I don't know if this Vitamin D kick is doing any good. Nothing seems to be doing any good, so I guess I'll have to live with it. The pain is in my muscles and my bones, so I'm thinking this is something a little different than just arthritis, and because it's spread out into my elbows and shoulders I know it's not just carpal tunnel syndrome. C'est la morte.
I'm thinking that in my dotage I'll lose what institutionalized learnings I ever grokked, but I don't think I'll lose the experiential database installed by my remembering vision. I'm not sure I fully know or understand the implications of that occurring. My interpretation of wot's sot before me to be evaluated from that database hasn't exactly gotten me elected Mister Congeniality with the people with whom I communicate currently. Either in person or online.
Resolving to the perspective gained by my remembering vision is not all fun and games. Saying what I see from that perspective is more likely to get me ignored, because looking at the world that way doesn't allow for anybody to love what they see of themselves in me because there is nothing left they'll recognize from just being human. No blame.
What if they never have been able to see of themselves in my behavior, and I'm just finding it out. Why am I always the last to know? I'm not sure what I mean when I tell people I love them, so why should they know any more about love than me? Inevitably. one has to define love, as they will to, and then attempt to live up to their own definition of love, but what of others? How can they know what your definition of love is in order to live up to it for your sake? They have to interpret what you say your definition of love is in order to please you. Do they not? How can that be done? "It takes two cups."
This is learned stuff. In the paragraphs above, I stated that's what I'm gonna lose track of in my dotage. Maybe sooner. Maybe later. But, since what the institutions I encountered never taught me anything all that valuable, it won't be no great loss. Not subjectively. What it'll look like on the outside looking in is anybody's guess.
I didn't learn what I learned from the Book of Changes (I Ching) from no institution, although the English version of the German translation is what I studied for thirty years. The reason I don't think I'll lose it as an installed base is because of the dream I had early one morning that told me to "Stop using the I Ching."
Memorizing the I Ching taught me a thing or two, but it really doesn't have anything to do with other people being whatever it is that they are. It taught me to be cautious in ways I never realized I needed to be on alert. I had to create rules of conscience the culture I was raised in didn't accept as credible, and it taught me how to ask questions of other people as if they were themselves oracles, instead of me using the Yellow Book.
Using other people as oracles taught me they can't refuse to be oracular if I do my part right. Usually, they don't know they can be that wise upon command, and it's troublesome when they can't forget it actually happened. "Do it again, Daddy, do it again!"
How people react to finding out they can wax oracular (if somebody that knows how ask them to) is one of the more unpredictable situations I encounter. I know it's because I ask them to, but I can't teach them or demonstrate to them how to ask it of themselves for the repeat performances they crave. It's apparently something that has to arise unsupported out of one's own needs and desires and sustained by their own initiative. They're the only one that's always with themselves night and day, and that's the kind of dedication that has to happen or either you gotta walk around during lightning storms and prey for a miracle that don't actually fry you like an egg.
I don't know what all can be done to have your own remembering vision. I've communicated with people who got it from having an otherwise horrible car wreck. Surviving cancer can bring it about. Falling from high places and surviving seems to get the job done. Failed suicide attempts have been the source of "seeing" your life pass before your eyes. That's all a remembering vision amounts to. Whatever causes it, if you "see" your life pass before your eyes, just like you've heard or read about it all your lives, is what I'm calling my remembering vision, but it goes all the way back to my arrival on earth several billion years ago. I'm writing about my COMPLETE history on Earth, but it's still just a vision of seeing my lives pass before my eyes. This is a better metaphor. I gotta remember this.
People have to walk that lonesome valley all by themselves, as it were, really. Nobody can "see" the subjective cues that's gotta be recognized so you can get out of your own way, and it's gotta be practiced unrelentingly, and a lot of time the process is very disparaging. The self-humiliation is not easy to bear up under. It's a self-contained process, because nobody can know what's going on even if you try to help them. They only "see" what they'd be doing if they were you. The final stages are not imitate-able. No models exist for you to mimick. You have to provide the original material from within yo'self. Nobody else's vision will do.
What answers me is their small, quiet voice they usually project on to other people because they won't listen to that inner voice when it speaks to them. I ask for that part of them to speak up. When it does, and the other hears themselves speak it, it can change everything they thought they knew, but even then it usually doesn't happen until they've matriculated into their own person that can hear themselves speak. Speak and gnow it's them that's really talking. That it's not somebody else's words they use for imitation and mimicry, but their own voice speaking through themselves, because they won't allow it to speak to them in intimacy even though they dream of it being that way. Some won't take it any way they can get it. Even if they do have to bounce it off the other by projecting. "Mirror, mirror, on the wall. Who's the fairest of them all?"
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
Monday, June 30, 2008
Sunday, June 29, 2008
New FAQ On Memsistors
Hewlett-Packard Labs has now put out a FAQ on memsistors:
http://www.hpl.hp.com/news/2008/apr-jun/memristor_faq.html
This is a fascinating development in electrical theory for me. I've had just enough electronic training to be dangerous to myself, but nobody else in the world. I like the theory part. I'm lousy at taking the theory from my head and put it into my hands. The first electronic school I went to was in the Navy and was about the old electron diode vacuum tubes. That happened in the late Fifties, and the transistor had just arrived on the consumer market about this time. The first portable radios like the Walkman were just being fitted with solid state transistors. I've been to a couple of other schools and studied electronics in the mid-80s just as personal computers arrived. I bought my first computer in '88. I'm not a nerd. This was forced on me by circumstance. The real reason I bought my first computer was to replace an electric typewriter. The ease of editing on a computer before I hit the Print button was immediately recognizable as a superior advantage. Particularly to someone who typed as badly as me.
The memsistor FAQ is really well written in a way a layman might understand the basic idea of memsistors and how they form the fourth cornerstone of electrical theory. I didn't expect to understand what i read in the FAQ. but I did. The head of the team that made the prototype and wrote it up for Nature magazine wrote the FAQ and used how water flows through pipes to illustrate, and I worked for twenty odd years fitting and welding pipe. The way he explained it I understood exactly what it was the missing link of electric theory. It remembers it's ongoing condition when it's turned off. It stays right where it was when the power or water is turned off. When the power or the water is turned back on it starts from the configuration it was in when it was turned off. That's why it can be used for "instant on" computing when it's used to make Random Access Memory. It doesn't "do" anything to remember it's contents as memory. It just stays like it was left, and when you turn it on again it starts from there. That means that unless some change is introduced it doesn't ever have to be turned on beyond static recognition of where it's at. Energy doesn't have to be expended to refresh or change anything about it's unchanging state of being unless change is required. I may have made that last part up.
DRAM has to be refreshed ever so often for it to maintain it's integrity as a zero or one. If the power is turned off, then the memory stored in the cells loses it's assigned value. When the power is turned on again, the DRAM has to have it's memory slots refilled from the hard drive again before data processing can happen. Random Access Memory made from memsistors wouldn't have to be refreshed from the hard drive. You could just turn on the power again and everything would be just like you left it when you cut the power off. I may have missed the mark here. I may have understood memsistors to work a little like ROM memory, and I don't know why, but I'm sorta positive what these people have done is not as if they reinvented programmable memory. What I don't understand is that if all the parameters present in a memsistor at any given moment stay the way they exist as when you turn off the juice, what does turning the juice back on do to the frozen state the memsistor was left in. Does it have the same affect as a BIOS battery that holds the BIOS code in ROM memory while the motherboard is turned off.
No battery is needed to keep the information in the memsistor even if you turn off the power to the circuit it's a part of. What happens to the data stored in the memsistor when the circuit power is turned off and then turned back on. Doesn't that alter the way it was left? What I'm curious about is, does any of the regular circuit power pass through the memsistor if it's contents doesn't need to be changed. I'm thinking about efficiency here.
Will the presence of memsistors in a digital circuit make it more efficient because no energy is exerted keeping the memory registers refreshed. I wonder if the minuscule amounts of electricity involved in the various brain waves have biological memsistors or the equivalent thereof. When I upsurge into conscious awareness when I wake up from a nights sleep, it doesn't take me long to jump right back into the patterns I retired from the night before. This might have something to do with Alzheimer's. Old people's bionic memsistors short out. '-)
http://www.hpl.hp.com/news/2008/apr-jun/memristor_faq.html
This is a fascinating development in electrical theory for me. I've had just enough electronic training to be dangerous to myself, but nobody else in the world. I like the theory part. I'm lousy at taking the theory from my head and put it into my hands. The first electronic school I went to was in the Navy and was about the old electron diode vacuum tubes. That happened in the late Fifties, and the transistor had just arrived on the consumer market about this time. The first portable radios like the Walkman were just being fitted with solid state transistors. I've been to a couple of other schools and studied electronics in the mid-80s just as personal computers arrived. I bought my first computer in '88. I'm not a nerd. This was forced on me by circumstance. The real reason I bought my first computer was to replace an electric typewriter. The ease of editing on a computer before I hit the Print button was immediately recognizable as a superior advantage. Particularly to someone who typed as badly as me.
The memsistor FAQ is really well written in a way a layman might understand the basic idea of memsistors and how they form the fourth cornerstone of electrical theory. I didn't expect to understand what i read in the FAQ. but I did. The head of the team that made the prototype and wrote it up for Nature magazine wrote the FAQ and used how water flows through pipes to illustrate, and I worked for twenty odd years fitting and welding pipe. The way he explained it I understood exactly what it was the missing link of electric theory. It remembers it's ongoing condition when it's turned off. It stays right where it was when the power or water is turned off. When the power or the water is turned back on it starts from the configuration it was in when it was turned off. That's why it can be used for "instant on" computing when it's used to make Random Access Memory. It doesn't "do" anything to remember it's contents as memory. It just stays like it was left, and when you turn it on again it starts from there. That means that unless some change is introduced it doesn't ever have to be turned on beyond static recognition of where it's at. Energy doesn't have to be expended to refresh or change anything about it's unchanging state of being unless change is required. I may have made that last part up.
DRAM has to be refreshed ever so often for it to maintain it's integrity as a zero or one. If the power is turned off, then the memory stored in the cells loses it's assigned value. When the power is turned on again, the DRAM has to have it's memory slots refilled from the hard drive again before data processing can happen. Random Access Memory made from memsistors wouldn't have to be refreshed from the hard drive. You could just turn on the power again and everything would be just like you left it when you cut the power off. I may have missed the mark here. I may have understood memsistors to work a little like ROM memory, and I don't know why, but I'm sorta positive what these people have done is not as if they reinvented programmable memory. What I don't understand is that if all the parameters present in a memsistor at any given moment stay the way they exist as when you turn off the juice, what does turning the juice back on do to the frozen state the memsistor was left in. Does it have the same affect as a BIOS battery that holds the BIOS code in ROM memory while the motherboard is turned off.
No battery is needed to keep the information in the memsistor even if you turn off the power to the circuit it's a part of. What happens to the data stored in the memsistor when the circuit power is turned off and then turned back on. Doesn't that alter the way it was left? What I'm curious about is, does any of the regular circuit power pass through the memsistor if it's contents doesn't need to be changed. I'm thinking about efficiency here.
Will the presence of memsistors in a digital circuit make it more efficient because no energy is exerted keeping the memory registers refreshed. I wonder if the minuscule amounts of electricity involved in the various brain waves have biological memsistors or the equivalent thereof. When I upsurge into conscious awareness when I wake up from a nights sleep, it doesn't take me long to jump right back into the patterns I retired from the night before. This might have something to do with Alzheimer's. Old people's bionic memsistors short out. '-)
The End Of Cruising? Bye Bye, American Pie?
_
The fuel situation has changed "cruising" by teenagers forever.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/us/29teengas.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
Cruising was a 20th Century phenomena. I don't know the history of it, and I didn't participate as much as many people of my several generations did, I was a bum and a hitch-hiker who rode shotgun with whoever picked me up off the side of the road for years and years.
About the only non-rich kids who will be able to cruise the streets now will be gang-bangers who finance their habits by the black market created by the War On Drugs. If the War On Drugs was abandoned in the same way Prohibition was abandoned, then only rich kids will be cruising the streets of America. This is sorta sad to me. It does not infringe on me so much because I'm an old man. By the time I owned a car and was able to cruise around looking for fun and excitement, I had obligations I had to learn to ignore. I hate it for the kids today and those to come who will never know that freedom because gas will cost so much it'll be considered a luxury. Casual irresponsibility will have to find another way to express itself. The world may not like it. So what, there's a lotta things the world don't like.
I put a link to my various blogs as the .sig file of all my e-mails. I started doing that so that the people who read what I write on the discussion groups will realize that although I do make sense sometimes, I'm basically as nutty as a fruitcake. I have to be nutty as a fruitcake to let myself be tempted to try and understand the big picture. To find balance I have to look at both sides of the issues that attract me. That's not as easy as eating a big slice of Mom's apple pie with a big scoop of ice cream on it. Even entertaining unpopular thoughts can associate me with things people get murdered about, either by individuals , groups, and especially the government. It's gonna get worse. Exploring both sides of sensitive topics about politics and religion can and will get you locked up in places like Gitmo. Nobody wants that.
Maybe they do. Maybe there are people who feel like they need to get locked up and survive some place like Gitmo to truly understand what's going on. Something similar happened to me and I did it. I did it knowingly. Well, as much as I could know before I actually did it to find out what could actually be known.
People enamor themselves with/of me. They don't need me to help them do this. I truly think they resent my interference. Obviously, I pay no attention to their concerns, and that's one of the main reasons they fall in love with their idea of me. For most of my life I actually thought they fell in love with who-I-think-I-am-is, but I deluded myself. Both ways. What I thought about them adoring me had nothing to do with their adoring me. Usually, when I figure that out, it makes me mad. Furious!
I'm persnickety to some extreme. Unfortunately, it's not an act. If it was, I could turn it on when I needed it, and when I didn't, stop it, and keep my stopping still. I'd really, really admire myself if I could make this happen like they do in the movies. I'm even persnickety in my sleep. That's saying that I'm persnickety when I'm totally unconscious. Persnickety-ness is my first nayme. Legally. If you got any discrimination at all, you know damned well I'm not legally felix manos peregrino. I don't even capitalize it, but that's who I have been since my remembering vision, because that's why the legal me made it up to represent something much, much older. I have to reside in my home town to remind me how to pretend to be human. felix has no such restrictions that I know about. Elsewise, I would make other arrangements.
I became my parent's son and bore their nayme as proudly as I could until my remembering vision proved to me with no uncertainty that I didn't belong to nobody, and there's the shame of it. I'm the world's oldest bastard. Nobody knows how to be a bastard with the finesse and crudeness I-am-is capable of. I sort of regret the crude part. I envy the more diplomatic bastards of the world, but I gotta go with what got me here until I can find more polite way.
It's easy enough to keen how I got to be this way (mean-spirited) when I consider everything that I've ever made myself into since I arrived here looking very much like an oyster pearl, except there was nothing corporeal about what that might have been.
It was a stupid little incident. That's all. There was nothing intentional going on. How could there be? I was allone in my house in my own domain. I don't have to act with intention here unless I get visitors, and I go to extremes to make sure every possible dimension of that event occurring is under my thumb.
I walked over and used the remote sitting beside my inherited motorized recliner to turn the TV on to distract myself from being persnickety. It gets on people's nerves. No blame. It gets on mine too. Even as the picture on the old analog TV with a digital converter came into view I could see the close-up was of a piano keyboard, and by the time it came completely into focus I knew it was PBS and the program was thepianoguy.com instructional video about teaching oneself to play the piano.
Since my hands and wrists now hurt so bad I can't even get through a short session of playing the scales, I'm really angry when thepianoguy program comes on. Not at thepianoguy, I'm angry I can't play through the pain. I'm angry that I was defeated by it. I'm angry I waited too late to do what I always knew needed to be done, and I didn't do it outta pure spite. I'm so pissed off and spiteful about several of my own discisions I find it more and more difficult to forgive myself as fast as I condemn myself. That's why I think I'm in sorrowful physical pain. I was warned. I was told. I blasphemed the spirit in which it was told. I tried to mend my ways and make up for lost time, but I don't even believe myself when I try to sound sincere. I got a history of lying to my Self, and it runs deeper once the colors are struck.
Sometime I think the essence of what's happened in my life is that I learned that lying to my care-takers would cause them to leave me alone to my own devices. They wanted to hear me tell them their worst fears were not actively transpiring. They didn't wanna know what I was doing. Just that I was being their version of a good boy. They wanted to hear my lies, and see me blink my long eyelashes deep in the shadow of my protruding brow.
The essence of the me-and-thee-ing (meaning) to be found in my formative years in life is what happened between me and thee. Everything else was chit chat. As a child I felt like that was all that mattered, and the world proved it to me every day that passed, and expecially in the Navy and other large institutions like colleges and hospitals. The only thing that mattered was those moments when my mother looked me straight into my eyes and demanded I tell her what happened, and I told her the lie she could use to defend me with. My mother was my first PR agent, and my mentor for becoming a journeyman liar. Later, I found out that any warm body would do of any age, color, or gender. Just politely provide whoever with the lie they could defend me with, and they'd let me go my way. "Thank you very much. Get in touch when you're back in town. I love the way you let me be you." Selah
I read somewhere that the term Selah is not well understood. A significant number of scholars appear to have concluded it was probably a musical symbol that meant the end of a passage or phrase of song or poetry. I use it that way because I want to impress people who take it religiously, and because I don't have to ask nobody if I can. Why would I not?
The fuel situation has changed "cruising" by teenagers forever.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/us/29teengas.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
Cruising was a 20th Century phenomena. I don't know the history of it, and I didn't participate as much as many people of my several generations did, I was a bum and a hitch-hiker who rode shotgun with whoever picked me up off the side of the road for years and years.
