Franklin's Dilemma

>> They never seem to ask questions even of themselves. How can a seeker enter or sustain a quest without asking a lot questions? <<

It's my take on things that each person is responsible for keeping their own curiosity alive and... well... curious. One of my favorite sayings is "It's curiosity that kills the "cat." When I'm feeling crude or in a mood to shock somebody, I use "pussy" for cat". The argument is that curiosity kills a woman's romantic or sexual interest when some purported lover is disinterestedly spouting off about love as a scientific experiment. 

I'm not all that sure this theory is entirely correct. I might have to be a nerd to understand experientially whether love as a scientific experiment is a topic that turns women off. There are exceptions to every rule I suppose.

I'm not a nerd or anything even close to being one. I can be curious about anything for any reason, but the proof of the pudding is that I'm not particularly curious about conjuring results using the scientific method.

I might be curious about a person, a nerd, who can do that, and they do it all the time. Why would they not? I tell myself the real nerds do what they do, but using numbers to do what I do using words. I don't do numbers with ease, so how would I know what women attracted to nerds are turned on or off about?

It's not that I haven't successfully taken courses in math beyond the required courses for a Drama and Speech major at the college level. I have, and I made A's and B's just to prove I 'could' do it. I can do math, I just don't care enough to give my very best. Granted, I never got beyond precalculus, but I felt terrific that I could tolerate manipulating formulae and numbers for even that much. 

It's so hard to get people to jump to ridiculous conclusions with me as if we were taking a hay ride together, while using numbers as incantation. For a math phobic person like me that's just suicidal. I don't have to do that to get what I need or want from people with no physical tools or implements to do it.

Getting the female gender to do for-me as redemption for they past sins and as a duty and path for nurturing themselves, is much easier than working alone in some remote lab somewhere reinventing the wheel. Hiring college math professors as a consultants for what i might need math for is dirt cheap compared to actually learning how to do it myself, and they're usually family men who are grateful for the extra money.

One of my strongest intuitions happened while lost to the world drawing and interpreting natal and horary charts, was that most every person has a genius for doing at least one specific task with extreme competence, if not a bunch of them. They wanna be asked to use their genius. People seem very grateful to people who know how to do that. Ask them to use their genius, that is, and if it's done with so-me finesse, it don't bother them at all to use their genius in your favor with nothing much in it for them at all. 

I like discovering people's genius, whatever it is, and giving control of it back to them simply by recognizing something they truly live for, but repressed without meaning to. I enjoy conjuring their genie out of it's den of iniquity, and proving it's needs to it's master irrefutably.

I don't usually ask permission or even tell them what happened. I don't want them to know in my presence that I'm conjuring. The logistics of how it happened don't seem to matter much. If it happens repetitively and/or for long enough, they will eventually do their own conjuring by unconscious imitation. Don't we all?

I make up the stuff I write here to amuse or to entertain myself. It's just drifting thoughts personified. A stitch in ti-me saves nine.

Negation And Being

I'm reading Sartre again at bedtime. It fascinates me to read Being And Nothingness. A lot of times I wouldn't believe for a moment that I actually understand what he writes about. Not until I'm actually in the process of reading itself. This translated version of what he did say in French, but only what his translator thought he expressed in English, combines to inspire to at least try to understand what he writes about. I don't know whether the two of them got together in person to mull it over, and come up with a more precise English copy. 

Not caring about the veracity or accuracy of the translation was the only way I could progress through the book. The content is so burdensome (in any language I suspect), that I couldn't read from the book for any appreciable amount of ti-me before I collapsed into sleep from the sheer overload and weight of the words. The next day, however, what I thought was impossible to understand sometime appeared in my blog entry and the e-mails I wrote. 

I'm reading the Introduction again. I think it was the translator who recommended doing that. I certainly understand after reading the first few sections of it why I need to read it again. I learned how to read Sartre as I read him. By the time I got to the end of the book I felt as though I understood what Sartre attempts to communicate, and so it appears reasonable to re-read the part where I hadn't learned how to interpret his meaning yet.

There is one particular statement that fascinates me, and it puzzles me somewhat too. That statement is "Negation can never be derived from Being." I seem to understand this better than I can write about it, and that's what worries me. It seems to be similar to Rembrant's comment that a person can only see as well as they can draw. Given that, I may not understand Sartre at all. I enjoy reading him anyway.

The insurance adjuster for the company representing the sixteen year old kid came by yesterday to figure out how much to compensate me for the damage done. The woman I talked to a couple of days ago led me to believe that the adjuster would take care of all the arrangements to get my car repaired, and that they would rent me a car to drive while that happened.

The adjuster didn't see it that way. He told me that he was going let me decide where I wanted to get it fixed. When I explained the difference between what he and the office lady said, he told me that all he had to do to change what she said was to mark one entry on his report that stated he was going the customer a choice about where they wanted it fixed, and the insurance company would just send me a check for that amount.

Now, I have to decide whether to take the money and fix the car or keep the money to use as I please. I think we already know the answer to that. The car runs very well. It's only the front passenger's door that's damaged, and as the adjuster kindly pointed out to me, that door will open from the inside.

I have two "big ticket" items I'm interested in purchasing before the Depression hits full stride. A new digital 1080p television with a 240 Mhz refresh rate. I've been reading about how if the refresh on these TV sets is so fast, people are wondering how much further do they need to go in order to combine a computer inside them. The other item I got on my mind is a new computer, but I'm waiting for the new Mac Operating System called Snow Leopard to get here next summer.

I'm probably not going to buy another computer until two upgraded technologies come on the market. One is USB3, and the other is a fast SSD. Both are coming to the trades shows next week in some form or fashion. In any case, they're well on their way. The SSD's developed and already on the market by Intel gets really great reviews. They just cost an arm and a leg to buy presently. This link will take you to where Newegg.com has the one I want for sale:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167013

A Hero Who Explained Himself Well

It seems rather tragic that European Christians (extrapolated Druids) don't realize or acknowledge they are Sun worshipers themselves rather than Son worshipers. They arrive in the Americas and attempt to convert the native Sun worshipers into Son worshipers in total ignorance of their own backwardness.  

Even I was a little shocked to find out the Mormons attempted to convince the native tribes in America they originated as some of the lost tribes of Israel. But, then again, how could the Mormons have known their lies would be exposed by DNA tests that prove the "native" "Indians" emigrated from Asia, and that they were neither native or from India. I'd bet good money that this huge inaccuracy won't change not one Mormon's mind. Why would they care if their religion is based on lies when everyone else's religion is based on lies too. Like all the rest of Earth's religions, the Mormon's lies are really true, and the other's are not.

They are the sa-me lies, if the Mythologist Joseph Campbell's theories are correct. I like his theories. Especially the one in his tour de force "The Hero With A Thousand Faces".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Faces

Campbell claims there is only one story, and that story is about Everyman as a hero who attempts to steal the gifts of the gods for himself, and subsequently manifest that ill-gotten gain in the sensory dimension in order to get people to think he was more important than your average bear.

The only differences between all the myths of all the peoples and all the places of the Earth is the location the story is told for. If the culture that produces a myth lives in the high mountains, their hero will ideally live in the mountains too, and his virtues will be the virtues of mountain men. If the story is told by a culture in America that lives in the Mojave desert area, the main character of that myth might be naymed Geronimo, and the story will be about Apaches who live in the Southwest. If the myth was generated the torpid rain forests of the world, the hero will possess the skills and know-how of what to do if he encounters a jungle beast. Maybe.

Campbell's point seems to be that the actual story plot of every myth written on Earth is the sa-me. That's why all the world's religions are based on the same lies. The "lies" are merely the environmental differences humans have to observe because they live in different environments like deserts or seashores or rain forests or in the highest mountains of the Himalayas.

The "real story" the myths are written about involve man's symbolic relationship with the Sun and the Moon. It's about light that's generated by the Sun, and the reflected light produced by the Moon. Every abstract construct known to man can be derived from those two basic points of reference.

What matters about that is, as far as we (humans in general) know through no-ing (denial), is that no other form of life can symbolically extrapolate the entire known universe from these binary polar opposites. It's the most amazing facticity I consciously need to consider using my own process of realization.

Noise Isn't Always Joyful

We hardly ever get pea soup fog in this area. I don't know why that is. I've traveled in places where it's supposed to occur, but have only experienced such an impenetrable fog a few times. It's foggy here this morning, Whatever the weather situation is that causes the fog also causes it to keep sound from escaping upwards.

It's sort of like how I've seen smoke coming out of house chimneys when i was a kid, and the smoke appeared to stop going upwards at some point and gather in streaky layers that fascinated me.

I heard an unusual sound last night as I was sitting around writing e-mail responses, and eventually it seemed so close to my house it motivated me to go outside to figure it out. It was the sound of the mechanical room over at the Wal-Mart strip mall about two miles away.

It sounded louder that it might have standing inside the equipment room itself. As it the low clouds were not only reflecting ambient sounds back downward, but magnifying them by making them louder than they normally would be. There are times when I wonder if I didn't select a weird location to build my house on.

I thought about and considered as many possible intrusions on my privacy as there might be here, but the idea that it might be contaminated by unwelcome sound wasn't factored in. Too late now. I guess I'll buy a new box of foam earplugs and learn to live with it.

I'm kind of a nut for ear protection devices. I worked in industrial construction where the job sites were usually populated with all sorts of loud heavy equipment. On large projects like power plants, oil refineries, and pulp mills there might be twenty or thirty diesel engines all running at various noise levels at the same ti-me. Much less all the jack-hammers and grinding tools whose aural output sometimes produced screeching sounds and low rumbles out of the human's audible range, but causing deafness without warning.

