While reading the morning paper, I noted that the local seniors activity hall was welcoming members now 40 and up. It appeared as if while 30 was the new 20 somehow within just a decade 40 weathered into the new senior. No gratis bus pass or early retirement specials but nonetheless in the view of this hall at least graduating into a sort of novice eldership.

While it was hard to imagine some of my skateboarding, video game playing, facebook addicted 40+ peer group being satisfied with the bridge and table tennis on offer, it certainly gave pause to readdress the conundrum of the middle years. It was also a rather bemusing affront to the botox injecting, teeth whiting aspirations of my forever young generation.

While age was a state of mind in many regards, and lord knows I've often felt older than many of my peers, I wasn't ready to sign up just yet, after all I'm almost but still not quite old enough (and it's nice to be too young for some things). It made me wonder what 40 year olds would welcome the seniors membership card in their wallets.

One of the most co-creative, capitalist savy painter of the modern age, Mark Kostabi launches a new game show where art critics and celebraties title his paintings for cash awards.
http://titlethis.com

Why do I love this and what Kostabi in his lustrous career of factory art has achieved. In the face of art crowd pretension and judgment of the unlimited "beholders" all that is sacred gets priced and sold in multitude. In the wake of Warhol, Kostabi's shameless reverence and affront to contemporary views of artist originality, he gleefully begets the question, as any modern artist worth their salt should, is this art. First paying people to paint like him, generate Kostabi ideas and add to his name on an hourly wage, he has now turned titling his paintings into a cash rewards game show. Kostabi rubs nose and dollar bills in the art world and manages to do it famously, artistically and lucratively.

The first thing people ask me when I tell them we've gone to a zero waste household is what does that mean. The immediate follow-up is, does that include recycling? Well we'd definitely have some serious trouble if it didn't. So a zero waste household is a household with no garbage can. Thus no magic garbage faeries to come whisk away our "waste" once a week. No more out of sight out of mind with our twenty-first century disposable realities. And yes, this does mean getting super serious about recycling.

Zero waste is about embodying the whole triple R threat - Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. Granted our society is currently really big on the last one, the first two being a little under-supported in their invariably anti-capitalist practice; however, zero waste is kind of an all encompassing life style shift that has begun to alter how I relate to material objects. Things that used to get tossed in my garbage can now sit on my dry rack, packaging taken apart, wrappers and tubs cleaned and made in good enough shape for the mixed plastic bin at the recycling depot - a place where my initial zero waste endeavor started four weeks ago.

OK, so my roomie, Miss Bliss, and I talked it over last weekend and we decided as a household to take on the zero waste challenge. Inspired by a recent article in Ascent Magazine detailing one woman's waste free odyssey, it made me think it's time to take my environmental consciousness to the next level. So I have been doing my research, which mostly consisted at re-looking at what the f**k I was throwing in the garbage, and paying a visit to the local recycling depot to have a long chat about what they accepted, and what they didn't. It turned out in this day and age you could recycle quite a bit.

Already a low waste household, about one shopping bag every 2 weeks, our little cabin here at Latimers End seemed the perfect candidate to raise the bar on sustainability. Surely we, if anyone, had a good chance of doing away with our weekly trash pick-up. Certainly we could be using the can for other things. Already I'm thinking it would be a great robust vessel to mix up manure tea for the garden in, but welcome suggestions. One day it will certainly be a blog post all it's own - 101 Things To Do With A Garbage Can: Besides Throwing Garbage In It.

On FAITH

Faith is a state of openness or trust. To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float. And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of holding on. In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all. Instead they are holding tight. But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.

Today a good friend bemused about future hopes and dreams on her private blog, which unsually consists of no more than a few inspirational words - an almost virtual blog haiku - mostly directed at transformational potential. The responses mainly consisted of a few light-hearted quips, but amongst them was a little gem that deserves to roll on further into the blogosphere.

“I’m trying to trick all my hopes and fears into the same bag where, like matter and anti-matter, they will annihilate each other in a brilliant flash and free massive amounts of energy.”

Thank-you Will for that flas

the greatest martial arts are the gentlest. they allow an attacker to fall down. the greatest generals do not rush into every battle. they offer the enemy many opportunities to make self~defeating errors.

the greatest administrators do not achieve production through constraints and limitations. they provide opportunities.

good leadership consists of motivating people to their highest by offering them opportunities, not obligations.

that is how things happen naturally. life is an opportunity and not an obligation.

~the leadership of tao (book)

It’s all about being mindful.
No matter where you are, what you do.
Simple or complex,
presence is to be mindful.

Of what you do,
pay attention,
to detail and
sensation,
inhale through every pore.

In the breath of this attention,
requiring the broadest of mind
and most enduring focus,
arrives the no mind.
In analysis to awareness,
the conscious is lost.

The me thinking about me,
imaging the contortions of my future,
putting myself in what if,
placing myself there and then,
when here there is simply the action.

The dance of gravity’s receptacle,
where sight to mind

How neutral I feel about most things.

I’ve always leaned this way despite my verbosity
and full-bodied expressiveness
- in love with much-
impassioned over a chosen few,
and completely neutral about most things.

but when I lean other ways too
I remember
Life is short.

How may times can it be said.
Life is full of suffering or sin
if you ask a holy man or lover.
It’s full of joy
and weighted
with so much hunger.

Of course you can be free
from it at all times
unattached to the way
you felt yesterday.
Live in
the eternity of the moment.
holding no expecta

Well I’m all about the dual desktop right now, How ever you can configure it. Two screens just fell into my lap, and voila I ‘d say quadrupal productivity.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/20/technology/20basics.html?ei=5090&en=6f…