Before December

Winterlong

Dafodills and Whooperills

Duh? Of course that rhymes and is an awesome visual. Thank you James Whitcomb Riley for completing this huge gap in my lyric writing abilities. How could I have not seen that? I was thinking "pigtails," which is a pretty good visual and sets the character as innocent, but the rhyming is a stretch.

The Perennials v. James Whitcomb Riley (Also Vonnegut v. Larry Bird)

I'm at my friend's house in Indianapolis and I say, "Hey isn't James Witcomb Riley's house around here?" They point through the window, "It's that one next door." Wow. A hundred years ago, a classic American author and poet wrote almost every single work right next door, and tomorrow, as in Sunday, the creativity continues on this block as the band The Perennials will get high and drunk and make a record on their computer using cool edit pro. I love this band, I love thier sound, I love these dudes. Members of the Mans, Half Rats and Eric from the Happy thoughts. Their verse is music, but maybe not so far from Riley either. On the coffee table, under a ton of empty Pabst and Budweiser cans, play station remotes, and pipes, they uncover a fossil and brush it off. It is an original 1911 printed copy of "Lockerbie Verse of Riley Prose," hard bound. I wonder what it is worth.
Hazel Crosby, a character in Kurt Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle" is a woman obsessed with naming Hoosiers around the world. Hoosiers of course is a name giving to anyone from Indiana, like Vonnegut himself. "Vonnegut is a Hoosier," you might hear Crosby say. But the fact why this is so funny to me is that Hazel Crosby is actually anyone from Indiana. Everyone that lives in Indiana love to name off Hoosiers and folks with Hoosier ties. They are proud, and rightfully so. What other state can boast, Michael Jackson (Hoosier) Jane Pauly (Hoosier) Dave Letterman(Hoosier) The Coog Mellencamp (Hoosier) James Dean (Hoosier)
I love to exploit this every time I come here. Firing up the proud Hoosiers to talk about other Hoosiers can entertain all night. We came up with a game where we tried to identify each state's Melencamp. "If Melencamp is the Melencamp of Indiana, then Springsteen is the Melencamp of Jersey."
Minnesota's Melencamp- Dylan
Michigan's Melencamp- Seger
Wisconsin's?-- I didn't say it, but everyone agreed. Tabman.

"The house across the back yard is the Riley house, the church across the street is where Jim Jones started his first congregation."
"Jim Jones? Jonestown?"
"Yep, Jim Jones is a Hoosier. The church used to have a sign telling about it, but they took it down."--

"Larry Bird is the greatest basketball player of all time."
"Woody is the best character on Cheers."

A review: 2009 Honda Accord 4 Door Sedan (Black)

My mother loaned me her car this week so I can drive around town and visit my friends. At night, the wind blows the leaves across the road and my first instinct is that it is a mouse or other night-time critter scurrying across the road. This car's suspension, speed, handling, brakes, and headlights calm my paranoia like no other vehicle. I can identify if it is in fact a mouse or leaf at a very fast speed with the superior headlights, and not worry about flipping my car if I want to swerve and avoid it. All while looking very sexy. 4 stars, 2 thumbs up.

Abyss Tearin' Me

"Last night I had a dream of a girl I wish I knew..whoo oooh oooh-
She said 'I'm not too far out of this world'."
-Rocktopus You caught me pt 2