It might appear as if I've been at war with noises that were literally threatening my ability to hear well all my adult life. In the Navy the whole steel hull and decks of the ships rattled one's bones with the noise and the vibration of the huge boilers and turbines, as well as the sounds of the eight 5" artillery weapons firing and lobbing explosives to indiscriminately kill anything around where the projectiles landed.

I worked on shrimp boats working the Gulf of Mexico on and off for years where the diesel engines ran 24/7 the entire ti-me we were away from land. It was such a pleasure to work out of Cameron, Louisiana where we might pull into one of the bays, run the boat up on the sand banks, and shut that diesel engine off.

Sometime groups of wooden shrimp boats that worked the shallow waters just off the Gulf coastline would pull into Cimarron Bay, and with the diesel engines thankfully shut down, the only thing I could hear would be the sounds of laughter and cussing in Cajun French on into the night, and when it stopped, only the wind whistling or nothingness. I love nothingness. It's so easy to not do, there's nothing to it.

I don't know why I didn't think about the fact that the big semi trucks I wanted to learn to drive were diesel powered. I was so excited that this huge trucking company would hire me and train me to be a truck driver at the age of sixty-one. It wasn't until I finished the training and the company issued me my own truck that it began to sink in that I'd painted myself in a corner with the roaring sounds of diesel engines again.

I found myself doing all sorts of things to take my mind off the noise. I could and did wear foam earplugs to soften the blow, but I was driving 14+ hours a day, and the lining inside my ears couldn't take it. I really think I undermined my chance at being a professional driver by having little accidents to use as an excuse to git outta Dodge. Accidents are not unusual for new drivers. Getting use to hauling a 53 foot long trailer takes a while, but i may have unconsciously pushed the limit to get away from the diesel noise. I dread seeing those orange trucks now. Truck driving was one of my rare, but definitive failures in life.

Now that I'm reflecting on diesel noise, the whole thing may have started with the first tractor my father bought to do the farm work instead of the mules and horses I was used to. The mules and horses wouldn't work in the dark. Sunset was the limit of my work day because they would literally head for the barn whether I liked it or not. The new tractor changed all that.

I was a teenager and sudden found myself frenetically attracted to girls. I didn't know anything about girls, but I wanted to go where they might be at night so I could figure it out. Even though the animals limited my work day to sunset, I still had to clean up and make myself presentable. I didn't have a lot of time before the teenaged girls had to go home. Practically none after the tractor arrived.

The tractor had lights on it. It didn't head for the barn automatically at sunset. My father had this notion that make-do work would keep his oldest son off the streets and out of trouble. He'd have me out working the fields with that tractor until the neighbors would call to complain of the noise messing with their sleep.

I grew to hate that tractor. Soon, I ran away from home to explore what becoming a man meant from my own perspective. It didn't do any good. I was returned to my misery by threats of my father taking legal steps. My father couldn't stop me from joining the Navy when I was eighteen years old. He cried like a baby when I got on the bus to California and out of his reach.

Presently, from the point of view of an old man with only four months to go until I'm seventy years old, it didn't mean all that much to find out about girls. No matter what color lipstick they wore, the whole deal was about procreation and enslaving oneself to your children. I ran away from that just as surely, and by then, nobody could make me come back. I did though, and here I am. Waiting and watching for the ti-me to co-me when the chance is gone.

Stem Cells And Aging

I'm so enthralled by the notion that anybody with an internet connected computer can use one of the search engines and get an answer for most any question that enters their punkin' haid. Literally. There is no real good reason to ask another person a sincere question that can't be answered even more precisely by something somebody has written and posted on the internet.

Recently I've begun entering questions into Google just like I would ask a human being using the same language I would use with a human being, and I get excellent results on the very first page of the Results Page. My other strategy is to start entering in as many individual words I can think of that have even a remote connection to the question I want answered.

It's taken me a long time to learn how to ask the questions that will get me the response I'm looking for. The Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching was the main source I used to accomplish this. I highly recommend a curious person to learn to use the I Ching for the questions they have about life. In my opinion, there is no oracle that can teach a person how to ask the right question better than this book, but it's fairly complex and takes patience to do the learning curve to get started.

Getting started in this case means forming a habit of approaching the I Ching if you have a question you want answered. I feel like I mastered what the I Ching needs to teach me more and so I don't use the book to approach any more. I use people as oracles these days, and from their reaction, nothing could please them more.

Even though I mastered the I Ching, I had to learn to use the internet search engine by itself. My expertise at using the I Ching didn't tranfer over to an expertise in using a search engine. My favorite search engine is Google, and has been since I first became aware of it.

The reason I had was simple. They had a page with a logo and a box for entering the topic of the search and that was about it. The Yahoo page was cluttered/littered with lots and lots of self-serving links that seemed confusing.

The oracle in the I Ching uses randomness as the generator to approach the specious present. The specious present is a more accurate and specific term for the eternal now.

Young mothers pee out excess stem cells by the score in their urine. The mystics have known since the bejinning. Drinking their urine is said to promote longevity, but only if it's done during the first three months of pregnancy. Nobody seemed to know why for sure until recently. Previously, such things had to be understood by the gnosis of sha-me-n. Vestal virgins and harems were said to be very controlled groups, but for reasons unsuspected by laymen. Purity of blood line in the urine, and all that jazz. 

I'm starting to believe there's a purpose in extending life and keeping old people sane. They've heard all the promises one time too many. If it gets to where they can stop dementia and Alzheimers so that enough of them care enough to speak up and call enough people liars, then maybe enough people will listen and agree to stop the madness. Do I actually believe this is possible. Not a chance in hell. The older I get, the less I care about the lies. I've begun to see them as a necessary evil.

In the end ga-me, people only perceive their own idea of the world individually. If any one of them says what they "see", the listeners interpret what they say into what they would have meant by saying the same words. That's why the Crowley quote, "Do what thou wilt is the whole of the law." has legs and can walk. Lots of people say quotable things that turn out to be as weird or weirder than your average bear.

The thing about Crowley's statement that makes so much sense to me is because we all have to interpret every event that happens within our ability to perceive. The only database around to compare what we perceive is our own experiential database based on our interpretive talents and abilities. We might as well do what we will to. Anything we want to. Because everybody perceives what they would be doing if they were us. That's unknowable in real time. All of us only see what we think is happening at any one time, and by the time an investigation into the veracity of our conclusion the world has moved on, and we find ourselves equivalently arguing with ancient sign posts.

Nobody knows. They can't know. They're too busy figuring out whether they like or dislike hearing what they would have said if they were the speaker. What they might have seen if they were the looker. What they might have tasted if they were the taster. Why not do what thou wilt? Nobody knows.

To me, that was rather shocking when I realized the lie of "No man is an island." It's more like "Islands In a Stream". Every person is an island unto themselves. Each of us perceive the world with senses we each shaped toward what we concluded was the best path with a heart that we can figure. It doesn't even matter. In my opinion, the only useful way to utilize this understanding is to keep it in mind constantly, and deliberately conduct one's behavior in the realization that everybody has their own way of seeing the world, and cautiously allowing for that to transpire is what living a life of no blame amounts to.

I like to leave the Other a lotta blanks to fill. They're gonna impose their view of what they think I meant by what I said anyway. No blame. Really. They can't not do it. They only have their own experiential database to compare what they preceptors inform them of. For most people (as if I would know), that's the only option they can conceive of. It's what I'm carelessly claiming that they've trained their sensory modalities to make sense of. They filter only for what they THINK is out there at any one ti-me.

It doesn't take a special kind of person to make the hero's journey. It's what each of us do when we dream. Either day or night dreaming. We dream on schedule during the day just like we do at night. We never stop dreaming. The hero's journey takes place in both our daydreams and what we dream at night. The way we manage our dreaming or the hero's journey is not any different either day or night. Similar to the descriptions of "lucid dreaming". First of all, either day or night, we have to realize we're dreaming in order to impose order upon what we figure is sot before us.

It might appear as if our discipline for realizing we're in some one phase of dreaming or the other 31 hours a deek (24 hours a day, seven days a week. 24 + 7 = __?). I personally don't figure a body can do that working for the man ll months a year. There is no tie-to-me (time) to reflect on YOUR own dreams or enough sanity to comfortably 'share and compare' with other dreamers. I acted like that too much of my life. The unhappiest times of my life was when I obligated myself to serve another's needs. I dig unhappiness. I can sing the blues with the best of 'em. It's just when it's a choice between being-for-the-other, and being-for-myself, I choose being-myself-for-the-other. If you can't grok that, man, then prepare for me not making myself recognizable to yo' consciousness on purpose. A man gotta do.

I don't know the truth. I'm not sure there is such a thing. I write stuff here to amuse myself. Don't take no wooden nickels.

Christmas, 2008

It's Christmas morning 2008. I'm alone again. As per usual. This is my life. too many of the prophecies I've encountered have come true. One astrology prediction from my natal chart stated that I would only have female children, and at least that much is true. Legally anyway. They're the only children I know about for sure from two marriages. They were the only children either of my two wives' had. That doesn't exactly make astrology true, in all cases, it depends on who is operating the system, and where they're at in their own lives at the ti-me of consultation.

I was not alone for Christmas of 1957. I was locked up in a cage with some really pissed off people in Los Angeles. They didn't nol pros my case and turn me loose for 37 days. I learned enough to not wanna repeat that performance, and haven't for the last fifty odd years. I watched two men get murdered and I didn't lift a finger to stop it. I would have been murdered myself. Funny, nobody had to warn me or teach me about that at all.

