Daniel Plainview - Existential Man

Major League Ballet

Orlando Hernandez, a.k.a. "El Duque" 

Tim Lincecum, a.k.a. "The Freak"

Dialectical and Historical Materialism 101

Hegel argued that the human cognitive process was the producer or artisan of the material world.  The approach was egocentric, to say the least.  Marx, however, reversed the process with his musing on dialectical materialism, or as Stalin coined the term, "diamat."  In other words, our cognitive ability is merely a reflection of the ever changing process that lies outside of our cognition.  It is not we who author the material world.  It authors us.  Class struggle then becomes the targeted recipient of Marx' critique of the matter of the world and his vision of the way things ought to be.  Our life is controlled by matter.  Human history is the history of matter and its dominion by humans.  This is historical materialism.  Proof 1:  I am made of the same cabon matter as the keyboard at which I peck away.

Michael Paul Smith - My Paternal Half Brother, Singing I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry, by Hank Williams

My half-brother, Michael Paul Smith, singing, I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry, by Hank Williams.

Hear that lonesome whippoorwill,
He sounds too blue to fly.
The midnight train is whining low,
I'm so lonesome I could cry.
I've never seen a night so long
When time goes crawling by.
The moon just went behind a cloud
To hide its face and cry.

Did you ever see a robin weep,
When leaves began to die?
That means he's lost the will to live,
I'm so lonesome I could cry.

The silence of a falling star
Lights up a purple sky.
And as I wonder where you are
I'm so lonesome I could cry.

http://www.bandmix.com/michael-p-smith/

Murmurations

The Eagle and the Mole, Elinor Wylie

Avoid the reeking herd,
Shun the polluted flock,
Live like that stoic bird,
The eagle of the rock.

The huddled warmth of crowds
Begets and fosters hate;
He keeps above the clouds
His cliff inviolate.

When flocks are folded warm,
And herds to shelter run,
He sails above the storm,
He stares into the sun.

If in the eagle's track
Your sinews cannot leap,
Avoid the lathered pack,
Turn from the steaming sheep.

If you would keep your soul
From spotted sight or sound,
Live like the velvet mole:
Go burrow underground.

And there hold intercourse
With roots of trees and stones,
With rivers at their source,
And disembodied bones.

Musicogenics

Once I finally learned about musicogenic seizure activity, the veil that had been draped over these ultra-mysterious and spine-tingling spells of mine was torn open so that, once again, science could explain the heretofore inexplicable activity that had made me feel so unique. How humbling.

They began when I was in my early twenties and, so far as I can recall, they did not initially get triggered by chord combinations that my once half brother and I referred to colloquially as swamp chords; E and A minor, principally. But at some point these events, that I refer to as "spells", began occurring only during those specific haunting chord combinations on a flat top acoustic guitar, or "box" as we used to call it.

Now, about those spells. Words. I need words. "Haunting" is one. "Familiar" is another. "Intimate", yet another. "Reversion" to a time and place specific, where darkness and stomachy pleasure inbred passionately, creating a paradoxical amalgam of simultaneous pleasure and internal discomfort. The same place. The same time. Always the same. The spells takes root in the gut and distribute upwards into the backboned spineworks and brainplex. I am consumed with the time and place. I am taken back, as if into a vague and recurring dream that I only experience when I'm awake and tending to the chord combinations that alarm the sleeping stage and cause velvet curtains to unbunch and shed sensory images from a well-rehearsed play, directed by some ancient hand. The pleasure is both intense and exhausting. Butterflys with sharp glassy wings and needle junkie proboscuses fly round and round my the inner sanctum of my gut, while I sit catatonic and perfectly captivated until it all passes, and my serial recovery from the experience begins once again. It will be thirty minutes or so until the residue is completely withdrawn into the inner dark stars from which the spell was born. The enigmatic play that is directed from entirely within by neurological circuitry has now suffered a scientific label and mystery surrounding it has been attenuated for the most part. This is the history of all myth and mystery.

The Most Beautiful Poem Ever Written

Original version of La Belle Dame Sans Merci, 1819

By John Keats

Oh what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.

Oh what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel's granary is full,
And the harvest's done.

I see a lily on thy brow,
With anguish moist and fever-dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.

I met a lady in the meads,
Full beauty - a faery's child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.

I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She looked at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan.

I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faery's song.

She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna-dew,
And sure in language strange she said -
'I love thee true'.

She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she wept and sighed full sore,
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
With kisses four.

And there she lulled me asleep
And there I dreamed - Ah! woe betide! -
The latest dream I ever dreamt
On the cold hill side.

I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried - 'La Belle Dame sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall!'

I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
With horrid warning gaped wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill's side.

And this is why I sojourn here
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.

Timber Rattler I Spotted On Porter's Creek Trail In Greenbrier on July 5, 2010

Timber Rattler Stacey Spotted Near Gregory Bald

Second Copperhead We Spotted on August 5, 2011 in Cosby

Timber Rattlesnake We Spotted on August 5, 2011 in Cosby