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Blog
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Written by Jason Brink
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Sunday, 24 January 2010 18:08 |
 It is strange sometimes, the way a scent can bring memories cascading over you, to pool at the front of your mind as a reflecting pool for your current life. There are a few scents that do this to me, a few scents indelibly etched upon my mind. The smell of crayons reminds me of driving to visit my great grandparents with my father, and leaving my crayons on his truck seat... the warm smell of melted crayon on the hot vinyl of the old Toyota. The biting scent of burning eucalyptus reminds me of the cold mornings spent around a burn pile at my next door neighbors house, tossing small sticks on the fire as a child, while he threw the pieces that actually merited burning. The warm smell of burnt gunpowder evokes memories of a thin wisp of grey smoke drifting from the cartridge ejected from the old break-stock Stevens up at my grandfather's cabin in the mountains. The smell of basil reminds me of all the pesto meals my mother would cook in the summer when her basil plants were in full growth. The smell of the shampoo my first 'girlfriend' would use, being in third grade and sitting on the couch in the back of the classroom doing our math homework together...the books were light blue. A million tiny memories, all held together by threads with remarkable strength by little more than olfactory triggers. It is quite amazing to me.
Last week my sister called and asked if I would be willing to take a picture of her, to send to our grandmother. I am always willing to take pictures, so of course I accepted. She showed up in my studio wearing a silk dress...I thought it looked familiar. I realized I had seen the dress some weeks ago when my aunt e-mailed a picture of it to me. In the picture, the dress is being worn by my grandmother, and she is dancing with my grandfather. Story has it that the dress was made from silk my grandmother brought back from Japan when they moved back stateside. In the picture my grandparents are dancing at a Christmas party, everybody looked like they were having fun and enjoying the evening. The people in the picture are clearly my grandparents, but subtly different than those I know today. Even a stranger could pick them out of a group, but it seems that in this picture they lack some of the wisdom I see them as having today. My grandfather does not look like the the immutable dragon I see today, nor my grandmother as the dignified wise women I see. I am sure that these components are all there, but this picture shows a side I have never seen. They look like children, I know they were not, given the time frame I know the picture was taken in, but it is just a part of history that seems far removed from me.
 As the de facto family historian, I have immersed myself in the stories and pictures of my ancestors, sometimes very deeply. From the earliest recorded members, like Margaret who was married to Hans Faust, a woman who was tried and convicted of being a witch in 1597. Her tongue was cut out, and she hung herself in the witch's tower in Budigen Castle, in Hessa, Germany. Or the stories of my family in all its branches arriving here in the US, tracking their paths across the oceans of water and grass to where we all are today...It is an odd think to think about the incredible paths that have been taken to get you to where you are today. Though family history is fascinating, I digress.
When my sister walked into my studio, a scent hit me. It is a scent I smell very rarely, but it suffuses everything at my grandparents house. The soft smell of clay dust. My grandmother is a very skillful potter, and through the years of practicing her trade, clay dust has made it just about everywhere. I remember growing up, being watched by my grandmother as my parents worked, 'playing clay' in the garage, making snakes and goofy little cars and other such things. She had (and still has, I believe) a worktable covered with canvas. Through the years this canvas has taken on the scent of clay in all of its fibers. All of the towels at the cabin the mountains were once her towels she used for potting, and every time I wash my face in the rain runoff up there, I am reminded. There is something comforting to me about the scent of clay, my times playing with clay are some of my earliest memories, making little creatures and working the clay until it was so worn out and flaky it would fall to pieces in my hands. I don't remember what I did then, but it probably involved standing there watching my grandmother work as she turned a shapeless hunk of raw clay into a work of art, working with her nimble fingers as it whirled on her kick-wheel. I remember running my fingers through the dried trimmings, crushing them into powder with my fingertips, probably making an unholy mess, then running off to climb in the tree or watch Mr. Roger's Neighborhood or something like that.
Each of us is clay, and we are each the potter. As we spin through this world alone, we have the ability to shape ourselves into anything we should care to...all we must do is make the choice. The choice to remove the excess that makes our walls too thick. To pop and fill the bubbles that make us weak, to straighten our sides that we might stand straight and tall. and to consign ourselves to the fire, that we may be tempered and hardened. Tested and tried by our own actions, to emerge as the best we can make ourselves, and then to be filled with the rich wines of life, the honey-meads of the world surrounding us.
