Way back, this morning....

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Morning, Coffee, Wooden Feather & Origami Cicada

#Amwriting - An Open Love Letter, in Four Movements

1st Movement: Questions in the Dark

Somewhere in 2010, I think: Browsing through Twitter, reading about writing, trying to catch up on a craft, on an art-form, a life - remembering some words - "So short the life, so long the Craft to learn" - William Morris. I follow one person, I follow another, through The Fog that is this life, this mind, and eventually somehow I stumble upon @Johannaharness and #AmWriting. She wrote something I really liked, and I @replied her to the effect that although I wasn't a "real writer", only writing my little blog, that I appreciated that thing she said.

I didn't really expect a reply. I mean Real writers like someone who could write the Claire Morgaine stories wouldn't be responding to me right? Especially after having just read a scathing post by another writer about unless we "posers and wannabes" had paid our dues(to the degree that she had) we were "Fucking Well NOT writers!"

Oh.So.Wrong. Not only did Johanna respond, she admonished me to stop thinking that misguided way because "Blog Writers ARE writers".
And then she showed me #AmWriting. (Que: Sun breaking through clouds)

I knew myself then, as I know myself now, vaguely, to be "much the same, but wholly Other", and my general theme is still often Sheryl Crow, On the Outside. A haunting tune for a haunted mind.


2nd Movement: Awakening the Dream

Winter Two Thousand and Ten, early Two Thousand Eleven - I gradually fell in with the "wrong" crowd. You know, writers, musicians, artists and other Bohos of that general ilk. Yahoo! Now we're having FUN! Did a lot of therapy. Took a lot of pills. Gave up the masque of "normalcy" I'd been not so successfully sporting for so many years and started embracing the Madness and the Fog. Turns out I'm not Mad, yet, just "not like the other boys & girls", and we're all in the Fog sometimes, I just more than most perhaps.

And somewhere in there, through the kind and gentle guidance of Johanna and her band of literary Merry Pranksters within #AmWriting and without, I've begun to develop a voice that I'm not ashamed of, that I'm comfortable having and being. I've come to learn that I'm less Other and more the Same than I thought. This through, dare I say it from within my badger hole, Sharing. Sharing real life stuff to a surprising depth. Being allowed in to know my new friends deal with many head and heart pains similar to mine.

A trust and sense of community and support have become part of that experience for me in a way I have not had craft-wise in many years. Getting in touch with the flow, as it were, learning to be comfortable with the joys and pains of being me, being we. To that end, "let us Pray" - Sarah Mclachlan, Witness



3rd Movement: Slammin' the thing, Hearing #TheRING

Here I am. All INFJ, Random abstract, Get Those Meds Balanced, Onward Through the Fog, Ta-Tonka Boy in the Sea Cave, Two a.m. Wow, "Love is the Drug for Me" - #AmWriting once again.

#Iam a Loon
Honeymoon in June
It's a thing
It's a thing
Can you hear #TheRING?
It's JUST a THING we use
All payin' our Dues.

Nobody get's out of This Place alive,
but what they must have learnt to strive
And Someone here be singin' The Blues

It's Johanna, Kristina, It's Kerry and Bill
It's Jack and Jill went up the Hill
It's a thing
It's a thing
It's JUST a THING
Are you tellin' me
you can't hear #TheRING?

- And then I hear My #AmWriting theme: Stevie Windwood - Spencer Davis Group GIMME SOME LOVIN'(Every day) 1967



4th Movement: In this New Space.

I could spend all day reading all the great stuff on #AmWriting. But I can't. I've got a lot of sifting to do, here in my head. I've fallen in with another "bad" crowd. The Poets, the #Haiku cookers and addicts of the #Twitterverse too numerous to name here, but I will say, much of the fault for the velocity of my decent in poetry lies with @Moondustwriter and @Coyotesings from over at @Onestopoetry .

As I write here from my comfy sofa, ancient and venerable laptop aboard the "we had a toddler" Ikea coffee table, I look across the room. There is a focal point, a centering place. I keep there bits and pieces, mementos of special times, significant objects and totems of power: the abacus I brought back from Hong Kong in 1976, the miniature book of original Edward Curtis Indian photos, my first Hard copy of a William Gibson book, A hand blown glass gee-gaw from Multnomah Falls, Bear Totem, Glass box of Cannon Beach, and there now at the front, from last April's #Tweetup at Powell's with my #AmWriting "Gang of Six", my County Line pin to go with my copy of Bill @bcmystery Cameron's last book of the same title - And my #AmWriting pin.