About the only non-rich kids who will be able to cruise the streets now will be gang-bangers who finance their habits by the black market created by the War On Drugs. If the War On Drugs was abandoned in the same way Prohibition was abandoned, then only rich kids will be cruising the streets of America. This is sorta sad to me. It does not infringe on me so much because I'm an old man. By the time I owned a car and was able to cruise around looking for fun and excitement, I had obligations I had to learn to ignore. I hate it for the kids today and those to come who will never know that freedom because gas will cost so much it'll be considered a luxury. Casual irresponsibility will have to find another way to express itself. The world may not like it. So what, there's a lotta things the world don't like.
I put a link to my various blogs as the .sig file of all my e-mails. I started doing that so that the people who read what I write on the discussion groups will realize that although I do make sense sometimes, I'm basically as nutty as a fruitcake. I have to be nutty as a fruitcake to let myself be tempted to try and understand the big picture. To find balance I have to look at both sides of the issues that attract me. That's not as easy as eating a big slice of Mom's apple pie with a big scoop of ice cream on it. Even entertaining unpopular thoughts can associate me with things people get murdered about, either by individuals , groups, and especially the government. It's gonna get worse. Exploring both sides of sensitive topics about politics and religion can and will get you locked up in places like Gitmo. Nobody wants that.
Maybe they do. Maybe there are people who feel like they need to get locked up and survive some place like Gitmo to truly understand what's going on. Something similar happened to me and I did it. I did it knowingly. Well, as much as I could know before I actually did it to find out what could actually be known.
People enamor themselves with/of me. They don't need me to help them do this. I truly think they resent my interference. Obviously, I pay no attention to their concerns, and that's one of the main reasons they fall in love with their idea of me. For most of my life I actually thought they fell in love with who-I-think-I-am-is, but I deluded myself. Both ways. What I thought about them adoring me had nothing to do with their adoring me. Usually, when I figure that out, it makes me mad. Furious!
I'm persnickety to some extreme. Unfortunately, it's not an act. If it was, I could turn it on when I needed it, and when I didn't, stop it, and keep my stopping still. I'd really, really admire myself if I could make this happen like they do in the movies. I'm even persnickety in my sleep. That's saying that I'm persnickety when I'm totally unconscious. Persnickety-ness is my first nayme. Legally. If you got any discrimination at all, you know damned well I'm not legally felix manos peregrino. I don't even capitalize it, but that's who I have been since my remembering vision, because that's why the legal me made it up to represent something much, much older. I have to reside in my home town to remind me how to pretend to be human. felix has no such restrictions that I know about. Elsewise, I would make other arrangements.
I became my parent's son and bore their nayme as proudly as I could until my remembering vision proved to me with no uncertainty that I didn't belong to nobody, and there's the shame of it. I'm the world's oldest bastard. Nobody knows how to be a bastard with the finesse and crudeness I-am-is capable of. I sort of regret the crude part. I envy the more diplomatic bastards of the world, but I gotta go with what got me here until I can find more polite way.
It's easy enough to keen how I got to be this way (mean-spirited) when I consider everything that I've ever made myself into since I arrived here looking very much like an oyster pearl, except there was nothing corporeal about what that might have been.
It was a stupid little incident. That's all. There was nothing intentional going on. How could there be? I was allone in my house in my own domain. I don't have to act with intention here unless I get visitors, and I go to extremes to make sure every possible dimension of that event occurring is under my thumb.
I walked over and used the remote sitting beside my inherited motorized recliner to turn the TV on to distract myself from being persnickety. It gets on people's nerves. No blame. It gets on mine too. Even as the picture on the old analog TV with a digital converter came into view I could see the close-up was of a piano keyboard, and by the time it came completely into focus I knew it was PBS and the program was thepianoguy.com instructional video about teaching oneself to play the piano.
Since my hands and wrists now hurt so bad I can't even get through a short session of playing the scales, I'm really angry when thepianoguy program comes on. Not at thepianoguy, I'm angry I can't play through the pain. I'm angry that I was defeated by it. I'm angry I waited too late to do what I always knew needed to be done, and I didn't do it outta pure spite. I'm so pissed off and spiteful about several of my own discisions I find it more and more difficult to forgive myself as fast as I condemn myself. That's why I think I'm in sorrowful physical pain. I was warned. I was told. I blasphemed the spirit in which it was told. I tried to mend my ways and make up for lost time, but I don't even believe myself when I try to sound sincere. I got a history of lying to my Self, and it runs deeper once the colors are struck.
Sometime I think the essence of what's happened in my life is that I learned that lying to my care-takers would cause them to leave me alone to my own devices. They wanted to hear me tell them their worst fears were not actively transpiring. They didn't wanna know what I was doing. Just that I was being their version of a good boy. They wanted to hear my lies, and see me blink my long eyelashes deep in the shadow of my protruding brow.
The essence of the me-and-thee-ing (meaning) to be found in my formative years in life is what happened between me and thee. Everything else was chit chat. As a child I felt like that was all that mattered, and the world proved it to me every day that passed, and expecially in the Navy and other large institutions like colleges and hospitals. The only thing that mattered was those moments when my mother looked me straight into my eyes and demanded I tell her what happened, and I told her the lie she could use to defend me with. My mother was my first PR agent, and my mentor for becoming a journeyman liar. Later, I found out that any warm body would do of any age, color, or gender. Just politely provide whoever with the lie they could defend me with, and they'd let me go my way. "Thank you very much. Get in touch when you're back in town. I love the way you let me be you." Selah
I read somewhere that the term Selah is not well understood. A significant number of scholars appear to have concluded it was probably a musical symbol that meant the end of a passage or phrase of song or poetry. I use it that way because I want to impress people who take it religiously, and because I don't have to ask nobody if I can. Why would I not?
Saturday, June 28, 2008
The Rod That Spoilt The Chile
From what he told me, my father never smoked tobacco. I got no reason not to believe him, but he did plenty to prove to me that he was still cool at the age of forty. I never was so cool myself, so I didn't really know what he meant. He talked to me about his life when we worked together in the gardens and fields he rented.
He moved to North Carolina from eastern Mississippi with a Model T truck that hauled a trailer. On the old two-lane road system, it was a thousand miles one way. He drove up here by himself to get the job and rent a place for his family to live. Then, he went back and got his family and moved them away from the only people they knew in the world to the coastal plains of Carolina popularly known as Tobacco Road. He brought a wife and two children, two cows, a suckling calf, and three hound dogs on the same trip, and went back again a couple of times by himself to bring more stuff. He took a huge risk, and nearly failed more than once. He couldn't have afforded to do that today. He couldn't have paid for the gas for that many round trips alone. The casual mobility the American society has experienced since World War Two is already a thing of the past, and it'll never be that way again. Just moving across town will cost a small fortune.
We moved from town to town when I was a kid. We rented the houses we lived in. Some of them had the facilities to keep his cows and raise a big garden my father needed to supplement his meager teacher's pay. Most of the houses didn't have a barn on the property or land for a five-acre garden. He had to rent them separate, and our milk cows and garden was sometime a mile or two away from the house we lived in. He needed a small farm in the worst way. I was fifteen years old before that happened.
While it's true I wasn't actually raised in the country, the towns we lived in were not much but small villages, and because my father kept cows his whole life and kept a large enough garden to be at least a wannabe farmer, and the fact that he made a living teaching high school agriculture, and was indeed raised on a farm deep in the backwaters of Mississippi, then "we" were farmers, despite the fact that until I was fifteen years old, I was raised in town.
His father had a right good-sized farm in Mississippi up to a little over a thousand acres, maybe, until the Great Depression came along, and his father's father had thousands of acres over in Alabama before the Civil War, and his father's father's father migrated there from his father's plantation in the coastal plains of the Carolinas where I live now. If we're living in town, it's just a matter of necessity, and we won't be there long, or so I"ve been raised to believe. It's just what I got when I swapped for this body.
My father used to tell me about his father when we worked in the fields. Particularly after he was able to buy his first small farm of fifteen acres when I was fifteen years old. Maybe I asked him to tell me because I'd just gotten this body myself, and I needed to know what to say in order to pass myself off as the boy he'd raised.
He told me his father used to use him as an errand boy to run down to the country store his father owned to "Git me some siggy-rettes." He had an odd way of pronouncing cigarettes. Seeegy-rettes. "Bill, go down to the store and git me some seegyrettes, and hurry back, or I'll whip yo' ass, boy." My father hated cigarettes with a passion. I believed him when he said he'd never smoked.
He confessed to many of his misdeeds to me while we worked alone together in the fields. He swore me to secrecy, and I more or less keep my promise to him. He too had sinned. He wanted me to know that. But, he had a double-standard. It wasn't alright for me to be a sinner too. I had to hurry back too or he would whip my ass. It's a family tradition. It ain't cigarettes I hate because of my father's failings.
He moved to North Carolina from eastern Mississippi with a Model T truck that hauled a trailer. On the old two-lane road system, it was a thousand miles one way. He drove up here by himself to get the job and rent a place for his family to live. Then, he went back and got his family and moved them away from the only people they knew in the world to the coastal plains of Carolina popularly known as Tobacco Road. He brought a wife and two children, two cows, a suckling calf, and three hound dogs on the same trip, and went back again a couple of times by himself to bring more stuff. He took a huge risk, and nearly failed more than once. He couldn't have afforded to do that today. He couldn't have paid for the gas for that many round trips alone. The casual mobility the American society has experienced since World War Two is already a thing of the past, and it'll never be that way again. Just moving across town will cost a small fortune.
We moved from town to town when I was a kid. We rented the houses we lived in. Some of them had the facilities to keep his cows and raise a big garden my father needed to supplement his meager teacher's pay. Most of the houses didn't have a barn on the property or land for a five-acre garden. He had to rent them separate, and our milk cows and garden was sometime a mile or two away from the house we lived in. He needed a small farm in the worst way. I was fifteen years old before that happened.
While it's true I wasn't actually raised in the country, the towns we lived in were not much but small villages, and because my father kept cows his whole life and kept a large enough garden to be at least a wannabe farmer, and the fact that he made a living teaching high school agriculture, and was indeed raised on a farm deep in the backwaters of Mississippi, then "we" were farmers, despite the fact that until I was fifteen years old, I was raised in town.
His father had a right good-sized farm in Mississippi up to a little over a thousand acres, maybe, until the Great Depression came along, and his father's father had thousands of acres over in Alabama before the Civil War, and his father's father's father migrated there from his father's plantation in the coastal plains of the Carolinas where I live now. If we're living in town, it's just a matter of necessity, and we won't be there long, or so I"ve been raised to believe. It's just what I got when I swapped for this body.
My father used to tell me about his father when we worked in the fields. Particularly after he was able to buy his first small farm of fifteen acres when I was fifteen years old. Maybe I asked him to tell me because I'd just gotten this body myself, and I needed to know what to say in order to pass myself off as the boy he'd raised.
He told me his father used to use him as an errand boy to run down to the country store his father owned to "Git me some siggy-rettes." He had an odd way of pronouncing cigarettes. Seeegy-rettes. "Bill, go down to the store and git me some seegyrettes, and hurry back, or I'll whip yo' ass, boy." My father hated cigarettes with a passion. I believed him when he said he'd never smoked.
He confessed to many of his misdeeds to me while we worked alone together in the fields. He swore me to secrecy, and I more or less keep my promise to him. He too had sinned. He wanted me to know that. But, he had a double-standard. It wasn't alright for me to be a sinner too. I had to hurry back too or he would whip my ass. It's a family tradition. It ain't cigarettes I hate because of my father's failings.
Toilet Training: Is It Mind Or Rectum That's Trained?
There is still this one question for me about how consciousness upsurges out of the plenitude into it's own separate reality. While dwelling in the fullness of being-in-itself, the original source of consciousness can possess no special significance or exclusivity any more than any of the other elements of that cosmic soup. So, what is it that upsurges into the nothingness outside the plenitude, and what serves as the event horizon of exteriority? Whatever that is or may be, albeit solid skin or dim aura, what becomes conscious of itself will return through this event horizon when it loses consciousness again, and again, and ...? In the Tarot deck this event horizon is represented by The Fool Card. It's number is zero. Nothingness.
I forewent consciousness last night by going to bed fairly early for me. About ten o'clock I decided to go upstairs and go to bed and watch the late shows on CBS. sometimes I watch Charley Rose. I only get over-the-air local stations. I don't have a digital converter on the upstairs TV which only has rabbit ears, so if I'm bound and determined to watch the late shows with any real interest, going upstairs is the least preferable location to do it
By deciding to go watch TV upstairs while laying down, I had automagically decided to lose consciousness soon. I intended to forego my conscious awareness of the sensory perceived world. Kaput! Back to the drawing board? Square one? What's the opposite of "upsurge"? "Downsurge?" That's what I do. I up the urge or I down the urge. How is that possible? The urge IS God according to some of my recent arguments. I stop paying attention to what my sensory modalities are reporting (reporting to whom); my ears; my eyes, my nostrils, my taste buds, and the feel of my skin with the sheets. Not important anymore. Goodbye cruel world... "I am bound to the promised land. I am bound to the promised land. Oh, won't you come and go with me, I am bound to the promised land..."
Something decides to arise into conscious awareness of the sensory dimension, and that same something (I'm assuming) goes back into the unconsciousness of sleep. When I consider these changes in consciousness, quite honestly I'm not as fascinated with the operation of my sensory modalities and what they have been trained to perceive in a world of unlimited possibilities, nor the world of unlimited possibilities itself. I'm usually fascinated with the element that decides to participate or not.
Sartre appears to claim this element of potentiality (to be or not to be) has limited options. The sacraments suggest otherwise.
On the Thomas group a couple of people are discussing their point of view of these things and are referencing something they call "the Trained Mind". Yes, they capitalize, and I think they do that to indicate that it's some sort of unique phrasing. This one guy wants to be unique, and he'll go to any lengths to make claims he thinks makes him appear that way. Sound familiar?
I'm not exactly sure why I disagree with the way they're using that phrase or expression. For one thing, are they actually referencing a "mind" when they call into play the kind of training they're implicating. Something is trained according to them, and they're assuming that what they've trained is one of their minds. Do they have two minds such that the untrained one is looking at the other like it lived in a glass house. The floor of which is paved with loose stones about the size of a baseball?
Earlier, I might have never questioned this descriptor. What changed my mind and introduced doubt was my sudden introduction to the notion that I subjectively create "rules of conscience". I'm convinced (at least temporarily) that my persona does what it does because of the rules of conscience I adopted for use in monitoring my behavior in the light of my persona mimicking desirable traits of the Other. This would be 'trained behavior", not a trained mind.
This faculty that can adopt rules of conscience in order to teach it's new body how to interact to the unlimited possibilities of the sensory-perceived world. It has been around much longer than it's current body and it's untrained sensory modalities (of whatever use they're finally limited to). But, it's not what upsurges into consciousness. Thus, it doesn't do what it does do consciously nor is consciousness required as a ground of being. I don't have to know where I am to be there. This docetic spirit does what it does ALL the ti-me wherever it's doing what it does. It creates and recreates and then redoes that with new curtains. Without consciousness, without a plan, ad infinitum. It ets wot's sot before it... millennia, wormholes, and stargates not withstanding.
Need I remind you I use this space to explore drifting thoughts, and I'm not particularly concerned with the truth or falsity of them upon their arrival? I try not to cull the thoughts that filter through my fingers to influence my reader to form positive or negative opinions of me through what they read into my stuff, and if they do that anyway as obsession or compulsion, I don't wanna know.
I did get an appreciable amount of sleep last night, although when I returned to beta consciousness at the end of each sleep cycle I was in considerable pain. My muscles hurt as much or more than my joints do. I suspect I'm already looking for another body. Since this happens outside my cultivated consciousness I can't say for sure. I've had this body since it was fourteen years old, and it's been interesting, but it's getting creaky now. I may decide to barter for a new one, and not come back to it soon enow. If I do, be kind to it's new occupant. It will have to be plenty desperate to make the swap to an old bag of bones.
I forewent consciousness last night by going to bed fairly early for me. About ten o'clock I decided to go upstairs and go to bed and watch the late shows on CBS. sometimes I watch Charley Rose. I only get over-the-air local stations. I don't have a digital converter on the upstairs TV which only has rabbit ears, so if I'm bound and determined to watch the late shows with any real interest, going upstairs is the least preferable location to do it
By deciding to go watch TV upstairs while laying down, I had automagically decided to lose consciousness soon. I intended to forego my conscious awareness of the sensory perceived world. Kaput! Back to the drawing board? Square one? What's the opposite of "upsurge"? "Downsurge?" That's what I do. I up the urge or I down the urge. How is that possible? The urge IS God according to some of my recent arguments. I stop paying attention to what my sensory modalities are reporting (reporting to whom); my ears; my eyes, my nostrils, my taste buds, and the feel of my skin with the sheets. Not important anymore. Goodbye cruel world... "I am bound to the promised land. I am bound to the promised land. Oh, won't you come and go with me, I am bound to the promised land..."
Something decides to arise into conscious awareness of the sensory dimension, and that same something (I'm assuming) goes back into the unconsciousness of sleep. When I consider these changes in consciousness, quite honestly I'm not as fascinated with the operation of my sensory modalities and what they have been trained to perceive in a world of unlimited possibilities, nor the world of unlimited possibilities itself. I'm usually fascinated with the element that decides to participate or not.
Sartre appears to claim this element of potentiality (to be or not to be) has limited options. The sacraments suggest otherwise.
On the Thomas group a couple of people are discussing their point of view of these things and are referencing something they call "the Trained Mind". Yes, they capitalize, and I think they do that to indicate that it's some sort of unique phrasing. This one guy wants to be unique, and he'll go to any lengths to make claims he thinks makes him appear that way. Sound familiar?
I'm not exactly sure why I disagree with the way they're using that phrase or expression. For one thing, are they actually referencing a "mind" when they call into play the kind of training they're implicating. Something is trained according to them, and they're assuming that what they've trained is one of their minds. Do they have two minds such that the untrained one is looking at the other like it lived in a glass house. The floor of which is paved with loose stones about the size of a baseball?
