• Smoking is a life saver.

    A few years back I went to a baseball game with my dad, my little sister her husband and my wife. It was a warm summer evening in Hillsboro Oregon. It was your typical minor-league game On a quite enjoyable evening .

    In about the third inning, my dad announced he was going to get a hotdog. If you read between the lines, probably searching out a secret place to smoke a cigarette. He did have a history, of getting lost on his little adventures.

    He was gone for a short time, and suddenly a player hit a screaming foul ball headed towards our direction. He caught all of it and it came right towards us. I had my back turned and turned and watched the ballsmash into the middle of the seat where my dad was once sitting.

    It happened really fast.

    A few minutes later, my dad came back to his seat, with mustard on his hands, and asked what the big indentation was in the middle of the seat.

  • What we think about every single day is not a conscious decision. Things pop in our mind both pleasant and unpleasant. And right now I’d like to concentrate on the pleasant. It is quite amazing what actually pops in your mind as we have very little control over that. It just happens. And the process fascinates me.

    Memories occur when specific groups of neurons are reactivated. In the brain, any stimulus results in a particular pattern of neuronal activity—certain neurons become active in more or less a particular sequence. … In other words, recalling a memory involves re-activating a particular group of neurons

    That’s all fine and dandy and we don’t really control that.

    And I can see why many people end up in counseling. Our past has a lot to do with our current every day waking life. And I take it as a privilege to write this as I don’t have anything that’s too traumatic or maybe I don’t dwell on it at all that often.

    I have this reoccurring daydream that pops in my head often. It’s a nice place but not spectacular. It’s the top of fire lane one in the middle of Forest Park. Or maybe it is spectacularI’ve been there thousands of times either running walking and it’s generally fairly pleasant. It sits at the top of a really difficult hill when running. But for some reason it pops in my mind all the time. That is where I go on a little mental vacation. I would not describe that as my happy place or maybe I would. But it just pops in my mind all the time.

    I also noticed similar places or times do as well. The biggest correlation I can find, and it’s all armchair conjecture, is that my mind goes back to a place that was uncomplicated.

    I probably learned nothing here, and the reader is probably no richer for reading this. I just stood on the back porch, as an unexpected gentle rain shower washed over me. It was calm, beautiful in a subtle way. Who knows it could be a memory that pops in my mind in the future.

    There’s nothing really to learn here, no inspirational thoughts rather a quiet little introspection of how a mind works. It is nice to look at once in a while.

  • This is the Mean -if we use the average the United States has a pragmatic view on gun control.

    If we use the mode- We have two giant masses of people on either end of the spectrum nowhere near the mean.

    But that’s mean.

    What we have is a very large standard deviation.

    And I can take that one stepfather (I like that voice recognition typo) on some thing that was just yesterday. And that would be fireworks. On average we are pretty pragmatic. Then again we have the bombastic who hang out in the driveway scaring every dog, veteran, nesting birds on the planet. On the other end of the spectrum we have those who abhor fireworks

    But on average we are a pragmatic bunch

  • I tried to paint Joni Mitchell as a teenager and never got it quite right. I learned so much in the process.

    I wanted to capture the eyes.