I was raised in an agrarian society, and my father was a hunter/predator in his spare time from teaching school, who also liked to grow his own meat for food in pens. I know all about killing things, and gutting them, and skinning them, and cutting them up into bite-sized portions. I sometime feel a wave of regret for people who haven't experienced this natural phenomenon. Namely, that we're predators at the top of the food chain. We kill in order to live like most other forms of life. Some caregivers go to extreme lengths to keep their wards from encountering death except as a remote idea that shouldn't concern them. Maybe they're right to do that. How would I know?

Ignorance is not always bliss. It's my sense of things that people who are familiar with growing food and slaughtering their own animals look at death with much less fear than those who are shielded from it. I think they have a better sense of how to avoid it. Especially in consideration of their gnowing the finality of it as an up close witness. It's a great excuse for getting out of some situation where I discover I don't wanna be. I just make death a part of their normal conversation, and nobody questions my lame excuse for departing.

I didn't initially kill the cabbage I bought at the grocery store, but I boiled it alive as if it were a lobster. I have never cooked any cabbage for myself that I can remember. I have to start doing it if I want fresh food that hasn't been sitting on a shelf somewhere possibly for years.

I cut the cabbage head in half and put one half of it in my biggest boiler, added salt and bacon grease, turned the front burner on medium low, and walked off from it. When I heard it boiling I went back to check on it. The outer parts of the cabbage head seemed tender, but it didn't feel cooked on the inside part away from the boiling water when I poked it, so I got a steak knife and my new tongs and cut it up into small pieces to cook thoroughly. I left the lid off so that some of the water would boil off.

If this test project works and the cabbage tastes even half decent, I'll eat a little better. I gotta do something about my diet. I think maybe my brother's dogs eat a healthier diet than me.

I just checked on my cabbage, tasted it, fixed me a bowl of it for my personal consumption. Damn... I'm good. I thought it would take a lot longer to cook. Maybe I was thinking of collards.

Shxt Happens, Thangs Change

"You need the cooperation of your living parents
in order to hate them. You need to see the pain
in their eyes when you scream it at them like bloody
murder, and you have to listen to them scream
bloody murder back at you, then toss you and your
baggage out of their house, and reject you as their
own child. Set aside? Set aside? God give me
strength to endure such deluded pomposity."

Again, I wrote the above paragraph in an e-mail. It's seems like more and more I have to be writing for-the-other to co-me up with a topic that interests me. In the one paragraph I aimed part of it at five or six discussion group members. That can only happen when I've participated in a particular group long enough to get a sense of the various members I reach out to.  

I attempt to treat every word I utter as if it could only be projection with no other options to speak of. I don't always like owning up to what I thought was going on in the past (how could I have been such an idiot?). Consciously filtering for the intent of my projections seems to be the only way I know to find out about or rediscover the rules of conscience I adopted in the past that have become baggage due to change. I've already figured out how to withdraw the energy I invested in them originally, but only if I can understand whether or not a particular rule I adopted in the past is no longer relevant to where I'm at with myself presently. Conjuring outdated rules of conscience from their hiding places can be a tricky business. 

I've had some comments from various people who know how to contact me that my writing makes less sense than ever. Tossed word salad? So what? I'm not writing to you. If you want me to write to you directly join the Gospel of Thomas e-mail discussion group and see if you can survive there long enough to take your turn.

Actually, I don't make any more sense there than I do here, so going to all the trouble to subscribe to an e-mail discussion group might be more than you can manage. I have my own e-mail discussion group, but we don't seem to be taking any application for subscription now. Nobody cares.

I've had a lifetime habit of attempting to do what I've been told I shouldn't do, and that's just not good enough for me. I wanna KNOW why I shouldn't be doing this or that, and aye matey, thar's the rub. It's true that sometimes I find out by doing that some old wives' tale are just that, and the myth or saying or tale ain't got legs to stand on. Otherwise, not.

By that I mean to indicate that those taboos of certain events and situations and behaviors I libidinously indulged did absolutely respond with the prophesied results. Infrequently at great peril to myself and mine. That's how I came to know I had to decide to alter my behavior to protect that what was mine or obligate what was mine to another for their sake.

I mostly know my own addictions and whether there is a chance in hell I'll stop indulging them. In this regard, the answer was no. the river runs too deep, and for more than one life ti-me. I've seen too many people come and go. I only lived in the house I was born in for a few weeks afterward, or the house after that but for a few months, and then a couple of places in between before my family moved to North Carolina. We moved to eight different places in North Carolina before my father finally bought his first small farm. I was thirteen years old.

My family lived in the house that was on that small farm until I graduated from high school and joined the U.S. Navy. By the time I got out of the Navy, they had moved across town to a larger farm he bought using the small farm as collateral. I came home out of the Navy to a place I'd never seen before, but at least my parents stayed in that one house until they died, and they both died inside that same house. I guess they were as tired of moving as we were.

I married my first wife during that brief stop upon my release from the Navy, and never lived there again until I stayed there to help with my father's death, and afterward, to keep my mother from being placed in a death house.

I moved over there from here, where I had been building my own house for a couple of years previous. I stayed with my mother for over two years, and it became a desperate struggle for her sanity or mine. Her loss of memory meant that I would inevitably win, but I couldn't stay and watch it happen. Finally my siblings stepped up. I've lived here alone since then, like I did before, like nothing ever happened.

I seem pretty sure there is quite a few people, particularly in the United States, who live alone and mostly prefer it. If the others are anything like me they feel betrayed by their culture. In my case, and in any Southerner's case, their culture was betrayed by the United States of America government, who criminalized our culture by an act of law. We were disenfranchised.

At first I thought it was for the best. I accepted this fate as well as I could and did what I could to go along to get along, but I'm beginning to see the erosion of the core values that made America a place where anyone could become an American. The world took America at it's word, and came here from everywhere. We've always been a melting pot. I'm afraid the melting pot is about to boil over the sides and put the fire out.

The military-industrial complex has pulled the rug out from us, and we can't cry out that we didn't know. We liked Ike, but did we listen? I'm deeply suspicious that the country will be divided up by war lords, and/or that there may be a consensus for Fascism that can't be stopped.

I feel safer for having written my lame anti-Bush diatribes now, but Obama prances and postures just like Mussolini. Both Leos. My dotage is beginning to look much more exciting. I may not get my wish to get shot dead by a jealous husband, but a firing squad is beginning to look auspicious compared to the hell-on-earth that's 'coming.

The Peace And Joy Brought By The Winter Solstice

There is this one guy in the same grade as me in high school who looks at me with askance still because my father gave him a failing grade that stopped him from playing in an all-star baseball game. He not only hated my father, but his entire family nearly fifty years later. I can feel the angst when he spots me sitting in the local cafe. He uses me to torture himself constantly over a long time.

If this man lives long enough he won't remember my father or his family, but he might remember playing baseball. It got him a lot of attention. He and his cousin kept playing baseball and then softball for as long as they could. This guy worked in a factory all his working years, but his cousin turned out to become a successful farmer. At least, so they say. I became someone else after my remembering vision. The person I became was the one I always become after I've occupied a certain body for a while. Eventually, I ignored the experiences of the personality who occupied it before me, and made those experiences just a part of the bigger picture. They became a small fish in a big pond, whereas before, they were a big fish in a small pond. Shit happens. Things change.

I have this theory I'll probably never be able to prove. It's about what old people forget when they experience dementia, senility, or Alzheimer's. I'm thinking they forget the academic stuff they learned. The facts they need to keep a job. I think they forget their own rules of conscience. The very stuff from which they created their precious personality.

I have trouble with that myself. Nobody knows how long i sit here sometime trying to remember some simple term or phrase or the title of some book I really enjoyed and took from. I don't think I'll forget what I experienced in my remembering vision as a experiential database, but that happens in real time, and not something I can rely on except for how I respond to current situations. It was created situationally, and that's how it's available. It depends on sources that are not temporary like personalities.

I'm dreading going to my car insurer to report this accident and see what I have to do to get my car repaired. it wasn't my fault, but somehow I'm suspicious they'll find some way of charging me more yearly. I have to do it though. I have to drive over there and stand around while somebody else decides my fate. This will probably be the case more and more often. I'm as ready as anybody can get as far as I'm concerned.

On the other hand, I might not live long enow to suffer the ravages of old age. I might get the opportunity to swap bodies with some distraught young person again. I don't think those kinds of decisions are made consciously. Consciousness is rather ineffectual in dealing with the world of instinct. I've seen myself taken over by instinct many a ti-me, and all the better for it.

A while back I realized I was taking fish oil for the omega 3 in it, and what that was really all about is vitamin D. Since I've been taking prescribed doses of calcium with 500 IUs of vitamin D included with it twice a day I decided to stop taking the fish oil. Now, i've changed my mind again. It wasn't hard to do since I have a ready supply of 1200 mg capsules on hand. I read an article that convinced me the fish oil had more value than just vitamin D.

I was also prescribed folic acid pills because the methotrexate depletes the body of that vitamin. It surprised me to be prescribed vitamins, but not so much calcium by the VA. It's free, as in beer, because that was part of the contract I signed with the Navy back then. It's not that easy any more. They changed the contracts. The all volunteer Army gets less.

