Time Talks Page 22 --- End of First Week of June 1989
History was interesting in June of 1989. The Tienanmen Square massacre occurred in Beijing, China. Like so many other Chinese tragedies, we will never know how many Chinese citizens perished. Be it typhoon or earthquake, flood or famine, pestilence or military or political purge, the Chinese victims are unending.
The Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini died in Iran. Americans, and perhaps a few other Westerners like me, were glad he was gone. He was one of the seeming endless boogey men of the Middle East for the United States. There would be many more; I did not really have an idea of how that would continue, from Libya to Afghanistan.
Michael Chang beat Ivan Lendl at Wimbledon. Historic feat. That was a big deal to me, at least. Major tennis championships can be a part of the context of history.
22 is one of my favorite numbers.
Good morning June 6 198**9.
What posesses [sic] a person to write?
Egotism? No . It's about 10:00 am and this paper and the adjoining deal is not necessarily grammatically and/or compositionally sound, whatever that means. .
Disect my life ... !Adious! ^--sp. [arrow pointing towards "Adious"]
4:00 p.m. How the time HA! flies!
I don't know. The irony of it all. Life, 1989, the 90's, 2000, 2001, 2010. All of it there, and me too, I hope.
Oh babble on, oh babble on
I look back now, May 19, 2020, and I see the foolishness and the wisdom, the universality and the particular peculiarity, the oneness and the allness, the simplicity and the commonality, the me and the you, the we and the they of it. I am like so many others, an American, a member of my state, the third of three children, a guy, a sports fan, a recent high school graduate, and hundreds of other things that make me like anyone else.
By the time I was in high school I would tell people that if you were one in a million, then that meant there were at least 30 other people just like you, in California alone. I was always fascinated by populations and demography numbers and statistics, and I was always wondering about the state of who we were as humans, how many of us there were, and what we were about.
In short, identity, quantity, quality. Were we all uniquely independent, or was the collective part of our hive the predominant trait? Where did God and chosen ones fit into all of it? Do they? Do we? Am I one? Are you? Who are you? Who am I? Read and write on...
Decades later, writing and ruminating in the same circles.
I am still collecting, as it were.
After decades, seeing some of the world and seeing some of life, living and experiencing some more of it, along with observing some death. We all collect, we all process, we all filter and remember and keep moving... books, articles, music and plays, movies and series on television and now computers and smart phones... We see life and lives through many prisms and kaleidoscopes.
22 is one of my favorite numbers.
Good morning June 6 198**9.
What posesses [sic] a person to write?
Egotism? No .
Good morning June 6 198**9.
What posesses [sic] a person to write?
Egotism? No . It's about 10:00 am and this paper and the adjoining deal is not necessarily grammatically and/or compositionally sound, whatever that means. .
Disect my life ... !Adious! ^--sp. [arrow pointing towards "Adious"]
4:00 p.m. How the time HA! flies!
I don't know. The irony of it all. Life, 1989, the 90's, 2000, 2001, 2010. All of it there, and me too, I hope.
Oh babble on, oh babble on
Babylon.
I bid thee farewell. --^ ! [Arrow pointing at exclamation mark to the right]
Forced to write at the frustratious [sic] point of boredom.
All those years I knew I should have been writing. All those hours I knew I should have been studying. I wasn't bored, nosiree.
I was collecting! Information in my own lackadaisical way. My own way.
_______________________________________________________________I look back now, May 19, 2020, and I see the foolishness and the wisdom, the universality and the particular peculiarity, the oneness and the allness, the simplicity and the commonality, the me and the you, the we and the they of it. I am like so many others, an American, a member of my state, the third of three children, a guy, a sports fan, a recent high school graduate, and hundreds of other things that make me like anyone else.
By the time I was in high school I would tell people that if you were one in a million, then that meant there were at least 30 other people just like you, in California alone. I was always fascinated by populations and demography numbers and statistics, and I was always wondering about the state of who we were as humans, how many of us there were, and what we were about.
In short, identity, quantity, quality. Were we all uniquely independent, or was the collective part of our hive the predominant trait? Where did God and chosen ones fit into all of it? Do they? Do we? Am I one? Are you? Who are you? Who am I? Read and write on...
Decades later, writing and ruminating in the same circles.
I am still collecting, as it were.