I'm lying in my mother's house in Indiana, 5 am, can't sleep. As long as I've tried to remember, Indiana was the loneliest abyss in the world at night. The wind may still blow, but when the corn is harvested there is nothing for it to blow through. And that is how I always felt here. Like a ghost, except with out a voice. Something that couldn't be seen nor heard but only forgotten; cept in contrast of the knowledge that the wind does in fact exist, and can be heard through the oak trees that still hold there November leaves in Wisconsin.
Since my childhood, I'll always remember going out to my grandparent's porch at night and looking at the sky, thinking of my dream girl and what she was doing at this very moment. Maybe she's looking at the same sky, the same moon. But when you are a lonely ghost with out a voice in the abyss, the imagination is the only way to connect with the dream girl. And always was I the one who was haunted.
When I lived here permanently in college, the loneliness became mundane. It seeped into my blood and gave me the energy to walk alone through downtown thinking of a dream girl. As the days went by, I decided to finally move back to Wisconsin, but not with out throwing a penny for a wish in this dark bottomless abyss. I asked out a girl. Not just any girl, a dream girl. I was working at a fitness place, so was she, and for 6 months I had the largest crush on her. She was short, well shorter, blonde, and had that slight Indiana twang that just drives a guy like me crazy. During those 6 months at work, I would see her and wave, blush, hide, wait to see her again, repeat. She was incredible. She could brighten my day just by knowing she was in the same building as me, she could make me smile for hours at night thinking about how she smiled at me when she passed me. There was a problem though...I couldn't talk to her. I was too shy. I could talk with anybody else, laugh, be myself, even flirt with other girls. Oh but when she was around it was like being in the presence of dream girl Divine- where words are meaningless compared to her beauty that made language irrelevant- where my cordial and casual greetings seem like a blasphemous desecration to the alter of Athena. How could I possibly express myself to a girl I adored?
A few days before I moved away, it was my last day at the fitness club and I grew bold. I confidently walked up to her desk then fell apart. I fumbled through my words, kicked my toes against the ground, swayed my crossed arm body back and forth, looked at the ground, but then I looked up. I saw her looking at me with beautiful green eyes and the question just fell out of my mouth like my lips could hold the weight of the sentence no more..."Would you like to go out sometime?"
And to my surprise, she said yes. It was an unbelievable feeling, I remember honking my horn all the way home, looking at her handwritten phone number over and over. Of course I moved away a few days later and that is the end. The black hue of the abyss of Indiana turned slightly grey, blinding me for a moment.
I forgot about that until tonight, I can't even remember her name? Tara? Cara? In any case, she doesn't haunt me.
So tonight once again, like every night in Indiana, I walk outside and look up to the sky and think about dream girls past, dream girls I never knew, dream girls I wish I knew. Though I recognize this abyss, I can't put my finger on why it affects me, and why it has swallowed me whole tonight above all. I feel so jaded. I feel like a fool who has gave up on love and betrayed a younger/bolder/dreaming me. Thinking back about falling in love with dream girls - writing letters and 10th grade poetry in the summer away from my make out sweety- whispering on the phone in the hallway telling my dream girl how much I missed her, and promising my Grandparents who picked up the other line that I would mow the lawn to pay for the long distance bill - where once there was a wind, and though it was a lonely wind that no one could see, it could be heard blowing through the corn. But now all the corn is cut down.

The abyss/Indiana teaches me, it shows me the depths of my loneliness. If you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you. and as I learned to say here, that's something I reckon I'll fix.

"her hair, spun threads, in the deep so blue-
and I couldn't breath, I'm a tellin' you
when she said "Hello" like a sweet sirens song.
...It won't be long" -same song

That wonderful photo up top that says a thousand words is by master of the lens and good friend Erin Dorbin.

Bethany and Blackbeard part 2

"Play 'Black Beard falls in Love'." Lindsay says to me whenever I have an acoustic guitar on my lap near her.
"No, it's not finished." Besides that, I don't like playing new songs to anyone. Secretly, I'm glad that people I'm close with push me to play my music.

I guess one of the things I try to accomplish in this blog is to recognize change especially in the medium of music. I have always been fascinated by a pattern of process when it comes to art and specifically music. Not necessarily music, but any art project, how does it work? How does it happen? Then why was it left to die at a thrift store or on the side of the road or timelessly live on? Why do some recognize a peice as their favorite when others will never have the oppurtunity to see it or hear it?
Say for example the process begins with an idea, then the idea materializes from the mind to a physical projection, then it becomes recorded by a brush stroke or to a tape, then finished, mastered, pressed, whatever. After that, who is to say? It may wither and die in one or a few minds, or it may serve as further inspiration to millions. The process of change is so amazing, and it is that focus that I am experimenting with in this blog, for my personal insight.
I talked about "Bethany" and "Black Beard Falls in Love" in my previous blog. I tried to show the way this song developed from a romantic thought about Black Beard's Flag, a work of art in it's own right, and how that made me feel. In the future of this blog, I'll shy away from my personal experience of change, fruition of art, and go beyond my own thoughts to try and understand more. But for now, I would like to include a couple of clips from the very earliest stages of this song when it had no lyrics or real structure, and how it evolved into a song I'm very proud to be a part of. I would like to dedicate all of my material and inspiration to that what can't be named, the sacred Tao, the force, or the universe, or whatever that I am fortunate enough to tap into with my limited talents and abilities. May the information that it provides me with reach others for their own sake of interpretaion.

