How much is a thousand words really worth?

My post about my recent Elvis pilgrimage illustrates (no pun intended) that I tend to take a lot of photos. On my trip to Memphis, I took more than 450 photos with my Canon digital camera alone. And I must have taken another three hundred or so with my iPhone.

That's a lot of photos.

I have photo storage accounts on Amazon, Flickr and Apple. I gave up on physical drives to store images because I've had bad luck with disk failures. But I think I have close to 90,000 images in the Cloud.

That's a lot of photos.

I've made physical books using some of the photos, mainly highlights of big vacations. I made a huge book of the photos from my first trip to Graceland in 2018. I didn't think I'd be going back to Memphis the following year, so I'm not sure what to do with my new photos.

I accept that not all of the photos are great. Some are. I especially cherish the photos I've taken of my family. I'm less enamored of the photos of myself. Though that tends to be all I share on my blog. I do share lots of photos of my family on Facebook, however, but that is more of a protected environment.

Pilgrimage

"Poor boys and pilgrims with families
And we are going to Graceland"

Graceland by Paul Simon 

I have spent years denying that I am a hard core Elvis fan. This is despite years of posting on a blog called Dizgraceland and a having a past where I went by the name Tim-Elvis for a lark. And I protested that I wasn't an Elvis fan despite a pilgrimage to Las Vegas to visit spots where Elvis had been including Landmark Drugs where he had his prescriptions filled.

I suppose not everyone has an Elvis tree every year with a miniature Graceland at it's base.  And there is the bookcase chock full of just about every book ever written about the man. Okay and there is that complete collection of Elvis liquor decanters depicting the various stages of his life.

But the one thing that I felt separated me from the rest of the Elvis followers was that I'd never been to Graceland. Oh, I'd passed through the Memphis airport a couple of times, but I never had visited the holiest of all holy sights to those inflicted by King worship.

I stopped being able to claim that distinction when my wife surprised me last year on my birthday with a trip to Memphis to visit Graceland. And I'll be the first one to admit that I was pretty awestruck to take the VIP tour of the mansion and the museums across the street, marveling at the cars, memorabilia and minutia that are on display highlighting his short life.

And let's not forget the feeling of visiting the Meditation Gardens and the King's grave.

It was kind of a once in a lifetime experience that I thought I'd never repeat. And then low and behold circumstances led me and my family back to Memphis again this year and another trip to Graceland. And on this trip I also added a road trip to Tupelo to visit the birthplace of Elvis.

So I've pretty much run out of excuses for my fascination with the King.

Walk into the light

It is no longer dark when I stand at the station waiting for my morning train. I wish it was, because lately I've been on autopilot in the morning and sort of just want to sleep standing up while I wait for the train. It doesn't help that I've been listening to Moby's Long Ambients 2 album on my Calm meditation app. It was written to help you relax and sleep.

When the train finally arrives at 7:10 a.m., I am generally the first one through the second doors of the second car. It is less crowded than the first and last car and my favorite seat, one that doesn't require you to sit next to anyone, is usually open. My latest morning ritual is to grab the seat, swap my baseball cap for a stocking cap I keep in my backpack, remove my glasses and pull the stocking cap over my eyes. Then I settle back and let Moby sooth my commuting soul.

It is only a 25-minute commute. The last mile or so is through a vintage train tunnel under downtown Seattle that pops you out on the border of Pioneer Square and the International District. I usually pull off my stocking cap just as the train is pulling out of the tunnel and drifting by an acre of graffiti littered walls that face the train platforms. I rise and slip out of the door still listening to Moby and join the rest of the walking dead as we shuffle towards the stairs that rise from the train platform to the street level.

Seeing through me

I wrote my first post about turning invisible in 2005. I've repeated the sentiment umpteen times since. Considering I started fading in my early 40s, I am pretty much not here now.

I got my haircut Sunday at one of those franchise haircutting places. It's a cheap and quick haircut without frills like coffee, shampooing and head massages that tack about $40 onto the cost. The downside is that, like Forest Gump's box of chocolate, you never know what you are going to get.

But when you are invisible, it doesn't matter.

I checked in on line and drove to the place. When I walked in, this person who has cut my hair several times greeted me and took me right back to cut my hair. There was no acknowledgement that she recognized me. But I imagine they cut quite a few heads of hair in any given week and they only see people every other month or so.

