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Had to share this:

There’s lots of those friendly people
They’re showing me ways to go
And I never want to lose their inspiration

Time for a cool change
I know that it’s time for a cool change
Now that my life is so pre-arranged
I know that it’s time for a cool change

(From “Cool Change” by the Little River Band)

I won’t be writing posts or answering emails for the next week or so. The Yellow VFR and I will be spending some quality time in the mountains, leaning hard to the left or right on some two-laned backroad, focused intently on what’s around the bend, looking to recapture some of the sanity that’s been slowly seeping away as I’ve lived my monotonous, necessary pattern of life.

The caution light on my sanity gauge came on months ago, and I’ve been running on fumes now for much longer than I should. (Some would say I’m bone dry.) But I’m convinced that there are latent stores of it floating in the air on those roads through the hollows and over the ridges, just as there are on the turn rows of cotton fields on cool October nights, out in the woods on still winter mornings, or sailing on the cool and bright clear water.

There are so many “modern” people living only for the next distraction, the next material gain or social connection, spinning faster and faster, people who fear that if they turn off the cell phone, the computer, the iPod and the TV and sit still for just five minutes, the entire universe may disappear. They miss the secret that it’s in those five minutes of quiet focus, of un-distraction, that life’s music can be heard, and its rhythm brings the peace which overcomes the anxieties we work so hard to distract ourselves from.

I’ll have my journal (the analog kind, a spiral notebook and pen) and at least one of my cameras with me on the trip, but only to write or click when convenient- little markers to jog my memory in the future, or at least to document that I really was there. I learned long ago that you can ride, or you can take pictures. I prefer to ride.

The essence of these rides lies in what can’t be captured on film or paper: the exhilaration of being singularly focused on the present moment for hours on end as the valleys and the cliffs and the trees and the critters whiz by; the physical fatigue and weariness of 14 hours of nonstop physical exertion and the blessed sleep afterwards which no pill could match; the chilling mornings and suffocating afternoons, the sweat and the sunburn, the thousands of different aromas on the wind which change with every passing mile, and the never-ending awe at the amazing views you see coming at you at an angle as you round each new curve.

The magic actually lies in the fact that what’s most important is what can’t be captured. You can’t bottle it up and take it home. You have to experience it in the moment. That je ne sais quois. Like the experience of seeing the Grand Canyon compared to only having seen a picture. It’s what Roger Waters described as that fleeting glimpse, that when you turn to look, it’s gone. Or as Miles Davis said about great music- “Don’t play the notes, play what’s between the notes.”

So bear with me till the next measure. For now, I’ll be between the notes.

Stockblog, stockblog, stockblog. I keep telling myself that. But you just can’t help noticing things…

All the libertarians (getting to be an ambiguous term… I prefer the more specific “Anarcho-Capitalist”, see Bill for clearer explanations, or Wikipedia, but Bill is more entertaining) who had hoped Ron Paul would at least make a ripple in the scum-covered pond of sewage that is national politics, well, that hope ended with the collective harrumph echoed across the nation during the most recent debate when he tripped over what may have been a valid point and instead produced a sound bite that allows him to be portrayed holding hands with Rosie O’fuckingDonnell chanting, “It’s all our fault, it’s all our fault.” That’s not what he meant, but that’s irrelevant now. It’s how it sounded, and it gave Rudy a bit of a “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy” moment to run with. Paul is toast.

And BNJ, in this post over at CynicalNation, puts a spotlight on the blatant facts which will eventually lead to the atrophy of John Edward’s chances. We’re a pretty ignorant bunch, but his lies are insulting to anyone with the independent thinking ability of even the average third-grader. Although the third-graders would probably vote for him because his wife has cancer and that makes them feel sad for him. Plus his hair is so pretty.

I have a running bet with a buddy at the hospital that Obama will have a Howard Dean moment and vanish from the running like… Howard Dean. I’m not sure when that moment will be, or under what circumstances it will unfold, but I have a Griff’s Hamburger coming when it does.

(By the way, I have another hamburger bet that Paris Hilton won’t serve one day in prison… the news today- that she is to serve “half” the sentence, 23 days, in a soft fuzzy place that’s “sort of” like a prison- may mean that neither of us wins).

Politics nowadays is a great big farce, not unlike healthcare, which creates diversions about payors and affordable insurance while in the background it quietly funnels hundreds of billions of your tax dollars to drug companies and white collar millionaires. Red Herrings and Straw Men everywhere.

One political “side” offers to get us back to when God was alive, when everyone worked for GM or Ford or IBM, and when “the country was strong.” The other side promises to pursue the “ideal” of realizing the dream of the hippies, creating a land where we all wear fig leaves, live in adobe houses, and get a check from our benevolent paternalistic government once a month (a dream which, if you think about it, makes Santa Claus the perfect president).

The truth, of course, is that neither of these possibilities exists. Our society is following the historical cycle that empires and democracies follow, with minor deviations from that path along the way (still well within the Bollinger Bands of history, we stock types might say). Following the Kyklos of anarchy, monarchy, tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy, rinse and repeat.