Anyway here is a clip of when the song was a Rocktopus song called "Black Beard Falls in Love"
and
Here is a clip of what it became to be known as "Bethany"
Sorry about the ad bullshit, I'll get that figured out too.

To fly you have to let go

I look back and I often wonder and wander. Looking back on a journal entry I just found date "1 Imix" (Sept 9th 2009) as I was wandering through a promise land, I wondered:
"Why does one delight in the discovery of each new beauty in the beloved? Beauty, as I intend, means the promise of a quality useful to my soul (+) and transcends physical attraction(*); the latter is only one particular kind.
An example of the difference of the beauty that I intend can be described by the two eagles high above the Mississippi River I just trolled past. Each in their own tree, waiting, wanting nothing else but to live in the companionship they found for life with their mate. The rest, or anything they see or behold with each other in their talons, becomes becomes ordinary beauty for these two eagles, but extraordinary beauty in the eyes of a spectator. This spectacle describes the latter, the (*), the particular kind of beauty that is physical beauty. To the eagles it perhaps is the former(+)."
below that in different ink, I scribbled:
"Magic Moments / Rob Eldridge" and a quote from Stendahl:
"And perhaps the perfect music I have just the pleasure of hearing...has mearly had an effect I already knew; that of inspiring livelier thoughts about my preoccupation of the moment."

I wish to the lord that I could find that song, but like with most things that effect me to that degree, it will reappear in the most convienient time.

Later that day I found my new favorite shirt at a not so thrifty price. But considering the sentimentality of my thoughts recorded earlier that day, I would say it is priceless.

Bethany, Blackbeard's True Love

Half a year ago I half wrote a song called "Black Beard Falls in Love." I made a demo recording in Chopper's basement with half hearted lyrics. I spent the days before the session researching Black Beard the pirate and how I could fit him into a future Rocktopus song. I felt strongly about his flag, in which he stabs a heart with a spear. I wondered, has Black Beard ever been in love? I wanted to romanticize the story with this burning image of his flag. I scrambled to write lyrics knowing that the time would come soon to record them. In the end I abandoned all historical knowledge and made myself Black Beard in a self deprecating song. A song about a pirate, and evil man who wrongs people wherever he goes. He meets a girl named Bethany on the coast of North Carolina and she changes his life. "To Nassau," he promises to take her where they can eat "Mangoes under the sun." But instead of hanging up his pirating and joining the girl he loves, he sets back to sea, "Cursing the Sea," for the possessing his mind and distancing him from the girl he loves. Through the song, Black Beard never never realizes his mistake, but continues to hold hate in his heart for a love he lost, or as I see it, he chose to lose.
I really liked this song, but it wasn't quite silly enough for the Rocktopus, a little too deep. Once Chris heard it, he separated the melody from the pirate lore and sea theme and said that it could be a good Midwest Beat song.
I played the song a few times for the Beat and they liked it instantly, but immediately offered the criticism to change the words and make them as "little aquatic themed as possible."
This I agreed and figured to be as easy as pumpkin pie. Four months have passed since then, and the song remained a blank slate with just a melody and vague composition. It hasn't even been revisited until recently when we decided to record it in the studio session on Nov. 19, 2009. Tomorrow.
In my monkey mind, I have ideas orbiting as far as Pluto, as indecisive as an electron manifesting as a wave or particle to quantum physicist. They need to be rounded up like a flock of sheep. And the most effective Sheppard is a deadline. As it approaches, my conscious mind's Sheppard crook makes my sub conscious tremble with fear.
On Sunday, Monday and Tuesday this week, I have worked with fervor and the Beat, recording demos, writing lyrics, and even arranging songs we do not know but will record for a record tomorrow. It seems that our whole band is wired with the same shepherding technique. Where as last week and a month before we knew what songs to record, they remained in pieces, not composed, not lyrics, no harmonies, an outright mess. Including the song "Bethany," which is the re-incarnation of "Black Beard Falls in Love."
I just couldn't wrap my mind around a new concept that didn't involve a "Sea Theme," much less any inspiration until yesterday when I completed the lyrics. The only thing that stood the test of time with this song is the opening line "Oh Bethany, where have you been all my life?" that Black Beard himself declared when he saw the beautiful mistress. I have about 6 pages in my notebook of different topics I didn't use from: Bethany is a metaphor for enlightenment, to a girl that walks in and out of a bar with out anyone else noticing. I abandoned them all. J-man spotting me with a pen to my mouth and eyes lost in another place would ask me, "where's Bethany now?" and I would give him "Well, this guy wants Bethany, she represents enlightenment, but he is not getting off his barstool."
"where's Bethany now?" he would ask again, and I would give him a different answer again "she is the farmer's wife in the 1930's during the dust bowl." Leaping again, Bethany finally arrived right where she always belonged. In Southern Illinois, last June, when the Midwest Beat played in Carbondale and the spirit of Bethany joined us. We along with 30 other people drove to the middle of nowhere to cool off in the most precious little lake until 4 in the morning on a 100 degree night. "Midnight Summer New Moon," the only light was the stars that shot to the earth over and over as we swam to the middle of the lake. "The stars fall, oh when my Bethany smiles."
So it seems after all this time getting away, we still remain "in the water, wade and wonder...could this be for real?" Black Beard's regretfull pains have bound his love for Bethany to an aquatic themed song forever.