Earlier, I might have never questioned this descriptor. What changed my mind and introduced doubt was my sudden introduction to the notion that I subjectively create "rules of conscience". I'm convinced (at least temporarily) that my persona does what it does because of the rules of conscience I adopted for use in monitoring my behavior in the light of my persona mimicking desirable traits of the Other. This would be 'trained behavior", not a trained mind.
This faculty that can adopt rules of conscience in order to teach it's new body how to interact to the unlimited possibilities of the sensory-perceived world. It has been around much longer than it's current body and it's untrained sensory modalities (of whatever use they're finally limited to). But, it's not what upsurges into consciousness. Thus, it doesn't do what it does do consciously nor is consciousness required as a ground of being. I don't have to know where I am to be there. This docetic spirit does what it does ALL the ti-me wherever it's doing what it does. It creates and recreates and then redoes that with new curtains. Without consciousness, without a plan, ad infinitum. It ets wot's sot before it... millennia, wormholes, and stargates not withstanding.
Need I remind you I use this space to explore drifting thoughts, and I'm not particularly concerned with the truth or falsity of them upon their arrival? I try not to cull the thoughts that filter through my fingers to influence my reader to form positive or negative opinions of me through what they read into my stuff, and if they do that anyway as obsession or compulsion, I don't wanna know.
I did get an appreciable amount of sleep last night, although when I returned to beta consciousness at the end of each sleep cycle I was in considerable pain. My muscles hurt as much or more than my joints do. I suspect I'm already looking for another body. Since this happens outside my cultivated consciousness I can't say for sure. I've had this body since it was fourteen years old, and it's been interesting, but it's getting creaky now. I may decide to barter for a new one, and not come back to it soon enow. If I do, be kind to it's new occupant. It will have to be plenty desperate to make the swap to an old bag of bones.
Friday, June 27, 2008
"How Low Can You Go... Gitlow?"
The title is made up from a line in the late Ossie Davis’s play, Pearly Victorious. My character, a plantation owner after the Civil War, spoke this line to the main character Pearly Victorious who was affectionately called by some, Gitlow, about his sly and slippery ways in the face of slavery. From my character's point of view, he was supposed to be more grateful he wasn't actually my slave any more.
Something unexpected happened this morning. I sent a reply post to the Thomas group... and received a copy of my own post in return! This is the first time this has happened in a long time, and I like it very much. When I get the same copy of my own post that the other members of the group get, I can see more of what they see. For a long time I didn't get a copy of the posts I sent to the group, and I couldn't figure out why I didn't, and then I would, and then for some reason I'd start getting them again. It's a communist plot.
I got certain ways I want my reply posts to look when I hit the Send button. I want two things clear. What you wrote that I'm responding to, and my response. A lotta times I achieve that by deleting any other content but those two elements. I'm not as polite as I used to be about including history of our previous conversation.
When people I correspond with include the last two or three or more of our last e-mails for this sort of clarification I get the feeling they must think I'm stupid. All that baggage they include is a deliberate act of snooty condescension. That's why over the years I"ve tried to eliminate extraneous bullshit from my posts, and if my correspondent treats me condescendingly by including baggage, I stop communicating with them entirely.
I suspect there are quite a few members of the Thomas group who couldn't be happier if I were to stop communicating with them entirely. I can feel their scorn even though many of them never write anything at all to anybody for any reason. Lurkers. The world is full of lurkers. Here's a quote I just took note of for the first time last night. It seems to explain why I overshoot the mark more frequently than not:
"Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go." ~ TS Eliot
I'm perfectly aware I go over the top with a lot of the ideas I pursue. I'm so used to making a complete ass of myself that I've become quite apathetic to my critics. I know why I push the envelope of believability. I know how far I can push before someone will start pushing back, not because I'm particularly gifted or clever, but because I've reaped the just deserts of going too far too many times. I not only gotta know "Why?", I gotta gnow "What for?"
My penchant for needing to know "what for" swelled up to a giant-sized curiosity while I was reading Sartre's masterwork, Being And Nothingness, during the last year or so. It's not that I haven't always wanted to know what for as well as why, it's just that reading Sartre (via his English translator) influenced me to consider "what for" from unexpected and diverse perspectives. I finally understand why I have to be completely alone when I compose this trashy crap, but even the idea of somebody driving up to my house from the paved road stops the process immediately. Being out of the sight of the general public where nobody interrupts my thought patterns by demanding that I do something for-them is my greatest adventure. It is the price of gas, and yet it isn't the price of gas, that keeps my stopping still.
It took me a long time to read this 800-page book. It took me even longer to understand that I could only understand the book as I read it while I was reading it. The book itself instructed me about how to read the book, and by the time I understood what I was supposed to understand from following it's instructions, I was done reading the entire book. I reject some critics notions that the book doesn't actually say anything. It IS, after all, a book about the nothingness of being. What's so hard to understand about the indescribable taking at least 800-pages to say nothing at all about something.
Something unexpected happened this morning. I sent a reply post to the Thomas group... and received a copy of my own post in return! This is the first time this has happened in a long time, and I like it very much. When I get the same copy of my own post that the other members of the group get, I can see more of what they see. For a long time I didn't get a copy of the posts I sent to the group, and I couldn't figure out why I didn't, and then I would, and then for some reason I'd start getting them again. It's a communist plot.
I got certain ways I want my reply posts to look when I hit the Send button. I want two things clear. What you wrote that I'm responding to, and my response. A lotta times I achieve that by deleting any other content but those two elements. I'm not as polite as I used to be about including history of our previous conversation.
When people I correspond with include the last two or three or more of our last e-mails for this sort of clarification I get the feeling they must think I'm stupid. All that baggage they include is a deliberate act of snooty condescension. That's why over the years I"ve tried to eliminate extraneous bullshit from my posts, and if my correspondent treats me condescendingly by including baggage, I stop communicating with them entirely.
I suspect there are quite a few members of the Thomas group who couldn't be happier if I were to stop communicating with them entirely. I can feel their scorn even though many of them never write anything at all to anybody for any reason. Lurkers. The world is full of lurkers. Here's a quote I just took note of for the first time last night. It seems to explain why I overshoot the mark more frequently than not:
"Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go." ~ TS Eliot
I'm perfectly aware I go over the top with a lot of the ideas I pursue. I'm so used to making a complete ass of myself that I've become quite apathetic to my critics. I know why I push the envelope of believability. I know how far I can push before someone will start pushing back, not because I'm particularly gifted or clever, but because I've reaped the just deserts of going too far too many times. I not only gotta know "Why?", I gotta gnow "What for?"
My penchant for needing to know "what for" swelled up to a giant-sized curiosity while I was reading Sartre's masterwork, Being And Nothingness, during the last year or so. It's not that I haven't always wanted to know what for as well as why, it's just that reading Sartre (via his English translator) influenced me to consider "what for" from unexpected and diverse perspectives. I finally understand why I have to be completely alone when I compose this trashy crap, but even the idea of somebody driving up to my house from the paved road stops the process immediately. Being out of the sight of the general public where nobody interrupts my thought patterns by demanding that I do something for-them is my greatest adventure. It is the price of gas, and yet it isn't the price of gas, that keeps my stopping still.
It took me a long time to read this 800-page book. It took me even longer to understand that I could only understand the book as I read it while I was reading it. The book itself instructed me about how to read the book, and by the time I understood what I was supposed to understand from following it's instructions, I was done reading the entire book. I reject some critics notions that the book doesn't actually say anything. It IS, after all, a book about the nothingness of being. What's so hard to understand about the indescribable taking at least 800-pages to say nothing at all about something.
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Folderol And Hadicol
Nobody argues much with what's actually possible for them. I'm figuring that's because of Sartre's mention of a species-wide flaw in homo sapiens that prevents them from realizing what's possible for them in real ti-me. That's one of the most difficult lessons I learned from my twenty year stint in reading people's palms.
People reacted to what i told them about themselves while I was holding hands with them. While I was sometimes caressing their hands. Man, woman, or child. Sometimes I would lift their hands to my lips and kiss them as if in awestruck adulation. Man, woman, or child.
Never. Not once. Not one single incident or event of my making love to their hands in front of witnesses, and their own people (husbands, wives, children, parents, best friends, worst enemies) elicited even one comment that what I did was improper either pro or con. That constantly shocked me. It was if It was my right to do that, and everybody accepted it.
My right? Yes. In context, it seemed natural enough. At first, when I reflected on what I'd done later, instead of it causing a problem, it created a completely different level of intimacy that allowed them to offer feedback to what I channeled. Nobody in their right mind would smooch a fundamentalist Christian's wife's hand in front of her husband, children, and significant others unless they understood what that meant, they probably just thought I was a retard. I am.
Learning how to read palms sometimes meant that I was to learn from my own mistakes. Sometimes I got over the top in boldness, and paid the price; and sometimes I didn't go far enough for our encounter to possess sig-nif-i-can't-ce. There were times I made mistakes in significance from which the resulting humiliation was almost more than I could bear. I literally left that town, and state, and sometime the whole country to get far enough away to live with what was left. I've been cut down to size so many times it's a wonder there's anything left to divide and conquer. But, I kept doing it. I couldn't resist. I couldn't believe what I heard myself tell people. Apparently everything and anything. I never got touched in retribution for anything I said while reading palms. Yes, I can say all I want to that nobody knows, but that's not quite right. I know, but that's what all this has amounted to. My life has been one sequence to the next of finding out and discovering the truth of things, but all I ever found out was that I already knew. What a drag, man. All that self-generated torture for naught.
From the time I got here in my pearl-like form I have made myself into and abandoned as not the thing-in-itself everything possible. I have BEEN all the forms and life-like entities I created myself into and got disappointed again in. No matter what I've done or what form of life or rock or mineral or vegetable I've ever made myself into through mimicry of the Other, I still can't be-co-me a real boy.
I think I started reading palms in order to phyically touch as many other homo sapiens as I could without lasting social commitment. I would not allow myself to be painted in a corner with my own lies. Well, only a couple of times when I was much younger, but still as foolish. I couldn't do exclusivity with another human being no matter how many times I tried. That's the same thing, isn't it? Trying to have an exclusive, monogamous relationship where I wasn't supposed to hold hands with strangers, and being a docetic spirit trying to be a real boy seem equivalent.
That docetic spirit I carry on about is what dreamed up who-I-think-I-am in it's attempt to become it's own creation. Pygmalion. My Fair Lady. Can the street urchin Eliza pass herself off as real aristocracy by learning all the tricks of the trade before she's ever seen Paree? Born with a gift or struggled for as an art? Amadeus. Gnosis is a gift that is useful for developing a hoity toity level of art. Rainman.
I've written lots of times. Only the docetic spirit can bestow the gift of gnosis. The priest class simply can't do that. Priests who have experienced gnosis can, but conversion of this sort is not tantamount to the bestowal of gnosis bestowed by an apple. Ka, the world serpent, is only present as a protector and a witness to the bestowal of gnosis by the spirit. It allowed Gautama to point to the ground to indicate that he had a right to be here. It allowed Krishna to drive Arjuna's chariot in order to allow him to shoot his own kinsmen to claim his own identity, as if to say, I have a right to be here.
The bestowal of gnosis by the docetic spirit is the Western religion's way of saying: I have a right to be here. I have been all the things of the earth. I have been all the phantasmagoric images (the ghosts of my past lifes). I owe them nothing. I have a right to be here as whoever-I-wanna-think-I-am-is.
I make this crap up to amuse myself, you know. It was never intended from the time I sat down to write this morning to be a truthful account of anything. Much less physically possible in some cases. It's not dangerous for you to read it unless you make it into something I never intended.
Time has taught me that there is absolutely nothing I can do about what a potential reader will make my jackleg non-sense into, for their reasons. Look at what people say the words in the Bible or the Koran mean. They act like their latest interpretation is God's own truth, and will cut yo' haid off if you disagree with them.
I won't cut your head off if you disagree with me. I don't even wanna know. For God's sake don't argue with me about my lies in public. People won't understand why you would bother, and think you're just as crazy as I am. That's why I don't allow comments here. I'm just playing around with familiar old words in public to see where they'll lead me. I'm not about to defend this folderol I make up just for fun, because you're fool enough to take me serious.
People reacted to what i told them about themselves while I was holding hands with them. While I was sometimes caressing their hands. Man, woman, or child. Sometimes I would lift their hands to my lips and kiss them as if in awestruck adulation. Man, woman, or child.
Never. Not once. Not one single incident or event of my making love to their hands in front of witnesses, and their own people (husbands, wives, children, parents, best friends, worst enemies) elicited even one comment that what I did was improper either pro or con. That constantly shocked me. It was if It was my right to do that, and everybody accepted it.
My right? Yes. In context, it seemed natural enough. At first, when I reflected on what I'd done later, instead of it causing a problem, it created a completely different level of intimacy that allowed them to offer feedback to what I channeled. Nobody in their right mind would smooch a fundamentalist Christian's wife's hand in front of her husband, children, and significant others unless they understood what that meant, they probably just thought I was a retard. I am.
Learning how to read palms sometimes meant that I was to learn from my own mistakes. Sometimes I got over the top in boldness, and paid the price; and sometimes I didn't go far enough for our encounter to possess sig-nif-i-can't-ce. There were times I made mistakes in significance from which the resulting humiliation was almost more than I could bear. I literally left that town, and state, and sometime the whole country to get far enough away to live with what was left. I've been cut down to size so many times it's a wonder there's anything left to divide and conquer. But, I kept doing it. I couldn't resist. I couldn't believe what I heard myself tell people. Apparently everything and anything. I never got touched in retribution for anything I said while reading palms. Yes, I can say all I want to that nobody knows, but that's not quite right. I know, but that's what all this has amounted to. My life has been one sequence to the next of finding out and discovering the truth of things, but all I ever found out was that I already knew. What a drag, man. All that self-generated torture for naught.
From the time I got here in my pearl-like form I have made myself into and abandoned as not the thing-in-itself everything possible. I have BEEN all the forms and life-like entities I created myself into and got disappointed again in. No matter what I've done or what form of life or rock or mineral or vegetable I've ever made myself into through mimicry of the Other, I still can't be-co-me a real boy.
I think I started reading palms in order to phyically touch as many other homo sapiens as I could without lasting social commitment. I would not allow myself to be painted in a corner with my own lies. Well, only a couple of times when I was much younger, but still as foolish. I couldn't do exclusivity with another human being no matter how many times I tried. That's the same thing, isn't it? Trying to have an exclusive, monogamous relationship where I wasn't supposed to hold hands with strangers, and being a docetic spirit trying to be a real boy seem equivalent.
That docetic spirit I carry on about is what dreamed up who-I-think-I-am in it's attempt to become it's own creation. Pygmalion. My Fair Lady. Can the street urchin Eliza pass herself off as real aristocracy by learning all the tricks of the trade before she's ever seen Paree? Born with a gift or struggled for as an art? Amadeus. Gnosis is a gift that is useful for developing a hoity toity level of art. Rainman.
I've written lots of times. Only the docetic spirit can bestow the gift of gnosis. The priest class simply can't do that. Priests who have experienced gnosis can, but conversion of this sort is not tantamount to the bestowal of gnosis bestowed by an apple. Ka, the world serpent, is only present as a protector and a witness to the bestowal of gnosis by the spirit. It allowed Gautama to point to the ground to indicate that he had a right to be here. It allowed Krishna to drive Arjuna's chariot in order to allow him to shoot his own kinsmen to claim his own identity, as if to say, I have a right to be here.
The bestowal of gnosis by the docetic spirit is the Western religion's way of saying: I have a right to be here. I have been all the things of the earth. I have been all the phantasmagoric images (the ghosts of my past lifes). I owe them nothing. I have a right to be here as whoever-I-wanna-think-I-am-is.
I make this crap up to amuse myself, you know. It was never intended from the time I sat down to write this morning to be a truthful account of anything. Much less physically possible in some cases. It's not dangerous for you to read it unless you make it into something I never intended.
Time has taught me that there is absolutely nothing I can do about what a potential reader will make my jackleg non-sense into, for their reasons. Look at what people say the words in the Bible or the Koran mean. They act like their latest interpretation is God's own truth, and will cut yo' haid off if you disagree with them.
I won't cut your head off if you disagree with me. I don't even wanna know. For God's sake don't argue with me about my lies in public. People won't understand why you would bother, and think you're just as crazy as I am. That's why I don't allow comments here. I'm just playing around with familiar old words in public to see where they'll lead me. I'm not about to defend this folderol I make up just for fun, because you're fool enough to take me serious.
The Most Vainglorious Of All The Poobahs
What I'm attempting to say is that if you consider gnosis an accomplishment then you're gonna want the credit for your "work".
If you consider gnosis a gift, then it not your's to claim credit for. It's a different dynamic and one for which you don't have to defend a claim. Alexander Pope, the British poet and philosopher wrote, " Modesty is the art of power." By that I figure he meant that to practice modesty is the only culpable way to use power as an art. The use of power as a science results in needless death and destruction like in Hiroshima. It's politically expedient to consider gnosis as a gift.
I mischaracterized my intent when I used the term "culpable" in the paragraph above. I guess I should have just used the term "responsible" in order to be plain-spoken. I'm perfectly aware that I'm not plain-spoken in my writing at times. There are probably other times I'm not plain-spoken enough, but I fairly apathetic about doing that if I do. Who knows?
There is a Hexagram in the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching entitled Modesty. There are no secondary explanations or descriptions like there are with most of the other Hexagrams. There are no bad or negative omens associated with the Hexagram. It's the only Hexagram in the entire Book of Changes that has all good omens. That's why it's considered as exceptional. No blame.
Each Hexagram in the Wilhelm/Baynes translation (like with the Bible, there are many other translations of the I Ching) has two original sayings to which other commentary is added. They are called THE JUDGMENT and THE IMAGE.
THE JUDGMENT
MODESTY creates success.
The superior man carries things through.
THE IMAGE
Within the earth, a mountain.