To her credit, she tried to make small talk (which anyone who knows me knows I love). At one point, she asked me what I did for a living. She had asked me this same question on an earlier visit and I thought when I responded she'd remember cutting my hair before, because I'd gone in greater depth than I like about being a public transportation marketing person.

But she didn't remember me or anything I'd told her before. She asked the same questions and seemed totally oblivious to what I did or the company I work for.

Who do you think you are?

Okay, it's is another philosophical question. I admit I don't really know who I am. I thought I did for years, but I kept surprising myself. It's part of the aging process. Enlightenment comes when you realize you don't know anything, including yourself.

Part of it is that the self we grow up believing in is, according to Buddhist and Hindu philosophy, is an illusion. Of course, so is everything else. If you accept that, then you have to wrap your illusionary brain around both creating the illusion and being the illusion.

Sometimes I think I'm pretty deep. Other times I worry that I'm just a windbag. I just came out of a business meeting with a consultant. At times I imaged I was witty and engaging. Everyone laughed at my jokes, nodded and took notes. But stepping out of myself, I realize they pretty much do all those things because I am the client. Inside they were probably thinking about what they were going to have for lunch.

Part of my anxiety about finding out who I am or who I am not is that I'd find out that I am no one. But if I engage in a bit of Zen word play, finding out you are no "one" could mean that you are many.

What's that? You heard the sound of one hand clapping? I did too. And it usually only happens when I show people the face I had before I was born.

It was 20 years ago, today...

I spent my 41st birthday in New Orleans, by myself. It was an odd time in my life. I'd weathered the milestone of turning 40 and wasn't quite sure what to make of things. I didn't have a relationship. I was on a career path I wasn't sure I wanted to be on. I felt lost.

I'd been to New Orleans three times. Two of the three was just to board a cruise ship bound for Cozomel. The other time was to attend a conference. I'd never really explored the city. So I decided to book a week in the French Quarter. I stayed at the Holiday Inn Chateau Lemoyne which ironically turns out to be just a block away from the Dauphine Orleans which I stayed at a few weeks ago.

I had no real itinerary. I knew I wanted to see what St. Patrick's Day was like in New Orleans. Other than that, I had no plan. And that is how I discovered that no plan is sometimes the best plan.

Every day I'd sleep in. Then I'd set out and just walk. Most times I'd head for Royal Street and enjoy the street musicians. Then I'd usually end up in Jackson Square. That's where I spotted the photo above of a street busker. I found out later that the performer was Amanda Palmer. Palmer was the lead singer, pianist, and lyricist/composer of the duo The Dresden Dolls. But she'd started out as a street performer in San Francisco and New Orleans. I only found out that the performer was Palmer years later when I saw her on a TED talk about connections.

That kind of sums up the trip. I walked. I ate great food. I watched the St. Patrick's Day parade. I turned 41 and celebrated alone on the balcony of a restaurant on Bourbon Street. It was one of the most memorable unmemorable trips I've ever taken.

Now, 20-years later, it is my birthday and I am turning 61. I am married now. I have two children. I stayed on the same career path and can glimpse retirement down the road (but still several years away). But sometimes it feels like it was just yesterday that I was strolling up Royal Street enjoying those unscripted moments of my life.

After all, they led me to where I am now.

Blogging like it's 2006

As I stare forlornly at my blog stats, I regularly see posts I wrote back in 2006 being viewed now, thirteen years after they were written. And as I reread them, I can't help but think they were pretty darned good. I think 2006 was my peak year as a blogger. Which is pretty sad considering I was not quite two years into this medium that was relatively new at the time. The above photo is a 2006 selfie I took in the bathroom mirror (this was before I had a phone that could take selfies). I took the photo to Photoshop my face onto various things as was my habit in 2006 (and more or less every year).

I suppose part of it was that it was a new type of writing and I was still having fun exploring the options. And I hadn't been blogging long enough to have started repeating myself. I had, however, been alive long enough to start repeating myself.

As much as I'd like to believe that I blog for myself and don't need an audience, in 2006 I had an active group of people who regularly read and commented on my blog. Their positive feedback did influence my writing at the time.

For whatever reason, all of the people in my blog community at the time moved on, dropped out, or found other outlets to amuse themselves. It's not like there were thousands of people who read my blog anyway. I think at the time there were maybe ten regulars at the most. So it's not like I ever went viral or was discovered.