The Congress ought to reinstitute the draft to at least replace the present slavery of forcing the soldiers to stay in the service longer than they signed up for. The guys who have been on the rotating shifts to Iraq are being driven crazy, and I live too near Fort Bragg to feel safe. Bush and Cheney should be arrested and tried in a court of law for what they did. If they're innocent, set them free. If they're found guilty of torturing people, then they ought to be jailed in Abu Ghralb with it run by the Iraqis. They preached "an eye for an eye":, now let them live it.

Uncorking The Bottle

So, I'm sitting here watching a Charlie Rose show, and he's talking with this guy who writes books on why he thinks people do things, and he has done a bunch of legitimate research and got hordes of index cards and all his stuff is thoughtfully done, and Charlie is obviously impressed by what this dude has written and acts like it. Then, they start talking about IQ and whether or not it's important, and after a few exchanges of their ideas of what's wot, they agreed that most people are irrationally impressed by how that goes whether they admit it or not. I agree.

I've written a lot about me having a genius IQ, and how finding that out was maybe the worst thing that ever happened to me. It's not that having a genius IQ is the worst thing that has ever happened to me, it's finding out about it in the way that I did. By that I mean that I was tested by a recognized expert who observed all the bells and whistles of what had to be there for the results to be considered valid.

I think IQ is controlled by how much curiosity is apportioned out from the gitgo. I don't thing one's intelligence quotient is inherent, but curiosity is. I was a nosy kid. I wanted to know for myself everything. Being nosy ain't easy. There is a lot of subterfuge involved. People don't like kids who are too nosy about what they consider they own business. I wanted to know everything.

Sometime for no good reason. Many ti-me-s just to write word salad. I just wanted to, and I virtually had to KNOW or my world would fall apart. This reduces down to NO so easily. Learning to KNOW something is synonymous with learning what to say NO to. For me it was a matter of ti-me and tie-me-ing (timing).

I agree with Einstein's bit about genius being 90% perspiration. Mostly redundancy and repetition. "Inch by inch, it's a cinch." Perseverance. Per-severance. Severing away the fat from the lean. The wheat from the chaff. Over the long haul. Persistently chipping away at the small things. Hoping the big things would respond to the slack reins on their neck.

The world has a way about it, you know, and sometimes the smart thing to do is to get outta the way and let the world find it's own way back to it's balance point. To it's equinox twice a year. The extremes are bearable if you know there is an end to them. The hardest thing for me has always be to leave things be.

Most of the ti-me, life as a physician heals itself. I get impatient and push the wet noodle. Not because I expect to make progress toward a desired end, but simply because I'm curious about whether it will respond like other inert objects I push against.

I really don't know what being a genius is for. It's not a recent doubt. I've questioned the usefulness of it every since I first found out for sure. Just yesterday I remember writing something about what the point of it all might be. It isolated me and denied me the creature comforts regular people seem satisfied with.

I'm deliberately sitting here in a cold-ass room when I could do something about it if I actually wanted to. Instead, I act like it's a scientific experiment that will end with me going upstairs where the electric blanket has been kept on all day for this very moment.

This is supposed to be the coldest night of the cold weather season. It's supposed to get down to 16 degrees (-8.8889 C). That's really cold for around here. I've been putting off going to bed for as long as comfortably possible. That way I'll be able to sleep until the sun rises and warms things up a bit.

It's supposed to be a little warmer tomorrow. The winds are supposed to shift from coming from the north to coming from the Caribbean around noon. Just that quick. Why not hibernate as long as I can until it's over?

My dilemma now seems to be about the difference between systems of expertise and the gifts of God/genius. I seem to know a lot about systems of expertise through my own experience. I wanna be able to give credit where credit is due. I wanna recognize when some person is exhibiting the results of a gift of God, and ask them a few questions I'd like satisfied. That's not easy, and sometimes I'm wrong in my assessment of what's wot. It's something to do.

Taint This, Taint That

It's cold today, and since I don't have any heat except a space heater to stay warm I have to use it to heat my kitchen to keep my water pipes from freezing. Tonight will be even colder. The weather reports say it will get down to 21 degrees Fahrenheit (-6.111 C). That's not all that cold for people further north, but for this area where the winters are moderate, and the houses are only built to undergo moderately cold temperatures, and especially the house trailers, any temperatures at or below twenty degrees may freeze a bunch of pipes. That can cost a lot of money if you buy water from the county.

Anyway, I'm sitting here in a room that is about forty degrees warm, and my feet are starting to get cold, so I decide to walk over to my brother's green house next door and sit with the tropical plants for a while. Then, since it was so comfortable, and I needed to occupy my time, I started singing scales.

I usually start out singing "om ne padme om" for a while, because that opens my throat up and the doing of it forces me to pay attention to what needs to be done to get to the place I'm going for with my voice. Once I'm satisfied with that, I start singing the vowels, because vowels are all that can be sung.

At first I deliberately end each vowel with the sound of "om". Then, I finish the om sound by closing my mouth and humming the om for as much breath I have left. When I feel like I've got the end of the vowel chant working right I attack the beginning of each vowel with an "H". For example, I sing ha-ha-ha-ha and it emulates laughing.

Sometime I just start laughing from the pure joy of it. I'm still ending the vowel I started with an H with an om closure until I get to the vowel "u". Hu-hu-hu works good, but then I start the hoo with a you, which shapes the "u" sound more distinctly, so that I'm singing yoo-hoo, yoo-hoo, you-hoo-blue. The term "blue" carries a very distinct flavor of "oooo"

When I've gotten the "u" vowel working with some power and resonance, I go back through all the vowels placing a "y" in front of the "h". Yee-hee. yee-yee,yee-hee. Then, I start stretching the vowels out yo-hoooooo, yo-hooooo, yo-hooooo.

Believe it or not, this is a lot of fun and extremely entertaining because sometime I just enter a state of ecstasy and do it for an hour or more without re-me-ing to break the enchantment. I'm not myself for a while, and that's a distinct pleasure.

Today I started a new practice I've very excited about. I've discovered through meditation that my breathing starts from the area of the taint. A friend of mine from high school on divorced her husband and went back to college in her late forties to get her Masters degree in voice. She can be an obnoxious bitch, but I listen to her when it comes to singing. She told me that I should sing from my lower belly rather than my solar plexus. Today, I realized I should go lower than my lower belly to develop a consciousness there.

It's not like I haven't already done this simply with the breath control I put into effect when I meditate. Some cultures consider the taint the holiest spot in the human body. I have mixed feelings about choosing any one spot to single out for that description, but if it ain't the holiest spot in the body it's pretty close.

The most difficult part of this is locating that spot to use as one will. For my own practice, I create a spot there with my imagination, and after I've got that established and I'm working it like it was the real thing, the real spot shows up on it's own. Hardly ever have I been able to direct my attention to it of my own volition straight aware. YMMV. '-)

I've never tried to consciously start my voice from this spot. I'll begin immediately. I already did. This morning in the greenhouse. Surrounded by tropical plants on the coldest day of the year, and the second day after the winter solstice. Why am I always the last to know?

Winter Solstice 2008

The Winter Solstice of 2008 happened around seven o'clock this morning. I was waking up and going back to bed to snooze some more. I reckon I was awake around that ti-me, but maybe not. I didn't notice anything special. I recently realized why December 25th is celebrated as Christmas instead of the equinox when i watched the Zeitgeist video the other day.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNf-P_5u_Hw&ref=http://www.subtire.com

It's represented in the Bible by Jesus (the Sun of God) laying in the tomb for three days after his death, and rising again afterwards to begin it's heavenly journey back to the Tropic of Capricorn from the Tropic of Cancer. The lands between these two lines of demarcation are considered the tropic zones of the world.

Key West, Florida, where I spent around seven years all told of my life is just north of the Tropic of Capricorn at around 25 degrees north Latitude. Previous to my hanging around Key West I had been in a number of tropical countries, mostly islands in the Pacific Rim, but I never realized what a difference subtropical and tropical made until I went down to Jamaica with a friend for a visit. I was surprised I hadn't recognized how much more lush the tropics are. Especially in Hawaii.

I've been a little sad since I watched that video. I realized the whole time I was watching it that very few people have studied astrology with enough depth and perspective to realize what the video was promoting was probably real close to the truth. The Bibles, both New and Old are interpretation books for astrology. They did the best they could with the lingoes they possessed at the ti-me. Most of the ancient languages previous to Latin had fewer than two thousand terms and/or expressions.

I don't know how many times I've written this out and tried to make sense of it. It's not gonna happen as far as your average person is concerned. They may be experts in some field of the other, but expertise don't cross lines. Each system of expertise has it's own lingo, and it's the lingo of any system of expertise that takes so long to master.

In a way I've been feeling smug lately. I did what I needed to do young enough so that ti-me could be on my side. I traveled a lot all through my life. I dealt with strangers most of the time. I had my remembering vision when I was thirty years old, and followed that by learning most of the occult systems through repetition and redundancy. I studied the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching for over thirty years both as a wisdom book and an oracle. I've never met many people who even know what it is, much less that it's one of the Five Classic Books of pre-revolutionary Chinese culture.

I did all this stuff for-me. But, I priced myself out of the market by the very doing of it. I got nobody to talk to about it. All that work has merely isolated me and caused me to detach myself from practically every activity that makes most people feel good about living.

I seem to be in some sort of transition. What happened with that wreck illustrates it to me. I was driving along in the parking area of a big shopping mall and this kid ran a stop sign and tore into the passenger's side front door. I got out and looked at the damage, then I noticed the kid. He didn't look like he had entered puberty, but he had a legitimate learning permit. He just screwed up as kids and new drivers are prone to do.

