i had a dream last night. don't you love hearing my dreams? i had walked a girl's dog and then we were talking about the war and somehow it seemed it was on the mexicans this time and she says they've always been that way and i say what way? i say we just want to kill them and take their land and oil and i woke mad thinking who was that bitch anyway i didnt even know her i'll never walk her dog again and why make the dog pay and then started thinking about obama's spoils of war ending up in our park here and making half a mil an hour talking to his banking cronies about future heists and you see where my banal dreams get me pshew, in dreams and reality humans proceed with extreme prejudice thinking themselves king of all they survey, not just the taking of green space but the taking, the taking- the empire of taking but we're not spose to talk about that we got to keep eyes on the prize of what we can save.

comet almost caught a squirrel eating pumpkin or a pumpkin eating squirrel and it was furry exciting kids. i am as readers know ambivalent about squirrels and chicago global warming and i admit i was not too emphatic in calling him in, watching the squirrel hang precariously upside down a minute from the roof beam. not that he was listening to me much anyway. he's got a lot of wilderness in him and i love to see him dance.

we bring good things to strife.

i saw this movie last night, i don't know what made me pick it, about drinking, i do know why, i still feel the drinker as ghost in me, and i've thought why belabor the past with the present mind, but it isn't past, and watching the movie i felt empathy and sadness, and i learned a little more about how drink changes the brain. they say drink is the basis for all the drinker's other problems. they showed how you lose reward function in the reward center and gain activity in the stress center, and more insidious, you lose ability in the frontal cortex to work properly, and that's the part that makes you who you are, the part that makes decisions and choices, the part where delay reinforcement occurs. if you lose that part of your brain you have no brake on impulsive behavior and stress-like responding. in the active drinker that promotes a vicious cycle. you end up drinking to fix the problem the drinking caused. 
was i a drinker even before i drank? was it in my genes from gramps and dad? was i a drinker before, and am i a drinker after? 
they say in the movie if you quit the brain is yet changed. i thought like my lungs getting pink again my brain might too, if pink is the right color, maybe coral pink. but it seems they say the brain shrinks in function and size and it is very very difficult to reverse the changes. they say the brain doesn't grow new neurons, but that it can strengthen other pathways that already exist.
i think the ghost was here when i came and i grew together with it and might have died and now must live with it and i am an ex-drinker too, forming new pathways, the same pathways every day, forming and following, the pathways of the brain, through the park, following and followed by dogs. the brain is resilient, and the dogs are light, and the trees are synapses.

horizon without borders.

a good roll in the green with crunchy leaves for tony z. happy birthday mister.

we're not supposed to talk about it so as not to appear prejudiced. but an ex-president who waged war for two terms whether or not he wore the nobel peace prize who comes home to wage a land grab in the neighborhood seems simply crass and grandiose and disrespectful. this is the wages of war brought home, the daisy cutters now developers. it seems like a rich and powerful narcissist building a monument to his own conquering hero- himself.  it shows his people now are the moneyed elite. he left the neighborhood and became a titan on the world stage. they act like war and empire is simple development. the price of empire is its spoils.  but we who love peace and green space and even the poor do not love the takers. and we are keeping a record too. peace and the preservation of historic green space may be a lost cause but it's our cause. we know we can't elect or buy peace or land, but we will continue to take small steps in the shadow of titans. small steps, and everything in stride.

the land grab is the local face of empire. it is empire at home.

don't be leavin it.

believe in it.

i'd like to get a book of olmsted, as we're living within his vision in our park. 150 years ago he saw today. saw the rich can always buy their own green space, and the people have none, who need it desperately. he wanted to give the people who lack money and power green spaces for health and sanity.
the idea that today a man of power and privilege would defile olmsted's green vision and confiscate free space granted to the people, one who purports to be for community, makes me sick of soul. the idea that the rich who could buy anything can take the peoples land not only for free but in addition make them pay is the idea that the people are nothing but slaves to money, and money changes everything, money rules, money is king.

i saw an orange on the path.

i saw a spoon shadow.

i saw the same boots in the same tree with one branch lost.

i saw the best friend in the the best world that could be was still with me.

under spider bridge i find some of my stray throughts settling

lost feelings regard feeling lost. can being lost be a given with joy and wonder part of the flow? isn't everything? feeling stultified is like the end of flow. maybe the mind exaggerates, feeling encroached upon. maybe it's just that the flow is sluggish. that's what i feel. a cold-sapped tree waiting for spring and the mind in anticipation is like that, cold sap. and it isn't even cold yet. first i need to find the solstice, and then it will drop to where my forehead will gasp and stiffen. i have to use my sluggish mind for now. it makes me sad. i feel like i need much more than i have to get something done. knowing nothing is ever done, yet somehow flows with regards.