The image of modesty.
Thus the superior man reduces that which is too
much,
And augments that which is too little.
He weighs things and makes them equal.
I just now realized while copying this from the Yellow Book that this description reads a lot like that from the astrology Sign Libra, The Scales. The first day of which is the autumnal equinox. As a vegetable oracle Libra represents the weighing of the fall harvest to find out if there will be enough extra to sell at the market place.
I used to collect sayings on modesty. I've forgotten many of them. Just now, I stopped writing to do a web search on "modesty". There are not many sites that appear to view the possession of modesty to act as the art of power. That's sad in a way, but I don't care any more. People see what they think is out there, and that's what they act like is so. I don't even want to do anything about that anymore. Probably because it's impossible, and even if it wasn't, it ain't my job.
When I put "modesty" in Google, the results page showed a considerable number of Catholic pages that looked like from the headers on the links to be mostly about women's behavior. This seems to tie in to the notion of behaving in a modest, polite manner as a way of dealing with the wild passions of men in lust.
In the same way, but in different circumstances, behaving modestly during a Gestapo interrogation might work mo' bettah than spitting in their faces. Or when your fellow inmates are muttering about playing "drop the soap" with you when you're all herded into the showers in prison. Practicing modesty in these admittedly extreme situations appears to be no less important than handling my own wild, intractable passions and emotions when confronted with any situation I can't deal with by fight or flight in the face of an overwhelming and determined enemy.
"The meek shall inherit the earth."? Meekness takes on a whole new light when it's interpreted as modesty, and affirms once again the meaningfulness of Alexander Pope's remark, "Modesty is the art of power." Women have power. Men have strength. Both have both.
My youngest brother is the one person who is constant to remind me to look up stuff on the internet. He means well by it, and I have a deep appreciation of his constancy. Today, in the composing of this journal entry, was the first time I consider doing a web search on the various and sundry meanings of "modesty".
I used the I Ching as an oracle practically every day, usually several times a day or more, for over thirty years. My investigation of the possible meanings associated with the notion of modesty were sorta random, serendipitous, and hit or miss depending on which libraries I might be near to tramp through their stacks.
Now? I type in "the art of modesty" into the Google inquiry box and hit the Enter button, and I got 1,970,000 hits in .27 seconds. That seems to trivialize a lifetime's work. Why would it not? It doesn't change the me-and-thee-ing (meaning) of how politeness works even with the most hardened of criminals and the grandest of all the most vainglorious poobahs, but to have it's diverse ramifications available to me in the blink of an eye seems to make it insignificant in some way I don't yet understand.
If you consider gnosis a gift, then it not your's to claim credit for. It's a different dynamic and one for which you don't have to defend a claim. Alexander Pope, the British poet and philosopher wrote, " Modesty is the art of power." By that I figure he meant that to practice modesty is the only culpable way to use power as an art. The use of power as a science results in needless death and destruction like in Hiroshima. It's politically expedient to consider gnosis as a gift.
I mischaracterized my intent when I used the term "culpable" in the paragraph above. I guess I should have just used the term "responsible" in order to be plain-spoken. I'm perfectly aware that I'm not plain-spoken in my writing at times. There are probably other times I'm not plain-spoken enough, but I fairly apathetic about doing that if I do. Who knows?
There is a Hexagram in the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching entitled Modesty. There are no secondary explanations or descriptions like there are with most of the other Hexagrams. There are no bad or negative omens associated with the Hexagram. It's the only Hexagram in the entire Book of Changes that has all good omens. That's why it's considered as exceptional. No blame.
Each Hexagram in the Wilhelm/Baynes translation (like with the Bible, there are many other translations of the I Ching) has two original sayings to which other commentary is added. They are called THE JUDGMENT and THE IMAGE.
THE JUDGMENT
MODESTY creates success.
The superior man carries things through.
THE IMAGE
Within the earth, a mountain.
The image of modesty.
Thus the superior man reduces that which is too
much,
And augments that which is too little.
He weighs things and makes them equal.
I just now realized while copying this from the Yellow Book that this description reads a lot like that from the astrology Sign Libra, The Scales. The first day of which is the autumnal equinox. As a vegetable oracle Libra represents the weighing of the fall harvest to find out if there will be enough extra to sell at the market place.
I used to collect sayings on modesty. I've forgotten many of them. Just now, I stopped writing to do a web search on "modesty". There are not many sites that appear to view the possession of modesty to act as the art of power. That's sad in a way, but I don't care any more. People see what they think is out there, and that's what they act like is so. I don't even want to do anything about that anymore. Probably because it's impossible, and even if it wasn't, it ain't my job.
When I put "modesty" in Google, the results page showed a considerable number of Catholic pages that looked like from the headers on the links to be mostly about women's behavior. This seems to tie in to the notion of behaving in a modest, polite manner as a way of dealing with the wild passions of men in lust.
In the same way, but in different circumstances, behaving modestly during a Gestapo interrogation might work mo' bettah than spitting in their faces. Or when your fellow inmates are muttering about playing "drop the soap" with you when you're all herded into the showers in prison. Practicing modesty in these admittedly extreme situations appears to be no less important than handling my own wild, intractable passions and emotions when confronted with any situation I can't deal with by fight or flight in the face of an overwhelming and determined enemy.
"The meek shall inherit the earth."? Meekness takes on a whole new light when it's interpreted as modesty, and affirms once again the meaningfulness of Alexander Pope's remark, "Modesty is the art of power." Women have power. Men have strength. Both have both.
My youngest brother is the one person who is constant to remind me to look up stuff on the internet. He means well by it, and I have a deep appreciation of his constancy. Today, in the composing of this journal entry, was the first time I consider doing a web search on the various and sundry meanings of "modesty".
I used the I Ching as an oracle practically every day, usually several times a day or more, for over thirty years. My investigation of the possible meanings associated with the notion of modesty were sorta random, serendipitous, and hit or miss depending on which libraries I might be near to tramp through their stacks.
Now? I type in "the art of modesty" into the Google inquiry box and hit the Enter button, and I got 1,970,000 hits in .27 seconds. That seems to trivialize a lifetime's work. Why would it not? It doesn't change the me-and-thee-ing (meaning) of how politeness works even with the most hardened of criminals and the grandest of all the most vainglorious poobahs, but to have it's diverse ramifications available to me in the blink of an eye seems to make it insignificant in some way I don't yet understand.
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
The Nothingness Of Not Saying No
It's difficult to tell whether the slight relief I've gained in the last couple of days is due to the fact that i stopped playing the piano scales and cut back on my typing or because of the way I'm medicating myself with lots of Vitamin D. I'm grateful for the relief one way or the other. If it's the vitamins, then it's gonna be very gradual rather than a miracle cure.
Some people seem to act like I don't have to know where I am to be there. It's based on projection, of course, they don't realize they don't have to know where they are to be there, and whose fault is that? Some people... eh?
It's not the sort of thing you can study up for and have a college of experts avow that you've learned the trick that satisfies all the written and oral exams. How would they know? How can a person who makes this sort of presumption set up the parameters of judgment for another? Nobody knows, and aye, there's the rub.
Sometime I feel so sad to sit there in front of the television set I just turned on to watch a little of the world news and Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune. It's because I'm alone, and nobody hears me when I mutter the correct question to the answer that stumps the experts. There's nobody around to be frightened by my apparent brilliance for solving puzzles and creating well-formed questions. Nobody knows.
I don't even know. I couldn't come up with the right question if I was in my right mind. If somebody was in the room with me, I'd have to be there for them, and that would queer the whole deal. I have to make a fool of myself by making huge leaps of faith to find out for sure if I could jump to warp speed suddenly and "be with" somebody else's me, without consciously being aware that is possible in real ti-me, every ti-me. When I be-co-me using the other's me instead of staying at ho-me (whole me), I can't know I'm there except by listening to myself utter a response appropriate only if I was actually ho-me-ing in on their experiential database.
I think I may be able to do this because of the type of autism I seem gifted with. Does that meand that I can't look a gift horse in the mouth? Well... maybe... either that or something very, very close.
I practiced this trick for years on a daily basis by reading palms. I held people's hands and looked into their eyes and told them stuff I could only gnow by a leap of faith. I didn't no what I knew. I didn't stop myself from making unvalidated statements. I wasn't guessing. I attempted to capture drifting thoughts as if they were mine for the taking. I used conjuring to tease them into my cognitive range and scope. I took the chance of being called a liar, a bullshitter, a fraud, a dumb sonofabitch, an arrogant asshole... whatever anybody could dream up or was provided by the gods... to stop me from finding out if I could be two places at once.
Yes I can. But, sadly, like sitting alone in my seedy wino's hootch brilliantly deducing the right questions at Jeopardy, nobody knows, and if they did, I couldn't do it. It's a risky way to invite nothingness to contradict my unverifiable claims of somethingness.
Some people seem to act like I don't have to know where I am to be there. It's based on projection, of course, they don't realize they don't have to know where they are to be there, and whose fault is that? Some people... eh?
It's not the sort of thing you can study up for and have a college of experts avow that you've learned the trick that satisfies all the written and oral exams. How would they know? How can a person who makes this sort of presumption set up the parameters of judgment for another? Nobody knows, and aye, there's the rub.
Sometime I feel so sad to sit there in front of the television set I just turned on to watch a little of the world news and Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune. It's because I'm alone, and nobody hears me when I mutter the correct question to the answer that stumps the experts. There's nobody around to be frightened by my apparent brilliance for solving puzzles and creating well-formed questions. Nobody knows.
I don't even know. I couldn't come up with the right question if I was in my right mind. If somebody was in the room with me, I'd have to be there for them, and that would queer the whole deal. I have to make a fool of myself by making huge leaps of faith to find out for sure if I could jump to warp speed suddenly and "be with" somebody else's me, without consciously being aware that is possible in real ti-me, every ti-me. When I be-co-me using the other's me instead of staying at ho-me (whole me), I can't know I'm there except by listening to myself utter a response appropriate only if I was actually ho-me-ing in on their experiential database.
I think I may be able to do this because of the type of autism I seem gifted with. Does that meand that I can't look a gift horse in the mouth? Well... maybe... either that or something very, very close.
I practiced this trick for years on a daily basis by reading palms. I held people's hands and looked into their eyes and told them stuff I could only gnow by a leap of faith. I didn't no what I knew. I didn't stop myself from making unvalidated statements. I wasn't guessing. I attempted to capture drifting thoughts as if they were mine for the taking. I used conjuring to tease them into my cognitive range and scope. I took the chance of being called a liar, a bullshitter, a fraud, a dumb sonofabitch, an arrogant asshole... whatever anybody could dream up or was provided by the gods... to stop me from finding out if I could be two places at once.
Yes I can. But, sadly, like sitting alone in my seedy wino's hootch brilliantly deducing the right questions at Jeopardy, nobody knows, and if they did, I couldn't do it. It's a risky way to invite nothingness to contradict my unverifiable claims of somethingness.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
There Oughta Be A Law!
I'm truly amused by the implications of how humans manufacture Vitamin D from sunlight with their skin, and how if they don't get enough Vitamin D, all kinds of evil shit can happen to them. Bear with me. I'm just playing around with the ideas I intuit when I reflect on this notion. I don't know what the truth is. Presently, I couldn't give a fuck because I got other fish to fry.
First of all, I still don't know if a Vitamin D deficiency is what's causing my arthritis and other bone related dis-comforts and dis-eases, but something is dissing my comfort and ease, and I'm determined to figure it out for myself because I'm the kind of fool who thinks he can do that.
Once I recklessly copped the information I filtered for in order to reach the possible conclusion that some of my aging problems didn't have to be here yet, I realized I might be neglecting some specific food my body needed to keep itself doing right for as long as it can suffering the least entropy possible. It's not exactly my theory. Some research into cancer is where the prevailing theory came from only last year in 2007, and the results are apparently just coming to light.
It's a bit shocking to me to realize that it's probably true that the people living further north than 40 degrees latitude do not get enough of the right kind of sunlight in the winter months to create Vitamin D through their skin. I reckon I though it might be more likely because they wore so many clothes to keep warm the ambient sunlight never reached their skin.
The totally disregardable and dubious theory I concocted on the flip of a coin is apparently not what the latest research is showing (as I interpret the info in the articles I read). What they appear to be saying is that there is still not enough UV rays that reach the surface of the Earth above certain latitudes in the winter months to make Vitamin D in these people's skin, even if they ran around bare-assed nakid with maximal exposure of their skin to whatever sunlight managed to reach them. All the big cities of the northeast, midwest, and northwest not withstanding. It's no wonder us Southerners tried our best to disassociate from these fish mongers. The genteel people of the South make enough Vitamin D through our skins to not have to eat all the fish in the ocean. My pappy was right all along! Those Damned Yankee Bastards are eating us outta house and home! They're slaughtering dolphins and whales because of their incredible ignorance.
With the question being with things as they are or could be: How many people just living life they best they know how would realize they MUST supplement their intake of Vitamin D or suffer severe consequences. According to this research, there are definite differences made in Vitamin D production by an interactive relationship between God (The Sun) and man, and the pigmentation of the skin. With the facticity of that being that the more pigmentation you got blocking this process, the more you gotta supplement the natural process with pills or fish oil. The point is that whether by an adequate supply of usable UV rays to exposed human skin or eating a plentiful supply of cold water fish, Vitamin D has to be there or a multiplicity of unnecessary reactions will certainly happen.
That's probably why a lotta older people in the United States and other affluent countries go to warm, sunny climates when they retire to alleviate the aches and pains ordinarily associated with old age. Do they go because they don't know they could avoid many of the aches and pains by supplementing their diet? That's the impression I'm getting from the news articles. There was a new one on Google News this morning. If this research is true, then it makes sense that they'd wanna get it out to people as soon as possible.
What's simple is easy. Take the pills. Eat the freaking fish. It takes more than your appetite can cope with when you get older. It's not gonna keep from getting old and dying like a dog in a ditch, it's just that it may not have to hurt so much. God, I hope not. I am such a baby about physical pain.
I'm really glad to find out I don't have to eat the ocean dry of fish to get the Vitamin D I need to stay as healthy as possible for the least effort. The fish market ain't been looking so good around here. If it turns out that the doses of Vitamin D I take are easy and cheap to manufacture and do just as much good as fish oil, then if enough people switch to the pill form to make sure they get enough, then the fish populations in the oceans may proliferate.
This may be a little over the top, but if people are eating more fish than they need to satisfy a physical craving that can't be fulfilled by eating more and more fish, and one pill a day to supplement what they do eat it'll ease their craving. If I remember right, and I'm admittedly biased toward this research theory, it states that people experience less of an appetite when this particular craving is satisfied, and they lose weight.
I wonder if the ballooning of America started when those pharmaceutical companies started preaching skin cancer to sell their wares? People started avoiding the Sun in droves, and when they did go out to play, they covered themselves with sun screen which literally blocks the production of Vitamin D in human skin. It's a plot I tell you! A communist plot. They've brain-washed us into acceptably murdering ourselves or at least suffering intolerable amounts of unnecessary pain. We gotta get those pharmaceutical companies out of and off the media. There oughta be a law! An amendment to the Bill of Rights to include the right to a sunburn. Damn skin cancer! Full steam ahead!
First of all, I still don't know if a Vitamin D deficiency is what's causing my arthritis and other bone related dis-comforts and dis-eases, but something is dissing my comfort and ease, and I'm determined to figure it out for myself because I'm the kind of fool who thinks he can do that.
Once I recklessly copped the information I filtered for in order to reach the possible conclusion that some of my aging problems didn't have to be here yet, I realized I might be neglecting some specific food my body needed to keep itself doing right for as long as it can suffering the least entropy possible. It's not exactly my theory. Some research into cancer is where the prevailing theory came from only last year in 2007, and the results are apparently just coming to light.
It's a bit shocking to me to realize that it's probably true that the people living further north than 40 degrees latitude do not get enough of the right kind of sunlight in the winter months to create Vitamin D through their skin. I reckon I though it might be more likely because they wore so many clothes to keep warm the ambient sunlight never reached their skin.
The totally disregardable and dubious theory I concocted on the flip of a coin is apparently not what the latest research is showing (as I interpret the info in the articles I read). What they appear to be saying is that there is still not enough UV rays that reach the surface of the Earth above certain latitudes in the winter months to make Vitamin D in these people's skin, even if they ran around bare-assed nakid with maximal exposure of their skin to whatever sunlight managed to reach them. All the big cities of the northeast, midwest, and northwest not withstanding. It's no wonder us Southerners tried our best to disassociate from these fish mongers. The genteel people of the South make enough Vitamin D through our skins to not have to eat all the fish in the ocean. My pappy was right all along! Those Damned Yankee Bastards are eating us outta house and home! They're slaughtering dolphins and whales because of their incredible ignorance.
With the question being with things as they are or could be: How many people just living life they best they know how would realize they MUST supplement their intake of Vitamin D or suffer severe consequences. According to this research, there are definite differences made in Vitamin D production by an interactive relationship between God (The Sun) and man, and the pigmentation of the skin. With the facticity of that being that the more pigmentation you got blocking this process, the more you gotta supplement the natural process with pills or fish oil. The point is that whether by an adequate supply of usable UV rays to exposed human skin or eating a plentiful supply of cold water fish, Vitamin D has to be there or a multiplicity of unnecessary reactions will certainly happen.
That's probably why a lotta older people in the United States and other affluent countries go to warm, sunny climates when they retire to alleviate the aches and pains ordinarily associated with old age. Do they go because they don't know they could avoid many of the aches and pains by supplementing their diet? That's the impression I'm getting from the news articles. There was a new one on Google News this morning. If this research is true, then it makes sense that they'd wanna get it out to people as soon as possible.
What's simple is easy. Take the pills. Eat the freaking fish. It takes more than your appetite can cope with when you get older. It's not gonna keep from getting old and dying like a dog in a ditch, it's just that it may not have to hurt so much. God, I hope not. I am such a baby about physical pain.
