not sure

an entire lifetime

a Lohbado diagram

Lohbado heard his name being called, a voice from the inner sanctuary of the Tabernacle. At first he wasn't sure. The deep, full-bodied voice resonated from a place deep within. It sounded like wind being blown into a jug. The voiced called a few times before Lohbado responded.

Lohbado went to the front of the Club Morono Sanctuary. He gazed up at an overhead tungsten bulb. The eye of Oogah inside the bulb winked at him. Rays of blinding light forced Lohbado to his knees. He kneeled on a peach coloured silk cushion and felt the urge to speak, as in the oral tradition. He realized how all his life he'd been obsessed with a set of concerns, quite limited when viewed against the vast and profound nature of all that there is. The voice of Oogah told Lohbado not to worry. He would be given twenty-four hours to organize his thoughts. He would be called back to account for himself tomorrow.

Lohbado Memoir moral

Lohbado self portrait

  
Undoubtedly many a man or woman felt he or she was singled out as being in some way a special case. Of course, one is a unique instance or token, one grain of sand on the beach. What happens when each sand grain feels worthy of special treatment? Imagine each sand grain feels it deserves a little more than all the other sand grains.

the funeral, from Lohbado's memoirs

a Lohbado decoration

    Inside the warehouse Lohbado saw three men and three women celebrating a funeral. The root syllable of funeral is fun. It’s funny to be confronted with something so final, to see somebody you knew reduced to a corpse and to imagine how you too will one day be a corpse.

OOO instant

a Lohbado OOO diagram

Lohbado arrived at an abandoned temple. Actually it was a warehouse with several loading docks by the rail yards. Trucks could back up into the bays. Overhead doors would slide open. Forklifts would load and unload the trucks. The warehouse hadn’t been used in about ten years.

Lohbado went inside. Broken cement, steel beams, some wood, the wind moaned through the cracks around the closed doors of the loading docks. A weird moaning, it sounded like vowels being chanted, a lonely supplication.

windows along the street

pawn shop

Cote des Neiges 2013

plain building

Pushed to an extreme, the lack of ornamentation becomes picturesque, the sheer desolation of plain form. Sometimes windows reflect the sky, or light accentuates the colour of a wall. Little moments of beauty happen in the attentive eye of the beholder.

wine to gladen the heart

product of Urakine

product of Greece

After a long winter, which most agree was psychologically difficult due to the endless snow storms and unusual weather events, Easter Sunday was the idea occasion to celebrate the beginning of spring. In many gatherings, wine and various beverages added beauty and relaxation. Metaxa is a distilled liquor from the Mediterranean region.

decorative dialogue

A discussion of shapes and sizes went on for quite a while.

Esmerelda

a painted Lohbado scribbler

a low relief framed painting

Tragedy struck Esmerelda over ten years ago. Angels took her younger daughter Ann. Ann got run over by a car when out bicycling, at the age of fifteen. There was something special about Ann, right from the start. She had trouble concentrating. Her head was in the clouds. She rode through a red light. An SUV flattened her. Blood bubbled out her ears. Blood mixed with saliva and flowed from her mouth. Esmerelda saw it. Esmerelda was seventeen when Ann was born and sixteen when she gave birth to Julie.

Lohbado clown

Lohbado went to the marital aids store to try and save his relationship with Esmerelda. This was just before he met Dr. Jane Wormsly. Esmerelda had an esoteric streak. She founded the Rainbow Translation Company for a while, then booked off after a nasty infection infiltrated her wall of protection. Something from the outside got into her body. It was time to quit the business anyway. She had enough to buy rental property and live off the assets. She could do psychic appointments to cover luxury expense. She had a fabulous art collection. The local artists loved her.

going out

near Berri Uquam

Decairie Service Road

on Decairie Service Road

It felt good to go out after the past few days of intense air pressure changes. One day it felt like summer, the next like winter. Today Lohbado went to Bibliotheque Nationale at metro Berri Uquam. It has a decent collection of books, movies and music. It's a very popular place for people of all ages and interests.

While walking here and there, Lohbado takes photos with his pocket camera, interesting visual arrangements.

gadgets

Portable communication devices could come in handy in a variety of situations. Lohbado took photos of these when visiting friends.

brick wall

There's something mysterious and spiritual about a brick wall. The vertical line in some of the above pictures suggests a connection with another way of looking at things, perhaps a line to the infinite, a dark line, breaking up the pattern of brick. Plenty of wall expressions exist... nose against the wall, run up against a brick wall, prayer wall, Pink Floyd's album "The Wall". One could pause to examine the lines, patterns textures, an infinite variety of visual discoveries.

friends

A friendly evening, once in a while it's good to get out.

clean washroom

not sure what this is

wash your hands

urinals

Washrooms have changed a lot. There's something fascinating about the washrooms in an old building, especially when they haven't been renovated in a while. The urinals in the above picture look fairly recent. Some old buildings have upright urinals practically the size of bath tubs. They don't make them like that anymore.

