A lot can happen in the blink of an eye, let alone a year, a lifetime by some measures.

Splendid Imaginings has it's own super-special homepage at http://SplendidImaginings.com where you can find out what's going on with the recording label (lots!).

I've secured a world-wide distribution contract. Nebulous Projekt and all my other pseudonyms have been consolidated into "Starflower". "Starflower's Tranzhop" is finally going to be released on all the digital distribution channels (iTunes, beatport, rhapsody, etc) on 19 August 2008. The sophmore album, "Starflower's Strange Creatures" is about a month behind that (exact date pending). Still enough material for two more albums this year.

My blog here is stagnant, I'll only be posting in my blog at http://Starflowers.org so if you like my writerings go ahead and check me there.

Gonna make an effort to get my account here back in operational order.

I realized years ago, after many rejections (read: non-responses) that record labels don't want people with a prolific talent. They realize that as soon as the artist has name recognition they can go ahead and start their own label and keep all the money for themselves, so the labels don't even bother investing.

Background. I have recorded close to 300 songs in the last decade in every genre from pounding progressive techno to light-hearted chamber music, ambient, hiphop... it just flows through me. I'm lucky because I recognized early on that songs are like children: they come through you, but not from you.

Long story short, besides all my day-to-day tragedies, I've been working hard at putting my music together into coherant patterns and have finished the first project, which I call Nebulous Projekt and it's first release, which I'll be self-releasing under my own label called Splendid Imaginings in early 2008. It's called Tranzhop, a whole new genre I've invented fusing together progressive trance, hiphop, ambient and classical.

I hope if you've run across me here, you'll take a moment to visit my website at www.unlogical.org and have a listen to some of my imaginings.

Human beings are like language, numbers, and music.. all finite things in which infinite things are possible.

Given a broad enough sample, simple mathematical odds become evident.  A certain percentage get cancer, another certain percentage will be killed in automobile accidents, some percentage will be leaders and some percentage will, as it is said, 'lose it.'

Of course it smats of Columbine. One difference is the race of the shooter, so sure enough some disturbing and disgusting racist videos have popped up on sites like YouTube. Anyone with the brain power of a bowl of drowning cornflakes can see past issues like nationality of origin -- Cho had lived a majority of his life, the past fifteen years, in America.

What first struck me was that this occurred on a University campus. That is a huge difference between Virginia Tech and Columbine.

In high school, we were ackward and unsure of our own identities and many of us were bullied and picked on, myself included. Like, I imagine, many of us who frequent Zaadz, I was an outcast in high school. I didn't fit in. I wasn't cool and some people were mean to me. And yes, I had fantasies of revenge. Luckily for me (or them, I suppose), I was never so beaten down by the world that I did just snap and play a game of real life Grand Theft Auto.

In University and College, I had a much better grip on my identity, had more self-confidence, and at any rate enjoyed the classes and whole environment far more than High School because nobody was really forced to be there. They could just as easily not pay their tuition, get jobs, and blend into the work-a-day world. No, University students are driven, idealistic people who are eager to learn and consider themselves privillaged to be in an institution where their thoughts can flourish in their minds and broaden their horizons.

High School, on the other hand, is more like a prison, and many if not most people don't really want to be there, are just trying to tough it out, and can't wait for it to be over.

There but for the grace of God goes any of us. It is easy for us to say that we could never be capable of such things, but then, we are each the product of our environment and a specific set of circumstances occurring in a certain order. Given a different set of cirucumstances, or having had different experiences and instead had a different series of thoughts cascade through our minds at the right moment, I am sure it could happen to anyone.

So the talk turns to blame, which is my least favorite part of any tragedy.

They say that Cho had been reported to the police accused of stalking young women twice, but no charges were laid. Are the police to blame? Should they have incarserated him? This is ridiculous - he was not charged with anything, which means that a) the women weren't that scared of him, and b) he therefor wasn't ever tried or convicted of the accusations.

Wrap your brain around the concept of what our judicial system would be like every time someone accused someone of something else.

He wrote 'disturbing literature' for English class assignments. Anyone who's ever been a creative writer has written some disturbing things. T'is the nature of the beast, to unleash the torrent of creativity and just see where it takes you. I've written disturbing things as classroom assignments and I'll tell you this, that if I thought for some reason I was going to be put under Big Brother's microscope and surveillance because I fit a certain 'profile', I never would have handed it in and instead would have come away with C's B's instead (and many great writers never would have written at all).

Just as a journalist can't reveal their sources to maintain their integrity, a writer can not censor himself for fear that his writing might be perceived as revealing a sinister plot.