This was before social media really overshadowed everything, too. In retrospect, I never really rose to any degree of success as a blogger. So I can't really lament languishing in relative obscurity now.

Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one with a lampshade on my head at a pity party.

Me, myself and eye

Everything I've been listening to philosopher Alan Watts say about reality and enlightenment pretty much nixes a sense of self and individual existence. This adds to my confusion about figuring out who I am and puts a dead end sign on my road to self discovery.

I don't pretend to totally understand what Watts is explaining. He tends to use a lot of Greek and other ancient language words that he spells out in his lectures (as if spelling them will make them any more comprehensible). I tend to listen to Watts lectures during my morning commute on the train. And I am usually half asleep while I listen to them.

Not that being fully awake would matter (in a literal, not a spiritual sense). Most of what I glean from Watts' explanations is that most of us mistakenly assume we are separate from the world around us. Watts conjectures that we are all connected to everything. So there isn't any "you" or "I."

That is the hardest part for "me" to accept. Because I have struggled my entire life with feeling pretty much alone trying to figure out what I am doing here.

I can't say that what Watts is saying is new to me. I have been fascinated for years with the concept that time isn't really linear. Our mistake is connecting a non-existent past with a non-existent future. In doing so, we ignore the infinite now. But it is hard to comprehend an infinite now because it seems impossible to pinpoint when now is. Because the moment you utter the words now, it has slipped into a seemingly non-existent past to make room for the new now.

I'll catch that tail some day.

I ain't afraid of no ghosts

I just got back from a business trip to one of my favorite cities, New Orleans. I've visited the city seven times in the past 20-some years. And although it has a reputation of being haunted, I have never seen a ghost there. I have seen some scary people there. And I've seem some people who seem haunted. But no spirits.

When I booked the Dauphine Orleans for this trip, it was said to be haunted. It was the site of a former brothel and was said to be haunted by some of the women who worked there. There was also supposed to be a civil war soldier who appeared now an then. But with the exception of a lot of screaming coming from the streets outside my balcony windows (it was Mardi Gras time), I didn't hear or see anything remotely supernatural.

I have pretty much given up on believing in ghosts anyway. I've stayed at many supposedly haunted hotels including the Del Coronado in San Diego, the Queen Mary in Long Beach, the Geiser Grand in Oregon, Thornewood Castle in Washington and the Bourbon Orleans and the Chateau La Moyne in New Orleans. All were supposed to have ghosts. And all of them snubbed me. Though the Geiser Grand felt haunted.

I shouldn't be surprised. All of the Alan Watts philosophy lectures I've been listening to speak to death as just a respite between living. The concept of a soul trapped between living and dying doesn't really make sense.

If you meet the Buddha by the side of the Information Highway....

I am still listening to Alan Watts' lectures on YouTube every morning while I wait for the train. And while I still have very little clue as to what he is talking about, I sense that it is very profound.

I do like that Watts seems to constantly remind us that the truth is that there is no truth. He repeats things like, "trying to bite our own teeth" or "using a flame to set fire to itself." He also pretty much takes a dump on religion.

But I could just be reading things into what he is saying. We all hear what we want to hear even if we don't know what we want to hear.

Watts does talk a great deal about our desire to hold onto our sense of self and how futile that is. He does allude to the fact that death is simply a respite from living (or something like that). And he implies that everything is an illusion. He also points out that everything exists because it's opposite exists (i.e. you can't have good without evil because you wouldn't know what it was without its opposite).

So Watts does keep you chasing your own tail a great deal. But I like that. It somehow helps me to know that there is no concrete truth and that we are better off just living than worrying about dying.

Snow way

The Puget Sound region is slowly recovering from a series of snow storms that dumped close to a foot of snow in an area that rarely gets any. And these storms hit in February with spring visible on the horizon.

I don't like snow. I don't like being cold. I don't like not being able to leave my house. I don't like having to shovel snow and clear patches of my lawn so the dog can poop. I don't like having to walk through snow drifts to get to the train station to get to work and then wonder if I'm going to get home again. I don't like getting two phone calls, a text and an e-mail from my kid's school district telling me school has been cancelled.

I live in the Puget Sound region partially because it rarely snows. So having to endure almost a week of this crap has made me think that moving to Costa Rica may not be a bad idea.

