• Your competence. I know you struggle with this personally, but here on the outside of your skin you still look like the most supremely competent man I know. Whether it's fixing a toilet, a car, a door, or a broken heart; whether it's building a deck, or a floor stand for my stitching, or a life together -- when something needs to be done, everyone you know turns to YOU to make it happen. I love that about you.
  
  
• Your stubbornness. I actually have a love/hate relationship with this part of you, but right now when I think about the hard times, the fights, the hurt feelings, the "deal breakers" we've faced in our time together, I'm terribly grateful for and love the fact that your hard-headed stubbornness kept you from giving up on me -- on us.
  
  
• The silver in your hair. I got to watch almost every strand come into being in our time together. They glitter in the sunlight, and in my heart.
  
  
• Your integrity. You don't knowingly compromise yourself. In this modern world of relative morals and an almost Machiavellian urge to do or say anything to justify the "bottom line," you just don't go there. I love it that integrity always wins out, for you.
  
  
• Your laughter. When we first got together I made it a personal goal to make you laugh at least once every single day -- and I mean laugh-from-the-gut kind of laugh. You were such an uptight white guy back then baby, you seriously needed to laugh, every day. You learned to laugh with me, at me, and then even at yourself. It was a lot of years before I missed a day, but even now I still love it when you laugh like that.
  
  
• Your hands. Yes they're calloused and hard from a lifetime of using them for work. But "work is love made visible,*" darling. You've used your hands in a lifetime of such loving -- I'd have to be dead not to respond when you touch me with them.
  
  
• Animals dig you. That may seem a silly reason to love you, but I knew when my cat Della adopted you as her second person that you were just all kinds of all right. :) For our darling lab Kira, the sun rose and set wherever you happened to be. In our time together we've had quite a few animals and they've all adored you. I can SO see why.
  
  
• Your writing, of course. You don't get to write stories very often anymore but I unfailingly enjoy the ones you do. Your ability to craft a plot from beginning to end and make it fun with lively characters and zippy dialog -- what is not to love, here?
  
  
• Your openness of mind, or perhaps the voracious appetite of your intellect. At 50 you're still learning, still looking for new knowledge, still willing to take on new challenges. You don't just look for stuff that validates what you already think you know -- you're looking for new stuff to know! Thank you for not letting your mind calcify and fossilize. I love you for that.
  
  
• Your love of toys. :) Yes, they're grown-up toys now and yes they serve some tool-like functions, but you know as well as I do that's what they are. I love that we share a love of some of them, like smart phones and computers. I love that we can geek out together over stuff like that.
  
  
• Your vibe when you're working on something. I don't know how to explain this so anyone else would understand it. There's this "groove" you get into when you're puttering on a project. Aura? Attitude? Energy? Maybe it's that "love made visible" thing again, but it's damn sexy, baby. Seriously.
  
  
• Your cooking in general, and your baking in particular. Your sourdough repertoire (including especially waffles!), your pumpkin pies, your Parker House rolls. The chocolate confections you bake for my birthdays and other occasions. I also love it that you bake all these things and we eat them and you never, ever tease me about being overweight. :)
  
  
• I love to go camping with you. I love how we settle into a routine of tasks without a lot of discussion. I love that you get up to start the fire in the mornings, and the coffee. I love how warm you are in the sleeping bags, and that I feel completely safe with you there. I love how serene you become as you accept nature's renewing grace and I can't wait for us to get up to Twin Lakes this summer.
  
  
• Your inner strength. That Bible verse you were given as a young man -- you know, the one about being the rock? Well, it was spot-on and it doesn't really matter what other metaphor you use for it. When my world is coming apart around me and I can't find anything inside myself to hold on to, you are there. You are always there, standing firm in the midst of my storms, giving me something to cling to when all else seems lost. Moreover, when the storm has passed and I'm feeling strong again, you let me stand on my own and you're never, ever threatened by that. For this reason alone, I would love you enduringly.
  
  
• Sleeping together. And I'm not referring to sex here though that's swell too -- I mean actually sleeping together. Sometimes it's tough when your body is hurting. You don't sleep well during those times and neither do I. But by and large sleeping with you in the bed with me, waking up with you beside me... I love that. I just do.
  

