Leaving for nyc again tomorrow to find a place and take part in the protests and marches around the city in defense of America against the inane tyrants. Something like that anyway. It is so amazing, but friends of mine from all over the country are emailing me from nyc who are already there and who have been there for weeks some of them. working for free, living however they can some of them the ones who aren't wealthy, but all of them, wealthy or not, are up there volunteering their time and energy for free in support of one of the 750 different groups who are protesting the republican national convention. Unbelievable solidarity the country is experiencing at this time in politics to try to defeat Bush and his merry henchmen.

Signed up for cell phone text messages from various activist groups. Any minute you may receive a text message that will read: “jail solidarity protest Wednesday at 10 am...” or “rnc area hot from 27th and park to 28th .. police coming. Be careful...”

Matrix anyone? Yes totally. a small battle is being waged between the corporate run government attack-dogs, and the American people. only, many of the American people don't even know about it yet. in the office today I met a real life republican. an older woman. hadn't actually met one in a long time. thought they all lived in the middle states. it was a surreal moment. She was gaga over the mayor Giuliani speech. Hey nothing wrong with rudi. But then she was going on about bush and his fighting terror and so I just casually mentioned how remarkable it was that so many people from all over the spectrum of American politics and entertainment were banding together to beat Bush and how unprecedented it was in our history. And she just went ballistic saying they were all idiots. I mentioned various criminal and nefarious activities of the current administration, including postponing the Kyoto agreement, defying the world war crimes commission or nato or the UN, abu graib prison abuse, occupation of Iraq, health care, same sex marriage, logging our forests, drilling in Alaska, on and on, and her answer? “Who cares about any of that stuff when our safety and freedom is at stake? None of that stuff is important compared to his war on terror.” I swear to God I'm not making this up. it was totally crazy. we could drop a bomb on the entire region of the middle east and kill millions of people and you get the feeling that there is this small Neanderthal like group out there that wouldn’t care as long as it was in the name of freedom and democracy.

When I told her that I was not a democrat and in fact was the grandson of a republican congressman, she had this look of shock on her face. She didn't expect that. said I should be ashamed of myself. What she doesn’t understand is that my grandfather was a republican during a different administration and he was an American patriot at heart, not simply a republican. life is not that simple. Mam, I sure wish it was. I've said it before and I'll say it again. Don't join any clubs.

Dictionary.com of course is marvelous invention. No reason to ever read a word in print and NOT look it up. you can just go there and in less than a minute you know what the word means. Today I learned the meaning for the twenty millionth time of sybarite – a wonderful word, or rather, definition, if I do say so myself – intrepid, beguile, a few others. Funny how we tend to forget the meaning of words all the time. I wonder how many we can actually hang onto... if there is there a limit. I read once that the average vocabulary consists of approximately 5000 words. wonder if there is any truth to this. the Ferret has an amazing grasp of English vocabulary. I don't think that there's a word in English that he doesn’t know the meaning of. Of course that's just English. And that's where it gets tricky. Because you realize that there are a lot of languages out there. so having a good vocabulary in one language isn't necessarily the most important thing. I think in the bigger picture it might be better to know five thousand words in five languages than to know ten thousand in just one. your ability to communicate with more people in the world increases, and perhaps through that your ability to understand the world around us is amplified.

fate and the universe... learning or rather the universe seems to be trying to teach me, that just because we see signs of things, coincidences or synchronistic events that in the new age state of mind we are all too quick to look for meaning in, may not mean as much as we take them to in each moment. Could it be that these synchronistic events only hold as much meaning to us as we decide in the moment? Could it be that God or the universe throws them all out there randomly but its up to us to really decide what to do with them?