Two women who witnessed what happened parked their car and waited until the cop got there. They took complete care of me. The kid called his father. No blame. But, it was those two young women who called the cops. They treated me like a superstar. It was almost like they were competing with each other to see which of them could be the kindest.

The cop told them they didn't need to stick around because it was obvious what happened. I should have gotten their names and address, but I was lulled into security by the way I was treated. If something goes wrong I'm gonna regret not getting their names and telephone number.

Once the cop got our driver's license and insurance papers, he told us to move our cars to an empty part of the parking lot. There, the kid's father came and tried to intimidate me for some reason. I was polite, but like a tree that's planted by the water. Unmoved. I just stood around until the cop took care of his end of things, got into my car and drove home. The only thing that worried me was that none of it worried me.

I've gotten more and more like that for a while now. Nothing bothers me much. I have a deep suspicion it's because all the mojos I've worked all of my life are starting to pay off. Nobody knows.

Becoming And Denial

Saturday morning is not the time to be a little bored and wanna do something different to break the tedium of ingrained habits. I decided to see if I could find a video to watch on visualization, so I opened up Google video and searched for "art visualization religious" without the quotes. If I'd typed in more words the search would have gotten much more specific. Love that Google search engine.

The results page came up with an interesting mix about art and religious tenets. The one thing most of them had in common was the repetition of affirmations. My rather astounding (to me) conclusion was that affirmations are rules of conscience. Why am I always the last to know?

I came up with an interesting take on affirmations. Affirmations are the root stuff from which rules of conscience are generated. This is practiced all over the world by various cultures in various ways. The visualization of the Goddess Kali being one of the most written about, although in Sanskrit, and I don't think for the most post that Sanskrit transliterates into Modern English very well at all. It's probably because the translators are more scholarly than Hindu ecumenicals.

Affirmations become rules of conscience when they are practiced frequently over and over for a long time. A symbol for an adherent of this sort of practice of any culture is counting beads.

Repetition and redundancy is the real work, but the point is to create a rule of conscience that reminds you to practice what it takes to be-co-me with the life model you install via visualization. When you "be-co-me" it, you make it a part of your me, just as nay-me-ing something denies the object as part of your me.

The Hindu Goddess Kali is a good example for explaining the type of visualization I find useful. You would have to imagine a statue of this eight-armed goddess with necklaces of human skulls strung around her neck to understand what happens if you wanna become an adherent of Kali in the most powerful sense.

A student of Kali would attempt to recreate that statue of Kali in their mind's eye, and then the adherents who have mastered this art would question the student in detail to find out how their memorizing was coming along. The student would have to retrieve their answers from the statue of Kali they had recreated in their mind's eye to satisfy the teacher.

There is only one criteria by which it can be told that a student had completed their task. When the last detail of their visualization process is completed, the "statue" of Kali they created in their mind's eye takes a life of it's own, and does as the Goddess Kali wills whether it's in your interest or not.

Christianity has many visualization practices meant to make Jesus come alive in the practitioner's psyche. The process is the same, it's just not presented in such a practical fashion that it can be easily understood.

I create my own affirmations in the form of poetry. It's easier for me to recite them repetitiously. I made some of them into songs. It's the ones that I have recited the longest that seems to have the most power for me. Some of them I have recited on a frequent basis for nearly forty years. It's hard to look around at what it's got me and write rave reviews.

I disclaim knowing the truth about anything. I make up what I write here to amuse myself and to capture drifting thoughts with words. I'm pleased with some of my prisoners more than I am with others.

Burgundy Runs Red

I went to Fayetteville to get my eyeglasses looked at because they didn't focus right. The had to give me a new prescription to get them to work correctly, but they still ain't as good as I'd like them Damn cataracts. On my way out of the shopping center parking lot, this sixteen year old kid with only his learner's permit ran a stop sign and into the front passenger's side door. Scared the shit outta the kid. It's just more work I wouldn't have had to do for me. The last two car wrecks I had was when two 16 year old kids ran into me. They got a ticket. My little burgundy red car got beat up on.

This methotrexate medicine is messing with mah haid, man. It's rough on my GI tract. I was told that it is supposed to help my immune system fight the inflammation that causes my joints to swell up and hurt, and it may be doing that, but it leaves me really detached at times. I get so clear-headed and say what's wot with such directness it catches me off-guard.

I was reading some hype on this yogurt that is supposed to help the immune system work better. The interesting part of the statement for me was that it said that 95% of the immune system is located along the digestive tract. That's where I notice most of the discomfort and nausea. One thing is for sure, it's doing what it's doing in the right area of my body, but it's messing with my head.

It's messing with my desire to create things like writing this blog and the e-mail groups I participate in. Not that it makes any difference to them. Nobody reads my blog and the mail groups just move on as if I was never there. No blame. That's how life is.

The Last Three Days Of Autumn

Went to the dentist today to get a chipped tooth repaired. It's the front tooth Jerry Lee Lewis' bodyguards busted with a diamond ring. I can't figure out with the damage that was done and the years that have passed how this tooth is still in mah haid. He smoothed some of my lower front teeth out. One of them had worn down in such a way that there was a big sharp spike on one of them that has caused more than one cut in my lips or tongue. I was happy to have that fixed.

There is this dental technician who loves for me to show up at the dentist office. She's got that Sarah Palin mentality and is about as fundamental as it gets religiously. I argue religion with her and tell her she's a heretic that worships graven images like the King James version of the Bible. Then, she cusses me out for me not letting her conscience be my guide. The woman at the front desk is in cahoots with her, and they try to gang up on me and humiliate me, but the fact that I shine them on and tell them what nincompoops they are that they like for me to come in.

I seem to running out of steam for writing again. I've literally figured some things out that has been bothering me for decades, and my curiosity hasn't re-inflated itself again from it's most recent resolutions.

The videos I wrote about and posted a link to shocked me somewhat in the creator's accuracy of the true meaning of the ancient writings, and how consistent they were with my intuitions brought about from studying astrology. The fact is that most of the content of the biblical writing is about astrology and how to interpret the various ongoing situations. I've known this for a long time, but knew so few people who had actually done the work to learn what astrology has to offer that it was hard to confirm what I only suspected.

The fact that we're having such warm weather when just west and north of here they're so cold amazes me. The cold weather seems to be held back by the mountains. This warm weather was predicted by the weatherman and it made them wonder too. Tomorrow it's supposed to get up into the mid-seventies (24 C). It's not all that unusual for there to be a few days in the seventies all throughout the winter here, but it's been unusually warm for a week now. I like it, of course, but it's just so odd.

Sea Shells And Doppelgangers

A very clever woman and I have a sort of ongoing conversation aside from the other members in an e-mail discussion group, mostly because we're both admirers of the Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist Carl Jung. Presently, we're speculating about the Genesis myth in order to develop our own ideas about what the myth actually represents. The paragraph below is a response to her ideas, and has been edited since it appeared on the discussion list:

"It's almost like you've written that the Garden of Eden is the plenitude, the womb, and the two-in-one are ejected from their conceptual ho-me together as if only one, but one in the mutual unconscious feeling that they are actually two, and deliberately divided to subject them to being conquered. They will soon be separated in consciousness one from the other again, as if they were like the two faces of the Roman god Janus. whose two faces view a polarized perspective, yet share the sa-me brain. There are no abstract memores yet because language hadn't been imposed upon them from the outside, and when it is, only one of them learns it. The Other must unknowingly speak through it's opposite as if in agreement, which is virtually impossible due to a species design flaw. This bodes disaster, does it not?"

She's made it perfectly clear she thinks my "species flaw" theory is a bunch of crap. No blame. I'm writing about the anima and the animus as the doppelganger of what will become associated with the eventual persona of either the male and female child as it's silent, and often mystical partner or invisible friend. It's futile effort to physically survive in the often cruel world of nature. There's no vaccine for being fatally flawed, yet.

I don't know the truth either way, even in case there actually is such a thing. For me, it's just a form of amusement to while away the ti-me. I don't speak for her, and she would say so in a New York minute, even though she lives in Chicago.

The people in the Carolina coastal plains are benefitting from a high pressure system out in the Atlantic Ocean that's bringing warmth and moisture from the Caribbean island area. The western part of North Carolina is freezing cold while the temperature down here in the swamps is almost sixty degrees fahrenheit (15.55 C). There is a light to medium fog that will apparently lift rather than burn off if it gets gone at all. It's fairly warm, that's all that really matters to me, and it's supposed to stay that way for another week. That's fairly amazing since the Winter Solstice is only a week away.

I watched a Google Video in the last couple of days that made a lotta sense to me as a person who has studied astrology and made my own charts by hand for over twenty years.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNf-P_5u_Hw&ref=http://www.subtire.com

Granted, it's been twenty years since I practiced making natal or horary charts. I stopped following those practices only because of the linguistics problems with the public-at-large when using that lingo brought attention I didn't wanna deal with. The only way I knew how to deal with it was to set the whole astrology thing to bed, and find another lingo that didn't conjure so much abuse. I left all my ephemerides and interpretation books on a rock in a National Park in Utah that featured hoodoos.

The video at the link above is one of a three part series. There's a movie by the same title. I don't know if the movie is related to the three associated videos about how religion emerged from astrological roots. "The Greatest Story...", and all that jazz. That's what I'm writing about.

These videos pretty much astounded me. The content and presentation of the videos is what I intuited from practicing astrology all those years, but with a lot more detail than I've ever attempted to describe.

All during my watching these three videos I was reminded of the thoughts of Joseph Campbell revealed in his masterwork, The Hero Of A Thousand Faces. In this book he claimed that there was only one real story for anybody to tell, and the only difference in all the stories and myths of the entire Earth only varied by the environments used to frame the story.