I'm really glad to find out I don't have to eat the ocean dry of fish to get the Vitamin D I need to stay as healthy as possible for the least effort. The fish market ain't been looking so good around here. If it turns out that the doses of Vitamin D I take are easy and cheap to manufacture and do just as much good as fish oil, then if enough people switch to the pill form to make sure they get enough, then the fish populations in the oceans may proliferate.
This may be a little over the top, but if people are eating more fish than they need to satisfy a physical craving that can't be fulfilled by eating more and more fish, and one pill a day to supplement what they do eat it'll ease their craving. If I remember right, and I'm admittedly biased toward this research theory, it states that people experience less of an appetite when this particular craving is satisfied, and they lose weight.
I wonder if the ballooning of America started when those pharmaceutical companies started preaching skin cancer to sell their wares? People started avoiding the Sun in droves, and when they did go out to play, they covered themselves with sun screen which literally blocks the production of Vitamin D in human skin. It's a plot I tell you! A communist plot. They've brain-washed us into acceptably murdering ourselves or at least suffering intolerable amounts of unnecessary pain. We gotta get those pharmaceutical companies out of and off the media. There oughta be a law! An amendment to the Bill of Rights to include the right to a sunburn. Damn skin cancer! Full steam ahead!
I Suffered Ten Thousand Cuts Docetically Unscathed
Like many people, I suppose, I watch the obituaries on television and the web with a glancing blow. Not much moves me anymore. Too many thousands of deaths each day to mourn. With the huge increase of information being thrown at me from all directions I've had to develop an even thicker skin. That's hard for an old person for any reason. Thin skin comes with the territory.
George Carlin's death stopped me in my tracks. I was a big fan for a long time. I knew that. My automatic response to his death sorta showed me that I was probably even a bigger fan than I thought. Ninety percent of my odd sense of humor involves an appreciable degree of sarcasm to carry the day. Much of it appears to go right over most people's heads. They miss the irony and take offense instead. No blame. George Carlin's sarcasm seemed to have the master's touch that brought a more desirable response to what seemed like to me a kind of common effort. He might not have agreed with that.
I didn't really know what death meant until I was about 19-20 years old. What heros I had as a little boys were dying of old age well before then. I didn't have many heros directly because there was so much less public information available then. Limited radio listening. No television at all for as long as I lived in my parent's houses. We lived in small towns that hardly qualified as villages the entire time I lived with my parents.
We didn't live in an area that had it's own movie theater until I was eight years old. By then we had lived in four different towns in two different states, and even my choices for local heros were a moving target. My father was the most constant model for maleness in my formative years, but he won't easy to worship. He was a living example of the virtual Old Testament God himself in living color. Spare the rod, spoil the child. He oughta know. No blame.
His cruelty to animals was a much anticipated pastime, and I was just another animal to be managed along with the succession of cows, horses, pigs, chickens, rabbits, and less domestically, various and sundry poisonous snakes, black bears, rabid foxes, and bobcats.
It took years and years for me to finally comprehend with some degree of fairness that my father's ridiculous fear of snakes was that he was afraid they would bite his children or animals. I was a daily witness to my father's treatment of his animals. He brought his work home with him. I lived in constant fear he would treat me just as indifferently, and indeed, the bruises and scars on my little body wouldn't let me to justifiably create romanticized versions of my father to make my mimicry of each facet of his way of life a moment to remember.
I guess I heard from both parents that my father was a spoiled brat nearly every day in some way from early on. It's as if that fact justified all his fits of temper, and made it impossible to stop himself from lashing out at the nearest trembling entity. At home, that is. It was murmured that he would cut you on the street. Maybe under the cover of a white sheet. I was afraid of my father until the moment he died, and I checked to make sure that he was.
He was born after his siblings were pretty much adults to a relatively old, worn-out man and woman (Aha! Really? Not the illegitimate child of one his purported "sisters", and claimed as their own by the parents for fear of the shame of it? We always stayed with the same aunt when we visited Mississippi. I just made this scenario up from my vivid imagination, didn't I?), who turned a lot of his upbringing to his older sisters.
It was said that my father played with his nieces and nephews as a child because they were the same age. His parents were getting on in age, and so he just took over everything at the home place his siblings visited with their own agendas and bags of personal garbage. He had his own colored boy named Walter from the time he was six years old until he left home for marriage at the age of 33 years. That would have started around 1911-1912. I heard all the stories. I was being prepared to live the same way, but by then it was becoming unfashionable, and was soon to be illegal. That was the way as if nothing had changed during World War Two. I couldn't follow in my father's footsteps because his way of life had been criminalized by an act of law by the time I was of legal age at twenty-one years of age. So, I got married and tried to get my wife to be my boy, and it sorta worked out until I eventually had to run for my life. That shit don't fly with educated Aries women.
The indoctrination was set too deep with practically no resistance. We moved too often for anything odd to get noticed. Wherever we went our family was newcomers that had their own foreign ways and people in the South were more likely to mind their own business as long as they were white and followed the way.
I think this may be some sort of universal about war, and it's a pretty stupid way to do things when the problem is reflected up. When men win a war and want to teach that culture not to mess with them anymore, they usually kill the males and impregnate the women with their own spawn. But, children are like stem cells before they take a specific form. It's the women who preserve the culture by teaching whatever race of species of child that pops out of their belly how to adapt to wot's sot before them in order to merely survive. They teach them the same hated cultural beliefs that make them the enemy of their own blood fathers. The two Bush Presidents are living proof. The older Bush fought Fascism in World War Two, and the younger Bush became a Fascist himself in order to pubescently defy him.
Here's a perfect example of why I don't let people get me too pumped up about writing stuff for a living:
http://health.usnews.com/articles/health/living-well-usn/2008/06/23/time-in-the-sun-how-much-is-needed-for-vitamin-d.html
If you've read the stuff I wrote about the web search I did on Vitamin D after I'd read a bunch of articles on the topic, and then read the article I linked above, it's easy to see that the author of the linked article performed a much more concise assessment of what's being passed around as significant these days.
I just read this article myself because it covered the same information I had familiarized myself with in a much more comprehensible fashion. It seems like the aspects of this information that intrigued me, also intrigued her. It's about what it means for the Sun to interact with human skin, and how the adaptations the skin has made to the various locations all over the world to the ambient sunlight ruled how the skin appears to the beholder. I'm now realizing this inability of the skin to make Vitamin D in the Northern climes because of a lack of enough UV rays to make it happen, and the native's not knowing to take supplements is the reason they move to a sunny place like Florida, California, and the Gulf Coast to retire. Many of the aches and pains of old age are due to a lack of Vitamin D, and when they go to places where there's lots of UV rays all year long, they are able to remedy their Vitamin D deficiency and feel better.
I have written copiously about my idea of how white people became white because they lived for long periods in caves. In the Slavs (slaves) case, it was probably as much to hide from their pursuers as it was to stay warm. Admittedly, it because difficult for me to make this case because of my cultural background. I could be accused of doing the equivalent of a cultural comb-over to cover up my racial prejudice. I'll apologize now. It's too late. I can't reframe my childhood to ease your social fears of keeping up with the Jones.
This Vitamin D publicity makes it easier for me to write about what I originally intended to write about in the first place. I had never considered before this reading, that even in the United States, there isn't enough sunlight for human skin to create enough Vitamin D for homo sapiens to stay healthy in the winter, without taking readily-available supplements. The point that impresses me is that the people living in these Northern climes really have to take those supplemental forms of Vitamin D (usually fish or fish products like cod-liver oil.) or they usually get sick. Worse, it's usually some sort of cancer or bone problem, and sometimes both. What a drag, man. It's not cured by eating yo' veggies.
I'm glad to find out about this. I've been up for three hours, and I haven't walked out into the sunlight yet. I usually don't. I'm fine with taking supplements. I just didn't know what and how much. Now I do. And another thing. The salmon we get around here has gone from bad to worse. It's difficult to find desirable fresh fish around here to eat. Much of it's trash fish that don't have much Vitamin D in their oil anyway. It takes deep-water fish or fish from the cold, arctic waters. I can just take these 2000 IU pills once a day and forget it.
They curb my appetite. I've been eating stuff willy-nilly that might have the Vitamin D in it to soothe my abused body. Now that it's getting an abundance of Vitamin D from me swallowing these pills, it doesn't have to eat everything in sight in the hope that something/anything will do the trick.
I've written about how both of my ex-wives looked different from me when we lay naked on white sheets side by side. I married some real white girls, and I'm fairly white. But, I went around practically naked from early Spring to late Fall every year working in the tobacco fields of the coastal plains. My first wife was raised in the high foothills well in sight of the Blue Ridge mountains. My second wife was raised in the suburbs of Cleveland. Both had considerable German blood in their genetic make-up. Their attitude about being outside and exposed to sunlight was totally different from mine. They sun-bathed. I was comparatively a feral beast. In more ways than one. I should have known better, but I'm much too selfish for that.
George Carlin's death stopped me in my tracks. I was a big fan for a long time. I knew that. My automatic response to his death sorta showed me that I was probably even a bigger fan than I thought. Ninety percent of my odd sense of humor involves an appreciable degree of sarcasm to carry the day. Much of it appears to go right over most people's heads. They miss the irony and take offense instead. No blame. George Carlin's sarcasm seemed to have the master's touch that brought a more desirable response to what seemed like to me a kind of common effort. He might not have agreed with that.
I didn't really know what death meant until I was about 19-20 years old. What heros I had as a little boys were dying of old age well before then. I didn't have many heros directly because there was so much less public information available then. Limited radio listening. No television at all for as long as I lived in my parent's houses. We lived in small towns that hardly qualified as villages the entire time I lived with my parents.
We didn't live in an area that had it's own movie theater until I was eight years old. By then we had lived in four different towns in two different states, and even my choices for local heros were a moving target. My father was the most constant model for maleness in my formative years, but he won't easy to worship. He was a living example of the virtual Old Testament God himself in living color. Spare the rod, spoil the child. He oughta know. No blame.
His cruelty to animals was a much anticipated pastime, and I was just another animal to be managed along with the succession of cows, horses, pigs, chickens, rabbits, and less domestically, various and sundry poisonous snakes, black bears, rabid foxes, and bobcats.
It took years and years for me to finally comprehend with some degree of fairness that my father's ridiculous fear of snakes was that he was afraid they would bite his children or animals. I was a daily witness to my father's treatment of his animals. He brought his work home with him. I lived in constant fear he would treat me just as indifferently, and indeed, the bruises and scars on my little body wouldn't let me to justifiably create romanticized versions of my father to make my mimicry of each facet of his way of life a moment to remember.
I guess I heard from both parents that my father was a spoiled brat nearly every day in some way from early on. It's as if that fact justified all his fits of temper, and made it impossible to stop himself from lashing out at the nearest trembling entity. At home, that is. It was murmured that he would cut you on the street. Maybe under the cover of a white sheet. I was afraid of my father until the moment he died, and I checked to make sure that he was.
He was born after his siblings were pretty much adults to a relatively old, worn-out man and woman (Aha! Really? Not the illegitimate child of one his purported "sisters", and claimed as their own by the parents for fear of the shame of it? We always stayed with the same aunt when we visited Mississippi. I just made this scenario up from my vivid imagination, didn't I?), who turned a lot of his upbringing to his older sisters.
It was said that my father played with his nieces and nephews as a child because they were the same age. His parents were getting on in age, and so he just took over everything at the home place his siblings visited with their own agendas and bags of personal garbage. He had his own colored boy named Walter from the time he was six years old until he left home for marriage at the age of 33 years. That would have started around 1911-1912. I heard all the stories. I was being prepared to live the same way, but by then it was becoming unfashionable, and was soon to be illegal. That was the way as if nothing had changed during World War Two. I couldn't follow in my father's footsteps because his way of life had been criminalized by an act of law by the time I was of legal age at twenty-one years of age. So, I got married and tried to get my wife to be my boy, and it sorta worked out until I eventually had to run for my life. That shit don't fly with educated Aries women.
The indoctrination was set too deep with practically no resistance. We moved too often for anything odd to get noticed. Wherever we went our family was newcomers that had their own foreign ways and people in the South were more likely to mind their own business as long as they were white and followed the way.
I think this may be some sort of universal about war, and it's a pretty stupid way to do things when the problem is reflected up. When men win a war and want to teach that culture not to mess with them anymore, they usually kill the males and impregnate the women with their own spawn. But, children are like stem cells before they take a specific form. It's the women who preserve the culture by teaching whatever race of species of child that pops out of their belly how to adapt to wot's sot before them in order to merely survive. They teach them the same hated cultural beliefs that make them the enemy of their own blood fathers. The two Bush Presidents are living proof. The older Bush fought Fascism in World War Two, and the younger Bush became a Fascist himself in order to pubescently defy him.
Here's a perfect example of why I don't let people get me too pumped up about writing stuff for a living:
http://health.usnews.com/articles/health/living-well-usn/2008/06/23/time-in-the-sun-how-much-is-needed-for-vitamin-d.html
If you've read the stuff I wrote about the web search I did on Vitamin D after I'd read a bunch of articles on the topic, and then read the article I linked above, it's easy to see that the author of the linked article performed a much more concise assessment of what's being passed around as significant these days.
I just read this article myself because it covered the same information I had familiarized myself with in a much more comprehensible fashion. It seems like the aspects of this information that intrigued me, also intrigued her. It's about what it means for the Sun to interact with human skin, and how the adaptations the skin has made to the various locations all over the world to the ambient sunlight ruled how the skin appears to the beholder. I'm now realizing this inability of the skin to make Vitamin D in the Northern climes because of a lack of enough UV rays to make it happen, and the native's not knowing to take supplements is the reason they move to a sunny place like Florida, California, and the Gulf Coast to retire. Many of the aches and pains of old age are due to a lack of Vitamin D, and when they go to places where there's lots of UV rays all year long, they are able to remedy their Vitamin D deficiency and feel better.
I have written copiously about my idea of how white people became white because they lived for long periods in caves. In the Slavs (slaves) case, it was probably as much to hide from their pursuers as it was to stay warm. Admittedly, it because difficult for me to make this case because of my cultural background. I could be accused of doing the equivalent of a cultural comb-over to cover up my racial prejudice. I'll apologize now. It's too late. I can't reframe my childhood to ease your social fears of keeping up with the Jones.
This Vitamin D publicity makes it easier for me to write about what I originally intended to write about in the first place. I had never considered before this reading, that even in the United States, there isn't enough sunlight for human skin to create enough Vitamin D for homo sapiens to stay healthy in the winter, without taking readily-available supplements. The point that impresses me is that the people living in these Northern climes really have to take those supplemental forms of Vitamin D (usually fish or fish products like cod-liver oil.) or they usually get sick. Worse, it's usually some sort of cancer or bone problem, and sometimes both. What a drag, man. It's not cured by eating yo' veggies.
I'm glad to find out about this. I've been up for three hours, and I haven't walked out into the sunlight yet. I usually don't. I'm fine with taking supplements. I just didn't know what and how much. Now I do. And another thing. The salmon we get around here has gone from bad to worse. It's difficult to find desirable fresh fish around here to eat. Much of it's trash fish that don't have much Vitamin D in their oil anyway. It takes deep-water fish or fish from the cold, arctic waters. I can just take these 2000 IU pills once a day and forget it.
They curb my appetite. I've been eating stuff willy-nilly that might have the Vitamin D in it to soothe my abused body. Now that it's getting an abundance of Vitamin D from me swallowing these pills, it doesn't have to eat everything in sight in the hope that something/anything will do the trick.
I've written about how both of my ex-wives looked different from me when we lay naked on white sheets side by side. I married some real white girls, and I'm fairly white. But, I went around practically naked from early Spring to late Fall every year working in the tobacco fields of the coastal plains. My first wife was raised in the high foothills well in sight of the Blue Ridge mountains. My second wife was raised in the suburbs of Cleveland. Both had considerable German blood in their genetic make-up. Their attitude about being outside and exposed to sunlight was totally different from mine. They sun-bathed. I was comparatively a feral beast. In more ways than one. I should have known better, but I'm much too selfish for that.
Monday, June 23, 2008
I Sold My Children's Birthright For Careless Love
I don't know what I'm gonna write about this, but it's just too good a title to not at least make up something. I wrote the squib below in a post to somewhere, and I had to realize I was projecting my own sense of self on to others or I would have missed the whole point.
"Jack's life was condemned to mediocrity from the moment his parents took him before Einstein to beg the Wizard's blessing. Jack don't know Jack. He only knows what he was brought up to be. He'll tell you. It's all he's got to say. You have to buy into Jack's dim-witted passion for pedantry because you sold your children's birthright for careless love. It's too late for both of you. '-)"
I have a good time pretending to lure people into betraying themselves through projection. It seems to help me do some serious projecting about myself. My accusations of the other's character is the onliest way I know how to find out what's the deal with me? The projection of my own idea of self upon the other is the only method or tool I possess for discovering the rules of conscience I've unknowingly put on a pedestal of self-aggrandizement. If I don't realize in real ti-me I'm projecting my own idea of what I would be over there, then the jig's up. There are serious gaps in the lies I tell myself about who-I-think-I-am-is. I am (is) the world. I am (is) it's people. Why would I want to discriminate one Pygmalion-like form against the other?
That's what be-co-me-ing is all about. In order to be-co-me (be with me) one has to let go of the notion that their me rates more respect than the other's. Get over it. There ain't but One me, and each of us "thinks" we're it. This is, in my highly disregardable opinion, is the highest mountain or deepest ocean to navigate in creating me-and-thee-ing (meaning) outta life. If you think that each of us has our own individual me, then co-me-ing becomes an impossible barrier that will never be over-co-me by that perspective. When you realize there ain't but One me (including your's), that sets the stage for being able to "be" any one's me, and you're still on the sa-me page. ME, the server and servant.