The Last Laugh

I watched a bad movie (The Last Laugh) the other night on Netflix starring a 75-year old Chevy Chase playing an even older ex-manager of comedians including one played by 71-year old Richard Dreyfuss. Dreyfuss looks like he is 85. It was your typical coming of old-age film that tries to instill faith that we still have it in us as we age. Chevy Chase hooks up with Andie MacDowell playing a swinging artist who had attended Woodstock. Thing is, actress MacDowell is the same age as me.

The film was pretty depressing. For one, it's audience demographic are people my age who know who the hell Chevy Chase, Richard Dreyfus and Andie MacDowell are and remembers what they looked like in their younger days.

I suppose I could start posting positive posts about how aging isn't really so bad. The thing is, there isn't a lot positive to say about aging except that you aren't led around by raging hormones anymore. I suppose that is something.

And then, then...

"Then" by definition is what comes after now. And I've already established that it is always "now," so you can really never reach "then." So why do we even have a word for it (then, not "it")?

 And yes, I am still listening to Alan Watts. I have to tell you, though, his speaking style is a bit annoying. He pauses a great deal while he speaks which makes me check my phone to see if I lost my signal. But "then" he finishes his sentence.

But I digress. Though I noticed that "then" is used a great deal to describe a sequence of past events. This butts heads with the notion that there is no past, either, just the now. So "then" can't cut break no matter what it describes.

In Mel Gibson's film, Braveheart, William Wallace asks the parents of a young woman he is interested in whether he can go for a horseback ride with her. The reply was "No the now." At the time, I thought it was just a Scottish thing. But "now" I think the scriptwriter may have been slipping in some philosophy. You be the judge:




I think this YouTube clip illustrates just how irritating being in the now all the time is.

But "then" I could be wrong.

Now, now...

So I continue to listen to Philosopher Alan Watts into the new year. And I realize that I have heard everything he has said about living in the now many, many times. But I doubt I have ever really "heard" it.

I wonder if my parents ever thought about their place in the universe and the questions of why we are here. My mother bought firmly into the myth of her religion and clutched to it right up until her death. And from what I witnessed of her death, her faith didn't offer much comfort in her final moments.

I never discussed anything philosophical with my father. He did seem focused on his here and now which ping ponged between discovering lost treasures in ghost towns and cheering on the Boise State Bronco football team. Though I imagine both fixations didn't really involve the now. He set his sights on a hidden treasure that perhaps he imagined would change his life of barely scrapping by financially. I can only guess as to why he was fixated on the Boise Broncos. He'd been a janitor at a dorm at Boise State that housed many football players. So my negative self imagined they became the sons he wished he had.

Send in the clowns

I would be remiss if I didn't finish out the year with a blog post, which makes this number 66 for the year and the most posts I've written since 2011.

If I'd written 666, it would explain the above photo.  Suffice it to say I was just clowning around.

But I digress.

I finished watching a documentary on Netflix last night called, "The American Meme." It essentially pointed out how miserable (and miserably rich) social media stars like Paris Hilton, a large man who goes by the unpolitically correct name of Fat Jew and another Instagram star whose name escapes me. But his millions of followers tuned in to see him get blackout drunk at parties he hosted that included scenes of him pouring champagne over women's breasts and butts.

All of the social media stars bemoaned that millions of people adored them but they were essentially lonely.

Sad clown.

The irony to me was that the only one of these celebrities I'd ever heard of was Paris Hilton. And it occurred to me once again how really old I am. Though I think I'm glad I wasn't born in this generation having never known what it was like not to stare blankly into the digital desert and wonder if that's all there is.

So I suppose ending 2018 on a grateful note that perhaps it is a good thing that Dizgraceland has never discovered is a good thing. Other than the vast amounts of cash it would bring in, it would just be a major annoyance to have people idolizing me and hanging on every word I wrote.

Happy new year.

Misty, water-colored memories

Well, another year is almost ready to slip into the ending credits and roll off the screen. It has been a busy and in some cases, an expensive year. I had to replace the engine in one car and actual replace our other car. I also had to have a new fence installed around our yard.

On the bright side, I finally earned a character skin (what the avatar looks like) in Fortnite that looks like me: Sergeant Winter. Okay, as my son informed me, he looks like me if I could grow a full beard and actually had muscles, but at least he isn't a man-bun wearing Millennial.  And we both have white hair.

