Golf is so simple and so complicated all at once. The ball is not even moving, so you'd think it would be easy to hit. Not so. Or at least hitting it where you would like it go is not so easy. If you hold the club a little differently, move your foot just a little, tilt your head just a bit, the end result can be completely different. Somebody coaching you can be overwhelming with all the things to keep track of. Somehow you have to develop some sort of intuition of what to do in a given situation.

What's the difference between fiction and non-fiction? Why don't they call it non-reality and reality or something like that instead? Then the differences would be defined in the titles, so alright, I'll accept it. Seabiscuit seemed like fiction. Connected to history, but perhaps tied together a little too well, too symbolically. All the broken characters fixing each other. Humans and horses in contrast to industry and cars. Some people love cars too, but that must be different. Acceptance leads to cooperation, optimism to perseverance. Inspiring but suspicious to see underdogs win. The power of hope is seeing beyond the reasonable.

Powell Street. Naming the festival for the location, not for Japanese-Canadians is more inclusive I think. Japanese food perhaps brings people together. Arts, traditional, martial, modern. One moment, a guy breaks a board with his head, the next, a girl raps. Old guys playing harmonica follow a funky rock band. Under the seniors' tent, old friends reminisce and re- discover lives the War shredded. Local homeless help out for food. I wonder if they stand in the long line for the tako-yaki — the dough balls with a spec of octopus in the middle, slathered with sticky sauce and green seaweed?

Maybe the disarray of my office reflects my state of mind. Part of the problem is that I don't have enough shelving where I can put things. So I have stuff in piles. Working on my own, I am letting my job description wander in various directions — cartoons, writing, developing educational programs and presentations. I can't make the argument with my office that I actually know where everything is. Nor with my work that I know what I'm doing. I go through stages of entropy. When the level of disorder becomes unbearable, I exert energy to re-establish some order.

In communications, you have the intended message and the received message. Differences between the two may be difficult to determine and depend on various factors. The sender of the message may be uncertain about her intentions, may be unable to express them clearly, or may be unaware of how to relate to the intended receiver. The intended receiver may be reluctant, unable to imagine the context of the sender, or distrust the sender. It depends on developing a relationship between the two, to learn how to communicate with each other. Will and effort are required. Amazing it happens at all.

Between yellow and purple, I decided yellow suited me better. This meant I was extroverted. Between a squiggle and a square, I chose the squiggle. This meant I liked ideas. Between a triangle and a circle, I chose a circle. This meant I liked people. Between red and blue, I chose red. This meant I liked playing. Altogether, this meant I was a butterfly, flitting between people and ideas. Sounds a bit flakey. Well, maybe that's true. Interesting ways to get perspective into yourself and in some way, this set of questions seemed to make sense. Purple is nice too.

Before going to sleep, I have been reading this collection of Japanese folk tales. They were collected by some white missionary almost a hundred years ago. So they are told with an outsider's voice and references to who told him the stories. He mentions how many people told him of their experiences with ghosts. I was teaching English to Japanese people using movie videos before and asked how many believed in ghosts. Most of them did and a few could even describe experiences they've had with them. Is the world weirder than I think or people weirder than I hope?

L picked up some blackberries on her way home from work. They were growing along the path she takes. It is a forested area, but it's not like we're out in the country. This morning she made pancakes with them. They are a bit reddish when cooked. A bit tart, but I like the little flavour explosions. I had an extra pancake to help mop up the syrup. The paper reported a study of newlyweds accurately predicting divorce within ten years based on the communication style of each spouse and putting the results in some equation. They didn't count blackberries.

Choice is supposed to be a good thing. When you have lots of companies competing for some piece of the market, they should be able to provide just what you want. This gets tricky when you're not sure what you want. And they can make you think you want something you don't really want, even without a sales pitch or heavy advertising. They sit on the display shelf with their array of subtly different features. Decisions, decisions. L just wanted a pair of binoculars for watching a show from the nosebleeds and on a hike, in case a pterodactyl appears.

This morning small birds landed on the yellow tree. They were like brownish grey cream puffs. One sat on a phone line as the others flitted from branch to branch, pecking ath things, maybe eating parts of the branches or the buds. At one point, when a noise startled them, they all instantly darted into the middle of the tree. They seem to do their own thing and yet work together as well. When I got up, they flew off in a flock. Their heads seem too small to hold the brains for simultaneously thinking about themselves and the group.