Drink Deeply
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Last Updated on Sunday, 24 January 2010 18:15 |
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Written by Jason Brink
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Sunday, 24 January 2010 03:28 |
 I did not write this, though I think it is brilliant. It was posted anonymously some time ago on an internet bulletin board, and I thought my readers might like it...I know I did. !MESSAGE BEGINS
We made a mistake. That is the simple, undeniable truth of the matter, however painful it might be. The flaw was not in our Observatories, for those machines were as perfect as we could make, and they showed us only the unfiltered light of truth. The flaw was not in the Predictor, for it is a device of pure, infallible logic, turning raw data into meaningful information without the taint of emotion or bias. No, the flaw was within us, the Orchestrators of this disaster, the sentients who thought themselves beyond such failings. We are responsible.
It began a short while ago, as these things are measured, less than 6^6 Deeli ago, though I suspect our systems of measure will mean very little by the time anyone receives this transmission. We detected faint radio signals from a blossoming intelligence 2^14 Deelis outward from the Galactic Core, as photons travel. At first crude and unstructured, these leaking broadcasts quickly grew in complexity and strength, as did the messages they carried. Through our Observatories we watched a world of strife and violence, populated by a barbaric race of short-lived, fast breeding vermin. They were brutal and uncultured things which stabbed and shot and burned each other with no regard for life or purpose. Even their concepts of Art spoke of conflict and pain. They divided themselves according to some bizarre cultural patterns and set their every industry to cause of death.
They terrified us, but we were older and wiser and so very far away, so we did not fret. Then we watched them split the atom and breach the heavens within the breadth of one of their single, short generations, and we began to worry. When they began actively transmitting messages and greetings into space, we felt fear and horror. Their transmissions promised peace and camaraderie to any who were listening, but we had watched them for too long to buy into such transparent deceptions. They knew we were out here, and they were coming for us.
The Orchestrators consulted the Predictor, and the output was dire. They would multiply and grow and flood out of their home system like some uncountable tide of Devourer worms, consuming all that lay in their path. It might take 6^8 Deelis, but they would destroy us if left unchecked. With aching carapaces we decided to act, and sealed our fate.
The Gift of Mercy was 8^4 strides long with a mouth 2/4 that in diameter, filled with many 4^4 weights of machinery, fuel, and ballast. It would push itself up to 2/8th of light speed with its onboard fuel, and then begin to consume interstellar Primary Element 2/2 to feed its unlimited acceleration. It would be traveling at nearly light speed when it hit. They would never see it coming. Its launch was a day of mourning, celebration, and reflection. The horror of the act we had committed weighted heavily upon us all; the necessity of our crime did little to comfort us.
The Gift had barely cleared the outer cometary halo when the mistake was realized, but it was too late. The Gift could not be caught, could not be recalled or diverted from its path. The architects and work crews, horrified at the awful power of the thing upon which they labored, had quietly self-terminated in droves, walking unshielded into radiation zones, neglecting proper null pressure safety or simple ceasing their nutrient consumption until their metabolic functions stopped. The appalling cost in lives had forced the Ochestrators to streamline the Gift’s design and construction. There had been no time for the design or implementation of anything beyond the simple, massive engines and the stabilizing systems. We could only watch in shame and horror as the light of genocide faded into infrared against the distant void.
They grew, and they changed, in a handful of lifetimes they abolished war, abandoned their violent tendencies and turned themselves to the grand purposes of life and Art. We watched them remake first themselves, and then their world. Their frail, soft bodies gave way to gleaming metals and plastics, they unified their people through an omnipresent communications grid and produced Art of such power and emotion, the likes of which the Galaxy has never seen before. Or again, because of us.
They converted their home world into a paradise (by their standards) and many 10^6s of them poured out into the surrounding system with a rapidity and vigor that we could only envy. With bodies built to survive every environment from the day lit surface of their innermost world, to the atmosphere of their largest gas giant and the cold void in-between, they set out to sculpt their system into something beautiful. At first we thought them simple miners, stripping the rocky planets and moons for vital resources, but then we began to see the purpose to their constructions, the artworks carved into every surface, and traced across the system in glittering lights and dancing fusion trails. And still, our terrible Gift approached.
They had less than 2^2 Deeli to see it, following so closely on the tail of its own light. In that time, oh so brief even by their fleeting lives, more than 10^10 sentients prepared for death. Lovers exchanged last words, separated by worlds and the tyranny of light speed. Their planet side engineers worked frantically to build sufficient transmission infrastructure to upload the countless masses with the necessary neural modifications, while those above dumped lifetimes of music and literature from their databanks to make room for passengers. Those lacking the required hardware or the time to acquire it consigned themselves to death, lashed out in fear and pain, or simply went about their lives as best they could under the circumstances.