And now I'm like that guy in the old song by the Band, "and when they get to the end, he want's to start all over again".The Band, Stage-fright, from Martin Scorsese's THE LAST WALTZ

A Very Happy Birthday to #Amwriting! The next stop on our tour is at the home of Linda Poitevin

The Compass the Binnacle & the Three Legged Dog

Today's post, about writing whether I feel qualified or not, is a guest post done at the most kind invitation of my friend Johanna Harness. You can read it over at Amwriting. If you write, and you don't know Amwriting.org, do yourself a treat & get over there. So much to see, so many fine writers and fine people. On twitter, my main online addiction, you can follow Johanna as @Johannaharness and @amwriting as well, you get it.

Stackin Rocks or How Twitter Changed my Life

Click on the title to go where this is posted - Amwriting.org

I'm very happy to be part of the Amwriting community.

The Thing about Aaron

Today my post for Autism Awareness Month is a guest post over at Leslie @moondustwriter Moon's blog. They tell me it's a poem. I guess I did steer it that way. The most big real thing I've written about in a while, I think. Also, It was meant to be an account of This is what it's like Just on the Edges of the Autistic Spectrum. P.S. I think the best book I still have ever read about autism is Elizabeth Moon's (no relation?) Fiction novel The Speed of Dark.

Thanks Leslie!

@moondustwriter Leslie Moon

"The Thing about Aaron" #autism http://nblo.gs/hg6th @BarnestormJohn

I've been thinking some more(Yeah, some of us are incorrigible that way)

I was procrastinating, rebelling against actually writing. (I mean today, specifically, those other times don't count in this)

This is where it's gonna start to get weird, perhaps a little hard to follow, cause I thought of something else.

That's the first point, a given, if you will, in this little reality we're sharing on this screen/page between us. "Then, I thought of something else" may be a reoccurring break or apparent change in topic in this post.

Cause why, you may ask? Aw, go ahead, ask, please? Ok, cause even though I know readers are used to, and expect any thing dubbed "thinking" to be presented as one cohesive, preferably coherent bit, that's not how I think. Is that really how other people think? Amazing.


So I understand that, I really do. I try to do that for us here most of the time A) To get some real, understood communication done between our minds and B) because if it gets too convoluted(possibly like this) then readers will throw up their hands, shake their heads, perhaps mutter something like"Geez John, perhaps a little less Mental here?" and move on.

Despite that, this post is going to be...Ahem -

"EXTENDED TRAIN OF THOUGHT
AND YES,
STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS ...
... STUFF."

That is after all, how we all experience things, isn't it?
Today, I tell it like it happened to me folks.
There really will be a point or two by the end, I promise.


"keep your arms legs inside the ride at all times please, until we come to a full and complete stop".

Reading about String Theory in physics again, warming up to searching about Leonard Susskind, the Plumber Physicist's theory about a holographic projection of the ENTIRE UNIVERSE(ok, what warrants all caps more than the ENTIRE UNIVERSE?) - Projected that is, on the inner(?) surface of, yes, the ENTIRE UNIVERSE itself. Everything that ever happened? All at once of course, or well, the Universe wouldn't be acting in that decidedly charmingly goofy way of doing/being exactly what you wouldn't expect it to be coming up with next.(Yes, supposedly there is, may be, an inner surface or membrane to the outside of the Universe. More mind warping theoretical stuff.)

And yes, it's kinda like that last paragraph that way.

So, everything that Was or Is or as they say, Yet Shall Be - has a twin holographic double, way out there, yes Virginia, Across the Universe.(remember, that's the ENTIRE UNIVERSE). Morgan Freeman says(yeah, he got this started) - "While we think we're all here, that this is all happening, here in this 3 dimentional reality, there's another reality - everything on the surface of the Universe out there " - But what are the other we out there, in the holographic projection version of reality, thinking about it?

At this point, I decided to go out on the patio and smoke a cigarette about all this. I usually go out, light up, and pace. And I look to the sky, always, to watch the world turn or the clouds blow, and think.

This time I sat down.

Well that was certainly different. "Really John, sitting down was different than standing? Imagine that." - aside - "It's gonna be one of Those days".

It was. Way - Different.

Just that little bit of difference in visual perspective made my yard, my world, more private, more quiet - closer to still. It became slower, and lower in it's intensity. That's a good thing for me. Less intensity in my perceptions is sometimes - a good thing.

Something moved. Ok, obviously about a ba-jillion things moved, all around and in and out of the whole scene. I mean Something. Moved.

