need to make a decision about. It is my focus, as the Narrator made clear to me years ago. You get what you focus upon, as Seth said. I always do. I am always intense. But I let my focus get distracted and diffused and join the drama-queen of surface reality. I've used "doing" things to cloak awareness of "being".

Until now, I haven't felt like I had the energy to live the degree of self-integrity that I maintained in those years, that allowed me that kind of awareness. The effort to maintain awareness of every thought, to pull back from every tempting daydream, and from all the small sarcasms of daily life, was huge. It was a bliss of awareness, with the exhilaration of courage, and the unbelievable exhaustion of constant internal change. I was so happy, and yet, I recognized the sheer amount of work that it took to hold that state of mind, state of being, state of grace, was so much more work than most anybody would be willing to invest.

I miss that, for the first time in a long time.

[later]

So, as usual the power was out in our train car. Nobody woke us to tell us we were at the kansas city train station. I woke up just in time to see the lights, realize where we were, get my stuff and get out the door before the train drove off with me to somewhere else.

The Kansas City "Union Station" is apparently the biggest in the country except New York. I feel about it rather like I do the Atlanta airport. On one hand, you have to admit that it's gigantic and it's got tons of stuff and so on. On the other hand, if you make the mistake of feeling like the important thing is getting on a train or a plane, then your feelings maybe different. In Atlanta, even with trams and moving sidewalks the place is so huge you need to wear running shoes and just ship your luggage UPS to your destination instead. At the KC union station, once you finally get around the big area with the little train and all the shops and diners and such, and get yourself into where the actual train ticket counter etc. is, once you have done everything and there's nothing more to do than get on or off a train, THEN you get to go outside, in like -2F degree weather, and walk about a city block down this sidewalk, and then this lonnnnnnng flight of steps (there is an elevator fortunately), and then down this lonnnng sidewalk beside the train. Should your nose fall off from the freezing cold prior to that, there is nobody to help you. Train cars, like hotel rooms, are always the farthest possible distance they can be from wherever you start. It's like some kind of cosmic law. I found myself blessing myself for having shipped my luggage home, all but my personal laptop and a small carryon. It was still hard work!

I was waiting to see if my kid or my friend came online. After insisting I couldn't leave her, the kid has disappeared for half an hour now. My friend is probably working or busy or something. I should go take a shower but I'm freezing here. I think I'll see if the radiator in this cheap motel room is capable of anything more interesting than what I feel. At this rate I'm going to put my coat and scarves back on and just sleep in my clothes.

Meanwhile... being away from home, although not a huge thing as I worked during it, was at least 'away from home' which was a nice break. If I could just get enough sleep now, to feel human and strong, I can begin the priority shift I came to while away.

Must sleep now.

High Fidelity

I'm a big fan of actor John Cusak. Of his sister Joan, as well. My other favorite actors are Bruce Willis, Brian Dennehy, Nicolas Cage, Chow Yun Fat, Tim Robbins, and I know I'm forgetting a couple... and some who've passed on, like Raul Julia and River Phoenix. Anyway after planning to see it for like five years I finally got around tonight to seeing John's movie "High Fidelity." His character was slightly similar, but rather more seedy, than the one he plays in "Must Love Dogs", a more recent movie.

He realizes at this one point that he's never really made a commitment (to the woman he loves). That he always had one foot out just in case. And that because he was never really fully committed to her, he didn't really focus on the positive potential of the future, either, but just sort of lived day to day.

Jack Black is a helluva singer. I hadn't realized.

It made me think about that for a little while. About how our plans and dreams for our future come in two categories: idle fantasies, that we engage in for the pleasure; and creative construction, because what we're daydreaming about is something we have committed to.

So it really comes down to committment. If you don't have your oars in, you're not going anywhere except with the stream.

I think I need to decide exactly what I want and don't want in life and make a commitment to it.