The Gift arrived suddenly, the light of its impact visible in our skies, shining bright and cruel even to the unaugmented ocular receptor. We watched and we wept for our victims, dead so many Deelis before the light of their doom had even reached us. Many 6^4s of those who had been directly or even tangentially involved in the creation of the Gift sealed their spiracles with paste as a final penance for the small roles they had played in this atrocity. The light dimmed, the dust cleared, and our Observatories refocused upon the place where their shining blue world had once hung in the void, and found only dust and the pale gleam of an orphaned moon, wrapped in a thin, burning wisp of atmosphere that had once belonged to its parent.
Radiation and relativistic shrapnel had wiped out much of the inner system, and continent sized chunks of molten rock carried screaming ghosts outward at interstellar escape velocities, damned to wander the great void for an eternity. The damage was apocalyptic, but not complete, from the shadows of the outer worlds, tiny points of light emerged, thousands of fusion trails of single ships and world ships and everything in between, many 10^6s of survivors in flesh and steel and memory banks, ready to rebuild. For a few moments we felt relief, even joy, and we were filled with the hope that their culture and Art would survive the terrible blow we had dealt them. Then came the message, tightly focused at our star, transmitted simultaneously by hundreds of their ships.
"We know you are out there, and we are coming for you."
!MESSAGE ENDS
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Written by Jason Brink
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Wednesday, 20 January 2010 23:19 |
 The rain is really coming down outside today. We don't usually get rain like this, the biting sideways kind, with gusts of wind that make driving a fun exercise in predictive vectoring. Its not so bad though, it could be icy or snowing...as it is it will clear up in a few days and we will be back to the mid 70s and clear blue skies. I honestly believe I live in the most beautiful part of this country, not always the most majestic, but always consistently beautiful. Yesterday was the first day of classes for this semester, starting out with English Composition: Critical Thinking. I am currently waiting for my next class to start. Not really 'waiting' so much, as it implies inaction, but being. In class yesterday morning the instructor had us read a poem by Sharon Olds, an author I am not familiar with. Her work reminds me of Whitman a little bit, bringing many disparate themes together and dashing them against one another like waves on a rocky shore. The poem in question was 'Sex Without Love.' It was presented as an example in comparison to an op-ed piece about 'hooking-up'. I have posted the poem below How do they do it, the ones who make love
without love? Beautiful as dancers,
gliding over each other like ice-skaters
over the ice, fingers hooked
inside each other's bodies, faces
red as steak, wine, wet as the
children at birth whose mothers are going to
give them away. How do they come to the
come to the come to the God come to the
still waters, and not love
the one who came there with them, light
rising slowly as steam off their joined
skin? These are the true religious,
the purists, the pros, the ones who will not
accept a false Messiah, love the
priest instead of the God. They do not
mistake the lover for their own pleasure,
they are like great runners: they know they are alone
with the road surface, the cold, the wind,
the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio-
vascular health--just factors, like the partner
in the bed, and not the truth, which is the
single body alone in the universe
against its own best time.
~Sharon Olds Poetry, like all art forms, is entirely subjective. Each of us looks at a piece of artwork and extracts out meaning from it, as the artform itself is only an outward expression of the artists internal mechanisms. The artwork is created and perceived from the fogged lens of the artists life, and they will see another image than anyone else who looks at the work through their own clouded optics. When I see this poem, I saw something else than the rest of the class seemed to see. I don't know that they were wrong in their perceptions, as none of us are the poet, but when they read this poem, they saw it as sad. When I read this, I see it as courageous and somehow hopeful, not bound by the rest of the laws that we find entrapping ourselves. The first sentence is key, I believe, to picking up the context. What tone do you find yourself reading it in? It is possible to read it the same way you would say it, were you to ask a runner how they were able to run a mile as quickly as they do, or a skilled artisan capturing the lighting in a still life perfectly on canvas. A question tumbling off the tongue with a sense of wonder and amazement, perhaps a hint of longing. "How do they do it? I wish I could be like that." This is the meaning of this line that leaps out at me, as opposed to the downward directed sneer that some others pick up. I think that she speaks of the act of making love as a path to an end for each individual. Not requiring the approval or justification of anyone, but two people alone with themselves, and yet together. It is a harsh reality, when you look out at the world and realize that in the very end, you are alone. All things in life are truly solitary experiences, even when we share them in part with others. At the beginning we are brought into this world alone, it is our first experience with separation, and fact (though we do not understand it in a rational sense) that we are alone. Even when two people experience the same event, their experiences are singular and unique only to them...it can be no other way. I do not see this as a sad thing... we all seek to not feel alone, but in the end you are only accountable to you. Each experience you share with another is two separate events, one for each of you, no matter what it is. We are each the center of our own manifold universe, and when you understand this, you can be truly free. "You still don't understand," the Gray Voice droned on. "There is no time, there is no space. What was is, and ever shall be. You are you, playing chess with yourself, and again you have checkmated yourself. You are the referee. Morals are your agreement with yourself to abide by your own rules. To thine one self be true or you spoil the game." - Time Enough for Love by Robert Heinlein |
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Written by Jason Brink
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Monday, 18 January 2010 01:23 |
 Rain has always held some fascination for me. As far back as I can remember, I can think on the times it was raining and how it has always made me feel. I remember sitting on the seat of my father's old Toyota truck, watching the rain drops race off the sides of the windshield. I can't have been more than three or four. I have always loved the stinging heat or the rain. Its cold, you KNOW its cold, but in that first instant as the rain touches your skin, you feel your nerves lit up as set aflame by the smallest bit of liquid flame...then your body warms the water and it just fades to a pleasant (or unpleasant) cool.