Chuck Berry and the End of Time

"I got a chance to write one!
Reelin' and Rockin', Rollin 'til the break of dawn....
Looked at my watch and it was almost one I said 'Come on baby, lets have us some fun!"

Is time speeding up? Or does it just feel like it? Chuck Berry seems to think so. So do scholars of the Mayan Calendar. Two of the most influential sources of information as far as I'm concerned. The theory paints this picture in my head of going to a science museum on a field trip when I was younger. Outside the gift shop us kids with some spare change would drop a penny or two in those big old round spiral things. One penny at one end, one at the other. They would spend a great deal of time at the top of the funnel, circling and barely intersecting, slowly, smooth. Patiently we waited on step stools for the coins to descend to the abyss. When they approached the black hole, they swirled violently as their centrifugal forces increased, sometimes running into each other before the climatic (ping/ching/clang/ding) sounds of coins hitting the others in a place you couldn't see.

"looked at the clock and it was almost 4, you know she turned me 'round - made me do it some more."

Time in the Mayan Calendar is measured in cycles, much like the coin spin-y thing. At the beginning of the Long Count calendar in 2500 BC, stuff moved pretty slow - to dark ages and renaissance thru the industrial revolution where time and the locomotive started picking up steam until today's technology internet and information collision. As we approach the end of the cycle in 2012 it is a thesis of scholars that this phenomenon exist. (if not on a quantum level, then on a conscious level) In other words, as we approach the end date, it will at the very least, seem like time is speeding up.

To me this week feels like a prime example. We are in the midst of a tiny cycle of the calendar, but a cycle non-the less. One that evolves based on a thirteen day period called a trecenna. Today is the 3rd day of thirteen, called 3 Lammat. As we move through this cycle, I'll see an evolutionary cycle. Today being a developmental stage, and harvesting the hard work s the trecenna moves on. Lammat means Star, and more specifically, Venus, and it makes a pretty neat-o crop circle. The great goddes of beauty with movements synchronized with the earth like a ballet that will make you weep.

"looked at my watch and it was quarter past 7, thats when we rolled off and took off to heaven."



Tonight, Midwest beat 5 hour band practice Milwaukee. Working on brand new songs we will record in the studio this week. Songs we have never played before tonight, songs that don't have lyrics, songs that have no arrangement.

"looked at my watch and it was quarter to Ten, she called me back and made me do it again."

Tomorrow Midwest Beat practice in Madison. Working on the fine tuning of vocal harmonies and arrangements that we completed tonight.
Tuesday afternoon, once again, in Madison thinking recording layers and other instruments, pianos, claps, fade ins and outs etc.
Tuesday evening recording Christmas song demos for Rocktopus.

"Looked at my watch and it was straight up Twelve, man we started diggin like old steamed shells."







"looked at my watch and it was almost five, man I felt more dead than alive."

Wednesday - Int'l Datelines practice for recording this week as well. Also, practicing for a show on Sunday, playing only new songs. I'm trying to get a hold of time and master all these songs, but it is a slippery devil.

"We boogied in the kitchen, we boogied in the hall, I got some on my finger and wiped it on the wall."

Thursday- Midwest Beat recording at Howl Studios in Milwaukee with Justin Perkins. 7 - 8 new songs including brand new ones wrote this very week. (Belladona, Ain't It Strange, Bethany, Too Late to Care, Alone Again, Blind Flower Girl, Wondering' and more...whew)
Thursday night Midwest Beat travels to Madison to play for the chance to win more studio time in the final round of Band to Band Combat at The Frequency.
Friday morning head to the studio to finish day two of recording.
Saturday head back to Madison to play 2 shows at Mickeys Saloon for Chopper Fest 2 with The Elephant Walk and Midwest Beat. Oh Shit, I should find some time for Elephant Walk practice this week.