It is interesting to note that they haven't said yet what his musical tastes were, or whether or not he owned video games like GTA or some other first person shooter. If he owned every Madonna CD and loved The Village People, chances are you're not going to hear about it. But if he owns EVEN ONE 50 Cent or Marilyn Manson MP3 on his hard drive, look out.

Did the video games inspire him? Did the music plant seeds of madness and murder?

He was on anti-depressants. And so what? Half of the entire world is on anti-depressants. They are supposed to anti-depress people. Whether or not anti-depressants are a logical solution to someone's depression, or effective, or ethical, are beyond the scope of this blog. No doubt that this subject is going to be discussed at great length for a long time, and soon we'll be seeing Cho's "death fridge" (the contents of his fridge at the time of his death, circa Anna Nicole Smith) and hearing from every person he ever had a class with. They'll all say that he seemed like a loner and was quiet. They'll all draw their own conclusions and share them with the world. Just like we all do, I suppose.

Were any of these things responsible for it? Who can we blame? Was it his parentage? Was it an ex-girlfriend? Video games? Drugs? Music? Should the police have stormed the school sooner? Should the University Administration have shut downt he campus after the first shooting? How could this have been prevented.

My opinion is borrowed from the immortal John Stewart, a very wise man, who once said:

There are crazy people in this world who do crazy shit; that is the end of it.

Just as we will each remember where we were and how we felt when we heard of what happened at the World Trade Center, we will always remember what happened at the campus of Virginia Tech. And like 9/11, there will be talk of increased security, invasion of privacy and a loss of liberty in the name of preserving it.

However, we can build giant walls around every building with X-Rays entrances and bomb-sniffing dogs and can never be completely 'safe', because if someone really wants to do something, it could be over and done before anyone else even realizes what's happening. It takes a heartbeat for a detonator to explode a bomb-belt (something which happened no less than four times today alone in Iraq, killing more than 230). Just as easily as any of us walk into our work places, government offices, banks, markets, malls, and yes, schools, so could someone else with a sinister plan being put into action, and there is no measure of security which can prevent that one person from pulling off a suicide mission.

It is because life is such a fragile thing. But it is also a resilient thing. A single blade of grass can bust through cement, babies are still born in warzones surrounded by death, ice ages come and go, but life finds a way. And so will the victims' families, and those who were there, and everyone else who has felt the stab of dismay at what happened on that day in Virginia.

Given a big enough sample, mathematical odds begin to become evident. A certain percentage will lose it, and a certain percentage will hold on for another day, and smile, and forgive, and continue to love.

A voice in the woods. What began as a howl, and became a cry, then whimper fades into the deafening silence of my sphere of awareness. I look out there and see there are people, but they are not real, they don’t know that I exist. I was an early pioneer of the Internet, homesteading online before AOL and Compuserve would admit defeat to the mother network. For some reason, I always had this ‘high ideal’ about how the lack of identity would set us free, force us to define ourselves in new and more meaningful terms. We could sculpt our own avatars and reflect the real insight into our true nature of the collective character of human beings. Sometimes, between bouts of apathy, I still hold on to the glimmer of hope that somehow we’ll suddenly break through the veil of idiocy that plagues our race… before it is too late.

What follows is a fiction of our own design. As the planet’s living systems buckled under the weight of decades of rampant abuse and the arrogance of man, those who had previously objected to even the idea of global warming were the first to declare that it was already too late. Although I have always held that as long as we have hope, we have a hope, but it was becoming more and more clear that I had better prepare myself for what was clearly becoming the inevitable outcome.

A Joke: One puppet government run by a ruthless dictator hangs another dictator because he is a bad man. That’s it. That’s the joke.

I make myself write in this blog because if I don’t then it will be like I never existed at all. At any moment I could be killed and all my efforts, all the time I have spent thinking and processing my input and producing output could just disappear and nobody would ever even know. Yet I am alive right now, as I write this anyway, and can hardly convince myself of it. Descartes never really sold me on the idea. The identity I inhabit as these words are produced as an artistic product is just a dream we are having of its collective self, as real as a moment and as fleeting as awakening.

For some reason my keyboard is putting è characters instead of proper apostrophes, so I have had to adapt my language to suit the means of expression, and can only use conjunctives or possessives where they will be auto corrected by the word processor. Funny how the message isn’t shaped by the medium so much as the medium itself becomes the message. Ha-ha.

So then I was having a hard time finding ways to provide negations without saying “can’t” – and I couldn’t, so I found the setting and fixed it. Necessity is the mother of all correction, n`est que pas?