This topic is still basically about simultaneity. The fact that we're all One in our me-ness (meanness) has to be (must be?) realized simultaneously with all the other projections making their appearance on the world stage rigtht damned now. One of the most obvious examples of simultaneity is the notion of peripheral vision. It's possible to see what's going on right in front of your eyes and still possess comprehension in your peripheral vision. These two types of vision can happen simultaneously without either losing their unique integrity of purpose.
The universal "me" is the backdrop against which individuality plays hide-and-seek. At least that's what I'm declaring for the moment to have some content for this wonderful title. I'm not attempting to declare that there is only the universal me (it's true, of course), but that the individual me ex-is-es at the sa-me mo-me-nt as everything else in all the potential that's possible for it ever. Everything is always potentially anything it can be, but nothingness.
There. That oughta do it. I'm not used to writing something to satisfy a title. Usually, it's the other way around.
"Jack's life was condemned to mediocrity from the moment his parents took him before Einstein to beg the Wizard's blessing. Jack don't know Jack. He only knows what he was brought up to be. He'll tell you. It's all he's got to say. You have to buy into Jack's dim-witted passion for pedantry because you sold your children's birthright for careless love. It's too late for both of you. '-)"
I have a good time pretending to lure people into betraying themselves through projection. It seems to help me do some serious projecting about myself. My accusations of the other's character is the onliest way I know how to find out what's the deal with me? The projection of my own idea of self upon the other is the only method or tool I possess for discovering the rules of conscience I've unknowingly put on a pedestal of self-aggrandizement. If I don't realize in real ti-me I'm projecting my own idea of what I would be over there, then the jig's up. There are serious gaps in the lies I tell myself about who-I-think-I-am-is. I am (is) the world. I am (is) it's people. Why would I want to discriminate one Pygmalion-like form against the other?
That's what be-co-me-ing is all about. In order to be-co-me (be with me) one has to let go of the notion that their me rates more respect than the other's. Get over it. There ain't but One me, and each of us "thinks" we're it. This is, in my highly disregardable opinion, is the highest mountain or deepest ocean to navigate in creating me-and-thee-ing (meaning) outta life. If you think that each of us has our own individual me, then co-me-ing becomes an impossible barrier that will never be over-co-me by that perspective. When you realize there ain't but One me (including your's), that sets the stage for being able to "be" any one's me, and you're still on the sa-me page. ME, the server and servant.
This topic is still basically about simultaneity. The fact that we're all One in our me-ness (meanness) has to be (must be?) realized simultaneously with all the other projections making their appearance on the world stage rigtht damned now. One of the most obvious examples of simultaneity is the notion of peripheral vision. It's possible to see what's going on right in front of your eyes and still possess comprehension in your peripheral vision. These two types of vision can happen simultaneously without either losing their unique integrity of purpose.
The universal "me" is the backdrop against which individuality plays hide-and-seek. At least that's what I'm declaring for the moment to have some content for this wonderful title. I'm not attempting to declare that there is only the universal me (it's true, of course), but that the individual me ex-is-es at the sa-me mo-me-nt as everything else in all the potential that's possible for it ever. Everything is always potentially anything it can be, but nothingness.
There. That oughta do it. I'm not used to writing something to satisfy a title. Usually, it's the other way around.
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Taking My Health In My Own Hands
It's so muggy and sticky this morning. I guess I could turn the air-conditioner on and it would dry out some of the humidity, but my electric bill was nearly $40 last month, and I have to watch my pennies. I had to stop taking so much OTC pain-killers because they were causing insomnia. Besides, I'm working this plan with Vitamin D to see if that's the basis of my arthritis.
I was hurting pretty good last night when I went to bed, but I anticipated seeing what good it's doing for me to imbibe large doses of Vitamin D. The generic stuff I bought at Wal-Mart has each pill containing 2000 IU of D3. I took the first pill Friday night, then another yesterday morning, another yesterday afternoon, and another one this morning. According to what I read it takes 40,000 IU to reach toxicity levels, so I"m not worried much about over-dosing.
I'm not all that sure that when I woke up this morning I could tell a difference. I drink quite a bit of water every night before I go to bed so I'm have to get up during the night to relieve myself. Back when I was working I wouldn't have dreamed of doing that because I had regular hours I had to work, and getting up several times a night would have interfered with my getting enough sleep. Now, it doesn't matter at all. I go to bed when I feel like it, and try every morning to go back to sleep again and again. I'd sleep 10-12 hours a day if I could pull it off.
I sorta think the vitamins have helped. It's probably much too early to tell how this is going to work. I can definitely tell something is different about the way I feel. Most of yesterday I sensed a different feeling in my throat where the adrenalin glands are located. I have read a little about how a lack of vitamin d can affect the way those glands work. I just hope the sensation I felt yesterday was a good thing. It's not there this morning.
One of the big deals about Vitamin D deficiency is how it related to several different types of cancer. Especially breast cancer, prostrate cancer, and colon cancer. It's been noticed that victims of these dis-eases usually have a severe lack of Vitamin D in their bodies. Doctors are putting their patients with cancers in their body on a regimen of Vitamin D by injection. They claim it really helps, and they suspect that some of the cancers are caused by a deficiency. They also think it's at least partially responsible for rheumatoid arthritis. I don't figure I can lose by taking a daily dose. That's what the cancer specialist recommend.
One interesting medical fact seems to be that much of the problems humans have with their bodies has to do with inflammation. They say that if a person can manage to reduce the inflammation that happens in the body, then their immune system will work much better. Vitamin D reduces inflammation. It doesn't matter whether it comes by being out in the Sun and having the skin produce it or whether you each a lotta fish. Apparently flax seed oil contains the same anti-inflammatants as fish oil such as cod liver oil.
My mother used to make us swallow a big tablespoon full of cod liver oil when we were kids, partially as punishment, but rickets was a big problem for kids when I was a boy, and the doctors had just begun to realize that cod liver oil could prevent rickets even before they discovered that cod liver oil was full of Vitamin D. They didn't know what vitamins were in those days. These were the days when they realized that Vitamin C cured scurvy in sailors. I hated having to swallow cod liver oil. Not any more.
There were a lot of advances in medicine and technology during the late 1800s and early 1900s. That was a real prolific time for making life easier for people. Aspirin and penicillin were both discovered about this time. It's almost like I got born at just about the right time to take advantage of these life-changing events.
I've stopped practicing the scales on my digital piano. I just had to. Playing through the pain was just making it worse. This makes me a little angry that I have to interrupt the learning, but I should have done the work when I was a kid. I bummed around the country and traveled instead. That was the right thing for me to do. YMMV.
I was hurting pretty good last night when I went to bed, but I anticipated seeing what good it's doing for me to imbibe large doses of Vitamin D. The generic stuff I bought at Wal-Mart has each pill containing 2000 IU of D3. I took the first pill Friday night, then another yesterday morning, another yesterday afternoon, and another one this morning. According to what I read it takes 40,000 IU to reach toxicity levels, so I"m not worried much about over-dosing.
I'm not all that sure that when I woke up this morning I could tell a difference. I drink quite a bit of water every night before I go to bed so I'm have to get up during the night to relieve myself. Back when I was working I wouldn't have dreamed of doing that because I had regular hours I had to work, and getting up several times a night would have interfered with my getting enough sleep. Now, it doesn't matter at all. I go to bed when I feel like it, and try every morning to go back to sleep again and again. I'd sleep 10-12 hours a day if I could pull it off.
I sorta think the vitamins have helped. It's probably much too early to tell how this is going to work. I can definitely tell something is different about the way I feel. Most of yesterday I sensed a different feeling in my throat where the adrenalin glands are located. I have read a little about how a lack of vitamin d can affect the way those glands work. I just hope the sensation I felt yesterday was a good thing. It's not there this morning.
One of the big deals about Vitamin D deficiency is how it related to several different types of cancer. Especially breast cancer, prostrate cancer, and colon cancer. It's been noticed that victims of these dis-eases usually have a severe lack of Vitamin D in their bodies. Doctors are putting their patients with cancers in their body on a regimen of Vitamin D by injection. They claim it really helps, and they suspect that some of the cancers are caused by a deficiency. They also think it's at least partially responsible for rheumatoid arthritis. I don't figure I can lose by taking a daily dose. That's what the cancer specialist recommend.
One interesting medical fact seems to be that much of the problems humans have with their bodies has to do with inflammation. They say that if a person can manage to reduce the inflammation that happens in the body, then their immune system will work much better. Vitamin D reduces inflammation. It doesn't matter whether it comes by being out in the Sun and having the skin produce it or whether you each a lotta fish. Apparently flax seed oil contains the same anti-inflammatants as fish oil such as cod liver oil.
My mother used to make us swallow a big tablespoon full of cod liver oil when we were kids, partially as punishment, but rickets was a big problem for kids when I was a boy, and the doctors had just begun to realize that cod liver oil could prevent rickets even before they discovered that cod liver oil was full of Vitamin D. They didn't know what vitamins were in those days. These were the days when they realized that Vitamin C cured scurvy in sailors. I hated having to swallow cod liver oil. Not any more.
There were a lot of advances in medicine and technology during the late 1800s and early 1900s. That was a real prolific time for making life easier for people. Aspirin and penicillin were both discovered about this time. It's almost like I got born at just about the right time to take advantage of these life-changing events.
I've stopped practicing the scales on my digital piano. I just had to. Playing through the pain was just making it worse. This makes me a little angry that I have to interrupt the learning, but I should have done the work when I was a kid. I bummed around the country and traveled instead. That was the right thing for me to do. YMMV.
Saturday, June 21, 2008
The First Full Day Of Summer, 2008
Ah, the first full day of Summer, and it's raining. That's very pleasing to me. It may be flooding in the Mississippi River valley, but there's been a drought going on here and we need the rain just to make things grow. It's too bad we couldn't have some of the rain they've been getting, but that's just not how things work. The weather patterns don't seem all that impressed by political borders.
The drought the southeastern states has been experiencing has been spotty at times. We've done better here in the coastal plains because we occasionally get a few showers blowing in from the Atlantic Ocean and the further inland you go from here the less rain they get from that sort of weather pattern. The diagrams they show on the weather programs indicate that the mountains in North Carolina are still experiencing extreme drought. I guess that covers all the southern Appalachian range and down into Atlanta.
I've done a lot more hitch-hiking than I have back-packing. As a matter of fact I'd never really been hiking until I went up on the Appalachian Trail and hiked a couple of hundred miles. There is nothing much to see when one hikes here in the coastal plains. It's as flat as a fly flitter here, and the only place we can see any distance is to climb up on the water towers or a tall building. There aren't many tall buildings around here.
As many times as I have ridden across the mountains I never got much of a sense of what it's like up there compared to here until I did that stint on the Appalachian Trail. Maybe I was up there for a month or so. I walked all day and crawled in my sleeping bag at night. Very seldom did I sleep in the shelters on the trail. The younger hikers would get there and be all set up by the time I arrived for the evening.
Hiking on the AT is/was a friendly thing to do. The hikers all do the same thing all day, and there's hardly anything else to talk about during the campfire chats at night. What people do in their ordinary lives don't come up much on the trail. I guess they go up there to get away from the banality of their ordinary ways. For me to see long distances from a high crag like Chimney Rock is a rare occasion.
All kinds of people from all over the world go to the AT to hike. There seem to be as many reasons for people doing it as there are hikers. I hiked for a few days with a guy from England who made his living as a mercenary and a personal body guard. We had some interesting conversations. I asked a lot of questions. Why would I not? I've never done anything near like that. I was surprised to hear about the kind of people who hire personal body guards, and why they need them.
I did have another experience like this once. I walked on the mule trail down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. I guess it was the tourist season, but there was a constant stream of people from all over the world walking up and down that mule trail. It only took a day hike to do it, but I really enjoyed the universality of people there. I walked to the bottom with an MP from England, and walked back up to the top with a guy from India. That's not the same old/same old in the world I live in.
The drought the southeastern states has been experiencing has been spotty at times. We've done better here in the coastal plains because we occasionally get a few showers blowing in from the Atlantic Ocean and the further inland you go from here the less rain they get from that sort of weather pattern. The diagrams they show on the weather programs indicate that the mountains in North Carolina are still experiencing extreme drought. I guess that covers all the southern Appalachian range and down into Atlanta.
I've done a lot more hitch-hiking than I have back-packing. As a matter of fact I'd never really been hiking until I went up on the Appalachian Trail and hiked a couple of hundred miles. There is nothing much to see when one hikes here in the coastal plains. It's as flat as a fly flitter here, and the only place we can see any distance is to climb up on the water towers or a tall building. There aren't many tall buildings around here.
As many times as I have ridden across the mountains I never got much of a sense of what it's like up there compared to here until I did that stint on the Appalachian Trail. Maybe I was up there for a month or so. I walked all day and crawled in my sleeping bag at night. Very seldom did I sleep in the shelters on the trail. The younger hikers would get there and be all set up by the time I arrived for the evening.
Hiking on the AT is/was a friendly thing to do. The hikers all do the same thing all day, and there's hardly anything else to talk about during the campfire chats at night. What people do in their ordinary lives don't come up much on the trail. I guess they go up there to get away from the banality of their ordinary ways. For me to see long distances from a high crag like Chimney Rock is a rare occasion.
All kinds of people from all over the world go to the AT to hike. There seem to be as many reasons for people doing it as there are hikers. I hiked for a few days with a guy from England who made his living as a mercenary and a personal body guard. We had some interesting conversations. I asked a lot of questions. Why would I not? I've never done anything near like that. I was surprised to hear about the kind of people who hire personal body guards, and why they need them.
I did have another experience like this once. I walked on the mule trail down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. I guess it was the tourist season, but there was a constant stream of people from all over the world walking up and down that mule trail. It only took a day hike to do it, but I really enjoyed the universality of people there. I walked to the bottom with an MP from England, and walked back up to the top with a guy from India. That's not the same old/same old in the world I live in.
Friday, June 20, 2008
It Won't Be Long Now
I'm playing the physician who heals himself again. I've been taking lots of ibuprofen and Naproxen. They have helped a little, but not that much. One of the results of taking the OTC drugs is that that keep me awake at night. They cause insomnia. When I'm in pain I'll try anything. Last night I was watching ABC News and they featured a bit on vitamin D and how not getting enough of it can cause arthritis. I Googled up the program and read what they had on this topic. They got their info from the American Cancer Society. It's an informative article about new findings about what happens to people who don't get enough vitamin D.
http://www.cancer.org/docroot/ETO/content/ETO_5_3X_Vitamin_D.asp?sitearea=ETO
I went straight to the store and bought a big jar of vitamin D where each pill has 2000 IUs of vitamin D and 111 mg of calcium. I took one last night and another one this morning. Vitamin D is the one you get from sunshine. Admittedly, I haven't been outside as much as I need to. I have been taking some vitamin D pills occasionally. Not that often, and they only had 400 IU. The article states that older people need a lot more than that, hence the 2000 IU pills. Oh, and if I take an overdose, I'll lose weight. Dread the thought!
I'm getting some e-mails from my oldest sister. That's pretty amazing because she's pretty much of a drama queen and an evangelical. She doesn't approve of what I write about. She told me not to write to her anymore about a year ago, so I didn't. At least she sent me a copy of a photograph of my daughter and her prospective husband. I didn't get one from my daughter, but there is no blame in that. It's amazing to me that these people wanna act like I don't know who they came from. That I don't know their people. I'm an embarrassment to them. Ho Hum...
As I've mentioned in the past, I have watched a lot of videos from Google and youtube. I have been seeing some mention of a new video site called Hulu. I went there yesterday and registered so I could see what they have. Commercials for one thing. But, they're not long commercials, just about 15-20 seconds. The commercials don't show up in some of the video clips. The thing I like about Hulu is that they go full screen at the click of a button. They have some full length movies too.
I'm gonna spend some time in the sun today. I'm a desperate man. I'm in some severe pain 24/7 now. It'll be just my luck to live a long time and stay in pain at least this bad if not worse for another 30-40 years. I'm such a baby about hurting, I'm going to change my ways one of these days.
http://www.cancer.org/docroot/ETO/content/ETO_5_3X_Vitamin_D.asp?sitearea=ETO
I went straight to the store and bought a big jar of vitamin D where each pill has 2000 IUs of vitamin D and 111 mg of calcium. I took one last night and another one this morning. Vitamin D is the one you get from sunshine. Admittedly, I haven't been outside as much as I need to. I have been taking some vitamin D pills occasionally. Not that often, and they only had 400 IU. The article states that older people need a lot more than that, hence the 2000 IU pills. Oh, and if I take an overdose, I'll lose weight. Dread the thought!
I'm getting some e-mails from my oldest sister. That's pretty amazing because she's pretty much of a drama queen and an evangelical. She doesn't approve of what I write about. She told me not to write to her anymore about a year ago, so I didn't. At least she sent me a copy of a photograph of my daughter and her prospective husband. I didn't get one from my daughter, but there is no blame in that. It's amazing to me that these people wanna act like I don't know who they came from. That I don't know their people. I'm an embarrassment to them. Ho Hum...
As I've mentioned in the past, I have watched a lot of videos from Google and youtube. I have been seeing some mention of a new video site called Hulu. I went there yesterday and registered so I could see what they have. Commercials for one thing. But, they're not long commercials, just about 15-20 seconds. The commercials don't show up in some of the video clips. The thing I like about Hulu is that they go full screen at the click of a button. They have some full length movies too.
I'm gonna spend some time in the sun today. I'm a desperate man. I'm in some severe pain 24/7 now. It'll be just my luck to live a long time and stay in pain at least this bad if not worse for another 30-40 years. I'm such a baby about hurting, I'm going to change my ways one of these days.
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
God Bless The Chile
Many, if not most of the people I exchange ideas with on the Gospel of Thomas discussion group appear to be comparing the Gnostic Gospels with what they were taught as children in the religious tradition they were brought up under. I understand that and believe they're doing the best they can do. Some of them have compared what they've experienced as adult with what they learned as a child before they came to the group. Some never questioned the dogma they were raised under, and that dogma is what they compared the Gnostic Gospels with. I compare not only the Gnostic Gospels, but everything else with my remembering vision.
