I am trying to start over with this blog. For some reason, I couldn't access it for a while, but here it is, in all its un-glory. There is a lot of un-glory in the desert; it goes along nicely, side by side with the more typically beautiful things there. Several places brought me here, not to the real desert, but to the desert between my ears. Oh, I've been to the real desert, and it didn't disappoint, but the etheral one in my imagination is hard to beat. It is borne out of a love and respect for the imagination. That imagination is the one that people once used to picture what was happening in a radio comedy or drama, years before television was in most every home. It is something Einstein once said was more important than knowledge. I'm no Einstein, but I respect the imagination.

An old song, called "The Shifting, Whispering Sands", was one of the major inspirations for this foray of mine into the desert. In the version I first heard, Ken Nordine, the inventor of Word Jazz, did the spoken parts of the song, and Billy Vaughn and His Orchestra played the music. Billy Vaughn was the most successful orchestra leader of all time, in terms of numbers of records sold. He also was an A&R man for Dot Records, back in the day. A song recorded by he and his orchestra, "Swingin' Safari", ended up on the soundtrack to the TV program, "Mad Men".

The desert is full of facts and figures, and trivia. There are abandoned knick knacks, and abandoned memories and ideas. The dunes shift to and fro, revealing what has been buried beneath them. These dunes are somewhat akin to the grey matter inside our heads, I guess. I'm always hedging my bets, and I notice a randomness in everything that is so pervasive; it begins to form patterns that seem almost recognizable. Welcome to my own personal desert. It may not be the stuff of which every dream is made, but I like it.