by Lee Stranahan | Feb 28, 2024 | Life |
1) Todd Rundgren: An inspiration because he does so many things well - musician, songwriter, video pioneer, computer pioneer, producer and so on. After being a fan for a decade - I saw Utopia in 1979 when I was 14 years old - I ended up hanging out with Todd on half a dozen occasions in the 1990s.
2) Charles Gatewood: An erotic photographer who was a big influence on me. I met him outside the Porta-Pottys at Burning Man 1997.
3) Zbigniew Rybczynski: Talked to him on the phone in 2004 for about a half hour. He’s a genius.
4) Howard Stern: I did a demo of the Video Toaster for Howard. He was businesslike and very sharp.
5) Neil Peart: Drummer and lyricist for Rush, he threw me off his lawn when I was 17 or 18. That’s sort of like meeting him.
by Lee Stranahan | Feb 28, 2024 | Life |
I’ve added myself to a couple of social networking sites - Tribe and MySpace. (I’m about 20 years too old for MySpace, I know.)I’ve spent a couple of years more or less hiding out and laying low so I guess I’m feeling the need to get some of my art out there and promoted again. I’m adding ‘friends’ to and fro. I’ve even found a few people that I actually know in real life.
I’ve also realized that content for the blog during the week is a little tricky, since the week mainly consists of me working. Not a lot of material there, really. So like a cook stretching a meal further through the judicious use of rice, I’m going to stretch the material a little bit by doing lists of 5 things, an idea I’m stealing from Merlin Mann’s 5ives site. Merlin is the dude behind 43 Folders, a really great site. He seems like a neat person. I should socially network him!
by Lee Stranahan | Feb 27, 2024 | Life |
It’s cold and rainy. Solid steady pitter patters on the air conditioning in the apartment window. We ate dinner and then I sort of passed out in bed while Lauren gave Olivia a bath. I got up and Lauren and I had some cereal. Now I’m going to fix the covers and crawl under them until it’s time to go out to Starbucks in the rainy morning.
by Lee Stranahan | Feb 27, 2024 | Life |
I really don’t. I’m going to try and explain a couple earlier posts of mine. Talking about one’s own spiritual beliefs makes one sound goofy or nutty or self-delusional. That’s one’s fear anyway. (In this little equation one = me.)
So, here’s what I hope is a concise version, but it’s still long. I was introduced to Ayn Rand’s ideas when I was about 15 years old and for about fifteen or twenty years, I considered myself an Objectivist / atheist / libertarian. I didn’t believe in God or anything like that because I didn’t see any proof. Then some things started happening around the time that one of my best friends, Paul Montgomery, died suddenly. There were a whole bunch of things related to his death that were just really weird - things he’d told me, things preceded his death. It’s a lot of stuff but one quick example is that he’d talked to me about how he wasn’t afraid of dying just a couple of months before in a conversation that struck me as very out of place. It was weird to the point that I mentioned it to Lauren at the time.
Paul And Me: December 1998
When He Was Alive And I Had Long Hair
I’m not trying to convince you of anything. You can say it’s coincidence and I certainly would have thought that myself if it hadn’t happened to me. There’s a lot more to it and it all adds up to it certainly not seeming like coincidence to me. Believe what you want but personally, I started seeing a lot of things that seemed a lot like proof of what I saw no proof for before. In the past six or so years, those things have continued. And my politics have changed, too - I’m a more leftist economically although still very libertarian socially. I’ve mentioned this stuff in the past on my blog and if I ever get the archives posted, it’s pretty obvious.
I don’t believe in a giant bearded God who lives in the sky and says ‘Thou Shalt Not’ a lot. My beliefs now are a sort of Unitarian Universalist Deist Buddhist. I believe that there’s a certain flow to the universe and that sometimes it talks to you. I don’t exactly know what I believe beyond that.
This has led to some cognitive dissonance on my part. I used to be able to explain exactly what I believed while standing on one foot. The past few years, not so much. So, I’ve been thinking about all of that lately and trying to reconcile my current beliefs - as scattered as they may be - with my previous beliefs. For months now, I’ve felt like two people in an ever-so-slightly shattered and confused sort way
So, there’s an attempt to explain my cryptic posts a little more. I’ll talk about the things that have made me feel a lot less confused in another post.
by Lee Stranahan | Feb 26, 2024 | Life |
It doesn’t happen all the time, but it’s happened enough times now that it seems very obvious to me that it means something. I go to church and I hear exactly what I needed to hear that day.
Today it was something that brought together some of the stuff that I was thinking about last night when I posted. I haven’t exactly put it all together in my head enough to write about but all the pieces are there.
Recent Comments