I'm surely just paranoid, but I'm developing this theory about why the conservative media and shadow-movers went to such lengths to kill Dean's candidacy (and yes, I know I said before that Iowa ain't nothing, that the story's not over yet, but I'm coming around to the idea that they really and truly have killed him dead -- about which I harbor no small amount of resentment).

I think they've got something on Kerry. They probably couldn't find anything on Dean.

If this is true, then they'll bring it out when/if it looks like he could mount a serious challenge. Then bam, 4 more years of the Puppet President.

Yay.

I make it a guideline in my life to get into something new at least once a year. I do this for a couple of reasons.

For one, I remember reading a few years ago about scientific studies into brain activity and the like. The gist of the studies was that the longer you're a creature of habit, the harder it actually becomes to think differently or adapt to new situations. Apparently, the oft-used synaptic patterns become paths of least resistance for thought patterns, much the way water in a stream eventually creates deeper grooves in the earth and makes it less likely that the stream's path will change. So I like to shake things up and keep myself intellectually nimble.

For another, learning new things helps me look at the world through different eyes. New perspectives help me come up with new approaches and solutions to problems.

For a third thing, occasionally I find something I really should have been doing for years, so exciting and interesting is it to me. It happened with rock climbing when my step-brother and friend finally invited me a few years back when we were in Hawaii.

But at any rate, the idea is to step outside my comfort zone and confront my frear, unease or misgivings and learn something new or do something nobody would think I'd ever do.

All of this is a very long way to get around to saying I've started painting with watercolors.

I have no experience or training in visual arts, except digital. I don't think I have the coordination or fine muscle control necessary to do even an adequate job. I don't feel like I have any business trying to create art of this type. It makes me very uncomfortable, especially when Mason looks with interest over my shoulder at my work.

I'm enjoying the hell out of it. And I'm looking forward to proving my preconceptions wrong, or maybe even proving them right, but in any event actually putting them to the test so I actually know where my boundaries lie.

Neil Gaiman's Blog is now on my LiveJournal Friends page. Hurrah! Now I (and anyone who peruses my Friends page) can keep up on the Great One's happenings. (No, really, even if he weren't a fantastically good writer, he's really a rather fascinating person)

Yeah, so I started a new novel last night. I should also note that I haven't even begun editing novel #1 -- there's just so much to do and so little time! And school starts up again tomorrow, so even the new novel may take a back seat.

But I was intrigued by a book we had left over in our slush pile (many of the books Mason and I buy to sell on Amazon end up being nigh-worthless, so we gather them up and donate them to a thrift store) and I decided to do some digging.

The book was a mass market paperback from the early 1970s called Who is Guru Maharaj Ji?. I was fascinated on several levels. Here was a guru I'd never heard of, who'd at one time commanded millions of followers. What had happened to him? Not only that, this book had been published by a mainstream publisher (Bantam, to be exact). Mainstream publishers don't usually go in for those sorts of things.

So I thought I'd do some Web searching. I happened upon a Web site created by his ex-followers. I dug around the site, read more about the man, visited his official sites ... the works.

Here was a man (well, a boy when he started) who seemed to have fallen into all the traps life lays for a cult leader. Rather than being felled in quite the same way as Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, he seems to have managed to cling on, reinvent himself and deny that anything controversial from the past 30 years ever actually happened. (Despite being quoted as having declared himself "Lord of the Universe," he reportedly later claimed that it was his mahatmas, his lieutenants, who spread such claims without his involvement.

He now goes by Prem Rawat (or Maharaji) and has a couple of Web sites and an organization that more or less paint him as a spiritually-oriented motivational speaker.

I found my mind wandering, wondering at the lives of people like Maharaji, Rajneesh, L. Ron Hubbard, and other actual or reputed cult leaders.

It seemed like an interesting mix of humanity and fallibility, the trap of fame, the excesses of wealth, power and powerlessness and, underlying it all, a desperate search for meaning.

And so it begins. I have some fantastic ideas. And while it isn't about Maharaji by any stretch, certain aspects of his life or reported life are an irresistable taking-off point.

I am excited.