 

good news, kids. the obama foundation's plan to confiscate our public park, jackson park, which is on the national register of historic places, is coming under federal review. i told r. i can't imagine the planned clear-cutting of historic trees and the building of an 18 story tower and a 4 story parking garage and an amphitheater and a pga golf course could pass any review anywhere as preservation. but this is chicago, and city hall says it's just routine and a small step towards breaking ground. we have to hope that wisdom prevails over big money. all we have is the hope of sanity, and we will cling to that as though to a mystical tree.

also a friendly reminder kids: the autopilots will not stop. you must have better attention to preservation than they do. you must make them see you, hear you, give you space to live here too.

          yesterday there were 116 viewers and the most viewed post was titled 116.

k. said i should look at the sunset and i said ok i go up on the roof now and the sky oh god the sky and when i got down r. message said did you see? and i did i was on the roof. 
thank you both and sky.
k. followed his lady to the point and it was ok she said she didn't even see and was just walking, strange but ok it was all an exaggeration ok and i realize the po-po made me alarmed and trouble was averted anyway we are all fine everything is as it is and not as it should be.

hi there, mister. do you come here often?

go up the ladder to the roof

 

where i can see heaven above me.

we are the same dogs after all.

dogs of anarchy

dogs of divorce.

reading about awe and thinking how often do i feel awe. the vagus nerve responds to awe and love. piloerection happens. i feel love and my hair stands on end.

fear hormones like cortisol flood receptors on the hippocampus and impair memory. it shrinks. memory gets lost in fear in it's own hood. fear grows.

i read about how the amygdala conditioned by fear fails to distinguish between real and perceived threat. fear then conditions memory. ptsd is a memory disorder. civilians have it too. it's generalized in the population. the hippocampus is next to the amygdala helps process memory but is neighbor to the house of fear.

is k. delusional? the question immediately asks itself in me. am i delusional? maybe we all are to some degree, maybe fluctuating like the weather and change. 
i just wanted to say this picture was a conversation yesterday we were having when k.'s old lady stalked by with her sad dog.
he was saying how there was an old curse on this place, hyde park, even before the indians, and that the hampton house where he stays with his old lady and her sad dog was once inhabited by the kkk. he asked what i picked up on about this place and i said i feel it's a place like miami that was appropriated and taken from nature, that nature underlying was still seeping up in a kind of miasma. that it was a place of power for the indians taken over by the whites. funny he said he saw a dense white energy. i said funny it was the place the first nuclear bomb was made, and the white city was made here, and harold washington, the first black mayor was here, and lived in k.'s old lady's building, and there was a huge colony of parrots in harold washington park, harold's parrots, and he and the parrots didn't last, and obama, the first dark president, not from here, but launched his empirical career here, and wants to build his conning tower here, and somewhere in all this is the story of a place i'm trying to put my finger on. i feel it pulsing all around me.

the light was serene this morning, and there were many people walking and i've noted before when there is a certain energy and light coming from the lake people seem to feel it and want to be there in it, and there were many dogs in the circle and all playing so calmly and with language between the dogs flowing and between the people and the words were just sounds we were just being there together interested. 
one of the dogs kept looking like me to see what the po-po might do but calmly and the po-po and k. were intrusions but also part of the whole and highlighted the rightness of our interested gathering and the keening of our instincts. 
i note how i'm drawn to different thinking, feeling my way, and sometimes that drawing leads me to grandiosity or insanity and i feel the instinct bolt awake in the back of my head and my senses bristle. k. is part of that dynamic and at times i pull away and at times i'm drawn and it's a kind of dance though an awkward one. i think everything that happens now is feeding into awareness and instinct and becoming attention. i don't have that stultifying fear of the insane i used to have. i think the whole human world is insane and it's within this world we have to awaken. so i'm thankful to k. and i hope he works it out with his old lady.

at spider bridge i thought how k. didn't have much sympathy for the homeless, he looked at the camp under the bridge and said someone should clear that away. i told him that was someone's stuff, someone lived there. k. told me his sugar mama was moving and i said so you will be homeless again? he got very agitated. don't say that word! he couldn't concentrate on anything after that for a while. he kept seeing that word, trying to clear it from his head. it was fear. 
this morning on the way back i saw a po-po parked in the park and i drew mister over by the other dog people for cover and talked while the po-po lingered. the po-po drove slowly by and k. came up all harried. he said his sugar mama saw us in the playlot yesterday and took me for a girl. she was jealous! he wanted to take a picture of me to show her i wasn't a girl. i said no, i'm not feeding her insanity. then she came stalking up, the same way as yesterday and kept going round, k. following and asking me to come talk to her, me saying no, no i'm not going there. especially with the po-po now parked by the gate. so i left him there and the sugar mama circling the playlot and the po-po malingering, and directly i felt i was leaving a troubled zone. i felt my little bud amygdala relax and my instinct wink in my forehead.