This is becoming more evident with me in all my activities. It reminds me of the lyrics to the Billie Holiday tune, "Yo' momma may have. Yo' poppa may have, but God bless the chile, who got his own." It continuously amazes me that I got my own. I don't think it pleases anybody else that I got my own, however, and they let me know it in a thousand different little ways. No blame.
This is becoming more evident with me in all my activities. It reminds me of the lyrics to the Billie Holiday tune, "Yo' momma may have. Yo' poppa may have, but God bless the chile, who got his own." It continuously amazes me that I got my own. I don't think it pleases anybody else that I got my own, however, and they let me know it in a thousand different little ways. No blame.
Any Wednesday
It doesn't take much to worry me these days. Presently I'm having to deal with a land sale deal I'm not too eager to engage in that has to do with my siblings and the land our parents left us. I always come out on the shallow side of these deals. The other thing I'm concerned about is being invited to my daughter's wedding. We haven't seen each other since 1982, and the divorce from her mother was not pleasant. I haven't seen any of these people in a long time and my ex-wife's family taught her and her sister to hate me like they do. No blame.
I ate breakfast at the cafe with my youngest brother this morning. He seems quite eager to attend the wedding and had already made the reservations for us to spend 3-4 days out there. The wedding will be held in Port Orchard, Washington. I've never heard of it. My brother had already looked it up and told me it was on Puget Sound. I have spent some time in that area. Since we're gonna have a rental car, I might be able to drive up that big mountain there.
Seeing that 14,000 foot (4,267.2 M) mountain from the Space Needle was one of the more interesting sights I've seen. It may be Mount Rainier.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Needle
I hate spending what little savings I have on this trip, but It isn't enough to actually do me any good if I come down with a serious illness. Better to see my family one more time before I die (if I live until August 22, that is).
I haven't played my piano in a couple of days now. I have hoped that if I stopped playing the scales for a while my hands and wrists might feel better. It may take more than a couple of days. The muscles around my elbows and shoulders is what's hurting me so persistently these day. That's why I've been taking some muscle relaxers for a couple of days now, along with humongous doses of ibuprofen and Naproxen. I guess it's helping temporarily for a little while.
I've studied and memorized a number of systems for thinking about things. By that I mean that my familiarity with these systems of thinking is not the problem if they don't show up when I need them. I don't really care what sort of value the other places on the particular sayings I'm working with at the moment. I sorta try sometime to be polite to the fools who disagree with me, but I've reframed that to exist as a condition in which I don't offer up for judgment stuff that riles people up against what I claim the truth is. That's something I found useful in the I Ching. It admonishes that "the Superior man" doesn't go around making claims about this and that, and provides a pretty good logic set to make it's point.
One of the first things I do when I read another person's assessment of such and such or so and so is to figure out what they're claiming. I suspect a goodly number of people look at what I write with askance toward the same end. So, I try not to make claims. Not just claims I can't back up either, but just making claims in general. If i claim something is so or not so, then I gotta be ready to defend my claim. With the question being: Do I wanna spend any time at all defending my claims. Nope, I do not.
I ate breakfast at the cafe with my youngest brother this morning. He seems quite eager to attend the wedding and had already made the reservations for us to spend 3-4 days out there. The wedding will be held in Port Orchard, Washington. I've never heard of it. My brother had already looked it up and told me it was on Puget Sound. I have spent some time in that area. Since we're gonna have a rental car, I might be able to drive up that big mountain there.
Seeing that 14,000 foot (4,267.2 M) mountain from the Space Needle was one of the more interesting sights I've seen. It may be Mount Rainier.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Needle
I hate spending what little savings I have on this trip, but It isn't enough to actually do me any good if I come down with a serious illness. Better to see my family one more time before I die (if I live until August 22, that is).
I haven't played my piano in a couple of days now. I have hoped that if I stopped playing the scales for a while my hands and wrists might feel better. It may take more than a couple of days. The muscles around my elbows and shoulders is what's hurting me so persistently these day. That's why I've been taking some muscle relaxers for a couple of days now, along with humongous doses of ibuprofen and Naproxen. I guess it's helping temporarily for a little while.
I've studied and memorized a number of systems for thinking about things. By that I mean that my familiarity with these systems of thinking is not the problem if they don't show up when I need them. I don't really care what sort of value the other places on the particular sayings I'm working with at the moment. I sorta try sometime to be polite to the fools who disagree with me, but I've reframed that to exist as a condition in which I don't offer up for judgment stuff that riles people up against what I claim the truth is. That's something I found useful in the I Ching. It admonishes that "the Superior man" doesn't go around making claims about this and that, and provides a pretty good logic set to make it's point.
One of the first things I do when I read another person's assessment of such and such or so and so is to figure out what they're claiming. I suspect a goodly number of people look at what I write with askance toward the same end. So, I try not to make claims. Not just claims I can't back up either, but just making claims in general. If i claim something is so or not so, then I gotta be ready to defend my claim. With the question being: Do I wanna spend any time at all defending my claims. Nope, I do not.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Keeping One's Stopping Still
I've only remembered to place a hyphenation mark between the "t" and the "i" in the term "question" recently. Quest-ion. Does a person go on a quest to get an answer or to find the right question? I'm thinking it's maybe the latter. In the past, when I've somehow managed to ask the right question about some topic or subject that confuses me, the answer I received resolved my doubts, and allowed me to move on in innocence to some other aspect of my life.
This predicament come to the fore when I started using the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching as an oracle. I didn't think about using the Book of Changes (I Ching) as an oracle when I first acquired it serendipitously. I only meant to look it over and maybe read some of the fascinating pages that I'd briefly scanned over upon my first encounter with it at a stranger's house.
I asked for this book to be mine, and it was freely given to me. I write that now, but I couldn't imagine me in a similar situation not giving the book to anyone who asked for it with the intensity I displayed at the time. My host was just a boy in his twenties whose trust funds allowed him to rent houses for him and his friends in exotic places to do sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Key West was, is, and always will be an exotic place. Location. Location. Location.
When I write about stuff like this I have to look about me to see the trophies of my quests before I recommend others do likewise. I live like a dog. I'm barely scraping by. Follow my advise and you'll only get sackcloth, ashes, and earn the hatred of your children for your reward. One little mistake and I'll be thrown into the institutionalized meat-grinder of The State and die alone. If I don't get thrown into the institutions of the State, I'll still die alone... "and the men will cheer, and the boys will shout, and the ladies they will all cry out, and they'll all feel gay, when felix comes marching home."
The thing about using any oracle comes down to asking the right question persistently. Anybody can stumble across the right question occasionally, with the question being: How do they know what happened after they did ask the right question was due to asking the right question?
It took nearly thirty years of daily use of the I Ching as an oracle for me to realize that the whole deal was about learning to ask the right question. What is simple is easy, but what is realized as simple and easy is not so simple or easy.
For me, I had to ask, and ask, and ask again or many more times before I got it right. The trick with the I Ching, at least the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of it would not answer my questions unless I did ask the right question, and it wouldn't answer if I just rephrased it again and again.
It didn't take me that long to realize what happened if I did ask the right question. Ecstagony. That's a word I figured I'd coined by combining ecstasy and agony, and I coined it as a shortcut because if I asked the right question, it became more and more lucid that I was gonna get dished up one or the other as my just deserts.
Of course if I was rewarded with ecstasy I was an extremely happy camper, but if I didn't I was gonna suffer agony, and for much longer than I was gonna suffer ecstasy. Why would I ask questions that at best was gonna bring one or the other? You might notice that the reward of either brought suffering.
Maybe what kept me consulting an oracle whose only reward was suffering was that my previous suffering could only be unwoven by more suffering. My asking the other the right question also brings suffering as a reward. The more I learned about how to ask the right question at the right time, the quicker I could posit suffering in the other as misdirection, slip out the door like a thief in the night, and get outta town while the gitting wuz good.
In other words, knowing that I could ask the right question as misdirection allowed me to stay in one place, and stop going on the road as misdirection. Asking the other the right question cause them to take to the highway, not me.
Then, I had to be able to do it in my home town where nary a soul recognized that I wasn't who they thought I was. I had to prove to myself that I could be here and still be a healer and prophet, because everybody whose anybody in the biz gnows that's impossible.
I'm prejudiced, of course, because my path with heart is nearly over, and if it takes me another thirty years to process a nearly chosen ritual to explore I'd be 99 years old by then. I'm pretty sure I'll keep riding the horse I came to town on and kept the faith with.
This predicament come to the fore when I started using the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching as an oracle. I didn't think about using the Book of Changes (I Ching) as an oracle when I first acquired it serendipitously. I only meant to look it over and maybe read some of the fascinating pages that I'd briefly scanned over upon my first encounter with it at a stranger's house.
I asked for this book to be mine, and it was freely given to me. I write that now, but I couldn't imagine me in a similar situation not giving the book to anyone who asked for it with the intensity I displayed at the time. My host was just a boy in his twenties whose trust funds allowed him to rent houses for him and his friends in exotic places to do sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Key West was, is, and always will be an exotic place. Location. Location. Location.
When I write about stuff like this I have to look about me to see the trophies of my quests before I recommend others do likewise. I live like a dog. I'm barely scraping by. Follow my advise and you'll only get sackcloth, ashes, and earn the hatred of your children for your reward. One little mistake and I'll be thrown into the institutionalized meat-grinder of The State and die alone. If I don't get thrown into the institutions of the State, I'll still die alone... "and the men will cheer, and the boys will shout, and the ladies they will all cry out, and they'll all feel gay, when felix comes marching home."
The thing about using any oracle comes down to asking the right question persistently. Anybody can stumble across the right question occasionally, with the question being: How do they know what happened after they did ask the right question was due to asking the right question?
It took nearly thirty years of daily use of the I Ching as an oracle for me to realize that the whole deal was about learning to ask the right question. What is simple is easy, but what is realized as simple and easy is not so simple or easy.
For me, I had to ask, and ask, and ask again or many more times before I got it right. The trick with the I Ching, at least the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of it would not answer my questions unless I did ask the right question, and it wouldn't answer if I just rephrased it again and again.
It didn't take me that long to realize what happened if I did ask the right question. Ecstagony. That's a word I figured I'd coined by combining ecstasy and agony, and I coined it as a shortcut because if I asked the right question, it became more and more lucid that I was gonna get dished up one or the other as my just deserts.
Of course if I was rewarded with ecstasy I was an extremely happy camper, but if I didn't I was gonna suffer agony, and for much longer than I was gonna suffer ecstasy. Why would I ask questions that at best was gonna bring one or the other? You might notice that the reward of either brought suffering.
Maybe what kept me consulting an oracle whose only reward was suffering was that my previous suffering could only be unwoven by more suffering. My asking the other the right question also brings suffering as a reward. The more I learned about how to ask the right question at the right time, the quicker I could posit suffering in the other as misdirection, slip out the door like a thief in the night, and get outta town while the gitting wuz good.
In other words, knowing that I could ask the right question as misdirection allowed me to stay in one place, and stop going on the road as misdirection. Asking the other the right question cause them to take to the highway, not me.
Then, I had to be able to do it in my home town where nary a soul recognized that I wasn't who they thought I was. I had to prove to myself that I could be here and still be a healer and prophet, because everybody whose anybody in the biz gnows that's impossible.
I'm prejudiced, of course, because my path with heart is nearly over, and if it takes me another thirty years to process a nearly chosen ritual to explore I'd be 99 years old by then. I'm pretty sure I'll keep riding the horse I came to town on and kept the faith with.
Monday, June 16, 2008
Briar Patches And Tar Babies
It's supposed to cool off tonight after a cold front pushes through and much drier air. It's only gonna get up into the mid-eighties with cool nights for sleeping. I've been thinking about getting some more sleep than I've been getting. The usual amount of time I sleep at night is about six hours, but I've taken to allowing myself to go back to sleep as many times as I can. It's like little cat naps I take after I've done the lion's share of sleeping just before.
We got some needed rain night before last. As much as two inches (5.08 cm) of rain was accompanied by lots of lightning and thunder. Dragons. The electric storms like what came through here sporadically the other night is what some Oriental cultures call dragons. Lightning is the fire they spit forth and the crop-destroying winds are generated by their wings flapping. Dragons! They'll huff and puff and blow your house down. I pretty much slept through the entire affair, but did hear the hard rain hitting the roof above my head. Rain. The blessings of heaven.
I walked outside a while ago. Mostly just to get away from the computer. The new fig trees are doing better. The one I bought that came from a commercial grower was having some problems and looked like might be dying. I've been watering it more and beating on the bamboo stobs I put around it to drive the moles off. This plant lies low to the ground compared with my old fig tree. I thought it was the same variety as the old one when I bought it, but maybe not.
There are a few full-grown figs on that little ol' bush already, and they're bigger than the fruit on my old tree. They might even get bigger still, but I guess time will tell. I want it to get a good root mass developed so it can survive. The one cutting I put out last winter that survived grew two more leaves and a couple of buds to replace the one leaf that got knocked off by a hard rain.
My old fig tree I planted twenty years ago got hurt bad by the late hard frost that killed it back last Spring. It's made up for it this year. The new growth is phenomenal. Some of the leaves on it are bigger than my head, and there's lots of fruit coming in. They're only about as big as the tip of my little finger, so it'll be another 3-4 weeks before they start ripening. That's the other difference between my old brown turkey fig tree and the commercial one I bought. The fruit matures earlier on the new tree.
I like that. The only time I eat figs is when they're ripe on the tree. By the time me, and the birds, and the bugs have eat our fill, I've usually had a bait of 'em. I might oughta try to save some by drying them or preserving them by canning, but I'm not that kind of guy. Death always comes unexpected.
I enjoy drawing people out of their shell. Sometime we're both surprised by the skeletons that come tumbling out of the closet. Ungrateful wretches. They hardly ever say thank you, and on the contrary, fill the air with threats of mumbo jumbo. That makes me quiver and shake and beg them not to throw me into the briar patch. Maybe that's how you do it when you're born in the Year of the Rabbit.
We got some needed rain night before last. As much as two inches (5.08 cm) of rain was accompanied by lots of lightning and thunder. Dragons. The electric storms like what came through here sporadically the other night is what some Oriental cultures call dragons. Lightning is the fire they spit forth and the crop-destroying winds are generated by their wings flapping. Dragons! They'll huff and puff and blow your house down. I pretty much slept through the entire affair, but did hear the hard rain hitting the roof above my head. Rain. The blessings of heaven.
I walked outside a while ago. Mostly just to get away from the computer. The new fig trees are doing better. The one I bought that came from a commercial grower was having some problems and looked like might be dying. I've been watering it more and beating on the bamboo stobs I put around it to drive the moles off. This plant lies low to the ground compared with my old fig tree. I thought it was the same variety as the old one when I bought it, but maybe not.
There are a few full-grown figs on that little ol' bush already, and they're bigger than the fruit on my old tree. They might even get bigger still, but I guess time will tell. I want it to get a good root mass developed so it can survive. The one cutting I put out last winter that survived grew two more leaves and a couple of buds to replace the one leaf that got knocked off by a hard rain.
My old fig tree I planted twenty years ago got hurt bad by the late hard frost that killed it back last Spring. It's made up for it this year. The new growth is phenomenal. Some of the leaves on it are bigger than my head, and there's lots of fruit coming in. They're only about as big as the tip of my little finger, so it'll be another 3-4 weeks before they start ripening. That's the other difference between my old brown turkey fig tree and the commercial one I bought. The fruit matures earlier on the new tree.
I like that. The only time I eat figs is when they're ripe on the tree. By the time me, and the birds, and the bugs have eat our fill, I've usually had a bait of 'em. I might oughta try to save some by drying them or preserving them by canning, but I'm not that kind of guy. Death always comes unexpected.
I enjoy drawing people out of their shell. Sometime we're both surprised by the skeletons that come tumbling out of the closet. Ungrateful wretches. They hardly ever say thank you, and on the contrary, fill the air with threats of mumbo jumbo. That makes me quiver and shake and beg them not to throw me into the briar patch. Maybe that's how you do it when you're born in the Year of the Rabbit.
Sunday, June 15, 2008
I'll Never Love Blue Eyes Again
>>> Therefore, for all the work, which is the work of self
knowledge, when gnosis comes it is evident that it is
not due to will or intent or anything that you have
just in that moment decided to do. <<<
I was at these people's house I didn't even know, in order to bum a joint they promised to give to me if I'd follow them home. I didn't realize it was what it was when it happened or for a long time after that. I just knew it was a big deal I might oughta remember. I soon realized there was no need for that. I wasn't gonna forget, and I still haven't.
My remembering vision gave me a framework for how to organize the sensory dimension on my own terms. I don't know how this works for other people, because I only see what I think is over there anyway, and it could be any other thing than what I've previously figured.
I've been on this docetic kick since I looked doceticism to find out what Klaus was rattling on about. I recognized my descriptions of my Kundalini experiences in the descriptions I read about the kristos not having the ability to become human. But it was my remembering vision that forced me to realize that I had "witnessed" myself come here and start making myself into an infinitesimal number of life forms trying to find something that was "just right". That's how I realized I was not one of the three bears careactors in that zany fairy tale, but the dumb blonde.
Maybe this is one of those anima stories about the male gender's inside way of being. What happened was that when I looked up doceticism to see what that was about I associated the spirit that couldn't become human as the entity that entered my consciousness during the rising of it from the area of my perineum and blasting up along my spine on both sides until it exited out the crown of my skull. I was somewhat hunch-backed until that happened from the hard labor I did doing farm work. The spiritual force that uncoiled and transformed me moved around through me and changed the inside of me just like it changed my posture from a hunch-back to a militant bearing.
When it happened I was just walking down the beach down toward the rooming house I stayed at. It came uninvited. I was terrified in one way, but I'd read about this sort of event, and it happened to me in pretty much the classical way I'd studied. I decided to let it happen, but there actually wasn't much I could do about it.