The piercing eyes beneath the unibrow was all I knew of Frida. I used to assume she was just self-absorbed, doing all those self-portraits. The movie put things in context. I don't know how accurate it is but at least, I am now intrigued by her work, even if I think it is grotesque. Apparently, Proust looked for people he knew in paintings. I don't think I know anyone like her. The hot fire of the woman's spirit is intriguing from a distance. How she deal with what happened to her. Did her passion made the pain better or worse?

Life seems good. If I were too busy, I might be stressed out, which would defeat the purpose. I hope I can keep working on things I am interested in and eventually find people who want to give me money for what I do. Julie Taymor, the director of Frida, talked about the importance of doing what she was passionate about, not worrying about making money. I enjoy a challenge but I don't jump up and down about things, I just chuckle about them. Am I amusing myself to death? Do I lack the substance to realize I lack substance?

Once upon a dime. This morning I found one gleaming like a full moon on the sidewalk. Perhaps someone was looking for their bus pass and it happened to fall out. Why is the dime smaller than the nickel? i guess it's the value of the metal, but still, it is confusing if you think about it. Or maybe it is to remind us not to confuse size with value. All these little coins collect over time. I go into phases where I conscientiously pay with exact change. I wonder if money lasts longer now that more people use plastic.

The core of the story is an apple, who, having been eaten, believes that her destiny has been fulfilled. Then she gets tossed into a compost bin as part of her afterlife. She starts to feel soft around the outside as the microbes begin to eat away at her. Sow bugs and worms break down the bigger chunks. The keepers mix up the bin. She can breathe again. She meets some who have been in there longer. They are closer to being one with the universe. Eventually she breaks down and carries on in a new kind of fruitful existence.

The conglomeration of lint, dead skin and sweaty residues had stewed in his belly button for so long, it was evolving into a sentient life form. At least, as sentient as any other part of him. Certainly more than the hardened mucous in his nose. He excavated that often enough so it could not develop complex, self-organizing systems. He sat in front of the TV, watching the Simpsons, laughing at the funny pictures without realizing the joke was on him. Meanwhile, his Navel Academy began an analysis of the life and work of Marcel Proust. Then the lights went out.

This metaphor of the butterfly's wings triggering a storm far away for how unpredictable the world is, does not fly with me. Somehow most things seem to work in chunks and even though they interact with other chunks, it is not as though everything was equally connected. This means that something are much more likely than others to occur. That idea in the Asmiov Foundation series about being able to predict patterns of human behaviour until this freak comes along that messes things up. One is only one but it is still one. Maybe the blackout was a chaotic system.

My mustache was not even, the optician had the audacity to point out to me. He is a cheeky fellow who likes to make fun of his customers. Sometimes I have problems with symmetry. My wife starts laughing at a restaurant when she realizes that it is uneven. What is even? Do I need to measure it out with a ruler? What if the corners of my mouth are not equidistant from the middle of my head? And what is the middle of my head? I guess it's the philtrum, that rut where the flaps of my face grew together.

My Dad said they had enough stuff in the freezer so it still remained frozen over the twelve hours they were without power. Some said they liked being able to see the stars without so much light off the buildings. One realized that life without air conditioning was tolerable, that lots of electricity gets wasted without a thought. I am hopeful the blackout will push people to a greater understanding of how the world works and look for sustainable alternatives. A friend enjoyed the excuse not to do anything. Is electricity is the slave or the slave driver? Irrelevant question?

In this compost bin world, the source of energy was the heat from composting bacteria. A whole religion developed related to the balance of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and water. They have pipes through the piles. They live in dim light. They are sow bugs and they have a language of antennae clickings. They are integrated into their surroundings, they see all things as cycles and accept the impermanence of form. Maybe Buddhists would be good at composting. I know an extraordinary woman who doesn't kill things because of her beliefs and wrote a book about the critters in the garden.

We had these beds my Dad built, with the dresser built in underneath. It was not quite a bunk bed, the upper one hung over the lower one maybe like some kind of extreme cliff formation. When it was hot, I would sleep near the edge of the bed with my arm hanging out. One morning I found myself on the floor from having fallen out of the bed. I think before that we had the regular bunk beds and one of us was jumping up and down on the top bunk when it collapsed on somebody on the bottom.

A 50 year old woman got chomped by a shark while swimming off the coast of California. Officials think the shark mistook her for a seal. I'm sure she'd appreciate that on her obituary. In northern India, a pack of wolves ate six children. I guess this is more unusual than starving to death, so it makes the news. Keiko the killer whale prefers people. This must annoy all those who were so sure the whale would want to get away to freedom. And how many people will name their boy Keiko, later to discover it's a Japanese girl's name?