"looked at my watch and it was quater to five, feeling like a Mustang on a four day drive."

Sunday morning the International Datelines will enter Sounds OK studios for an intense 1 -day session. Recording: "Oh Teenager" "Shame Shame Shame" and ummmm a bunch others, I don't even know.
Sunday night International Datelines pack up and head down to Franks Power Plant to play with one of my favorite bands and good friends from Indiana, The Half Rats.
Monday, wake, work, wait for a basic mix (harvest of the hard work in this evolutionary "thirt-night" trecenna. Rest, relax, let the period pass and die, then move on to the next cycle beginning on Thanksgiving day with a prediction that time will continue to feel as if it is accelerating with every 13 day cycle or trecena. Time is speeding up...At least it seems like it.

"Sometimes I do- then again I think I don't."

Friday the 13th and effects on divine feminine. Also 1 Cimi (death)

The origin of Friday the 13th is the remembrance of the day when the Vatican betrayed the secret society the Knights Templar who later became what is known today as the Freemasons. The french crown owed a great deal of debt to the Templars who instituted the modern system of debt plus interest. When he realized that he had a debt no honest king could pay, King Phillip the Fair conspired with the Vatican and captured the leader of the Templars, Jacques DeMolay, and burned him at the stake on Friday Oct 13th, 1307.
Other Western legends hold the superstition to the last supper of Christ, a Friday with Jesus and his twelve apostles.
Certainly an archetypal power can arise from the fears of a collective psyche, but to acknowledge such a superstition, one would have to also believe that the Gregorian Calendar is something more than a device to measure time, and that it is not. Moreover, it imprisons the mind to accept that linear time has no underlying waves of evolution, and simply stagnates our race to be confined in a trap of illusion to time and matter.
Allow me for a moment to debunk this myth, and show a special connection to today's Friday the 13th of the Gregorian Calendar to the sacred Mayan Calendar, the Tzolkin's date of 1 Cimi, or 1 Death. I would also like to mention the effects that recognizing the superstition has on separating the Devine Feminine energy from our world. I can't imagine any of my gal friends believing that female energy is disrupted by a silly superstition, but it is something I truly believe. (I also believe zero of my gal friends read this blog.)
Today's glyph in the Tzolkin Cycle is Cimi or death and it happens to be the first day of the 13 count trecena. This might not make much sense to those unfamiliar with the sacred Mayan calendar, but it does not matter. For a great resource and to calculate you birth glyph and trecena number, this is a great site here. Cimi is a special glyph and the people who I know in my life that are Cimi's are very intriguing, mysterious, special and downright cool. It means Death, but death to us was much different than death to the Mayans and ancients of the East. Death is the end of a cycle, a beginning to the unknown. Those born on this glyph were thought to posses a special energy of mystique and often became mid wives or shamans. Cimi meant "Closed in Death" in the ancient text, and because today it falls on the 1st day of the 13 day trecena, a good astrological forecast of the Mayan calendar would be to let go of the things we cannot control, things like death, and embrace the change into a new realm of thought and ideas. There was no need for the Mayans to fear death, they embraced it, and the transition it would lead to their souls. They did not grasp to the thought of holding onto life of their bodies, crops, ideas about wealth or love, and the civilization they built on the calendar proves that.
Do not let the spooky movies or ingrained thoughts from the patriarchal Vatican tether your plans of Friday the 13th. Let go, move on, change, and grow today, with Cimi as your guide to a new light.
I will continue to offer more light on the execution of the divine feminine from the patrarcical society we live in articles to come, but because today is special to us trapped in a Gregorian calendar, I'll make a brief take on the number 13 and how it is used to destroy the female energy in which it represents. The 13 cycle lunar calendar that ancients followed in accord with a solar agricultural cycle appears over and over again to today's archaeologist. The star gazers of Neolithic Stonehenge were obsessed with the 13 times per year between full moons, which correlated exactly to the same amount of time between menstrual cycles of females. The Sun has been regarded as the masculine archetype, the moon as the feminine. From around 2000 BC until today, the lunar (and therefore feminine) aspect of spirituality has been systematically destroyed. Calendars arose honoring the Sun, the masculine, and as I will explain later, even became a solar abstraction enslaving our consciousness to the illusion of time. Author Robin Heath tells in Sun, Moon and Stonehenge the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty, originally called Briar Rose. In the tale, the king plans to invite 13 wise women from the land to celebrate the birth of his daughter. He only has twelve golden plates, and when the 13th wise woman appears, she is super duper mad. She curses the king and his court sending them to a long and deep sleep. The story offers a "Prophetic warning of what automatically will happen when the feminine, and hence lunar, qualities are neglected." 12(months relate to solar masculinity, 13 is "Very much connected to the moon and hence to matters matriarchal and the old Goddess religions." This cutting off of the feminine qualities of spirituality begot witch hunts and continues today in our modern times. Over and over again, the Solar aspect of 12 defiles the sacred number 13 from everything to being unlucky day, to not having a 13th floor in our modern rational world skyscrapers. Sorry that this is so wild, but do you see what I'm getting at? Defaming 13 = destruction of the power of the sacred feminine. I can go on and on, and believe me, I will soon. By a collective consciousness giving Friday the 13th the power of doom and unluckiness, you give power to the MAN and take from the woman. Fuck the MAN!