This may be so scattered a description I'll never make any sense of it, but it seems important for me to try. What I want to describe is how I stumbled across an intuition that what I am is might be a spirit that deliberately came here to do something very specific that it's tried to do any number of times, but it never succeeds, and might know this is a futile thing to do, and does it anyhow.
The only time I have been consciously aware that I might be a docetic entity was during the introductory part of my remembering vision. I was consciously aware of being a pearl-like appearing point of radiance that moved through open space with the greatest of ease, and experienced what I coined "ecstagony" by the movement through space. I came here and started making myself into various life forms and then abandoning them when they no longer served my purposes. I was surrounded by other pearl-like creatures who were already here when I arrived, and I was making myself into various forms of life to mimic them. In the vision, it seemed like I did this merely as entertainment or just to have something to do.
Since I've begun contemplating the me-and-ing of doceticism and the odd way it reminded me of the Kundalini experiences that started early in life with this golden spirit that enveloped me and took me into itself at around fifteen years of age, I'm beginning to wonder if I've gotten things bassackward. As a personality with a physical body I can no more identify with being a docetic creature than the docetic creature that I purportedly really am can become human. What a mess.
I don't have a clue as to how I can experience my docetic creatureliness in the first person. I suspect personalities is just not how things are done in that dimension. For one thing, I gotta stop trying to be human. Why can't I accept such as an impossibility? If as a human with a persona and a physical body I can't know my own possibilities in real time, why is so difficult to cognate myself as my impossibilities? Theoretically, it might seem as if they were polar opposites. So, if I can't know my possibles as a homo sapien in real time, then I should be able to identify with my non-possibles as a docetic creature. I'm getting nowhere with this yet, but I've only addressed this form of inhumanity recently. '-)
knowledge, when gnosis comes it is evident that it is
not due to will or intent or anything that you have
just in that moment decided to do. <<<
I was at these people's house I didn't even know, in order to bum a joint they promised to give to me if I'd follow them home. I didn't realize it was what it was when it happened or for a long time after that. I just knew it was a big deal I might oughta remember. I soon realized there was no need for that. I wasn't gonna forget, and I still haven't.
My remembering vision gave me a framework for how to organize the sensory dimension on my own terms. I don't know how this works for other people, because I only see what I think is over there anyway, and it could be any other thing than what I've previously figured.
I've been on this docetic kick since I looked doceticism to find out what Klaus was rattling on about. I recognized my descriptions of my Kundalini experiences in the descriptions I read about the kristos not having the ability to become human. But it was my remembering vision that forced me to realize that I had "witnessed" myself come here and start making myself into an infinitesimal number of life forms trying to find something that was "just right". That's how I realized I was not one of the three bears careactors in that zany fairy tale, but the dumb blonde.
Maybe this is one of those anima stories about the male gender's inside way of being. What happened was that when I looked up doceticism to see what that was about I associated the spirit that couldn't become human as the entity that entered my consciousness during the rising of it from the area of my perineum and blasting up along my spine on both sides until it exited out the crown of my skull. I was somewhat hunch-backed until that happened from the hard labor I did doing farm work. The spiritual force that uncoiled and transformed me moved around through me and changed the inside of me just like it changed my posture from a hunch-back to a militant bearing.
When it happened I was just walking down the beach down toward the rooming house I stayed at. It came uninvited. I was terrified in one way, but I'd read about this sort of event, and it happened to me in pretty much the classical way I'd studied. I decided to let it happen, but there actually wasn't much I could do about it.
This may be so scattered a description I'll never make any sense of it, but it seems important for me to try. What I want to describe is how I stumbled across an intuition that what I am is might be a spirit that deliberately came here to do something very specific that it's tried to do any number of times, but it never succeeds, and might know this is a futile thing to do, and does it anyhow.
The only time I have been consciously aware that I might be a docetic entity was during the introductory part of my remembering vision. I was consciously aware of being a pearl-like appearing point of radiance that moved through open space with the greatest of ease, and experienced what I coined "ecstagony" by the movement through space. I came here and started making myself into various life forms and then abandoning them when they no longer served my purposes. I was surrounded by other pearl-like creatures who were already here when I arrived, and I was making myself into various forms of life to mimic them. In the vision, it seemed like I did this merely as entertainment or just to have something to do.
Since I've begun contemplating the me-and-ing of doceticism and the odd way it reminded me of the Kundalini experiences that started early in life with this golden spirit that enveloped me and took me into itself at around fifteen years of age, I'm beginning to wonder if I've gotten things bassackward. As a personality with a physical body I can no more identify with being a docetic creature than the docetic creature that I purportedly really am can become human. What a mess.
I don't have a clue as to how I can experience my docetic creatureliness in the first person. I suspect personalities is just not how things are done in that dimension. For one thing, I gotta stop trying to be human. Why can't I accept such as an impossibility? If as a human with a persona and a physical body I can't know my own possibilities in real time, why is so difficult to cognate myself as my impossibilities? Theoretically, it might seem as if they were polar opposites. So, if I can't know my possibles as a homo sapien in real time, then I should be able to identify with my non-possibles as a docetic creature. I'm getting nowhere with this yet, but I've only addressed this form of inhumanity recently. '-)
Only The Personality Dies
Whatever the emotional surges I've been feeling lately spring from, the most enduring is that I'm not to blame for most of the stuff that happened to the people who took me at my word. If there is anything I've learned about myself in the last 69 years it's that my word ain't worth a plugged nickel.
I think my personal life began the moment I realized my word was not my bond, and it didn't have to be. People hear me say stuff I never intended for them to hear as my opinion. They project their own me-and-thee-ing upon my words, and appear to claim I intended to say what they would have been saying. No blame. It's not like they have a choice. Which is why there is no blame in taking me for themselves. I don't blame them one bit. "Why not take all of me?"
I like using the hyphenated expression me-and-thee-ing more readily than the more commonly accepted term "meaning". I figure the intermediary form left out thee, and became me-and-ing, then meanding, and finally meaning. Since humans don't have a choice but to project their idea of their self on to the other, it's only through thee that my me can identify itself through thee. It's how we determine what we believe about the other's effort to communicate. If either of us take our responsibilities the wrong way, then we fight in some manner, but if we agree about the me-and-ing, then the further consideration of the element "thee" matriculates to an us and "we" fight together. Why would we not? Who doesn't like coming in out of the cold, dank world of being one's own mole?
It's quite likely that I write in some frenetic attempt to get someone/anyone to agree with me because I'm so lousy about agreeing with the other. I like living alone, don't I? Why should I be kind just to save myself? I'm just so selfishly bigoted about my own opinion it's practically impossible for me to cater to your just desserts.
"Just desserts"? Oh, so you think I'm not spelling it right? I wondered myself. So have others:
http://www.snopes.com/language/notthink/deserts.asp
I'm not attempting to claim that I'm not responsible for what I say to other people or they for me. LIke the explanation at the bottom of the linked article above, I'm saying I have no control over how people interpret what I say, and thus incur no blame for the other assigning me the task of living up to their assessment of my god-forsaken chatter. That's why I tend to say whatever amuses me, because it doesn't actually matter what I offer up as fatted calf or wine to quench their gullet.
I like to pretend I write what I write in full consciousness that my reader must interpret the content I provide to mean what they think it means because of their own experience with the subject or topic they think I've written about. Some claim I write what I write for the reasons they might have, if they wrote what they concluded that I wrote, which is impossible, but what difference does that make? To me or them?
I've had a lotta people tell me, "You oughta write a book." As far as I"m concerned they should take their own advice, and write the kind of book they think I should write. I've met too many people who have written books because somebody told them they oughta and it ruined their lives. They get stuck having to defend something they only created to feel important in the first place when you were young. Unfortunately, doing that's probably a form of blasphemy of the spirit. Blasphemy of the spirit is not a funny joke. Either in this life or the next.
It's shocking how many authors commit suicide in one form or the other. I didn't realize Jamie Herlihy committed suicide until nearly a decade after his death, and only then because Roger, a long-time member of the GoT mailing list, looked it up and informed me. I was shocked. Now, I realize that Jamie may have written me to say goodbye, and I didn't get it. I didn't even answer his letter until a good while after he was already dead.
I guess I got those emotional surges because of what I saw watching television this morning. It was Sunday morning and I am habituated to watching the news shows on television to wrap up the week. I don't watch the news much during the week. I forgot it was Father's day.
The memorial to Tim Russert was in full swing. Meet The Press was his Sunday morning show for a long time. He had written a biography of his father that got published recently. There were lots of fawning over what a great guy he was and pictures of he and his father, and of him, his father, and his own son. The holy trinity?
It might have been being painted that way for reasons I don't understand or coulda been just another of my inane conspiracy theories, but when I watched a show on North Carolina potters of the Catawba valley after the Russet memorial was over, and the central characters of their documentary was a trio of grandfather, father, and son, I realized it was the latter.
It's difficult to confront the bottomless pit that my own cowardice is. I don't pretend it's not there, I just avoid getting slapped in the face with it as often as I can. The problem with my particular kind of cowardice is that it is unforgivable. Such is the root source of myth. I've carelessly romanticized my way through life as a lark, so far, but with this question remaining: Will I be able to romanticize my way through death? Will it hurt?
I actually think not. I hurt all the time now. Why wait? I can only romanticize events I appear to have some modicum of control over. In the dying process, just as when losing consciousness to sleep ("perchance..."), I have to let go of manipulating the live images in the sensory world I use to define me. Maybe what I'm trying to describe is similar to literally going into shock and losing control of the sensory environment makes me think I'm okay.
Once I enter that state of shock and consciously experience losing control of the sensory images that constitute my being okay, my fate is sealed. I no longer possess the faculties necessary to competently manage my surroundings. Without that support of identity, and If this tendency continues on and inevitably ends in death, so be it, but I won't consciously know that I have died or that I am indeed dead for the simple lack of identity.
What died? Who died? Somebody I used to know died? You might ask what does being dead mean? Nothing. On the contrary, death is the virtual end of all me-and-thee-ing. Death is the end of the ongoing relationship between me and thee. Without a relationship with thee, being me don't amount to much.
A monad has to have a personal identity to die. After all is said and done, it's only the identity (who-I-am-thinks-it-is) that actually tastes death. Being-in-itself don't know life or death is even possible because it has no consciousness other the the possibilities of the upsurged being-for-itself that's out on it's own. It just is. So, how does an unidentified entity escape the fullness of the state of is-ness in order to upsurge into a separate reality, and question it's own ex-is-tense as a method of staying aware of the sensory dimension it id-eates into a facsimile of it's best hopes and wishes?
The nomadic spirit that defiantly created and used an unending array of bodily forms (in it's persistent and eternal attempt to become human), can not die, even as a pig-in-a-poke.
In Heaven a spirit doth dwell
"Whose heart-strings are a lute";
None sing so wildly well
As the angel Israfel,
And the giddy stars (so legends tell),
Ceasing their hymns, attend the spell
Of his voice, all mute.
http://www.poedecoder.com/qrisse/works/israfel.php
You know I gotta state my disclaimer and personally notify each and all about the fact that I write this stuff off-the-cuff just to see what will appear on my computer monitor. For those who subscribe and are notified immediately when I post a new entry, you should understand that I edit a lot after the fact. If at first you don't get what I mean the first time, because of typos and bad mental habits, you can come back later and there might be changes to clear things up or make it worse.
I attempt to capture passing thoughts with words. I can't vouch for the truthfulness or duplicity of these passing thoughts. It's about time and simultaneity. I can't concern myself about the ethical or moral implications of my muse's content in the real time of my intention, and simultaneously attend to sometimes eccentric idiosyncrasies of the daemon I write for once, and then move on.
I think my personal life began the moment I realized my word was not my bond, and it didn't have to be. People hear me say stuff I never intended for them to hear as my opinion. They project their own me-and-thee-ing upon my words, and appear to claim I intended to say what they would have been saying. No blame. It's not like they have a choice. Which is why there is no blame in taking me for themselves. I don't blame them one bit. "Why not take all of me?"
I like using the hyphenated expression me-and-thee-ing more readily than the more commonly accepted term "meaning". I figure the intermediary form left out thee, and became me-and-ing, then meanding, and finally meaning. Since humans don't have a choice but to project their idea of their self on to the other, it's only through thee that my me can identify itself through thee. It's how we determine what we believe about the other's effort to communicate. If either of us take our responsibilities the wrong way, then we fight in some manner, but if we agree about the me-and-ing, then the further consideration of the element "thee" matriculates to an us and "we" fight together. Why would we not? Who doesn't like coming in out of the cold, dank world of being one's own mole?
It's quite likely that I write in some frenetic attempt to get someone/anyone to agree with me because I'm so lousy about agreeing with the other. I like living alone, don't I? Why should I be kind just to save myself? I'm just so selfishly bigoted about my own opinion it's practically impossible for me to cater to your just desserts.
"Just desserts"? Oh, so you think I'm not spelling it right? I wondered myself. So have others:
http://www.snopes.com/language/notthink/deserts.asp
I'm not attempting to claim that I'm not responsible for what I say to other people or they for me. LIke the explanation at the bottom of the linked article above, I'm saying I have no control over how people interpret what I say, and thus incur no blame for the other assigning me the task of living up to their assessment of my god-forsaken chatter. That's why I tend to say whatever amuses me, because it doesn't actually matter what I offer up as fatted calf or wine to quench their gullet.
I like to pretend I write what I write in full consciousness that my reader must interpret the content I provide to mean what they think it means because of their own experience with the subject or topic they think I've written about. Some claim I write what I write for the reasons they might have, if they wrote what they concluded that I wrote, which is impossible, but what difference does that make? To me or them?
I've had a lotta people tell me, "You oughta write a book." As far as I"m concerned they should take their own advice, and write the kind of book they think I should write. I've met too many people who have written books because somebody told them they oughta and it ruined their lives. They get stuck having to defend something they only created to feel important in the first place when you were young. Unfortunately, doing that's probably a form of blasphemy of the spirit. Blasphemy of the spirit is not a funny joke. Either in this life or the next.
It's shocking how many authors commit suicide in one form or the other. I didn't realize Jamie Herlihy committed suicide until nearly a decade after his death, and only then because Roger, a long-time member of the GoT mailing list, looked it up and informed me. I was shocked. Now, I realize that Jamie may have written me to say goodbye, and I didn't get it. I didn't even answer his letter until a good while after he was already dead.
I guess I got those emotional surges because of what I saw watching television this morning. It was Sunday morning and I am habituated to watching the news shows on television to wrap up the week. I don't watch the news much during the week. I forgot it was Father's day.
The memorial to Tim Russert was in full swing. Meet The Press was his Sunday morning show for a long time. He had written a biography of his father that got published recently. There were lots of fawning over what a great guy he was and pictures of he and his father, and of him, his father, and his own son. The holy trinity?
It might have been being painted that way for reasons I don't understand or coulda been just another of my inane conspiracy theories, but when I watched a show on North Carolina potters of the Catawba valley after the Russet memorial was over, and the central characters of their documentary was a trio of grandfather, father, and son, I realized it was the latter.
It's difficult to confront the bottomless pit that my own cowardice is. I don't pretend it's not there, I just avoid getting slapped in the face with it as often as I can. The problem with my particular kind of cowardice is that it is unforgivable. Such is the root source of myth. I've carelessly romanticized my way through life as a lark, so far, but with this question remaining: Will I be able to romanticize my way through death? Will it hurt?
I actually think not. I hurt all the time now. Why wait? I can only romanticize events I appear to have some modicum of control over. In the dying process, just as when losing consciousness to sleep ("perchance..."), I have to let go of manipulating the live images in the sensory world I use to define me. Maybe what I'm trying to describe is similar to literally going into shock and losing control of the sensory environment makes me think I'm okay.
Once I enter that state of shock and consciously experience losing control of the sensory images that constitute my being okay, my fate is sealed. I no longer possess the faculties necessary to competently manage my surroundings. Without that support of identity, and If this tendency continues on and inevitably ends in death, so be it, but I won't consciously know that I have died or that I am indeed dead for the simple lack of identity.
What died? Who died? Somebody I used to know died? You might ask what does being dead mean? Nothing. On the contrary, death is the virtual end of all me-and-thee-ing. Death is the end of the ongoing relationship between me and thee. Without a relationship with thee, being me don't amount to much.
A monad has to have a personal identity to die. After all is said and done, it's only the identity (who-I-am-thinks-it-is) that actually tastes death. Being-in-itself don't know life or death is even possible because it has no consciousness other the the possibilities of the upsurged being-for-itself that's out on it's own. It just is. So, how does an unidentified entity escape the fullness of the state of is-ness in order to upsurge into a separate reality, and question it's own ex-is-tense as a method of staying aware of the sensory dimension it id-eates into a facsimile of it's best hopes and wishes?
The nomadic spirit that defiantly created and used an unending array of bodily forms (in it's persistent and eternal attempt to become human), can not die, even as a pig-in-a-poke.
In Heaven a spirit doth dwell
"Whose heart-strings are a lute";
None sing so wildly well
As the angel Israfel,
And the giddy stars (so legends tell),
Ceasing their hymns, attend the spell
Of his voice, all mute.
http://www.poedecoder.com/qrisse/works/israfel.php
You know I gotta state my disclaimer and personally notify each and all about the fact that I write this stuff off-the-cuff just to see what will appear on my computer monitor. For those who subscribe and are notified immediately when I post a new entry, you should understand that I edit a lot after the fact. If at first you don't get what I mean the first time, because of typos and bad mental habits, you can come back later and there might be changes to clear things up or make it worse.
I attempt to capture passing thoughts with words. I can't vouch for the truthfulness or duplicity of these passing thoughts. It's about time and simultaneity. I can't concern myself about the ethical or moral implications of my muse's content in the real time of my intention, and simultaneously attend to sometimes eccentric idiosyncrasies of the daemon I write for once, and then move on.
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