After decades, seeing some of the world and seeing some of life, living and experiencing some more of it, along with observing some death. We all collect, we all process, we all filter and remember and keep moving... books, articles, music and plays, movies and series on television and now computers and smart phones... We see life and lives through many prisms and kaleidoscopes.
22 is one of my favorite numbers.
Good morning June 6 198**9.
What posesses [sic] a person to write?
Egotism? No .
The first number, twenty-two, is the reference to my birth date, back in 1970, which then became my fav. The date that I wrote this, the 6th of June, 1989, (little was I to know that) this date would be the birth date of my first born 12 years later, the futuristic year of the next century, the next millennium. Symmetry, anyone? Perhaps this yet is an indicator of another normality of life and existence: one lives long enough and the things of life occur: going to college, getting a job, marrying a wife, have children, start a blog, buy a car. These are normal things for a lot of us.
But maybe not so normal to reflect and respond to one's own journal 30 plus years after one started it...
Here we are. Ego, is that what drives us? No, still no. There is id, and ego, and super ego. All of them, all need to know more and process more. We do things and have multiple motivations for others, sublimating our own egotistical or selfish desires for the benefit of others. This is why we write. Ask George Orwell. My daughter, born on that June day, prizes her journals the most of any of her possessions; she is my same age of 18 when I wrote this... Closer to the age when Ernest Hemingway was earning his journalist chops in Kansas City, or when John Steinbeck was scribbling his way to Stanford. I don't what Jack London, William Faulkner, or F. Scott Fitzgerald were doing as they approached their 19th years... What about Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, or Alice Walker? Ot Virginia Woolf, Annie Dillard, Pearl Buck, or Isabel Allende? Or the luminaries Vargas Llosa or Garcia Marquez? Most likely reading their fair share.
It's about 10:00 am and this paper and the adjoining deal is not necessarily grammatically and/or compositionally sound, whatever that means. .
Disect my life ... !Adious! ^--sp. [arrow pointing towards "Adious"]
4:00 p.m. How the time HA! flies!
Time.
What bigger concept is there, really? It encapsulates everything, right? The ephemerality, the immensity, the perplexity, the curiosity of it-- From morning to afternoon to night.
Time. What a thing always changing and never changing. What a mystery, and such is life. And death. Timeless and timeful. Eternal and finite.
I don't know. The irony of it all. Life, 1989, the 90's, 2000, 2001, 2010. All of it there, and me too, I hope.
Oh babble on, oh babble on
Very existential these lines, feeling like life is ironic, like how Alanis Morrissete would sing so poetically a few years later in the 1990s, when I would be a college and post college student. In 1989 I had the hang up of those mathematical and science class grades weighing on me and against me, plus even the Spanish language was somewhat daunting in front of me: in the very daily conversations that I had with my Spanish host family, dealing with the demons of the high school homework and tests that I had fought, like some new age Don Quijote, only much less heroic, or less in every extreme. And not much of a Sancho Panza or steed to accompany, either. Maybe it was only the future me all along. And now to some degree the lector, as in you.
It is good to establish what is not known, and what is known. You know? I don't know. No sé. (Any irony there?) No sé yo, no sabes tú, no sabe Ud., no sabe él, no sabe ella, no saben ellos, no saben ellas, no sabeís vosotros, no sabeís vosotras, no sabemos nosostros.
Hemingway might say something similar with his "nada a nada." We know little or nothing, and perhaps, in the end, there is little or nothing. A bit of an Eastern notion, perhaps like zen Buddhism.
Not that I am him, or anyone else is, but because of him and all the collective conscious readers and cogniscenti across our planet, we are aware of his messages spread across time and page, so it ends up we know something. At least a little of him, at least a little of Spanish and Spain.
So then I prognosticate a little on the future, and contemplate the times that I would live to see and observe.
And I have written, spoken on those years in years past, and hopefully will do so again.
Hopes fulfilled.
And I go babbling on and babbling on, as the brook does outside my windows above the sloping hill, in the late night on a Friday eve, no this 23rd of May, 2020; no longer the 22nd, a favorite number in dates.
And there is a reference to time once more, the ubiquitous and intoxicating elixir, or panacea, or placebo, or ether that makes us fall into sleep, or eventually death, eternal and resplendent, sublime.
