Fourth Day of eBay Determinations:


Auction of the Day: Playmobil Circus Carnage

Susan and I are having major deja vu. Neither of us knows why. Perhaps we wauctioned out belongings on eLay 100000000000000000000000000000000000 existence cycles ago. Or perhaps we're suffering from sleep deprivation.

Sleep schedule:
1st night: 6 hours
2nd night: 6 hours
3rd night: 4 hours

I feel like I did when I stayed at Wat Tam Wua Forest Monastery during the 2003 Thai dry season, except that here I'm plugging away for hours and hours posting auctions instead of sitting in a dark cave. I am experiencing the same feeling of non-self. Selflessness, almost. Not that I'm being altrustic. I'm not. As Susan says, this is like "all the birthdays and Christmases of our lives rolled into one reverse Christmas."

You can imagine a "sell all your childhood posessions eBay auction" all you want, but until you actually do it, you don't know what it's like. By the time you're rolling around on the living room floor in the middle of the night, there's no one to feel pain. Or at least no one to feel the cat licking the head.




We sold our first item today. It was a one-day Halloween fun auction. It should have sold for more than $1, but some lady in Canton Michigan should be happy with her 3 Halloween-themed Beanie Babies. *Shudder*


Here are two pictures: Left, Susan's boyfriend, Dash Rendar with his ship the Outrider. Right, a giant Playmobil model, our auction bread 'n' butter. Just where do my sham wife's allegiances lie? The flirt.

And as if what I already posted isn't bad enough, here's something that will forever keep me from being elected senator of anything.

Riding High the Glut of American Consumer Culture:
Or, How My Sham Wife and I Liquidated Our Childhoods on Ebay
Day One:

Wanna help Susan and me get overland to South America this fall/winter? You can help us lighten our loads by surfing on over to our

AUCTION SITE

page. There, as the auctions are posted over the next week, you'll find a highly collectible array of Star Wars, Simpsons, vintage toys and Disney collectibles, and Nintendo memorabilia. You'll also find 1940's playbills, comics, coins, non-sport cards, and more nutcrackers than you have nuts to crack (if we ever find them in the attic).


We sure would appreciate you stopping by. And if you bid up the auctions and end up not really wanting what you've bid on, we'll just donate the item to charity and keep the change.

We're even auctioning off a date with our good friends, Doctors Ooter and Martha McHaggis. Those two lovable Scotts will traveling with your narrators Joshua and Susan on their way to the Brazilian Amazonia. If you're somewhere along their proposed route from Michigan to the West coast of the United States to the Yucatan to Central America, you just keep your eyes peeled for your chance at having dinner with two cheerful James Joyce scholars from Saint Andrews University, Scotland. A chance not to be missed!

Happy bidding!

A Short Hypothetical Conversation:
Couldn't Let This Go Without First Telling You.

My friend Tom wrote this to me in an email:

The following short discussion of meditation comes from The Way of the Peaceful Warrior by modern philosopher Dan Millman.

I'm keeping a dream journal and reading a book about dreams. A few nights ago, I dreamed two vivid nightmarish realities, and had written an exposition of them both. But the next night, I had dreams about a nurturing being in the body of an old girlfriend and a fantastic, other-worldly sunset. I felt intrigued that I had had two nightmarish dreams, followed by some wonderful heavenly experiences. Today I read this passage:

Here is the passage from the excellent tale "that changes lives":

“Socrates, how do I do it? How do I open myself to this light of awareness?”
“Well,” he asked, answering a question with a question, “what do you do when you want to see?”
I laughed. “I look! Oh, you mean meditation, don’t you?”
“Yep!” he answered. “And here’s the core of it,” he said as he finished cutting the vegetables. “There are two simultaneous processes: One is insight—the willing of attention, the channeling of awareness to focus precisely on what you want to see. The other process is surrender—letting go of all arising thoughts. That is real meditation; that is how you cut free of the mind.”
“And, I just happen to have a story along these lines:

A student of meditation was sitting in deep silence with a small group of practitioners. Terrified by a vision of blood, death, and demons, he got up, walked to the teacher, and whispered, ‘Roshi, I’ve just had horrible visions!’
‘Let it go,’ said his teacher.
A few days late, he was enjoying some fantastic erotic fantasies, insights into the meaning of life, with angels and cosmic decoration—the works.
‘Let it go,’ said his teacher, coming up behind him with a stick and giving him a whack.”