I actually have become fairly adept at playing Fortnite and have been accepted by all of my son's 10-year old friends who play on our squad. I have accepted many challenges and can emote with the best of them. I will be sad when Fortnite is replaced by the next trend and Sergeant Winter and I are forced into retirement to sit around in easy chairs recalling our past glory.

But I digress.

All retch and no vomit

I've been watching YouTube videos of British philosopher Alan Watts' lectures lately. Actually I am just listening to Alan Watts since he died in 1973 before the world captured every moment with a digital camera. Watts was one of the first Western philosophers to embrace Zen Buddhism (and kind of understand it).

In one lecture Watts used the phrase, "He was all retch and no vomit." I realized it was a intellectual version of "all hat and no cattle."

And why am I listening to lectures by a dead British Zen philosopher who died at age 58? Because I have to have something to do in between playing matches on Fortnite.

Oh, and I'm passing through one of my soul searching phases. I've also been meditating for ten minutes a day using an APP called Calm. And I went on a crystal craze for a bit, surrounding myself with various quartz crystals.

I think I'm over that, though.

I have also been watching alot of TED talks, too.

Falling back

If I could save time in a bottle
The first thing that I'd like to do
Is to save every day
'Til eternity passes away
Just to spend them with you 

--Time in a bottle by Jim Croce

I've had tirades about Daylight Savings Time in several posts, so I won't waste anymore time here ranting about it.

It does make everything off a bit though when we arbitrarily turn back the clocks an hour and say we now have an extra hour. Though everything seems a bit off in the world lately anyway.

We took the kids to the Phinney Ridge Community Center in Seattle on Saturday for a Day of the Dead Festival. They had a community Day of the Dead ofrenda (altar) where you could put photos of your dead ancestors to honor them. The altars are supposed to welcome the spirits of the dead back to the land of the living during the Day of the Dead celebrations. Technically that takes place on November 1 and 2 and the festival we went to was on November 3. So I have a hunch there were some pretty confused and pissed off spirits at the Phinney Ridge Community Center on Saturday.

Here, muse, muse, muse...

Muse 

• (sometimes lowercase) the goddess or the power regarded as inspiring a poet, artist, thinker, or the like.

• (lowercase) the genius or powers characteristic of a poet.

I was on track this year to post more blog posts than I have in almost seven years. Then for whatever reason, my muse went south for the winter and I haven't been inspired to write anything. That's the funny thing about muses. You never know when they will become unamused.

I toy with the idea that I have said everything I have to say. I have shared my unsolicited opinion about many things, sometimes in a less than kind way. And considering the current state of our divided world, I think there has been enough unkind words bantered about.

I'd write about what is going on in my life, but I'm afraid the highlight lately has been getting a new fence installed (though it is pretty cool since the old one was about 44 years old and was ready to collapse any day). I could have written about my first experience with using a wood chipper to get rid of the crap load of branches I had to cut back on my hedge to allow the fence maker to tear down and install a new fence. But it was uneventful except for it eventually clogging and me not being able to decipher the instructions on how to clear the clog and restart it.

Family

For whatever reason September seems to draw me back to my birthplace. I just returned from a weekend in Boise. It was almost six years to the day that I was there at my mother's death bed. This time I was there meeting a sister I never knew I had until a few weeks ago.

I debated writing about this. It is a family matter. But it has also been a secret too long.

A few weeks ago my brother e-mailed me a link to a story posted on a genealogy site. It was a woman's story of meeting her birth mother for the first time. That birth mother was my mother.

It was, of course, a shock to me. My mother had had a baby girl back in 1945. The father was a Army Air Corp soldier stationed in Boise. When my mother told him she was pregnant, she never heard from him again. He flew back to his home town in Pennsylvania a month before my sister was born and married his high school sweetheart.

My mother was from a family of 13. She was 20 when the baby was born. She was working as a telephone operator. She had the baby at a hospital in Boise that housed "unwed" mothers. She relinquished the baby at birth. My sister was adopted by an older couple who lived in a rural area of Idaho. She was raised as an only child.

My sister eventually faced the desire to know about her birth parents and found out my mother lived in Boise. She wrote my mother a letter, but at first my mother refused to meet her. Then my sister went to Boise with a friend and the friend convinced my mother to meet the daughter she'd given up years before. My mother was 80 at the time. My sister visited her several times after that and they wrote to each other.

My mother never breathed a word of this to me or my brothers. She carried the secret to her grave.