HHGG on CD

My life right now: feeding a microwaved mix of canned food and sliced “deli-style” turkey to a cat that cycles through days of sneezing blood and mucus interspersed with days of just-plain gargled breathing; I type with my left hand on the keyboard while in the right arm cradling my little velveteen feline buddy as he falls asleep into the cat dream world of his, sawing branches with his snoring.

Thus, I am not alone.

I eat leftover popcorn and watch “The Giant Mechanical Man.”

I ruminate on stories about PE ratios and declining middle class wealth.

I masticate.

I expectorate.

I do not like deciding the fate of others but I go ahead anyway, stirring the pond’s waters and redirecting the pebbled waves I quietly dropped in my monklike meditation.

It — the mysterious two-letter word that commands attention at the beginning of this sentence — is no easier now to order the elimination of labeled beings we train ourselves to see as the Others, “them,” as it was the first time I let peer pressure push me to end the life of a being that could not live in the hustle and bustle of so-called modern society.

I is one letter less than it.

I am this artificial label for a relatively dense set of states of energy we sometimes say is a human being.

A head concussion in high school split my brain apart.

Ever since then, I have reconstructed the universe in small quantities and big ideas.

Something about my corpus callosum bothers me.

Gray matter matters, too.

I have stopped drinking alcoholic liquids/beverages.

I have dedicated at least one book each to my parents, my wife, Monica, Ann P., Maggie and who else?  I have not finished the book I plan to dedicate to Jenn.

I can say what a book is not but can I truly, really say what a book is?

Twenty-one days since I last checked the Mars countdown calendar.

My next book to read: Sagittarius Rising.

My wife’s family memories

Where are your family memories stored?

For my wife, they’re kept in many places, not just in the synaptical, neuronic electrochemical impulses of a single central nervous system.

Some are stored here, at the cemetery in Stony Point, Tennessee, next to New Providence Presbyterian Church:

New Providence Presbyterian Church panorama

IMG_0139

New-Providence-Presbyterian-Church-and-Forgey-gravesites-2007-12-27

 

 

…where naturally-aged gravestones tell the story of time in more ways than one:

 

Carmack-John-gravesite-2007-12-27 - wide-shot

Forgey-James-gravesite-2007-12-27

 

Forgey-James-R-gravesite-full-stone-2007-12-27

Forgey-Margaret-gravesite-2007-12-27

Forgey-Rachel-daughter-of-James-and-Margaret-gravesite-2007-12-27

Forgey-Rachel-gravesite-2007-12-27

Harlan-Elizabeth-gravesite-2007-12-27

 

 

…and verify information stored in the Forgey Family Bible, of which my wife is the current keeper:

 

Forgey-Bible-family-record-births

Forgey-Bible-family-record-births-deaths

Forgey-Bible-family-record-deaths

Forgey-Bible-family-record-marriages

Forgey-Bible-births

Forgey-Bible-deaths

Forgey-Bible-marriages

Gabriel-Forgey-Mary-Harlan-marriage-March-14-1870

Those memories make my wife happy and when she’s happy, I’m happy!

A Writer’s Secret

Thought to self: do not fixate on any one idea or image that bobs to the surface of one’s pool of consciousness before spinning out of the eddy and disappearing into the mainstream.

Which person will connect the dots between Chinese senior citizens collecting recyclable trash, Central American children escaping unstable societies, Carlos Slim suggesting part-time work is good for you, Bill Gates suggesting an old collection of New Yorker short stories to read, Elon Musk selling a “people’s car” version of the Tesla and Erin Kennedy organising a robot party?

What about the algae that gives the atmosphere the oxygen we need to breathe?  How much water and algae do we need off-planet to terraform our new digs?

I saw the first USPS vehicle making deliveries on Sunday driving down our street just now — what Amazon purchase was so important that it had to arrive before Monday morning?

I essentially quit hanging out in the virtual community known as Facebook, having checked in a couple of times since I quit because I didn’t have contact information for people outside of Facebook.  Once that was completed, my time spent on Facebook is over.  Although I enjoyed communicating with people in that social media space, I lost track of me, spending more time managing my Facebook personality than spending with the flesh-and-blood body that has to eat and breathe.

Primarily, since I was a young child, I have lived in and with my thoughts.  I learned to convert thinking into writing, and then examined the labels of “thinking” and “writing” to discover for myself why I am the center of my own universe.

I never stop eating and breathing but I sometimes stop being me in order to please the person in me who thinks he has to please other people enough so they don’t see the real me who’d rather sit in a nest of his thoughts than listen to others’ opinions that I have to pick through to find something in common that minimises controversy, lessening the chance that I have to stay connected to a person for longer than I have to.

I am not unique.  I compromise like many people.  Even these sentences are a form of compromise, walking the minefield of libel, slander and inflammatory comments I could make were I less civilised.

I write because it’s the quickest form of communication for me to scan when I want to return to previously-recorded thought trails of mine.

Time to close my eyes and remove myself from words, experiencing the living minideath of meditation that sometimes becomes sleep, the temporary suicide of self that rejuvenates me enough that I can stand to be around people again for a while.

Admission of Guilt?

Bill Kling, Huntsville City Council member, as well as the entire state of Alabama, admitted guilt today in the contribution toward global warming and use of herbicides/pesticides to reduce the bee/bird population by reiterating the demand (a/k/a Ordinance No. 86-294 entitled “The Huntsville, Alabama, Grass and Weed Ordinance”) that residents maintain an inedible crop of grasses at a certain height that does not allow the grass to produce flowers and thus seeds all for the sake of “a way to help keep the community looking its best.””

