Loud Loft

What, Me Worry? Dreams I'll Never See . . .

Just one more mornin'
I had to wake up with the blues
Pulled myself outta bed, yeah
Put on my walkin' shoes,
Went up on the mountain,
To see what I could see,
The whole world was fallin',
Right down in front of me.

[chorus]
cause I'm hung up on dreams I'll never see, yeah baby.
Ahh help me baby, or this will surely be the end of me, yeah.

Pull myself together, put on a new face,
Climb down off the hilltop, baby,
Get back in the race.

[chorus]

Pull myself together, put on a new face,
Climb down off the hilltop, baby,
Get back in the race.

[chorus]

Ok, it’s not Shakespeare or Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote or Kurt Vonnegut but I literally grew up listening to this song. It was the second track on side two of The Allman Brothers Band album (that was both the name of the album and the name of the band - they were either real economical with names or not very creative, I have to go with the former because . . . well, they sort of invented and dominated an entire genre of music). It was the longest song on the album at 7:19 and the music dominates the lyrics if you catch my drift.

They were known for stretching out a song. Considering that the live versions of Whipping Post clocked in at 22:53 and Mountain Jam ran 33:39 you just have to believe that for the brothers, it is was more about the music than the words. That’s ok with me and it seemed to work ok for the Grateful Dead and later for a little band from Vermont called Phish.

But anyway . . .

One of the more interesting side effects of this medicine that I’m taking is vivid dreams. Now I couldn’t find that specific terminology listed as a side effect but I’m certain the Doctor who gave me the prescription used those words . . . and if she didn’t, well it makes a much better story if she did, so there.

So, either way, I’ve been having the most vivid dreams lately, including the one that centers on the mythology that if you die in your dream . . . you will die right then in real life. I’m here to dispute that myth.

I won’t go into the whole dream sequence because, well it’s dream and most of it didn’t make much #$%&* sense. The end of the dream found me in a very tall building looking out over the city. I had to be at least 20+ stories in the air. There was a beast (let’s call it a lion) that was roaming the floors inflicting the most excruciating pain as it found people in it’s path. It wasn’t roaring or tearing them limb from limb or anything that you might expect an angry lion to do. In fact, it was quite nonchalant as it wandered around, but when it found you . . . it was bad, real bad.

To save a bunch of folks the agony and suffering at the hands of this beast I had convinced them to hop on this trolley (remember this is a dream so it doesn’t have to make sense) and had steered it thru a window causing everybody to plummet to their death 20 stories below.

Seriously, compared to the horror, suffering and pain that the lion was handing out, falling that distance to a quick splat at the end was a merciful option.

I was still standing at the now shattered window (for some reason I had jumped off the trolley right before it crashed thru) and watched the lion as it ambled towards me. I turned to face the skyline thru the open window and stepped off the edge.

As I fell, I leaned back to the point that all I could see was the blue sky above me and the sides of the buildings on either side slipping by as I rushed towards the ground.

I thought how beautiful the sky was and wondered what I would feel when I hit. And. Then. Bang. Everything went black as I felt the first feeling of impact with the concrete. The first thing I thought was “wow, that didn’t hurt at all. I guess the impact was so severe and sudden that my passing from consciousness to  . . . well, whatever it was I was feeling now was so sudden that I didn’t really have time to feel anything at all. Mercy.

Remember, I’m still asleep and dreaming. I didn’t wake up just before I hit. I didn’t wake up just after I hit. I kept right on dreaming.

The first shock was the sense of peace. I thought “this is it? This is what dead feels like? What the #@$% is everybody so afraid of? This is nice.”

I didn’t see any bright lights or hear trumpets or find myself staring into the face of God and much to my dismay . . . I woke up right about then.

Here’s the deal. I believe in God. I believe in Jesus. I believe in Heaven. I believe that Hell is, at least, separation from God. So maybe I had to wake up right then because I wasn’t dead. Maybe it was just my vivid imagination (and I do have one) picking plot lines and story elements from the storehouse of movies, books and shows I’ve seen over the last 51+ years and weaving all those parts together to entertain me while I was sleeping.

I don't have a clue. I don’t care.

What I came away with was that death is not the end of things, it’s how you get to the next thing. I believe that next thing for me is community with God and that even my most vivid imagination and all the most vivid imaginations of all of the most creative minds in the world all gathered together in one place will not be able to describe it.

So - I will leave you with these words from brother Gregg Allman.

Pull myself together, put on a new face,
Climb down off the hilltop, baby,
Get back in the race.

Preach it Gregg. The living is in the race . . .

OPM vs MM (opium vs eminem)

Nope - it’s not about drugs, candy or troubled white rappers from Detroit. It’s about a philosphy of dealing with money, cold hard cash, credit, assets, moola, whatever.

