We salute at the threshold of the North Sea
in my mind
And a nod to the boredom that drove me here
to face the tide and swim
(Whoaaaa) I swim (Whoaaa) oh swim (Whoaaa)

Dip the toe in the ocean. Oh how it hardens and it numbs.
And the rest of me is a version of man
built to collapse into crumbs
And if I hadn’t come down
To the coast to disappear
I may have died in a land-slide
Of the rocks, the hopes and fears.

So swim until you can’t see land.
Swim until you can’t see land.
Swim until you can’t see land
Are you a man or are you a bag of sand?
Swim until you can’t see land
Swim until you can’t see land
Swim until you can’t see land
Are you a man or are you a bag of sand?

Up to my knees now, do I wait? Do I dive?
The sea has seen my like before though it’s my first
And perhaps last time.
Let’s call me a baptist, call this the drowning of the past
She’s there on the shoreline
Throwing stones at my back

So swim until you can’t see land
Swim until you can’t see land
Swim until you can’t see land
Are you a man or are you a bag of sand?
Swim until you can’t see land
Swim until you can’t see land
Swim until you can’t see land
Are you a man or are you a bag of sand?

Now the water’s taller than me
And the land is a marker line
All I am is a body adrift in water, salt and sky

So swim until you can’t see land
Swim until you can’t see land
Swim until you can’t see land
Are you a man or are you a bag of sand?
Swim until you can’t see land
Swim until you can’t see land
Swim until you can’t see land
Are you a man or are you a bag of sand?

http://www.frightenedrabbit.com/

Easy to take this all for granted. Breathing. Walking. Seeing. Feeling. Any sense. Pick one. And it’s even easier to stroll through this whole thing blind to the possibility that this may just very well all be some dream. We know nothing about what any of us are doing here.

In the meantime, we find things to make it about: for some, it’s about love and a sense of belonging. For many it appears to be money and fame. That’s surprising, isn’t it? Celebrity only seems to present new problems. It doesn’t change anything. It steals privacy, creates further issues with identity, but doesn’t provide any solutions for this singular dilemma. Nothing does.

So I am writing this to myself.

When people die, people close to us, it kindles something. What is that feeling? It makes me calm, reminds me of our connectivity to everything. It may be morbid, but I am oddly comforted by that loneliness, walking around in that stupor. Pleased to be again so intimately conscious that we have no control over any of this schwack. I am at peace within the moments of tragedy in a way I cannot be to quite the same degree otherwise. i don’t need anything in those times. I’m not hungry or thirsty. I’m not tired. I just seem to be picking up some signal that can’t be known coming from somewhere, everywhere. Call it shock if you want. There’s something more going on there, something unseen that has properties. As if ocean waves generate this frequency that we haven’t even considered the possibility of, or clouds being ghosts that have trapped themselves here, not having let go of their lives here on Earth yet. I laugh at what we think we know. Even if it is correct, it is always, ALWAYS, only the tip of the iceberg.

We can buy this, travel there, pretend to be this or that but it doesn’t help.

As Vonnegut used to say:

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.”

Are we evolving closer or further away from this awareness? What are the advantages of each? Disadvantages?

What could this awareness do for us? Is it important?

Does it change how we treat each other? Ourselves?

Do we care?

Mark Oehlert, an acquaintance of mine via Twitter, turned me onto his friend Phil Dodds, who turns out was not only in the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but contributed a great deal to our culture in his short life, including, but not limited to, SCORM:

From Wikipedia:

He was the chief architect of the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) under the guidance of the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative, a project of the United States Department of Defense. The ADL SCORM is widely perceived as a means to achieve interoperability, accessibility and reuse of the component pieces of web-based instruction, irrespective of Learning Management Systems. Philip’s work on SCORM will continue as hundreds of organizations around the world continue their collective efforts to resolve remaining issues associated with SCORM’s Simple Sequencing Models, such as a lack of common instructional strategies and taxonomies (common definitions) for learning objects.

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This was posted on the forsaken FriendFeed this a.m.

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We knew him, we loved him and, especially with a remake of The Prisoner in development, we will miss him.

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