And somewhere around the 60s, around JFK, around Viet Nam, and LBJ and RFK and MLK and Jimi and Janis and Jim. Medicare. Nixon. Fiat money. OPEC. Stagflation. And on and on. Somewhere back there, within just a short decade or so, our society jumped the shark.

And the next President, or perhaps the one after that, will preside over a country which, after all the years of milk and honey and entitlement, begins to suffer the massive hangover of the consequences of its citizens’ collective decision to ignore reality for generations, the consequences of 300 million people looking left and right for someone to save them, but wholly without the ability to look in the mirror.

Whew. Time to switch to decaf, I suppose.

Spent this weekend, as I do every second weekend when I’m off from the ICK! other job, shuttling young ladies around, grilling, yelling about the cellphone forming a connective tissue matrix with their ears. And loved every second. They’re truly the raison d’etre in an otherwise pointless existence.

We even watched Eddie Izzard’s classic Dress to Kill routine, and they learned more about American history from a British transvestite than they do from their own teachers. Also, somehow the word f**k is easier to overlook when it’s pronounced with a British accent, no?

But the most memorable part of this weekend for me was the part I spent after the kids were asleep, and before they woke up (with the teens, that’s early afternoon if I’ll allow it). Last week I received the stack of Kurt Vonnegut books I’d ordered, and since Friday night (it’s Monday night now, just got home from work) I’ve read three of ‘em, in my “spare” time.

I sometimes get frustrated that artists I know of, whom I’ve read or listened to a bit of, etc — I never get around to really looking closely at their work until I hear they’re dead.

Or maybe it’s fate, and now the time is ripe for me to see Vonnegut beyond “Harrison Bergeron” (which I loved) and the movie version of Slaughterhouse Five, during which I always have trouble staying focused.

Vonnegut comes to me as the spittin’ image of a Vulcan mind-meld between Alan Watts, my favorite western philosopher of all time, and Hunter S. Thompson, who captured moments and emotions with his words like a cynical Ernest Hemingway on drugs.

And some of the strange things he says, or his characters say, or space alien protagonists of a writer who’s one of his characters say… some of those things match precisely ideas that have occured to me in the past, and which I’ve never bothered to try to explain or discuss with anyone because they’d think I was crazy.

So, now here I am, comforted that Planet Crazy does indeed have multiple inhabitants… or at least visitors.

A while ago, I noted magicJack in TraderMike’s links. It’s a product that looks so very promising. Skype that a “regular” person could use. Y’know, the majority of people we more geekly types tend to forget; the ones who can’t comprehend that computers are anything other than email and MySpace boxes. And that don’t see a discrepancy in their beliefs that they have a “right” to drive an SUV and a “right” to $1.50 gas at the same time. Yeah, vote for your politician, he/she will protect you from your own accountability.

Anyway, I bookmarked magicJack’s website, which announced “coming in April ‘07″. Well, dude, today is April 30th. Have we been jacked by magicJack?

Age 33. Estimated Income: 1.5-2 billion dollars. Lives in: Houston.

Hmm, seems that the top trader in the world lives suspiciously close to Trader-X territory.

Damn, all that money and he looks like Brad Pitt. Lindsay really missed the boat.

TDAmeritrade now gives us some more creative order options:

Conditional orders let you combine two or three individual orders that will, if filled, either cancel or trigger additional orders. Conditional orders are available for both stocks and single-leg option orders (in option-approved accounts).

The following types of conditional orders are available:

1. OCA (one cancels another) - submit two orders simultaneously; if one order is filled, the other is canceled.
2. OTA (one triggers another) - submit an order and if that order is filled, submit another order.
3. OTT (one triggers two) - submit an order and if that order is filled, submit two additional orders.
4. OT/OCA (one triggers an OCA order) - submit an order; if that order is filled, submit two orders simultaneously; if one of these orders is filled, cancel the other.
5. OT/OTA (one triggers an OTA order) - submit an order; if that order is filled, submit another order. If that order is filled, submit a third order.

And not in a good way.

There are some amazing charts I want to post (the “correction” to the upside may be subsiding), a couple of soapboxes I’ve got in the corner I need to climb onto, and some Real Estate “news” I wanna set straight. However…

I went to work at the (ICK!) regular job Saturday. Graveyard guy calls in sick (again- he did this 2 weeks ago). I’m stuck working thru the night (and missed a helluva birthday party, I’m told). One of our day people is sick Sunday, so I go home, catch a 2-hr nap, then go back and work till 9pm Sunday. Go home, sleep a few hours, back at 0730 this morning to work the Cancer Center.

All in all, I worked 34 hours out of 52, and a stretch of 26 out of 30 within that.

Which brings me to the Time Distortion. I noticed today that I could glance at the clock, work 15 minutes, then glance at the clock again, and only 5 minutes may have passed. And one time an entire hour passed in under 10 minutes. It’s amazing what happens when we mess with those little internal chronographs we take for granted.

A friend tells me that reminds him of his entire college career…