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When I was in high school, a friend and I found a passage in David Gans’ book “Playing in the Band” (a chronology of the Grateful Dead) that spoke of how riding with Neal Cassady (muse of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road and, later, the driver of the Merry Prankster’s 1964 cross-country road trip) the people in the car would often be amazed at how Cassady would keep a stream-of-consciousness rap going that would often integrate the words coming through the radio into his verbal stream until the two audio streams (radio and voice) would weave together and the radio would seem to act as a prophetic tool of sorts, anticipating Cassady’s next thought as much as Cassady’s thought would mirror the words coming out. Someone (perhaps Bob Weir) called this “Radio I Ching.” I used to think about this a lot and some very strange synchronicities would definitely emerge. I pretty much gave up on putting too much weight on them when night I was paying extra special attention and the next song on the radio was “You’re so vain, you probably think this song is about you.” I guess the Soundtrack Elves have a sense of humor.

So, that lead-in said, circulating virally on Facebook, there’s a thread that went from K8 to Tiggrrr to others that essentially shows a way of using a media player as a form of divination… here are its suggested parameters:

1. Put your MP3/Media Player on shuffle.
2. For each question, press the next button to get your answer.
3. WRITE THAT SONG NAME DOWN NO MATTER HOW SILLY IT SOUNDS. . .
etc . . . enjoy!

~~~~~~~~~~
IF SOMEONE SAYS ‘ARE YOU OKAY’ YOU SAY?
Doin’ Time in the USA
Quicksilver Messenger Service

HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOURSELF
The Ecstasy of Gold
Ennio Morricone

WHAT DO YOU LIKE IN A GUY/GIRL?
(Love That’s Real) Not Fade Away
Grateful Dead

HOW DO YOU FEEL TODAY?
Rastaman Vibration
Bob Marley and the Wailers

WHAT IS YOUR LIFE’S PURPOSE?
Ain’t No Way
Aretha Franklin

WHAT’S YOUR MOTTO?
Nighthawk Postcards (From Easy Street)
Tom Waits

WHAT DO YOUR FRIENDS THINK OF YOU?
International Feel
Todd Rundgren

WHAT DO YOUR PARENTS THINK OF YOU?
Worthy
Ani DiFranco

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT VERY OFTEN?
Things That Scare Me
Neko Case

WHAT IS 2 + 2?
Mean Disposition
Rolling Stones

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR BEST FRIEND?
Moog Island
Morcheeba

WHAT IS YOUR LIFE STORY?
Learning To Fly
Pink Floyd

WHAT DO YOU WANT TO BE WHEN YOU GROW UP?
Cash In Your Face
Stevie Wonder

WHAT DO YOU THINK WHEN YOU SEE THE PERSON YOU LIKE?
Mean Woman Blues
Allman Brothers Band

the first verse: “well i love you baby, but you won’t give me the time of day / you treat me so bad, but i love you any way” — ha ha!

WHAT WILL YOU DANCE TO AT YOUR WEDDING?
Hamburger Midnight
Little Feat

WHAT WILL THEY PLAY AT YOUR FUNERAL?
Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans
Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong
(and, YES, <b>I DO!</b>)

Incoming search terms for the article:

• neal cassady radio i-ching

Well, I just got back from a week in DC. The Historic Inauguration of President Barack Obama. First off, yes, it was ALL THAT. And then some. I didn’t even get the full experience because so much of my experience was enveloped in the chaos of a shirt vending gig that went more than a little awry, but after ten election rallies and spending Election Night in Chicago’s Grant Park, I think I can safely say that the movement that Barack Obama is the figurehead for is a powerful, beautiful force to behold. 

Now… how to hold onto and channel this energy into concrete, tangible, positive change? First things first… in his first days in office, Obama has been going through bad Bush policies and either reversing them or freezing them as quickly and completely as possible. He’s opened a Whoop-Ass sized can of Bush-Be-Gone and at the very least it’s going a LONG WAY towards clearing the foul stench from the national political air. 

But… I am a long way from feeling like the national challenges will get swept up in a tidal wave of rampant Hopiness that will right every wrong, usher in a new era of peaceful co-existence and ecologically sustainable living and leave us all feeling the warm fuzzies for this guy for years to come.

First… the Energy Crisis… if Michael Ruppert is right, then the Energy Crisis is the root crisis in the economic meltdown. I am not an economist. I haven’t even made an effort to understand economics until, oh, about five or six years ago. Then I read a book called Petrodollar Warfare and my vantage point on money and politics shifted rapidly. I had read Federal Reserve Scam information and looked at the way in which The Fed loans money to the Treasury at interest on the face value, but what I had not fully comprehended was the relationship between the strength of the dollar and the political loyalty of OPEC to the United States. 

After reading Petrodollar Warfare I came to view every finanancial interaction though the lense of deep-rooted global chess playing that essentially viewed the so-called First World as the entitled recipients of all petroleum and as the United States as the Favored Child in this game, so much so that if the United States fell out of favor, its economy would plummet overnight. 

So now, with the collapse of the investment banks, it looks like that night has come. Bankers are packing up and fleeing in the night as quickly as they can. No one wants to be around saying “The Buck Stops Here” when the bad debt comes home to roost, least of all the people who encouraged that deficit spending the most…

Yes, on some basic level, I’m still pretty much bluffing when it comes to explaining my comprehension of the economy. I’m just reading the tea leaves as I see them. The dollar’s connection to OPEC oil is pretty much indisputable.  And if Peak Oil theories are accurate, then the volatility of The Dollar (and every other Currency on the planet) is pretty much what’s really at stake in this so-called economic meltdown. 

Do we fall into full-scale global economic freefall or is there something very tangible about The Audacity of Hope…???

I’m asking here, because I truly do not know.  

Is it enough to collectively Aspire to a better world? On some simple level I think this may, in fact, be all that’s needed. We need to realign our personal compasses so that our True North is not pointing simply to accumulating clutter to ward off some fear of scarcity and realign to something deeper in all of us, something more like our True Aspirations or True Desire. 

At the core of this, for me, is the question of how best to frame my reality. It is too easy to be a Doomsayer. The Sky has been Falling for years. There’s nothing new under the sun. But what if this sky, under this particular sun really is falling at this particular time in history?

Obama has said of his election, “We have chosen Hope over Fear.” Even if Obama turns out to be a shill for the Bilderburglars and other such crooks, Fear fuels too much of the nation’s political mindset. So we need to remain Hope Fiends, even when the deck seems horrifically stacked against us. Pronoia may well be the secret escape hatch… Believe in the notion that the universe is a benign force conspiring on your behalf and you may well find evidence to reinforce this belief. It is, of course, much more appealing than the alternative thoughts… war, famine, brutal battles over resource depletion…

And, of course, on the flip side of the two party coin is the realization that no matter what Obama does, he’ll have inherited the Bush Crime Family’s greatest looting ever and he’ll have to make some sense of it all, even while coming to the realization that a wealthy powerful cabal of foundations are already planning to deconstruct him in the mediasphere. $50 million was spent by these foundations to uncover an out-of-wedlock blow-job during the last Democratic presidency. Who among us can say they’d come out looking clean if anyone spent $50 million investigating their past? 

I wish ya the best, Barry! You’re by far the most inspiring candidate in my lifetime! I hope that’s enough to qualify you to steer the nation through the challenges of currency collapse, climate change, peak oil, and, of course, the usual series of headaches that any president has to preside over.