That's what I figured the videos exposed even more profoundly by the simple fact that the technology was there to flood the senses with examples in video, audio, and technicolor.

There are lots of ways to come to grips with the notion of not worshiping graven images. One way is to use graven images to do it in the same sense of fighting fire with fire. The videos demonstrated that there are a lot of different ways to say the same thing, and there always has been, up to the limits of the ongoing technology. The video editors appear to try to broaden the scope of their viewers by illustrating how the same story has been told in many different environments around the world over at least three ages or aeons. History repeats itself, but it's done very vaingloriously.

What happened to me when I saw the videos the first time (I just watched them again when I retrieved the link) was that I had been more or less right all along when I figured out that a lot of the stories I read as a bookworm-ish kid were pretty much the same story at heart, but no one would believe me. No blame. I was just a kid. I knew that. I didn't read Campbell's stuff until I was a full-grown man with my own rather estranged, individuated persona.

I figured even back then that my way of looking at the world would change to a more conventional perspective as I grew older, but it didn't actually do that. I learned that it was politically expedient to allow the other to believe I accepted convention as my path with heart. True, I felt like I needed acting lessons to get over, and I took 'em, along with larning how to talk so people wouldn't think I was a hick trying to gain entry into the polite classes of nincompoops. I just wanted to be able to fade into the woodworks if push come to shove. So, I taught myself and learned to be-co-me. It's the sa-me old story too. Why would it not be? It's all about me, and the fact that there ain't but just One.

I was particularly impressed by the way the video makers treated Sun worship and the fact that no other sort of worship is anything else than Sun worship. Life and death depends directly upon it. The Sun is obviously God in every religion in the world. Thou shalt have no other...

Learning astrology basically amounted to memorizing a bunch of signs and symbols just to get started good. This is true about any system of expertise in ex-is-tense. That's just the way it is for any system homo sapiens use for figuring out their possibles in real time. No matter what system of expertise is used, the object or aim of using them is to do what can't be done. It's a species flaw. Homo sapiens can't realize their own possibles for-themselves in the specious present.

All the systems for thinking about things ever created by homo sapiens in any time frame is about how to figure out what's possible in the immediacy of right damned now. Selah.

The problem is not with which system is created or used. The problem of relying on any system of expertise is about who is operating the system, and where they're at with themselves when they do it. People do deliberately seek out alternate states of being, and if they find them, then nobody is home to operate the system of expertise they've committed themselves to, for or by either love or money.

My musician friend Rainey, tells me he's like that frequently when he's playing his mandolin with a group of friends of short acquaintance. It's like that for me when I'm writing and get on a pretty good roll. Nobody is home minding the store. I'm outta mah body searching for the next word I'm gonna use to amuse and amaze. You might could come and burn my house down with me in it, before I might realize that the jig was up... legs a'dangling... Aaaiiiiyeee!!

A Warm Autumn Day

Sometime I feel so clever. I only use a stove to keep my pipes from freezing. I don't know whether or not this is a choice I made or I'm just too cheap. That doesn't mean my fingers don't get cold on the keyboard and mouse. Back when I first started having trouble with my hands and wrist I realized I was using bad ergonomics and ended up buying a cheap computer table to resolve my problem. The table has a glass top with a sliding mesh metal drawer for the keyboard. The keyboard drawer is the only part of it that seems a little unstable.

It came with two tables. The second one is smaller was designed to hold a printer. it has a glass top also, and a mesh shelf under it. I mounted my computer and all the peripherals on the small table and rolled up under the larger table. None of that is why I think I'm so clever.

I have a heat lamp with an aluminum reflector with a long cord on it that I've had hang above my keyboard and table. It worked okay, but the heat was too direct on my hands, and it blinded me with it's light. I finally figure out that I should take the heat lamp and use the clamp that came with it to attach it to the metal leg of the small table, and aim the heat lamp up at the glass top. It heats the glass top and spreads the heat better, and since the small table fits under tha larger table, it catches that heat and sends it toward the keyboard and my hands.

I finished burning the trash pile where I had heaped up a bunch of brush I had cut in the woods at the edge of my lawn. I say "woods" but the twin hurricanes took care of that about ten years ago, and only a few of the large pines are left. The rest of it is new growth that's kind of scruffy, and I've been trying to make it look a little better.

I have had a few trash fires get away from me and burn small sections of the woods before. That's made me cautious. I only burn now if there has been some rain. I prefer it to be like today and be sprinkling rain. By the time I emptied all the trash mail out of the floor of the passengers side of my car I have plenty of paper to start the brush heap burning.

I'm usually in my car when I pick up my mail from the rural delivery box. There is always a bunch of spam from the health care companies who solicit retirees. They're like ghouls perched in the trees around the cemeteries. No blame. If you don't or can't take care of your own affairs, they will take your stuff and wait for you to die. It's the way of the world. My place ain' t much of a temptation.

Leftover Rice

A zodiacal chart is relatively easy to draw on bare ground with a stick if you know the rudiments. I've drawn them on sidewalks with colored chalk, and literally drew crowds of... ummm... tens. Rabble rousers only need yer basic crowd to generate a brooding mob.

The riot master need only to be plausible in his harangue, not reasonably or logically convincing. People love to fill in the blanks. So-called smart people who are products of fill-in-the-blank institutions from childhood can literally be heard to mutter under their breaths, "Yippee!" and clinch their fists in victory as they string up their next victim "from the highest tree... Oh, woman, would you weep for me" Giving these types blanks to fill in makes them fill like children again, even as they mischievously dig their own graves in their deranged playfulness. 

There is absolutely nothing about astrology that is not an abstract construct. It's designed that way through the hit or miss of over a million years or more. It's the same song all over again and again with different lyrics. It's the coward's journey with a thousand paces. '-)

The result of learning those loosely-knit symbols is not what's called gnosis. It's a system of expertise whose usefulness depends on the operator of said system. In that way it's like the process for becoming (be-co-me-ing) a Grandmaster in chess. At the end of the process you must need pick up the right piece and move it to the right square to capture or mate to win the title of Grandmaster. Gnosis is not a system of expertise, but an unearned, undeserved gift derived from an experience of encountering God. 

Nay-me. Have you ever observed that wot don't have a name or label is considered to be part and parcel of yo' me? When you label so-me external object, you are in effect stating that named object is not a part of yo' me. You have nay-me-d it. Consciousness is only gained through negation. When you stop screeching "You are NOT me..." you immediately lose consciousness of the world of the screamer. 

Negation can never be derived from Being. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

A Real Little Boy

This sort of requires me to describe something that just ain't easy for me. It's about how the other forms of life are not conscious that homo sapiens have personalities they use to make decisions about abstract situations that are not apparent to living beings without a complex language system. We use words as bookmarks for pieces of ideas that through redundancy and repetition engender a neural pathway for the term "red" to be associated with the term "blood". 

Rabbits don't care if they can't see in color due to the lack of a lingo with which to create abstractions. I made myself into a rabbit by imitating the pearls around me that was doing the same thing. The logic may have been to create powerful enough hind legs in a creature to jump back into space and the life-abandoning joy of ecstagony. 

It didn't work, of course, but you know the urge to life. Never say die! So, we began making ourselves into what eventually became a kangaroo. Bigger hind legs. Since there are still rabbits and kangaroos ditty-bopping around, that's proof positive that notion didn't work either. 

I could describe how we made ourselves into monkeys and tried to climb back into space or birds and tried to fly back into space, but homo erectus began to give us ideas, and when ideas solidified enough to write things in stone, we quit abandoning the bodies we created through imitation. When the Dragon's Tail swept through the galaxy and made all the monad into two, the pearls stopped looking for a way outta here to look for their other half. 

Keeping in mind that I consider myself a docetic spirit seeking a human experience (like Pinocchio, I want to be a real little boy. Not gonna happen Pygmalion. Go sell some flowers and pick some pockets), it's this pearl-like entity that arrived here from space (in general, not FROM somewhere in particular, no language separated out from itself to make me-more-s, yet), the cosmic consciousness bit is dealing mostly with the sort of me-mores (the more of me than you can see) that don't perceive colors. Color requires ideation. They're lucky to have black and white images without emotional content, if they possess a sense for sight at all. Just ongoing immediacy without reflection, as when stalking. Selah. 

After you DID have such an experiential database installed or revealed during your cc experience, do you remember looking for images obtained which you might normally associate with abstract constructions. If one filter for such images whose distinctions are only there for an animal that "sees" in color, then the humongously vast majority of all the life forms you've ever made yourself into through mimicry and evolution will be "over-looked". At least, that's my story, and I'm sticking to it until the Winter Solstice. After that, it's a crapshoot. 

The entity I associate with the word salad above is wot traded bodies. I don't remember whether it arrived astrally at the scene where the deal was made after having swapped bodies many times previously, or whether I-am-is possessed the dying body from it's conception. Like my me-mores of where the pearl came from upon arriving from space, I don't re-me the particulars of the rapidly dying body it proposed to trade to the distraught young man for it's hardly-used body. For all I know it was a passing opportunity for an extended stay on Earth while in possession the sa-me memores, and I took it with frenetic impatience for the exchange to happen before the boy changed it's mind. 

Apathy In C Major

"It depends on the reader and the eyes they hear with."

I wrote this for some odd reason this morning, and when I re-read it I realized that as far as communicating with e-mail over the Internet it's true. We have to read the message on our computer monitors to "hear" what other people are writing as if they were talking instead.

