Weblog 86

September 30, 2007~ 12:00am



I babysat for little 4 year old Bill, and 2 year old Kay today. Their house is already decorated for Halloween with big spiders, witches, a skeleton coming out of ground in the front yard-- and oh, we had a grand old time. Everything 'spookable' already. The weather was 68 degrees and sunny, and first there was Saturday morning cartoons, and then we drew dinosaurs with magic markers (Kay asking only for 'pink', little lady that she is) and Bill anxious to get outside and "LET'S DO SOMETHING, GRANDMA!"

I used my artistic skills to draw us a treasure map of the back yard, and we spent- literally- four hours traversing the grass- (which was the ocean)- and listening to the 'talking trees' - which whispered 'CLUES!' if you took a low-hanging branch and held it up to your ear like a phone- (I was the only one tall enough to do this, so I got all those messages.) We picked up on 'portents' (new word for Bill) and invisible messages written on rocks to help lead us finally to the "MAGNETIC SINGING STONES", which were the treasure, and well-hidden under a yellow bucket camouflaged with leaves.

THREE, LOOOOOOONG treasure hunts to be exact- three different maps- each one becoming more and more detailed. The imaginary 'sailboat' would carry us to the far corner of the yard- Bill at the helm, and he'd call out, "We're stopped! The wind stopped!"- and we'd pile up behind him, waiting for the next 'gust'. We sailed into "BUDDHA COUNTRY"- (thus named because my daughter set up a Buddha meditation corner there)- but oddly, we'd have to come back in a rowboat, also imaginary, "BECAUSE THAT'S "THE PLAN, GRAM!" as Bill put it- but never bothered to explain why we had to exhaust ourselves so- rowing like galley slaves.

Right beside the buddha in the yard's corner was a big 'X' made of sticks- "Now where is that X?"- Bill would say every time. "Hmmmmmmmmmm....." and of course... there it would be... right next to the Message Rock, which left us pithy statements- (also invisible)- such as, "You shall keep this until you die." Bill made that one up. LOL!

This went on the whole day until 3:00, when Holly came home, but fifteen minutes before her arrival, when I told Bill it was nearly time for his Mom to be pulling up in her car, he began to cry. "Nooooooooooooo.........we're having too much fuuuuuuuuunnnnnnn." Wow! That's music to a grandmother's ears, let me tell you!

Kay kept our spirits hoisted high during our long journeys, by carrying the "SOUNDING SWORD" (a plastic pirate saber I picked up at the Dollar Store that makes a neat sword slash ring whenever a button is pressed in the hilt.) Whenever energies were flagging, I'd call out, "Kay!- the Sounding Sword, please!"- and she'd use her chubby fingers to depress the button, then look up at me grinning. "Thank you! Now we can go on...." Kay also manned the playhouse by fitting neatly through its tiny door, where she became our GROG WENCH: there she happily served up empty glasses of grog and would grin and say, "More?" We ate real peanut butter crackers and raisins at the picnic bench- unfortunately, the hot sun soured Bill's glass of milk, which he spit energetically onto the concrete. LOL!!

After I came home and took a nap, Wayne and I went out to dinner and shopped, and came home to watch a movie. If you've been following this blog at all you'll know that I've been having an awful time with my 12 (13?) year old female cat, Ed Harris, who'd become 'untrained', and had to be relegated to the basement.

Nothing else to be done. I could no longer live with the smell of cat piss constantly in the kitchen. Tonight I went downstairs to give her wet treat, and found her lying dead under the steps. No blood, no vomit or feces, laying on her side, stiff and still. I burst into tears. God, she'd driven me to the point of madness, but I still loved the little orphan I rescued from starvation so many years ago. I have no idea what killed her. Old rat poison she'd found somewhere in a corner of that horrible, decrepit basement? Eating paint chips (which are everywhere down there)- old, lead-filled paint- lead poisoning??? I have no idea.

She was fine on Thursday- and I'd heard her stirring down there yesterday. Of course, I blame myself. I feel I'd abandoned her to die alone, in a dark cellar. Tomorrow I have to dig a hole and bury her-- the hell with the neighbors, she's going under a bush in my front yard. Period. I wrote this poem to get the 'gunk' out of me. (Of course, there's always the possibility that whatever killed her, is slowly killing me too--a gas leak or something, who knows?) Time will tell. It's only me and Beethoven now... my nineteen year old tom.... and when he crosses over, no more pets! It's too damn hard when they pass away. Too awfully sad.