When I was younger, I used to love to make little boats of sticks and leaves to sail down the small rivulets that trailed down the driveway, building small dams and lochs for the boats to navigate. My siblings and I would have races, so see whose boat would win. I seem to remember my boat always being the one that won, but I am positive that was not the case. One leaf bobs down the stream just as well as the next. In my mind we were always racing away down a wild river on some great adventure. I suppose the rain in this context always conjures the image of Scuffy the Tugboat...one of my favorite books as a very young child. It is the story of a small tugboat that a little boy is playing with in a small stream, and it slips from his grasp and away down the stream and through the meadows to the river, and finally into the ocean, where the boy and his grandfather find it once more and it is returned to its home. As a child the concept of the waterways all connecting amazed me. I think it is just one of the ways that we can see the interconnectedness of everything. What happens in your stream carries father on to find its way to the ocean, where the water is recycled and returns as rain. A startlingly complex and elegant process, all working perfectly within the laws of nature. It is a beautiful thing.
The other lesson easily drawn from Scuffy is the concept of linear motion in life. Scuffy was never stationary, always moving with the flow of his tiny toy tugboat life. I think this concept was very well illustrated by James Alan Gardner in his book " Vigilant" (an entertaining read, if sci-fi is your thing). He wrote, "Everyone knows this is real life, it's all real life, sixty seconds of real life every minute, no one gets less...But you can take less. All the time you're swimming in the ocean of real life, it's so precious easy to keep your eyes closed and just tread water. Even so, if you're lucky, you might be caught in a current, a current that's carrying you toward something...No, too simplistic. We're all caught in currents, dozens of the buggers dragging us in different directions sixty seconds every minute, and it's never as obvious as people want you to believe. You live through a day, and at the end you grumble, "I didn't do anything"...but second by second you did do things, you occupied every second, just as you occupy every second of every day. Here's the thing, the crucial thing: your life is full. And if you don't realize that...then you're just like the rest of us, but that's no excuse."
We are all drifting through life, and it is up to us to make it worth it. We can sit inside, cover our heads with our hands and hide, or we can get out there and paddle. Paddle for all its worth as if the gods themselves are tearing at our heels. Don't sit at home, content with your small life, with your small world...step out and breath the rain-freshened air. Feel the flames of the raindrops on your bare skin as you dance in the rain as you haven't since you were a child. As we grow older we are told that we should not jump in puddles, we are told not to make waves, we are told to be quiet and still, to speak when spoken to, to keep our heads down and bury our noses in paperwork...and yet every single one of us has looked at a puddle and thought about how much they would like to jump in it (unless there is some sort of irrational water fear involved). Do it! Jump in the damn puddle. I bet you can't do it without cracking a smile like you haven't since you were a little kid. As we grow older it is so easy to hunker down and ignore the world around us, to not see the beauty in a single lead floating in a still pond, or the elegant simplicity of a single ripple.
We lock ourselves behind the bars of our civilization, allowing our lives to be controlled by the things we have created. Lately, I have been selling many things I own on eBay. It really is a liberating experience, to realize exactly how little possessions I really need. There are some things I WANT, but as far as NEEDS, there is so little that is REALLY required. I am working on trimming ALL areas of my life down to bare essentials...tossing the excess iron in my hold into the drink. I don't want it, I don't need it, time to get rid of it. - If you feel like it... go to eBay and buy it. :P
I have plans, and I am not going to let a bunch of boxes of stuff I have not looked at in 4 years slow me down.