Some nights it's colder even than what the temperature gauge spells out. Last night was one of those nights for me. I couldn't put on enough clothes to stay warm, so I went to bed fairly early to get warm all over. Even then, I wore my big down jacket too bed so my shoulders would stay warm. That makes it more tedious to toss and turn, as I seem to require for sleeping. I imagine this need be to shift things around in my GI tract, but all I know is that I don't sleep good if I'm confined in a space to sleep where I can't twist and turn all night long.

I've managed to go to Wally World at some time of the day for the last 6-7 days. It's the biggest retail outlet store in the county, and people come in there from all over to shop for Christmas. I don't know many of them, praise the Lord, but I like knowing they're out there somewhere hanging out in the woods and swamps. Back in a shady nook nobody can see from the road, and nobody knows they're there until they go to Wal-Mart.

I'm writing a bit today, but this ain't the place I'm doing it. I seem to be going through a big change in the way I present myself to the world, and the future seems very uncertain. Life ain't business as usual, and I don't have the slightest intention of forcing the issue. Maybe I'll feel more like writing tomorrow after I win the lottery tonight.

Artsy Daftsy

The gas prices went down and I decided to drive up to the State Capital to get outta town and do a little shopping. There were only two definite things I wanted to do. Go to the Apple store and see if they had some software I wanted, and go to the State Museum of Art for one of my infrequent visits.

The Apple store jaunt was a disappointment. They didn't have what I wanted. A Sudoku game I favor. Since I'm not going to buy anything until Apple comes out with the Snow Leopard OS there was no reason for me to hang around there. However, I was able to get the Sudoku game I bought a few months ago to work right again when I got home.

The support people at Tik.games were able to figure out what I was doing wrong. I really like this Latin Squares Sudoku game. It's a little hoky on the flashy side, but it's big and easy to see, and it's thoughtfully laid out. I'm really happy to have it working again. I like doing Sudoku puzzles. It's been months since I've worked crossword puzzles.

It's been a while since I've been to the museum. I've only been once this last year. I've been looking at some of the paintings and sculptures there since I was twelve years old. The Museum is a little tricky to get to if you don't know your way around Raleigh. Now that they're remodeling and building a bunch of new buildings there, it's even trickier.

Inside the Museum it was very sedate. They were remodeling on the second floor and many of art pieces from the American Gallery were not on display. Next came the European Gallery, which always freaks me out. It embarrasses me. It makes me feel ashamed of myself. It's probably why I married my first wife. I'm a disgusting human being.

There are a disproportionate number of paintings of European women of royal families. At least five of the women in those paintings look remarkably like my first wife. I'm not going to try to describe what that look is like. If you wanna know what my first wife looked like when I married her, go to this museum and see for yourself. I may have married my first wife in order to make people think this woman of apparently royal blood chose me for her consort.

I can't tell you how stupid it makes me feel to realize it's probably true. I'm definitely a fool, and untrustworthy to boot. She hates me now at best. No blame. Our daughter, who fortunately looks like her mother instead of me, hates me too, if she is emotionally invested in the idea of me at all. I haven't seen either of them in at least a decade, if not more. I ruined their lives with my disruptive insanity. I am is an embarrassment to them. No blame.

There were some painting I hadn't seen before. They were just down the hall from the entrance and were the first paintings I saw today. Most of them were painted in my own lifetime. That interested me very much. Without exception I agreed with the Museum's decision to buy them.

There was a display of some couple's private collection. They were all painted in my lifetime too. I felt like I understood why the artist painted them. I don't understand at all how they painted them. The nice thing was that I didn't feel like I needed to understand much about what happened in order for the artists to produce the paintings. The works themselves took care of that. I guess that's why they are considered museum quality. They were self-explanatory in a powerful way.

Im still influence by my reading the book called Blink. The new paintings at the museum I read all the placards about the paintings. I move up close to see the details, and backed away to get the big picture. Literally. But, the museum's old pieces and the ancient civilization stuff merely got the once-over from me. The me-and-thee-ing (meaning) could only be taken in by small slices of time. A nip and a tuck was all it took to gather it all in.

It's been unseasonably warm the last three days, and welcomed, but tonight the temperature is back to it's late Fall, autumnal forms. Nippy. I turned the new space heater on my sister-in-law bought for me. I keep telling her I'll be okay. Then, my brother shows up with the new one. It's just like the one they bought me last year that broke after one winter season. Har-rummph! They don't make 'em like they used to.

I have two other broke space heaters besides that one. Four space heaters, and only the brand-new one works, and not that well either. One of these days I'm gonna have to invest in a solid way to actually heat my house in cold weather. Granted, I'm a true miser, but it's kinda crazy to be a cold true miser.

Solar Salvation

I offered the following paragraph as a response to an e-mail, but after re-reading it after I'd clicked on the Send button, I realized that I'd left out a few words that may make my intent more lucid:

"The only part of this that irritates me is that my interest in languages was stymied by my father. Basically, he refused to let me take Latin in high school. He chose every course of study I took there. Except for the sixth grade, he taught at every school I attended through high school, and he took his work home with him, as did my mother, and so I was "in class" almost every waking hour.

I expressed a lot of bitterness and spite toward him and my mother, although she never taught in any of the schools I attended. After decades, I finally realized I refused to take the only course I needed to get a four year degree in college due to bitterness. I literally hated my parents, and hated myself for doing it... until I read this saying in the Gospel of Thomas:

55 Jesus said, "Whoever does not hate father and mother cannot be my disciple, and whoever does not hate brothers and sisters, and carry the cross as I do, will not be worthy of me."

http://users.misericordia.edu//davies/thomas/Trans.htm

Refusing to finish college by not passing this one, fairly easy sophomore-level course in stage design was a stupid thing to do. I didn't have a clue what my motivation was at the time. Later, I came to realize I refused to get a college degree to spite my father. Worse, to do it by deliberately refusing to obtain a passing grade on an easy course was mean-spirited.

It was fortunate I didn't realize why I did what I did until after my father died, but then it was too late to make amends. The odd thing was that my father forgave me for my bitterness and spite toward him before he died, and asked my forgiveness for the rather extreme physical abuse he imposed in my childhood. Well, he sort of forgave me through my sister-in-law. Never to my face. I like to pretend he forgave me, because I pretend I forgave him too. 

I'm looking forward to the Winter Solstice again this year. A few Solstices ago I consciously experienced a feeling of peace and joy of fairly profound intensity during and just after the winter solstice. It was by accident I noticed. It wasn't an event I had anticipated by design.

The way I rationalized it was to consider the dynamics of the days getting shorter and shorter from the dawn of the Summer Solstice. The light of the Sun disappearing incrementally over the next six months naturally induced a fear into me, that this loss of sunlight might not stop happening, and the world would be left in darkness. Isn't that WHAT the world saviors and religions promise to save us from? Darkness?

Well, it's not their peace and goodwill to give away. The same tension is relieved even if you've never heard of any of these famous dead guys. The inhabitants of the Earth may need these careactors for some reasons, useful or not, but they don't need them to be saved from eternal darkness because the light of the Sun went away. The inhabitants of the Earth would go away first. Why would they not?

The Final Lynching

I've sat at breakfast with a number of men who were approaching their seventieth birthday and listened to their observations, and then afterward when, inch by inch they edged on past it. Their general opinion was pretty much amazement that they had lived that long without suffering anymore than they did, no matter how much they had suffered.

I was impressed by this one guy Mike, who fell from a step ladder on to the driveway separating he and his neighbor's house. He had been out trimming his shrubbery, and the wife of the neighbor came out and asked him to lop a particular branch that hung low over their mutual driveway. He said he was happy to do it, but when he fell from the ladder, he broke his leg high up on his thigh.

The doctors put a stainless steel pin in the break and then supported it with a stainless steel plate that bolted together. I don't remember a morning for ten years that he didn't walk into the cafe trying to not limp, and then after he sat down in the booth, and had his coffee in front of him, would reach for the pain-killer of the month in his shirt pocket.

He talked about the incident that initiated his suffering. He talked about how he felt each individual stainless steel bolt that held the plates together. He rattled on for hours (accumulatively over the years) about how distinctly he could feel the edges of the stainless steel plate grabbing at the thigh muscles as he walked. He was reluctantly bitter about how much pain he had to endure because of ceding to a reasonable request from a neighbor. He suffered because he tried to do right.

Then, one day his doctor upped and told him that medical technology had advanced to the point where it was practical and feasible to get a hip-replacement in which the lower shaft of the implement would reach down past where the stainless steel plates and bolts were in his upper thigh, and take the infernal instrument of torture outta his body.

Like all old people who show up for breakfast at these cafes, these universal hang-outs all over the world (to show their friends they ain't dead yet), he returned from "taking his operation" as soon as possible, and he stated that his future looked a lot brighter. The wicked witch of the west was dead.

There was a setback. the artificial hip came out of it's socket and jammed it's way up into his lower abdomen, but they replaced the hip with a new model, and soon he was walking around like a rooster strutting his stuff. Then, he had a major heart attack, and eventually, we talked that all out too. Rather, he talked all that out, I listened.

Some people I seem to go out of my way to hear both sides of their story. I never imagined I'd do something like that, but I listened to two men tell what happened for over ten years each. In the end, neither one of them liked me very much. The other side of the story was not easy on them for me to conjure.

This passive side of me just seems so strange in comparison to the way I usually carry on. It's always been there. I just never noticed it so much until I was older. When I think about it, I spend a lot of time listening to other people tell me what's wot about themselves. Part of it is that I like to fish for this information from them. What they hear themselves telling me seems much more shocking than anything I might say to them without the pro-vocation of stimulating them to speak up.