There is something I have been thinking about lately, and I can’t seem to put my finger on it. These ideas have been coming to me again, like when I was younger, and I’m really finding it necessary to bring them into being, wherever it leads and whatever it may mean. It is great because I thought that part of me had vanished, thought that I had lost it, but at the same time, I have a good reason to hold on to the communal hallucination we like to call reality.

So I started taking pictures, again. Both stills and video are mediums I have pretty extensive experience in. No lessons or anything, just sort of taping it as I see it. Kind of been lucky like that. It’s the same was I compose music – I just calls them as I sees them, so to speak.

As for the eternal winter, well, it's warmed up over the past week. I shoveled off my lawn and have been keeping busy in my new job (same job, new contract), renovations, and the occasional wink of sleep. We've gotten a kitty, just to add to the madness, and my depression is receeding. It's amazing how sleep deprivation and seven months of cold and indoors can drive a normally optimistic life lover into a pit of depression. What I'm going to do about the looming tax burden and debts... well, I guess we'll deal with that bridge when we come to it.

I've long been a staunch believer that  the universe will always provide for you whatever it is you really need in your mission at the moment. At midnight of the eternal winter it seems forever out of reach, but hey - sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy.

Also, I'm going to leave the previous entries, as despairing and dark as they were, because they are a part of me, and I really believe in being true to myself (even the dark parts). Why I share them with the world is beyond me... I am, after all, just a voice in the woods... what began as a howl, then a cry.. then a whimper...

 

Perhaps it's time I take this blog to the next level, the same monotonous blawg of personal boo hoos the vast majority of blogs on the net are, the pretense that everyone else gives a crap how hard my life is right now, et al.

So here goes: my monthly expenses exceed my income, not including the vast sum of debt I've managed to accrue in the past eight or ten years. I keep changing jobs and every time I do so, I make less money than the last one. My eldest son swung the dog's choke chain and smashed the window in the door to the oven - which is the only new appliance that we own (very old fridge, semi-broken portable dishwasher). The bathroom renovations are into their third month and every time I try to get ahead, I end up two steps back. A thinly veiled metaphor for my life. I got up Sunday to get it out in a blog and the Mac wouldn't turn on. Apparently it finally overheated and it'll mean a new motherboard before it will rise again. This is like the death of a friend... a computer tech for more than a decade, the Mac was the first computer I truly loved. Wah.

This always happens when things ought to be going amazing fantastic - new home owners, new baby, etc. Maybe it's the ETERNAL FUCKING WINTER (thanks to our latitude and environment changes), or the never ending stream of 'one after the others' or the creeping suspicion that I'm being set up to get ROYALLY fucked. I haven't saved any tax money in a year and a half. I keep getting 'suprise' bills : cell phone $700, our home energy costs are almost that too, and I can't even remember the last time I paid any money on any of our four student loans. Consumer debt going unpaid and interest/overage mounting, it's just a juggling act and all of the sudden I have a cramp in my hand.

Depression.

Of all the fantastic things I've thought, and created, this is how it will end for me, I can tell. One of those tragic tales of talent that never found the right public, intelligence that never found the right subject, suppressed creativity, a spirit crushed under the weight of the world.

I even started smoking again this weekend just to provide SOME kind of relief, even though it'll make it worse in the long run. Tobacco's reserved for the poor, black, and stupid, as they say.

I've had a pinched nerve in my neck for the last week, and can sometimes barely move (but my job is physical so I've got to and all these kids rely on me to keep it together). All the kids are sick, there's snot and piss everywhere. My youngest son started using the potty today but my eldest son will happily sit for hours in a shitty diaper. WTF.

It's -15C today. April and it's fucking winter again.

Listening to the music I made in my past life just makes me sad. I wonder if I'll be able to do that again. Not as long as I have kids and have to slave every waking second towards an unachievable goal... not even getting ahead, but just the hope of staying afloat.

All day long all I think about is what I can do to pay off this ton of debt I've managed to get myself into merely trying to survive honestly. I think about going back to drugs, selling drugs, being killed while driving so my family could inherit a life insurance payout. I actually fantasize about that... but I would miss them so. But that's selfishness speaking: to choose to die in order to save your family is a noble death. The life of destitute poverty we are leading towards, after our asses have been reamed and the creditors have taken everything I gave up all my dreams of success at my arts for, so I could give a life for my kids... I don't know.

Maybe they'd just inherit my debt. What a joke.

I've been in a very dark place lately, which is not a good thing. What else can I do but break my back.  And try. At least I can say I tried.

Gotta go. There's drama about.

I am not usually one who falls for seasonal depression, but it is REALLY tough to be optimistic at this point.

The day after tomorrow is the first day of spring and today our dog escaped from our yard by stepping over it. The snow is that damn high.

