Posted on Leave a comment

Gem In I-ambic Diameter

Gemini

gemini with hum audio version, before clicking adjust your volume

He slid the glass door open,

stepped out onto the darkened deck
Down below
a hundred decibel surf
pounded the Pacific shore
trying to exchange vibrations
with the Atlantic
He could not see the surf
He could feel it and hear it

He turned his attention to the sky
knowing where his eyes would come to rest
knowing what w

melanding

ould be there
at one a m on oh one oh eight oh six
at one eight oh degrees south
at sixty degrees from midheaven

The Pacific went sile

nt

Vibrations ceased
He heard only his constellation
There
his trapezoid
comprising four stars
wonderfully unsquare
such simple astounding asymmetry
such Janused dissimilar duality
such unbounded agility
suggesting

such readiness
to be anything
just anything the cosmos needed

His reflection, his Gemini, his doppelgaenger, his twin

Some elsewhere in the universe
Some other perspective
Someone was standing
on a darken

ed deck
enthralled with the same four stars
as a perfect parallelogram
so perfectly equiangular
such simple astounding symmetry
such focussed unity
suggesting
such rigid permanence
eternally its same self
Poor bastard!

Posted on Leave a comment

Safe Sax

saxophonejones  Click there for the audio mp3 file. Adjust sound before clicking.

Yes, I know I should be finishing that book on Maya ‘prophecy’ with surmises as to its direst possible content and ramifications. But, the tenor sax got in the way. So, I took it for a walk. When we arrived at the boulevard bus stop, the sax was tired of walking and wanted to sit where the boulevard sound drowns out the blow job. Today the sax and I agreed on a medium of Clapton blues from the Chronicles album. I got to toss in my favorite Bob Seger tune, In Your Time, in exchange for the sax’s choice of Sultans of Swing from Dire Straits.

Then we picked up the mail from PO and walked on back thinking about a novel born of the thoughts that run through the heads of people leaving the PO who are wondering why the old man and sax choose that bus stop bench to perform. And then some neighbor says, “you must play us a song sometime.” And I think, “Yeah, that’s just what my neighbors need, me blowing their pacemakers off frequency with 150 decibels of vintage Mark Knopfler guitar as blown through a single shot tenor sax barrel.”

Then I put on Take Five and listening to Brubeck’s piano, Desmond’s alto, and Joe Morello’s drums I reverently revered the time Tobola said, “What if we got some Poly Space, a jazz band like SLO Mambo to play behind Ray Clark Dickson reading his stuff, you know his birthday is coming up? We could sell raffle tickets, The winner could ride to the gig in the limo that picks up Dickson. It could be an art council fund raiser to beat all arts council fund raisers.”

And Kate of Stuhlberg fame said yeah and everybody said yeah including Dickson and SLO Mambo. And I held out for an OK to play alto sax from the back of the room while Dickson did a jazz poem from the front.

I came out of my revery feeling good about my bank reserves. Not the financial bank, but those stored in The Bank of Reminiscences.

And that is how blog articles get written. On this keyboard, at least.

The media memories of that fund raiser are stored away. So I will put this online with an mp3 copy of my own sax poem with some simple back up from my that same tenor sax that enchanted the POed boulevardiers a little while ago.

And then I am definitely going to finish that book that no one will buy. Well, pluck’em if they can’t stand a poke.

Posted on Leave a comment

The Latter Day Saints of Maya Prophecy or Last Flight for Mercury

So, what about Maya prophecies whose time of fulfillment coincides with our date of 20/21 December of 2012? If asked, any hip Maya individual will smile knowingly and say, “those crazy gringos! What Maya prophecies?” Because no such related Maya prophecies really exist? Only conjecture? Granted, good money making conjecture? We will see!

And … without a knowledge of 21st century science when the ‘prophecies’ would have been made in the year, say, 700CE, what, minus exact scientific terms, would be the worst imaginable catastrophe a prophecy could fulfill that would occur in the week preceding the celebrating of the anniversary of the birth of Christ a la 2012?

So, two important questions: will the Maya prophecy, real or not, come true? and what is the worst possible disaster that could be foretold for 2012’s close out sale?

A short and pithy book will appear in a couple days on Kindle by CanDo Jack ( http://www.amazon.com/author/candojack ). The title of the book is The Latter Day Saints of Maya Prophecy. And, hey, if you have One Click Kindle Delivery you can get it fast and read it in time to light out for Mars should fear take control.

I will tweet when the book goes up.

The book considers: one, the idea that such a prophecy exists has a very interesting source story. And, two, the fact that a prophecy does NOT exist has never prevented greedy “prophecy experts” from making a buck off it and three, the fact that a prophecy does not exist has never prevented terrorists from using it as a date to schedule an incredible catastrophe. And, four, such a catastrophe could be the most devastating catastrophe ever experienced by humanity. And the most novel, and the most feared for the last fifty years by threat knowledgeable US Defense experts. And is more threatening now than ever before.

More on that beginning with a little background.