The Biblical and church hymn line, of course, memorized and internalized into me, even before the full time mission when it came up again in my conscious and conscience while our U.S. bombs were leveling the Iraqi forces:
"Oh, Babylon, Oh Babylon! We bid thee farewell! We're going to the mountains of Ephraim to dwell!"
I happen to be of Ephraim. And, years later I had a harrowing experience late at night, while raining of all things, in the pitch darkness, driving through a desolate mountain of mountains, with none other than Ephraim as my destination. Irony, luck, chance, destiny, fate, coincidence, happenstance, weird connections or links...
Spain to Indiana to Utah to Chile to Indiana to Utah. All quite linked, quite circular, a cycle, a loop. Some say time of the clocks and planets and stars do the same: travel in loops, circuits. Like electricity, like electrons circling nuclei in their quadrillions of universes...
It's about 10:00 am and this paper and the adjoining deal is not necessarily grammatically and/or compositionally sound, whatever that means. .
Disect my life ... !Adious! ^--sp. [arrow pointing towards "Adious"]
4:00 p.m. How the time HA! flies!
Time.
What bigger concept is there, really? It encapsulates everything, right? The ephemerality, the immensity, the perplexity, the curiosity of it-- From morning to afternoon to night.
Time. What a thing always changing and never changing. What a mystery, and such is life. And death. Timeless and timeful. Eternal and finite.
I don't know. The irony of it all. Life, 1989, the 90's, 2000, 2001, 2010. All of it there, and me too, I hope.
Oh babble on, oh babble on
Very existential these lines, feeling like life is ironic, like how Alanis Morrissete would sing so poetically a few years later in the 1990s, when I would be a college and post college student. In 1989 I had the hang up of those mathematical and science class grades weighing on me and against me, plus even the Spanish language was somewhat daunting in front of me: in the very daily conversations that I had with my Spanish host family, dealing with the demons of the high school homework and tests that I had fought, like some new age Don Quijote, only much less heroic, or less in every extreme. And not much of a Sancho Panza or steed to accompany, either. Maybe it was only the future me all along. And now to some degree the lector, as in you.
It is good to establish what is not known, and what is known. You know? I don't know. No sé. (Any irony there?) No sé yo, no sabes tú, no sabe Ud., no sabe él, no sabe ella, no saben ellos, no saben ellas, no sabeís vosotros, no sabeís vosotras, no sabemos nosostros.
Hemingway might say something similar with his "nada a nada." We know little or nothing, and perhaps, in the end, there is little or nothing. A bit of an Eastern notion, perhaps like zen Buddhism.
Not that I am him, or anyone else is, but because of him and all the collective conscious readers and cogniscenti across our planet, we are aware of his messages spread across time and page, so it ends up we know something. At least a little of him, at least a little of Spanish and Spain.
So then I prognosticate a little on the future, and contemplate the times that I would live to see and observe.
And I have written, spoken on those years in years past, and hopefully will do so again.
Hopes fulfilled.
And I go babbling on and babbling on, as the brook does outside my windows above the sloping hill, in the late night on a Friday eve, no this 23rd of May, 2020; no longer the 22nd, a favorite number in dates.
And there is a reference to time once more, the ubiquitous and intoxicating elixir, or panacea, or placebo, or ether that makes us fall into sleep, or eventually death, eternal and resplendent, sublime.
The Biblical and church hymn line, of course, memorized and internalized into me, even before the full time mission when it came up again in my conscious and conscience while our U.S. bombs were leveling the Iraqi forces:
"Oh, Babylon, Oh Babylon! We bid thee farewell! We're going to the mountains of Ephraim to dwell!"
I happen to be of Ephraim. And, years later I had a harrowing experience late at night, while raining of all things, in the pitch darkness, driving through a desolate mountain of mountains, with none other than Ephraim as my destination. Irony, luck, chance, destiny, fate, coincidence, happenstance, weird connections or links...
Spain to Indiana to Utah to Chile to Indiana to Utah. All quite linked, quite circular, a cycle, a loop. Some say time of the clocks and planets and stars do the same: travel in loops, circuits. Like electricity, like electrons circling nuclei in their quadrillions of universes...
Babylon.
I bid thee farewell. --^ ! [Arrow pointing at exclamation mark to the right]
Forced to write at the frustratious [sic] point of boredom.
