Making Media

I was back at the Krobar today (Cork and Tap), where the bartender kindly looked up Tiger Balm (aisle 21) which I procured for Carol, suffering from a well-known chest cold she sometimes gets in Oregon, where the spikes in hot and cold may prove taxing.

This was after producing another video, hoping to connect some dots for myself an others.  I invest in mnemonics, which is to say memory banking.

You'll find a lot of business models bank on customers remembering where they learned a lot, or in some other way got their money's worth.

Customer loyalty translates into repeat business, and without repeat business, you may run out of customers (not always the case, as some needs remain transient).

I'm hoping to orient students who do not consider themselves "true believers" when it comes to deities or a deity. I'm working to tease apart "prayer" and any specific form of deism. 

Having friends in religious camps doesn't cancel my appreciation for secular space as a kind of neutral ground between faiths, much like the emptiness of outer space, not really a vacuum either.

I just had the one Boneyard RPM. Having procured the necessary supplies, I'm keeping a close watch on the household.

Beertopia

I've gone on and off beer a few times, however not on moral grounds, so much as for health reasons (for going on, not just off). When I go off beer, I up other alcohol beverages, keeping it constant, more or less.

This is not health advice, and I'm no medical doctor.  Call me a witch doctor if you like, but to me that just means I'm not hanging out a shingle, as one who wants to be persecuted for practicing voodoo or whatever shamanistic science (oxymoron alert!).

I'm just another Quaker who likes beer, and who takes pride in Quaker breweries, if the beer is any good.

Anyway, I was at one of my regular watering holes with a friend I'd not seen in a long time, on her way back to an important career, which had sent her here for a conference.  I introduced myself casually to one of the bar customers, and started yakking with the bartender.  My friend took up with the stranger and they talked on and on and on.

Well of course it turned out later that my friend had mistaken my casual introduction to a stranger, for a nod to a well-known friend.  She thought in sharing her life with this guy, she was likewise filling me in, as he and I would be talking later.  I doubt I'll ever see him again.

Another time on the same visit, my friend got my mother talking about her childhood and sharing stories I hardly ever, if ever, have heard.  Not pleasant stories (about how her older brother was killed when he roamed out in a new neighborhood to explore a construction site) but also not often heard.  However my friend assumed mom frequently told this story, and that I'd heard it many times before.

I think that's what old friendships, renewed much later in time, sometimes engender:  new forms of misunderstanding that aren't necessarily damaging, more like instructive. 

I mean, you're free to put a negative spin on just about anything uncomfortable, but if you're able to afford a positive spin, you'll be propelled into new fun adventures.

Or such is the PR.