Barbara’s bartering banter

Barbara, tell us your story:


Bartering as a Lifestyle

I’ve learned to live on very little money in order to support my lifestyle as an artist. I haven’t had medical insurance since 1985 and luckily I’m very healthy but whenever I have needs, such as dental work, and once, a doctor, I asked around and found someone I could barter with. I’ve bartered for airline tickets, amazing places to live, places to stay while I’m traveling overseas and this continent, and car repairs. I usually barter my art, but I’ve met people with skills such as massage, hairstyling, jewelry making, and bookkeeping, to name just a few, who have done well with barter. If you are willing to work, create art, or have something to trade, then you’ve got something you can barter with. I’ve found that there are many times people might not want to spend money but will barter.

When I quit my systems analyst job and didn’t want to be stressed out about money, as a single person I learned that caretaking other people’s property allowed me the freedom to make my art. This lifestyle has landed me in extremely beautiful places, with my rent, utilities and, depending on the situation, food, salaries, vehicles, and use of swimming pools, as part of the deal. On this blog site I intend to tell my stories as well as those I’m collecting from other people, and pass on some web sites that will help you meet up with other people interested in bartering.

In my twenties I traveled around the world and found wonderful opportunities for work exchanges along the way. In Australia I lived for a couple of years in the outback where I rented a house on a two hundred acre farm for the low rent of $80 a month in exchange for keeping an eye on my landlord’s cows. In Bodh Gaya, India I spent a couple of weeks in a Thai Buddhist monastery, in exchange I spent an hour a day helping one of the monks with his university studies. In Israel I lived on a kibbutz for three months and did a variety of jobs in exchange for everything I needed. I learned that honest, loyal, hard working people were really appreciated and could get jobs anywhere in the world.

In my thirties I finally settled down and worked as a computer programmer until I sold two of my short travel stories to a magazine and a piece of art that I’d created was accepted for an important juried show the City of Los Angeles was sponsoring. I quit my job and began looking for ways to survive as an artist, which in L.A. meant long-term house sitting and scenic painting for movies.

In my forties my first creative work exchange was as a scenic painter for the New Hope Theater in Pennsylvania. I spent the summer painting sets in the Pocono Mountains while living in a beautiful resort hotel. I stayed for two months in an apartment in Venice Beach, CA in exchange for doing all the black and white still photography for a video project an artist friend was working on. On vacation in Jamaica I met a woman who lived in a beautiful villa on a hillside overlooking the Carribean and ended up house sitting it for a week when she had to go away. While there I learned wood carving from a local artist.

One of my favorite work exchanges was for a real estate investor in Bel Air, CA. For three years I worked two days a week as his office assistant in exchange for a salary and a nice little apartment in one wing of his house. I had full use of the grounds and swimming pool. It was while living in Bel Air that I began carving large sculptures for the Treepeople Park in Beverly Hills. I finally left Bel Air to do a summer work exchange at the Avondale Forest Park in County Wicklow, Ireland where I carved a large sculpture (see photo above) from a famous tree that had died. After this experience many of my work exchanges were art related.

Several times a week I will update this site with these stories and many more. I’m hoping to interview Ryan McDonald of The One Red Paper Clip fame, have a piece on house swapping, do an article on business barter sites, and much more. Don’t get me wrong, money is great, but if you don’t have much, there are alternatives with bartering. World travel, living in millionaire homes, the sky’s the limit on what you can manifest.

You can see some of my work on these blog sites:
barbarayates-sculpture.blogspot.com
woodenbooks.blogspot.com
barbarayates-photos.blogspot.com

If you have questions to can contact me at: byates3347@gmail.com

Sunday, July 12, 2009

Barbara’s Bartering Blog

Multiple layers of creativity?

How many layers of the creative process do you/I experience?

We experience the consumption of the creative process frequently, especially the creativity of our ancestors who invented language and others tools of our social structure — reading books, watching films/sporting events, listening to other people talking, learning through the apprenticeship method on how to mimic the use of tools to recreate something.

We constantly participate in the creative process when we rearrange words into sentences of our own, or even quoting others in the context of conversations, and when we use other tools in ways we hadn’t directly seen.

We create new tools.

We create new objects/processes with old tools.

We experience thoughts in the zeitgeist when we see/hear something and think/say, “Hey, I already thought of that or should have thought of that myself.” We are massively driven to think up the same independent inventive idea before seeing/hearing it from others.

I travel through time in my thoughts to keep me from being too much stuck in the jointly shared mass media moment. We all do.

We remember moments previously experienced and yet to be conceived in our linearly lived corporeal existence.

How then shall I ensure my future self on Mars gets as equal a stimuli-enriched existence as the one I have now?

How does one keeps the creative juices flowing?

What motivates us to go from thought to action?

What is creativity?

I let my many moods/personalities wander my thought trails as undisciplined and uncontrolled as I can.

In my thoughts, a character who believes only in practical, no-nonsense, utilitarianism struggles for attention with the no-worries, anything-goes, live-and-let-live ambling wanderer who believes nothing is absolute.

Giving time to both characters without a desire to balance attention to them is tougher in some moments than others.

What is true randomness in the thinking process?

How is it related to creativity?

What is the discipline to physically manifest the completion of one (of many) project(s) one mentally creates on the fly?

If it wasn’t for hunger and other body functions like the itching numbness in my buttocks, could I sit here for days at a time watching the weeds and trees grow in my yard during changing weather patterns?