In places there are packed paths that are six feet above lawn level. Coming in the back door is like coming down a ramp. I've had to dig it out twice in the past week with an axe and shovel just to keep it as that.

The snow is so high that I can walk onto the low portion of our roof without a ladder.

A week ago, I did just that and shoveled off the whole roof. Now it's got a foot of snow on it again - some of the stuff at the bottom is a foot of packed ICE with more snow on top of it. I'm not making this shit up, it is completely ridiculous and is making me hysterically depressed. I'll post the pictures if I remember later since they're on the Mac and I'm stuck on the stupid PC right now.

Everyone has been cooped up for the last six months - literally - and are bouncing off the walls with cabin fever (literally).

In our nice little town they keep the streets relatively cleared, as compared to in Grande Prairie, where some streets won't get plowed AT ALL, EVER. Even relatively cleared, there was so much snow that fell JUST TODAY that I had to dig my driveway out for half an hour before I could back my work truck into our "driveway" (which is itself just a path cut in the snow).

Our minivan is parked in our "winter stall", which is up on what is the sidewalk where there isn't three feet of snow laying on it. We can't even just get bundled up and "go for a walk" because the snow is too uneven to drag a sled and too deep to push a cart, even a jogger. Pedestrians are relegated to the roadways, which isn't a great place for a cold family of five plus dog to go walking at night. Not in Alberta, anyway.

This especially sucks because I am a courier and it's my job for 8-12 hours a day to drive on these roads.

Also, my wife is losing it - and who can blame her, locked inside with three kids climbing up her leg and nothing to do but pace in circles and clean the same messes all day long. She doesn't have her driver's license (really, she doesn't) so she can't (legally) drive anywhere, and besides which, even if she could drive somewhere, where would she go. There's not a place for 800KM that you can just 'go to' and do stuff with three kids.

We've even had to start feeding the kids McDonald's because it's the only place we can take our kids to get excercise. How fucking ironic is that. It makes me so mad!

The snow is relentless. Even now it's coming down. Marci (driver's license or no) drove the car to the hospital that is literally across the street, 100 meters away, because it started snowing for the THIRD TIME TODAY and baby Ella has developed thrush so she needs to see a doctor. Also, it's three weeks until her first flu shot, and I think she's gonna get the Flu because Marci suddenly came down with it today.

Which means that I am going to come down with it in the next couple of days but my job involves being focussed, driving on trecherous roads all day, and lifting heavy stuff. When I say this, Marci says "I guess raising three children doesn't count as work then huh!?" and it's off to the races then.

Besides any of this stuff, I am a summer baby and have always been most in my element in the sunny days of June through August. Even the storms. Just the warmth, and decided absense of FI:KJNE SNOW. 

It seems so distant...



                                                              ...... patience.....

The worst is that I can't help but notice the shock in all the native Grande Prairians, that they've never seen anything like this and when will it end. Since my job involves interacting with a wide cross-section of people, I can't help but notice that most of these people are aligning this with climate change, even if they won't say it as directly as that.

Still, sometimes I see them say "oh yeah, the snow, that's GLOBAL WARMING FOR YA!" sarcastically and see instead the real fear in their eyes.

Statisticians will tell you that whatever the data is, sudden changes involving two or more factors in an otherwise predictible pattern usually indicates that they're related (though never as clearly as I just have).

I wonder if we'll wake up in time..

At least, that's what I used to say at anti-war rallies. ;)

The following is something I found in a book I keep in my truck for moments when I become a little thoughtful or whatever and have time to write it down. T'was dated 14Aug.06 But here it is, as it is.

.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.

People ask how we can "create peace" in the middle east.This is a silly question. Peace can not be 'created', only destroyed.

Peace is our natural state, where human endeavour is at rest, when conflicting enterprises cease, there is peace.

The United Nations, although founded on high ideals (like so many fallacies and modern facades) operates in utter ineffectiveness. One can not "keep peace" and especially not guns. We seem to think that a cease-fire is a peaceful situation; it is not.

Any time weapons are involved one can hardly say that a situation is "peaceful." Acts of aggression end peace. As a modern sage once said...

You can not bomb the world to peace, but you can bomb the world to pieces.

When I was more politically active in my youth, I would go to anti-war rallies. Not because I felt that our protests, no matter how vast, would have any bearing on plans already in motion, but because it consoled me to see so many others distressed at our circumstances. We would discuss the vulgarities of world events and how powerless we seemed to stop them.

It is not our place to stop these events, I would say, because we can not.

And yet we are still here, filled with meaning like a great poem which has yet to find the right publication.

