there was another girl in the car who kept singing joni mitchell's 

"you turn me on, i'm a radio... i'm a country station, i'm a little bit corny..."

i hadn't heard it before but i learned it and i still know it well... we stopped and bought avocadoes at 5 for a buck... and a loaf of whole grain bread and no mayonaise or nuthin - i learned that on that trip too - how good avocado tasted with a good bread, no frills...

it might have been that trip too that we stopped at the organic cherry tomato farm and ate ourselves silly in the fields... i had never tasted tomatoes as sweet...

i must have been 18 at the time.  might have been 69... i was running away from college at USC... i hitchiked a million times up and down that coast but we were inland, like napa or something.... i remember so much - we were probably tripping... 

it might have been a white station wagon... the couple in the front were a black woman in the passenger seat and a white man, her husband, at the wheel... i thought he had a white ponytail too, and i remember we talked a lot about health and garlic, and she ate garlic raw and i was so impressed...

 

i woke up today with this in my head - my memory is so wierd... very selective, and i mix past lives in... and maybe whatever movie i might have seen - i think most memories are pretty generic... i 'm into john fowles... did you ever read the one where he programs an android to replace his dead wife...?

 

this morning i turned on the tv and got into this sewing show and i thought to myself: kids won't learn this!  kids don't even read any more... neither will they spend years practicing penmanship like i did in catholic school... i haven't the patience to write without a laptop - not for 20 years!  i lived the first half of my life in the Old World of communications and arts technology, and now... bingo.  Marshall McLuhan was right about everything.

 

along with our new tools is a new relationship with personal identity 

it's in crisis as it changes... people seem so silly - we fight for our individuality but we aren't that different really... neither do we have secrets that somebody else doesn't also have... 

for example:

the really great pop stars are the best at modelling the Everyman or woman... they sacrifice themselves like jesus... are literally consumed by their own mass appeal - whatever the payoff... sex money power... that stuff is all generic as well... programmed from fight or flight impulses, we've just sophisticated it with our human skill of complicating everything...

 

pop technology turns me on... but only when i can pick and choose my moments of interactivity.  i need huge chunks of time in a garden with growing things to remind me how sweet earth can taste... it's almost completely incongruent and yet... i respond organically to all of it, real or made up... 

 

what mystery motivates me to write this silly entry?