My trilogy about life

I still think about kyfho from time to time, and he came up in memory the other day. I remembered a conversation I'd had about kyfho's insistence that you need to define your philosophy of life or otherwise you just drift. Another friend I deeply respect called that statement a bunch of hooey, or something like that.

I got to thinking that kyfho may have influenced my last three major writing projects – the books Refuse to be Afraid and A Scream of Consciousness, and the current effort ImagRev: The Imaginary Revolution, a novel that I am writing as a daily blog that will become a book at some point.

What is this little trilogy if not an attempt to define a philosophy of life? Refuse to let your fears control you. As much as possible, tend to the needs of the present moment, because neither the past nor the future are accessible just now. And, in Ray Kaliber's Tenets of Common Wealth, Love your neighbor as yourself; interact with love, not force or violence; and give more than you receive.

Enough navel-gazing, my other friend has cried a time or two. He misses what I had to say when I was railing against the abuses against individual sovereignty that occur daily in what is proclaimed to be a free country. What I'd decided was that freedom is an internal thing, and that its embers are fanned into a flame not by focusing on politics and government but on personal actions. Still, the forces of government do spend a lot of time trying to restrict and even outlaw personal autonomy.

I'd like to think The Imaginary Revolution would please both friends. It has a healthy dose of philosophy, being about a society based on the Zero Aggression Principle and all. But science fiction, speculative fiction, has never really been about predicting the future as much as it is about reflecting the present in an alien environment. You may find that life on Sirius 4 has a familiar feeling.

Please consider this an invitation to explore these philosophical musings and dramatizations and let me know what you think – especially if you find it a bunch of hooey. Being challenged is how we grow.

Uncle Warren's Attic 75 - The Barry McGuire Episode

Click on the pod icon or this link to download/listen to Uncle Warren's Attic #75.

This 75th episode of Uncle Warren's Attic tells the story of when I met Barry McGuire, the 1960s folksinger who morphed into a 1970s contemporary Christian music singer and now tours the world with a show called "Tripping the Sixties."

It's the story of my latest book, A Scream of Consciousness, and of my latest little homemade recording, Ten Thousand Days. You'll hear Barry sing a well-known sixties tune and a live solo rendition of "God Like the Wind." You'll hear me sing a song I wrote a long time ago called "Just Today" and a more recent one called "All That's Left You."

If you've hung around for 75 episodes, thanks! If you're new to this, welcome to my Attic!

And if you're ever in Green Bay, make sure you stop by the Cup O'Joy!

About this week's prizes

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Sunday's episode of the Uncle Warren's Attic podcast features a contest - be one of the first three listeners to identify what these four songs have in common and win signed copies of my last two books. It occurs to me you might want to know what you're going to win.

A Scream of Consciousness (the one with our golden retriever Willow reveling in the moment on the cover) is a collection of essays about about becoming alive, getting in touch with God and the universe, and embracing the here and now – here, and now.

Refuse to be Afraid is another collection of essays, this one about dealing with fear. It seems everyone from politicians to pharmaceutical companies want you to be so afraid that you'll willingly buy what they're selling, no matter the cost. The message here: Refuse to be Afraid. Free yourself. Dream.

Click here to learn more

My best friend whom I've never met, Wally Conger, and I chatted together after the release of each book, talking about the themes but also roaming far afield to subjects like zombies and such. If you'd like to hear those conversations, Wally has them available in handy-dandy form - just click here for A Scream of Consciousness and here for Refuse to be Afraid.

And you'll probably want to explore Wally's site while you're at it. There's quite a lot of good stuff there.

Then check in Sunday for the re-debut of Uncle Warren's Attic and tell me what the four songs in the contest have in common. I suspect you'll have a suspicion 10 seconds into the first song and you'll be able to predict what the fourth song is, so get your guess to me asap.

Made for these times

"I keep looking for a place to fit where I can speak my mind..."

The mark of a great artist is that she puts words or images to a thought or feeling that is inside many people but hasn't been expressed in a way that most of us will understand. Brian Wilson is a great artist.

In the song "I Just Wasn't Made For These Times," Wilson puts words and music to the awkward feeling that each and every one of us feels when we recognize there is no one else in the world quite like "me."

"I've been trying hard to find the people That I won't leave behind ..."

The search for friendship, the search for meaning, the search for "fitting in." Ultimately we won't find complete fulfillment from other people. John Maxwell writes about being in the audience when someone asked his wife if "John makes you happy" and getting surprised when she responded, "No." Then she explained that true happiness is something you find inside yourself and not the responsibility of other people - and he realized she was right.

"They say I got brains, but they ain't doing me no good; I wish they would ..."

As a result of that realization, Wilson sings, "Sometimes I feel very sad," and he gets frustrated when his hopes and expectations don't quite come true ...

"Each time things start to happen again, I think I got something good goin' for myself, but what goes wrong ..."

The sadness makes Wilson wonder if "I guess I just wasn't made for these times," but in giving voice to the sadness, he touches something in every heart, the sense of uniqueness that is both the joy and curse of our existence. He sings about the loneliness of being unlike any other living soul on Earth.

"Every time I get the inspiration to go change things around, no one wants to help me look for places where new things might be found - Where can I turn when my fair weather friends cop out? What's it all about?"

But there is also the joy in realization - If Brian Wilson can give voice to my loneliness, I'm not alone.

And if each of us is a unique being, how precious that is: How important it is that we treat each other with the respect and care that something precious and unique deserves.

None of us will ever quite fit in precisely, because we were designed to be different. That can make us sad and lonely, but it can also give us strength and inspiration, voiced in such motivational clichés as "If it's going to be, it's up to me."

Looking for a place to fit where you can speak your mind? So is everyone else - so gain power from that fact and speak your mind anyway.

Do the thing you fear, and you will find, like Brian Wilson did, that you have something to say that people need to hear.