good morning cats and dogs, living and dead, kids and dults. i had a dream of mister last night. he was running. i felt the thrill again, though he ran too fast and then held up one hind leg. i woke remembering when i would sing and run along the lake path and he turned his head smiling and looking up at me. he was my song's sweet refrain. it's hump day.

i hate bad movies, and bad critics who say they are superb. one such being wildfire by paul dano. i shouldn't get so offended by bad movies, as the majority are, but i wish i could just leave them be and not subject us to them. that's what critics are supposed to be for, but like politicians, you can't trust them, they are mostly dumb, shills, or both.

the goal of meditation is for there to be no border between daily life and the practice. 
walking with lulu i marveled at the awareness that she walks with the leash loose, pacing herself along with me, and i can hold the loop with one finger. until someone she loves greets her and she goes bonkers. to meditate in the moment lulu goes that would be something to marvel on. the sorrow and despair is also something to meditate on. sometimes it feels too grim to even bother waking up. i signed up for a thing called waking up. will let you know how it goes if you want to know.
i like it. like his voice and his words. it's all about breathing. the word has such resonance now. to not be able to breathe is unthinkable. but often i breathe shallowly, erratically, anxiously gasping, or almost not. you know the feeling of going under water and sitting still and not breathing? then bursting up to the surface for air and oxygen rushing through your body? we're lucky we can think about breathing, lucky someone is not crushing our windpipe. i've felt that too, with the chicken butcher in bucktown. also held my breath every time i passed the smell of wholesale death. there are untold reasons we can't breath, and all the reason in the world to breathe.
sam harris talks about how breathing meditation is deceptively simple and extraordinarily profound, almost impossible to exaggerate how deeply interesting and transformative the simple practice of paying close attention to your experience can become.
that's day one.

hanging by a spider thread. it's september. kids are going back to school. yikes. it's a time to go inside. but inside is fraught. it's a time for spiritual renewal but the spiritus mundi is being attacked and burned viciously, relentlessly. and the pandemic slowly pervades everyone and everything. individually, we go inside and watch the fall, cringing in a hibernation we cannot afford and a hole in the vague shape of the human we cannot hope to emerge from whole.

the same company, hilco, that exploded a coal plant here in chicago with no warning and no accountability, exploded a coal plant in new jersey, no warning, no accounatbility. the company is buying up abandoned mills and factories for fire sale prices, with no environmental review or cleanup, exploding the sites and developing them for amazon maga-distribution centers. no environmental protection, no protection period. corporate rule and the rule of law is you pay the politicians and they lie to the people. people die, but hey, it's a pandemic.

waking up, such as it is, we heard a cry outside. this peregrine falcon. i opened the fire escape door in the kitchen and silently went outside. i forgot myself and walked past the neighbor's kitchen to try to get a better picture, turning back i saw her sitting at the counter having breakfast and we smiled and waved. later i'll apologize for appearing in my boxer shorts in her window and tell her i was possessed by the beauty of the peregrine.

i listened to popular resistance a minute ago. margaret flowers and kevin zeese talking to chris hedges, giving voice to the desperate danger we're in, and under. it's not going to end well. the two party system is a two headed behemoth—the consolidation of power that is the corporate state. it's stupefying. the endless war, the failed state, the hopeless vote for nothing, against the one you hate. 

chris hedges said, referring to emile durkheim on suicide, those who seek the annihilation of others are driven by self-annihilation. that's what it feel like on the gut level. how else can reason see this existential crisis, this perversion of human society, this system of war, all against all. i was looking for that quote and found this one—

"When this ultimate crisis comes... when there is no way out - that is the very moment when we explode from within and the totally other emerges: the sudden surfacing of a strength, a security of unknown origin, welling up from beyond reason, rational expectation, and hope.

 

in the dunes. we had a six hour vacation. i wish i could live by the inland sea and forget the failed police state. i wish i could be a frog in a coastal sanctuary naked and free from the failed state.

you know the way the u.s. has crushed democracies around the planet, it's happening here. 
it's bipartisan, one party—the corporations rule this failed state. the assault on democracy is on us.