"...I celebrate this breakthrough as a symbol of the events that are about to unfold in your personal life: the long-lost truth finally revealed."

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): "Jazz music is an intensified feeling of nonchalance," said playwright Francoise Sagan. Keep that in mind during the coming week, Sagittarius. Whether or not you actually play or listen to jazz, do whatever's necessary to cultivate intensified feelings of nonchalance. It's extremely urgent for you to be blithe and casual. You desperately need to practice non-attachment as you develop your ability to not care so much about things you can't control. You've got to be ferociously disciplined as you transcend the worries and irritations that won't really matter much in the big scheme of things.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Your circumstances aren't as dire as you feared, Scorpio. The freaky monster in the closet is bored with spooking you and will soon be departing the premises. Meanwhile, one of your other tormentors is about to experience some personal sadness that will soften his or her heart toward you. There's more: The paralysis that has been infecting your funny bone will miraculously cure itself, and the scheduled revelation of the rest of your dirty secrets will be summarily canceled. I hope you're not feeling so sorry for yourself that you fail to notice this sudden turn in your luck. It may take an act of will for you to wake up to the new dispensations that are available.

Title: Recast Casting Call for Stormclouds

I am looking to recast a character in my AD&D game that is run here (http://rpg-fusion.com). The game is Stormclouds on the Horizon and is epic fantasy at its best.

The character's name is Tob, and he was played by a Robin Kaspar back during the LostCoastGaming Site days. He had many RL complications and it doesn't look like he will return to gaming at all. I had been in sporadic contact with him, but that has ceased altogether. I can only believe he no longer wishes to take part in any gaming.

I have held off recasting this role for awhile, but feel it is time to move on. He is a wonderful character and there is a history for him as well as future. I would hate to see the character and his future disappear from the fabric of the story we are weaving.

He is a ranger and has been Janus' best friend and protector. I strongly encourage everyone to give serious consideration to joining this game and taking over the role. Tob disappeared in the middle of the night before the group went down into the catacombs under Castle Northwatch on Guardian's Isle. He left on a mission most dire, and THAT is a story to tell in itself.

Once again, I strongly encourage anyone who loves roleplaying and epic fantasy to consider this and apply. Any interested parties can email me at paragon@rpg-fusion.com , or PM me via the site or the forum pm. I will get back with anyone that applies and we will take it from there. I WILL ask that all applicants review some of the past posts and maybe get with a couple of the players that had a lot of interaction with that character.

thanks

Welcome Address, by Karl Paulnack

“One of my parents’ deepest fears, I suspect, is that society would not properly value me as a musician, that I wouldn’t be appreciated. I had very good grades in high school, I was good in science and math, and they imagined that as a doctor or a research chemist or an engineer, I might be more appreciated than I would be as a musician. I still remember my mother’s remark when I announced my decision to apply to music school—she said, “you’re WASTING your SAT scores.” On some level, I think, my parents were not sure themselves what the value of music was, what its purpose was. And they LOVED music, they listened to classical music all the time. They just weren’t really clear about its function. So let me talk about that a little bit, because we live in a society that puts music in the “arts and entertainment” section of the newspaper, and serious music, the kind your kids are about to engage in, has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with entertainment, in fact it’s the opposite of entertainment. Let me talk a little bit about music, and how it works.

The first people to understand how music really works were the ancient Greeks.And this is going to fascinate you; the Greeks said that music and astronomy were two sides of the same coin. Astronomy was seen as the study of relationships between observable, permanent, external objects, and music was seen as the study of relationships between invisible, internal, hidden objects. Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside us. Let me give you some examples of how this works.

One of the most profound musical compositions of all time is the Quartet for the End of Time written by French composer Olivier Messiaen in 1940. Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered the war against Nazi Germany. He was captured by the Germans in June of 1940, sent across Germany in a cattle car and imprisoned in a concentration camp.

