smoke and silence

Zealots need not apply.
As much as I love music, I sometimes crave silence. When it’s silent, you can hear sounds you normally don’t hear. The sound your spit makes as you work your mouth; skin rubbing skin as you wring your hands, your own breath in your throat. Smoking my pipe in silence has always been enjoyable to me, to be able to listen to nothing at all and watch the smoke waft from the bowl of the pipe. I can remember sitting on the back porch back in Florida smoking my pipe and reading the yellow-paged copy of The Fellowship of the Rings I bought from the used book joint. I liked to go out when it was raining… sit in the screened-in shelter and read and smoke in silence. Yeah… that’s what I’m writing about.

I’ve got to try and get to bed earlier tonight… this 1am thing is fine for vacation, but won’t work with a 7am rise-n-shine. One thing that staying up and sleeping late is good for is dreams. Over the past week I’ve had several memorable dreams, a strange occurence for me. My dreams always seem to mix old and new. Just this week, I was trying to protect a friend who hired another friend to kill an ex; was scuba diving with two acquaintances from college, and making a scale model of some geographical feature… an islet, or isthmus, or phalange or something. Whenever I wake up able to recall a dream, I wish I had one of those dream “interpretation” books, although I’ve looked at them and they’re about as specific as a horoscope most of the time. Still I would hate to miss the fact that dreams about scale models of fjords mean you’ll win the lottery if you only buy a ticket.

Something about the idea of a commune is totally appealing to me. Except, I wouldn’t call it a commune… I think the term “co-op” has a lot less Davidian connotation. Y’know, get some friends together… snag some cheap undeveloped land, and start communing on it. We could grow our own grub, build our own houses, generate our own power, maybe do some web-developing work for extra scratch (like the comet-cult), whatever. No job except tending the crops and animals, keeping the house, generating power, and fervently praying to the co-op’s chosen higher power. OK, we could skip the fervent prayer part… but I guess the “no job” thing is relative considering maintaining the cult… uh… co-op would be a full-time job anyway. Maybe I’ll just join the Rainbow and move to a national forest.

One the back-to-basics kick, I proposed a week-without-TV experiment to Sharaun tonight. I want to go one week without TV, seems like such an easy thing right? We could read more, talk more, maybe get out and walk around more or something (pre-surgery, of course). When it comes down to it I guess we “watch” a lot of TV. Even though I rarely “actively” watch, the TV is probably on every second we’re in the house… even if just in the background. Most of my killing-time time is spent on this computer, typing or surfing the web for nothing. I bet that’s not so uncommon nowadays… online time overtaking TV time as the dominant thoughtless activity. Anyway, I just wanted to see if we’d feel any great sense of “liberation” by cutting the cord and going TV-less for a week. I picked a bad time though, with her being laid up post-surgery and all. Although, she didn’t seem completely opposed to the idea in general… so maybe after she’s recovered a bit.

Ugh… every time I search through my old entries and find one of those strange WordPress-conversion artifacts (y’know, commas-turned-question-marks, letters with accent marks turned Chinese characters) I just cringe. I hate the fact that some of the older entries look crappy. Every time I find a post with artifacts, I try my best to fix it… but I know they still exist out there. Tell you what, if you see one… or find some ingenious way to search for them… lemme know and I promise I’ll fix every last one. OK? Thanks.

What a piecemeal entry… I’m sorry. It’s time to go to bed now, goodnight.


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One Reply to “smoke and silence”

  1. Remember when Pat, Justin and I lost our sattelite dish [subscription]? That was effectively the same as not watching TV for several months. It was insanely liberating. I felt so much better about myself. I started reading books, leaving the house, getting things done, working on projects. It was great – the best in fact. I want to do it all over again Dave. I want to become aumish again. Oh yeah, and the commune thing… can we somehow fund a plane? If we can, then I’ll consider it.

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