Kitty Haiku pt. 3

Kitty Blues

The last maple seeds
Spinning slowly to the ground
could be so much fun

Kitty Haiku pt. 2

Kitty Destroys


You Rebel Rouser!
IT's all Ruined MEOW-zer!
Too cute to be mad

Kitty Haiku pt 1

Kitty Love


Snuggled up in purrrrrz
It's my curiosity
Want to know your love

Enough Bullshit!

Ever have a bad day at work? You feel like your boss is going to knock you off your bike and stab you with his horns. Whenever I'm feeling down in the dust, humiliated, or trampled with bullshit, I just throw on some H.A. & the Tj F'n B and it's all fine with me.

Marushka!

One of my all time favorite thrift store finds, a Marushka original.
I've had the Puffins in the living room for 8 years now.
Check out some great prints here and let me know if you find one.
I've always been drawn to them, but once the print led me to a treasure. My brother used to hide bottles of booze all around Riverwest, a prank he called "A Secret To Everybody." I thought it was a silly legend, but once when I was doing some yard work, I found a little bottle of vodka. I threw it in the freezer, forgot about it until one day when I was having guest over. Brock, my brother was there and asked for a drink. I told him about the vodka in the freezer. Upon looking at the bottle he asked me where I got it. Before I could finish, it clicked and occurred to me that Brock had in fact, stuffed this bottle precariously in my bushes for me to find.
"There's a Sparks somewhere by your house too." he said.
"Where?"
"I don't know," he said, "I'll have to look at the map."
"You made a map? How many have you hid?"
"20....25."
"Let me see the map," I said.
"Never!" and that was it. Brock got drunk and the night melted away.
A month or so later, I visited Brock in his new home. I went upstairs and among the 100's of He-man and other action figures placed nicely on the shelves something stood out to me from the cluttered walls. It was this print.

"Whoa! Awesome!" I said moving towards the wall. "Where did you get that?"
"Don't touch it!" he said with a half angry grin, "Get away from that!"
I grabbed the framed cloth from the wall and a piece of paper fell to the floor. I unfolded it. Brock stood close, only helpless to the possibility that I would find his map. "You weren't supposed to see that." He laughed. At the top of the barely legible map was written "A Secret to Everybody."
"You put this in the Marushka, of course I would find it."

Great Big Kiss

Call me old fashion, I believe in love and romance on every level. Perhaps the most romantic thing in the whole universe would being in a "phi based relationship." Phi, also know as the Golden Ratio, the golden proption and so on is 1.618. This number is derived from the Fibonacci sequence of 0,1,1,2,3,5,8...where the 2 preceding numbers add together to make the next integer. When you devide the larger number by the preceding one, you eventually get the phi constant of 1.618.
This is a very special number no doubt, it makes me smile. Seen in many plant proportions, animals, and even our own human anatomy as shown in Da Vinci's "Vitruvian Man." There is an aesthetic beauty to phi in matter, and beauty is the desire of a lover's eye.
There is a story of 2 lovers that share a romance strengthen by this sequence. It is such an amazing story I can't quite express how beautiful it is, so I'll just tell it like this...

