Saturday, March 29, 2008

MARCH 29, 2008Share
2:07pm Today | Edit Note | Delete

Joseph = joey = joe = junior = jp = chico = joseph = HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME!

Many thanks and high fives back to all of you, your greetings added to the love today.

Word of the day = Music

Film of the day = August Rush

Hope of the day = 8 p.m. turn out your lights and celebrate Earth Hour!

Songs of the day =
Kid Cudi - Day N’ Night (Crookers Mix)
Time To Pretend - MGMT
Beach in Hawaii - Ziggy Marley
Funky Space Reincarnation- Marvin Gaye
Ratatat - Seventeen Years

Mix of the day =
Walden Pond Mix by thePAsystem : )

Top 10 Albums Played This Week March 29, 2008

Ziggy Marley - Love is My Religion
Panther - 14k God
Vampire Weekend- Vampire Weekend
MGMT - Oracular Spectacular
Black Mountain - In The Future
Cadence Weapon - Afterparty Babies
We Are Scientists - Brain Trust Mastery
Johnny Greenwood -There Will Be Blood
Fu#$ Buttons - Streeet Horrsing
Smashing Pumpkins- American Gothic EP (Sunkissed - Ben’s song today)

The last year was amazing and brought me many miracles and bundles of love. I am ever so thankful for this life. Here’s to the next year of amazing discoveries and joy.Thank you Keli & Ben!!!!!
Go Habs, Go UCLA!

Thursday, March 27, 2008

Cracking Ice

This morning as I walked to work and turned off of Pacific Boulevard on to our beloved street in Gastown the magnificent spectaculars were out in full force. The piss filled air roams through the streets, as do abandoned condoms and needles. As I pass the Starbucks on the corner and head towards Pender Street a man runs out of the 7-11 chased and tackled by the employee for apparently stealing something. The alleged thief manages to break free in front of the store and while the employee calls the police the thief and his friends discuss what just happened. “Maybe you should take off before the cops show up,” one of them manages to slur out.



As I continue down Abbott St. ahead of me is what appears to be a skinny junkie bent over and sifting through her box of belongings right in front of the McDonalds. One item after another gets hurled over her shoulder in a desperate search for nothing but her lost mind. Her black tights are small and barely cover the track marks all over her calves. As I cross Pender St. another woman covered in smeared mascara, wearing knee high socks and an overcoat is squatting in front of the Budget rent-a-car filling up her crack pipe. Another woman, or is it a man walking sideways, comes barreling around the corner and almost lands on top of the squatter. The next two blocks between Pender past Hastings to Cordova Street feels like a scene right out of Jim Carroll’s Basketball Diaries. I start to wonder like in some of the other popular films about drug culture if a big shipment of crack hit the streets last night. It’s like the Night of the Living Dead – except its 9:00 a.m.!!



My eyes were filled with these images and more on my morning walk while my head was still picturing the footage of the disintegration of the Wilkins Ice Shelf in the Antarctic Peninsula. A massive 160-square-mile piece of western Antarctic – poof! So the two different scenes in my subconscious today – ice and crack ice. I couldn’t help think how so much of the mechanisms in life, in society, feel as though they are merely here to keep us entertained and oblivious to the real things happening. Sure, I have felt this for some years now but I wonder if more of us are becoming numb or more aware? As we pick and choose what to do with our awareness some of us fall into a blissful state of apathy while others fight off the pessimism of knowing.


Meanwhile, I continue to question everything and live on in constant preparation for a new way.

© Chico Sousa 2008

Friday, March 21, 2008

Paperback Typer


So this is great practice for myself. I am lost. I am here but I am in search of something more. Something else, something that has meaning. Must all my meaning only be found in the inspiration of song? There is no guidance, there is no assurance, there is barely a compass showing us the way. We dredge on not knowing of our future but do any of us? The captain is shroud in mystery, his whereabouts purposely unknown, untold. Deal with this, and this and this, as I leave it last minute for you to complete thanks to the tequila twist. I'm in a whirlwind trying to find a spot to fit in, story of my life - where shall I begin? Sounds of nostalgia and disco breaks set the tempo to these nimble fingers attempting to create something out of nothing. There is no methodology here, in fact there was barely a thought put forward to bring about these actions. I was led here by my fingers and all I can do now is follow until I break free to the beat of a new direction.

