I was doing the Seaport Village

Spring 2009 Art Show

It was Sunday morning,

The third and final day

One of the show organizers

Brought a fellow to my tent

She introduced Warner,

Another show participant

Apparently she had told him

A little about me

She and I had spoken

During the first day

The conversation this time

Began with Noam Chomsky

Warner was curious

How I felt about Chomsky

I told them I didn’t like Chomsky

And he asked why

I explained that I didn’t agree with Chomsky’s ideas

About hardwired modules for language in the brain

I said that people, and even animals,

Do have hardwiring for pattern recognition

And that this is enough

To generate a lot of functions

I also felt that Chomsky pontificated

About subjects which he was not an expert in

Warner was a big Chomsky fan

But wasn’t offended by what I said

Sigal slipped away at some point

While Warner and I continued talking

We touched on a variety of topics

And ended up spending

The better part of an hour

Covering fascinating subjects

He eventually took his leave

And went back to his display

It was now well into the late morning

And I hadn’t read a page of my book

Usually by this point in an art show

I would have gotten some reading in

I started reading on page 548 of

Neal Stephenson’s new novel Anathem

I didn’t even get through the first paragraph ---

It brought up something we had just talked about:

“The ancient animal part of my brain,

So attuned to subtle, suspicious movements,

Had picked out this one star among the millions.”

I had to bring this over and show Warner;

He agreed that this was quite curious

A little while later, a woman stopped at my booth

And asked if the images were fractal-based

I was a bit surprised because she was probably in her 60’s,

Not the usual age for people knowing of fractals

She told me she was an artist and had even

Attended the Photoshop User Group meetings

I had just been in touch with Stephen, who runs that group;

He was quite excited by the ACN video phone

This was the flagship product from

My new business venture in telecom marketing

A colleague and I had demonstrated it to Stephen

At the monthly Digital Art Guild meeting

He even invited us to demo it

At an upcoming Photoshop group meeting

Telling this woman visiting my booth about the phone,

I decided to show her what it looks like

I happened to have some ACN material with me,

As it is kept in my car in a box with some of my art material

The cover of Success From Home magazine

Had a picture of the video phone

This woman, Catherine, noticed that John Maxwell

Was featured in the issue

She knew who he was

And wanted to see his article

We couldn’t find an entry in the table of contents

So I started leafing through the issue with Catherine looking on

She saw a page with Robert Kiyosaki

And mentioned she had met him

She had done a workshop with him;

The goal of one exercise was to land rings on a post

Points were awarded based on how far one was

When successfully tossing a ring onto the post

The restriction was that

Both feet must be on the ground

Catherine lay on the floor with legs outstretched

So she could easily place rings on the post

Oddly, Warner had brought up how he

Has never had both feet on the ground

Catherine gave me her business card,

Which had a cool embossed image of a comet

The image title on the card was “Cometale”;

She explained that it’s actually “comet tale”

I dug out my 11x14 print of “Comet”

And showed it to her

Catherine went on to share that she

Is highly medically intuitive

She senses medical conditions about people

Just by standing near them

She used a downward sweeping gesture with both arms

To illustrate how this information channels through her

Oddly, Warner had used the same gesture

To illustrate recently giving away 65 books

He referred to this as

Channeling this resource to others

The last straw was when Catherine

Stated that she can even intuit from animals

She related a story about a friend

Whose dog was ailing

Catherine said the dog spoke to her

And told her what was wrong

I’d heard enough, signaling Warner to come over

Because he needed to hear all this

       *       *       *

Warner had spooked a visitor to my booth

Who had a large thin dog on a leash

Warner had wondered if it was a whippet

But the owner told us it was a greyhound

Warner then said he’d once been at a greyhound racetrack

And had found himself in front of a dozen of the dogs

This had not happened before or since,

But the dogs spoke to him in English

One told him it wasn’t feeling well

And the eventual winner said it would win

At that point the dog owner took his leave,

Clearly thinking Warner was a kook

       *       *       *

Warner came over and I introduced

My two new strange friends

We chatted for a while,

Then Warner headed back

Catherine confided in me that she had sensed

Something very serious with his health

Eventually she took off,

But a little while later she returned

She had stopped off with Warner and his wife;

He explained he’d been run over when he was twelve

This was awful but much better than

There being some lurking disaster

Catherine said so long again

And I finally got to resume that paragraph in my book

I didn’t get to finish it, however,

Without yet further funny business:

“Then it broadened to a dot of orange,

Then flared yellow and threw out a comet-tail.”

What a bizarre mixture of conversations,

Personalities, and stories…