Babylon represents the world, and sin, and carnality, and ruin, and distance and death from God.
Babylon is the evil empire, the lustful goal, the carnal conquest, the cheap thrill or pleasure.
Babylon must be fled, and bid adieu. Repent and live, give up sin and the world for the higher kingdoms, the higher glory.
Farewell old me. Look to Jesus and live. Live again, reborn and newly minted. Newly cast, as God would have you.
Was I bored? Yes and no... In many ways I have had times in my life, up till when I was 18, my youth, where I was bored. But there were so many other things that interested me. My top 10? Sports (I have my top ten of those), world affairs, politics, religion, fiction, science fiction, history, science, movies, television, foreign cultures and languages... That about covers most of it.
There are times and places when I am or I have have felt bored, or more likely I feel or I have felt I am in positions of drudgery or pain that are not places where I wish to be. Some physical and some mental tasks have taken on onerous qualities that have worse than bored me, but have taken on a sense of drudgery and distaste for reasons that, which come from my own brain and personality, my own flesh and attributes of strengths and weaknesses.
So yes, I am like so many others, this we know. But each of us possesses a voice that is unique, and that voice is the one that we only own, and we ourselves must seek after, search out, eek out, carve out, (notice how many of these action verbs use the preposition "out") we have to bring out, remove, extract, unearth, disinter, bring to light, yes, sacar a luz, bring to light, illuminate what is known and what is known.
Knowledge, wisdom, feelings, plans, ideas. Life and death and the cosmos.
Thank you James Michener.
All those years I knew I should have been writing. All those hours I knew I should have been studying. I wasn't bored, nosiree.
Babylon represents the world, and sin, and carnality, and ruin, and distance and death from God.
Babylon is the evil empire, the lustful goal, the carnal conquest, the cheap thrill or pleasure.
Babylon must be fled, and bid adieu. Repent and live, give up sin and the world for the higher kingdoms, the higher glory.
Farewell old me. Look to Jesus and live. Live again, reborn and newly minted. Newly cast, as God would have you.
Was I bored? Yes and no... In many ways I have had times in my life, up till when I was 18, my youth, where I was bored. But there were so many other things that interested me. My top 10? Sports (I have my top ten of those), world affairs, politics, religion, fiction, science fiction, history, science, movies, television, foreign cultures and languages... That about covers most of it.
There are times and places when I am or I have have felt bored, or more likely I feel or I have felt I am in positions of drudgery or pain that are not places where I wish to be. Some physical and some mental tasks have taken on onerous qualities that have worse than bored me, but have taken on a sense of drudgery and distaste for reasons that, which come from my own brain and personality, my own flesh and attributes of strengths and weaknesses.
So yes, I am like so many others, this we know. But each of us possesses a voice that is unique, and that voice is the one that we only own, and we ourselves must seek after, search out, eek out, carve out, (notice how many of these action verbs use the preposition "out") we have to bring out, remove, extract, unearth, disinter, bring to light, yes, sacar a luz, bring to light, illuminate what is known and what is known.
Knowledge, wisdom, feelings, plans, ideas. Life and death and the cosmos.
Thank you James Michener.
All those years I knew I should have been writing. All those hours I knew I should have been studying. I wasn't bored, nosiree.
I was collecting! Information in my own lackadaisical way. My own way.
All these years I know I should be writing. And I am writing, right now, time now, in the present.
Today. This week, this month, this year, this decade, this century, this millennium. This eon.
Bored? Yes, I think that the grades really did become a boredom, or a hassle. I don't mind learning, just not all the time with a letter grade or Grade Point Average affixed.
We should learn for the sake of learning and also to get things done, to in the end understand what and why and how we are. Never stop searching, never stop writing, never stop living and expanding.
Collect in every possible way whatever you can, I can, we can.
We can.
Understand.
All these years I know I should be writing. And I am writing, right now, time now, in the present.
Today. This week, this month, this year, this decade, this century, this millennium. This eon.
Bored? Yes, I think that the grades really did become a boredom, or a hassle. I don't mind learning, just not all the time with a letter grade or Grade Point Average affixed.
We should learn for the sake of learning and also to get things done, to in the end understand what and why and how we are. Never stop searching, never stop writing, never stop living and expanding.
Collect in every possible way whatever you can, I can, we can.
We can.
Understand.
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