Your faithful hunt-and-peck typist.

Lords of Creation

The Raven spent virtually the entire day on the deck, sketching, writing, and reading. We advocate doing this sort of thing from time to time. Reading matter: Dialogues of Plato. That Socrates was a real card. You really didn't want him around when you were explaining to people how much you know. "What do you mean by 'knowledge'?" Pretty soon, he's going on about carpenters and bakers and lyre players and before you know it, you look like a sap. The section I was working on today is titled Euthydemus and is the ancient Greek equivalent of "Showdown at the O.K. Corral." Two famous philosopher-rhetoricians come into town and claim they know everything. Socrates steps in when he sees 'em intellectually browbeating a kid and he eventually turns the tables on the pedants. Great fun.

8:01:26 PM       

Every now and then you get one of these relatively calm periods when the media seem less frenetic and more contemplative, as if the beast is exhausted from its thrashings and needs a breather. Which gives us a chance to digest what's been happening and brace ourselves for the next wave on the way.

The media is a fairly complex organism, usually a smooth-talking con-artist with a practiced manner that lulls you into thinking that not only is it presenting us with reality, but in a larger sense that it is reality. It's during these slack times, when the rowboat of consciousness slips into the liner's wake, that the illusion is especially easy to spot. You also get a break when you're vacationing on an island or camping outdoors. Once you're away from the images and text stream for awhile, you notice that you don't really miss it and you feel a lot better about things. At least I do.

"If it bleeds, it leads." That sells copy, but it also takes a handful of child kidnappings and magnifies them to the point that the average parent is running down to the police station to fingerprint their kid and maybe embed him with a subdermal chip while they're at it. You don't tune into the datastream to hear about how nice we are to each other; to do that, you take a walk in your neighborhood and you smile at the people around you. A few waves, a few howyadoin's, and things seem to balance out.

Instead of consuming, take advantage of the slack moments to create. Today, The Raven is off to the art supply store to pick up some colored charcoals and watercolors. It's a day to sketch, to change perspective, to think or not to think, depending, but a good day to feel.

9:39:52 AM