Back inside, (how's that for some head-O-logical cliff-hanging-stuff for a break) Like -"Mean while, back at the ranch"

I step inside to this on X-finity Music - K.T. Tunstall, live, Come on Get it . from the Manchester Ritz 2010. I Wonder if Big Black Horse might have been written about that Black Gibson Dreadnaught she's playing in the video - never mind.

A nice break from physics & Head -O-Logics.

So, there's this Black Hole see, in the middle of our cozy little home galaxy - the Milky Way. As you would expect, there are things doing odd elliptical orbits around Mr. Black Hole, drawn in by his HuuuuGe Melon. Er, I mean Gravity - Yeah Gravity, that's it, Of course.

Some of these things, orbiting the hole, are stars. All kinds of Stars. They spin faster as their orbits loop closer to the hole. Of course they do. Do to. That's one way we know the Hole is there.

This all eventually, Mr. Freeman's distinguished baritone says, conveys to the Black Hole Information Paradox and the debate between Hawking and Leo Susskind. (they call him the Pumber-Physicist - but check out his creds on wiki).

Leo, as you may remember, brought us String theory, bless his heart. Really interesting, supports the Vibrating at Higher Frequencies thing, much to my delight.

As we get past Black hole in middle of Milky Way, (wonky star patterns in there, tell us so. No, really.), - past that, past string theory, To the Black Hole spraying, as it were, the reflection, and the sub-atomic-particle essence of EVERYTHING out Across the Universe, to it's very edge, it's very gravitational membrane, to where ALL THAT gets holographicly projected.

Now we're back to there's another exact analog of EVERYTHING that ever was, is, or will be, out there. Yup, WAY - the Hell & gone, beyond comprehend-able(or at least relate-able) distances.

Crunch a few brain cells up against that for a little while and see if things don't move.

Back at the ranch, I still have a couple of post owed about specific stuff, that didn't get done, but will. That brings us to the main point number TWO:

All the sudden, it snuck up on me, I've hit that point where I need to start keeping track of ALL MY IDEAS.

I haven't been in a creative state where that was an issue for many years. It's a quandry of retention, and of organization. But it's a quandry I am happy to feel. Again.

Thank God, I was afraid I might be gone.

And then I had a thought. No, really.

I sometimes tell myself that the Loud tinnitus, The Ring, which is with me always, is actually the long distance remnant of The Music of the Spheres. (just a little story I tell my self to amuse me)

Have I mentioned that my thought processes are decidedly Random Abstract. Perhaps I should have warned us. You're sharp, I bet you figured that out by now.

Remember, today you're getting it the way it comes to Me. It's about trying to relate My world, as it Really Is. Or is it as it only seems? How would I know?

Eventually, we get to the point of Morgan Freeman's Cosmological expounding, which is: Hawking was wrong about this, Susskind was right: A Black hole does not, in fact destroy or do away with the matter, the accumulated INFORMATION that goes in. INFORMATION IS NOT LOST. Perhaps. Not. Ever.

I will pause while we all think on that little tidbit. Yes, in this sense I think, at least for purposes of this, we are information also.

Now, what was it I was worried about before?

An additional thought: Those stars orbiting around the Black Hole make a pattern. It's exactly like the pattern made by sub-atomic particles orbiting the nucleus of an atom. It's that Microcosm, Macrocosm thing that we see as a repeated theme in both nature and human thought(which is, it has been argued, nature also).

Break!

Heres another musical interlude: Peter Gabriel, live, In Your Eyes.

I know, that's a long one(10 minutes), but I think it's worth seeing and hearing. Gets down to the nitty-gritty of what this relating stuff is Really all about. Well, I think so.

What was my point?

The universe is bigger and weirder than even we have imagined.

Sometimes, in the middle of all this random, Something Moves. In my head, in the Universe. Creativity is not dead. Information is not lost. Love(a type of information?) goes on.(Yes, it's a leap, but I'm going to make it head first. So sue me.)

There may yet be good reason for me, and for all of us, to Hope.

"Well, I think we've made excellent progress today, but it's about time to wrap this up".

more later...

Thanks, Kerry, Stylish huh?

Of all the things I've been called in my life, Stylish., not so much.

Big surprise a couple of weeks ago when friend Kerry Schafer passed on the Stylish Blog Award to me and several others on her post over at KerrySchafer.com .

Thanks much Kerry for including me in this.

I really appreciate it.