That's Venus up there and boy is she beautiful with her lovely blond hair flowing as she spins amongst her songs. Singing perfect harmonies alone in the skies to herself. But I'm listening, I'm singing along. She's always alone, maybe if I had a big Heavanly body then I'd ask her to dance the most precise dance. The way spins is so elegant, so slow. I am Earth, I would love to kiss her beautiful face and sing that beautiful music with her and just dance and dance until the end of time. But I'm a hopeless romantic, so I'll wait for the perfect time. I know when she leaves I'll see her again, and it will seem like forever for me. I'm sure when she sees me again it'll only seem like a short time for her. But I just love to watch her, and wait for that kiss, that dance, that hair flowing in the opposite direction.

As John Martineau a geometry expert writes in "A Little Book of Coincidence,"
"Venus...rotates in the opposite direction of the Earth," So slow, with her hair flowing away from me, "Her day is precisely two thirds of an Earth year, a musical fifth. This harmonizes exactly...so that every time Venus and Earth kiss, Venus does so with the same face looking at Earth."
8 Earth years = exactly 13 Venus years and the 5 kisses they share in that time will craft in the heavens a perfect pentagram with the orbits. 5,8,13 all belong to the Fibonacci squence and my heart is longing for our next kiss. Every 243 years, Venus passes between the Earth and Sun twice in 8 years - the last time 6/8/2004 and the next 6/6/2012. Every 243 Earth years, exactly 365 Venus days will pass.
I love you baby sooooooo much!

(once I found this record at Goodwill on capitol in MKE, a Shangri-las greatest hits record. I didn't examine it before paying the 2 quarters. I bought it home, took it out and the record was "Free For All" by fucking Ted Nugent! DAMN!)

Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Isao Tomita and Mr Jack Horkheimer

Ever since I was a little kid, I always enjoyed watching Jack "the star gazer" Horkheimer. In my youth, he was known as the Star Hustler, but like most of us moving on with life, he gave up the hustling for gazing. On Sunday night at a seemingly different time every week on PBS, Jack will zip around universe and give the forecast for "this weeks skies," compelling the audience to "Keep looking up!" before being whisked away on the rings of Saturn or sucked and spun into tiny oblivion by a black hole. It is a slight theory of mine that his name change was the last thing to have changed. I won't dive into the conspiracy now, but he and the production quality of his show has yet to age. Is it possible that Jack the Star Gazer is dead and filmed the forecast of the skies to come in several episodes at once? YES! Is it possible that maybe a large part of him died when he could no longer hustle? Absolutely.
One thing has always stuck with me since my childhood viewing of Jack Star Hustler, and it's the theme song. The theme songs is Arabesque no. 1 by Claude Debussy arranged by Tomita and his amazing instrument, the Moog. Just look at him up there in that huge control room, all those synthetic pianos, all that circuitry, cool as can be in his sunglasses. Tomita quickly realized that there was a problem with Debussy's masterpiece, in it's full scope of worldly instruments it failed to "tickle the senses." So Tomita, with his giant instrument that was a huge room, changed the song as well as my life forever.

I was 19 and living in Green Bay, WI years ago, I loved to explore the incredible thrift stores in the area, particularly St. Vincent De Paul. I had no idea who the theme song was written by, I had no idea who Tomita was. It was an accident stumbling upon this record, not searching for it, but it finding me - telling my sight with the incredible artwork on the cover that "Kyle, purchace me and I will only continue to tickle every single one of your senses until your mind is blown." Now, I have had a mind blowing experience from many songs, many times- but never has music made me squirm around the floor laughing, crying, understanding for a brief moment the secrets of the universe like Tomita brings me. Hearing this song became an instant love affair. I felt the nostalgia of my youth jumping with heels clicked like I stayed up too late on a Sunday night and got away with it. I felt the heightened awareness of each note, the song like a series of bubbles rising to the stars and bursting with a single note. It sounded like some notes were laughing at the fun. I felt grown up, listening to records. I felt that this amazing coincidence of finding this silly song on this silly record was no coincidence. I needed this song and it found me.

After that, my roommate and I have complied an incredible Tomita record collection mainly found at St. Vinny's. I often see a Tomita record at a thrift store, and when I find it, I put it at the front of the stack so everyone shopping can see. I've even given one as a wedding gift to a friend, along with a gift card.
If you take the time to look through the records at your next thrifting, keep a third eye out for Tomita and your senses will thank you. (once they stop giggling)