Just Do It

so i'm working on a new piece of music. a song that requires a lot of work and thought and i'm actually figuring out what notes i want and there is this whole intricate side of this particular piece. work - real and actual work - not the kind of music i normal make - not the familair "it just poured out of me" sort of music. what i'm doing today is what i usually run away from. i like easy, i like it fell from the sky, i like it when the sounds just pour out.


but i'm taking a break because i've realized i need to create this piece in a different sequence and i'd really like carl's help in getting the microphone right and the levels correct. this all at the end of a day where i attacked several other projects and while i am not happy with those results so much i still made an effort to make things the way i wanted them, and now it all just needs a little tweaking.


this all comes after a summer of what i consider dragging my ass - i've done tons of tiny things but no real projects - not much painting, no new music, just fiddling with things and wasting time. i'm very good at wasting time. and i seem to live in this odd fantasy world of nothing ever changing - time does not move forward, even though my hair is grey and we've planted 2 summers worth of veggie gardens in the new house. time does not go this fast - even though it's been 3 years now since i was in portland last visiting friends who in my head still live in the same places and know the same folks, and yet the city changes every day and many of the places i saw and people i met are not there anymore. it's a time warp - it is a refusal to admit that a day will come where i am dead and gone, and before that comes there will be a day when my eyes quit working, and before that the arthritis will stop me from painting or playing my guitar. i live in eternal avoidance of those thoughts and actions - i will never get old, my friends will never get old, my siblings will not pass before me because they will not pass. i am in denial at the passing of time.


and it is the passing of time that i wirte about today, and again about an iconic advertsing slogan. one known the world over. one known for a simple little mark, a little swoosh of a trademark.


nike.


one of the world's largest and most well known of all brand names and trademarks. a multi-billion dollar corporation known not just for the folks who wear it but for the kids who sew it. yes, the world's largest companies often employ child labor, and extremely poor people, and do not pay them near enough for them to even imagine escaping from the confines they are in. we all know this - everyone who wears nike anything who has a conscience knows this - all you people who eat organic, buy local, eat whole fresh foods and avoid canned tomatoes - you live with thoughtfulness on every level, including your intense love of physical activity - running, biking, jogging, playing any myriad of sports - you know this practice is so commonplace we cannot avoid it. so you wear nike. it's a good brand. they are well made. they look cool. when you are sweating on the basketball court and trying to win that bet against your buddy so he has to buy beers at the bar  you do not think of the poor and the under privilidged, or the children, who made the shoes on your feet. you just want to win.


nike. known world over. hugely famous. a ridiculously wealthy company who has one of the best slogans you could ever come up with. the words i thought of today while i was painting and working on music. while i was lamenting ove this odd avoidance phobia i seem to have (well, i know i most certainly have) and the slogan was right there - right on the tip of my tongue.


just do it.


just do it. 3 simple words that have propelled a million atheletes into giving their best, giving their all, or at least getting off the couch. 3 words that will, for my entire lifetime, be associated with the nike brand. with the idea, ie the dream, that anything is possible, and therefor you should Just Do It. dream that dream, live that life, walk that walk and not just talk it - do it. just do it.


who on earth came up with that slogan? i bet i could wiki it, but i am trying to not break my stream of words here - i'll look it up later. i most certainly hope whoever coined the slogan is filthy rich - although i feel, in my gut, that the person who wrote it was probably just some dude getting paid by the hour to write propelling ad words for all sorts of stuff.


have you ever seen Crazy People? the movie with dudley moore where he is an ad guy? where he writes about volvos being boxy? i love that movie.


do you think whoever wrote Just Do It is rich? i wonder if they copyrighted it. if they own it. nah - i'm sure nike proper owns it. OWNS IT. like you try to do when you are out on that basketball court, or that 50 mile bike ride, or whatever it is you do while wearing your sneakers and staying off the couch.


oh, sneakers you say? sneakers, sneaky. word play. YES! eureka!! word play is exactly what i'm talking about here. the nike slogan is one of the best examples of word play i could ever imagine. other than scrabble.


the average joe is not gonna think any farther past just do it than get off the couch and go win at something. for yourself or for your team go win - go be All That You Can Be (we'll tackle the army in a subsequent episode). but if you honestly think about it, the nike slogan is very layered, very deep, and potentially worrisome.


just do it. you hear it purred into your ear - you are a teenager thinking of hitting that very first joint that very first time. your peers - that really cute girl you've been dying to impress just so she'll say hello to you - she leans over and hands you that joint and purrs - just do it. and you'd leap to your death if that was what was presented to you at the moment. the words are sultry, smokey, they curl and hang in the air with a mystery and a sexuality you cannot ignore.


yes, a sexuality - just do it. that same girl is whispering in your ear again and this time it's not about smokin'. well it is actually except a differnet kind of smokin', and now those words are egging you on to strip off all your clothes and have whatever kind of relations with whoever you are with. throw caution to the wind and just do it. now, stop waiting, come on come on and hurry up we ain't got all day JUST DO IT.