Love This Life, Onward Through the Fog - I've been doing it for a couple or so years now. It's growth in quality has been slow and steady I think. I come to be having to write fairly late in my life. Kerry, and a few others have been great help and great encouragement in that(So it's really partially her fault, as well as my talented poet brothers Michael & G. Barnes, Johanna Harness, Kristina Martin, &, &, & ...

Many of those folks can be found in the "Blogs I follow most" of my newly declared stylish Blog, or in the "Following" section of my @Barnestormjohn twitter profile.

That puts us at the end of the "...thank God, and Everybody and their dog" part. It's on to the meat of this thing(unless you're a vegetarian, and then we're on to the Tofurkey & Curried anything). As Kerry and Kristina before have done, we begin the thing -

It's time for me to observe the venerable rules, rites, lefts and traditions of this most auspicious award:

1. Thank the Stylish Blogger Award giver and link back to their blog. See above.

2. Share seven little known things about myself. O-kay...

• I was born on Shakespeare's birthday, April 23rd, in the same year as were born Prince, Madonna, Michael Jackson and Jamie Lee Curtis, 1958. Hmmmmm, 'splains a lot, huh?

• I was engaged, but never married, three times - in kindergarten.

• The first thing I ever learned on guitar was the bass line to Cream's Sunshine of Your Love.

• I had to take swim lessons three summers before I learned to breath while swimming(without choking).
  
• On the Myers & Briggs Character/Temperament sorter I'm an INFX(cross over INFP&INFJ), along with roughly .5% of the general population. Yes, I'm a rare & special boomer child.

• I have never been to a high school football game (Try not to hate me like I hate crowds).

• Even though John Ross was a fairly famous Cherokee Chief, I was actually named after both Gramps - John Barnes and Ross Anderson, nothing to do with the Chief.
  

3. Pass the award on to other bloggers

• Jaqueline Dick for her young but very impressive blog 1emeraldcity. Tweeting as @Fumanchucat, Jaqueline is a prolific and fine poet and essayist, part of the poetry/art gang over at OneStopPoetry(a gathering place for writers and visual artists). She teaches literature and Facilicates discussions of current events and writes. I especially like her micro poetry. Jaqueline is hilarious as well as having quite an astute sense of observation coupled with a fine affinity for words. Major Micro Poetry.
• Aliki McElreath over at Family Education. I have enjoyed the keen mind, thoughtful and very real writing, and kind friendship of Aliki it seems forever, but I guess it's really just a few years now. She is a Creative Writing Professor in North Carolina, An honest and forth coming chronicler of the life, love and laments of a parent of two great children, one of whom happens to have Aspergers. She has been a help in my endeavors to deal with our own special son.
• Jane Devin Over there, at Jane Devin .com, you"ll find the real life of a strong voiced writer, from the land of New Mexico. Researched laboriously over a long span of time and space. @Janedevin on twitter. She just finished writing a big first book. She writes killer Blog Posts also.
  
• Crazy Sister from her Blog: Graze If You Want To, But Don't Eat Dirt. Cello player , Mom, Wife, Writer from Queensland, Australia. She writes things funny, about things, that it turns out, Are Funny. She can also talk in a serious way, though much of it's camouflaged by funny.
  
• Givenya De Elba Sister, it turns out, of Crazy Sister. Her Blog: Killing a Fly with a Ukulele is Probably a Wrong Thing To Do is well worth a follow any time. Another Mom, Professional, Wife, Writer also from Queensland, Australia. It's a whole 'nother mirror world, just like and very different, from an American perspective. She characterizes her family, including the dog, by Toy Story characters. And, it works.
• Karla Archer for Living the Life Fantastic. Not only is she a talented writer & designer, she and her husband Randy met online, on twitter. She and Randy own Archer Creative in Birmingham, AL. They have four great kids that figure prominently in her family posts and in her tweets, followable as @karlaArcher. She and @RandyArcher are bigo Huge Bham fans. And yes, since I wrote that Bham has been devastated, still finding bodies, lives lost or starting over. Do what You can, pease.
  

4. Alert the blogers to the fact that they’ve been awarded.

Will do, immediately after I actually post this.

These Writers are not necessarily that much alike in content, perspective, style or aim.

These Writers are all pretty astute observers and fine story tellers and minds.

Well, I think so.

Once again, Thanks to Kerry Schafer for including me in this. Now, everybody go read each other's stuff.

"Turn to your neighbor(penguin) and Fluff him up a little"- Loveless the love penguin (Robin Williams) from the movie Happy Feet.