Monday is the Solstice. 8:30 or so and dusk can still be seen. Great.

This summer I have a few projects. Some are trivial. Prep for Fall teaching, bone up some programming. Other things not so much. In May I decided to learn how to play the guitar. And 100 Days is pulsing like the desert sun. I’m, therefore, writing at mediaplay, where the summer work is stored.

Today, boosted by this film by John Timmons and loads of images by other’s in the collaborative, I learned about an old man who lives in Osaka and whose father may or may not have died in the bomb blast at Nagasaki. He’s still with me. I see him holding his photograph. And I see the mother on the porch and hear the thinking of the fictional narrator, whose thought process is really my own.

This Osaka is perpetual. It is always present, like the El Paso I still remember from my last visit or the corridor of Park Street in Hartford. I wonder where the old man is now. I wonder what he’s eating. I wonder if his mother is alive.

The last couple of days have seen graduation to a new level of guitar playing. The funny part is that I go from beginner to a little more than beginner as I have thousands of hours left to go toward mastery of something I don’t really know much about. Luckily I have friends who do. I’ve learned a piece that weeks back I couldn’t even have attempted without a lot of pain and frustration. What’s amazing about all this is that I’ve re-connected with the thrill of just learning something new, something that I’ve always wanted to do but hadn’t had the time to consider seriously.

The brain is physically changing. And that’s thrilling. I often joke that I want to connect a program to my head that will teach me to do things. It’s a joke of course. The fun part would be missed. It’s totally thrilling to learn something new.