That Burning Smell is Me Thinking…

A friend of mine has this weird talent, I would break my bones trying to do this.

I sat down for dinner and found an onion on the table. Somebody had sliced a chunk out of it and left it. I asked my friend, Bob, about it and he said it was there when he arrived. So I decided to make it into a dessert.

Enloy!

People like to leave their mark on the sea wall on Lake Michigan. Here is one interesting example. So are all those cave drawings that archaeologists find just simple graffiti?

I was looking outside and noticed a police man blocking traffic. So I went out to investigate and found a street blocked off and all the firefighters and police officers standing around doing nothing.

Then this other truck shows up and it said “Hazardous Rescue” or something like that on the side. I overheard someone say they hit a gas main digging down the street or something.

So since it looked kind of unexciting, I went back to the office.

There was a fire in a building on the next street over. I snapped this picture from the roof of the Wilson Building. I didn’t get there in time to get a shot of the flames shooting out, but I did get a good smoky shot.

The old farm seems like a dream, so long ago. Sometimes I feel like it never happened, but I see these old pictures and I start to remember, it was real. There was something wrong with the camera (or maybe the photographer), and the pictures turned out overexposed. After some fiddling around in Photoshop and iPhoto, I have been able to make them look like the fuzzy memories in my head.

You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it is going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious dogmas or goals, it’s always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.

- Robert M. Pirsig - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values

Fanatics talk a lot. They want to believe. They want to assure themselves that they are right. They usually don’t let others get a word in edgewise, for fear of hearing an opposing viewpoint.

Robert Pirsig put into words what I have been thinking for a while now. People who talk about their faith all the time don’t really have faith. People who often talk about their idealistic political beliefs are trying to convince themselves.

At a U2 concert 15 years ago, five simple words popped up on the video screen at the end of a song:

“Everything you know is wrong.”

They remained there for several seconds; I let them sink in; I gave in to the possibility that those words may be true. When I start to sound like a fanatic, I remember those words.

I remember when I was young and we would tape songs off of each other’s records. Often, though, I would end up taping the whole album. My friends and I would buy albums that the other didn’t have and we would make tapes for each other. If I really liked the albim, I would go and buy my own copy of the album after wearing out the tape. Then I would tape it for another friend and the cycle would start over again. A lot of the stuff I listened to wasn’t played on the radio at the time so sharing music was the way for more obscure artists to get heard.

Today, technology has made it much easier for independent or obscure artists to be heard, but the state of music is even worse than it was when I was making mix tapes at home on the HiFi. I know in my case file sharing has helped me find great artists I would have never heard of on the radio. I have bought albums based on songs I have copied from friends, much like I did back when I was young.

So the mix tape was the old school analog version of file sharing and record sales were doing just fine.

If you have fond memories of cassette tapes, check out http://www.tapedeck.org .