He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him paper and a place to compose. There were three other musicians in the camp, a cellist, a violinist, and a clarinetist, and Messiaen wrote his quartet with these specific players in mind. It was performed in January 1941 for four thousand prisoners and guards in the prison camp. Today it is one of the most famous masterworks in the repertoire.

Given what we have since learned about life in the concentration camps, why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy writing or playing music? There was barely enough energy on a good day to find food and water, to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to escape torture—why would anyone bother with music? And yet—from the camps, we have poetry, we have music, we have visual art; it wasn’t just this one fanatic Messiaen; many, many people created art. Why? Well, in a place where people are only focused on survival, on the bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is that art must be, somehow, essential for life. The camps were without money, without hope, without commerce, without rec reation, without basic respect, but they were not without art. Art is part of survival; art is part of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one of the ways in which we say, “I am alive, and my life has meaning.”

On September 12, 2001 I was a resident of Manhattan. That morning I reached a new understanding of my art and its relationship to the world. I sat down at the piano that morning at 10 AM to practice as was my daily routine; I did it by force of habit, without thinking about it. I lifted the cover on the keyboard, and opened my music, and put my hands on the keys and took my hands off the keys. And I sat there and thought, does this even matter? Isn’t this completely irrelevant? Playing the piano right now, given what happened in this city yesterday, seems silly, absurd, irreverent, pointless. Why am I here? What place has a musician in this moment in time? Who needs a piano player right now? I was completely lost.

And then I, along with the rest of New York, went through the journey of getting through that week. I did not play the piano that day, and in fact I contemplated briefly whether I would ever want to play the piano again. And then I observed how we got through the day.

At least in my neighborhood, we didn’t shoot hoops or play Scrabble. We didn’t play cards to pass the time, we didn’t watch TV, we didn’t shop, we most certainly did not go to the mall. The first organized activity that I saw in New York, that same day, was singing. People sang. People sang around fire houses, people sang “We Shall Overcome”. Lots of people sang America the Beautiful. The first organized public event that I remember was the Brahms Requiem, later that week, at Lincoln Center, with the New York Philharmonic. The first organized public expression of grief, our first communal response to that historic event, was a concert. That was the beginning of a sense that life might go on. The US Military secured the airspace, but recovery was led by the arts, and by music in particular, that very night.

From these two experiences, I have come to understand that music is not part of “arts and entertainment” as the newspaper section would have us believe. It’s not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pass time. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we cannot with our minds.

Some of you may know Samuel Barber’s heartwrenchingly beautiful piece Adagio for Strings. If you don’t know it by that name, then some of you may know it as the background music which accompanied the Oliver Stone movie Platoon, a film about the Vietnam War. If you know that piece of music either way, you know it has the ability to crack your heart open like a walnut; it can make you cry over sadness you didn’t know you had. Music can slip beneath our conscious reality to get at what’s really going on inside us the way a good therapist does.

I bet that you have never been to a wedding where there was absolutely no music. There might have been only a little music, there might have been some really bad music, but I bet you there was some music. And something very predictable happens at weddings—people get all pent up with all kinds of emotions, and then there’s some musical moment where the action of the wedding stops and someone sings or plays the flute or something. And even if the music is lame, even if the quality isn’t good, predictably 30 or 40 percent of the people who are going to cry at a wedding cry a couple of moments after the music starts. Why? The Greeks. Music allows us to move around those big invisible pieces of ourselves and rearrange our insides so that we can express what we feel even when we can’t talk about it. Can you imagine watching Indiana Jones or Superman or Star Wars with the dialogue but no music? What is it about the music swelling up at just the right moment in ET so that all the softies in the audience start crying at exactly the same moment? I guarantee you if you showed the movie with the music stripped out, it wouldn’t happen that way. The Greeks: Music is the understanding of the relationship between invisible internal objects.

I’ll give you one more example, the story of the most important concert of my life. I must tell you I have played a little less than a thousand concerts in my life so far. I have played in places that I thought were important. I like playing in Carnegie Hall; I enjoyed playing in Paris; it made me very happy to please the critics in St. Petersburg. I have played for people I thought were important; music critics of major newspapers, foreign heads of state. The most important concert of my entire life took place in a nursing home in Fargo, ND, about 4 years ago.