More than a year ago, I began researching Maya history for a fact filled novel entitled Nine Elevens. The term ‘MayaN’, capital N for emphasis, is reserved as an adjective for the language of the Maya people who exist, by the way, primarily in Guatemala. They have been there for certainly three and probably five thousand years. They are the reason you can have bananas on your cereal.

Not to get lost in word misuse and Maya abuse but here is a quote from a review of a review of Mel Gibson’s “Apocalypto.” The review of the review is at http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/12/08/278950/-Maya-vs-Mayan

Quote:
One is a Maya, two or more are Mayans?

Well, no. Here’s the convention used by Mesoamerican archaeologists. Always choose “Maya” unless referring to a language, in which case the word is “Mayan” (there are at least two dozen living Mayan languages.)

The people are Maya, not Mayans. Our reviewer writes of “a Mayan urban center.” Those in the know would say “a Maya urban center.” He speaks of “Mayan culture.” Nope. Say “Maya culture.”
Unquote.

That entire gotcha may seem to be more archeological language detail than is required. But, keep it in mind for the next week or so because that detailed knowledge may be handy for making some judgments about the credentials of Maya Prophecy ‘scholars.’

My novel, Nine Elevens, began with my discovery that the Mountain Meadows Massacre occurred on a 9/11 date, 1857 specifically. The location, specifically, was about thirty miles west of Cedar City, Utah. Personally, until that point the only thing famous to me about Cedar City, Utah was that in 1993 I arrived in Utah from my home near Munich with two goals: one, sharing Utah’s weightless white wonderful ski slopes with my wife; and, two, renting a plane in Cedar City to fly her around the entire Grand Canyon.

Years later my interest in the Cedar City area was resurrected with the story of The Mountain Meadows Massacre and a trail of 9/11s which took me eventually back to the land of the Maya on the date 9/11/911.

I was hooked. My brain, joined by my heart early on, spent the next three months with the Maya. I was with them in the first great civilization, then through the classic civilization and six hundred years later to meet the Spanish Conquistadors.

By then my Classic Maya twin brother heroes Pacall and Exall had created themselves and gotten ship wrecked on a small island in the Caribbean. The island’s chief cannibal was explaining to the tree bound twins how he would prepare them for supper. Writer’s responsibility to ensure the story continued demanded that the twins be rescued. But, by whom?

Fortunately, the writer’s background brain delivered, under threat of an inaugural case of writer’s block, the character, Phoenix, the first Phoenician Jew. At least the first Phoenician Jew, sailor, explorer, cosmopolitan, dilettante, inventor, scientist whom the writer had ever encountered. And the first to reach Maya.

And neither Maya nor the Caribbean were ever the same again. And the etymology of Caribbean, cannibal, was restored if for no other reason than to honor James Michener, whose 672 page novel, CARIBBEAN, introduced those cannibals to the readers of the world in 1989. That tome sits next to its German cognate cousin, KARIBBEAN. They stare at me from my bookshelf to ensure I give them proper recognition. They stand shoulder to shoulder with an older sister, Iberia, whose Michener knowledge base and influence provides some help on the al Andalus chapters of my NINE ELEVENS. Remind me sometime to tell you the tale of how I happened to have in hand a half read copy of IBERIA when I arrived in Spain from Denmark in 1980 to work with Iberia Airlines. And forgive my typing a final sentence to this paragraph as my heart takes a brief leap back to high school where I first read Michener’s Bridges at Toko Ri instead of reading Chemistry, the only course I ever failed. Even then Michener wrote long books.

BREAKING THE MAYA CODE by Michael D. Coe introduced me to the cast of characters who did the breaking. The documentary by the same name is primarily favored by David Coe. Linda Shele’s extensive contribution and her taking a teenaged vacationer in tow. That charmingly brilliant kid became Dr. David Stuart who wrote the amazing book, THE ORDER OF DAYS: THE MAYA WORLD AND THE TRUTH ABOUT 2012. David’s knowledge and his tenacity in getting and securing that knowledge thrilled me and rescued me from a multitude of gotchas about the ‘Maya prophecy’ with the same vigor and analytical thinking that allowed my hero, Phoenix, to rescue Pacall and Exall, two of my Maya heroes from NINE ELEVENS.

At this point you may see growing in the knowledge that I have categorized the world of Maya ‘researchers’ into those looking for the long story of the real Maya and the short story of those looking for what can be boxed and sold in 2012 in time to be ready for the first social sensation of 2013.

But let me let Dr. David Stuart say what I want to say about that better than I can. I choose to let him say that in the book that will appear as mentioned on Kindle in a very few days.

And let me leave the laying out of potential events to that book as well.

For now, let this article persuade you go back to the top of this page and click on SHOP to buy my NINE ELEVENS and read it for yourself.

The novel has several adventures I did not even mention here. Ever been to Big Sur? It will take you there. Ever played poker with people like Jesus and his Papa, the Big Deal? It will take you there. Ever run off the cliff with lemmings, it will take you there? Ever steal a Spanish galleon from the conquistadores? It will take you there.