An Eternal Golden Braid

This picture, dear readers, is of your humble blogger playing drums in his high school rock band (we were going to conquer the world, but that dream is another story). Although this picture was taken over 30 years ago, I had never seen it until a few months ago when it arrived in an email from ... Baghdad.

My friend "Mike", bass player in the band, had an older brother "Jack" who was a photographer. He was hanging out with us snapping photos (35mm analog, of course) while we were jamming in a little lot downtown in 1973. He'd taken some pictures at previous gigs, but I had never seen these and had long forgotten about the event. Meanwhile, Jack joined up with the military shortly after high school. After a long career (including stints in both Gulf Wars), he retired from the military, signed up with a defense contractor, and headed back to Baghdad.

At any rate, before he headed back to Iraq he was cleaning out his garage and found these old photographs. He scanned them, brought them on a data key to Baghdad, and emailed them back to his brother who sent them on to me.

I can't quite describe the feelings brought up by having this picture of me in my carefree youth delivered from a war zone halfway around the world via email. The impact of this confluence of such disparate eras, places, technologies, and perspectives was just overwhelming. It was almost a visceral experience of the unity of matter and thought described by both mystics and quantum physicists - one of Hofstadter's Eternal Golden Braids, stretching across decades, continents, and consciousnesses. And here it is in a blog on the Web ... where will you take it next?