One of them weighed 420 pounds. That is probably bigger than anyone I have ever seen. But his opponent weighs 720 pounds. They run into each other. The smaller man actually won, by using technique a little more. I could incorporate their corpulence into something on simple machines. The importance of leverage. A female wrestler managed an impressive judo flip of a guy more than twice her size. She was pushing in one direction and he was resisting, then she suddenly turned, using his momentum to toss him over her hip. Something to remember in a situation with resistant minds.

The man is reading the info sheet. They don't get newspapers anymore just an electronic sheet that receives transmissions of press releases. They don't have journalists anymore, it's all just PR. Anyway, his wife has been keen on getting a robotic dog. You can choose the type and aspects of its personality. Will it know if you're away and so on. You have to feed the thing special food that it converts into batteries. And you have to pick up it's poop. That's considered a feature. These are non allergenic, but they are warm, soft, and have a fuzzy exterior.

The beagle woke one morning and realized he was realizing. Suddenly, chasing a stick no longer seemed enough. Receiving his bowl of chow at regular intervals could no longer be the highlight of his day. What else is there to life, he wondered. He set off on a quest, leaving his family without a note, since his consciousness had not included an ability to write in English. His paws probably would have thwarted that in any case. To experience life to the fullest, he explored alleyways in search of truth and in the coats of less fortunate, fleas to pick.

In Jung's memoirs, he talks about dreams he remembered from his childhood. I can't remember dreams from last night. L seems to remember dreams. I notice they fade quickly when the radio comes on. The news replaces them with death and destruction. Jung said Freud was more obsessed with being an authority than the pursuing truth. Jung claimed to be more concerned with truth than career advancement. Maybe that's my excuse. I'm not sure about his collective unconscious but the significance of symbols is intriguing. He was trying to be scientific but maybe the materials didn't lend itself to science.

It begins with the crew getting tense because of the extended void they are in. That could be an interesting existential quandary if you thought you might just be lingering in nothingness, wallowing in regret. Eventually they had to run into creatures and a commentary of making money at the expense of other life forms. Today I had a vague sense of unease. Perhaps I have too many loose ends at the moment, or I don't have anything lined up next. Maybe I need a bigger project to pull me through. This is tricky, always being responsible for my actions.

Why would someone make a computer virus or a worm? Such perverse malice. Maybe those affected can practice being less attached to information and urgency. And why does it take so long for people to figure out they have one of these things? Maybe that is a metaphor too. People going around wreaking havoc without realizing it. Perhaps the devil is God's hammer for building stronger people. If you believe in God, then you can believe anything. That could be good or bad. It does save you from making up your own purpose. Anyway, all this garbage mail is annoying.

Some native group in the American southwest sees a rabbit in the moon. The japanese also see this, although I think it's also hitting rice in a mortar. Is it an obvious thing to see a rabbit, or did those ancient peoples who crossed the Bering Strait bring it with them? I saw work by Ainu in northern Japan that reminded me of Haida black and red pieces. I mentioned this to a native guy. He said they were the ones who went to Asia. Memes, genes and coincidence make the path from the past to the present so complicated.

Among shards of morning light, flaking off that dish of a inky gelatin, near-black silhouettes of gulls sit waiting, one atop each of three pilings, for a waitress to bring breakfast. A half-tone mass of masts, a forest of boats, conference in the yacht club awaiting their admirals. Shadowy rectangles of downtown foreshadow lurid undulations of consenting slabs of meat and soft of lumps of mountain slip further and further away, into paler and paler washes. Then, without breakfast, the breathy waitress, pounds with purpose as dark sweat wells up from well packaged breasts, baiting her eddy with bittersweet imaginings.

Apparently, some people say they can sense they are being stared at. So this guy Sheldrake is trying to study it. He claims that people do detect being stared at more commonly than not. Skeptics dismiss the possibility without testing it. Good for him. But I think though he may not be using an appropriate statistical test if the decisions to look are not actually randomized. For example, if the person chose to say they were being stared at 100% of the time, but the starer stared 60% of the time, then they would be correct 60% of the time.

Suppose I were to write about how to use your brain, what would that involve? Attitude would be important. This is something perhaps people suppose just happens, but I think you can change your attitude. This is related to perception. The way you see things can affect your attitude. And imagination, the ability to imagine possible ways for things to turn out. So you can generate possibilities. Then you have to decide on them. This can be tricky. Part of it is logic. Some would be intuition. You need criteria, this would relate to values. Where do they come from?