i'm upset and it's a tempest in a thimble but still it's my thimble my little thimble of art oh my heart i left my memory card out and now can't recall how i transferred images from the internal memory into my puter and i had pix of the unruly pointers but oh does it really matter and that now when i put pictures in the puter it remembers two todays, there's not just one. two. how can that be you say. is it puter anarchy? i am not in control of my enterprise, kids. so i always have to look for today's pix in the other today. 
so what you say. people are getting carjacked, fracked, unhomed, bombed and generally fucked over. yeah yeah i get it ok. 
so the pointers are back and unruly. they went with the other half of divorce and i'm reminded of when i was a kid and we came back from dad's with fucking haircuts and attitudes, poor mom. i thought at first well they're just being pointers that's what people say, though they were crazy frazzled like divorce. i know anarchy and i hate arbitrary rules and power and control and all but hello how about a little cooperation! oh the dogs of anarchy, just like people they got to learn to be free responsibly. i feel like a dazed shepherd. 

and into my borderless mind, an air, a scent, a piney atmosphere of freedom wafts.

gratitude, my friend, is not something you should feel, it is something you feel, you feel me?

i so glad my florid border is gone and i am free of one personal device, my frame is open bordered, my nose peeks in, a tree peeks out, mister looks to a dog named claude walking slowly by. i am liberated within my frame, my own, my lack of device.

if you want to save something. the developers will poison the world and cover it in buildings and pavement. one mountain is sacred and is everywhere, yet they destroy many mountains, destroy all that is sacred, we don't know if we can save one mountain or one small green parcel from becoming a parking garage but one green space is all space for living, and we have seen people die to save it. save something.

meet otis.

meet gabriel.

meet us.

oh yeah i was gonna say at the busstop mr. lost me in the bus kiosk and was looking by the coffee shop and a lady with child said that's dangerous and i thought she meant him off leash and i said no he's not dangerous see how sweet but then i realized she saw him momentarily lost on the corner and i said to myself yes she's right, i have to increase my attention if his wanes, lack of attention on either part is dangerous. 

 

what rests the brain? soft fascination.

mea culpa mea culpa mea maxima culpa it is just a hangover from yesterday's florid devices really i got the shit out of my system i just want to say addictions can be overcome one day at a time.
we create artificial environments we have to respond to we have stress response due to the artificiality of our environments and of our responses conditioned by our artificial environments. we lose the connection with natural environments so we lose the natural environments so there is nowhere to go that is natural to destress we destroy the places we need to destress where our distress goes is stressed. our attention is consumed in distraction and anxiety particulates our breath and the very air. our nature without nature shrinks artificially.
it's kitsch i know. partly born of longing for the real, real flowers. florence williams says daydreaming is the charismatic, elusive flower child of the brain. which can be briefly evoked perhaps by a motif or a device of flowers, in winter, and when the killers of nature converge. but even in daydreams come devices and earth-moving machines.
 

at last and finally i hope i have done with the kitschy-daisy borders. thanks to r. for penetrating my fog and asking the pertinent question: how long? no matter why. i can't even say, but i feel grateful for any relief from my random attachments and automatic devices. 
today a glory of light envelops the land and the critters are amazed and ambivalent. they can't help think what it means, even if more or less permanently distracted. i stepped into the bus stop to give my anti-war friend a save the midway card and commented on his grandson being absorbed in his gameboy and part of the textus anthropithecus generation which obomba and the polsky's and the university of chicago slather over in a frenzy of land grabbing exploitation masquerading as development. speaking with a friend from u.c. about the tech revolution i got downhearted and said at a certain level of money and power all these individuals and families and universities and corporations, all the uber-predators become one scourge that will own and develop everything, controlling our very attention with ever more seductive personal technological devices that act as leashes for our essential being, the people we are deep inside still crying for freedom and green space and silence and natural dark. we are in a grid and we are locked in their devices through our own. we are prisoners of virtuality deluded that the next app and the newly generated device will set us free.

r. listened to hair and said i would love it or hate it but i loved it way back then and still do. i saw the movie again recently and instantly the songs sang me. it was so liberating. growing up painfully here in alien america hair inspired me to grow my hair down to there as i grew and my budding anarchist too.

i often react with emotion where my intellect has no footing, and i had a note about mister maybe drifting in his own mind and seeming confused when i call his attention, and maybe his senses are not missing, just drifting in that inner way. when he was young he was a dreamer and would often seem confused when he looked up and didn't see me, and would sometimes run the other way. when i was a kid, i was that way too. some mental umbilicus would tug me back, to the common plane. i thought, maybe confusion is partly about attention, and maybe when we focus inwardly we seem to be drifting in the world, unable to pay attention. 
this may make me feel better as well as being true. so as i said to mister, we must be attentive to each other, us fellow dreamers, and in our dreamy way take care of us. 

we come to know freedom by our loss.

they will clear cut twenty-six acres of trees 
making ground zero 
for the powerful rise 
of the tower of obamaland.

freedom is no longer an abstraction for the abject people. freedom is nature. and nature is freedom.

in istanbul 8 people died and thousands injured in protesting the paving of one of the last parks in the city. they were ready to die for a tree.