This morning I woke up perfectly. I was dreaming that I was lounging on the grass with four friends after having walked around a lot, and we were sharing two popsicles of different flavors, having a bite and passing it to someone else. We were talking entirely in non-verbal gestures, understanding each other completely. I passed the blue one to a male friend and he smiled at me, and it went straight to my heart, how good I have it. I closed my eyes to soak in that feeling, and lifted my face to the sun, and woke up.

lord. thank you.

(the difference between longing and lounging is u)

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If there's a song that ever described me exactly, it would be "So Unusual" by Jason Mraz. I don't know if it's on his CD, I have a live copy off the internet. He's got a very nice voice. The song pairs flute and guitar really well.

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And then there is the place that has redeemed LA in my heart. For this reason alone I do not want LA to drop off the face of the earth.

The Museum of Jurassic Technology.

Some of their exhibits are:

• the Deprong Mori, an extraordinary bat with very special powers of echolocation
• No One May Ever Have The Same Knowledge Again--letters to the Mt. Wilson Observatory.
• Tell The Bees... Belief, Knowledge, and Hypersymbolic Cognition
• The Eye of the Needle--a master violinist becomes a sculptor in microminiature (complete sculptures no larger than the eye of a needle).
• The World Is Bound With Secret Knots

That day, I was thinking about the Museum as I was falling asleep. I was trying to find some uniting principle between all the exhibits. It wasn't just science, nor was it just art, and it wasn't just about humans. The science wasn't always disproved or correct. The exhibits weren't satirical, nor were they always historical. I realized why I like it, then discovered the uniting theme. I got up to write this down:

You know what I love most about the Museum of Jurassic Technology? More than anything else, it is a museum about interesting and outstanding people who think very differently and do things with a passion. The Museum simply shows their art and artifice as evidence, and it is exhibited as such, with great respect for the context from which the genius came. I would drive six hours to see it again and show it to my friends.

Jurassic Technology. What the fuck is Jurassic Technology? What was at work there?
Evolution.

We can see the future by finding the anomalies of the past and present.

What if in the time of the monkeys, a creature was born with something like a Homo Sapiens brain? Like all of a sudden, the potential of years/ages of evolution spontaneously manifested itself in some poor creature. It would be out of its time; a little confused and maybe angry; eccentric to be sure. It would be seen as one crazy monkey. Its brain would make strange things out of its context, things other monkeys could barely grasp, if at all. More than likely it would be consistently misunderstood and shunned. Maybe that monkey died with no offspring, or its offspring didn't carry its anomaly. Either way, it popped up and faded out, to be resurrected as true evolution in the course of time. The odd monkey was forgotten.

But we have history. We have the written record now. And the future can be glimpsed by finding the anomalies.

The Museum is also very beautiful. You can't see it on the website, but I took some non-flash pictures:

1-4, clockwise from top left:
1. the rotating magnetic oracle of Athanasius Kircher
2. I don't know the story behind this one. Scientific contraption.
3. microscopic art made of butterfly wing scales. (different guy than the needle sculpture.) I got this picture by carefully putting my lens against the microscope viewer (thank you digital). If you can't tell, it's a chicken and her rooster. I liked this one better than the bouquets of flowers.
4. one of Kircher's horns, made according to his theories of acoustics.

Ah, my heart! my heart! It a-pitter-patters for love of this place.

11:07 a.m. 2004-01-10