Our job, as I see it, is to teach forgiveness, to forgive, and to be forgiven. The collected Karma of the human experience is filling with hatred, so it is the role of those who are not inextricably drawn into such conflicts to do what we can to balance the equasion.

Besides, there is evil in this world which can only be answered with violence. It is a terrible truth, but is such as it is. I am not anti-war, I am pro-peace. And not the cease-fire kind of peace, but a real, genuine, lasting peace, a peace which begets itself eternally.

I desire to see and live and in my way bring about a peace where men do not war because it no longer makes sense. We must first learn to forgive to end this current cycle of hatred and revenge.

Imagine a world where trees die of old age. I once had this fever vision where we did not live beyond our means. burning fuel to develop fuel, growing an unremittable debt to our Earth. Once I caught a glimpse of our world as being lived in accordance with our potential for greatness.

I saw how in our lifetime the people of planet Earth could overcome themself.

This glimpse, fleeting and momentary as it was, has always stuck with me and been a guiding star to direct my personal course across the seas of life.

IT IS POSSIBLE, however impossible it might be.

First we must overcome ourselves, and our petty selfishness and a great many more must catch a glimpse of this vision too, and maintain it, and stop idolizing the messengers and choose instead to idolize the message.

Because we are all messengers.

(Something I'd written years ago that I stumbled across and found that it still had a resonant ring in myself so I thought I'd share it with you. Il s'appelle "Nym."



I'm still not sure if I'm living in a dream,
Life can be so crazy and some times
It don't make sense, or doesn't rhyme.

But I am still inclined to believe in Destiny,
From what I've seen.. it all happens for a reason.

Never asking questions still seems to get you lies,
You should:
Bend away from deception
(for within is the question)
To the answer you have been thinking for
and the hardest thing's to find the key to that door
that exists only within the cracker section
at your local grocery store.

Yes I am a tribesman and I have a clan. As an addition to my sons Darwin (3) and Orion (2), my wife and I just had the third and final installment to our breeding, a little girl named Ella Dawne. Horray for us. ;) I was hovering over her after her birth (like I always do) and was clicking at regular intervals and managed to capture the first moment she opened her eyes.

I recall a science project I'd taken part in around grade three. Something to do with astronauts in space, and we looked at how the astronauts went to great lengths to make efficient use of their resources: electricity, food, water, heat. "We don't need to worry about being so careful because we have lots of resources, but in space...." my teacher had explained. It wasn't until some twenty odd years later, while I was doing dishes on this very night, that I recalled this lesson and smirked in contrast to the energing awareness we examplify.

We don't have "lots" of resources. Not anymore. The rainforests are disappearing at a rate we can see with our own eyes. Global warming. Melting icecaps. Other apocolyptic images I've been seeing for years but of which the general public are really just beginning to take seriously. When I think about how much of our resources are wasted it makes me sick, and the reason nothing's ever been done about it is because there's never been much motivation to be efficient.

Will you scrape the peelings for the last of the juicy fruit if there is an endless supply of fresh fruit at your side? Would most people?

We have all been raised with a disposable culture. Our attitude is to throw things out, buy a new one. It's cheaper to go out and buy a new TV than it is to get my old TV fixed. Even I bought the new TV.

However, we are now coming to a point in our history where there is not, for the first time, a seemingly endless supply of fresh water, fish, trees, etc.

So as I was washing my dishes, I became aware of the amount of water I was wasting. This was something I'd become alarmed about a few months ago, while I'd been brushing my teeth. Think about how you normally brush your teeth: turn on water, run brush under it, apply toothpaste, brush teeth, rinse brush, brush teeth, rinse brush, rinse mouth, shut off water. Notice all the stuff that happens between the times we're actually using the water. I started doing experiments to see how much water I was wasting, but had difficulties finding a way to even approximately measure the water wastage. Sinks would have overflowed, cups overflowed too rapidly. I realized that in brushing my teeth, I was wasting easily 10 litres of water, often more.

Perfectly clean water just going down the same drain that the toilet flushed our waste down.
Then I thought about how much a bottle of water costs. Sure, the tap water isn't Evian or anything, but it's not sewage either - but that's where it's going.

Some day (and a hell of a lot sooner than any of us think), our ability to just turn on the tap and get relatively clean water will become like a myth, a story we tell our kids like "there were trees so big that it took ten people hand in hand to wrap around the trunk."

As for energy, this is a subject I've spent a lot of my life thinking about (as a physics geek), and is something I'll probably spout off about at length later. For now, I'd like to point out a fundamental law of physics, that is, that energy is never created nor destroyed, but only ever converted. That being said, we've got to find new ways to efficiently use the energy that we convert, and to re-capture it in its converted forms.