No-Mind Tonight

The muse isn’t speaking to me particularly clearly tonight.  My mind is kind of nowhere right now.  Which, in a zen/yogic sense, is probably ideal.  My belly is full, my apartment is warm, Laila Jo and I are chilling and listening to one of my metal tribute to Metallica discs; I really can’t think of anything more for which to ask.

My friend Mike bought me a kitchen knife set for my 4th anniversary of not being a complete asshole.  It’s pretty sweet.  I’ve been cooking more lately, and I can’t begin to tell you how much easier it is to cut onions with an actual cleaver than it is to cut them with a big ass hunting knife.

I’m grateful for the Gratitude Drum Circle this past Saturday evening.  Quite a few people showed up, no drama ensued (to which I was privy, at least), I’m pretty sure everyone had a good time, and my apartment is cleaner and more organized than it has been in a while.

In order to have room to fit everyone, I had to put a lot of my (albeit “organized”) clutter away – I’m grateful for the abundant closet space in my attic-like apartment.  I bought a vacuum on Saturday; sweeping the cat fur off of the rug was becoming a full-time job.  I picked out a good vacuum cleaner from the new Target on Route 4, but didn’t look at the box I actually bought.  This one has a bag and is much bigger than I the one I was looking at.  I don’t really like vacuums with bags.  Maybe my mother, brother, or sister could use a new one.  In any case, the overall feng shui of my apartment has improved significantly since I put all my junk away.

Come to think of it, I also bought the wrong silkscreen ink on Saturday as well.  I needed black ink for the shirt I’m making for Jim Spaulding, and instead of picking up black fabric ink, I bought black acrylic ink.  The latter isn’t designed to be washable.  Pearl paint was all out of black fabric ink, and I really thought I found the last one – that’s what I get for being right-brained:  the words ‘fabric’ and ‘acrylic’ are awfully similar in a holistic sense.

As I was driving to the car wash on Sunday, I was thinking about the Gratitude Drum Circle of the night before and was – get this – overwhelmed by a feeling of gratitude.  Go figure.  Probably the coolest part about the experience was that it happened on a section of road upon which I drive to work every day.  So it happened again for me this morning.  I’m hoping this feeling continues whenever I drive over that particular bit of macadam.

Several people said they’d come back for another drum circle on the next full moon.  I wish I could figure out how to set up an audio link to the *.m4a file that Alli sent me with one of the drum circle grooves on it, but I can’t even get my media player to open it.  If anybody has any suggestions, let me know.  I’ll probably google it another time; I already did, but the conversion program I installed wants me to give them $39 for the year to make it work – which I’m not going to do.  I’m sure there’s a free way to do it, if I only look a bit harder.

Someone else put up a blog post about Star Wars characters on Twitter, so I posted the link to my list in the comments section.  My stats have been blowing up all day.  Which is good for my ego and (theoretically) my pocketbook – I’m going to guess that Google owes me about $5 for the ads over the past year.  I’m not going to bother checking; this blog isn’t that popular yet anyway.

So yeah, that’s pretty much it.  As I said, my mind isn’t anywhere in particular right now, and I kind of like that.  I’d like to spend some time setting up a separate directory and installing WordPress MU and Buddypress, but that’s going to take some time and stress, and I don’t feel like harshing my mellow right now.  I’m going to go practice my bass for a bit – I printed out the tablature for Jason Newstead’s bass solo at the Mexico City concert from the Binge & Purge boxed set.