Sotto Voce.

The latest issue of Artella: the Waltz of Words and Art just arrived in the mail, and boy is it beautiful! I’m really excited to see my short piece “Hunting the Power Animal” appearing with the mixed media art doll by artist Anne Mayer Hesse that inspired it, along with some of my better answers to the contributor’s questionnaire. Great job as always, Marney!

You can order a copy here. Do your part to keep this wonderful project — a venue, a forum, and a sane asylum for creatives of all kinds — going.

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A full-page ad for a new crime thriller in today’s New York Times Book Review leads with this quote from a Publisher’s Weekly review:

“Michael Connelly comes as close as anyone to being today’s Dostoyevsky of crime literature . . . one of his finest works to date.”

[Boggle].

Some publicist out there actually thought that a quote in which the author is said to be no better than anyone else at writing books in a style completely unsuited to the genre is a compliment?

Note to self: Never hire that publicist.

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In a Washington Post article titled “IPod Devotees Rocked by Thefts”, staff writer Del Quentin Wilber discusses a new and unexpected form of identity theft — loss of musical expression. Having experienced a similar loss recently, I can sympathize.

My loss was not due to theft, but rather to some nameless careless-ass Apple subcontractor assembly line flunkie in Tennessee (am I bitter? Nah.). My iBook G3 has been plagued with motherboard problems as it passes gracelessly through its middle age (at three years old), and the latest seizure caused the computer to lose touch with its RAM. This meant that I couldn’t back it up on MJ’s G4 using Target Disk, so I made sure to get at least three second opinions as to the likekihood of a hard drive wipe — which Apple techs always duly warn you is a dim but statistically non-irrelevant possibility. All were universally confident that the problem wouldn’t require messing with the hard drive at all.

Note to self: don’t believe Apple techs anymore.

My faithful, hardworking machine came back with not only the hard drive wiped, but no OS. Plus, Technician #316354 didn’t even fix the damn CD-ROM drive either, so I couldn’t boot off the restoration disk. Back to the shop for another round. This time it came back with an OS — 10.2.0, to be precise. So on top of everything we had to spend hours bringing it up-to-date as well as reloading everything.

Gee, thanks for all the hard work, Apple Subcontractors. Next time I’ll just get me a big electromagnet and do it myself.

Long story short: I rebuilt almost all of my work files on MJ’s machine from backups, but my music — a huge chunk of which were painstaking recordings off cassette tapes that I will have to redo — lots of photos, and files I’ve been carrying around for countless generations of computers are irretrievably gone. (Don’t ask about the files on the iPod — you can guess.) On the upside, the old G3 has been reconditioned and is going to MJ’s brother to use in law school and I have a Power Book arriving today on the slow boat from China.

But I know the pain of e-loss (or perhaps iLoss). The long sessions of hunting for, loading, de-duping, and arranging files and folders so that I wouldn’t miss a beat with my clients’ projects were good opportunities for me to meditate on the meaning of attachment and the clinging aggregates. And despite the loss of those things — and they weren’t even “things” in their own right, but virtual copies of things, arranged from digits on a hard drive — I am still here and whole and functioning.

Damn right I’m going through a grieving process, but even in the midst of it I recognize that it is just the dance of separation that the ego must perform. Doesn’t make the feelings any less real, but it doesn’t make them any more real, either. Know what I mean?

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You are right so
I must be wrong but
My heart says I’m not and
What I feel is what I feel but
That can’t be right because
Both of us can’t be right and
Your argument sounds better and
I can’t really explain what I’m feeling so
You must be right because I’m not but
My argument seems valid to me but
You don’t see its validity so
That means it’s invalid so
I am wrong and
You win.

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“Science says that man is unique because he has awareness of himself.
“Zen says that man is unique because he thinks that having awareness of himself is important.”

—Anonymous

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Someday I hope to explore this in a little more detail, but posting it here is at least a start. For me, the moment that made everything else possible — philosophically speaking — happened about 20 years ago while I was watching a TV story about department store mannequins. More specifically, about a man who makes his living as a department store mannequin.

Who here remembers the old series PM Magazine? For those who don’t, each program was a series of short human interest stories from the local area and elsewhere around the country. As a teenager I used to watch it regularly (and not just because of the drop-dead gorgeous local co-host).

Well, one night one of the segments featured, as I mentioned, the story of a man who would stand in department stores modeling clothes, moving awkwardly on a podium as though he was a machine — a slow, sharp arm raise there, a robot-like turn of the head there. People would gather and gawk; he was so good that he could make even skeptics look behind him for the electrical cord or the wind-up key.

When the reporter interviewed the man, she asked the obvious yet nevertheless intriguing question: “But what do you do if you have an itch?”

“I say to myself, ‘Yes, that is an itch,'” he replied. “I just accept that it itches. Then I don’t have to scratch it.”

(Try it. It works.)

This story keeps coming back to me when I think about cause and effect, or Zen Buddhism, or about my relationiship to conflict. Just because something itches doesn’t mean we always have to scratch. And just because we’re not scratching doesn’t mean we have to be fighting the instinct to scratch, either. We can just accept the itch.

I wish I could find that mannequin man and thank him for the wonderful, life-altering gift of his incredible insight.

And next time you feel an itch, try just accepting it and see what happens.

Then see what else you can accept.

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Hi, I’m Paul and I’m a Trekkie.

(CHORUS: “Hi, Paul.”)

I first tried Star Trek in third grade when my best friend Steve Mansfield told me all about it. Thanks again, Steve, wherever you are.

This was when we were living in Los Alamos. It used to be on Saturdays at 10:30 on KOB Channel 4. One night after going to bed I heard someone on the TV downstairs say “Captain Kirk” and “Mister Spock” so I got up to look. The first scene I ever saw was the one where Spock was trying to brain Kirk with a fish tank. My brother Mike let me stay up to watch the rest and I was hooked. Thanks again, Mike, wherever you are.

Anyway, over the years I’ve kept a running log of comments about the Star Trek movies. I started in college and for the sake of tradition I have kept it up ever since. And as part of my recovery process I’ve decided to put it out on the Internet.

I know what you’re thinking: “just what the world needs, another web page of Star Trek reviews.”

Well, humor me. I like to think that mine is a little different because I require readers to ensure that all tongue is planted firmly in cheek before proceeding.

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So I’m sitting in the living room reading, for the simple reason that I never noticed it on the bookshelf before, The Tao of Pooh. And there it is, on page 10: P’u the “nameless uncarved block.” AKA the “unsliced bread.” Somewhere along the line I backed into the same idea and came to my own not-entirely-dissimilar simile.

Cool.

Now I would just love to find the Chinese symbol for P’u, so that I could paint it, sketch it, stare at it, sculpt it and feel its form in my hands, and put it on a banner and wave it from my roof. But I can’t find it anywhere on the Internet, and somehow this seems entirely appropriate.

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A few days ago I heard from Boys’ Quest that they’ve accepted one of my articles for publication! So there it is, ladies and gentlemen — I am officially going to be a published children’s writer! And there’s plenty more where that came from…

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