Naked Emperors And New Clothes

I used to enjoy tuning in to the TV programs on Sunday mornings to listen to what the journalist pundits say what they gotta say to each other. Watching them do their job with the politicians is boring by comparison. I don't feel the anticipation so strong these days. I'm pretty much burned out on politics and hearing about how we're constantly getting screwed by people we're supposed to be able to trust. It never changes. The pundits have taken to playing some form or the other of "I've Got A Secret!" Basically, they say what they gotta say to get their fix of being the news instead of the usual suspects. It's not that I blame these people for doing the very thing they're hired to report on, because their motivation for these scenes is basically their own greed for power.

I don't know what happened to my greed for power. I think I remember having it at some one time or the other. I suspect I just wasn't any good at it. I couldn't compete for power on a level that impressed me, so I sorta gave up on doing it the way I thought was best for me.

My relationship to Key West, Florida serves as the example I like to write about that portrays the undoing of my lust for power came about. The first time I went there was because the Navy sent me there to study about rocket-launched nuclear weapons. The rocket part, the delivery system, not the weapons part. I'd never heard of Key West, for the most part, until the Navy sent me there in 1965. Key West made a semi-tropical impression on me that has lasted to this day.

It was my memory of being there in the Navy that drew me back to it when I ran away from home during my first marriage. Running away from "being married" got to be a habit during that period. People kept telling me I was crazy to do stuff like that, and eventually I took them at their word, convinced myself I could use that role to get out of the marriage altogether, did that, and started returning to Key West to spend the winters after hitch-hiking around the whole country and more during the warm months for about three or four years.

It was during one of those winterings that I met my second wife in Key West. She doesn't have the excuse of not knowing what she got into when we started playing house. She was fully informed of my history of mental disruptions. She knew perfectly well that I was a diagnosed schizophrenic, and had committed myself to the state hospital in order to get out of my first marriage.

She knew full well I was a bum on the streets when she met me. She didn't know my ambitions were a lie, because up until then, neither did I. I did know they were on the back burner, but not that they were missing in action completely. Not yet. Not yet... I did know I was special, but not that kind of special. I especially didn't know everybody was that kind of special, but that they didn't know it anymore than I did. I found out. I'm still finding out.

I've written on these blogs for years that my true lust from childhood was to discover how charismatics could use me to satisfy their own needs, and I couldn't stop them. i didn't know how they were doing that, and my life's ambition was to find out. I even became somewhat of a charismatic myself, but only in order to find out how they did what they did to me.

I never have used my care-is-matic power for evil, unless apathy is evil. It's not that I wouldn't do that or consider myself innocent of guilt, it's just not me to rely on physical wealth to force the issue with the other. I've always been attracted to the empty hands approach. I like having only wit and grit as my only real resources. It's gonna be the death of me. I'm gonna die when all it would take is the widow's mite to save me. Very exciting stuff.

The reason charismatics could manipulate me is the same reason anybody else can be manipulated. The ease with which charismatics cause things to go their way with me is not because I'm the biggest fool on Earth. That's been a very relieving thing to know. Well, that's a sort of lie. I am the biggest fool on Earth, that's for true, but the grace that forgives me is that every other Other on Earth is as big a fool as me. The Earth is considered by at least one writer as A Ship Of Fools.

Homo sapiens have a species-wide flaw. The charismatics manipulated my not-knowing and my unwillingness to acknowledge I can't know my own possibles in real time to jerk me around as it didn't even matter if I knew they were doing it. I did know they were doing it, and because I couldn't stop them despite my knowing is why I felt the shame and humiliation, and why, indeed, I naturally be-ka-me a sham-an. A shamed man. A wounded healer. A man of deep shame. A shaman.

"be-ka-me"? I was thinking of the world serpent some Asian cultures call Ka. One can think whatever they like about snakes, but if you put them there holy sacraments in your body as a path with heart, then you gwine run into snakes in every dimension you make into a "possible".

It's the lack of security we experience because we can't know our possibles in real time that makes us reach for the stars, and into the depths of the universe, if need be. For homo sapiens, there IS no greater need. They will pay any price. Even risk their very life... repeatedly! '-)

The Rolling Stones didn't need to record and sell but one song to have fame and fortune. "I can't git no... sat-is-fact-shun!"

They couldn't shun the fact that we do it all the ti-me without actually accomplishing, ever, what we set out to do. Not getting no satisfaction is a doing from which one learns nothing. "... and I tried, and I tried, and I tried, and I tried... Can't git no... satisfaction."

There was a final phase in my relationship with the city of Key West. I went back down there after I acquired a trade and become a master craftsman. I arranged to get a job as a journeyman with a construction company that was rebuilding some hangars for the Navy at the nearby air base.

The job paid for the condominium some of us lived at, and so I found myself in Key West with a comparative pocket full of money in this town I had spent so many years walking the streets as a homeless, but agreeable bum. The people I knew from before absolutely hated me when I had disposable cash and wasn't dependent on them anymore. Oddly enow, I hated it too.

I love for people with money thinking they can have their way with me. I can usually back up faster than they can come forward. Retreat is a strategy that makes time and space spin in the palm of yo' hand. They keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, and seem astonished they didn't notice I arrived barefooted. The Emperor was naked all along. I seem perfectly willing to allow the other to dress me in their clothes to help them find the child within. You know how it is with children, they can't keep secrets. Only the inner child knows it's own possibles in real time.

The child is the Father of the man?