Until a little over two years ago the company I worked for was owned by a very large media conglomerate in New York City. They bought the company from the original owners (and stock holders) for $422,000,000 in 1996. Ten years later they wrote it off and pretty much gave it away to the company that owns it know. For those ten years we operated on OPM . . . also known as “Other Peoples Money”.

We pretty much blew thru millions of dollars in those ten years - it was lots of fun.

Of course the down side was that we also pretty much ran the company into the ground - not so much fun now that we look back at it . . . The lucky folks who picked up the pieces got a great facility, lots of content and a #$%*@ load of debt, payroll and failing equipment.

That’s when the MM comes into play . . . also known now as My Money. We went from having our NYC Daddy pay the rent to having to pay it ourselves and there was this little problem of cash flow. The problem was that the cash flowed out faster than it flowed in and that’s been pretty much the way it’s been for the last couple of years.

Also, just about this time last year, the BB (that’s the Beautiful Bride) and I began planning the start up of her Personal Training business, FIT by Design. That was a grand adventure - sort of like a colonoscopy in some regards but it worked out quite nicely in the end (pun intended).

It did require lots of hard decision on what to spend our money on, how much to go into debt and lots and lots of considering what was the best use of, wait for it . . . MM (of course it’s really not my money - for that matter it’s really more the banks and credit card companies money, we’re just paying them to use it for a while and in the grander scheme of things it’s all God’s and He’s just letting us use it so He can see what kind of stewards we are with His $#%&)

But work with me on the MM concept for moment since as far as the bank is concerned Lisa and I are the ones ultimately responsible for the money.

Where this concept runs into resistance is from folks at work who still seem to think that we are hooked on OPM and from the occasional instance at FIT by Design when folks don’t quite get that every dollar spent has to make at least a dollar back just to break even . . . and actually, as long as we are paying off debt (which will not go away for awhile) every dollar spent had to make itself back several times over.

It’s been interesting as we see the dawning of realization on the face of friends and coworkers that this is how we are supposed to look at money. Basically, it’s learning to be responsible stewards of what God has given you . . . and if you aren’t, no one’s going to bail you out.

The last couple of years at work have been very hard but it’s been a good hard in that there has been a seasoning of the folks who remain. The last year of getting FIT by Design off the ground has taught Lisa and I that the best thing for us to do is thank God for what we have, dedicate it to Him and try to not screw it up . . . He really will take care of all the rest.

Why we can’t see God

So I’m at this conference this week in Palm Springs (yeah, boo hoo for me).The first afternoon is the guy who “wrote the book” (no, seriously, he wrote the book) on image display devices . . . that would be TV’s and video projectors to you.

I’ve heard this guy speak a number of times in the past and he’s actually quite fascinating, very entertaining and I am able to continue my life long goal of being the dumbest guy in the room whenever I go to one of his presentations. . .

The first time I heard him speak he talked about the physical properties of the human eye, how there are three different types of “cones” in the eye and how they respond to color but the “rods” in the eye don’t care about color but are all about how much light they are getting (rods are what your eye is using in the dark to stumble around the room when the light is out - the cones are taking a break because all they care about is amount and type of color in the room). If you’re they guy when it comes to writing the book about image display devices it helps to understand what makes the eye tick . . . ok, the eye doesn’t tick - whatever.

This time he’s talking about how the eye tracks movement and follows motion. Of course he goes into how all the different types of TV’s that you can buy actually display movement and how the eye responds to these varying formats.

During the presentation a guy in the audience (not me - remember, I’m the dumbest guy in the room) asks the question “Does the eye process image movement and perform image tracking determined by the movement of the eye itself or by the movement of the object it’s viewing”?

In his answer the speaker told of an experiment that had been done. Remember those little slide viewers? The kind that is a little plastic box with a plastic screen, a battery operated light and a little slot on the top for the slide to drop into? Got that image? Now imagine one smaller than the rubber eraser on the end of a pencil. Now imagine it glued to an eyeball . . .

We know have an image that can be viewed (when we turn the little light on) that tracks in perfect synchronization with a human eye. Besides the obvious situation of having something glued to your eye - this relationship between image and eye does not normally occur in nature. Our eye’s are constantly moving even when we try to keep them still. In most cases our environment around us is constantly moving even when it seems still (there are some exceptions but they are relatively rare in our day to day life).

So, what happens when the researchers turned on the little slide projector? What did the subject see?

For a brief instant - the subject saw the image . . . and then it disappeared.

It seems that - even though everyone (including the subject) can clearly see that the object is clearly in his line of sight - the image is not there . . .

We are wired in such a way that when an object is moving in perfect sync with us - our brain can not process it’s image. Only when that object chooses to “step out of sync” can it be seen. We can’t step out of sync with it - no matter how hard we try, it’s always there . . .

I love when we find truth and we aren’t even looking for it.