Happy MLK Day, Everyone!
Picture from an old anarchist calendar or some 80s zine.
I was walking on a driveway or ramp of some sort, in the daytime, surrounded by white concrete buildings or parking structures, and i looked over a railing at another driveway/ramp and my sister and parents were walking there. It seemed like the dream took place in the present day, but i didn't feel like there was anything odd about my mom being alive in the dream. Nor was I aware that i was dreaming.
Suddenly after i looked at my family, i was down there on the other ramp, walking up the sloping sidewalk with them, and it was nighttime. We noticed that there were a LOT of stars visible. Dad, Laurie, and I were all trying to identify constellations and we were all enthused to be sharing the experience with my mom, like we were trying to impress her with our great astronomical knowledge. All of us were excited about what a clear beautiful night it was, and my mom was laughing and assuring us that yes, she saw the constellations too.
I kept trying to see what constellations i could recognize, but all I saw was dippers. Lots and lots of dippers. Big dipper, little dipper, several other sizes of dippers, and then the biggest, most dense constellation I thought I had never before seen: the one called The Shopping Cart!
Today I tried to find a clip of that episode of ST TNG where data is dreaming. I guess i wasn't using the proper key words in the search because i either end up with thousands of irrelevant clips of other stuff, or a few clips that are people's homemade tribute videos. I think there might be more than one episode where data dreams. The one with the miners and another one where he is on the bridge talking to his dad, and his cat is in the captain chair. If anyone runs across it or knows the name of the episode(s), lemme know?
Here's Buffy doing some dreaming.
Click to viewIf you are off work today I hope you get a chance to go out and enjoy the snow. The apartment complex crew came here just before sunrise and ran their little sweeper vehicles over the walks and now it has snowed so much that it's like they never cleared the walks. Sure is like an old fashioned winter again all of a sudden. I saw someone walking in the lot earlier and he wasn't slipping around so i will probably go ahead and bus tonight. It's much easier to navigate snow than icy walks, i just have to leave a few minutes earlier tonight. It will be beautiful with the snow cover, it always seems like it never gets dark at night. Talking to kevvy last night i was standing on the patio looking at the glittery snow, the way the glimmers look like you're looking towards the ground, but seeing a starry sky slightly obscured by a white cloud.
Trying to find my MLK book The Trumpet of Conscience to get a really good quote for this day, but my books are really unorganized. I run across it when i'm searching the shelves for something else. I should get rid of most of my books. I do donate boxes of them to benefit sales each time i move, but still... I live in a city with over 75 libraries, and a lot of reference material is here on the internets, so really only a handful of items that i repeatedly refer to or that were given to me by friends and family would be the ones to keep.
If you or your children have never seen the full dream speech, you can watch it
by clicking twice on that play button, and i think clicking a couple more times on it will get you to that clip's home on the youtube site, where you can make it fullscreen by clicking the little screen icon in the lower right corner. Then you have to hit the pause button on the clip on my LJ or that clip'll still be playing when you get to the site and it starts there. Watching it so that the image expands to fill the whole screen would be the only reason to watch it directly on their site, since several clips with MLK in them have vile racist comments under them. Almost all clips of anyone on there have mean stupid people that comment it seems. But i don't know how to make it so clips can be fullscreen when you view them here in the hushed reverence of the SRI. The clip is over seventeen minutes long so that's why i thought if you choose to view it you might want to make it fullscreen and kick back and enjoy.
Such a venerable speaker I was surprised to realize last year at this time that he was not an old man when he died. Only 39. For those of you who are younger people that might not seem young, but believe me he was just getting started. Today is his 78th birthday. This year the day falls on his actual birthday, which i was aware of way before it was a holiday, because today is also my dad's 74th birthday.
Since MLK can't write and speak new words to us now, thank goodness Jimmy Carter is still around.
Our Endangered Values will probably be of comfort to you, and informative as well.
It's available on audiobook at the library, but i think that unlike some of his other books which are read by him, Our Endangered Values is read by an actor. I like hearing Jimmy's voice, but the guy who reads it is okay too. During the nineties me and Chris W used to remark how it made us feel better even to see on the news, Jimmy Carter get off a plane, in some other country. Me and tft have talked about that too. If the current admin would send him in to some countries there'd be better progress, I believe.
On MLK's 27th birthday, he preached on "How Do We Believe in a Good God in the Face of Evil?" at Dexter Baptist, which was where his official preaching gig was.
Our nettlesome task is to discover
how to organize our strength into compelling power.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