I was playing with a very dear friend of mine who is a violinist. We began, as we often do, with Aaron Copland’s Sonata, which was written during World War II and dedicated to a young friend of Copland’s, a young pilot who was shot down during the war. Now we often talk to our audiences about the pieces we are going to play rather than providing them with written program notes. But in this case, because we began the concert with this piece, we decided to talk about the piece later in the program and to just come out and play the music without explanation.

Midway through the piece, an elderly man seated in a wheelchair near the front of the concert hall began to weep. This man, whom I later met, was clearly a soldier—even in his 70’s, it was clear from his buzz-cut hair, square jaw and general demeanor that he had spent a good deal of his life in the military. I thought it a little bit odd that someone would be moved to tears by that particular movement of that particular piece, but it wasn’t the first time I’ve heard crying in a concert and we went on with the concert and finished the piece.

When we came out to play the next piece on the program, we decided to talk about both the first and second pieces, and we described the circumstances in which the Copland was written and mentioned its dedication to a downed pilot. The man in the front of the audience became so disturbed that he had to leave the auditorium. I honestly figured that we would not see him again, but he did come backstage afterwards, tears and all, to explain himself.

What he told us was this: “During World War II, I was a pilot, and I was in an aerial combat situation where one of my team’s planes was hit. I watched my friend bail out, and watched his parachute open, but the Japanese planes which had engaged us returned and machine gunned across the parachute chords so as to separate the parachute from the pilot, and I watched my friend drop away into the ocean, realizing that he was lost. I have not thought about this for many years, but during that first piece of music you played, this memory returned to me so vividly that it was as though I was reliving it. I didn’t understand why this was happening, why now, but then when you came out to explain that this piece of music was written to commemorate a lost pilot, it was a little more than I could handle. How does the music do that? How did it find those feelings and those memories in me?”

Remember the Greeks: music is the study of invisible relationships between internal objects. This concert in Fargo was the most important work I have ever done. For me to play for this old soldier and help him connect, somehow, with Aaron Copland, and to connect their memories of their lost friends, to help him remember and mourn his friend, this is my work. This is why music matters.

What follows is part of the talk I will give to this year’s freshman class when I welcome them a few days from now. The responsibility I will charge your sons and daughters with is this:

“If we were a medical school, and you were here as a med student practicing appendectomies, you’d take your work very seriously because you would imagine that some night at two AM someone is going to waltz into your emergency room and you’re going to have to save their life. Well, my friends, someday at 8 PM someone is going to walk into your concert hall and bring you a mind that is confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether they go out whole again will depend partly on how well you do your craft.

You’re not here to become an entertainer, and you don’t have to sell yourself. The truth is you don’t have anything to sell; being a musician isn’t about dispensing a product, like selling used Chevies. I’m not an entertainer; I’m a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker. You’re here to become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor, physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and well.

Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music; I expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don’t expect it will come from a government, a military force or a corporation. I no longer even expect it to come from the religions of the world, which together seem to have brought us as much war as they have peace. If there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is to be an understanding of how these invisible, internal things should fit together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that’s what we do. As in the concentration camp and the evening of 9/11, the artists are the ones who might be able to help us with our internal, invisible lives.”

Originally written for the Aldeborahnn campaign, now being rebooted at http://rpg-fusion.com. I want a copy of it here. Any and all feedback welcome. :)

1. A rented copy of Kung Fu Panda (it was .54 cents!)
   
   
2. Five books on Mary Magdalene
   
   
3. A sunburn
   
   
4. A sore arm (dunno what happened, it just hurts)
   
   
5. A repaired Book of Ink Project and the fourth block about 1/4 complete
   
   
6. A living room (mostly) clear of needlework inventory
   
   
7. Part One of a pirate story complete!
   
   
8. Chocolate (Ghirardelli's 60% Cacao Bittersweet Chocolate Chips, to be exact)
   
   
9. Two more sets of Libby-claw puncture marks on my skin
   
   
10. A sense of being rested up and happy and ready to start the week!