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Last Updated on Monday, 18 January 2010 01:37 |
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Written by Jason Brink
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Thursday, 14 January 2010 05:03 |
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This afternoon I was poking around in a forum I frequent, and something caught my eye. It was a discussion surrounding some film or something of that nature, or how someone said something that "clearly showed their socialist leanings" or something like that. The person who posted it, Hubiestubert said, "Please, just stop trying to turn EVERYTHING into a mirror for your politics. Food is sometimes just food. Vegetables aren't a Commie-Pinko plot to destroy the beef industry. French fries are just a damn side dish. Free range chicken is more expensive chicken, and a gimmick to get folks to get the damn cacciatore. Movies are sometimes just movies. If you can't take off your ideological blinkers off for a moment and just take a breath, you may have to admit that you're just a damn horse lashed to a wagon without any will or volition. You want to be a slave to that, go ahead, but there's a wider world out there. Swears. And it's got some really nice stuff. Pretty girls, ice cream, and sometimes a really nice salad that comes BEFORE the steak."
It kinda struck a chord with me, because our nation has become so incredibly polarized as of late, that it has become impossible for anyone to accomplish anything. Democrats are shooting down republican sponsored bills just because they were sponsored by republicans, and republicans are doing just the same. I am tired of hearing "B...b...b...but Bush...!" and "B...b...b...but Obama...!", or "They started it!" or "Mom! Shes breathing my air!" I am tired of everyone making excuses for what has happened in the past, and what they are unable to do now. Both sides seem determined to bicker us into our graves, and both sides conduct themselves with the decorum of a class of kindergartners who were just given red kool-aid and sugarcubes for lunch. For instance, Al Franken (D-Minnesota), whom I usually don't really like all that much, put forth an amendment to the defense appropriations bill that essentially said that if a military contractor (read that as Halliburton/KBR) does something like lock a woman in a cargo container against her will and threaten her with violence if she reports the rapes committed against her by her co-workers, that she is permitted to place criminal charges against her rapists instead of being shunted off to mandatory arbitration. The purpose of the bill was to withhold government contracts from companies "if they restrict their employees from taking workplace sexual assault, battery and discrimination cases to court." This seems pretty clear cut, basically it comes down to a case of "Rape is bad, and people who rape people need to be brought to justice." That seems fairly cut and dried...and it just squeaked by filibuster in the senate. 30 senators voted against the bill. Why? It was democrat sponsored.
Yes...you read that right... they voted against a bill that was essentially solid legislation for the sole reason it was democrat written and sponsored. I am sick and tired of people pulling this party-line bullshit from either end just because it came from the other side of the aisle. Listen...your job is to read the legislation and vote on whether the legislation is logical or not...not sit there with your fingers in your ears like a damn petulant child.
Oh, and one other thing... I was listening to Rush Limbaugh today, and heard him bitching about Obama's quick public response to the Haitian Earthquake. He put it up against what has now been dubbed the "Fruit of Kaboom Bomber." He criticized the three day lag on public comment to that incident, while he immediately offered aid to Haiti. I would like to put something into context here...cover your years because this might be loud...
THE 'FRUIT OF KABOOM BOMBER' IS A CRAZY JACKASS WHO TRIED TO BLOW UP HIS UNDERPANTS!!!
 Does this REALLY require the leader of the most powerful nation on earth to comment on it? I mean...really? Again...a man tried to blow up his underpants. The ONLY reason that this was in any way anything more than a liner note on the last page of the newspaper was because he was a Muslim, and it was on an airplane. I mean, it was certainly a bad thing and could have had terrible potential, but its not like this guy was strapped with a suicide vest and detonator...he was trying to ignite his underwear.
Compare this to the earthquake in Haiti... They are reporting over 100,000 dead. That is over three times the total population of Paso Robles...think about that. Numbers like that don't fit inside our heads, when it comes to the total cost in human blood. That is 30x the death toll of 9/11. Over 340x the maximum death toll had 'Mr. Kaboom' been successful. If you laid 100,000 corpses end to end, the line would stretch almost 100 miles...or from Paso Robles to the outskirts of Santa Maria...and back. How can you possibly respond too quickly to something like that?
It's all just about enough to make me sick.
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Crimson Cannonball: The Non-Blog of Jason Brink
