This is Swami Vivekananda... I am not home right now, but...

Like a curiously large number of bloggers, I am in a band. I suppose the urge to create music must run parallel to the urge to write rambling expositions about life. Isn't that what so much music is?

The band even has a website that our drummer Ron maintains. In the picture, I am the fellow with the blonde "bowl on my head" haircut. I do not look anything like this now - that picture was taken ten years ago. Yes the band has been around that long. For a bit of a hint as to what we might sound like, you can try my MP3.com.au site - but other than the way I sing, the band does not really sound like that.

Anyway, the point of my writing here is not primarily self-promotion - it is a meditation on that which is Tim, our keyboard player. Tim is one of the most interesting people you could ever meet, but it would take you a while to realize it. His fashion and bearing are, well, quite "Joe Jim Bob Fred." He seems a regular guy, and yet, at the urging of a photographer he knew once, he did do modeling work, affecting a rather bohemian hip that is quite unlike who he looks to be, but is very in line with who he really is. The photographer captures his soul better than Tim himself does in his day to day appearance.

His bookshelf is full of Joseph Campbell books, various writings about the importance of mythology. I'd like to claim to have read them myself, but I have not. Tim once gave me, for my birthday, a copy of the super-string guy's book: Roger Penrose's "The Emperor's New Mind." I will surely have something to write about that someday, but I have misplaced this book at the moment (I did read it.)

Tim's answering machine used to be a treat - people would call and leave him a message just so that they could hear what the answering message said. Frequently the answering machine spoke with the voice of Swami Vivekananda. He was my favourite.

The band practiced quite often during the Clinton years. As a result, we wrote a number of unreleased (and frankly unreleasable) songs about Presidential indiscretions. We have had more serious work to do lately (working on a recording) and have been altogether too serious to write about George Bush's many Presidential difficulties.

In time, I say.