I laughed at the story and said, You know Soc, I’ve been thinking…” Socrates gave me a whack on the head with a carrot, saying, “Let it go!”

I miss that crazy crabdaddy. Drawing by Greggory McKeighan, aka Greg Stovetop, Ann Arbor singer/songwriter/cosmos-in-a-person.

from the back of this drawing:
He moves with sea waves
far and wide
most definitely
impulsively
crazy
crabdaddy

Faith Vs. Belief

Faith is something very different from belief. Belief is the systematic taking of unanalyzed words much too seriously. Paul's words, Mohammed's words, Marx's words, Hitler's words--people take them too seriously, and what happens? What happens is the senseless ambivalence of history--sadism versus duty, or (incomparably worse) sadism as duty; devotion counterbalanced by organized paranoia; sisters of charity selflessly tending the victims of their own church's inquisitors and crusaders. Faith, on the contrary, can never be taken too seriously. For Faith is the empiracally justified confience in our capacity to know who in fact we are, to forget the belief-intoxicated Manichee in Good Being. Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief.

From Island, section III of the fictional island's underlying principles: "Notes on What's What" by Aldous Huxley, 1962

Now Here's an Ann Arbor Personality!
Galaxor Nebulon (aka Ryan Hughes) Sings His Brain Anatomy Songs
Ann Arbor, Michigan

Your narrator ran into his old buddy Galaxor at a party. He sang three songs and we recorded them. Now you can download all three of them--for free! All in one small file!

Download the songs.

When I first met Ryan Hughes, he was a writer for the University of Michigan's Gargoyle Humor Magazine. He always seemed to be hanging around the MIchigan Daily when I was there as an undergraduate. The Gargoyle is on the first floor of the Student Publications Building, so he'd just walk upstairs and hang out in the news room. Some of you may know him by his pranks, like the kid who tried change his name to Galaxor Nebulon. Here's what he wrote about that on his website:

I tried to have my name legally changed for the year 2000, to Galaxor Nebulon. I thought it would be funny, but apparently the Honorable Judge Thomas L. Brown Presiding disagreed ("I don't think fun [said with such derisiveness!] is a good enough reason to change your name. [sound of gavel banging]"). Ever since then, I've thought of filing an appeal, or trying to have my name changed to The Honorable Judge Thomas L. Brown Presiding, but I haven't felt like rustling up the $150 that it takes to appear in court again. *sigh*.

Nebulon ran for the Michigan Student Assembly (U of M's student government) with the F.R.A.T. (Friends Rebelling Against Tyranny) Party. You can read a write-up of the 1999 MSA elections and the FRAT Party by that young arch-conservative lizard, JJ Wilson.

Ryan got into trouble when he spray painted the signs of homophobic preacher Fred ("god hates fags) Phelps when the Kansan's mob descended on Ann Arbor with their hatred and lawyers. As Ryan says,

I was also involved in a little hullaballoo in which the University tried to punish me under its little laws for activist activities I was involved in. I'm sick of talking about it, but suffice it to say that Unjust Authority + Hearing + Clown Suit = Charges Dropped! (with a lot of help from a lot of people, thanks!).

Mr. Hughes wrote these songs on his day off while doing some yard work.

Here's that link to the songs again.

Another Evening At Arbor Vitae:
Might As Well Feed it to the Mantis
Ann Arbor, Michigan

Here, for the first time! In ear-shattering 32kbps wav format, it's Arbor Vitae's latest chart-topping Olde Time Hit, "Might as Well Feed it to the Mantis"--LIVE!

The mantis, guarding her egg sack like any good mother, has already eaten the father of her young, over 4 dozen crickets, five batteries, and...as you're about to hear...much, much more.


Download "Might as Well Feed it to the Mantis" (9 minutes 50 seconds)
Meet the Composers Shaun and Sharon.