Democratic Individualism

I was sitting at a stoplight today when an SUV pulled up beside me with a special Virginia bowler license plate. What? So I got curious and went to the Virginia DMV website. There are now 180 choices for your car's plates. You can not only tell the world you are a bowler, you can tell them you are a fox hunter! Or love the Class J No. 611 Steam Locomotive! Or you are a Parrothead (this one can even be for your motorcycle!)! Celebrate our Tobacco heritage on your plates! Or tell the world, "Hey, I'm a friend of Tibet!" You can even spread the news that you went to Virginia Highlands Community College! Neato!
And on the other side of me was a bright yellow, tricked out Scion with a website for a Scion club decaled onto it back window. At the Scion webpage there is a link entirely for Scion "culture".
Those two cars got me thinking about how we as a culture seem to want conflicting things, simultaneously. We want to be an individual and stand out, while not wanting to stand out so much that we are left out. We want to be part of the crowd, but not "the crowd" if that makes sense. It's like that old Far Side cartoon with the penguins all standing on ice and one in the middle is singing, "I gotta be me, I just gotta be me..." . I guess I mean that the rule is, as our culture sells it to us, there is plenty of room to be yourself within the confines given to you. Like "the crowd" says you should own a car, but doesn't say it can't be bright yellow with a stupid "KIDS FIRST!" license plate. What about not owning a car in the first place? Then you are no longer an individual, you are weird. Then wouldn't weirdness just be society's distinction between "normal" individuality and unacceptable quirkiness? Ehhh?
That's it, I'm getting a hot pink Scion with brown dots and 10-inch alloy dubs and two subwoofers and a spoiler and my blog stenciled on the window with my "HORSE ENTHUSIASTS" plates.


Oh and while I was at the DMV site I checked the availability of getting some form of Labowski on a bowling plate. LBWSKI is already taken, as is DADUDE and THDUDE but I could totally get LABWSK.

Rounding, My Set Jaw

One of my friends recently made me a trio of Grateful Dead live shows and I'm loving them. They aren't something I've typically been into; they were too freeform and jazz like. I liked my structure. Lately I'm ok leaving that structure behind. Music so closely defines moods and thoughts and emotion for me in ways that my ignorant tongue has no way to communicate, and to it I am indebted. Lyrics were my manna; now I'm seeing the notes too. The music that's been cycling recently has been "Extraordinary Machine" by Fiona Apple, "Halos and Horns" by the Dolly, "The Beginning Stages of..." by the Polyphonic Spree, "B Sides and Rarities" by Damien Rice, "We Will Become Like Birds" by Erin McKeown and this great mix of The Clash, The Postal Service, Ben Harper, The Black Keys, Cyndi Lauper, Led Zeppelin and Eastmountainsouth. I'm singing more, not in a focused, performance way, but in the way an old faucet drips: out of habit, out of comfort, out of joy. I sing while I do my life. I'm aging I think. My edges are rounding, my set jaw is slacking. I'm liking space between my words.

Ad Astra, Per Aspera!

News #1: I officially have internet at home again, so I can officially update this more than once every random increment of time. It's totally foreign to me, this whole internet thing. It'll take me a while to ease back into it.

So We're 1/4 of the way through 2006, and it's time for a grade report.
Basically, 2006 only receives a passing grade because of these things: .....I have no idea why it receives a passing grade. It's just because I'm a soft grader, and it was 85 that one weekend in February. This past month has been the hardest of my life, no doubt. Lots of fear and powerlessness and chaos and turmoil and heartache and general crap, and I wish I could say it was just happening in my life, but it's more in the lives of those around me, particularly family. Through it all I've been learning a lot about peace and joy, especially the latter. What is joy anyway, and should it be independent of life situations? I do not think joy is merely a synonym for happiness; it is more of a way of life rather than a feeling in it. The ability to step outside of a circumstance and not despair, the connect between chaos and quiet. But I don't know, I'm learning about it, I don't actually feel knowledgeable either way.
I wish I had more to post, but that's where I'll leave this one. I'm easing back into it. But now I'm here to stay, hopefully for a while.

Now I Love Mud Turtles

Got on a geanology kick today.
Just connected myself to my ancestor, who came to the US in 1637 at the age of 17.
Here's to you, Internet geanology databases!
But found out my great grandfather (who is my namesake as the first of the Stockman Spooners) has a turtle named after him.
The Illinois Mud Turtle, latin name kinosternon flavescens spooneri.
He was the head of the Zoology Department at Eastern Illinois University for 28 years, so that's cool.
Here's to you, Doc Spooner.

Vacant

I had a class in college that discussed how when most Americans see a undeveloped parcel of land, they see it as "vacant" or "useless". Only when we put something atop it or in it does it ascertain any level of value.
This weekend I was thinking about solitude and my day and how I do the same with time. Like how a time for meditation and/or solitude is seen as "vacant" unless I specifically schedule it, like the space between scheduled items is devoid of any worth. It is once again the difference between Kairos and Chronos; of the time in which to do and the time in which to simply be.
I need to spend more time in focused solitude, to be away from Chronos and live in Kairos, even if it takes a bit of my type-A scheduling self to get me there.