We both know they wouldn't do it if I didn't ask the right questions. Using the I Ching as an oracle for over thirty years taught me how to do that, but it actually did take a lot of time to acquire some mastery in this arena, but it's one of the best agendas I've ever stuck to. What I didn't understand when I was younger was that this was my calling, my vocation.

"To have vocation means in the original sense to be addressed by a voice ... whereupon they are at once differentiated from the others and feel themselves confronted by a problem that the others do not know about... - C.G. Jung

http://koti.mbnet.fi/amoira/jungvoc1.htm

This "original sense" of the term vocation strikes home with me. Maybe when I was younger I didn't understand that the voice that called me is external. Actually, the other's voice rather than some internal voice that tells me when to stop using the I Ching or to stop eating bananas.

It's true. Those two commands was the only demands my inner voice has made of me that I consciously remember. "Stop doing the I Ching!", and "Stop eating bananas!". I love bananas. Who doesn't? But, despite that, I've never knowingly eaten a banana since I was told to stop. I wonder if that voice will tell me, "Stop breathing forever!" when the jig is up?

A Priori Speculation With No Place To Go

Pheromones. A mere whiff of them from a bleeding woman takes away the kind of focus and attention men need for spiritual work because the pheromones immediately begin preparing the male body for possible procreative behavior instead of singing gregorian chants, whether he likes it or not. He might not even notice his agenda has been subtly reframed.

The State Of Magnolia

+
I bought me a rosemary bush at Lowe's. $12. The guy there told me to keep it in the pot and inside the house when it freezes until next Spring, then I could put it in the ground and it would survive in this growing zone with ease. I keep picking off a sprig occasionally and chewing it to see what happens when I mix it with other tastes.

This morning I am eating some Cheezit crackers and Christmas-y gourmet cheese to have something in my stomach to take my prescribed medicine, and chasing it with coffee and wine. I like it. A lot. I'm reading about it on the web. My friend Rainey may have something very positive going on with these herbs. I'm gonna clip a few sprigs and put it in some wine. It really changes the taste of the burgundy into something special. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary

This Wikipedia article has a number of links that allow an inquirer to follow up on their interest. I chose the one below and it has a series of articles on herbs. I particularly like that rosemary is an ancient ingredient for treating gout (arthritis), and while it may not compete with Prednisone steroids for reducing the inflammation and pain, it may help in a distinctly pleasant way.

http://www.superbherbs.net/rosemary.htm

The articles in Sara's Superherbs are well written, and include more information than I'm really after. I don't know what I'm really after. I've never pursued a deeper understanding about herbs in general, but I'm hitch-hiking on Rainey's current interest to see if it'll take with me. Whatta I go to lose?

Odd, very odd, I stopped typing and noticed the pictures of a flowering rosemary plant in the Wikipedia article behind my text program page. Below these pictures are it's scientific names. It's of the Kingdom: Plantae, the Division: Magnoliophyta, and the Class:Magnoliopsida, and the Order:Lamiales. I.E., it's part of the Magnolia family, the State tree of Mississippi where I was born. "Oh, goody.", a connection to my ancestral ho-me.

I've read about people in Europe having gout in the past. Particularly the stories in the older books. Gout of all sorts. But I didn't know gout was a form of arthritis. Anything that is good for gout has gotta be good for my arthritis. Have you noticed that I've begun calling it "my arthritis"? Is that smart?

I may be almost over the whining stage of realizing I have this incurable disease that causes me a lotta pain. Whining appears to be the way I segue into an attitude of acceptance. The same as my internal conversations. The pundits who claim that internal conversations should be eradicated are idiots. To me, they're the best self-teaching tools I possess.

There is the long-running documentary that keeps showing up on PBS about what's referred to as "primitive artists" who build and paint unrefined art. Unrefined because they usually have no lessons in art at all, and yet appear obsessed with what some call "tinker toy art".

I watched the interview the documentarians had with one of the more adept of this very interesting group of artists. He had done some truly amazing things with scrap metal he usually got from the junk yard or whatever showed up. I knew from looking at him that he was a Coharie or a Lumbee Indian. They're smarter than your average bear, and usually as friendly as you wanna be. Up to you.

He mentioned that he was 84 years old and still creating this art which included some really difficult physical work to make happen. As an aside, he commented that doing this art must be good for him, because none of his brothers and sisters lived beyond 72 years old. When asked about his health he said it was pretty good, then he held up his hands and said, "I got a little arthritis, but I ignore it and keep going. I don't let nothing like that stop me." I think that's where I'm headed.

By that I mean that I'm gonna do what I can, including going to the rheumatologist at the VA Hospital in Durham, and most likely letting him be the doctor and taking the medicines he prescribes, until it gets to the point that they seem to do more harm than good, and get on with what's left of my life.

Sunset And Screaming

He never has indicated anywhere near full acceptance of my right to play God with my own life, but now he has launched an unprovoked attack on me to protest my deliberate unprovoked attack about an unprovoked attack on someone I admire. It was a sham and a gull. Sound familiar?

I've corresponded with this guy as the occasion arose on a fairly frequent basis over the last five years, and complimented him frequently for displaying an admirable writing style that I'm a little envious of. When I read his post this morning, in which he prophesied some bad things were gonna happen to me one of these days when I'm in the condition my supposed victim supposedly is (who knows, it is the internet we using), I was oddly unsurprised. He seems to have been leading up to something like this for weeks.

I moved around through my morning ritual thinking about how I was gonna respond to these conventionally mundane charges, when I thought about the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Go_Gentle_into_that_Good_Night

and his encouragement to scream against the dying of the light. That's how I might approach this "victim" because of my silly conviction that I've sort of made myself an expert on human shame without actually calling myself a sham(e)man by posting hand-written announcements at the laundromat bulletin boards.

In my strange, small-minded world I thought the incident responsible for this guy's unprovoked attack on my unprovoked attack of this dying man was just up my alley. I responded like it was my cup of tea by screaming at the dying of the light. My nemesis chided me for being impolite to a helpless person. I suspect he might have offered him a soft pillow of politeness and soothing new-age affirmations to help him die with dignity.

I may take steps to assure myself this correspondent won't take the same approach with me should he outlive me. Yet, I guess I should give consideration of the adage "Different strokes for different folks.", because a soft pillow of politeness might be just the ticket if I-am-is were dying of shame.

Damn! Coldest morning of the year. It mo' better than further North. Still, the low twenties (@ - 5.555 C) for this neighbor is serious, water pipe busting weather. From the low twenties it only gets lethal to more and more forms of life and seam-splitting moisture-laden, inanimate objects.

Someone asked me recently if I experienced more problems with the arthritis when it gets sure 'nuff cold? It doesn't seem to make my joints hurt as much as it makes my fingers stiff, and maybe that is a source of discomfort, but the diagnosis for me was "mild arthritis", so more degradation may introduce new sensations. God, I hope so. I'm getting bored with the health issue, and that forces me to be cautious about becoming boring myself.

"Bored people are boring." AU
_

Writing An Era Of My Life Off

I've had an entertaining morning doing e-mail discussions. If I was able to manage my end of the exchanges with the kind of competence I've grown to expect from myself, I think I was able to back up faster than they could come forward. I might have written some edgy stuff that came a little to close to insult to be suffered lightly, but always with a backdoor in order to run helter skelter toward visibly dissembling as an end game strategy.

If I hadn't tested the waters and gone one step over the line in questioning my own sanity, I wouldn't know how far I can go with dissembling (certainly further than the average bear, and even some who have never tripped the light fantastic) rapidly, if need be, and even as a diversion if I'm stuck in the check-out line. I got no couth.

I'm becoming more aware of how taking a vasectomy has changed everything about me, especially my menagerie of half-baked personas created for my unconscious procreative goals. My pretenses to authority on many levels become paper tigers that self-immolated before my very eyes. My care-acting had no legs to stand on it's own as a viable, believable being. My male power was compromised with the snip of a pair of surgical scissors.

I sort of thought my manhood had been compromised by a football accident when I was fourteen years old. I got kneed in the groin and was lucky to come outta that with a minimal sperm count, but it appeared as though my testosterone production was still in the average rage according to the oncologist. Every aspect of my life was affected by that ill-fated misfortune too. So, I thought, what more harm can a vasectomy do to my ego than what was done twenty-odd years before, right?

Wrong. I was waaaay wrong. The football accident didn't leave me infertile. That was the final straw that broke my resolve to at least attempt to appear conventionally masculine. I took the vasectomy ten years after having my remembering vision. The vision was the calling, and my response to it dictated how I shaped my "wounded healer" persona as a vocation. The vasectomy matriculated the initiation of the football accident to the third order of magnitude, and I crossed the ring-pass-me-not of eunuch-dom(e) at warp speed.

I don't know how to describe how flat-lined my emotional sensitivity is or what I might compare it to for some ratings game, but I know that it can make my objectivity a written-in-stone diabolic instrument of torture. It's not like being deliberately anything as much as second-nature. My capacity for emotional investment has gone bankrupt. What requires caution for me, and hopefully invisible to the world-at-large, is that I appear to be left only with my skills for pretending in order to initiate a ruse of care-acting that the barn door was carelessly left open.

It's easy for me to understand how eunuch' might be used to guard harems. It would extremely difficult to manipulate this johnny-come-lately persona I designed to respond to stimuli with dispassion, in order to avoid behaving in a manner that might discredit my imaginary handlers.