Hurry Hurry Hurry - you're robbing the bank, you're running ut of time to crack the safe, your hands are shaking, just do it already! hop in the getaway car and drive as fast as you can - skip town, go to jamaica, get a swiss bank account.


just do it. are you starting to see, or hear, the layers of connotations those 3 words carry with them? the underlying effect of those words on your psyche, like an opiate in word form, the verbal equivalent of a night of heavy drinking. you are immortal, you are impervious, and you can Just Do It!! whatever it is, no matter how impossible or how wrong or how underhanded or sleazy or forbidden, you can just do it. do it do it do it.


when you bought those shoes with the swoosh, you never knew this was what they meant. you just figured you'd get some new shoes that looked cool to go play hoops in. but deep down in your mind, under the layers of day to day reality and conscious thought and awareness, your psyche knew what the connotations were. your subconscious mind felt the allure of the sleaze factor, of the "i can get away with it" factor that each of us tries to hide each day, hide from our own eyes and the public's view. all those personal thoughts you have that you never share with another soul - all those dirty things.


what a slogan - what an incredibly powerful all encomapassing mind fuck of a slogan. and you never knew, cuz you were just doin' it.

there is always room for jello!!

oh advertising. how it sticks with us from day to day. how it warps our thoughts and fills our minds with disillusionment. today i pick advertising as my rant - hopefully the first of a series on commercialism, consumerism, and conciously deciding how to live instead of just going with society's tendencies.

so lets get on with it!


today while eating breakfast - a nice mixture of sauted zucinni, red bell pepper, mushrooms and garlic, with a cracked egg over top, i took the tomato from my plate and gave it to carl. he said, "please don't give me any more food - i don't have any more room in my belly." but, it was a homegrown tomato, and of course he ate it. we adore them.

in my mind, what i heard was, "there's always room for tomatoes," a play on the slogan used for the jello commercials in the 70s and 80s. there's always room for jello! it's a series of words i have heard thousands of times, both on the tv and from the mouths of friends and families. it was an advertising slogan that stuck, and then became a part of our day to day lives.

there's always room for jello! what does that mean? what are the real connotations behnd this series of words? let's investigate.

you've already eaten dinner. you should be full. but eat more - come on now, eat more - there's room in there!! force it in! there's room in your belly!!

some of you would say - jello can't be so filling, so who cares? why are you making a fuss?

i say - jello is a big bowl of sugar. sugar being better than HFCS of course, but still sugar. don't you remember being a kid and just wanting to eat it out of th envelope? it was like candy - fruit flavored sugar in a bag that mom said you could have!! alright!!

a bag of sugar, with flavoring. they say Fruit Flavoring! it's a lie. well, it is a half lie. it is fake fruit flavoring, artificial, i suppose, not fake, as in fake fruit would be........conterfiet fruit, something made to be a stand in for fruit, a totally false representation of real fruit, oh yes - all that does mean artificial!! maybe they did not lie afterall, but who noticies the non-fruit part? strawberry jello has got to be strawberries, right? i mean, if you get the pistacio kind it has real nuts in it, right? we have really had the wool pulled over our eyes.

fake fruit flavor. fake fruit color. one of the worst concoctions to ever be manufactured on this earth, and to think we all eat it every day!! food coloring!! the fakest of the fake. nasty chemical weirdness added to everything we eat. our bodies were not made to process this stuff - it is totally foreign to our systems. and it messes us up daily.

you think it is okay - the government lets it be in our food - it must be okay! bullshit. the food industry is a for profit industry, and lots of stuff is allowed that should not be. most of what is sold in a grocery store is bad for you. is foreign to your system. and food coloring is so at the top of the list!

your white cake frosting is not white - it is pale Yellow #5, the most commonly used food coloring. yellow #5 is made from COAL TAR. coal tar. coal tar is in your macaroni and cheese. it's in your cheese-it crackers. it's in all the food you thought was white, and all the food that isn't. it is the first and foremost food color used today, and it is in most of the stuff at the grocery store that comes in a package. every breakfast cereal. just about everything in a box.

coal tar. whoo hoo for the human race! let's live on coal tar!!

now, you can read about yellow #5 on many other websites, read about how it causes an amazing amount of food allergies and health problems. so i'll skip that for now - but i will tell you it's real name - tartrazine. look it up - find out what it is you put in your body everyday.


we come back to jello and it's slogan of There Is Always Room. for what? sugar, fake flavor and coal tar? or any of the other myriad food colors out there, made to mimic real fruit, made to TRICK our minds into thinking that it is real fruit - nutritious, ripe, healthy real fruit.


you see - we are an old species - we got this far through evolution of our bodies and minds, which includes a million years of collective knowledge. we did not get this far by eating poisonous foods, or things that would harm us. we have built in radar for what is ripe and healthy and if we were still living out in the woods as foragers (hunters and gatherers) we would know what was the right thing to eat. so food colors mimic that ripe factor, and they TRICK our minds into thinking that food is healthy. even if it is not. food coloring is a facade to hide the trash, a whitewash to make the old worn out wooden fence look pretty again. it is not for eating!! but we eat it everyday, in almost every food we take in.

unless you eat whole foods, natural foods, organic or unprocessed foods. but that is a discussion for a different day. right now we are talking about JELLO and it's advertising slogan.

THERE IS ALWAYS ROOM FOR JELLO.  always is a word of absolutes. we are taught to use it it to mean forever, no matter what, from now till the end of time. always. you are gonna have room in your body to cram extra food and extra calories AND a ton of fake crap into your system no matter what for the rest of time!!

why are we so overweight? why do we have such ill health?

the science and psychology of what goes into our food and how it is marketed to us is a long, strange, winding road. you probably never thought, when eating that jello waldorf salad at christmas, or that banana strawberry mixture at easter, or the crazy brain shaped thing you served at halloween that you were being duped, lied to, reprogrammed, ect. it did not really taste right, but it looked pretty and it was sweet, and so you ate it. and your kids ate it. and you lived like that always.


our bodies were not made for this stuff. or actually - this stuff was not made for our bodies. it was manufactured (real food is grown, not manufactured) to fasely convince us that it tastes good and we like it. when really that is so far from th truth. horay for ground up horse hooves and sugar and food coloring!! hot damn can i have some more!!

there's always room for jello. would you like some now?