Guilt

My cat
is dead. I went into the basement
to take her
her food, down into her gaol
where she's been living
for the past two months
because she
stopped
being litter box trained. Went insane. Didn't seem
sick
at all

but perhaps she was. Perhaps
that cat
died of my
neglect,
alone, in the dark

on the cement of the hard
and
dampish floor- I have no explanation

only
brackish sorrow. Only
blame: that's
the
way my
mind works, scorpion's stinger
turned upon itself. It could have been paint
chips,
died
of lead
poisoning- that one ate
anything, pine
needles, fuzz, her own
puke,
and god knows what she got into down
there, all
I know is she
didn't
run
to the
wooden steps

did not meow
when I opened
the door.

The original
orphan, Harris

is
no
more

and I have
only
guilt. Perhaps it
was a gas leak, radon, methane
after all;
perhaps
I'm
next.





September 30, 2007~ 8:45pm



If you're from around the Pittsburgh area you will surely know the story of old 'Dixmont State Hospital For the Insane'- (as it was named when opened in in 1862)- and stood abandoned since 1984 when it was closed forever to patients, but became a favorite spot for teens looking for spooky thrills- for filmmakers- and even photographers intent upon an avant-garde approach in which to frame their nude photography studies! The building itself was stunning-- as you can see in this vintage photo from its heyday-



It almost looks like a European resort hotel of that time set in rural splendor, canopied and nestled beyond the hubbub of everyday life. Dixmont took its name from social reformer Dorothea Dix, who believed that the incarceration of the mentally ill as criminals subjected to cruel treatment was a grievous wrong, so she spear-headed a movement for a more humane and sensitive program, which included living in a pastoral setting while pursuing more normal human activities, such as sewing and farming. Dixmont was at one time, a completely self-sustaining community, with its own farm, dairy, smithy- everything one would need to create an entire 'world-away-from-the-world'.

In 2006 the building was razed and the property sold to Walmart. Since then, there has been nothing but disaster surrounding their attempts to set up yet another temple of consumerism. There have been two major landslides on the site caused by the destabilization of the entire hill upon which Dixmont stood...you see, there is a series of underground tunnels connecting all the outbuildings- a veribable catacomb network that the builders knew about, but took no precautions to fortify before bulldozing and moving tons of equipment and materials onto the land (which is- as I have read- particularly lacking in a supportive rock base: it's merely soil.)

The hill began to cave way, and to come down on Route 65, disrupting traffic for weeks at a time. A halt was put on things a while back, and just on Friday, I heard on the news that Walmart has 'opted out' of continuing with their plans for Kilbuck township. Oh, the history that's been demolished- the souls who lived and suffered and died there, now just mounds of moving, pushed, and pummeled dirt.

There are also some 1,300 graves there in the woods, on property (thank God) still belonging to the state of Pennsylvania. One wonderful soul saw the need to try and dignify their memory through a personal campaign to maintain and treat the Dixmont cemetery with the respect that perhaps the lives that went into the ground there, did not enjoy in life- so those souls could be something more than a depersonalized 'number' on a tombstone-



She's 29 year old Kate Guerriero, of Hopewell, a graduate of Carlow College. Click on the link here to Opacity - to read more about it. In fact, click on the Dixmont link at the top of the page when you're through. Very moody, brilliant photography of 'abandoned places'-- I found myself lost in it last night and the night before.

Perhaps it's laying my little cat to rest today, buying a big bunch of burgundy, fall mums and planting them over her, has made all of this seem more personal: the forgotten, the lost....the insane, or aberrant of behavior. We know next to nothing of the sufferings that went on for such as these- and my God- even animals deserve respect, and I tried, Lord knows...failed in many ways, but I did try. Even in death.




October 3, 2007~ 11:30am



For a really nifty trick, click on the clock above. I have NO IDEA how these things work. They always stump, always mystify...always delight. Have fun with the Magic Gopher!




October 5, 2007~ 12:00am
Maybe many of you have read this- being that it's been around since 2005- but today was the first time I came across it, and it floored me. What a wonderful bouquet of wisdom here.....what a guy....


This is the text of the Stanford University Commencement address given by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.



Simply stunning. Words to live by.....ROCK solid.





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