Lohbado spent a fair bit of time, over the decades, pausing to pee into various porcelain devices. In the old days, privacy wasn't such a big deal. It's quite common these days to separate urinals with little partitions, so men can't look at each other, at the variety of devices nature provided for emptying the bladder.

Lohbado goes to church

St. Joseph's Oratory

pain and suffering

dome

pew

St. Joseph's Oratory is a Montreal landmark, visible from a great distance. It requires a good set of legs to walk up the hill and up the long flight of stairs, but once inside, escalators make it a little easier. There are several places where one could sit quietly and relax. Lohbado visited the main sanctuary, just inside the front entrance, then rode the escalators to the sanctuary under the dome. The sheer size of the basilica is amazing. It also offers a panoramic view and a spacious park area outside. It's rare to find a public space that doesn't torment the visitor with background music. Lohbado sat there for quite a while to enjoy the peace and quiet.

33

in a restaurant

Van Horne Mall IGA

Decairie near Bourret

Lohbado sat at table 33. A few days later he went for a walk in the rain, a dark, overcast sky. In the original photos, the sky came out white, so Lohbado masked out the white areas and put in a more dramatic, cloudy sky.

thinking

jet plane ride to nowhere

burn, feel it burn, a jet plane ride to nowhere, or whatever... birth to death, a little dreaming in between. 00000000000

Morono Exercises

A good mental spring-cleaning exercise is to sit down, back straight and have a look at what is going on in one's mind. Take a few moments to relax. Watch the thoughts come and go. It's amazing how thoughts have so much power to whirl one about, one moment elated, the next moment crestfallen, or else in a stupor. If one sits up straight for a while, eventually the mind settles. If you let a murky glass of water sit, the sediment settles to the bottom and the water becomes clear.

don't lose your nerve

Don't lose your nerve. There's always somebody who is not going to like what you're doing. The more "weird or far out" your activity, the greater the number of people who won't approve. Don't seek applause. It doesn't matter if people like it or don't like it. You're doing it because you are doing it. Don't worry about the rest. Lohbado followed the instructions of Oogah.

Lohbado was quite familiar with the uptight-reaction. The person's face puckers, the eyes narrow to slits, or bulge, the jaw tightens into a grimace. Such expressions indicate that the person has reached a point on their mental horizon, beyond which they won't go. It's the point when the person cries: enough is enough! I don't get it! What does it mean! This is not the way I was brought up. My parents, grandparents and great grandparents would never tolerate such images. You're a degenerate!

The worst uptightness was the uptightness in Lohbado's own mind, which he inflicted on himself. He whipped himself often with negative discursiveness. Lohbado realized he should let it all go and take some time to relax.

substances

digestion

after dinner snack

Keep going, slow but sure, one meal after another in the long journey of digestion, eating one's way from birth to the final moments, when one's appetite finally fails before death. Or maybe one might die while eating, choking on a ham sandwich. A man in a cafe once died while eating spaghetti. He collapsed, heart attack, face into the noodles and sauce. Eat and be eaten.

beauty treatment

sink

Beauty treatment begins at home, in the comfort of one's bathroom. Above the sink one usually finds a cabinet with a mirror door. Take whatever you like out of the cabinet, cleansing and enhancing products. Adjust in front of the mirror. One special occasions one could go for a coiffure and come out looking like Venus or Adonis.

operation

The mind has outbreaks of negative discursiveness. There’s a faculty of mind devoted to criticizing oneself and others. This makes it difficult for people to get along. There’s always a level of tension, or potential for conflict. Endless critical chatter doesn’t mean one doesn’t like people. It just happens, like water dripping endlessly. Microscopic creatures wander through the brain. Some wear a bell to warn of contagious disease. There are now over 80 cases of Ebola virus in Guinea. 

It's helpful to distinguish between the negative stream of chatter in one's consciousness as opposed to the actual state of things. If one took the chatter seriously, there's the danger of doing an injustice to others, of projecting negative ideas on to them. Is the problem in the person and in the world, or is the problem in one's mind? Maybe it's a little of both. If a person is coming at you with a knife, then definitely that's an outer problem. But if you start building negative theories about your friend or companion, that's an inner problem, or maybe both.