17 February 2019
A Major Hack
An alert came from Google telling me my owner accounts for three of my seven websites had been hacked. What to do? The infestation was widespread, affecting all my websites on my hosting provider, where I later learned there was an endemic presence of malware. A chat with a security tech convinced me to spring for their quick fix and 3-month quarantine measures. Not so quick, really, as I had to spend the rest of the day and night followup up with my part of the cleanup operations. But at least today, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel… $735 poorer. The cost of doing business these days, apparently.
The First Woman President?
While doing some of the routine website cleanup tasks last night, I watched Tulsi Gabbard speak and answer questions at a Town Hall meeting in Keene, New Hampshire, kicking off her 2020 presidential run. Basically she’s the only vocal anti-war candidate out there. Why is that, asked one Vietnam War vet. Tulsi responded, “That’s a great question, and I think you should ask the other candidates.” To her it supercedes all other issues, because of the enormous cost in resources and suffering, at home, by troops, and in the countries devastated by the US’s regime-change “wars of choice.”
LIVE on the road – Townhall-style gathering in Keene, NH #TulsiTV #TULSI2020 https://t.co/tAA7kqS01e https://t.co/GO7CTk76aF
— Tulsi Gabbard (@TulsiGabbard) February 16, 2019
Drum and Dance
The Tuesday night jam here at the funky wooden Hostal del Lago, with 30-50 people or more, is inspiring. The majordomo, scraggle-bearded Tor, is pretty low-key, actually, offering casual words to discourage egos or “performers,” and supplying a dozen or so of his homemade drums for general use, and accepting voluntary donations in a hat. When the music gets cooking, as it usually does, dancers dance. The way it should be…
Writing and Reading
Finishing the proofs for my long-in-progress memoir (last iteration, two and a half years in the making, and really seeded as far back as thirty years ago, late 1980s), and then sending out queries to a dozen publishers, now I will wait 6–12 months for replies. Next? A new Roots Jam drum rhythms compilation; a book of my travel writings; and shorter pieces—essays, stories, poems, reviews, blog posts.
On Voice
The foregoing installments I recognize as merely factual, without voice. Am I but the transparent eyeball, yet prone to the diction of the “American Scholar,” Emersonesque, waxing all ancien siècle? Not the streetsmart politico, certainly, like Caitlin Johnstone, darling of the narrative rebellion… Now there’s a catchphrase.
Do I identify with an issue, unselfconsciously passionate in whatever voice arises to meet the moment—a thematic area of concern, like Tulsi’s War and Peace, in her humble honest manner?
Assert my own intransigence to speak to the herd, but rather entertain other lone wolves on the edge of wilderness, crooning aimlessly to la luna?
Or this: to simply ride the surf of language where it wants to go, the improvisation of rhythm which is after all where it’s at for me, it just takes a while to warm to the groove, establish the beat, before riffing on variations.
This vocation is a curious fellow, rubbing elbows of syntax together for small sparks of consciousness to fly like seeds across the digital ether whether micro in this moment, or across the ages of time and space… it’s all one.
And so this concerto evolves with its own lifespan, past the neighborhood bungalows on the way to the jam, the voice workshop, the hootenay, the tribal village. In this surrender there is neither apology nor pride, simply being in that moment of surrender, to it, the moving moment, whatever it holds, birthing new creations as we speak.
In this manner I can address the Emersonian vastness of Nature as well as the particular evils of our narrative overlords, always with an ear to the space between stories–nod here also to Charles Eisenstein, and his gifting to the occupation of dialogue. For now, it is this lone space of connection to all that is, to the lone listener one by one now or later, projected into this narrative frame as before a canvas already hung in the gallery, ready for the splash of the avant-garde, or the studied portrait of an apple, a pear, a mango, a pineapple, ruddy and sweet with juices of this place, this time, Atitlan.
