My chess game is improving by leaps and bounds. Have only missed two or maybe three nights in the past few weeks I’ve been here. A couple people here I haven’t been able to beat yet, but I’ve been studying their moves & decision-making patterns & working on stealing their powers. Making simultaneous advances in my carpentry skills. Suddenly struck upon a technique to build a customizable re-usable flippable arch for capturing nice curves that can be repeated in a cartoon. Have never had a blast of creative breakthrough energy hit me like that before in the carpentry world, so I’ve been riding that high for a few days and trying to compound those advances, double it all up on each other. Thinking through chess games and carpentry problems as well as staging issues has zapped my step-by-step logical/logistical mind into high gear which I’m revving wherever possible with a new take-charge attitude. Figure I’m almost thirty, I can see the road ahead, I can use the tools and techniques at my disposal to get what I want and go where I want, or at least to usher in changes that are favorable to my position and strategy on the board. It’s quite here now. Everyone has gone to sleep as tomorrow is matinee day, our first. Last night was the season opener, which was followed by a lovely soiree. Things are humming along, making mental plans to put pieces into place for the fall, gain new skills, shore up old ones, work with people who are better than me, work my ass off, put together a bunch of money, work more jobs in more places, maybe buy a vehicle, start a bunch of side businesses, new hobbies like brewing in the basement (assuming I have a basement). I don’t know, we’ll see how it all pans out as other players make their moves on the board. Should be a good time though. Planning to revisit tenth grade math and re-learn old geometry/logic proofs. Should help both my chess game and my building. Hoorah. Thinking through a new tattoo for the end of the summer, a lily to match the rose and complete the circuit…
Oh, and my 29 and a halfth birthday (Saturn returns) is in three days. One or two days after that, I’ll be playing an executioner onstage here for our production of Gilbert & Sullivan’s Yeomen of the Guard. How apropos on a lot of levels.
Whatever weird things he’s done or not done, the dude made awesome art. In honor of his contributions to the human race, here are a bunch of mostly unsubstantiated rantings about Michael Jackson’s alleged freakishness:
- Michael Jackson, Mind Control Victim?
- Michael Jackson’s Magician
- Michael Jackson & The Paranormal
- The Pied Piper of Neverland
- McMartin Psychologist Used in Jackson Case
- Jackson’s Bloodbath
Have spent the last few days working extensively with the jigsaw on an ornate art deco style gate carved out of wood. Mentally still focused on the same small set of activities: balance boarding in my scant time off during the day and playing game after game of chess at night. It’s all coming together somewhere in the center - which is good. That’s what I’m after. The center. Can’t help my mind from racing outward from there into the future though, projecting the center forwards in time, rolling along, making plans on missing information and probable but possibly entertaining mistakes. Life is full of them, so what’s the best method for picking and choosing out of the cornucopia available? Thoughts on love and what it is, what it consists of in practical day-to-day action and how to recognize It & Its Effects On You™ continue to invade my awareness. My typical train of inner monologue on the subject goes something like: love consists of actions, decisions whereby you create a channel for the emotional elements to flow through. Because the feelings themselves come and go, so how do you know? Love as a volitional act, Love under Will. Is that what they mean? Beyond that, my thoughts move towards mechanics, hydrodynamics, intensely practical real world sciences as applied not just to the stage, but to the stage of life. The esoteric in the intensely practical. Salvation in the jigsaw.
Played four games of chess today. Lost two, won two. Almost got a stalemate. Anybody know how many moves a lone king has to make to avoid entrapment before stalemate is achieved? My balance-boarding has improved tremendously in only one day. Very interesting thing to practice and I have to say that I think it’s helping me to “find my center” so to speak. It’s funny because it’s such a cliche pun but it’s so damn accurate. Just heard someone say the word “balance” totally out of context in another conversation, but I’m trying not to pay such mind to synchronicities and the like lately. Been using such things as guiding lights for too long. The problem is these things, these random pointless things end up becoming these little wedges that build up and build up in your decision-making process. How then to make decisions? How to be creative, intuitive, etc. Found in a fortune cookie today the dictum, “Spread your good feelings around.” Splatter painted today a broken down church. Have these flashes where I think the balance boarding is helping my chess playing…
Just have to bang this out really quick before I run off to work for the day. It’s not fully formed yet, but these are musings from a day spent on and off the balance board. Yesterday I found my center of balance. It “rocked”, so to speak. Sorry for the bad pun… It’s like maybe two inches below my sternum. I totally found it. I didn’t know it was such a discernible spot, something you could so totally get into physically. And there it is. So, Da Vinci, esoteric Renaissance wisdom, circus arts. Vitruvian Man, the circle of activity carved out by a man’s reach, by any particular being’s existence. Possibilities, center of balance. Rotational axis, centrifugal force. Flower of life, many small circles of action, rotating together in unison. The simple machines. Pulley, wheel, axle. Wheel rotates in full. Pulley is stationary, rope moves around it. Axles connect the rotational cycles of two or more wheels, humming in unison. The solstice is a point of shifting balance within a natural rotational cycle.
