Garble! Garble!

I realize I haven't been saying very much on here lately. I guess I'm kind of off words these days (see playlist at right). They just seem so cheap and insidious, the way they distort experience to fit it into their neat little packages. "Words all fail the magic prize," as Gordon Gano says. To which I reply, "When sober girls around me, they be ackin' like they drunk."

I will tell you, though, that I've been working like a maniac over here, sometimes 12 or 14 hours a day. There's one giant project for Acadia that's been going on for awhile, an historical journal that's nearly complete now, and no shortage of other smaller jobs. New clients keep coming out of the woodwork too. I actually had to send one to someone else recently.

It seems like a bad idea to complain about having too much work as a freelancer, so I won't. But just to paint a picture of how it's been lately, there are days when I can't afford 20 minutes to take a shower, and sometimes I can't even find time to eat until well into the afternoon. My back went out three weeks ago because I spend so much time hunched over in front of a computer, stressed out, and don't get any exercise. It (the back) is slowly getting better, but is still not great.

There's light at the end of the tunnel with this mountain of work, though. The Acadia project will be finishing up on Monday, and then I can get caught up on everything else. Then we're vacating to Jenny and Tom's cottage on PEI for the entire second week of August. At least that's the plan... I haven't actually emailed them to confirm that recently. That's still OK, right guys? Heh.

Meanwhile, I'll try to stay on friendly enough terms with language to let you know of any important and/or interesting developments in our lives. And sometime soon I'll get around to the third and final installment in my atheistic-empiricism-is-mistaken-to-dismiss-mystical-experience-as-meaningless rant. To keep some spark of interest going, here are some words-as-pointers from J. Krishnamurti:

"Consciously or unconsciously, surreptitiously or openly, one begins to inquire into the purpose of life, and each one receives an answer from the so-called specialists. The artist, if you ask him what is the purpose of life, will tell you that it is self-expression through painting, sculpture, music, or poetry; the economist, if you ask him, will tell you that it is work, production, cooperation, living together, functioning as a group, as a society; and if you ask the religionist he will tell you the purpose of life is to seek and realize God, to live according to the laws laid down by teachers, prophets, saviors, and that by living according to their laws and edicts you may realize that truth which is God. Each specialist gives you his answer about the purpose of life, and according to your temperament, fancies, and imagination you begin to establish these purposes, these ends, as your ideals.

"Such ideals and ends have become merely a haven of refuge because you use them to guide and protect yourself in this turmoil. So you begin to use these ideals to measure your experiences, to inquire into the conditions of your environment. You begin without the desire to understand or fulfill, merely to inquire into the purpose of environment; and in discovering that purpose, according to your conditioning, your preconceptions, you merely avoid the conflict of living without understanding."

- Being Vulnerable to Truth, 1934