Like dreaming I'm on stage somewhere I don't belong

Unspoken Poetry Slam Instagram page. Find me in there three times - I'm the token white guy and the token senior citizen.

Memory

Read two articles on memory in Guardian science section this morning.

We Can Never Fully Trust our Memory

and

How to Avoid Loosing your Memory in the Digital Age about memory athletes. Talks about how we can greatly improve memory through practice and effort. Methods of associating what's to be remembered with something else, the most common being rooms in a building one is familiar with. The article didn't mention it but that's an old method monks used to memorize scripture. I remember Peter Coyote talking about some method like that he used. I've used a list of items for years to recall items I don't want to forget. One to six is wan, tool, tree, fort, fife, sex. I remember driving somewhere in Texas when I was young. Stopped at a diner Bought a book on how to remember there. Read it while waiting for dinner. The author's method was to place each item to be remembered on some part of an automobile. Seemed good. Driving on I later realized I'd left the book back at the diner. Darn.

Forgetting Programmed Differences

Woke this morning lay in bed
memories came
summer 1964
walking neighborhood South Side of Chicago eve
with a guitar
invited to play freedom songs
at a CORE meeting
so all could sing
going to the South Side
to visit playful Stanley, photographer met at civil rights training camp
Stanley, wife, twice as old as me
dinner, relaxed
prior spring
lunch with a half dozen others
restaurant next door to COFO office
what a gift
times like those
boy from Texas
the only white in those scenes
forgot about race
just us doin what we were doin
that forgetting
wasn't planned

strange feeling

I walked into Tulane University, found the psychology department, met with a professor, and asked him about an unusual experience, a strange feeling I got now and then. It was hard to describe. It happened when I was calm. I can remember it happening while I was lying in the back seat of my mother's car taking a nap while she was playing music with some friends. A buzzing would start in my head, a feeling buzzing, not a sound buzzing. There'd be light, a little brightness, a floating feeling. strange time sensations as it increased, then a sense of everything being very fast and then slow and fast and slow at the same time as if one side of time were fast and the other slow, and I'd feel big and small at the same time, and other contradictory sensations. It was a little bit pleasant and a little bit unpleasant. I could stop it at any time by just getting up, shaking myself, and looking around. The professor said the closest he could come to was that sometimes writers, poets, artists express something like that. I said that Sartre described something in Nausea that reminded me a bit of it - how a doorknob would feel and I couldn't think of more to say nor he. - from Freedom Songs, Part XI

Banten

Here's a bit about banten in Bali.Our housecleaner has to switch days sometimes because she's making banten for a ceremony with other women in her neighborhood or extended family depending on the ceremony. 

Bum

The water filter salesman who was here was a neat guy named Kadek (like our house cleaner, a woman - Bali names are not usually gender specific) and  I found him entertaining so I offered him tea. Usually people here ask for water if they want anything at all - when offered. But he said ok to green tea. Of course he wanted sweetener and was happy to have honey in it. He spoke good English but we'd veer into Indonesian too which is fun and I always learn something. I can't remember in what context but he used the word bum for butt and asked if that was the only word for the rear end.

Nazava Water Filters

A Nazava water filter salesman came by. He knew we already had two of them and had been filtering our own water for over four years. We've saved a ton of money because we don't buy drinking water but make our own from tap water. Came to check it out and ask a few questions for a company survey. He was a funny, bright guy from the city of Klungkung bout an hour away. I had things to say to him about how to maintain the units that was different from what they teach. We don't use the blue straw that's connected to the drip thingy. Why? And I don't use their abrasive scrubber to clean it - just my hand, so it doesn't have to be replaced. I just went to the company website and asked them about those two practices and if there was some reason I should use the tube and clean it like they suggested. I suspected they like replacing the filters every two or three years for the money. But Katrinka who cleans it much less uses the scrubber so maybe we've got the perfect combo there.

One other thing I talked to the salesman about. I've noticed that most locals who get these things donated to them don't clean them enough so they clog up and stop using them. I've had friends with restaurants get them and cleaned them and refilled them myself when I see they need it. They're too much trouble. New habits hard to take on if it means going to more trouble than the old ones. Even poor people will buy water or boil water (which doesn't get the pesticides) rather than get into using them right. We know a guy who gets grants to to distribute them all over to the poor and refugees from volcanoes and earthquakes. He does one quick mass instructive talk and is off. Good luck. I suggest the company do a followup. Potable water from the tap is far superior. There are also many places with potable and non potable supplies running next to each  other.

If you got heavy metals in your water you have to move up to a more sophisticated system.