I put these digits aside and somehow they awake again and flow back into their arched position attempting to create. They move with lightening speed yet they are void of any true thought, a thought that I should take solace in but somehow the peacefulness of nothingness leaves me with feelings of emptiness. Life's true work just can't be found in this limiting structure, in these walls of uncertainty nor in the margins of profit and loss. I read your thoughts of familial experience, the experience of true meaning of which I agree but still within this system it too is left with very little time in comparison. So dream fingers, dream on and find that kwan, the kwan of mixing career with love. A pipe dream as we may have all lost sight of the truth, our true connection to mother earth. A connection we have worked decades to lose. So my words hand off the baton to Kalle Hasn from Adbusters magazine.

~ That pretty well sums up the way most of us in the affluent West feel about global warming: we’re ready to make small sacrifices, change our light bulbs, our cars and even our leaders, but our culture – the American way of life – is not negotiable.

That’s too bad, because our consumer culture is the primary cause of our ecological crisis. Since WWII, our consumption levels have grown by 300 percent and in the process we’ve developed enormous footprints, insatiable appetites and a boundless sense of entitlement. There’s something degenerate now at the very heart of our culture, and fixing it won’t be easy. We’ll have to confront the fact that we do not have the right to emit carbon into the atmosphere at a much higher rate than everyone else on Earth. And then we’ll have to rethink many aspects of our lives: the way we eat, work, get around, shop, entertain ourselves, raise our children and think about freedom and the responsibilities that come with it.


That kind of cultural transformation will be pretty hard to pull off and it may take more apocalyptic eco-news, more Virginia Techs, kids on Ritalin, more military strikes and terrorists who hate us and maybe a global economic crash before we get serious.

But there’s also an upside to all this: we’re in the endgame now – all six-and-a-half billion of us living through one of the wildest, most lunatic moments in human history, working our way towards an enthralling collective climax. Will it be a dog-eat-dog bloodbath, or a more erotic, consensual kind of climax in which we work it out together? For awhile longer, the choice remains ours. ~

Monday, March 17, 2008

Green Socks

I just spent the last moments of the weekend organizing my sock drawer. It was fascinating, seriously. I feel as though I solved a thirty-year-old mystery. You know how you always lose a sock or two during the laundry ritual? Where do all those socks go you keep wondering? Tonight I figured it out.

C. Jeanne Heida at associatedcontent.com sheds some light on the top places missing socks tend to go. She says to try checking your agitator. “When I donated an old washing machine several years ago, I pried up the agitator and found nearly twenty missing socks.” Apparently there is a gap in the washing machine where socks can easily slip through. Fascinating.

“The other place socks tend to go,” she says, ‘is hidden or stuck to other pieces of clothing,” which makes great sense. She adds that socks aren’t alone in finding themselves missing in action during the laundry process. “Underwear is particularly fond of turning up in places where it shouldn’t be.” I hear that all the time at home!

The subject continued to fascinate me so I continued researching other articles, long articles – about missing socks! The funny had now become absurd. The coolest piece I read was Brian J. Reardon at laundry-alternative.com with his Fate of Missing Socks - Laundry: A Quantum Mechanical Approach. Intrigued I had to read on to find out that the first modern theory to explain typical laundry questions like the missing sock query, was the Decay Theory that states; the quantity of socks in a load can be expressed as a decreasing exponential function of time which is analogous to radioactive decay. Of course, duh!

Nt+N0*exp(-pt)



Reardon points out however, “according to this theory, socks should never completely disappear, or, more importantly, reappear. This clearly contradicts every day experience.”

My weekly laundry experience showed me that when I found a solo sock at the end of folding I would throw it in my sock drawer. Well tonight, that’s exactly where I found them all, every last solo sock found its’ mate tonight in the bottom of the sock drawer. Mystery solved. All except two different green socks, independent stragglers losing their mates after the St. Patrick’s parade but their match may be in the laundry as we speak, or stuck to someone’s kilt drenched in green beer at the Blarney Stone.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!!

© Chico Daily 2008